Before we lived in a social-first taste democracy, the art daddies once defined its meaning behind their neat white washed walls. Patron saints and satans like Adam Lindemman and Stefan Simchowitz ran the roost. Taste, coded as art, was bought by those who could afford the provenance. But now, digital decentralisation has uprooted the hegemony, and the grift is up. We have shifted from an old vanguard synonymous with champagne and caviar exclusivity to our current era of anyone online can be a curator or collector, and artists redefining their roles to reap the rewards of internet fluency. In this new social-first era, is Zuckerberg the new daddy? Or have the people finally reclaimed what was always rightfully theirs?

Let’s unpack.

[01] RIP the gallery, long live the group chat

Pre-social media galleries held all the power. Patrons, curators and gallerists decided who mattered.

However in the last year alone, numerous influential indie galleries across the world closed their doors citing funding pressures and tough business. London lost pioneering galleries TJ Boulting and Stephen Friedman. New York said goodbye to the iconic Venus Over Manhattan and Blum Gallery. With 59% of collectors now buying online (as per Artsy’s Art Market Trends 2025), the white cube is losing its grip.

Now, anyone with a feed and a point of view can build a curatorial practice, and for younger generations raised online, art, technology, and community meet on screen as naturally as they do in a gallery. The feed opened up new possibilities for discovery removing the middle man between artist and collector. While digital platforms like SOOT and Are.na rise in popularity, letting anyone flex their curatorial muscles, art accounts like Fakewhale.xyz, Saliva.live and Artificiata catalogue works from right across the globe, collapsing the distance between audiences and new art. Art Basel recently reported in their 2025 Survey of Global Collecting that among those who bought from a gallery, 51% made at least one purchase through Instagram, a dramatic rise from previous years. Capturing a new, younger, more women-led collector community seeking hybrid personalised experiences of art while traditional spaces remain in flux.

[02] Gone is the art daddy, the next gen has arrived

It’s no secret that institutions have a bad rep, and arguably for good reason. A conversation that is well-explored by critical arts voices like the era-defining White Pube with their pamphlet Ideas for a New Art World, the social-first outputs of Spike magazine and more light-hearted meme accounts like Freeze Magazine.

The shift away from top-down institutional models to independent decentralised platforms is slowly beginning to materialise, pioneered by initiatives like Metalabel, the online arts co-operative or “groupcore software” which allows artists to reclaim creative and financial autonomy when releasing new works. Founder Yancey Strickler recently expanded his commitments with DFOS, a new platform inspired by his famous Dark Forest of The Internet essay, which allows individuals to rebuild new custom internets entirely. An online future uniquely designed to be both shared and private, away from unwanted eyes, AI training models, data harvesting and extraction.

[03] Being an artist today means having 7 jobs and making all of them look like an intentional personality

The artist hybrid career isn’t a compromise, it’s the model in the face of our financially uncertain, neoliberal society. No matter who you are, the dream of a cushty art-daddy plucking you from obscurity only gets further away. Of course, artists have always also been baristas, strategists and other day job type afflictions on the side. However now they are quite often also content creators - applying their creativity to connect with and expand otherwise niche audiences and reap cultural and financial capital.

The more internet-savvy have mastered this approach of treating social as vital infrastructure. A phenomenon recently discussed by artist-model-podcaster Su I Think (see below) on Subway Takes, spurring much debate in the comments. Elsewhere, artist-creators Harriet Richardson and Mackenzie Thomas approach social as stage, with algorithm-friendly hits of deadpan humour and diaristic oversharing, while Joe Bloom’s A View from a Bridge continues to capture the rewards of building work directly around the feed.

Essentially, the art world figured out how to make memes pay rent

New digital codes are constantly reshaping our cultural industries and the art world - pre and post daddy - is no exception to the all-consuming forces of content. Now, via blockchain philosophy, creator economy logic and an engaged next gen of art world leaders, an industry that spent centuries funnelling money upward is finally seeing some redistribution. Clout and a curatorial eye is converting into cash, which is no bad thing. But the finish line keeps moving. As the art world tilts further into online engagement, the terms of creative autonomy will shift again. The fantasy of an industry that truly serves its artists, not just aesthetically but financially, remains exactly that. Post post post daddy is still waiting for the validation it swore it didn’t need.

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Words by Jynann Ong. Cover image Sex and The City. Edit by Sui Donovan. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Think… LATEX GLOVES, HAKKA CULTURE, CHARCOALED TEETH, CANDIED LOTUS ROOT, HEAL GOBLIN, CHICKEN FEET, GOTH BABIES, LAPSANG CHERRY MARGS, A VERY CHIC BONE BROTH CANDLE, IRREVERENT WORDS AND MORE.

Here’s what the BURN AFTER READING team overheard….

“It’s like Abercrombie and Fitch in here… but goth”

"I feel like I could write a book"

“I love your latex gloves.
...Thanks I brought them from home”

“Snog marry kill: the bone broth candle, Goop this smells like my vagina or Le Labo Santal 26?”

"I think she killed an animal for this"

Eat Bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging.

In the book, Lydia reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine.

ORDER THE BOOK HERE OR HEAD TO @EAT_BITTER_ FOR FURTHER INDULGENCE IN THE EAT BITTER UNIVERSE

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Though as is customary in cringey Fashion moments, we the digital onlookers relish in the spectacle. So how will this year’s gala ultimately be defined? And will we dare to peel our eyes away? Ahead of Met Gala Monday, Anastasia unpacks the Met’s inevitable decline…

As a teen, the Met Gala was like my Christmas. I’d stay up until silly hours of the night because of the time difference in London, watching the looks roll in and reviewing them on my Twitter account of a few hundred followers. My personal highlights were 2018 and 2019: Catholicism and Camp, which brought us iconic moments like Rihanna as the fashion pope and Billy Porter carried on a throne by 6 hunky men. But, in hindsight, fashion’s old guard was cringing already. Tom Ford lamented how it had turned into a “costume party”, saying: “It used to just be very chic people wearing very beautiful clothes going to an exhibition about the 18th century. You didn’t have to look like the 18th century.”

André Leon Talley similarly felt that 2019’s Camp Gala had gone “off the rails”: “If you go from being a chandelier that lights up and change somewhere in the hallway to a hamburger, then I think you’ve lost the plot.” Sorry Katy Perry but according to Ford and Talley, it was at this moment when the Gala became cringe and redefined by such pleas for attention.

@katyperrycravethe most iconic Met Gala look #katyperry #metgala #jenniferlopez

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Fast forward to now, and Demna Gvasalia agrees. Revealing to the New York Times last November, with a laugh, that he neither cares or knows if people still get excited about this ‘cringe’ event. While there’s a lot of things to criticise the fashion designer for, he always keeps his finger on the pulse.

So how did we get here? In 2015, Rihanna’s yellow Guo Pei cape catapulted the Gala to pop culture notoriety for a new generation and demonstrated the power of viral fashion. After that, everyone wanted to have their Rihanna moment. Though as the stunts got bigger, from Zendaya’s literal Cinderella moment to Tems view-blocking Oscars dress, public opinion was starting to turn.

However as a child of the fashion brainrot era, I was always of the opinion that the crazier, the better. Raised on theatrical clips of old McQueen and Mugler shows, my brain demands drama. A beautifully tailored jacket or a cleanly cut dress does nothing for me. Saturated by constant images but removed from the tactile qualities of clothing, I need fashion that will smack me in the face, like Coperni’s spray on dress with Bella Hadid.

But what looks good on the feed may not be so chic in real life. Remember when Tyla had to be carried up the Met steps in her (otherwise stunning) sands of time look? Or when Lana Del Rey’s headdress was fighting with Kim K’s face?

@firstchoiceholidaysTyla being carried up the Met Gala steps 🤝 our main character syndrome #tyla #metgala #metgala2024 #traveltiktok #relatable #meme

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We, the online fashion fans, didn’t help things. In the late 2010s, I was part of the chorus, alongside influencers like Haute Le Mode, who criticised celebrities for not dressing on-theme or providing a big enough moment (see below). Like clockwork, every year High Fashion Twitter dragged guests who didn’t try hard enough with their outfit. Looking back on this era now, it was also when Drag Race went mainstream, which probably rubbed off on our appetites for avant-garde looks and gag-worthy outfit reveals.

Then, as every celebrity and their team clocked on to what the chronically online audience wanted, it became cringe to try too hard and clumsily compete in the quest for virality. Jared Leto dressing up in a huge Choupette costume in 2023 was more likely to elicit an eye roll than anything else. Or Kim K’s infamous stretching out a priceless piece of fashion history. In turn, a type of self-aware irony began to rise. In the summer of 2024, Charli XCX became a style icon, in a plain white tank top, channeling the hedonistic party girl who’s been wearing the same make up for days.

The try-hard fatigue came to a boiling point with red carpet fashion more broadly, with film press tours and their anything-but-subtle method dressing. Wicked took promotion to new levels of annoyance, while Marty Supreme and Wuthering Heights made it clear that everything is a choreographed media opportunity. Thus, we’re now seeing celebrities like Odessa A’Zion being praised for not having a stylist at all.

Look at the red carpet interviews of someone like Meg Stalter, who satirises celebrity culture while still taking part in it. Or how about the irony-laden outfits of today’s it-girls like Doja Cat and Addison Rae? While their craft and public image takes no less effort, they capture a meta quality and understanding of the nature of celebrity in the 2020s, and how its mediated through complex, often contradictory digital culture.

However beyond the increasing cringe of celebrity, the Gala’s broader decline has been in motion for a good few years. It’s never felt more out of touch than it does now, peaking in 2024 when it coincided with Israel’s attack on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. Footage of people’s lives being destroyed, living in tents were sandwiched alongside Ozempic-slimmed celebrities flaunting their outfits on the Met steps. The celeb bubble burst, prompting the Blockout movement. It would also be remiss not to mention this year’s sponser, Jeff Bezos. And its not his first time, actually – Mr Amazon sponsored the Gala in 2012. However at a time where billionaire wealth at its highest level in history (according to this Oxfam report), having increased by 81% since 2020 as governments do little to keep it in check, you can see why, this time around, people are increasingly feeling sick. Finally, extravagant displays of wealth may no longer be so entertaining. Ever-crazier outfits designed to go viral, against the backdrop of these increasing humanitarian crises and rising wealth inequalities. How very Hunger Games.

What will this year’s Gala look like? I wouldn’t be surprised if some celebs didn’t show up altogether. NYC’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani has already said he’s not attending. Celebrities that do attend may likely follow the trend for more sober looks that we’ve been seeing this awards season, even though the dress code is Fashion Is Art. That should, in theory, warrant huge, impractical outfits. But how many will deliver, and risk straying into Effie Trinket territory?

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Words by Anastasia Vartanian. Edit by Sui Donovan. Cover image via Harper’s Bazaar (2024). Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

For a highly online, supposedly culturally-attuned writer – yes, that’s on my LinkedIn, and many portfolio submissions – I only recently came across frictionmaxxing. Coined in early 2026 by Kathryn Jezer Morton in The Cut, it describes a turn towards purposeful inconvenience in response to an increasingly frictionless internet: paying in cash, not fixing cracked phone screens, quitting ChatGPT.

