Michael Sun

The internet as it is right now is more restricted than ever, right?

More corporate, more buttoned up, more difficult to find things outside of what we actually want to see and what's fed to us algorithmically.

I'm an internet culture writer and my screen time is 12 hours a day, which means I'm clinically insane.

But even if you use the internet like a normal amount, I'm sure you'll have noticed that the internet today is a very different place to what it was 5, 10, 15 years ago.

The internet as it is right now is both faster and harder than it ever has been.

If you're on TikTok, which I think most of you are, you'll know that micro trends pop up at the speed of light, then disappear into the ether, never to be spoken of again.

As an experiment, I wrote down a list of things that were going viral on TikTok about a month ago while I was writing this talk, right?

Here's that list now.

The Hunger Games, okay.

Vodka pasta sauce.

Flavoured water, water talk, and unicorn syrup.

Being a la-la-la girl versus being an okay-okay-okay girl.

I mean, none of these words are in the Bible, right?

If you cast your mind back even further, the trends become even more meaningless.

I'm talking coastal grandma aesthetic.

I'm talking frazzled English woman.

I'm talking the return of twee, pasta chips, whimsy goth, dark academia, Barbie core.

What do these words even mean?

We are cycling through content at such a velocity that things become old news the second they hit the feed.

Even me standing here right now telling you that things are happening faster, you guessed it, that's old news too.