Particular universals
As tedious and superficial as trend reporting can be — how many anecdotal instances constitute a "trend"? how narrow and myopic must your milieu be before you can "spot" them? how many simultaneous related trends comprise a "vibe"? does a concerted marketing campaign count as a trend? — I don't think there can be too many trends, as this recent Vox piece by Terry Nguyen suggests. The more trends there are, the less anyone will feel compelled to fall in line with any one of them. Their multiplicity robs them of social force and makes them self-cancelling, but that doesn't mean they are "dead," just sublated. In other words, I like the trend of people spuriously inventing trends; it's maybe even better than the "I'm above trends" trend I embraced in the 1980s, when a very significant trend forecaster declared that it's hip to be square.
When commentators talk about trends, they are often talking about the available media space to constitute them. "People have a penchant for naming elusive digital phenomena," Nguyen argues, "but TikTok has only accelerated the use of cutesy aesthetic nomenclature." The assumption here is that these trends exist only on social media platforms (they are "digital phenomena" despite involving human bodies, specific physical spaces, particular fabrics and patterns and so on) and are "accelerated" by the kind of engagement TikTok is optimized for, a speed which presumably is what makes the phenomena "elusive."
The (non)trends play out as the individual viewer's need for novelty within the larger structure of predictability stabilized by the platform's algorithms and its system of monitoring user behavior to determine what they supposedly want to see. The (non)trends don't play out as expressions of social relations among people connected in complex ways that exceed the capacity of TikTok's network analytics to capture — what Nguyen calls "the formation of traditional subcultures." Instead of expressing (while obfuscating or mystifying) social hierarchies and power relations, rearticulating who has the ability to create, sustain, and terminate trends, the (non)trends express TikTok's power to compel attention and incentivize certain narrow forms of symbolic creativity, i.e. "cutesy aesthetic nomenclature." In fact, I would definitely follow an account that used a GPT-3-like engine to generate trends out of word salad and DALL-E to make images for what they might look like.
Trends are useful for seeming to spontaneously sort society into separate groups, which are then further subdivided into leaders and followers and so forth. But while the content of trends change, people's positions in those groups generally don't. Subcultures remain sub, their political energies neutralized by the effort of maintaining their own cohesion and pose of opposition. Trends change over and over again, in an orderly way, so that the underlying social order they express doesn't have to.
Content algorithms do a similar kind of sorting of users and content, which produce experiences that seem trend-like but are attached to a different kind of social order, one that a platform articulates in its own interest. Part of what platforms offer are an alternative status hierarchy (the fantasy of becoming "internet famous"), as well as a more individualistic and interactive experience of culture, wherein what "matters" is explicitly shaped around your specific behavior. As Nguyen writes, "There are more choices than ever today, but seemingly less authority as to what constitutes a trend’s lasting legitimacy." The institutionalized envy of the fashion world is dissolved into personal consumer choices that feel meaningful to individuals on their own terms (which are just the terms of algorithms driven by the confluence of attention metrics and ad conversions).
The corollary to being fawned over by algorithms is that your worldview becomes so self-centered, your idiosyncrasies made to seem so meaningful, that you will eventually be brought to simply posit yourself as a trend. That seems like it could be a good thing: Universalize yourself as a particular! Become your own concept! Extricate yourself from the process of performing society's aesthetic modes of inclusion and exclusion and normalization! Unfortunately, being your own trend probably plays out as sociopathic solipsism.
Against the kinds of accelerated trends produced under algorithmic pressure, one might propose that we somehow forcibly slow culture down to restore "legitimacy" to trends again. In piece from Harper's Bazaar that Nguyen cites, Rachel Tashjian proposes "slow fashion" as an antidote to "fake trends": "clothing that is intentionally hard to find and difficult to make." Make fashion elitist again.
Slow fashion evokes the whole nexus of "slow" culture — slow TV, slow film, slow art, etc. — that is supposed to teach us how to pay rich attention again in a technologically saturated world of cheap stimuli. In one of the essays in Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis cited this lecture by art historian Jennifer L. Roberts, in which she extols her efforts at “teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention.” Roberts explains:
I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available “in nature,” as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.
Thus Roberts would require students to spend three hours looking at some specific object before writing about it for her class. This seems like a nice enough idea, but it also seems somewhat one-sided, abstracting the idea of mental “speed” away from specific contexts and putting forward a fetishized idea of “slowness” as intrinsically deep and rewarding. There is an economical, quantitative understanding of attention that characterizes this approach just as much as it characterizes “speed reading” or “doomscrolling” or the various techniques that try to make cultural consumption more efficient. The point is not to decide in advance to move fast or slow, but to be in control of how you calibrate your attention in specific situations according to their specific demands. You need to be able to explain to yourself how you arrived at the decision to look away.