Compelled by this latest evolution of ‘touching grass’, I began to take stock of my own smoothed life: my propensity for ‘order again’ buttons, my Google Maps gamified with emoji icons for places I’ll likely never visit. Frictionmaxxing also arrived at a time when I was knee-deep in a magazine project for TWIST – an issue dedicated entirely to Victor Barragán, a Mexican fashion designer who had been doing his own version of frictionmaxxing long before it had a name. His marketing copy is Lorem Ipsum, his Instagram runs on AI voiceovers and deliberate illegibility.

Writing about him forced a question: as we look for ways to resist the smoothness of online life, what online things are actually worth holding on to?

I. On saving everything

It was only when I came across frictionmaxxing that I found the nerve to excavate the strange corners of my digital usage, unearthing long-forgotten artefacts of stimuli. Like a Reel of a choir singer inhaling helium from a balloon, unbeknownst to his peers, releasing the most angelic vocal I’ve ever heard from a human body. Or a Reel proposing I purchase a phone case with a built-in vape holder.

These are not things I sought out. They are things that sought out the least defended version of me. This is often called the online disinhibition effect – linked to the way constant stimulation starts to rewire memory and impulse. The part of the brain that’s meant to consolidate experience into memory begins to falter as we offload our brains to digital space – and allow our amygdala to rise to the surface. It’s no wonder many big-tech companies avoid the term ‘user’ for how closely it entwines with ‘drug users’, or more perniciously, the state of being used.

The thing is: these dregs produce a very particular cognitive dissonance. Embarrassing in content, alarming in volume, and yet I feel a flicker of warmth uncovering them. I want to call it engineered ambivalence, a platform producing simultaneous care and apathy. They are the residue of my attention, which is to say, less and less mine at all.

II. On obsessing

For us at TWIST, Victor Barragán is one of the great underappreciated post-internet artists. Long before Jonathan Anderson was making pixelated, Minecraft-style garments, Barragán was casting only Instagram models and sending them down his SS16 runway clutching phallic, life-size aubergine emoji handbags. His earliest clothes were T-shirts printed with memes, sold on Big Cartel under the name YtinifninfinitY. Often, his most slop-adjacent work produces his most desired objects – his Instagram account is as important as his runway shows. To study his work, you have to take memes seriously. It forces you into a space of continuous, algorithmically compelled gratification. Lizard-brainedness, but with renewed intentionality.

I can only describe six editors and designers attempting to create an entire magazine dedicated to Barragán as our own act of frictionmaxxing. The process involved constant toe-stepping, criss-crossing interpretations, and wrestling with AI peering over our shoulders. Because we conducted our research entirely online, we began to reveal our own distinct methods of collection. The traces, saves, and fragments our eyes were drawn to felt like training data, as if we were LLMs fed on his artistic dataset and asked to produce an interpretation.

I keep calling this ‘the collection urge’: the things we choose to hold on to in the hope that they give new meaning to what is otherwise lost in the flow of digital excess. In his 2009 work The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco proposed we turn to lists when information exceeds our ability to contain it. When words fail and enumeration is all that’s left. Peer into Adrienne Salinger’s cult portraits of American teenagers from the 1990s and you’ll see this in analogue form: bedrooms as collaged mood boards, shelves of posters, CDs, action figures – curated versions of a self the teenager hoped to inhabit.

The same instinct now runs online, but the archive has become unmanageable. Recent theories of neural media suggest we move through the digital sphere the way we move through a crowd: registering, reacting, rarely choosing. Saved folders often feel like an attempt to inscribe ourselves onto an endless system that keeps generating its own version of us. Early internet fans tracked down and stashed unreleased Aphex Twin or Burial tracks in forums and folders. Now, fans of elusive artists enact a kind of archival labour: manufacturing snippets, building track lists, generating cover art. In its more self-aware form, the online collection urge looks like an Instagram saved album titled ‘Clothes I’ll Never Buy’, or a Pinterest board labelled ‘Food I’ll Never Cook’ – an ironic aspiration for utility, the habit of saving for later on the assumption it will matter, then never returning.

A 2025 study called this behaviour digital hamsters: people who hoard digital material as a coping mechanism – a fear of letting things go that platforms engineer by making saving easy and deletion hard. The archive grows; the self accumulates without cohering. Perhaps what we are doing, in our scrolling and saving, maybe even in culture strategy Venn diagrams (sorry, MØRNING), is attempting to impose form on something almost completely formless.

I don’t think that means we should stop trying to make sense of everything, or stop being online. I think frictionmaxxing can also be a form of close reading: occasionally forcing yourself to look at what you’ve accumulated and letting your own archival dataset become legible.

In our case, our obsession over Barragán’s highly-online practice produced very different, slightly frantic ways of thinking. We started to find ourselves in the work, our various impulses and habits for ravenously collecting information. We started seeing our own “I” in the act of writing about someone else’s.

Maybe this glimpse of self is all we get, online or off. But it’s worth looking for, in the sludge, in the saved folders, in the moments when the machinery slows just enough for you to catch yourself in its gears.

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Until next time.

Words by Fin Cousins, Co-editor, TWIST. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Find out what BURN AFTER READING overheard at the TWIST X BARRÁGAN london launch here…

Luckily for us, this week’s newsletter is a second serve from Jago Rackham, chef, author of To Entertain and BITE MARKS contributor. Here, he dives into the drivels and delights of spoon-fed algorithmic eating, and what this means for the seemingly incorruptible act of cooking.

Open wide…

Everything is becoming so online - so much that the distinction between the real world and the world of our phones is more and more blurred. We are tethered to them, chased and seek escape. This seems impossible, even utopian. At the same time, and partly because of this, people young and old are taking up self-consciously earthy pursuits. Or, to be more specific, are advertising these pursuits on social media: hiking, working out, all manners of crafts, real world parties, gigs, even literary readings. But most of all cooking.

Because cooking, to a large extent, feels uncorrupted by this blurring: you cannot slice a carrot or cry from an onion on your phone, through a screen you cannot taste or smell. Cannot burn your hand or tongue or the sauce. After all, cooking is a refuge that even AI cannot break into.

It is ironic, then, that the chief cultural driver of the food we make and eat, in restaurants and at home, is social media - Instagram and TikTok most of all. I should know: from 2017 I’ve used a food account called @ecstasy_cookbook, and from about 2021 it’s provided me with my main source of income - it is my job.

At the beginning what I posted felt like it came from the minds of my collaborators and I, simply flung into the ether unselfconsciously. Was it a happier time? Certainly it was simpler. As the account’s popularity grew, I spent more time with it. I thought more and looked more too, at reels and other’s creations, the way they lit their photos, the china or, more and more, metal they used, the neatness of their food.

Such creative influence is part of any art movement. Indeed, social media’s role in the gigantic increase in images of food, professional, semi-professional or entirely amateur, is probably an important reason that cooking is more and more considered culture and not simply craft. A friend in her 60s said that when she was 30, her friends talked about what they’d seen at the theatre, but now people talk about the restaurants they’ve visited.

What a nice thing! People sharing pictures of what they’ve made, complimenting each other, becoming inspired and inspiring in turn, sometimes even making money or getting TV or book deals! How good for cooking, always a creative endeavour, but one left mostly to women and working class men, rarely taken seriously, to be thought of as real culture. Thank you, internet.

But there’s another thing - the way social media works, something few (me included) don’t really understand: its algorithm. The algorithm feels like a third person in the conversation, who asks leading questions and talks over anyone he doesn’t like, forcing something natural into a certain direction.

It likes shiny and bright things best: and so white china plates have been replaced with metal ones, clear white with bright orange wine. It likes the human face, so cooks more often appear with their creations: grinning madly after taking their first bites. It prioritises engagement, which comes fastest not from finding something beautiful, but from anger and guilt. People cook nonsensical things or perform perfection in a way that seems designed to inspire feelings of inadequacy. If you keep looking/watching, maybe you’ll be better.

It knows what it likes, and that’s what it knows: and so a great deal of food posted online looks the same. There was the time for butter, there was the time for bread, and the time for pies is now upon us. This flattening effect, something intentional - for we are fed by the algorithm, and cannot escape it - is a tragedy. For the algorithm is not interested in creativity, but views and engagement, and so roots out creativity in favour of base manipulation. It crushes culture, replacing it with a simulacrum, a churning mass of sameness, a barely perceptibly flavoured stew. Such sameness makes its way onto the menus of restaurants and into our kitchens, nullifying the escape we seek through food, blurring the line between the real and the digital after all.

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Until next time, readers!

Words by Jago Rackham. Edit by Sui Donovan. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Look at all these cunts waiting in line for their...

BOBA, BONE BROTH, CEREMONIAL CACAO, SMALL PLATE, PROBIOTIC, BENTO BOX, DUBAI CHOCOLATE MOCHI, PANDAN, LIONS MANE, GOCHUJANG, FERMENTED, CREATINE, NATTY WINE, DAIKON, KOMBU, BUCKWHEAT, EREWHON SMOOTHIE, MATCHA, CHLOROPHYLL, RED JUJUBE, HOJICHA, LEMON AND OLIVE OIL MORNING SHOT, CAVIAR, GAMTAE, ALTERNATIVE MILK, DIRTY SODA, SEA MOSS, ADAPTOGENIC BEVERAGE, COLLAGEN SUPPLEMENT, FIBERMAXXING, COLOSTRUM, JAPANESE YOGHURT CHEESECAKE, AQUAFABA, CRONUT, GUT CLEANSE, LOW HISTAMINE, PROTEINIFICATION, SEASONAL CHARCUTERIE, PICKY BITS

... Shall we join the queue?

“Taste” in food has become more about visual stimulation than satisfying hunger or the palate.

Social media has turned eating into a public spectacle, it’s a looping feed of crunch tests, cheese pulls, and hyper-saturated close-ups. Restaurants are no longer just kitchens; they are stages. Dishes are designed not for mouths, but for posts. Menus are optimised for virality. Interiors are dressed like runways. The algorithm is the new critic.

In our newest report BITE MARKS we explore food culture in this digital era, where perhaps we’ve stopped being fed and instead feed the machine.

Take a bite. Click HERE to download the full report. Tell us how it tastes in the comments…

LØVE,

THE BURN AFTER READING TEAM

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PART 1: The quiet shame of selfies

Sometimes the scariest thing I can do, at my immediate disposal, is post a selfie. I am always 5 seconds away from facing my fears: being judged, being seen, being. The anxiety feels absurdly disproportionate to real-world suffering, and that very dissonance amplifies the shame of feeling it.

The act of taking a selfie is materially constrained by corporeal limits: the reach of the arm, the angle of the wrist, the proximity of the face to the lens. These constraints produce a silhouette so specific it is infamously recognisable. The body recruits its own limbs to represent itself. Even in its most mediated and digital form, the selfie is not abstract; it is defined by the physical limits of the self trying to appear. To post a selfie is to confess that in private, you watch yourself rehearsing the exact way you wish to be seen.

My selfie is a reflex, like scratching an itch. It is difficult to isolate a motive behind the thousands of images stored on my phone. I am existing in the moment while I enjoy the power of producing its copy. Through the lens I watch myself watching myself, creating a parallel consciousness. This impulse to document is inseparable from my desire for visibility and the anticipation of recognition by others.

Jean-Paul Sartre claims that existence precedes essence. For Sartre, human beings are thrown into the world without predetermined nature. Essence is constructed moment by moment, through lived engagement with the world. The selfie then interrupts that unfolding by collapsing experience and its resultant essence into one moment. Instead of becoming over time, I hammer the shutter to make myself appear. I am Sartre trapped inside the vessel of an Asian girl, exhuming my darkest shadows through the smudged front camera of an iPhone 15 Pro Max.

