News from the Collective

COPIUM

A week after I finished writing the first blog posting You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks,  discussing the incoming C-wave and China’s growing influence, Biden signed a law effectively banning TikTok in the U.S. What followed became the biggest clutch of my creative career, securing a seat in the based department just before everyone else. I’m writing this follow-up as I cope with losing my edginess as a Western Xiaohongshu user, while also bragging that I was China-pilled before it was cool.

XIAOHONGSHU

While 170 million internet users scramble to find an alternative to TikTok, many are choosing to explore new platforms instead of fleeing to familiar ones. This behavior could be driven by several factors: reluctance to compete with established creators on Western platforms, Meta’s suppression of leftist content, or simply the desire for a fresh start. One app in particular, Xiaohongshu (or RedNote, as Americans call it), has seen a massive influx of self-proclaimed ‘TikTok refugees.’ It occupies a unique position as a well-established alternative that is globally available on app stores, does not require a Chinese VPN, and lacks competition from established English-speaking creators.

Initially, Westerners were not welcomed with open arms. Some Chinese netizens criticized them for bringing “American slop content” to the platform. Many explained that Xiaohongshu is valued for its high-quality, aesthetic, and informative content, in contrast to the sensationalist and loud videos posted by incoming TikTokers. Others, however, saw an opportunity to grow their audience and began adding auto-generated English translations to their posts. As American content flooded the platform, many users were upset that their carefully curated for you pages had been disrupted.

Given this, we must reconsider the term ‘TikTok refugees.’ In light of the native user base’s response, their arrival resembles a colonial invasion more than a search for refuge. Much like traditional colonizers, Western creators are drawn to the promises of a ‘new land,’ exploring unfamiliar algorithms, enjoying newfound freedoms, and stepping into a blank slate with little to no regard for its existing occupants. One user wrote “native English speakers already enjoy enough privileges, no need to add another one and change ourselves to make them feel more comfortable.”

In my early speculations on how the app’s developers might respond, possible scenarios included launching a separate Western-oriented version (similar to the Douyin–TikTok split), pulling Xiaohongshu from Western app stores, geo-blocking foreign users, or requiring Chinese ID or phone number verification for sign-ups, as some competitors do. However, given that Xiaohongshu is still young and only saw its rise in Asian markets in late 2023, the West became an attractive target for expansion instead. The app has since rebranded itself on Western app stores as RedNote, adopting its Americanized nickname. Another notable change was the swift introduction of a translation feature to facilitate communication between users. I was waiting for Americans to lose their minds over the app’s name literally translating to Little Red Book, a reference to Mao’s Little Red Book, but everyone was too invested in the LARP to care.

Two days after the big wave, many Chinese netizens began cautiously welcoming Western users to the platform, while urging them not to turn it into another TikTok.  Americans (for once) have also recognized the existence of other people and made efforts to encourage respect for the native user base. In agreement with Chinese netizens, many foreign users embraced a culture of bilingual posts, recognizing that most Chinese users either don’t speak English or aren’t comfortable using it. This helped ease the initial sense of exclusion within the community. However, the trend faded with the introduction of instant translations by the platform’s developers. All things considered, there still is an elevated sense of toxicity and hate, something the community hadn’t experienced before the mass migration.

After the initial shock within the community, the event has facilitated many interesting cultural exchanges, with both parties expressing genuine curiosity about each other’s cultures. The influx of TikTokers, although problematic, has also sparked valuable learning experiences and cultural exchanges that I have long advocated for. Users from both sides of the globe are posting questions about internet censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, personal freedoms, social media trends, memes, and more. If the dissonance among users is alleviated, the situation could provide long-term benefits for everyone involved. Americans (and, by extension, the rest of the Western world) could gain a much-needed understanding of Chinese culture, a country so notoriously misrepresented by Western media. Furthermore, this newfound awareness among younger Americans could prove highly beneficial in strengthening local anti-establishment movements. On the other hand, Chinese users could gain exposure to topics often omitted from mainstream discourse, such as queerness.

With ‘Westoids’ already experiencing early signs of the ‘Place, Japan’ effect in its redefined, Sinic rendition, a Chinese app like Xiaohongshu becoming the new meta in America could seriously claim lives in the Department of Homeland Security. For now, the ban has been delayed by the Trump administration. If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. On January 13th, Xiaohongshu stood as the #1 app on the U.S. App Store, proudly giving legislators the middle finger. Once again, yet another unpredictable turn of events, exposing the rhizomatic nature of internet-era politics and opening up new perspectives. As the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu famously said: “All warfare is based […]”

EVERYONE IS GETTING MORE CHINESE

On January 27th, 2025, we witnessed yet another instance of Xi Jinping’s aura-farming. A shocking advancement in Chinese AI, DeepSeek, sent U.S. stocks plunging. Contrary to Sam Altman’s appeals to the government, this competitive model was developed with only a fraction of OpenAI’s claimed budget. Outperforming GPT-4 in response time, DeepSeek has challenged America’s narrative, which seeks to downplay China’s technological successes. Judging from the US’s reaction, apparently the free market is not always good.

