It’s been a liminal summer with no defining trends, an onslaught of algorithmically-designed content and performative consumption
Between a global pandemic, a cost-of-living crisis, unprecedented heatwaves and wildfires, devastating wars, increasingly polarised politics and the rise of AI, it feels like there’s been a relentless cycle of bad news. As Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick notes in his Trend Report, previous years have been marked by some standout cultural moments, like Barbenheimer and Brat Summer, but summer 2025 has come and gone without a defining trend or song, unless we count the Jet2 Holiday jingle. It all just felt a bit mid. Is this a sign that culture is stuck?
The algorithm certainly has a lot to answer for. Music, movies and fashion all feel safer, flatter, neatly designed and packaged for optimum virality and maximum clicks, all to be consumed without the need to stop scrolling. For Emily Gordon-Smith, content director at Stylus, “the sheer volume and pace of information flooding our feeds means that it’s hard for any one thing to dominate in a meaningful way”.
In his Garbage Day newsletter, Ryan Broderick touches on the type of music that’s popular right now. In a Blueksky discussion regarding the musician sombr, who’s had over 2.2 billion streams without really crossing over into the cultural mainstream, one user called out “the enshittification of popular culture”. Some people are pegging this to the shift in conservatism while others argue that this soft, flat style of pop music does so well in terms of streaming is because it’s optimised for the algorithm. As Broderick says, “Music that sounds like muzak fits better in long-running playlists, which is better for time-on-site metrics. This is why AI bands keep getting huge streaming numbers.
With the algorithm feeding us a deluge of content, mostly of questionable quality (see memes and slang like Skibidi Toilet, rizz, Le Poisson Steve, delulu, and Showing Things to a Victorian Child), it’s not surprising that “brain rot” was the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year for 2024. We even have Italian brain rot now, a series of memes featuring AI-generated creatures with pseudo-Italian names, like the three-legged, Nike trainer-wearing shark Tralalero Tralala.
The relentless pace of content means our attention spans have shortened. Gen Z is consuming television in clips and song lengths are decreasing – the average song length of a track in the UK Top 40 had dropped from close to four minutes in the noughties to three minutes and 12 seconds in 2019, and is now somewhere around the three and a half minute mark. And the brain rot has very much crossed over into the offline world. In Bloomberg, Amanda Mull explores how these social media-driven trends are creating fuelling brands that are “engineered to be devoid of meaning”. Kyle Chayka, writing in the New Yorker, believes this Labubumatchadubaichocolate fad is “IRL brain rot”.
Brands have been lacking an overarching cultural moment to market their products with, as well as contending with a customer base that’s being more careful about spending. It’s harder to stick your neck out and do something radical with one eye on the bottom line and the risk of cancellation around the corner – just look at American Eagle, who hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons following their ‘great jeans’ campaign with Sydney Sweeney.
In a chaotic world, consumption has provided comfort and we have reached for the Labubus (and the Lafufus), the strawberry matchas, the jelly shoes, the Dubai chocolate-flavoured everything with both hands. We’re buying things to signify an identity that’s been prepackaged and fed to us. We post the products on social media that we’ve already seen on social media. It’s an endless scroll, a neverending cycle of targeted advertising. As Chayka says, “we are the Labubus, grinning ecstatically amid the wreckage of our rapidly dismantling, recombinatory era.”
This summer (arguably this whole year) has not been one for the books. Fitzpatrick nailed it in his newsletter, saying, “summer 2025 was the liminal summer, a waiting room where nothing and everything mattered, where everything was so painfully boring and mid yet kept us rapt but waiting, when the world was preoccupied with trying to consume our way out of the mess that we overindexed on shit.”
How do we get out of the shit? For Chayka, the way out might be going further in. “For all of the superficial commercial trends involved, IRL Brain Rot strikes me as an almost radical aesthetic movement,” he writes, standing in contrast to the “cul-de-sac of superhero blockbusters and millennial beige”. If, as he posits, our bodies and brains are already rotted by sugar, vapes, microplastics and the Internet, “if we have reached the rock bottom of an ecstatically meaningless culture, in which all ideas and aesthetics are simply atoms to be smashed together, their energy harvested as engagement, then the only way out is through.”
Or we wait for the pendulum to swing again. In his investigation of whether this is the worst-ever era of American pop culture in The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber spent time with music historian Ted Gioia, who said, “Most people fundamentally want to have cultural experiences that are mind-expanding and broaden their world. If the corporations that control our culture refuse to deliver that, they will find a way around it and there will be a rebirth. We will have a new counterculture.” Or we dive into nostalgia by rebuying the Joni Topshop jeans, embracing indie sleaze (again) and attempting to unplug from social media, rather than just watching clips from a bygone era served to us by the algorithm.
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