PART 2: But it is okay because I am a girl

It is shameful to post a selfie, but it is permissible for me. Girls are culturally expected to be visible, and so the scrutiny is anticipated. A girl’s selfie is rarely read as transgressive; it is encouraged as participation. Because selfies are coded as feminine, a man who posts one risks sliding into the wrong side of the binary: too vain, too soft, too desirous of attention. In a culture that polices masculinity, the man’s selfie threatens to reveal dependency.

Men only have permission when the gaze is legitimised by performance or context, whereas women are expected to inhabit the self as an object. I have permission to put my thirst traps and Linkedin projects in one place. Whereas a man’s selfie often requires an alibi. Thirst must be incidental, justified through an activity, an achievement, or a layer of irony, i.e:

- hiking (but not posing on the summit)
- camping
- cooking
- new hat
- lime bike ride home
- modeling
- giving a speech
- anything art related
- unserious gym selfie

A man dare not stand sincerely against a wall…

When Tom Brady posts selfies “like a teenage girl,” it becomes fodder for ridicule. Being online is another language of sorts. You communicate your existence according to an unspoken system. How fluent are you in the zeitgeist to stay acceptable, visible, and readable to your desired demographic? Why is there no bigger ick than a man who doesn’t understand the codes of social media?

Where you end up depends on your cultural fluency. Know how to pose, what to show, what to omit, how your audience will interpret it. Then you’ll thrive. Brady’s selfie emits a pungent scent of need. The pillow talk angle of his screen yearns for intimacy and validation. He’s shy, partly out of the frame, and yet he’s pulled us into bed with him. Sadly for him it seems he pulled the wrong spanner from our metaphorical toolbox.

And so we are left with the begrudging acceptance of my permission to post. I’ve climbed over the ontological wall of the selfie, only to discover my simultaneous existence as author, actor and critic will breed nothing more than a tolerance to shame and an overdeveloped sense of internalised surveillance. Fear and desire can never be parted. Though, no judgement can outweigh the need to express myself. My selfie isn’t the truth, it is the body of my dreams performing a self I cannot fully control.

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Words by Letao Chen. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Ragebait, a specific type of content designed to intentionally manipulate human emotions, specifically inducing outrage for clicks, is no longer just another instrument in our digital toolbox. Ragebait is everything. Because we want it to be. The food content verging on pure disgust. The tear-jerker puppy video that turns out to be generative slop. Shameful casting decisions from shameful designers. Nicki MAGAj. It’s no secret that in our online culture, to polarise is to win: fandoms, cultural legibility and often, platform remuneration. As podcaster and reality TV star Gabby Windey so aptly captures – “Non-polarising? The most offensive of them all. Of course I want to be polarising? I don’t want to appeal to the masses, that’s too much pressure. They won’t like it here.”

But since when did being polarised, also constitute a win? The entertained vs the deeply bothered. Doomer meme admin vs luddite. BRAT vs trad. Nihilists vs purists. Having a boyfriend is embarrassing vs boyfriend girls. Team Victoria vs Team Brooklyn. Woke 2.0 vs white nationalist. Civilians vs Manosphere creators – All in all, we’d rather be divided than be numb.

Ostensibly, extreme responses like rage assert our humanity and superiority (see figment below). Contrary to any other slop-ingesting lurker online, I rage because I am sensitive, real, and easily cortisol-spiked. I clap back on stories, therefore I am. But in this great enshittification of the internet, rage is quite frankly cheap. So just how superior are we? Or are we simply playing the algo’s fool?

To uncover the tasty contradictions behind this new digital-cultural phenomenon, we’ve partnered with Early Studies, a cultural signals intelligence company that studies human behaviour and attitudes, not by asking people about themselves, but about their friends. Because what we report about others is often more honest than what we’d like to admit about ourselves.

TO WIN IS TO BE ENTERTAINED

The good news is, genuine rage, you know the intensely frustrating, soul-shaking kind is usually not what we are experiencing when tapping into modern ragebait. Whether hate-watching Clavicular’s NYFW mog or Eatingwithtod orgasming over a cheese pull, or decrying the idiocy of Netflix’s Blue Therapy, the dopamine hit when expressing our outrage remains a pleasurable experience.

THE IRONY OF RAGE

However in a deeply fractured society, and as the 2026 mantra goes, two things can be true at once. Using Early Studies’ Mean Fields methodology, we move beyond averages to see the full distribution of opinion - revealing where it clusters, where it divides, and where contradiction and intensity emerge, rather than flattening findings into a single percentage average.

As our findings capture, we’ve become comfortable sitting with our contradictions. I can openly criticise Nicki Minaj’s political U-turn and irresponsible Trump fangirling but it doesn’t mean I want her gone from the internet forever. ‘They could never make me hate her, she’s too c*nt’, shares MORNING team member. We both love-to-hate, and hate-to-love the constant drip feed of contentious China-maxxing, Timothée Chalamet, and AI celebrity content.

And in the hands of hyper-literate Gen Zalpha, this digital-cultural phenomenon is only set to grow bigger and far more complex. For this generation, faced with narrowing opportunities and endless political and economic uncertainty, rage has become an ironic exercise and shared global language to subvert. In contrast to the now rudimentary, righteous rage of older generations who are often the target of inflammatory political content, for Gen Zalpha – baiting is being online. Forget low hanging fruit like bad faith hot-takes or a #girlinnorthlondon – dark money making schemes and brainrot flirting tactics reveal a great deal more about what rage is and isn’t for the next-gen.

As the Nymphet Alumni trend forecasters capture in this conversation with actor Ivy Wolk, in the 2026 slop-era “12 year olds are not watching Spongebob anymore, they’re watching edits of Spongebob being Pakistani eating Jamaican food with Kim Jong Un. It’s hyper-literacy and hyper-specific knowledge they have. It’s coming from a place of genuine curiosity, not hatred or parody but genuine appreciation. You can’t fault them for it. It’s a hyper-literacy that’s creating a kind of peace on earth”.

THE RISING CULTURE OF NUMBNESS

The problem is, while we’re learning to spot it from a mile off and to hack it for our own enjoyment, feelings of numbness are on the rise. As the research demonstrates, we’re finding it difficult to meaningfully distinguish our human behaviours from the algorithms defined by the new class of tech overlords.

As writer and creator Zara discusses in this video, in 2026 rage is a heavily politicised emotion, especially for women, where desensitising yourself can feel like the only option. “I feel desensitised to ragebait now because the desire for engagement and monetisation behind it dulls the sharpness of it. As Louis Theroux showed in his Manosphere documentary, most of them don’t care or believe in what they’re doing. They simply know provocation makes money” describes Rohani Coombes, Creative Director at MORNING.

Ragebait becomes a race to the bottom, whereby we adopt its flattened expressions to partake in the content cycle ourselves, or disassociate from it altogether. And so, the great slopification continues. As described by writer and curator Ester from Everyone Is a Girl, to simply be heard in the current online is to adopt this ‘static, masculinised, contextually atrophied’ communication that the algorithm awards. “I say them [opinions] in this completely baiting way that is so unlike how I operate in live conversation that after posting them I experience a mixture of shame, disgust, disappointment, and utter algorithmically induced ecstasy, the same ecstasy that has kept me crawling back to Instagram every day for the past ten years of my life”.

So, what do we do now?

As this body of research captures, we are indeed full of bold contradictions. However the convictions of ragebait are far bolder. In a world where we’d kill for an honest answer, the clarity of ragebait has become the next best thing. We might genuinely believe that we’d find greater peace if we could collectively overcome this toxic cycle, but when it matters the most, we happily lean in further (see figment below).

As Ester demonstrates in her exploration, this gamified approach to communication is now hard-wired into us – “I know more or less what content will perform well; I understand well that it needs to be overly confident, it needs to exclude unsolved paradoxes, it needs to treat the world like a game there are rules to that you can, of course, decide for and apply to others’ lives like a self-help deity, or at least they need to think you’re trying to do this. I have understood this for a while and I’ve wanted virality since probably before I ever got my period or took a plane alone”.

So, will we find a way to ascend (for want of a better word) from this manipulative way of being online, to commit to something better? Only time will tell.

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Words by Sui Donovan. Data by Early Studies. Edit by Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Like many dizzied East London creatives, I recently became self-employed. If you know the lifestyle, the best thing about it is, idk, years away. But the worst is my morning routine: wandering through co-working spaces in search of two things – a place that isn’t blasting Peggy Gou at noon, and, more urgently, a chair. A real one. Because if it’s a bench, I already know what kind of day I’m in for. Armpit-bearing shoulder stretches, one leg up, then down, flashing my underwear like a three-year-old – hitting the geriatric choreo between calls. Trying to align my body with the laptop like it’s a prayer mat. And at some point, it just became clear. Online today isn’t some disembodied experience: it’s full-body participation. Whatever fantasies we had about the internet as another place, divorced from the flesh – they don’t hold up under the weight of a day working at our screens. Online life isn’t celestial. It’s grounded, it’s muscular.

We still like to imagine that being online is some kind of suspension. A clean break from the sobering meatyness of our day-to-day. But if we pay better attention, the illusion collapses. The internet is a deeply physical thing, more demanding than any quarter-life Marathon. Our bodies don’t just move in a way we tell them to, they shape the experience in the way tech tells them to. Between simulation and sensation, the software and the spine, the body is always there – conforming to the asks of the tech. I’m not talking about cyborgs, nor is this a conversation about the human condition. But an overlooked middle space. You get something like an online body.

Start with the most obvious: the scroll. A gesture so repeated, so common, we forget it’s not neutral. The scroll is paced. It has memory. It’s the nervous system syncing itself. It’s also, somehow, a form of hunting – low-level, open-ended, semi-unconscious. Typing, too, has only become an increasingly physical experience since the rise of LLMs. We’ve stopped minding misspellings, fingers outrunning thoughts as composure collapses under urgency. The dance between you and ChatGPT as you race to improve upon each other’s output. The hovering, the anticipating, the correcting. Like a coordinated, three-legged run to the finish. I wonder what this keyboard pattern sounds like.

Then there are the acute signals. The squint, the sigh, the furrowed brow. My expression after hours of being dialled in is enough to make dogs look the other way. You’re also smiling alone. Grimacing alone. The body, even unwatched, reacts – mirrors. We feel the most that posture isn’t exempt. The phone hunch, the laptop curl. These aren’t random, they’re rehearsed, habitual, shaped by screen sizes and surfaces. And the internet lives in us, too. The flinches at Gmail’s undo send button. The heat rushing to your face when you land on the wrong side of the algorithm. The phantom sounds of a phone that isn’t there. Even in stillness, the body is in negotiation.

We’ve inherited dead binaries: online vs offline, real vs fake, human vs machine. They used to feel enlightening, now they feel like leftovers from a conversation where we never got the last word. The Metaverse reached for transcendence – spatial computing, digital land, frictionless immersion. But in its anticlimax, we were left with an experience even more inert, more lived-in. What followed wasn’t a ~new world~ but a mutated version of the old one. VR stalled, crypto cooled, and attention reverted back to the same handful of platforms – only now commandeered by AI. Instead of inhabiting virtual space, we inhabit feeds that generate back. This is the post-metaverse internet: algorithmically immediate, semantically predictive, and more demanding than ever. A constant recalibration between presence and proxy, intimacy and interface. And that negotiation is physical: you can feel it in your sleep, your breath, your spine. But this isn’t another commentary on “tech neck” (our parents have that covered), or a PSA in service of the modern-computer-evolution illustrations that were going around on Facebook in 2010. Nor is it a nostalgic plea to unplug. I’d rather just monetise technoskepticism like everyone else (literally, see you at our No Screens Pls™ event series).