At this point, the frequency of China’s wins has caught everyone’s attention. Newly established online exchanges between users from the opposing superpowers have sparked a wave of pro-China sentiment among younger generations. ‘China-posting’ — the practice of sharing memetic images that depict the country in a positive light — was already circulating in less-frequented corners of the internet, but the state’s recent media presence has pushed it onto mainstream feeds. Trending memes, such as an image of the U.S. stock market crash remade into a Chinese flag (see above), reflect the frustration of young Western users who feel misled by their governments’ portrayal of China as a totalitarian, poverty-ridden ‘third-world’ country. While undeniably authoritarian and still grappling with poverty and human rights issues, the civilization-state boasts state-of-the-art infrastructure, high-speed rail networks, and ambitious housing initiatives—luxuries that many Americans can only dream of.

With this newfound resentment toward Western neoliberalism, users began engaging in a practice of weaponized data sharing. Many signed up for multiple Chinese-run platforms and apps, proudly flaunting their willingness to share data with the CCP. This shift wasn’t just about rebellion, it was about seeking alternatives. Disillusioned by Western platforms’ data privacy scandals, censorship, and corporate greed, many users found a strange sense of agency in embracing China’s digital ecosystem. The argument was simple: if all tech giants collect data, why not choose the one that isn’t aligned with the Western status quo?

Freed from Western propaganda, a new perception of China is emerging on social media, perhaps driven by young people searching for signs of hope for the world’s future. As Generation Beta is born into the most uncertain decade since World War II, they may be the first generation to see China as the world’s leading power. While it’s crucial not to blindly praise an imperialist state, we can ask ourselves a question: who’s imperialism would you rather have? With hatred towards the U.S., often driven by personal experience, many young people would pick China. Gen Z and younger are often referred to as ‘digital natives,’ will the first generation rid of resentment towards China be the Gen Xi?

MADE IN CHINA

Trump’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly hostile — whether through his executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, claims to the Panama Canal, or the ‘final solution’ in Palestine. Beginning with remarks about the EU being “too woke,” the administration has even threatened to impose sanctions on European countries. Taking many by surprise, it’s hard to imagine the once-inseparable NATO partners having their trade relationships severed by economic warfare.

China’s growing dominance in international trade is primarily reflected in its exports to South American, African, and Asian markets. While the country’s exports to the EU have grown substantially, existing systems still prioritize trade partnerships with the U.S. over China. However, recent exceptions have been made, most notably for the sale of Chinese EVs, which outperform the competition in safety, efficiency, and affordability. If the U.S. imposes tariffs on European countries, it could push the EU to strengthen ties with China, further cementing its status as a rising economic leader. Such newly formed trade partnerships could help shift the fear mongering narratives, helping form new channels for exporting cultural products.

China is already dominating foreign gaming markets, with Tencent owning Riot, 40% shares in Epic Games, and many popular titles like Final Fantasy, Genshin Impact etc. As of now, the country’s cultural exports differ greatly from those of Korea or Japan. Two major examples that come to mind — K-pop and anime — are often products carefully crafted to fit both local and Western markets, with Japan’s government even aiming to artificially boost new anime productions for export. Series like My Deer Friend Nokotan are getting injected with Western references, K-pop distributors have entire business plans centered around the U.S. market and there is a growing dissonance between Japan’s pop culture for the local and global market. On the other hand, China is less interested in tailoring their output to a global audience, and when they do, it’s made more culturally-universal by stripping any semblance of local cultures (e.g. gaming industry). Conversely, China’s culture is inconspicuously leaking through online channels, like aesthetic trends, brainrot or other social media phenomena, as I discussed earlier in You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks.

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The passing of Quincy Jones has left a silence that feels almost impossible to fill. Every time I play Thriller at home now, it’s no longer just a celebration of his unparalleled artistry. It’s a ritual to sit with his legacy, listen more closely, and honor how his music shaped the sound of memory itself. With each spin of the record, my family and I find ourselves inside his arrangements, held by their richness, precision, and sense of story as though the music is breathing with us, speaking back across time. Jones’s work was never just production; it was communication. A language of sound connected us to melody and beat and the fuller spectrum of emotion, culture, and memory that lives in Black music.

This piece joins a tradition of Black sonic remembrance that Sounding Out! has previously offered in moments of profound cultural loss, from Regina Bradley’s remembrances of listening to Whitney Houston on the radio with her mother to Ben Tausig’s reflection on Prince’s passing to Kristin Moriah’s meditation on Savion Glover’s tap dance tribute to Amiri Baraka. Such pieces remind us that mourning Black artists is not only about personal grief; it’s about listening to the soundscapes they left behind, tracing how their artistry shaped how we collectively move, mourn, and remember. Houston’s voice, much like Jones’s production, was a vessel of Black sonic innovation, shaping how we collectively move, mourn, and remember. Like Prince, Jones’s catalog is a vast archive of Black sonic innovation, where every horn line, bass groove, and percussive hit tells part of a larger story about Black life, joy, survival, and creativity. Jones, like Baraka, understood the radical potential of sound to entertain and agitate, educate, and summon history into the present. Writing about Jones now in the quiet left by his absence is a mourning and a celebration, an offering of flowers in the form of careful attention, deep gratitude, and collective remembrance. This is a way of honoring him as a producer or composer and as a practitioner of sonic rhetoric, a storyteller who spoke through sound and whose language of rhythm and harmony shaped how we feel, remember, and belong.

