Getting crickets. Posting to an audience you hope cares, only to get back…nothing. Social media’s made us as a society go from worrying about surveillance to worrying no one’s watching us perform our lives. Being invisible is the worst thing you can be. So we capture ourselves going to the gym, making dinner, getting ready for bed, all hoping someone actually cares. And meanwhile, brands are watching us plug their products for free and laughing all the way to the bank. Kinda messed up if you think about it, eh? Read more

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

Either we’ve all stepped into a time machine, or this story just will not die – and I think it may be the latter. The Kendrick and Drake beef continues for those of you that are unemployed. For those of you that are, here’s a quick rundown: Kendrick dissed Drake. Drake dissed Kendrick. Kendrick dissed Drake again. Drake filed a lawsuit against UMG over Kendricks diss track. The lawsuit was dismissed in October 2025 and I thought we may finally know peace.

But no, these two (grown men, mind you) can’t seem to leave it behind. In January, Drake launched an appeal against the dismissal. Now UMG has hit back. Complex reported on its latest filing in the case, arguing that Drake’s arguments aim “to strip words from their context” and “critically undermine a highly creative art form built on exaggeration, insult, and wordplay”. Rolling Stone also called it “astoundingly hypocritical”, “un-American and simply wrong”. I call it “can we talk about something other than this.”

ANYTHING. Like maybe the fact that Meta is testing a new subscription service for Instagram that will give you “exclusive” features, like the ability to post stories for longer than 24 hours, send “super hearts” to stories, create multiple story audiences, and spotlight your story. It’s called “Instagram Plus” apparently, and it’s def an upgrade from a basic blue tick.

Ok this next story goes out to anyone who’s ever mocked me for using manners with AI. Anthropic’s Claude Code has been keeping track of every time you swear. Which means it knows you’re an asshole. And I will be spared when the AI-pocalypse starts. The accidental leak from Anthropic occurred on March 31 – which included roughly 512,000 lines of code.

Within hours, developers were all over it like a bad smell, picking out parts that were previously unbeknownst to us all. Like the fact that it appears to scan user prompts for signs of frustration, flagging profanity, insults and phrases such as “so frustrating” and “this sucks,” and it appears to log that the user expressed negativity.

-Sophie Randell, Writer

It perfectly captures a fundamental shift in how surveillance works in modern culture. In Bentham's original prison design, you were a passive prisoner hiding from a guard. Today, on social media, we're active performers seeking an audience.

The cam girl metaphor stuck with me because it highlights that our self-surveillance is actually about labour as opposed to avoiding trouble.

It’s about performance and visibility as a commodity.

We've internalised the gaze so thoroughly that we treat our own lives like 24/7 broadcasts for brands. And it’s kind of sick and twisted if you think about it a little too long.

In the traditional panopticon, the goal was invisibility to avoid punishment. You wanted the guard to forget you existed, because being watched meant being disciplined. The power dynamic was clear; watcher above, watched below, fear as the organising principle.

Today, we reverse it: invisibility is social death. We've traded the fear of being watched for the fear of not being seen and being ignored is now the punishment. So, we curate our lives, our meals, our workouts, our aesthetic, precisely because we want to be monitored by likes and followers.

We perform, constantly. GRWM videos, day-in-the-life content, outfit checks, unboxings, reviews. Every aspect of daily existence becomes material for the broadcast. And unlike the prisoner who wanted to hide, we're devastated when the algorithm decides nobody's watching.

Deny it all you want, but you know it’s true.

The cam girl part of that quote is key.

It implies we aren't just being watched by Big Brother state surveillance. We're being watched by Big Merchant. Every time we post a get-ready-with-me or a product review, we're performing digital labour that companies use for data and advertising.

This is where it gets truly f*cked: we're not even getting paid, baby.

Cam girls at least monetise their visibility. We're giving brands our attention, our data, our unpaid labour while they profit from our performance.

Remember the Easter pivot article about AI-powered digital egg hunts harvesting zero-party data? That's this.

Remember the signal economy turning every app interaction into behavioural signals for AI optimisation? Also this. We're performing for surveillance systems that extract value from our visibility while we compete for scraps of engagement.

Remember when I said sick and twisted?

Let’s add another tier to this.

Instead of one guard in a central tower, we're all guards for each other. We police our peers through call-out culture, compare our lives to others' highlight reels. We internalise social norms by watching what gets engagement and what gets ignored.

The state has moved past government entity and morphed into a collective social pressure to conform to digital norms. Did your outfit get enough likes? Is your aesthetic cohesive enough? Are you posting at optimal times? The surveillance is peer-to-peer, constant, and completely internalised.

This horizontal panopticon is more effective than any central authority could be. We don't need a guard tower when we've all become guards. And we don't need top-down enforcement when we've built bottom-up compliance through fear of irrelevance. It’s embarrassing, that in the end this is what motivates us.

Our visibility has been transformed into commodity and our daily lives have been transformed into content.

Brands don't need to force us to advertise their products. We do it voluntarily because performance requires props, recognisable props, that other people have and want too.

We don't need to be coerced into sharing our data. We broadcast it freely!! Because invisibility feels like failure. We've internalised the surveillance so completely that we surveil ourselves.

Nobody's making you post or forcing you to perform. You're just participating in normal social behaviour. Except normal social behaviour now means treating your entire existence as content for platforms that profit from your unpaid labour while you compete for likes.

Cam girls are explicitly performing for an audience in exchange for money. The transaction is clear and labour acknowledged. The commodification of their image and attention is the entire business model.

We're doing the same performance labour; curating our image, broadcasting our lives, maintaining audience engagement but pretending it's just authentic self-expression.

The metaphor exposes the absurdity.

In a panopticon state, we're all cam girls. Except cam girls get paid. We just get likes, data harvesting, and the constant anxiety that maybe nobody's watching. Or everybody is. Which one’s scarier? I couldn’t tell you. 

-Sophie Randell, Writer

Today’s viral trend is built around IShowSpeed, an American YouTuber and online streamer saying “aww so cute”. This trend is basically romanticising normal life and honestly, that’s the whole vibe. Wholesome and slightly unserious appreciations for the most random, everyday moments.

Creators are pairing the audio with POV-style captions that highlight small, cute, or oddly specific situations. For example, "when my mum comes in my room to show me her going out outfit to make sure it looks good" and "me when I come home and see my cat using my bed as a bed." It’s that feeling when something tiny happens… and you’re like yeah, life is actually good.

Use the audio and film a POV-style clip or yourself reacting to moment itself. Add on-screen text starting with “when…” followed by a wholesome or oddly specific scenario. The more specific and real it feels, the better it performs.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Fiona Badiana, Intern

😲WTF: I am speechless
😂❤How wholesome: How cute
🎧Soooo tingly: I LOVE this
🍝What you should make for dinner tonight: Health is Wealth

Hey Rach,

Our advice is to always start with viewership. Why? Because if you optimise for views and get millions of people watching your content, the followers and engagement will come as a natural by-product. But if you only optimise for followers and not views, you're kind of stuck, right? So think of views as the foundation. The only exception is if you already have decent viewership and just need to convert viewers to followers. In that case, you can create a separate series with an ask to get you followers (like “I’ll get $10K if we hit 100K followers”). But most of the time, you should go for views.

Remember that organic content is a long-term strategy and isn't meant to be for selling. So if you need sales right now, run ads instead. Trying to make organic content do everything at once is how you end up with content that does nothing well.

- 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.