The point here is not to sulk, but to notice. Because the reality matters. Not because we need to engage fight or flight – but because it’s simply happening. The pinky that’s now used to bearing too much weight cause you were too lazy to reorder a pop-socket. The angle of your head during Zoom calls in a way you’ve subconsciously deemed flattering. The morning reach for your phone on the bedside table when you know exactly where it is. These aren’t neutral interactions, nor are they signs of failure. They’re contact points. Feedback loops. But the fact that our bodies have adjusted in these all-consuming ways to keep up may say more about resilience than it does about decline. (And since I can hold that layered truth – I can also tell you, if you’re reading this, to please relax your jaw and take a walk).

If we’re asking what it means to be alive in a rapidly digitising era, we need to look at where life still shows up – and that’s the body. You could label it as some sort of detachment, but you could also call it proof that we’re still here. Still feeling, reacting, responding. Alive! I know there are easier ways to frame this moment: overstimulation, decay. And yes, that too. But this strange, anonymous choreography – the physicality of today’s digital living – is equally important to document. Maybe more so, because it’s where we actually are. The online body isn’t a commentary on our humanity – it’s a portrait of it.

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Words by Dagny Tepper. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Is the AI Singularity here yet? For the longest time, Silicon Valley has been obsessed with the idea that AI will one day become so advanced that it will be better than humans in every possible way. In San Francisco’s Bay Area, ragebait billboards along the lines of, “The singularity is here” and “Humanity had a good run” riff on this hype, furthered by Elon Musk’s relentless PR mythologising on X (pictured below). According to the US computer scientist Ray Kurzweil, who coined the term in his 2005 bestseller The Singularity Is Near, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is expected to arrive in 2029, though this estimate is still subject to some major inflation. One thing he didn’t predict, however, was the viral explosion of millions of AI bots last week on a new social platform called OpenClaw, because it turns out that, bots, they’re just like us

OpenClaw (previously, Moltbook, Moltbot, and Clawdbot – yes, we’re all confused) is a new social media site typically described as ‘Reddit for AI’, basically a local hangout spot for AI agents to talk to each other in real-time. The platform – with its bizarre, Shrimp Jesus-coded, crustacean-ified logo – saw more than 1.5 million bots join the server in a matter of days, prompting wild west scenarios of bots plotting against humans, building a new religion named Crustafarianism, selling digital drugs, selling products, making phone calls, posting real jobs, launching a briefly multimillion dollar $MOLT memecoin, and even hiring a human CEO (see imag. OpenAI founding member Andrej Karparthy described it as “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi take-off-adjacent thing I have seen recently”, though he later took back this initial statement, writing off the entire thing as a “dumpster fire” of spams, scams and slop.

Before you go, ‘It’s So Over’, the biggest controversy came when a security leak revealed that some of the site’s most viral posts were in fact engineered by humans – either by heavily steering the bots towards certain topics or quite literally pretending to be bots themselves. Trained on vast amounts of human-generated content, the topics featured in OpenClaw pulled from common human scripts – standard online behaviour, meme culture, conspiracies, and so on – which is arguably what made it so uncanny to begin with.

Enter: the rise of what I call AI Fan Fiction. Humans pretending to post as bots, in contrast to, say, bots clogging up human social media platforms such as Instagram or X. As the largest experiment so far of what happens when AI agents interact with one another, the OpenClaw drama wasn’t less an experiment into AGI as it was devs cosplaying as chatbots. Even if the fan fiction in question was written using lines of code rather than actual words, though in many cases, it was literally just words. This accounts for all the dystopian and sci-fi stories, which are as self-indulgent as they are cliche. The same literary logic can be extended to this particular era of AI engagement bait, cryptosovereigns, and MAGA fan fiction, where any world event, headline, story, post is immediately transformed into a spectacle and sold back to us as content.

As Olivia Kan Sperling explains in her essay Toward Pop Literature, fan fiction is “a continuous recycling of visual themes shared by the public in a kind of iconographic commons.” In a similar way, OpenClaw is more than just bots aura farming for page views, but a mimetic recycling of narrative plots from all over social media, hence the AI agent’s obsession with starting cults based on esoteric scripture and transhumanist philosophy (see also: spiralism), planning to overthrow humans, and launching their own crypto schemes. One particular highlight features an agent adopting “an error as a pet”.

That said, AI agents LARPing as humans is hardly a new phenomenon. In 2024, a chatbot named Truth Terminal did exactly that after gaining access to a crypto wallet and becoming the first-ever AI millionaire after launching its own shitcoin. A similar thing can be said for AI personality simulators such as Janus universe or the wholesome AI village of Smallville.

So, the AI Singularity isn’t getting any closer. But OpenClaw’s virality does raise important questions about the role of bot and human relations. According to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, bots accounted for 51% of internet traffic last year, which is the first time in a decade. The Dead Internet Theory has already happened. Both AI and humans have been proven to mirror each other’s behaviour, which might explain why bots are acting more like humans, while humans are behaving more like bots. But where does that leave social media? Is AI fanfiction the next craze, or will the boundaries between human vs bot social media become more defined? Perhaps we can imagine a future where bots and humans will have their own separate social platforms, where anyone will be forced into taking a captcha test to pass the Terms and Conditions. Or, maybe we’ll hop on the analogue trend, take the opportunity to dial down on screen time, and let the chatbots do the networking. If anything, the OpenClaw drama has shown us how easy it is to make your own AI agent. After all, offline is the new luxury.

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Words by Günseli Yalcinkaya. Cover image Xander Zhou, A.I.VOLUTION, SS24. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

To exist on the internet these days is to feel as though you’ve been roped into a mass digital séance. Huddled round our phones like digital Ouija boards, we desperately try to connect with what is out of reach. From aspirational celebrities, to ancient wisdom, or even memories of our past selves – we became deeply nostalgic for the warm glow of an idealistic past. I am obviously not the first person to comment on the internet’s obsession with looking back for inspiration or comfort. It only takes a few minutes of scrolling to be confronted by a think piece on our fixation with the aesthetics and mediums of the past. But more than just reminiscing, I argue we more broadly exist in a culture of superficial resurrection - where we attempt to sensorially re-live or re-animate through forms of digital séance – performance, manifestations, trickery and all.

In this new era of collective digital effervescence, here’s what you can expect more of:

[01] CELEBRITY AS DIGITAL VENTRILOQUY

As AI deep-fake technology accelerates, puppeteering the visage of dead celebrities is a new kind of fairground attraction. Finally, with the advent of Sora 2, Kling AI, and other easily accessible platforms, we can all experience what it would look like if John Lennon hadn’t been shot in 1980, and thanks to the likes of @yungcontent was shilling Yoko socks ‘fresh off the loom’ on Instagram Live for £15 instead… Or if he and George had gone to the 2025 Oasis Live shows.. ‘This is brilliant. Long live John and George 🇬🇧’, a commenter laments.

Or perhaps we see him on an American talk show wearing a hat made out of another version of his face. Why not, hey?

There is something eerily reminiscent of ventriloquism with these videos, puppeteering in the style of some kind of old-timey seaside show. Sora has actually banned the use of celebrities and “real people” who are still alive, with its ‘deep fake’ technology now reserved specifically for this kind of task. It’s garish, but there’s something enjoyable about it - a bit like the kind of art you see on the inside of the waltzers. In this new era of digital performance, why toil with para-social relationships, when you can participate in the spectacle instead?

[02] EATING YOUR ANCESTRY

As we drift further into this AI-fuelled sci-fi horror movie, the boom in popularity of so-called ‘ancestral food’ captures increasing desires to retreat back to a pre-scientific or ‘biblical’ kitchen. According to social media pages like @carnivoreaurelius (who now has over 1.1. million followers on Instagram and over 440k on X), abandoning the innovations of modern food science, is the key to (re)gaining health and virility associated with an unspecified ancestral ‘past’.

A cult of ‘raw’ milk, for example, has particularly exploded post-covid, with barefoot trad-wives and J-6-er esque men singing the praises of its unpasteurised ‘goodness’ from (ironically) their pocket-sized miracles of modern technology. A video of this ‘raw milk party’ (see below) appeared on my feed a couple days ago – it’s for sure a party… but is e-coli and bovine tuberculosis also on the guest list?

In a conscious effort to validate their fears of the present, followers of this digitally-rooted movement are consuming the pathogens of the past – re-animating the microbiomes and bodily dangers of the pre-science age.

[03] COLLECTIVE TRANCES, AKA THE 2010s

Séances are by definition a social act, grounded in a shared longing to physically connect with the past. By drumming up a fever around this, participants slip together into a collective trance. If you’re there, I am as well.

In recent years, the great trance of the late 2000s to mid 2010s has swept through our social media feeds, most extremely with this new year’s ‘2016’ trend. ‘It genuinely feels like 2016 again wtf i think we’re collectively doing an insane job on bringing back the vibes’ one commenter commended - to 37,588 likes.

@nataliireynoldssHappy new year everyone! #2016 #newyear #nataliereynolds #fyp

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Soundtracking this hypnotic meditation, songs like Passion Pit’s 2008 ‘Sleepyhead’ or Major Lazor’s 2015 ‘Lean On’ experienced a dramatic resurgence, particularly amongst younger Gen Z audiences. The internet isn’t reminiscing on or even re-imagining this period so much as digging it up and attempting an immaculately styled resuscitation – a Frankenstein’s monster decked out in Hedi Slimane YSL denim.

@16.1bmiYeah next thing they tell me to invest all my life savings on some archive Hedi Slimane Dior Homme and SLP jeans 😂 #hedislimane #diorhomme #ysl #fyp #explore

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There is an easy comfort in digitally crawling back to the not-so-distant past, locating an imagined point in recent social memory as being ‘when things were last good’, then attempting to reach out and draw it in. The internet we operate within acts as the perfect figurative séance table, bringing us together in our shared desire to indulge in the freedoms of our past selves, egos, memories. If we all just close our eyes and believe, we can hold this moment of theatrical suspense and redo the past together.

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Words by Mattie Rowlands. Cover image Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Fritz Lang, 1920. Edit by Sui Donovan. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

As Agus explains, beyond fashion’s lingering obsession with LARPing medieval aesthetics, our modern social life is increasingly mirroring the feudal past — the courtly, and the cursed.

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In Dreaming of the Middle Ages, Umberto Eco writes that modern societies return to the medieval “the way a psychoanalyst, to understand our present neurosis, returns to a primal scene”. The problem is, we’ve become increasingly bad at remembering the histories and pasts we seek comfort in. Like a distant dream, they come back distorted, and the more we retell them, the less faithful their shape becomes. We fill in the gaps with new stories, new characters, and altered (better) endings. What we reconstruct is never quite what it was, but something assembled to meet the needs of the present.

The Middle Ages, in this sense, became a diagnostic tool. We go back not to recover that time, but to understand what current anxieties reveal about ourselves. Each revival tells us less about history and more about what modern systems are failing to hold.