Two new books published in 2024, Matthew D. Morrison’s Black Sound and Earl H. Brooks’s On Rhetoric and Black Music, arrived at a particularly poignant moment, offering critical frameworks for understanding sonic rhetoric as a vital Black cultural practice. Morrison positions Black music as a vessel for cultural identity and history, emphasizing how it carries narratives that transcend mere auditory pleasure. Brooks extends this argument, demonstrating how Black music functions as a living, breathing rhetorical form, shaping and reshaping cultural identity and narrative with each performance, each recording, and each arrangement. That these books emerged in the same year the world lost Quincy Jones feels deeply significant, a reminder that his life’s work embodies precisely what they describe. Jones mastered using rhythm, melody, and arrangement to shape cultural memory and invite reflection. His genius does not reside solely in his ability to create captivating music but rather in his ability to layer each note with history, emotion, and meaning, sound as storytelling, sound as cultural conversation.

As I reflect on Quincy Jones’s legacy, I realize that his production and compositional skills have profoundly changed my understanding of sound. My admiration for Jones’s mastery of sound and his unique way of using music to communicate drove me to explore sound rhetoric more profoundly, especially how his work became the foundation of new sonic storytelling. His work allows me to imagine myself as a young Black boy, playing with sound and allowing it to communicate in ways that speak to the world. I am grateful for his inspiration, enabling us to envision the possibilities of sound and its power to connect us all. To honor Quincy Jones in rhetoric and sound, we must recognize his pioneering contributions to music as a form of communication. By studying his innovative approaches and the sonic landscapes he crafted, we can deepen our understanding of how sound shapes cultural narratives and personal identities. Engaging with his work encourages us to appreciate music’s profound impact on our lives and the stories it tells, ensuring that his legacy continues to inspire future generations of artists and listeners alike. 

For readers who may not be as familiar with his legacy, Quincy Jones is one of the most influential and celebrated figures in music history. His career spans more than seven decades, marked by numerous Grammy Awards, groundbreaking collaborations, and an ability to shape the sound of entire musical eras. Jones’s journey into music began with a chance discovery that would define the course of his life. As a young boy, he broke into an armory and found an upright piano, sparking his lifelong passion for music. This serendipitous moment led him to explore various instruments, from percussion to trombone, sousaphone, and eventually the trumpet, which would become his instrument of choice. These formative experiences gave Jones a diverse and rich understanding of sound that he would later weave into his compositions. His journey through different musical styles, be it jazz, R&B, or orchestral arrangements, allowed him to develop a unique ability to merge genres and cultures, creating works that resonated on a global scale. Jones’s work as a producer, composer, and arranger redefined what it meant to be a producer in the music industry, elevating the role to that of a creative force, an artist in their own right. Most famously known for his work with Michael Jackson, Jones’s sonic contributions to Thriller transformed pop music and how producers and artists interact to create timeless music. His groundbreaking approach to music production changed how the world listens to music, showing how sound can transcend entertainment and become a powerful form of cultural communication.

For example, celebrating the Thriller album with my children has been an ongoing discovery. I am captivated by their responses to the music. They quickly catch specific sounds, anticipate instrumental flourishes, and react to subtle details, proving the immersive quality of Quincy Jones’s work. His production goes beyond entertainment; it engages listeners, inviting even young ears to feel part of the experience. The power of sonic storytelling is the ability to craft a narrative or evoke emotion purely through sound without relying on visuals or lyrics alone. Quincy Jones’s genius lies in how he layers instruments, sound effects, and vocal textures to create mood and atmosphere, building stories that listeners can feel unfolding around them. Sonic storytelling turns production into a cinematic experience, where a sudden bassline shift, a carefully placed synth, or an eerie silence all contribute to the larger emotional arc of a song. Jones doesn’t just produce songs. He builds immersive worlds through sound, showing how music, at its best, can tell stories as vividly as any film or novel. Songs such as “Thriller,” “Beat It,” and “Billie Jean” epitomize Jones’s mastery of this craft. Thriller is a prime example of his brilliance, each track meticulously balancing complex soundscapes with universal appeal.

With eerie beats, haunting synths, and Vincent Price’s chilling monologue, “Thriller” has become synonymous with Halloween, transforming it into an auditory icon that reshapes how we experience the holiday. It has a layered, cinematic arrangement, where Jones fuses a creeping synthesizer line with lush orchestral swells and Vincent Price’s velvety horror monologue. Each sonic element functions as a narrative device, placing the listener inside a haunted space where sound, the creak of a door, and the hiss of wind become part of the story. Brooks’s On Rhetoric and Black Music reminds us that sound arrangements can evoke emotion and memory, and Jones’s work exemplifies that power.

