Not the thing itself. Just the faces. The gasps. The pauses. The strategically timed tears. At some point the feed stopped being a place where culture happened and became a place where people performed having feelings about culture. And somewhere in the middle of that shift, the rest of us have outsourced our emotional processing to strangers with ring lights. Today we're asking what happens when we stop experiencing things directly and what it costs us when we do.

Digiday reports that a new Walmart study found roughly half of consumers who identified as soccer fans expected to increase their grocery spending by at least 25% during major match weeks. And the data validated those intentions over the course of the tournament. The study surveyed over 1,000 casual and dedicated soccer fans through Walmart's own Customer Spark Community, covering everything from snack choices to spend levels.

Walmart also launched guided in-store tours for international World Cup visitors who'd been going viral for discovering jumbo-sized condiments and family-reunion-sized peanut butter for the first time. The World Cup was very good for ranch dressing.

In the week's most eyebrow-raising Hollywood deal, TechCrunch reports that Netflix has confirmed it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive, an AI filmmaking startup co-founded by Ben Affleck. And it's one of the largest tech acquisitions in the streamer's history. InterPositive's tools use a production's raw footage to assist with post-production tasks like relighting shots, replacing backgrounds and fixing missing footage. Affleck joined Netflix as a senior advisor. And around 300 of its current titles are already using generative AI in production.

The deal was announced back in March alongside Affleck saying he wanted to "protect the power of human creativity." Netflix's earnings call this week focused heavily on how much money AI is saving them. Two slightly different vibes.

And finally, in the most perfectly timed quote of the weekend, TechCrunch reports that Christopher Nolan, whose film about the Trojan Horse just made $264 million globally in a single weekend, called AI "a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside." Speaking in an interview timed to The Odyssey's release, Nolan described it as "a transparent horse, it's made of glass." He also said he'd found it "pretty encouraging" to see deep public skepticism of the technology, particularly from young people.

"I've never seen a technology advancing so rapidly that's been so completely rejected by the public," he said. The man makes a film about deception and then spends opening weekend calling out deception. Method directing.

Guys. Like, be so for real.

I had to stop (eventually, after exiting the rabbit hole) and ask myself when we turned human emotion into a mass-produced consumer commodity. Shortly after I remembered, oh yeah, for a while now. But hey, we carry on.

The modern social media feed is filled with rot that culture critics are calling the Reaction Economy. So, instead of consuming art, news, or culture directly, we consume the spectacle of other people consuming it. (yes, chat, we are cooked.)

Instead, they're the hyper-stylised video frames of creators gasping, crying, or shouting at a screen in the corner of the layout.

It’s almost like we’ve outsourced our emotional processing to strangers with sub-par ring lights. Meanwhile, we've turned human vulnerability into a flat currency designed entirely to farm algorithmic engagement metrics. Help. I hate it here.

The algorithm has long recognised that authentic human expression, like maybe a sudden tear, or a gasp of pure shock… maybe even a gut-wrenching laugh, is the highest-converting form of visual data on the digital market.

By serving us an endless loop of people merely reacting to things, the platform perfectly mimics the psychological feeling of sitting in a living room with a friend, sharing a collective cultural experience.

It's like a simulated intimacy infrastructure built to combat the absolute isolation of the modern screen-bound lifestyle. We watch someone else get excited about a cinematic sequence or an album drop because it validates our own reactions.

But the true danger of this loop is the systematic flattening of our internal emotional landscapes. I feel as though if we constantly filter our experiences through the pre-packaged reactions of content creators, we start losing the ability to feel things privately and honestly. And that’s a slippery slope.

Because we then become hyper-aware of the invisible audience watching us. Always subconsciously preparing our own faces to match the trending aesthetics of the timeline.

The moment a piece of art or breaking news hits the web, our immediate reflex is no longer to sit with the discomfort, the wonder, or the grief of the moment. Our reflex is to check how everyone else feels and is reacting to it.

We're surrendering our cognitive and emotional sovereignty to a dystopian black-box system that rewards performative shock value over deep, quiet contemplation.

Here’s my take (whether you want it or not): if your brand communication relies on cold, clinical data or sterile promotional graphics, you are not sh*t to the modern user within this landscape.

To survive, you must learn how to design for emotional immediacy.

Why are you trying to show people the functional specifications of your product, when capturing the un-edited, visceral human reality of what it feels like to actually interact with your brand in real life is the standard?

Provide the raw material that provokes a genuine, un-choreographed response. That's how you cut through the synthetic noise of the feed by delivering an undeniable proof of life.

And I understand that as independent operators navigating this hyper-connected wilderness, we have to establish a fierce internal boundary against the commodification of our attention.

If you find yourself feeling the overwhelming urge to click on a reaction loop or broadcast your immediate thoughts to a public comment section, genuinely, consider pulling the emergency brake.

Put your phone face down on the table for two seconds. Sit with the silence. Allow yourself the luxury of a private, unmonitored emotion. One that doesn't need to be validated by an applause emoji or captured for a data-tracking pixel.

True creative isn't about participating in the constant, noisy theatre of the feed. Instead, it's about possessing the depth to feel something real, completely on your own terms. All without telling a single soul on the internet that you did it.

Give it a go, babes. You may just find your own agency coming back with it.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from an episode of TLC's 1000-lb Sisters where co-star Amy claps back after hearing something she is simply not willing to accept:

"I'm not gonna sit here and have you feeding me this bologna when I don't like bologna."

Creators are lipsyncing to the audio as on-screen text describes whatever absolute nonsense they were expected to just smile and nod at.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever nonsense you were expected to just sit there and accept as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

Hey Dmitri!

Since you're in the beginning stages of your business, I would focus on creating content around that journey. You and your business partner will be working together, but you will each have your own perspective about the experience. So I'd post about topics like, What learnings have you had so far? Why are you creating this business? Why is it personal to you? What challenges have you had to overcome in building the business? This kind of content will bring your audience on the journey with you. This is the best way to build your personal brands without hard selling in your content.

- 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.