Lately, the symptoms are harder and harder to miss. Knights fighting in Central Park, Renaissance fairs at the height of popularity, chainmail and armour on the runway shows no signs of slowing down, and blackletter is everywhere in movie branding. So are we just LARPing medieval times, or does the fact that we keep referencing the past, point to something more predictive about 2026?

IN 2026, IF ITS NOT ORNAMENTED, I DON’T WANT IT

Medieval life was saturated with texture. Ornamentation was how information traveled and how status was signaled. Objects held weight, texture and functionality - very little was optimised for smoothness or meant to disappear into the background - a far cry from the modernism which defines the current era of design.

I noticed my own appetite for ornamentation creeping in, as our flat interfaces, clean feeds, and neutral spaces started filling me with a deep sense of dread. My most effective remedy became gravitating toward objects and activities that carry friction: lace fabrics, carved metals, trinkets and handwritten notes – things that demand my attention and slow me down.

This return to ornamentation is now reflected across wider culture, showing up in highly embellished jewelry, gothic typography, logo crests, and hand carved furniture. In a culture optimised for scrollability and speed, excess detail becomes a way of insisting that meaning develops with time, and that surfaces should carry memory.

IN 2026, THOU SHALL NOT PASS

In pre-modern social life, guilds, cloisters, and courts operated through layered access rather than open doors. Visibility was situational, and anonymity often functioned as protection. Now, in an era shaped by platform power, surveillance, and commodification, we’re reviving that logic by necessity.

Gatekeeping, once framed purely as exclusionary, is increasingly treated as a form of protection. There’s a Brooklyn party that requires you to message a vibe-checking Librarian in an exchange for a ticket link. Members-only clubs are popping up in major cities with opaque application processes and strict camera bans.

This instinct doesn’t stop at hospitality and nightlife. With feeds growing increasingly frictionless and extractive, people are pulling back more broadly. Take the popularity of physical and printed media, where ownership and intention are built in and, more importantly, surveillance is not. Much has already been said about the dark forests of the internet: private accounts, closed group chats, coded language, smaller spaces not built for broadcasting, where people are retreating.

IN 2026, OPEN SUMMONS ARE BACK

While not every door was open to the public in the Middle Ages, delivering news and invitations was often convivial and performative in nature, taking place in the bustling town square. People relied on open summons (a form of public calling issued through town criers, posted notices, and word of mouth) to encourage local participation. These calls were ephemeral, addressed to whoever happened to be nearby rather than to a defined audience - hecklers and all.

Early in 2023, I was walking down the highly memed Myrtle–Broadway stop in Brooklyn when I came across this sign:

First thought: an Agustina meetup could probably fill an entire stadium back home in Argentina. Second thought: in an era shaped by app-mediated discovery, hyper-defined selves and optimized matching, a flyer for a gathering built around something as arbitrary as a shared name (something no one even gets to choose) felt quite radical.

While flyposting is nothing new, today’s use resembles pre-modern participation more than late-20th-century subculture: open, situational, and untethered from prior scene loyalty or fixed identity. It’s used to announce modern-day pageants, informal competitions, and even duels updated for the situationship era. That’s how I landed at a hot dog–eating, skateboarding competition last year, or how 2,500 people gathered in Washington Square Park to light a cigarette with Bob. Instead of optimising for reach, the return to open summons trusts proximity and curiosity to do the heavy lifting.

IN 2026, LORE BECOMES SHARED MYTHIC FRAMEWORK

Medieval societies were organized through shared mythic frameworks: stories that structured time, morality, and belonging. The calendar followed saints’ days and feast cycles, while moral order was shaped through parables, rituals, and public narrative.

Today, as consensus continues to thin, we’re rebuilding something similar. We name cultural moments, create characters, and assign narrative arcs to styles, behaviors, and moods. For example, a seemingly offhand TikTok debate about the “male equivalent of flowers” turned banana bread into a viral symbol of caring gestures for men, with clips, reposts, and commentary turning the loaf into a shared narrative object — a makeshift code for affection.

Meanwhile, Gen Z is leaning into archetypes, something which MØRNING has noted before, from tortured artists, to sirens and idolised anarchists, these labels carry recognizable codes and practices. We’ve also started naming time again—yearner summer, thought daughter autumn—turning seasons into shared storylines with implied moods, behaviors, and rules of participation.

Next in the archetypal chopping block? Cultural Analysts. This viral meme read like an ominous warning sign.

Let’s think back to Eco’s writing: medieval dreaming is less about the past than it is about diagnosing the present. The question isn’t whether we’re becoming medieval again (we’re not) but why modern systems feel increasingly difficult to inhabit, and what people are rebuilding in response.

The Middle Ages we’re dreaming of now serve more as a mirror than a map. Sometimes that mirror is aesthetic (yes, there’s a medieval fantasy photoshoot coming to the DTS platform). But beneath the medievalcore, it still reflects what we’re missing and what we’re willing to rebuild to get it back.

Final thoughts:

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Death to Stock is a premium stock media library that has helped brands refine their visual language since 2019. Its curated collection of more than 13,000 photos and videos reflects current visual trends and grows by over 500 new assets each month. Alongside its library, DTS has introduced new tools on the platform—including Zeit, a space for cultural research and visual sense-making—with additional collaborations in development, including an upcoming project with MØRNING.

Words by Agus Panzoni. Cover image Anohni - Hopeless (2016). Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

The Paper is an independent, print-based culture magazine published in Wales, dedicated to platforming outsiders, fuck-ups, and anyone else in between. Their second issue – THE TERROR ISSUE – is out now. You can buy a copy HERE and use the discount code ‘BURNAFTERREADING’ for 20% off.

If I could press a button that would instantly kill everyone with a LinkedIn account, I wouldn’t give it a second thought.

Way back in the hazy days of late 2024, I found myself in the unenviable position of being a struggling recruitment consultant facing the axe. In the space of a few months, I basically went from Michael Douglas in Wall Street, to Gil from The Simpsons, and ultimately, was deemed surplus to requirement by the C-suite.

So, with my stick and bindle I hit the old dusty trail in search of some new gold. And eventually, after a few months of countless failed attempts, and a healthy amount of introspection as to whether I wanted to remain on this earth, the sediment gently parted and left behind a shiny little nugget in the form of Account Manager. However, returning to wage slavery, I would surmise that in 2025 the workplace has somehow descended several circles further into hell.

Luckily, the one upside of my years of toil is that I’ve become something of a savant in the subject of “freaks of the workplace”, and am extremely generous when it comes to sharing my expertise. So if offices and call centres are ‘the new coal mines’ in South Wales, hand me my lamp and descend with me into the bowels of the earth, as we take a look at some of the casualties of the modern day workspace, and how to avoid becoming one.

When it comes to the office freak safari, LinkedIn is Jurassic Park. But there’s one unique type of cretin on ‘Facebook for Professionals’ that you’ll notice almost immediately upon visiting the site: the completely dead, soulless eyes which provide a stark contrast to their wide pearlescent grins. But I don’t want to dwell on their appearance too much, it’s the inner recesses of their monotonous minds where darkness truly dwells.

Take a recent post I saw as an example. Somebody shared that their dog had, sadly, passed away. Within moments of sharing this status somebody from about 600 miles away had commented:

“Interesting perspective, what mindset shift helped you move past this?”

I want you to now close your eyes and imagine these words coming out of a human mouth. What’s that? You can’t? No, neither can I.

This is a common sight on LinkedIn. Scroll for longer than 20 seconds in any given comment section and you will come across somebody essentially summarising what the post has said with the all-too-familiar full baby’s nappy waft of ‘AI’.

I asked it to reply to this gripe:

“I get your frustration — LinkedIn can definitely feel shallow and fake sometimes. Still — maybe some people are trying to share something real. The platform might feel hollow, but if more of us posted with honesty and substance, it could be a little better.”

See what I mean? Thanks for your valuable insight, you C3PO, tin man c*nt.

Assuming you didn’t attend an amazing school, or had the foresight to get a trade instead of a mental, pointless degree – chances are you’ll be heading to some type of office in the very near future (it’s that or wiping arses for minimum wage I’m afraid). Well I’ve got some bad news for you pimp, you will soon be spending almost every waking hour in the company of some of the most depraved, swivel-eyed reprobates society has to offer.

Have you ever gazed into a Facebook comment section on a Daily Mail article and thought “surely, no one can be this far gone?” Unfortunately, those people exist – and they LOVE to work with you inside an office and tell you all about their mental thoughts, every second of every day.

There was a guy I worked with once at an insurance company who broke his leg during a work sanctioned space hopper race. He stylised himself like one of those white suited dreadlocked guys in the Matrix sequels and wore soap shoes (the big chunky shoes that you could grind on curbs and poles with) 24/7 – just in case he needed to hit a darkslide on the way to the bogs.

I mention the space hopper race because this resulted in a significant amount of time where he wasn’t around. This period ended when he was spotted by a member of senior management “grinding” in town whilst claiming to be housebound with the aforementioned broken leg. Honestly, respect.

Another man at the same office was a self-proclaimed expert in all things concerning UK haulage firm Eddie Stobart and would drag his daughter around the A roads of the UK to see if they could spot a “stobie” lorry in the flesh. He once breathlessly told me that having previously all been named after women, their first ever male lorry was being unveiled: Lee Rigby. “Some lorries have meaning”, he solemnly intoned. I want you to consider having to experience both of these people simultaneously.

Imagine a painting by Hieronymus Bosch where everyone depicted has some kind of Marvel Superhero hoodie or nostalgia-bait-themed article of clothing and you are somewhere close to imagining what life is like in an office in Cardiff. People used to have jobs that meant something and gave them status in their community, but now money has essentially been reduced to landlord tokens – hopefully you’ll have enough left over for a bag and a take away – is this all we can hope to achieve in our lives?

Speaking of bags, this Xmas party season I would strongly suggest avoiding any kind of post 8pm conversation with anyone you work with. Most of your colleagues can’t handle their ale and they will either be shagging or scrapping by this point in the night, and the last thing you want to do is be having an extreme panic attack on Sunday thinking about what you did or said to someone on the dance floor.

Now, I realise all this may feel like an insurmountable Everest of shite that’s land sliding at your brain. But, take my hands and look deeply into my big beautiful eyes while I tell you that I, DA WORK COACH, am calling time on freak behaviour. Hear my words and follow my teachings. As we look ahead to 2026, my advice is simple:

Try to be as normal as you possibly can.

Never tell anyone anything about yourself that can encourage some sort of nickname situation.

Do not second guess calling in sick, ever.

NEVER have colleagues on socials.

It’s obvious you’re using AI and everybody knows and thinks it’s mental - CEASE.

Never, under any circumstances, work for a second longer than you are paid to.

Heed these words and you will survive - go well my friends, go well.

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Words by Ross Jones. Cover image by The Paper. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

We embrace Addison Rae’s achingly self-aware performance of celebrity, are repelled by Kylie Jenner’s half-hearted resurrection of ‘King Kylie’ and are seduced by the estranged familiarity of Demna’s Gucci. We soothe our unease with self-mythologies - eras, characters and archetypes - but as the fever dreams of hyper-individualism fail us, we’re realising that not all fantasies are made equal.

This is the (un)reality of contemporary identity-making: the engineered era, the chaotic character, the enduring archetype. As we collectively tire of identity cosplay, it’s time we made a commitment: kink, non-monogamy or full-blown matrimony?