Then, consider the storytelling pulsing in the bassline of “Billie Jean,” a throbbing heartbeat grounding the song’s tale of obsession, fame, and denial in something bodily, felt in the chest and gut before the mind catches up. With every layered texture, from the crisp snap of the drum machine to the soaring, wordless vocal harmonies, Jones does not simply produce music; he scripts sonic stories where Black creativity and cultural history converge in every beat.

Jones’s approach to production embodies this idea, transforming how we listen and engage with music. Take “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” where layered percussion, call and response vocals, and a pulsing bassline create a sonic landscape that feels alive, constantly shifting and evolving. The song’s now iconic “Mama say mama sa mama coo sa” chant reaches back to the Cameroonian makossa tradition, embedding a diasporic history within a global pop hit (listen to the opening seconds of Manu Dijbango’s 1972 “Soul Makossa” to hear the resonance).

Then, in “Human Nature,” Jones works in the opposite direction, crafting an atmospheric, dreamlike arrangement where gentle synth pads and delicate electric guitar melodies wrap around Michael Jackson’s voice like mist, evoking a sense of vulnerability and wonder. These tracks, like so many in Jones’s catalog, do not merely present melodies and rhythms. They create spaces where memory, emotion, and history converge.

Jones’s ability to craft soundscapes has long extended beyond Thriller, both backward and forward in time. His track “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962), famously featured in the Austin Powers films, evokes nostalgia and joy, transporting listeners to memories of sunny beach days and family vacations. But there’s a deeper story behind this piece that’s often overlooked that spoke volumes in its original context. Originally released on Jones’s album Big Band Bossa Nova, the track arrived when the genre and the term “bossa nova” were being culturally sanitized and marketed to white audiences, particularly in the U.S. As scholars have noted, Black Brazilian musicians whose innovative work laid the foundation for bossa nova, were often erased from the story as the genre’s global fame became linked to lighter-skinned artists palatable to international audiences. 

Jones’s decision to title the track “Soul Bossa Nova” at the height of the Civil Rights Movement and during the global rise of Bossa Nova was not merely clever branding. It bridged the emerging coolness of Bossa Nova with the distinct sensibilities and innovations of African American music, at a time when both the U.S. and Brazil were grappling with deep racial segregation and the commodification of Black art.  It was also a subtle reclamation, insisting on Black presence in a genre already experiencing the erasure of Black Brazilian pioneers such as Johnny Alf. In “Soul Bossa Nova,” Jones fused the light bounce of Brazilian rhythms with a brassy, big-band jazz sensibility, centering Black sonic playfulness and cultural hybridity at a time when both were under threat from the forces of segregation and global anti-Blackness. The track’s instantly recognizable piccolo flute riff, playful, mischievous, and a little sly, becomes, in this light, not only catchy but also defiant, a declaration that Black sound is limitless, able to traverse continents and contexts while carrying the weight of memory, history, and joy.

And the story did not end there. Decades later, Ludacris and various hip-hop artists paid homage to Jones’s legacy in Jones’s last album, the 2010 project Q: Soul Bossa Nostra. This playful yet reverent tribute sampled and reimagined Jones’s catalog for a new generation. Soul Bossa Nostra is a clever play on “Cosa Nostra,” merging the sonic underworld of Jones’s orchestrations with the familial pride and intergenerational respect that defines hip hop’s tribute culture.

This interweaving of “Soul Bossa Nova”‘s history, from its quiet defiance in 1962 to its unexpected resurgence through Austin Powers to its embrace by Ludacris, exemplifies the lasting power of Jones’s compositions to connect across eras and genres, all while telling a much larger story about race, ownership, and the endurance of Black sonic innovation.

In Thriller and “Soul Bossa Nova,” Jones’s compositions offer listeners an immersive experience that connects personal and cultural narratives, proving that his work is more than entertainment. It is a powerful form of artistic communication that resonates across generations. I have experienced this firsthand, listening to these songs with my children, not just once or twice, but as an ongoing, evolving family ritual. Their responses, the way they anticipate certain flourishes, react to subtle shifts, or sing along with total abandon, remind me that Jones’s work does not sit still in time. It moves through us, binding my children’s joy to my own memories of discovery, just as it ties us all to the larger, unfolding story of Black sonic creativity. Through Jones’s soundscapes, we are not only hearing songs. We are participating in cultural memory, shaping it anew with every listen.

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Being known as an unparalleled intergenerational sonic storyteller is already a feat, but Quincy Jones’s influence is embedded in the DNA of contemporary music production in other important ways. From the way producers are now seen as creative equals to artists to the expectation that producers bring their signature sound to every project they touch, every time a contemporary music producer is celebrated as a vital voice in shaping a record, they stand on the foundation Quincy Jones laid. Long before the term “producer” carried the weight and cultural significance it does today, Jones redefined what it meant to hold that title.

