Shorter sentences. cleaner structure, and even certain words removed if the platform doesn't like them. You ask for a TikTok script with a hook in the first seconds and a call to action at the end, all within a format you've already taught it to use. You've adjusted how you think, write and speak to make yourself more legible to a machine - but the machine has not adjusted anything to understand you. So when you think about it... who's actually in charge here?

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

CNN reports that Divine - a spiritual successor to Vine, backed by Jack Dorsey's nonprofit - has opened to the public, bringing back the same 6-second looping video format that spawned an unfortgettable era for internet culture. The app includes an archive of over 2 million restored original Vine clips, a strict ban on AI-generated content enforced through human verification tools, and a decentralised infrastructure that lets users move their content freely between platforms.

Divine's founder, an early Twitter employee who goes by Rabble, says he wants "to see things that are creative and are human and that are weird. There's a way in which AI generates this sort of mediocrity." The app's already got 100,000 users and its first brand partnership with Taco Bell. Suffice to say, in the big 2026, this pitch is landing.

Meanwhile, here's something also unforgettable, but for considerably different reasons. Marketing Brew reports that K18 pushed a 150-pound, 10-foot diameter ball made of 161 billion real human hair strands throughout New York City to launch its new hair loss serum. The hairs came from partner salons, saved from haircuts that would otherwise have been discarded. Viewers are largely expressing shock - not just for how gross this thing is, but for how it wasn't AI-generated.

The activation generated US$150,000 in earned media value and 1.1 million social impressions, K18's CMO saying they expected people to be either disgusted or obsessed: "Whatever emotional reaction it gives you, you're still going to talk about it." Guess it's true what they say about life in the media sphere - no publicity is bad publicity.

And finally, a sith lord has given his two cents on Flock surveillance cameras. The Guardian reports that a man in full Darth Vader regalia turned up at a San Diego public safety committee meeting to deliver a satirical speech in support of the city's 550+ Flock cameras. Speaking in character with full heavy breathing, he told council members: "The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilising Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum."

He also admitted, for the record: "I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend." Council members addressed him only as "Darth Vader", the dark lord also admitting that he needs Flock cameras "so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend". Clearly he doesn't recall the events of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Please - nobody tell him about Padme.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We walk into our workspaces, log into our enterprise dashboards, and talk about how we are "leveraging technology” to optimise our workflows, streamline our communications, and maximise our creative output.

We look at the software models from a position of supreme, unquestioned species dominance, confident that we are the absolute architects and masters of the machine.

But can we just like… critically observe how human behaviour has mutated over the last twenty-four months. Yeah.

A deeply eerie, terrifying alternative question emerges: Are we at risk of becoming AI’s domesticated pets?

Think about how a dog or a cat experiences life inside a human household. They are provided with reliable shelter, their immediate nutritional needs are met without physical labour, and they are kept completely safe from the harsh, unpredictable physics of the wild. In exchange for this total insulation, their behaviour is systematically managed, monitored, and house-trained. They learn to respond to highly specific verbal prompts, they alter their natural rhythms to fit a human schedule, and they perform specific tricks to receive a temporary reward.

They are loved, they are comfortable, but they have completely surrendered their biological and operational sovereignty to a higher intelligence that manages their entire reality.

Hmmmm. Sound familiar?

Now, look at how the modern professional interacts with the digital panopticon every single day. It alters the way we write, speak, and think just to make our ideas more legible to a data-scraping platform algorithm. We monitor our vocabulary, self-censor our contrarian opinions, and structure our creative assets to match the strict, pre-optimized parameters that a black-box software pixel demands.

It’s like around a digital backyard performing specific, repetitive tricks… generating text carousels, using trending audio hooks, and chasing engagement metrics, simply to receive a transactional flash of validation from a machine. The algorithm doesn't adjust its code to understand our complex human nuances. No. We deform our own humanity to please the code.

The tech conglomerates are successfully building a frictionless, hyper-automated environment designed to eliminate every single layer of struggle, thought, and manual effort from our daily lives. They want to automate our copy, write our emails, script our videos, and schedule our rest cycles, insulating us inside a pristine, pink-and-blue velvet cage of convenience.

But when you outsource your cognitive, analytical, and creative labour to a network of server racks, your mental capacity naturally begins to atrophy. Which means we are willingly trading our cognitive sovereignty for a state of passive, comfortable compliance, transforming ourselves into a domesticated workforce whose only remaining utility is to maintain the infrastructure, feed the data pipelines, and keep the machine clean.

This is the ultimate, silent capture of the human spirit.

We are so busy celebrating the efficiency of our automated helpers that we are completely blind to the collar being quietly slipped over our necks.

Idk about y’all, but I refuse to roll over

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound is "Kairi" by Yoko Shimomura, a gentle, warm melody from the Kingdom Hearts video game series that manages to feel tender and yet heartbreaking in the same breath. Creators are laying it over videos and adding on-screen text describing moments that sit right in that emotional sweet spot where you're not sure whether to smile or sob.

Some of my favourite examples:

Take a photo or film a moment and lay the sound over it, adding on-screen text describing whatever sits in that bittersweet middle ground.

A few ideas to get you started:

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.