You'd lock in on a subculture, wear the same aesthetic for two years, cringe about it later, and eventually become your own person. The process was messy as hell and took time. Today's teenagers are being handed a new identity template every 90 days by algorithms that carry no interest in who they actually are. So if an entire generation never gets the chance to figure itself out before a trend's swiftly moved on, what actually happens to them?

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

TechCrunch reports that Instagram has launched "First Draft" - a new AI editing feature that automatically trims selected video clips, removes pauses, and assembles the best moments into an initial cut in under 10 seconds. Accessible directly from Instagram's camera or Reels gallery on iPhone, it gives creators an automatically assembled starting point for refinement, rather than having to edit from scratch.

Similar tools already exist in Adobe Firefly and CapCut, but building it directly into Instagram removes yet another reason to ever leave the platform. The feature happened to launch the same day Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified in Meta's high-profile social media addiction trial. Quite the date to pick for a slick announcement like this...

Meanwhile, Fanta's decided that its annual Halloween campaign is no longer enough - it wants a Halloween universe. Marketing Dive reports that Fanta's new "Haunted Universe" is a fully developed original entertainment property featuring four original monster characters, a cinematic trailer, collectible packaging, a limited-time flavour, and a Haunted Fanta Factory experience. You can expect a spookier orange soda from today across 50 global markets.

Last year's Halloween campaign delivered 10 billion impressions, Fanta's global VP of marketing proclaiming: "What Christmas is to Coke is what we want Halloween to be for Fanta." A year and a half in the making, the platform was developed with WPP Open X, Ogilvy and AI entertainment studio Grail. According to Fanta, we can expect the first "iconic" character collaboration announcement soon.

And finally, a cinematic experience that'll have you at the edge - but not the one on your seat. Consequence reports that Lionsgate held two special invite-only screenings of Fall 2: Deadpoint where audiences watched the entire film while standing on elevated platforms. If they lost their balance and fell off, they were ejected from the theatre. The film follows two climbers stranded thousands of feet above the ground in Thailand, and hit theatres next week.

It follows the same studio's Long Walk screening last year, where viewers had to watch on a treadmill. Lionsgate's building a reputation for making people physically suffer through their own movies - and I respect it big time.

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

There’s a reason for it being notoriously one of the most tumultuous times of your life.

But it was at least tethered to genuine, stable cultural dynamics and actual, tangible subcultures.

You could align yourself with a local scene, trial a specific identity configuration for a couple of years, and navigate the real-world boundaries of peer circles within the physical perimeter of a high school. There was a slow-burning consistency to the process. You had a socially mediated framework over time to foster a secure, reliable sense of self, experimenting with counter-cultures that actually possessed history, philosophy, and a physical community to back them up.

Today, that foundational developmental milestone has been dismantled and replaced by an accelerated algorithmic meat grinder.

We have entered a volatile era where social media algorithms have accelerated consumer and cultural trend cycles to a pathological degree.

Instead of finding a genuine community or an enduring subculture to adhere to, modern adolescents are subjected to a relentless onslaught of three-month micro-trends that emerge from the pixel, peak into total algorithmic saturation, and completely vanish before a cohesive human identity can even form.

The insane turnover rate of these digital aesthetics leaves kids in a state of perpetual instability, anxiously striving to keep pace with a shifting digital landscape that changes the definition of "cool" every ninety days.

This structural fragmentation cuts straight to the core of how young people evaluate their own human worth. Historically, according to classic sociological comparison frameworks, evaluating yourself alongside immediate peers was a normal, healthy mechanism for internalising community boundaries and understanding cultural norms.

But in a hyper-connected society like ours, a teens sense of belonging is heavily mediated by the curated, deeply inauthentic highlight reels of an interest-based feed.

Because young people naturally lack the comprehensive media literacy to recognise this content as utter bullshit, they are forced to measure their private realities against idealized depictions of wealth, physical perfection, entrepreneurial side hustles, and flawless digital relationships, most of which aren’t even real.

And when they inevitably fail to meet these impossible benchmarks, the downstream psychological consequences are devastating.

Their sense of validation and belonging collapses, which only accelerates the crisis of adolescent anxiety and clinical depression rampant in our youth. 

This all-consuming digital connectivity hasn't liberated youth culture at all. More so fundamentally fractured real-life social bonds and corrupted the stability of contemporary identity formation. Teeneagers are now forced to substitute real-world peer connections with a constant, exhausting state of anxiety cantered around digital compliance and baseline social survival.

The result is a superficial approach to human identity, where cultural expressions are quickly adopted as temporary aesthetic scripts and just as quickly discarded when the algorithm shifts its focus (see: office siren, brat girl, etc etc.)

Teenagers are literally being transformed into passive consumer units.

It flattens the rich, and beautiful process of growing up into an administrative task of profile optimisation, trading the sacred, slow-burning evolution of character for a shallow race to the bottom of the platform attention span.

And it’s made me realise something: the playground is no longer a space for organic face-to-face peer bonding; it has become an arena for digital defence mechanisms. When your entire sense of self is contingent on keeping up with a sequence of fleeting, code-driven aesthetics, you don't look for friends who share your deepest internal values—you look for social metrics that validate your current compliance to the timeline.

Kids definitely are not going through the awkward side fringe and eyeliner phase that I can only define as character building.

And this breeds an underlying, chronic state of exhaustion, forcing kids to perform identity rather than live it.

We have allowed big tech to turn the vulnerable architecture of growing up into a fucked up monetised transaction. And until we give these kids permission to turn off the software, close the applications, and experiment with who they are completely in the dark, they will remain trapped inside a digital capsule, endlessly chasing an identity that melts away before they even have the chance to find out if it was real.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from a compilation of creator Sabrina Brier reacting to various things with surprise and puzzlement:

"Oh... oh..."

Creators are lipsyncing with Brier's reactions and adding whatever bombshell left them not so much shocked, but deeply, deeply perplexed.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever information took a moment to fully land as your on-screen text.

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.