In today’s music landscape, the constructive collaboration between an artist and producer can be a defining force, shaping careers and setting entire musical eras into motion. This reality exists in large part because of Jones, who was not just arranging instruments or overseeing technical sessions but building entire sonic worlds, shaping the emotional architecture of songs, and helping artists translate their most personal visions into soundscapes that could speak to the world. His work with Michael Jackson epitomizes the collaborative alchemy possible when a producer steps into the role of creative partner, cultural interpreter, and sonic architect all at once. With Thriller Jones did not merely produce an album, he co-authored a cultural phenomenon. Jones and Jackson’s collaboration  not only redefined pop music but also set a lasting standard for artist-producer dynamics, showcasing the brilliance that can arise when two creative minds align. Jones’s legacy as a producer is one of vision, trust, and translation, helping artists hear possibilities in their work they could not fully imagine and giving the listening public music that defined moments and movements.

Hip Hop, in particular, has carved out a prominent role for music producers in the style of Quincy Jones, something that Nas pays homage to in his track “Michael and Quincy” from King’s Disease III (2022). In doing so, Nas directly parallels the collaborative genius between Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson with his recent creative collaboration with producer Hit-Boy, now running 6 albums strong.

This is not just a passing reference. It is part of Nas’s more prominent, ongoing project of honoring hip hop creators and the artistic lineages that shaped his career. Across the King’s Disease trilogy and in his The Bridge podcast (which he co-hosts with Miss Info), Nas has taken deliberate care to uplift the cultural architects of hip hop, weaving their stories into his narrative and preserving their legacies for future generations. On “Michael and Quincy,” Nas celebrates the power of collaboration, positioning the artist-producer relationship as a crucible for innovation and cultural impact. The track’s lyrics paint vivid images of creative combustion, with Nas rapping, “Smoke steaming off the microphone,” evoking the almost supernatural energy that fueled Michael and Quincy’s sessions. This imagery extends to Nas and Hit-Boy, capturing the intensity and urgency they bring to their creative process.

Sonically, “Michael and Quincy” also mirrors this spirit of collaborative innovation. Hit-Boy’s production constantly shifts, blending classic boom-bap drums with more atmospheric textures, creating a soundscape that feels both reverent and forward-thinking. The beat morphs beneath Nas’s verses, never settling into predictability, much like how Quincy Jones infused “Thriller” with unexpected sonic twists. Nas and Hit-Boy’s sonic interplay echoes the Jackson-Jones dynamic, where the producer’s vision expands and amplifies the artist’s voice. In its lyrics and production, “Michael and Quincy” serves as a sonic tribute, not just to a legendary duo, but to the transformative power of artist-producer partnerships, a lineage Quincy Jones helped define and one Nas is determined to carry forward. The era-defining success of Thriller still ripples through music today.

Nas’s tribute serves as a powerful reminder of these partnerships’ enduring impact, bridging genres and generations. The image of “smoke steaming off of the microphone” is one I carry with me, embodying the intense, creative spirit that Michael and Quincy brought to their collaborations, a legacy now celebrated and extended through Nas’s words and music. Nas draws from their example to remind us that great partnerships, whether in music or other creative endeavors, are often the spark that ignites monumental cultural shifts. Their combined energy was undeniable as they pushed each other to new artistic heights. The success of their work was not only about the music; it was also about the more profound connection to culture, identity, and collective memory.  Like the tracks he produced, his music lives on, inspiring us to reflect on how we listen to and engage with the world around us. By revisiting the breadth and depth of his work and the many sonic creations it has inspired, we continue to discover new layers of meaning and artistry, ensuring that Jones’s influence will be felt for generations to come.

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Featured Image: SO! Screencap from Nas’s performance at Rolling Loud, November 11, 2024
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Jaquial Durham is a multi-hyphenate social justice champion. The South Carolina native has spent over a decade actively engaged in various outreach initiatives to uplift and empower marginalized communities. He is also a passionate cultural enthusiast dedicated to exploring the rich tapestry of African American history, which drives him to continue making a meaningful impact in the lives of those around him. His advocacy for social-political issues that encompass race, prison culture and gender have been at the forefront of his work.

As the CEO of Public Culture Entertainment Group, an entity focused on raising public awareness about the myriad of components that influence culture, Durham spearheads the company’s TV/film projects and cultivates unique apparel capsules that showcase prominent African American figures, organizations and landmarks often absent from historical dialogue. The ambitious, young go-getter prolifically uses creative activism to amplify the voices, stories and experiences of those often overlooked. His
visionary brilliance can be seen in the groundbreaking documentary Southern Prison Culture, a cinematic film highlighting the challenges individuals face within the system and fiercely advocating for much-needed reforms. As a result of the film’s success, Durham has received prestigious awards like the Milan Gold Award, the Austin Lift-Off Film Festival Award and the London International Film Festival Award.

Durham has been a driving force behind various social justice reforms, calling for equitable and inclusive policies and practices. His unwavering dedication to helping others earned him widespread recognition that included opportunities to lecture at colleges such as American University, Benedict College, Claflin University, Clemson University and Texas State University. Durham was honored by Grammy-Award Winning rapper Killer Mike, who has respect and credibility within the culture. His dedication to the development of higher education institutions in America has led him to refine his intellectual and creative genius relentlessly. While Durham received a bachelor’s in African and African American Studies with a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Winston-Salem State University, he is pursuing a Ph.D.from Clemson University in Rhetorics, Communication and Information Design.

