Digital Culture Review: Patching the holes in 2024’s social web
Thought Leadership
What are people getting from their online lives, and what’s still left to be desired? Big questions, we know. But if we just squint hard enough at last year’s content, some patterns come through the deluge.
Our previous review pointed to power, creativity, and youth as focal points for social, all of which are still on the cards for 2025. But this year, the collective psyche has added questions of morality, mental friction, and the politics of artist control.
In this year’s Digital Culture Review, our Global Director of Cultural Insights, Mira Kopolovic, looks at where people are channeling their online energy, and how today’s web will slough off its skin for a new year online.
Remember Luigi Mangione? Why would you – his meme fame, and extremely public homicide campaign, will be over a month old at the time of this publication. Between then and now, enough TikToks have been made to fill the great Library of Alexandria a million-fold.
But even if Mangione’s murderous it-girl status has dimmed, his spectre haunts this year’s Digital Culture Review. The internet’s response to his shooting – to gloss over his politically ambiguous online footprint and frame him as a figurehead of the alt right or far left – has made the state of culture clear. In 2024, social was a space for telling stories, not learning truths.
As critics like Charlie Warzel point out, this is cause for concern – social is so obsessed with narrativising that it’s floundering at basic knowledge sharing. But in the culture shifts we outline below, we see this idea of social as a ‘meaning machine’ come through in a slightly more optimistic hue. If there’s no objective story, authorship is up for grabs.
Across the board, people are becoming more aware of their own agency in shaping digital culture’s meaning – and with that comes responsibility for shaping its impact. Is brain rot something to be reviled, or cherished? In a world of pathological seamlessness, can we find beauty in the friction that slows down our scroll? What does it mean to subvert authority online, and whose job is it? For today’s users confronting these questions, the truth is there for the making.
Until now – and now, still – being online could be described as a sort of ease: the thoughts, work, and makership of some billion minds can wash over anyone with a dextrous thumb. But if these shifts are any indication, 2025 will see viewers, creators, artists, and institutions angling at a more active role.
Subversion-seeking
Today, if you’re asked ‘who is subversive online’, the primary images conjured are those of Andrew Tate and Elon Musk. Maybe, on reflection, trad wives like Estee Williams, or ‘dark feminine’ influencers, like @TheWizardliz, who frame all romance as a calculated assault on an unworthy adversary.
But subversion didn’t always have a conservative reputation. Not long ago, it was the purview of creatives – it’s why ‘avant-garde’ conjures up images of artists, not billionaire tech founders.
On today’s social, though, it’s harder to see subversion that feels aspirational*. In the noughties, edgy counterculture aesthetics bled all the way from gamers and ravers into advertising. Now, the Bumble’s celibacy campaign (or the Balenciaga child bondage episode that preceded it) shows a dwindling appetite for brands’ edgy takes.
Later, in the oughts and early ‘20s, pushing boundaries meant pushing values, with Kaepernick’s bent knee ending up on a Nike billboard. Now, as diversity fatigue hits major institutions, there’s been a quiet decline in the utopian cage-rattling that drove us forward.
As it stands, the subversion shortfall is being very loosely serviced by an ever-escalating swell of absurdist content. (After years on our feeds, unbridled weirdness is so normalised that it’s now appropriate for evenly formerly austere or dry entities, from luxury fashion houses to salt-of-the-earth cookie brands). Loudly hedonistic narratives – the bacchanalia of raves, sex, and burgers described in our Think Forward trend Primal Renaissance – are another shot at this. But as many have noted, there’s a hollowness to storytelling without convictions.
TL;DR. Surreality and indulgence are powerful aesthetics. But without a powerful sense of meaning underpinning them, they feel less satisfying. As we move into the next year, people will be asking more from their subversion – demanding that creators and brands think a bit more deeply about the values or structures they’re challenging with their work.
(*We know that, obviously, many people do find the Tate-to-tradwife continuum compelling, but we’re writing for an audience that doesn’t find this extreme turn aspirational)
Artist buzzkills
Is it too much to say the way that we engage with art – music, film, any cultural production – has soured? Maybe more precise to say: it’s become a victim of its own success, sped up to the point of becoming unable-to-be-savoured, with artists having little command over how their work is consumed.
