Jukt Micronics

In this recent post, Drew Austin proposes that the prefix micro- could be considered “the most appropriate descriptor of post-2020 digital culture,” to the extent that it serves as the opposite of “mass”: He refers to microfame, microcelebrity, and microtrends, all of which indicate the absence of a large audience for behavior that otherwise seems to presume it. “Microfame” might be understood not as a low level of fame but as a kind of behavior, posting to social media for no one in particular, often out of an inchoate sense of duty, as though it were one’s job to post, to attract measurable attention, to build up a presence online even if it’s merely spectral.

“Microtrends,” in Austin’s account, are trends that the microfamous promote try to ride to legitimate fame; a microtrend is a pattern of behavior observed by someone who lacks a large enough platform to insist on its relevance and make it come true as a real trend. The microfamous speak in microtrends to give their posts an air of relevance:

In the atomized landscape of contemporary culture, to merely express a personal observation, disconnected from any broader significance, is to risk the cardinal sin of irrelevance. The microtrend is thus a vehicle for making something matter, however illusory, And it’s not just our audience we must convince but ourselves—that we’re not just shouting into the void.

The implication is that “microtrend” is a style of discourse that any kind of observation can be fit into. It’s a way of viewing the world in terms of popularity and momentum, as so many “things that trend” — a mode of expression that grasps all phenomena in the terms of the attention metrics of social media platforms. It is posting without any specific context for nobody in particular, and thus is paving the way for generated content, which comes from the same nonplace, presenting some arbitrary vector in the vast multidimensional matrix of data in which anything can be combined with anything and presenting it as significant in this moment. If we are already used to microtrend posting, we won’t be bothered by the “AI slop” made in its image.