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
On Donuts, Sandwiches and Beattapes: Listening for J Dilla Six Years On–DJ Primus Luta

Unlearning Black Sound in Black Artistry: Examining the Quiet in Solange’s A Seat At the Table–Kimberly Williams

Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt

“Heavy Airplay, All Day with No Chorus”: Classroom Sonic Consciousness in the Playlist Project–Todd Craig

Mingus Ah Um (1959) and An Ethics of Care in Jazz–Brittany Proctor

SO! Amplifies. . . a highly-curated, rolling mini-post series showcasing cultural makers and organizations doing work we really dig —

The MS Sound Forum invites papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto, Canada in January 2026. The session responds in part to the MLA Executive Council’s refusal to allow debate or a vote on Resolution 2025-1, which supported the international “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS) Movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In light of the Council’s suppression of debate, some of the Sound Forum Executive Committee members decided to resign in protest while others remained to hold the MLA accountable for its undemocratic procedures. To acknowledge and respect the decision of those who left, the remaining members chose not to immediately fill the vacancies to let the parting members’ silence speak.

At MLA 2026, the Sound Forum seeks to provide a space for dialogue and meditation on silencing, censorship, and the role of organizations like the MLA in systemic violence and suppressing academic freedom. Sound studies scholars have long articulated listening as a practice for critical interventions, especially in the face of oppression. For example, Sonali Chakravarti’s Sing the Rage—written in the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—argues for an engaged and good faith reception of anger in the aftermath of colonial and institutional violence like apartheid and genocide. Chakravarti posits listening as the ground of recognition and a key path for attaining justice in the aftermath of mass violence (123). Drawing on Chakravarti, Naomi Waltham-Smith in Free Listening insists that listening “isn’t restricted to a power of relief but is precisely what enables catharsis to transform into a vehicle for justice because it promotes trust” (67). 

To entrust MLA with the task of upholding one of its core values—the commitment to champion intellectual freedom—does not come easy. Indeed, Waltham-Smith reminds us that “Rage—and especially Black rage—is figured as an excrescence to the European rational logos. It’s too loud or too dissonant for the ears to parse” (55-56). The MLA Executive Council’s justification for their pre-emptive silencing of debate on Resolution 2501-1—as chronicled by our colleagues Anthony Alessandrini, Raj Chetty, Cynthia Franklin, Hannah Manshel, David Palumbo-Liu, Neelofer Qadir, S. Shankar, Rebecca Colesworthy, Chris Newfield, and others—remits to this noise-logos dichotomy, appealing to legalistic and fiduciary logic as a rationale for denying debate.

Waltham-Smith develops this argument in dialogue with Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks and Audre Lorde, asserting: “Rage is also connected with aurality in that a lack of listening—a feeling of going unheard—is itself a spur to anger, which is further compounded when the expression of that anger and, hence, its legitimacy is denied through silencing of one kind of another. It is this double injury that Jean-François Lyotard articulates in The Differend with his notion of the différend, whereby the original damage is compounded by the fact that it cannot be brought to the attention of or recognized by others. […] The assumption here is that listening has always already softened the blow” (63). This double injury occurs when one’s rage is discredited, deemed to be out of proportion to the weight of the wrong, or simply unheard, thus compounding the rage and shutting down avenues for multiracial collectivity when “white people remain unable to hear black rage, if it is the sound of that rage which must always remain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable” (hooks, Killing Rage 12).

It is no accident that we are invoking studies of Black rage when discussing the plea of our Palestinian colleagues. Indeed, one of the seminal sound studies monographs, The Sonic Color Line, was written by Jennifer Lynn Stoever in part to historicize the state and police violence Black Americans were subjected to in the 2010s by positioning these instances of brutality—often triggered by disputes or disagreements over what a soundscape of the public space ought to be—within a larger history of the racialized listening practices. Those of us who experienced the Ferguson uprising in 2014 witnessed Palestinian allies sharing—over Twitter and in solidarity against the state violence—their first aid strategies when assaulted by the police tear gas for standing up for the dignity of Black and brown lives.

It is within this context of the MLA’s refusal to listen that we organize this panel. Beyond the immediate confines of the MLA, we also bear witness to contemporary practices of silencing, such as CEO Elon Musk tweaking X’s algorithm to penalize posts he deems to be “negative”; the Trump administration’s defunding of research on marginalized communities on the basis of flagged terms like “historically” and “female” (Palmer); and anthropocentric disregard for the more-than-human in enacting environmental policies, among others. At this juncture, resisting the erosion of democratic decision-making procedures and the freedom of expression is imperative.

While the panel theme is motivated by our collective desire to hold the MLA to account for its undemocratic procedures and to improve the Association’s processes from below, we also invite proposals thinking capaciously about questions of silencing, censorship, or free expression—as well as the role of listening and sound in these dynamics—through a sound studies framework. Topics might include: silencing of the more-than-human; AI and social media censorship (algorithmic black boxes); scholasticide and epistemological imperialism; ableism as silencing; authoritarianism and political censorship, etc.

