You couldn’t have lived through the 90s and missed any of these cultural touchpoints because they were totally universal. Just like you couldn’t have escaped American Idol, Janet Jackson’s Superbowl incident, the LOTR movies or Harry Potter books in the early 2000s. But now, we’re all experiencing life through the lens of our own algorithm. What you consider a huge part of culture may be something I’ve never heard of. Some even say we’ve reached the Post-Culture Era. So, here’s what that means…

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

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Welcome back to uncanny valley. The headlines are just as whack as you’d imagine them to be this morning. Starting off strong with a TikTok tarot influencer being sued by Idaho professor Rebecca Scofield for making videos suggesting she was involved in the 2022 slayings of four college students. Based on what? Well, her "spiritual intuition." Otherwise known as, Source: trust me bro.

Ashley Guillard was found liable for defamation, awarding damages to Scofield, a history professor, who said the repeated online accusations shattered her mental health, career and reputation. As you can imagine over 100 videos claiming you’re linked to one of the most shocking crimes in your community would do. Guillard now has to pay $10M in damages as a result of the harm she caused.

Why stop there when we can have more crazy news?

South Park writer Toby Morton just launched "DraftBaron" – a satirical campaign to send Trump's son to Iran. South Park and its writers are notorious for being the OG trolls of quite literally everything. But this is a whole new level of ballsy.

Over the weekend, the US joined Israel in launching waves of aerial attacks across Iran in an attempt to bring regime change to the country. Trump labelled the campaign "Operation Epic Fury," claiming it would end a security threat to the US. However, the IDF used the term “pre-emptive” to justify its attack, meaning that this is not a response and instead, as highlighted by the BBC, a “war of choice.”

This prompted the campaign site from Morton called "DraftBarronTrump.com." And this is not his first rodeo with creating satirical domains. Morton previously registered TrumpKennedyCenter.org, anticipating the current president’s highly criticised move to add his name to arts institution The Kennedy Center. The landing page of said site features pictures of Trump with the late Jeffrey Epstein. The campaign is obviously mocking the contrast between pro-war rhetoric from political elites and how far the bubble in which they reside is removed from consequence of such rhetoric.

Lastly, we’re circling back to that story last week about the McDonald's CEO. He basically handed himself over on a silver platter to forever rival Burger King, whose CEO seized the opportunity to dunk on him, posting something snarky about how their food is actually edible. These two would argue over the curtains, though, so it’s no surprise. Maybe one day we’ll see them turn enemies to lovers??

-Sophie Randell, Writer

I want you to ask five people under 30 what books, movies, or music defined the last decade. Chances are, you'll get five completely different answers.

Now ask someone over 60 the same question about the 1960s. They'll all likely say: The Beatles, Vietnam, JFK, and the Moon Landing.

That difference might be evidence we've entered what cultural critics are calling a "post-culture era" - a time when the shared cultural alphabet that once united us has shattered into a million tiny little pieces, leaving us only niche subcultures and fragmented feeds.

There, he argued that Western civilisation had moved past its golden age of shared literary and moral consensus. Back then, most educated people operated from the same cultural playbook; biblical stories, classical references, historical touchstones. You could mention Shakespeare or the Bible and assume your audience knew what you meant.

In a post-culture era, those shared reference points dissolve.

Different groups operate with entirely different sets of facts and symbols. What replaces unified culture is fragmentation - niche communities, algorithmic bubbles, and what Steiner called a "fragmented global morass."

Artistic works that were once treated as monuments (permanent contributions to humanity that would be studied and preserved) are now content (quantifiable, disposable digital units designed for immediate engagement and monetisation).

Your favourite album is content. That novel you loved? Content. The film that changed your life? Just another piece of content competing for attention in an infinite scroll. Everything flattens into the same consumable format, stripped of the reverence we once gave to art.

And what about value? Well, value gets determined by viral popularity rather than critical consensus. A TikTok with 10 million views matters more culturally than a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel most people will never read.

Your feed is custom-built for you based on what you've engaged with before. This creates what scholars call "private realities" or echo chambers where everyone experiences a completely different version of culture.

You and I could be living in the same city, on the same internet, and have zero cultural overlap. Which is so f*cked up when you think about it. Your algorithmic feed shows you one set of references. Mine shows me something entirely different. And neither of us has any idea what the other is seeing. Wild.

This technological mediation means we've lost the broadcast age - that brief period when a few TV channels and radio stations created a shared national conversation. The monoculture, if you will.

Cultural nostalgia and endless recycling feel like symptoms. We're drowning in sequels, reboots, and "90s nostalgia" because we've seemingly lost the ability to create new, cohesive cultural forms. Everything is a remix. Everything references something else. Originality feels impossible when shared cultural foundations no longer exist.

Then there's the post-truth problem. When personal beliefs and emotions hold more weight than objective facts, when different groups can't even agree on basic reality, that's a direct symptom of collapsed cultural authority. We don't just have different interpretations anymore - we have different facts.

And maybe most tellingly: we experience everything with meta-awareness now. We celebrate holidays with layers of irony rather than genuine belief. We perform cultural rituals while simultaneously commenting on how weird it is that we're performing them. Distance from meaning has become the default mode.

Some see this as disaster. Cultural analysts often associate it with societal stagnation, the death of shared meaning, cultural collapse. Which is true, in a sense. Others argue we're in transition, a chrysalis stage where new forms of connection are still being born. Maybe fractured culture allows more voices and perspectives than the old monoculture ever did.

But living through it feels disorienting either way. That’s why Gen Z and Alpha are nostalgic for eras they never experienced. Because at least those eras had cohesion. At least people agreed on what mattered, even if they disagreed about everything else.

Probably, yes. Let’s see:

Do we mourn what's lost and try to rebuild shared foundations? Or do we accept fragmentation as the new normal and figure out how to create meaning within our smaller communities?

Because whether this is calamity or chrysalis, we're living it. And your algorithmic feed is probably showing you a completely different version of this article than what someone else would see.

Argue amongst yourselves about it x

-Sophie Randell, Writer

People are using audio from Caleb Hearon's "So True" podcast where he asks Chris Fleming "why don't you have a podcast?" and Chris responds "because I think that something awaits for me in the divine for resisting." The clip perfectly captures that energy of stubbornly refusing to do things everyone else does and treating it like a noble sacrifice.

Whether it's avoiding trendy apps, ignoring pain medication, dodging adult responsibilities, or staying ignorant about things you "should" know - people are acting like their resistance will be rewarded in the afterlife. The joke is treating completely mundane refusals like they're acts of virtuous self-denial.

My fav examples include:

Grab the trending audio. Caption it with a question about something you stubbornly refuse to do - be it a popular trend, an obvious solution, or a basic adult responsibility - that people constantly ask you about.

A few ideas to get you started:

-abdel khalil, brand & marketing exec

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Hey Sam,

Posting a lot of random content is one of the most common traps people fall into. Most likely the problem is that you’re trying to do too much rather than just doing 1 thing well. Coming up with a new idea every day is hard, if not impossible, even if you have a content team. So you either end up giving up, or you get stuck on this treadmill where you feel like you're posting constantly but never getting anywhere.

What the most successful creators do instead is find one simple, repeatable format and just stick with it. That's what actually builds momentum, both with your audience and with the algorithm. It sounds almost too simple, but that's kind of the whole point.

- 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.