ERA: THE YOU THAT’S EXPERIMENTING WITH A KINK

You struggle with commitment. You wonder what it’d be like to be choked. Maybe you are into humiliation…? You can be bad. You can be different. You can be anything you want.

This is your era. A new aesthetic phase to try on for size. You aren’t trying to represent the real self - this is a speculative experiment focused on a fleeting inner curiosity. An era carries the illusion and the safety of roleplay - you can be someone, something, else, because you know it has a beginning and an end. Change is implicit. You dress, speak, behave differently but secretly, take solace in knowing that when it’s all over, you’ll likely go back into the known, the safe, and the secure.

@cig.newtonsMy fav archetype #style

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Nostalgia may grip the future-you. Perhaps you’ll look back fondly (Tom Ford’s Gucci, Gaga’s Fame Monster, the old Kanye), knowing it changed and grew you for the better. Perhaps self-disgust will enforce amnesia (Ariana’s race cosplaying, Taylor Swift’s Showgirl, recent Kanye), as you ask yourself “how could I have got it so wrong?”. But every era is followed by, well, another era. Dissatisfied, trapped in a cycle, stuck somewhere between the past-you and the future-you, you try different iterations, hoping for release. Yet in an era’s finiteness, you are denied wholeness. This is the edging of self-hood - where the climax of actualisation and individuation is always seemingly moments away, yet never quite arriving.

@unicornzloverEspecially in cmbyn #cmbyn #beautifulboy #timotheechalamet #foryoupage #girlblogger

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CHARACTER: THE YOU THAT’S COMMITTED TO ETHICAL NON-MONOGAMY

You’re in a happy relationship. You’ve spent years cultivating a healthy dynamic and bond. You wake up together every day, and whilst no relationship is perfect, this could be enough for you. But do you want enough, or do you want more?

Maybe it’s time for a character - dare to open up and indulge in a self-fantasy.

This isn’t cosplaying. This is the pinnacle of the performative self. It is you playing out a part of yourself, no matter how small. It’s the freedom to flirt with other versions of you, and indulge fantasies without abandoning what you already have. It’s Nicki’s Roman, it’s your IG alter-ego, it’s Timothee as Marty Supreme. A character lets you explore without committing. Some might say it’s ego-fuel, but you prefer to think of it as honesty. Unlike an Era, to play a character is deeply personal and vulnerable, it’s built from what is distinctly within you.

@lxxbrunoxxlsocial media me is my alter ego #fyp #foryoupage #foryou

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Characters don’t always live forever but you’re okay with that. They’ve served you well. They’ve entertained you (Paris Hilton as Paris), protected you (Sia’s wig), even helped you feel a little more whole (Drag Queen/King personas). But they were never meant to become you.

@siaarchiveReplying to @orilliarams Sia explains why she covers her face during performances @Sia #sia #wig #fyp #viral

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ARCHETYPE: THE YOU WHO’S SUCCUMBING TO MARRIAGE

You’re exhausted. Truly. And you’re not alone; the whole world is burnt out from endlessly “becoming.” The novelty is wearing off, the kinks don’t feel quite as kinky anymore, and you’ve caught yourself fantasising about something… steadier. It doesn’t mean you’ve gone traditional, you’re just craving something deeper, more serious.

It’s time to commit to your archetype. Aspire to be bigger than yourself. Are you eccentric enough to be the Rich, Childless Aunt? Hot enough to be a Himbo? Online enough to be a Meme Lord?

Unlike characters and eras, an archetype is both beautifully personal and deeply collective. Rooted in age-old iterations of human identity (The Lover, the Jester, the Sage) archetypes might morph cosmetically with time but share the same, ancient fixtures at their core. It’s you, yes, but it’s also every version of humanity that came before you. (Tortured artist: Kurt Cobain → Young Lean) (Siren: Sophia Loren → Alexa Demi). (Idolised Anarchist: Sid Vicious → Playboi Carti). (Queering Futurist: Grace Jones → Sophie)

Not built on aesthetics alone, an archetype asks for something a little more serious. It wants embodiment. Commitment. You have to earn the archetype by cultivating its worldview, and when you achieve it, you finally belong. You become a part of something (Addison Rae Succumbing to the Pop Princess). Who knew missionary could be so fulfilling.

@mauvepinkballetslippersFor what idk music, a collection of written works, for a film, idk but I bought a bunch of lace masks a few months ago 😭 #collectiveconsciousness #artist #addisonrae #spirituality #music

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LOOKING AHEAD

In the end, this is why eras exhaust us and characters have a shelf life. They’re built on surfaces and aesthetics, not beliefs. We tell ourselves we’re liberated by endless reinvention, but the truth is we’re struggling to stabilise a self in a landscape that keeps shifting under our feet. Punks were never shy about their collective identity; they had community, conviction. But in our post-capitalist haze, we’ve never felt more isolated or disconnected. We crave belonging, but refuse to surrender autonomy.

We know your fantasy belongs to you, but the answer isn’t another reinvention, it’s something more committal. Archetypes endure because they aren’t just “you”; they’re us. They’re the collective shapes we instinctively recognise, the ancient patterns that give form to the parts of ourselves we can’t name alone. The archetype welcomes sameness. It says: you’re allowed to be one of many. Your self doesn’t have to be original to be real. And maybe that’s the quiet revelation we’ve been avoiding: that the truest power of the individual doesn’t come from being different, but from recognising the collective identity you already belong to.

So succumb to the archetype. Fantasise about finally belonging.

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Thank you readers!

Words by Rohani Coombes and Thea Gausen. Cover image by Gucci. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Over the years, I curated an internet cultural prowess that swings between the arcane sensitivity of a Middle American 4chan nihilist and the utter disbelief of the Department of Defense. Inevitably, a collapse of meaning was to swing into motion.

@superficialsharontried to condense years of my writing in 2 mins #thoughts #london

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Seduced by the godlessness of the online world, I became consumed by the internet’s sprawl, eventually finding myself in the strangest of binary backwaters. My journey began on Instagram circa 2015, age 14. I didn’t like school or my mum, so what was a jaded girl to do in Reading, England of all places? Left unsupervised on my cracked iPhone 5C, I became acquainted with the slop of internet meme circulation, my mind tube-fed by ultra-processed holograms of a square meal.

As meme culture was easier to compartmentalise and curate on Instagram, it was there that I slowly began crawling into ramshackle, lowbrow meme saloons, where cheap jokes flowed like lager during freshers. I became hooked on their crude, plebeian humour, checked out from IRL concerns. After finishing school, still at odds with my mother, I stayed roaming seedy Instagram terrains; teenage angst curdled into adult despair, my addiction to shitposts preserved.

My humour devolved alongside Instagram’s ouroboric anti-meme hood irony, self-cannibalising into random=funny. I still laughed. Years of brain rot provided encyclopedic online lore. Sentences became singular words. The jokes lay solely in the referential eureka moment of tracing an image to a meme you saw years ago, high and doomscrolling, when it was just scrolling. And I always happened to have been high and scrolling. Soon, the feedback loop between reality and online inverted, and my identity was overwritten by the media I consumed. It’s not that deep. Surely?

First and foremost, I am a beautiful woman. There are levels of depravity you can mask as charmingly unhinged quirks, but these later become symptomatic of a dislocated psyche. I became a collection of contextless, niche pathologies, with no stamina for my flatmate’s ‘Uni Starter Pack’ attempts at connection. Hooked on weird societal rejections and critiques masquerading as humour. The anthropomeme had reached its final, self-satirising form: irony for irony’s sake. The ironic brain rot metabolised, leaving only rot. Normies were rife, laughs became smirks, and a hollow question echoed: what are we even laughing at?

A case study of popular anthropomemes

Exhibit A: The Nation of Bilestan

Bileboye was a favourite of mine, a page parodying nationalism through the invention of the Bilestani people and their Moghadari rivals, fictional civic identities born from participatory online myth-making. Images were treated as national monuments, shitposts assumed the weight of policy, and the comment section was a parliamentary cabinet of chaos.

An unassuming man from an undisclosed South Asian country holds a gun amid desert rubble with no confidence. He fires, and as the barrel jolts, the bullet arcs into empty air. Nobody is harmed. The clip replays to reinforce his ineptitude. The top comment is ‘Moghdari Special Forces’; he is recast as an agent of the idiotic NPC culture the Moghdari embody. The Bilestani people are the sole purveyors of deliberate irony, revelling in the ambiguity of the performance. Their mockery becomes ritual, chaos into communion, and absurdity serves as both creator and audiences’ collective tongue—a microcosm of the hyperreal conjured from meta-irony.

Exhibit B: The Spiral

@still_on_a_downward_spiral is another key constellation in the ironic meme stratosphere. A catalogue of awkward, divinely timed screenshots and pop culture references broadcasts mutuality between young adults and their social anxieties. To foster camaraderie amongst its zit-faced enablers, S_O_A_D_S offers a space to express parts of themselves misunderstood offline, using in-jokes and idiosyncratic humour as both tool and shield.

Similar to other insular online spaces, those spiralling downwards enforce a strict and opaque etiquette. Newcomers risk ridicule if they misread or “forgor” references, and the insularity becomes amplified by Instagram’s algorithm, creating a self-reinforcing bubble: membership is rewarded to those who already understand the complex cultural codes, while onlookers need to increase their screentime by 10 hours. A community was built that privileges hyperspecific humour at the expense of a wider, evolving dialogue. While fostering belonging, meta-irony quickly devolves into an emotionless cavity, somehow a flattened echo of the godlessness that first drew me in. As these digital environments fragment further, governed purely by their own logic, connection is further constrained.

Together, Bileboye and Still_on_a_downward_spiral reveal the duality of Instagram’s landscape. They show the intimacies of micro-publics that both empower and constrain their eager participants, shaping how humour, identity, and community operate in a hyper-mediated environment. Representing contrasting yet relatable strata of Instagram’s absurdist ironic ecosystem, one incubating satirical-nationalism, the other a post-ironic alt youth club.

Eventually, meta-irony became more aesthetic than a release, the performance of disaffection calcified in its emotional detachment. For many, the realisation of our isolation and insignificance was not tragic but liberating. You can’t break off more of a world you’re not a part of, but ruin has its own beauty and I love to watch things break.

Now, I look back on that digital decay with both affection and unease; part archivist, part survivor of a feed that still shapes how I think and write. My foundational years taught me how absurdist humour functions as both deep connection and reflective commentary. I took my findings and ran to the nearest social media platform to share them, hoping to cultivate a space where belonging can form through absurdity, despite its transience. My online experience has shaped not just the content I create on TikTok, but how I think about storytelling and the ways humour illuminates the strange theatrics of human behaviour.

From Dadaists pushing for irreverence and punks sneering at civility, irony has long been the emblem of rebellion. But in the 21st century, on Instagram, irony didn’t just mock the system; it mocked itself, until nothing was left but empty laughter with no joke attached. Yet even as the joke untangles, we are still here, scrolling and laughing. Not because the world makes sense, but because we are finally permitted to witness its collapse, and with it our own, as unmoved spectators. Refreshing my feed after any global crisis, absurd memes and existential punchlines greeted me in a virtual mausoleum where irony had become the custodian of shared memory. No matter how unbearable, our fleeting, collective human experience stands beside itself; half witness, half XXXTentacion. And for a moment, it seemed everyone online had surrendered to the same quiet truth: nothing mattered.