Please submit your 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by March 20, 2025 to:

• John Melillo, johnmelillo@arizona.edu
• Setsuko Yokoyama, setsuko_yokoyama@sutd.edu.sg
• Tamara Mitchell, tamara.mitchell@ubc.ca

Please note that all speakers must update their MLA membership by April 7th, 2025 to participate in the conference. We look forward to receiving your proposals.

While the MS Sound Forum has decided to hold this guaranteed session at MLA 2026, we acknowledge and respect the decision of many of our colleagues to resign from their MLA-affiliated positions and withhold their membership, financial contributions, and labor in protest.

The MLA Sound Forum Executive Committee

John Melillo, Tamara Mitchell, Julie Beth Napolin, Setsuko Yokoyama

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Featured Image: Photo by Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

My Music and My Message is Powerful: It Shouldn’t be Florence Price or “Nothing” –Samantha Ege

The Sound of Feminist Snap, or Why I Interrupted the 2018 SEM Business Meeting–Alex W. Rodriguez

Spaces of Sounds: The Peoples of the African Diaspora and Protest in the United States–Vanessa Valdes

EPISODE 61: Ni Le Pen, ni Macron: Parisian Soundscapes of Resistance–Naomi Waltham-Smith

Photographic images and memes seem largely irrelevant regarding their ways of circulation and their relationships with reality, with a contrast between referential and indexical, ambiguous and unambiguous. However, to what extent can memes learn from photography? What about the other way around? Photography, whether digital or analogue, retains its powerful function as a medium for social utility. The capacity of a photographic image embodies the particularity to show a specific sight, with which people identify, archive and distribute evidence of their life worlds. Traditional and digital circulations of news and social media contents reduce reality to representations and rely on symbols for knowledge transmission. Texts are added to images to provide additional contexts to sometimes colonize and transform the meaning. Through framing, cancelling and reframing narratives, power structures shape images into multiple visual fields that both enable and camouflage meanings and meaning-making processes. The visual and textual layers dialogically render the photographic images non-neutral and unstable, sometimes reducing them to mere illustrations of text.

Now that technology has continuously lowered the barriers to the production and distribution of images, the functionalities of both photography and memes are afforded to be expanded. Despite the fact that the different levels of technological advancements of photographic images and memes are obvious, photography’s mechanism of social confirmation and manipulation of visual meanings have expanded by memes’ affordances of multi-layered images combining texts with images, distributing a variety of images to a broader scale of trans-cultural audiences. The easy reproduction of forms and ambiguity, as well as the users’ willfully generated immaterial labor in cultural production, form various digital vernaculars and can be easily turned into a techno-liberal marketing project. Meme viewers are invited to read the meaning of their messages as shallow texts whose informational content is contained in its referentiality, rather than as fragments of tangled reality presented for interpretation. In this sense, memes are simultaneously an extension of photography and an amputation of it.

By navigating the encounters between meme images and Polaroid photography, the video essay explores the alternative sites of knowledge production and new modes of subjectivities situated in digital space and contemporary frenzy.

My video essay on YouTube

Nostalgia, Polaroid and Memes

Why still bother comparing photography and memes, as their boundaries are disappearing? If photography acts as a pragmatic progenitor of meme images, the native speakers of the digital vernaculars can, in return, expand their vocabulary with a great embrace of photography and visual culture. Looking at the contemporary social and cultural landscapes and examining how technical images are complicated by these practices become urgent.

My research begins with a Polaroid camera. It was a birthday gift from a very close friend six years ago. I choose Polaroid not necessarily because the practice of analogue photography is purposefully rejecting digital technology… The resistance as such is largely romanticized. Instant analogue photography like Polaroid and meme images can both be seen as consumed relics regardless of cultural and historical contexts, and despite their qualities of reproductivity, levels of intimacy and material basis. Studying the entanglement of Polaroid photos and meme images through photographic practices, I attempt to resist the contemporary numbness and sadness through new modes of encounters, relations and subjectivities those images embody.

The camera I used, a Polaroid Supercolor 635CL

By reducing the significant lag time between the development and exposure of images in the darkroom work, Polaroid photography strategically predicts the immediacy of digital photography, resulting in a lively and party-like experience. The happenings of making images and viewing them take place almost simultaneously. This mediation of shooting experience and the production of a quickly made and easily consumed relic of it constitutes Polaroid’s quality as a commercialized product. The practice of taking Polaroids becomes a generic stylization, where the photos turn into distinct and intimate commodities.

Similarly, despite a more ambiguous socio-technological construction, memes are optimized for visual communication on the digital screen. These optimizing processes protect meanings and overcome the distortions inherent to digital circulations while traveling across cyberspace, which can be fit into a broader promotional and/or marketing project situated in the digital reality.

Polaroid photos and memes also seem similar on the level and forms as cultural landscapes, in terms of their social functions, banal nature and sets of vernaculars.