In a digital mediascape, users can’t police themselves into deep engagement, and platforms don’t want to. Now, it’s up to artists themselves to forcefully reshape how we engage.
Some, like Tyler, the Creator and Chappell Roan, have decided it’s better to be feared than streamed. Tyler is forcing users to slow down their consumption, by insisting streaming platforms release his new album on a Monday morning (when users are poised for a deep listen) rather than Friday at midnight (implying background music for a night out). Chappell, for her part, is splashed across social for the undiplomatic way she sets boundaries between herself, her fans, and the media machine. Even Charli XCX, darling of both crowds and industry, marks this move away from accessible art. Her recently released Brat manifesto explicitly notes that BRAT’s identity would be “obnoxious, arrogant and bold”, and that some people would hate it. This tension is by design.
This is the luxury of the most successful; Tyler, Chappell, and Charli could afford to take a punt, and the online discourse only loves them more for it. But medium-range stars are taking softer tactics to force fans to slow down and digest. Take Ethel Cain, who, in the lead up to her album release, chose to ask fans’ attention for meaty short stories on Tumblr, rather than just vibrant hype-up marketing.
This isn’t just brewing in music – it’s in every creative field where artists and makers are standing against enshittification, fan pressure, and industry control. In gaming, where big corporations have jacked up the cost and complexity of play, gamers first flocked to #cozygames. Now, indie game developers are taking matter into their own hands, making their own, lo-fi games: ones whose graphics are as pixelated as an early Super Mario Bros, but that better service community bonding than their hi-def alternatives.
TL;DR. As of late, there’s been a shift towards empowered fandoms and empowered distribution platforms – both at the expense of artist control. As artists push back, finding inventive ways to slow down, obstruct, and shift the consumptive process, it’ll change not only how people consume, but how fandom is expressed. Will we align with the will of our favourite artists, or push back against constraints?
Polarising attention
Last year, the internet saw its predictable acceleration. Content, by this logic, should be a quickfire, enrapturing expression of vibe, not a story or argument that needs assembling. In this value system, even ‘brain rot’ isn’t derogatory – many Gen Z have noted that being online means seeking out mindless, intuitive spikes of emotion that render focus irrelevant. Creators like @missy.mcintosh and @itsmartymillar – whose viral skits are feel-good dialogues of nonsense words – marked the far reaches of this gooey hopefulness.
But what seems like a singular slide towards cognitive minimalism is actually, on closer inspection, cultural preferences parting like the Red Sea. On the one hand, brain rot – on the other, a willful move towards deeper, slower formats that hit differently on the psyche.
Set apart from the brain rot internet, creators like ContraPoints, Mina Le, and MayiTalks have long been mainstreaming in-depth explainers and cultural criticism, to the point that everyday Tiktokers are celebrating a return to long form. And if taking on brevity wasn’t bold enough, some corners of the internet have decided that the image is dead – long live text.
Internet critics have outlined the motivations for this move away from vibrant video. A format like text makes you slow down. It’s the ‘whole foods’ of content, forcing your psyche to take time to digest, instead of gorging on the ultra-processed sugar high of a deep fried meme. Text is also just sexy. Fashion brands know it – Miu Miu launched a project handing out feminist texts, because literature, as evidenced by #BookTok, is as good a performative gesture as visuals. Accounts like @stylenotcom have shown how simple, bold text can have its own beauty, even in the visually-oriented world of couture.
And if text needed anything else in its corner, it’s also the mode of choice of Chat GPT, the internet’s favourite conversational partner. We’re already seeing human creators reshape their output to look more GPT-like, so no wonder some are hearing the image’s death knell.
TL;DR. Ultra-absorbing video content will (very obviously) have a powerful place on tomorrow’s internet – but so will long-form content and image-free text. These forms aren’t mutually exclusive. The notable takeaway here is how people are becoming more discerning about their moods, and what type of content suits it. For the brands and creators of tomorrow, the best approach will be the tactical deployment of the full spectrum of pure-words to pure-vibes.
Mira Kopolovic is Global Director of Cultural Insights for We Are Social in the UK. Quoted in publications from Dazed to Vogue Business, her work in insight has spanned seven years and four continents, informing how Tinder understands cultural notions of intimacy, how Google understands attitudes towards censorship and surveillance, and much more.
Thought Leadership