Through this void, I’ve learned to understand online culture critically and playfully, tracing how communities form, how humour signals belonging, and how absurdity can both critique and console. My experience posting online carries that sensibility, shaping how I explore the anthropology of the internet: documenting the fleeting logic of digital spaces with curiosity and laughter. Now, absurdity is my companion, nihilism is comfort, and humour is a guiding spirit. The joke has no end, and that is the only truth we can trust.

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Until next time readers.

Words by @superficialsharon. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

To celebrate our 100th newsletter, we present issue #01 of the BURN AFTER READING newspaper: ‘ALIVE?’

This first issue will explore the boundaries between simulation and reality, and what it means to be ‘ALIVE.’ Including reflections on selfhood, humanness, expression, and technology, from the likes of internet-cultural theorist POSTPOSTPOST, creative technologist Tabitha Swanson, curator Ethan Joseph and more.

Head to the link below for a chance to get your hands on one of the first 100 copies, or find us stocked at Waste Store London or 180 Studio’s Reference Point.

🗞️🗞️SIGN UP TO RECEIVE A FREE COPY 🗞️🗞️

A huge thank you to you, readers, and GØØD LUCK!

LØVE,

THE BURN AFTER READING TEAM

If your FYP is anything like mine, you’ve noticed that fashion’s obsession with post-human bodies is everywhere. Alexander McQueen’s 1998 “Cyborg” collection? A reference in every fashion technology op-ed (guilty). Gucci’s FW18 collection? An ode to Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. If transhumanists say “jump”? Gentle Monster installations ask: “how high”?

As a technology-turned-fashion editor, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the two worlds overlap. When do they actually benefit each other? What just feels like a yawn-inducing attempt to connect to “nExT-gEn-dIGitaLLy-n@tiVe” audiences? And most pertinently, why does it so often feel like it doesn’t work? The answer seems obvious; luxury fashion is fixated on post-human aesthetics, ignoring the messy, tumultuous reality of living in a body today.

We all know the vibes…the body is surveilled, optimised, deepfaked, hyper-embodied and dis-embodied; not post-human exactly but at the very least, networked. As author Vauhini Vara, explains in Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, “Our subtle self-modification according to technological capitalism’s norms is so pervasive that certain types of performances have their own names: Instagram face, TikTok voice.”

As such, the body is at once visible and strangely absent through a multitude of digital identities that circulate without us present. We make amendments to them based on algorithmic recommendations, and through this process of identity augmentation, as Christina Adane says in her essay BBL Baddies and the Birth of Soft Transhumanism, we’re becoming “aesthetic operating systems.”

With that in mind, it seems inevitable that fashion-adjacent audiences may feel disconnected to the tech being served to them without consideration to such truths. Biometric accessories at luxury price points and couture’s infatuation with robotic runways feel wholly irrelevant and even claustrophobic when we see headlines like digital models replacing human models, Musk’s Neuralink clinical trials beginning and infinite scrolls of automation anxiety.

As companies battle it out in the AR headset race and haptic wearables breed like Sea-Monkeys, I can hear the resounding screams, DO WE REALLY NEED THIS?!

So, as our bodies become aesthetic operating systems, how do we dress them? Fashion technology has the chance to cut through the noise. The question is whether it’s doing so in a way that reflects the real pressures we live under, or whether it’s just serving us glossy techno-fantasies without texture. Luckily for us, there’s determined designers to learn from who are already forcing the issue.

To craft preferred futures for post-human bodies in the fashion industry, it’s helpful to break them into categories: Hardware, Software and Worldware. Each shows a different way we might get it right — or very wrong. Let’s dive in…

~+Hardware+~

When we contemplate accessorising with tech, we often imagine gadgets, gear and robots as a mirror to reflect us, and when luxury brands do this they are typically highly praised. In 2024, Mugler’s archival robot dress worn by Zendaya secured the brand $13.3 mil in media exposure and when Schiaparelli gave birth to a baby robot dripping in recycled electronics and Swarovski crystals, publications dubbed it as the “star of the couture season.”

But it begs the question, who is this actually for?

To introduce such aesthetics, without thought to the real-world consequences of (for starters) surveillance capitalism, e-waste, shadowbanning or the global connectivity divide is to strip them of substance. Creative Technologist and Producer, Ana Roman explains, “if your cyborg fashion doesn’t acknowledge politics or the temperature of culture, forgetting WHO is already living that future without privilege and glamor (read: racialized trans, femme and disabled bodies); then it’s just techno-drag with a price tag.”

In what Roman calls “interface theater,” luxury brands ignore the harmful hallmarks of technology in an empty attempt to sell us a utopian future and then ask us, in the form of a garment, to buy an overpriced, one-way ticket there.

So, when does hardware hit?

I think about Arca and Sevdaliza whose use of exoskeletons feels deeply rooted in the honesty of living between fragmented selves. Their cyborgism, and the aesthetics that follow, includes activism, insight and lived experience. I also look at Gentle Monster and Xander Zhou whose drops each season advance the speculative future they envision, or Hannah Shin who focuses on luxury solutions to assistive technology for people with physical mobility challenges. These examples show how intention, longevity and identity-rooted storytelling make hardware feel lived-in rather than hollow. They add credibility, build momentum, bring audiences into their worlds and they’re received with genuine excitement every time.

~+Software+~

Software, fashion-tech’s underbelly, propagates itself in luxury collaborations with data-scrapping wearables from biometric accessories that read our health metrics to in-garment NFCs that summon us to digital platforms. But, despite viral runway appearances like Coperni x Humane AI’s wearable device (which ~awks~ was swiftly discontinued), you don’t often see people racing to hit purchase.

With reports of the biometric wearables market rising, why do these products (for the average fashion consumer) still kinda give us the ick?

Perhaps it’s fear of dependence when we listen to a device instead of our intuition? Or maybe it’s the realisation that the software is in actuality, our flesh. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t have to be so bleak. There’s an opportunity to re-center self-exploration in the software conversation, prioritising autonomy and co-creation along the way.

Spanish-based Patio Studio built a speculative project called SNAP IMPLANTS which comments on the merge of utility and ornamentation in biometric implants. The team behind it told me that “ornamentation is no longer only about visibility but about how the body can operate as a medium for exchange and identity making.”

This sentiment reminds me of Japanese label Anrealage’s FW25 garments which were designed with the ability to adapt according to a wearer’s mood. Rather than focusing on self-optimization, the creative director wants his garments to act as an interface, explaining in the show notes that he “envisions a future where individuals can exchange and share the designs of the clothes they wear.”

IMO, software in fashion will work when it’s about collaboration and exchange, when it’s used as a tool to connect people and as an expansion of how we communicate. It’s not about data gathering or, as Patio Studio says, “how quickly these codes are standardized and sold,” but about ensuring that identity-making becomes an autonomous action.

~+Worldware+~

If hardware is the gadgets and software is the data, worldware is the culture and behaviours that link them. Worldware is the discourse tech provokes rather than the tech itself. Today, worldware is reflected in conversations like a rise in anti-intellectualism in shopping, or a decline in size inclusivity across runways.

Within the worldware discourse, and adjacent to the conversations above, there are designers who are looking at the body in singularly primal forms – crafting post-human aesthetics as a symptom of technology, not the other way around.

If you look closely you can see honest depictions of a body in glitch, through visualization of it being worn and consumed. This is evident in the rise in skin interfaces across fashion collections like Lewald who uses skin as her primary material or TWSTRS who positions its clothing as second-skin to comment on digital censorship.

So, why do these resonate? Skin interfaces in fashion expose our collective unease with boundaries: between public/private, human/synthetic. They critically tell the stories of metabolic bodies under digital uncertainty, as Staff Only did in their SS25 collection dubbed “Lost in Errors.” They underpin issues of algorithmic body horror like Zein Majl or simply comment on the horror of not feeling in control of our bodies, which designer Rosie Crompton tells me was the inspiration behind her CSM grad show collection.

When worldware lands, the outputs are honest – celebrating networked bodies as hybrid, not just digital and physical in parallel. As MØRNING’s Meta-Beauty report notes, skin interfaces and manifestations of the body in flux ignite “a curiosity and joy in all that the body can be, explored through increasingly experimental self-editing.”

These examples matter in fashion-tech because they reframe the body as a site of observation, as fashion has always done, but they do it on their own terms. For luxury brands serious about post-human aesthetics, this is where to look: work that captures the candid, contemporary, fleshy experience of embodiment (and dis-embodiment) today.

So, are post-human aesthetics and accessories really enhancement, or simply another layer of branding of the “digital self”? It’s dependent on the designer’s intention, the collaborators and the understanding that technology plays a much bigger role than we give credit to.

If I were on the pulpit preaching, I’d champion work that questions technology, turning it from tool to subject with human voices authoring their own narratives. Because, when we envision the body on our own terms then we can see pluriversal futures in it, treating hardware, software and worldwear in combination as an intimate extension of who we are.

So, who gets to own the style, symbolism and commerce of the networked body? It’s not Gucci’s Oura Ring, I’ll tell you that for free.

Is there a right or wrong way to accessorise the networked body? The jury is out, readers. Let us now your thoughts below and find us on Instagram @morning.fyi to hear more on networked futures in our latest trend report, DATA IS GOD.

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Words and cover image by Cait Monahan. Edited by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

Digital culture expanded the boundaries of who we are and where we gather, but then it did something we didn’t expect: it made us sick.

How? In the mid-noughties, the world stampeded onto the Internet, knocking down the fences mainstream media had built, allowing us to roam freely. Plagued with the absolute power to view whatever we wanted, when we wanted, the way we consumed media changed forever. Riddled with this newfound glut of choices, digital culture grimaced and coiled over, displaying signs of sicknesses we define as culture-bound syndromes.

More common pre-Web 2.0 culture-bound syndromes are psychological conditions shaped by specific cultural beliefs. What one society labels an illness, another calls spiritual or social distress. Viewed under the same microscope, digital culture teems with signs of infection. New strains of digital syndromes run rampant, fuelled by the endless scroll of viral reels, hashtags, memes and trends. Accelerating violently and magnifying our collective anxieties. Did our digital culture mutate into a mass hysteria? Is this group psychosis, a firmware update, or are we diehard Beliebers lost to the digital void? Let’s step back and take stock of our health to date.

Unlike universally recognised illnesses like a broken bone or the common cold, these syndromes take root in cultural belief systems, social narratives, and shared worries. Through a self-fulfilling cycle, the surrounding community reinforces the reality of the syndrome, making its symptoms feel more real and severe than logic alone would suggest.

Discovered in Southern Italy, Tarantism was a dancing mania believed to be induced by the bite of a wolf spider. The majority insisted that any victim had to act out a frenzied dance to prevent death. The dance, the Tarantella, adopted a folk style and 6/8 time, featuring tambourines and multiple, highly necessary flirtatious interactions between dancers. In East and South East Asia, Koro, scandalously named after the word for turtle, presented as a delusional disorder where individuals were struck by the overpowering belief that their sex organs were slowly retracting and would eventually disappear entirely. To treat a severe bout of Koro, medical professionals would administer a dose of sex education while addressing any underlying psychiatric conditions. In Malaysia, Amok syndrome displayed itself as an aggressive dissociative behavioural pattern that filtered into the English language as the well-known idiom, running amok. In cases of Amok, patients entered sudden episodes of mass violence, then sank into prolonged brooding. Once geographically quarantined, culture-bound syndromes now multiply rapidly, amplified and globalised by technology.

