Enter: The State of Social, Rewild The Web
A quick preview of our brand new trend report
MØRNING. Unless you’ve been living under a rock (so jealous) it’s clear that we live and play in a new realm of the internet yet again. We’re brain rotting harder than ever, dragging everyone and anyone, and getting more Roblox by the day.
As the pace of social moves faster than ever, with platforms proliferating daily and communities become nicher than niche.. it's clear that digital culture has become the primary driver of culture. To be truly social first within this landscape, you need to know the cultural codes. Why be a Demure copycat when you could be a Talk Tuah CEO, right?
The Internet rewards those that get its deep randomness. Those who seek to not just stay above water, but to understand the tides. We are entering the new State of Social. It's time to Rewild The Web.
Well, how did we get here? The World Wide Web has not delivered on its decentralised promises. The Metaverse hasn’t come to fruition. NFT has become a dirty term. Screen fatigue is on the rise. The internet, a once beautiful space for play, expression and discovery is now being blamed for the flattening of culture. Social media, once viewed as counter culture in itself has become a littered space of cores, adverts, echo chambers and algorithms.
In turn, what we’re experiencing is an unpredictable chaos — no matter who you are, no one can rely on analytics right now, and there’s no formula for emerging pipelines. When the virality is piercing enough, a new creator, content, or platform emerges like a lone puzzle piece. Telling us something, and nothing, all at once.
So, for our latest industry report, MØRNING set out to uncover the rotten truths at the core of this digital mess. We spoke to leading internet cultural voices like Spike’s Adina Glickstein, and players on the ground, like art student Kai from Hong Kong, to better understand the motivations of the digital natives shaping our current culture: to know them, is to win them.
In order to level with this generation, we uncovered a landscape of sentiments and behaviours they find themselves co-existing across: from feed fatigue, to battles with the fourth wall to the rise of promotional provocation.
Today, in order to garner attention online, we use promotional provocation as a tactic: purposely dishing hot takes, arguing for the sake of it, and angering our audiences with disturbing (yet often silly) clips of weird shit.
Do you empathise with the artist stirring the pot on big name accounts, in the hopes of picking up a few new kindred followers? Or do you resonate more with ‘Politigrammers’? This begs the question, are we all just edgelords now? And if attention is our blunt currency, (see Lil Internet in conversation with MØRNING’s Shadeh Kavousian) perhaps farming rage is our greatest pursuit.
“Rage farming is the product of a perfect storm of fuckery, an unholy mélange of algorithms and anxiety.” - Molly Jong-Fast, The Atlantic
But fear not, it's not all doom and gloom. #Hopecore 2.0 anyone? Let us now direct your attention to the sunny side of the digital hellscape we call home. Beneath our greedy destruction lives a thriving mycelium network that’s persisting and healing itself. We forage for hope; like joining our friends in a Roblox fashion show, or getting sent a meme that spits it all back with cutting intellectual accuracy.
Being wild online is how we survive, take us back to steamy Myspace hookups and BitTorrent wrist slaps, give us more Discord groups dedicated to pickles and ‘digital utopias’. The people want to see a way through — a way to ascend. It’s time to embrace the randomness of it all. Our relationship with content has shifted, we’re in our ‘fuck it’ era. It’s never been easier to ‘add yours’, ‘stitch this’ or jump on a live with someone else. The painstaking curatorial performance of online self has exhausted us. In revolt, we’ve decided that it’s just not that deep.
Dispelling outdated myths of metrics, in lieu of quality and creative integrity would do us all some good. The days of velocity, volume, and rigid posting schedules are over. There’s little you can do to cut through these days, and while that might be scary, there’s a freedom to be embraced here. Break free of the algo and, instead, lean into doing less but better, smarter, and with stronger creative. Margeaux of Alexis Bittar, could tell us herself – if only we could ever have the honour of being in the same room with her.
As an antidote to the clutter taking over the web, we burrow deeper into the Cosy Web, consisting of online society’s slower digital realms, offering shelter from the demands of mainstream platforms: the constant performance, publicity and perfection. PI.FYI, the intimate new project inspired by its founders newsletter, is thriving in this space. Meaningful exchange and sincere dialog is the expectation, and stats like follower count are hidden.
Think back to the joy we experienced in Web 1.0, building out pockets of the internet and filling it with internet friends. In Yancey Strickler's Dark Forest Theory of The Internet’ he presents that, “In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviours, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet”. Audiences are craving outlets to ascend through: it’s time to put in the effort, to meet them in unexpected mediums and channels and protect the joy of being online.
Today, we experience an internet that exists somewhere amidst the promise and pain, and between the chaos and order.
Between the mass and the cosy, against the backdrop of algos and AI, grappling with what’s gate kept and what’s accessible – today, for both creators and consumers, the backend of internet culture can best be described as a feral field day. One where the ultimate prize is simply… feeling satiated again.
There’s a cultural tug of war between honing in on the ‘reliable’ resources the online once offered us, and engineering new ways of learning and connecting. There’s an egg-and-spoon race where players are attempting to preserve subcultures that have already been put in far too compromising positions. And finally, the relay. Passing the baton, processing and progressing this internet hellscape together, hoping we make out a destination.
How do you feel about the current State of Social? Where do you find yourself consuming across spectrums of chaos and order? How do you find community online?
Let us know what you think! Comment below or find us on Instagram @morning.fyi
In the spirit of gatekeeping, if you'd like to get your mitts on a copy of the report you’ll have to start a conversation with us. Drop us a line at people@morning.fyi
Til next time!
Words by Dagny Tepper. Brought to you by @morning.fyi.
Could not be more excited for this report. Y'all always offer such compelling, well-researched, well-constructed provocations. Endlessly inspiring.
I've been meaning to say...this is fucking gold.