Apparently, it’s chainmail. Dark, textured typography. Gritty visuals that would look more at home on a poster for the Renaissance Festival than on a six-inch screen in 2026. In certain corners of the internet, getting away from the too-perfect slop you’re seeing everywhere means taking it back. Like, wayyyyy back to the medieval times. Because there’s something about the textures, the layers, the dark visuals that feels so real. And real is what we’re all craving right now, isn’t it?

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

The wealthy elite have officially given up on standard dating apps. So, you won’t be needing to swipe left on your least fave tech oligarchs’ son on your usual 10pm Raya scroll. Bad news, they are now using their fortunes to fund the ultimate throwback. According to WIRED, high-end matchmakers are charging tech entrepreneurs and finance executives anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000 to find them… trad wives.

These fabled wealthy men, many of whom aren't even religious or conservative themselves, are explicitly asking for younger, submissive, Midwest-raised women who will ditch their careers to cook, clean, and look up to them….

One matchmaker recalled a tech founder who rejected a caregiving candidate because she was a doctor. Meaning she was "too focused on her career". Yikesssss. They essentially want the real-life Nara Smith aesthetic. But several matchmakers note that these awkward billionaires usually alienate the women instantly with atrocious table manners (among other things, I’m sure). You can buy a tech company, but you cannot buy class.

You can buy your way into the medical field, though. With a real fancy scanner. Midjourney CEO David Holz just unveiled their first-ever hardware product. And it is a certified Silicon Valley fever dream.

Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it is an ultrasound-based full-body scanner designed to give you MRI-quality body composition maps. But instead of a regular clinic, they are opening a four-story luxury "cyber spa" in San Francisco’s Union Square. They will be complete with a gym, saunas, cold plunges, and hot-tub-equipped scanning rooms.

To get scanned, you literally step into a "shallow pool of golden light." Then you descend into the water while a ring of sensors uses "echolocation" to track your muscle, fat, and bone. Holz imagines a future where health nuts do this every single day just to see how a workout changes their body. Nothing says 2026 quite like getting a dolphin-style tech scan after your ice bath/sauna combo while sipping your adrenochrome electrolyte tea 😊

Speaking of people who can’t read a room, Hollywood! Hi. We currently have a classic case of executive straight-washing. Following the explosive global success of the queer hockey drama Heated Rivalry, streaming networks have scrambled to cash in on the "hockey romance" hype. The only problem is they… kind of stripped out the exact thing that made it popular. Another WIRED report highlights that Amazon's Off Campus and Netflix’s upcoming Icebreaker are serving up aggressively basic, heterosexual storylines.

Executives looked at a massive fandom built on queer pining and thought, "Ah yes, the viewers must simply love ice skates!". Fandoms are rightfully furious. But since Off Campus already pulled in 36 million viewers, get ready for a relentless wave of straight people holding hockey sticks.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

And I’m more obsessed than a damsel awaiting her knight after countless moons. Haven’t you noticed your favourite cutting-edge fashion boutique, or independent graphic design portfolios creeping backward? Way, way backward. When you scroll past the vanguard of internet subcultures, do you see a sudden, dramatic shift in the atmosphere?

The clean lines of mid-century modernism are dead. The pastel, sunny aesthetics of the Millennial Pink era have been completely abandoned.

We are talking about heavy raw textures, iron-forged typography, brutalist architecture, chainmail-inspired textiles, and a dark, brooding romanticism that feels less like a social media trend and more like a soldier marching through the mud to return to his princess.

This isn't a fickle fashion cycle or new “core” for us to run through (thank heavens). It’s a Neo-Medieval Backlash the ultimate, desperate human rebellion against the relentless onslaught of AI slop.

Generative AI has flooded our digital ecosystem with a very specific kind of visual pollution: Smooth Slop. AI-generated images and designs are universally characterised by their lack of friction. They are bright, plasticky, hyper-symmetrical, and entirely devoid of human touch. They are the visual equivalent of high-fructose corn syrup; mass-produced, sickly sweet, and fundamentally hollow.