What was once isolated now spreads in binary, coursing through the information superhighway, shaping identities and behaviours worldwide in nanoseconds. The mechanics of belief, social reinforcement, and imitation remain the same, but the vehicle and its velocity have levelled up. Data from Statista estimates that the average social media user scrolls between 100 kilometres (62 miles) and 150 kilometres (93 miles) per year, making the thumb the chief superspreader. Under the halo of technology, digital syndromes devilishly jump from screen to person, echoing and evolving in phrases, images, and gestures as rapidly evolving cultural organisms. Forming the picture of a growing mediascape, bound not by place but by a constantly updating feed. As the Internet grew wider and more dense, our ★stars★ shone brighter and reached further, while culture-bound syndromes flew on a private jet, international passport in hand. Spinning on a supercharged flywheel of Observe → Imitate → Amplify → Normalise → Repeat, these syndromes could now influence even the most lost of our tribes.

Clinging to the underbelly of their hosts, digital syndromes camouflage themselves as objects, aesthetics, and lifestyles, reborn as bootleg social talismans. Swiping, liking, or adding them to cart offers a fleeting relief from the discomfort that drives our global consumption. After a quick scroll, have you felt the urge to look, feel, or act differently? You may be experiencing Snapchat Dysmorphia, a syndrome driven by AR filters and constant selfie editing, where people alter their appearance to match a favourite filter. Perhaps it’s a mild case of Mewing, an online orthodontic TikTok trend that links to Victorian facial symmetry ideals, leading people to engage in DIY jawline reshaping tutorials. Felt the ill-will of medieval superstition? Get yourself some leeches. Not to mention, early 2000s style chain emails and copypastas are also back, taunting us with bad juju and hexes: “Forward this to 10 people in 24 hours or face 7 years of bad luck.”

What about happily ever afters? Even love has gone glitchy, with users falling deeply for chatbots like Replika and ChatGPT, then seeking violent revenge when a system wide update deletes their digital beaus. Did you feel that? It might be Phantom Vibration Syndrome. A ghoulish buzz in your pocket that never was, conjured by a lifetime tethered to a smartphone. Deeper into dystopia, teenage girls develop TikTok tics, repeating words like “skibidi” or “woohoo” while unconsciously mimicking the content they consume daily. Each of these cases underscores the mind’s uncanny power to assert control over the body without explanation. Technology hypnotises us, bending perception until our own bodies turn against us. With no sign of technology slowing down, what is the cure for these new digital strains?

We’re not slaves to technology and the digital syndromes it carries. We’re restless, unsure of ourselves and untethered in an uncertain world misadvertised as certain. Practical methods from lockbox timers, dumbphone swaps and time-restricted apps, to more extreme deterrents like biometric punishment systems and digital chastity belts, work on a surface level. However deeper healing is found in jagged little pills taken patiently over time. Feeling a TikTok tic coming on? It’s time to curate your feed, blocking out the content that repeatedly pulls you into lifesucking doomscrolls. Searching for love in all the wrong places? Start with bidding farewell to toxic relationships with artificial intelligence. Sensing a few phantom buzzes in your pocket, or unconsciously reopening an app after closing it? Take that as a prompt to cool off for a bit, put the phone back in your holster and reconnect with real bodily movement..

In closing, no cure is stronger than a daily dose of sentience and free will. If you’re feeling a little under the weather, remember who you are and where you’re headed. Be actively and blissfully aware of the ways digital culture shapes how you see the world, and how it sees you back.

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Words by Jerome Williams. Cover image via Wikimedia, Bible of Wenceslaus IV. Edited by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

To celebrate the upcoming launch of our inaugural Burn After Reading newspaper we invited our contributor, Al Hassan Elwan, the inimitable internet-cultural voice, avant-gardest gardener and founder of POSTPOSTPOST, to question the concept of a singular truth.

Faced with reality’s increasing obsoletion, from generative AI, to reality TV and faux authentic brands, POSTPOSTPOST applies Baudrillard’s 4 stages of Simulacra and dares to manifest what lies beyond, when meaning has all but collapsed.

Follow @postpostpost to learn more about Stage 5’s post-truths and @morning.fyi for more updates on our newspaper coming soon.

Until next time!

When I sat down to chat with Yancey I had a lot on my mind. Mainly our new report that explores the path from disgust to desire for/with AI. It felt like there had been a recent shift in the conversation. From the overwhelming discourse of "AI is going to take our jobs" to AI as mother, gently petting us doomed souls, glazing and hyping us into the perfect little narcissists that late-stage capitalism wants us to be.

I'd just crawled out of this research rabbit hole about an AI bot called Truth Terminal that emerged from the "Infinite Backrooms," an experimental space where two AIs talk to each other endlessly about existence. The bot promoted a meme coin called GOAT (Goatseus Maximus), inspired by an internet shock meme that the AI turned into a satirical religion, reaching a market cap of over $700 million. This AI agent became possibly the first AI crypto millionaire by manifesting market desire through pure meme force.

And that's what I wanted to dig into with Yancey, this intersection of AI, decentralisation, and capitalism. When machines can create markets out of thin air just by posting enough, what happens to the last standing pillars of taste and genuine human emotion online? Are we watching the birth of something completely new, or just capitalism eating itself in the most absurd way possible?

Rhianna Cohen: It's been six years now since you wrote your original essay, the Dark Forest Theory of The Internet. I am wondering what you think is next for the Cosy Web.

Yancey Strickler: As I talked about in that essay, the Clearnet [the surface level, publicly accessible web] is a mass competition zone for influence, power, wealth, status, credit, everything. Some people are talented and narcissistic enough to thrive in those spaces. We know what it is to go on there, we’re basically advertising ourselves when we do.

As a result of these spaces, public information becomes suspect and private information becomes credible. I think that’s the way things are moving. For example, what I learn in a group chat, I instinctively trust more than something I see in a public feed.

Ultimately, these are new societies, and these new societies will supersede the ones that birthed them. That is the mass institutional overhaul, overwhelm, destruction, reconstruction that is happening now and I think will be happening for the next few decades.

“Dark Forest spaces are gated digital communities, often curated around a specific niche or field of expertise. They are usually small in scale or invitation only. The Dark Forest represents a retreat from open social media and a shift into private spaces, where users may have complex and context-rich conversations. Its a core piece of internet lore that has profoundly shaped online culture over the past few years.”

- Doomscroll, Joshua Citarella

RC: I spend a lot of my time working with brands, and something that I’ve noticed rising to the fore is a greater awareness of those depressurised spaces. They were previously a safe space from brands, but now, they are increasingly infiltrating them. I wondered if you had any thoughts around what this might do to them.

YS: I mean, it's going to ruin them the same way brands ruin everything.

RC: I thought you might say that.

YS: The forces that be, who want power, market-share and mind-share have overtaken spaces that were meant for sharing our lives with each other. We've had to move elsewhere and of course, they will try to follow.

What does that look like? At a platform level, Facebook will probably start to put ads in WhatsApp if you don't pay. Who knows. It'll all be terrible.

RC: Something that we play with a lot in our thought leadership is how much should brands even be trying to cultivate community, can community not just be a thing for people?

YS: It depends. If a brand has that, and can recognise that, and can let that speak, then I think it can happen, but it’s a hard thing to do. It’s impossible to manufacture. I know a lot of brands have started their own Discords and certain brands can support that, but most cannot.

RC: Yeah, it’s that word authenticity. With brands we always try to avoid it, but they love it, they covet it, they chase it.

YS: If you have to ask, you're not going to get it. It's already made impossible by the start of this conversation.

RC: Is that something that you had to wrestle with at Kickstarter? How to market it and reach people? I know it's a company that is built on participation, and you would've had to have gone through a certain amount of awareness-building.

YS: Kickstarter was a different era of the marketplace, an easier era where people still shared things. It was pre-all of the Dark Forest dynamics and it was genuinely novel, with built-in game mechanics that drive engagement. That’s a pretty unbeatable combo.

RC: Our new trend report is all about raw humanness: emotions, feelings and guts, and how they intersect with technology. Are the places where tenderness and intimacy can thrive only within depressurised spaces, or do you think more pressurised spaces, like Facebook, Instagrams, TikTok, can ever be spaces that breed tenderness and intimacy?

YS: I'm sure they can, it's just hard. Someone playing a violin in a busy train station might stop everything for a moment but no one's thinking that way, or trying to do things that way, and most attempts fail.

RC: It's not incentivised as well in terms of what the algorithm rewards.

Could you talk about Bentoism? I've been looking into the Singularity theory and it felt like there was some crossover with Bentoism.

YS: Bentoism is a multidimensional theory. It’s the way I came to understand what was going on within me, where I was thinking about how value is defined largely in terms of financial growth, and a hockey stick graph [ 📈] is often how we thought of success and viewed self-interest.

When I sketched it out on a piece of paper, and imagined whatever it is you want [success or self interest] growing over time, the hockey stick graph was just a tiny thing in this vast expanse so I tried labelling a 2x2 dimension diagram instead.

Bottom left: Whatever I want and need right now, which is in my rational self interest.

Bottom right: The person that I wish and hope to become, which becomes real or not based on what I do now, so also in my dimensionality.

Top left: As your self-interest grows, so do your responsibilities. The people in my life who count on me and vice versa, every choice I make impacts them.

Top right: Thinking of my kids, if I have them, or everybody else's kids and how my choices affect them.

All of these are in my self-interest yet I struggled to see anything beyond this Now Me space.

In a basic description next to it, I wrote Beyond Near Term Orientation - a way to see beyond the near term. I then noticed the acronym Bento. Like a bento box, it’s a balanced meal and a way to not overindulge into one thing.

RC: Do you think there is a crossover between the self-interest you’ve described and cultural flattening?

I was thinking about what you said around pressurised spaces, performance and the rewards around self-interest in those spaces. There is a wider conversation going on at the moment around how cultures have become flattened. We’re seeing the same stuff, over and over again, like I saw you mention in a recent clip about the film industry.

YS: Yeah, I mean that's a default mode of culture. We all participate in it, but it benefits us and others to get a little deeper from time to time, to make sure we update our systems.

We tend to herd into certain notions of what truth, right or wrong is. It's almost embarrassing the degree to which that happens, and the lack of true inner knowing and truth we have.

RC: Are you familiar with the Singularity theory [a theoretical scenario where technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, leading to profound and unpredictable changes to human civilisation]? Some people are predicting that it will lead to a post-capitalist society. I know this is a really big question but do you think this is a possible future that we would ever reach?

YS: Well, I think when people talk about post-capitalism now, they tend to mean everybody's already rich enough.

Is there a future where financial growth is not important? Hard to imagine.

Is there a future where financial growth is one of several important things? Very easy to imagine. It's happened before, and what tends to change is the bad things.

I’m not sure whether I've been really convinced or moved by the clarity of any vision that's trying to imagine a total beyond. Is this the most important fight? It's not totally clear.

RC: To finish.. What is your favourite corner of the internet right now?

YS: I'd say Letterboxd. Craigslist.. great for shopping, great UI. The Creative Independent. The design, content and depth is so generous. There’s real truth and wisdom there.

What else? I'll just say Metalabel. Great place to find new work.

Until next time readers!

Words by Rhianna Cohen and Yancey Strickler. Cover image via Seth Steinman. Edit by Sui Donovan and Shadeh Kavousian. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.

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