If you’re not quite sure why everything is suddenly Dubai chocolate or what exactly a Labubu is, you’re not alone. Trends have such a tenuous connection to our culture at large that posters online have started to identify the phenomenon with word salad: “labubu matcha dubai chocolate crumbl cookie benson boone …” You get the gist.
Amanda Mull, who’s writes about consumerism and the internet for Bloomberg, says this miasma of trends is all a part of our algorithm-mediated world.
When Mull looks back at fads of the past, like when everyone was collecting Beanie Babies back in the nineties, she can follow a clear trail of sociological phenomena and human actors that paved the way from cult status to ubiquity.
But tastemakers don’t control trends anymore; the algorithm does. What all of these new fads have in common is the ability to grab your attention while scrolling on TikTok or Instagram Reels. Something like the soothing green hue of a matcha latte or the rich textures of the kunafeh filling in a Dubai chocolate bar is perfectly positioned to make you pause as you scroll.
Mull spoke with Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram about how trends used to work pre-algorithm and what evolving social media consumption means for the trend cycles of the future. Below is an excerpt of their conversation that has been edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote about a strange group of items that had a very big summer.
Well, I have to give full credit for this to zoomer internet users who sort of created this grouping of trends on their own. The matcha lattes go along with Dubai chocolat,e and Labubus, and Love Island, and Benson Boone — and you can sort of spiral out from there.
This set of weird recent trends, I think, is indicative of how weird the trend cycles have gotten in consumer goods in the past. Trends have forever seemed a little bit weird, because the average person doesn’t have a ton of insight on where something ultimately came from that is suddenly everywhere. You know, in the Devil Wears Prada scene about cerulean and blue sweaters sort of demonstrates that dynamic, and that’s existed for a long time.
But when you get down to it, a lot of random-seeming trends in consumer goods from decades past have a pretty easy way to explain them if you dig a little bit. Trends recently seem to have even less connective tissue to culture at large than they used to, which is a real change in how trends are produced, how people become aware of things, why people buy things.
So what binds all these things together?
Yes, a lot of this is TikTok fueled, but in general, this I think is a phenomenon of algorithmic social media, because when you interact with things on these platforms, when you’re presented with things on these platforms, you have very little context. So, you don’t have the sort of traditional methods of learning about new pieces of culture, whether that’s word of mouth or dissemination through traditional media. That means that the things that catch on, the things that end up getting seen by a large audience, it’s very, very difficult to trace where they came from, why they became interesting to so many people, or what any of it means.
The algorithm certainly feels like a helpful explanation of how these random things sort of took the summer by storm. But I think you write in your piece about the fact that we have seen stuff like these things become popular before. I think the best example might be not Benson Boone, but, like, the Beanie Baby, because it’s so close to a Labubu What was the difference then, and why did Beanie Babies happen?
Yeah, well, Beanie Babies are a fascinating story, because they seem so random. But they’re actually a really good demonstration of how trends are traditionally disseminated through culture.
They came around as collectibles sold in gift shops and stationery stores by a relatively small toy company who was looking to increase sales by stoking demand through the sort of traditional, well-known marketing tactics of false scarcity, and limited editions, and things like that. But they really took off because eBay was launching at the same time. So, Americans were presented with this idea that anybody could resell anything to anybody else in the country, and you could do it from home, and you could quit your day job by selling random stuff. Beanie Babies as a financial instrument, that was the response to a new type of commerce. That’s what really fueled them.
And how does that compare, then, to the Labubu thing?
In the sort of traditional trend environment, like with Beanie Babies, it really mattered if the thing you were selling or buying was real. People had sort of rational beliefs about — and by rational, I don’t mean reasonable, let me be clear — but they had reasons that were rational enough for wanting particular dolls at particular prices. With the Labubus, there’s not quite so much of that at all.
In fact, there’s very real demand for real Labubus. But alongside them, the market for fakes — which are adorably called Lafufus — has really exploded. The craze is fueled by people just wanting to clip one of these things onto their outfits. It’s not about the Labubus themselves really.
They’re all kind of — no judgment — a little infantile? We’re talking about sweet treats, and toys, and Benson Boone.
Yeah, I think so. The way that algorithmically mediated social platforms work is by sort of collapsing your capacity to understand the context of what you’re looking at. If you’re being served things that you don’t know why you’re seeing this, you don’t really know what it is, and then suddenly that thing is everywhere, you sort of lose your capacity to use some of your more mature emotional skills to limit your reactions, because you get, sort of, a split second to react to things.
That is why stuff on social media tends to do the best if it’s highly stimulating — if it’s colorful, or incredibly delicious looking, or outrageous, or maddening, or offensive. These are the sort of emotional reactions that the algorithmic social media values, because they stoke engagement, they increase people’s time on the platforms. So, things that do well in these environments are sort of like maximally stimulating, and that means that you’re going to get sold a lot of things that are mostly sold to kids, because the sort of maximal colorful, sweet, cuddly fun stuff is generally made for children.
How do we feel about that, Amanda?
That’s pretty bad. I think that that’s not doing anybody any favors culturally. The sort of persistent interest and staying power in a few of these trends is also indicative of a real desire on the part of people who use these platforms to try to make sense of the internet and online life in real life in physical reality. Because these are all, by and large, these are all objects, or things, or experiences that you need to get up and leave your house and go have. They are things that exist in physical reality.
People want to reconcile their online lives with their offline lives. Those are not really separate anymore. Viral objects are a way for people to emotionally, intellectually, bridge that gap that they are constantly straddling. It’s like a consensus experience. And it, I think, gives people a little bit of a sense of participation and a sense of … that the stuff they look at on their phone is real.
And is that a good thing? I mean, we talked about the infantilization of adults being a bad thing, but is getting out and making, I don’t know, a thing you see on your phone, a tangible consensus reality good for us?
People still want a little bit of consensus reality, that people aren’t entirely, sort of, like, feed-brained at this point. People aren’t fully satisfied just with seeing things online and participating online. I think that any indicator that we have that people want to have normal, physical, social experiences with each other is probably a good one.
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