The human spirit naturally repels this level of artificial perfection. And since our attempts at a "cool 2000s analogue revival" were quickly commodified by Big Tech, the culture did something radical. It swung the pendulum back 600 years.

You cannot fake the texture of hammered iron with a lazy prompt or replicate the emotional weight of a dark, rain-soaked castle courtyard through a generic algorithm. The Neo-Medieval movement is a deliberate clawback of texture and emotion. A desperate search for things that feel heavy, flawed, and undeniably human.

The modern digital world makes us feel incredibly small, fragmented, and passive. We are constantly swiping, clicking, and tracking vanity metrics. There are no high stakes. Just infinite, mind-numbing scroll time.

The Dark Ages aesthetic brings back a world of cosmic stakes and deep romance. It romanticises a life where actions matter, where honour is real, and where survival requires raw, physical grit.

It swaps out the corporate "productivity hustle" for the eternal quest.

When you see creators and designers leaning into this heavy, brooding energy, it’s like they’re building a psychological suit of armour to protect themselves from a digital world that wants to smooth over their humanity.

They want to feel the weight of the sword, not the swipe of the screen.

Ban the gloss, embrace the forged. Take Thor's hammer to your polished, corporate visual identity. Inject raw texture back into your brand. Use heavy, textured paper stocks for physical assets. Lean into asymmetrical, brutalist typography. Make your brand look like it was carved out of stone or forged in a fire, not generated in a browser tab.

Sell the epic quest, not the convenience. We’re all entirely fatigued by companies promising to make their lives "easier" and "more optimised." Stop selling convenience and start selling the journey home. Frame your product or service as a tool that empowers the consumer to overcome a massive, meaningful challenge. Give them a hill to climb.

The emotional premium. In an era of automated content, raw, unfiltered human passion is the ultimate luxury good. Ditch the polite, neutral, and corporate in your messaging. Be bold. Be dramatic. Lean into deep, intense storytelling that evokes a sense of loyalty, honour, and human connection.

But they forgot that human beings don't want to live in a sanitised, plastic box. We need the mud. We need the friction. We need the heavy, brooding weight of reality (and armour, and our handsome knight's muscles).

The Neo-Medieval movement is a beautiful, chaotic warning shot across the bow of the AI revolution. It is proof that the more the machine tries to make our world smooth and predictable, the harder humanity will fight to keep it dark, textured, and deeply, beautifully flawed.

So, are you going to keep polishing your frictionless, automated slop? Or are you ready to put on the armour and join the crusade for real human culture?

-Sophie Randell, Writer

This trend is for those days when you're so far gone and you're so over it. Because when you're having one of those days, there's always someone who will come and push you over the edge, leading to a massive tantrum. The sound is from Love Island, when participant Melanie loses it. After walking past a group of people, she yells "give me 10." Creators are now using this audio for any time they're feeling aggravated.

How this trend has been used:

Lip-sync to this audio. Then, put a caption up top or centered about your present moment or a moment you can reflect on that overwhelms you or makes you react with utter ego.

A few ideas to get you started:

-DJ Taivairanga, Intern

😂Yap’s funniest home videos - how they use to fight in the 50s
❤How wholesome - fans cheer for baby
😊Soooo satisfying - ice cream povs
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight - Breakfast with Sausages

Hey Ngaio!

There are so many ways you can create content around a service like this. One of the easiest content styles you can use is just answering FAQs you get. You can create a list of questions clients ask or have AI help you come up with some. Or you can find others in your industry who already have a following and see what people ask them in the comments.

Once you have a list of questions you can answer, record your team answering them. At the end of each video, ask the audience to put more questions for you to answer in the comments. You can always branch out and try other content styles over time. But this is an easily repeatable, low production content style that allows you to show off your expertise.

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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.