Just like Polaroid as a photographic apparatus for parties, meme images group people together as technical images in cultural consumption. Whether the prevalence of snapshot photos or randomly layered memes, both convey a sense of immediacy that exposes the banal moments of everyday life. Performed by untutored amateurs in a diversity of milieus, both kinds of images form specific vernaculars that facilitate cultural traction through wide reproduction and dissemination.

In The Postcard,[1] Derrida states that destination does not exist by examining how a destination can actively shift our interpretation of ideas when the destination itself is taken into account. Viral images, like the contemporary mutations of the Derridean postcards, are always molded, framed and destinated somewhere, provoking variations and multiplicity of interpretation. They are the most effective in concealing their materiality. They have become the ‘gestural assemblages’, where moods are codified into reiterable symbolic statements.[2] They are constituting an amalgamation of symbols that provoke our desensitization stimuli by media violence and its repercussions on the real world where the narrative context is lost and the gratification is permanently temporal.

Recent efforts have been seen as a nostalgic return to the analog and handmade cultures, summoning a digital revival of the manufacture of a Polaroid-like photo. Users can easily generate a heavily filtered digital photo with white borders by using algorithmic softwares. The societal desire for the physicality of analogue technologies, what Miyake has termed as technostalgia,[3] refers to a craving for a sense of security of material and hard technologies entrenched in the analogue past, in a digitalized reality where physical time and space are largely disintegrated.

Ironically, the attempt to capture imperfect and ‘authentic’ reality for a counter-narrative to the perfect digitality is itself stylized and commodified. Polaroid attempts to digitize memories and the unstable archiving of them by manufacturing new products that transform digital photos into Polaroid chemicals. In theory, you can print a digital meme into a Polaroid photo with a printer that was released recently. Through the historical transformation from traditional images to technical ones produced by apparatus, images no longer signify the phenomena from the real world, and instead, signify the concepts that are produced by scientific codes. As Vilem Flusser points out:

The lack of criticism of technical images is potentially dangerous at a time when technical images are in the process of displacing texts – dangerous for the reason that the ‘objectivity’ of technical images is an illusion.[4]

The transformation of medium from traditional image to technical image alters the ways of reception that are increasingly indoctrinated through technology. In the ‘black box’ where the operating space of indoctrination takes place, memes and Polaroid photos engage with their cultural contexts to trigger larger-scaled dynamics and movements that we witness today. In the digital realm where content serves as the primary means by which we project our identities and network with others, content consumption emerges as a pivotal force in uniting people socially. People are no longer drawn to one another by problems, but rather group themselves through technical images. This shift signals a profound transformation in how we organize and relate to the world around us.

Smoking, surfing, toileting

This motivates my performance-based research (or research-based performance) of remediating memes through Polaroid photography. I selected 6 memes from Instagram, RedNote and Pinterest that are feasible to be remade, giving them a personal retouch and reformulating the process of creating memes on chemicals, an alternative material basis. Additionally, I filmed the process of remaking as an attempt to mobilize the memes instead of merely presenting the surface of images. The video essay unfolds a process of intermedial transmission that happens between meme images, photographic images and moving images. These in-between moments enable a new way of relating, allowing one image to be a part of the other without lacking the social significance of the original. Destabilizing while simultaneously weaving the relations between the unattainable original and the remade, these moments negate demarcating and decisive processes of circulations in the physical and digital space.

Communicating with inanimate eggs/dumplings

Lost Future

The urge to return to the analogue past perhaps demonstrates a contemporary resistance to virality where memories are largely nullified and absent. Photography is sometimes associated with the concept of death, with frozen moments in time that highlight the impermanence of life. It invokes the sense that time has passed, and what is photographed is now gone.

The sense of presence that is sustained by instant photography offers Polaroid photos a unique perspective on space, time and death. This sort of spatial and temporal mimesis evokes a sense of longing for an absent affective past and nostalgia of a prosthetic memory, be it personally attached or socially entangled. They are uncommon witnesses to human experience — like ghosts, long gone yet refusing to be forgotten.

Is photography potentially distancing people from the real and lived experiences, or a deeply personal medium that can evoke powerful memories through its connection to the past? These counterpoints on distancing and intimacy unfold the exact tension of meme images and photography in the contemporary context. Meme images, like photography, are fossils of the present, deprived of specificity, serving as decontextualized images. Meme images become an extension of photography. Not only is the distinction between photography and memes increasingly diminished, but this exact distinction is also reducing both into an interface of communication, in search of a lost time that we have never been in, and an aesthetic form that only resonates with an illusionary past where cultural specificities are largely absent. In the realm of visual culture and production, the cultural effects of the memers and photographers are merely the distortion or rejection of the old ones, instead of creating the new. They are assemblages that are only indexing other ideas.

Maybe the future is lost, as implied by Mark Fisher[5], who believes that the pervasive influence of neoliberal capitalism has led to cultural, political and social stagnation. The future, once imagined as open, progressive, and filled with potential for radical change, has been foreclosed, where, essentially, the idea of a better or different future has been canceled.

Memeticizing Polaroids

Is technostalgia a trap? Here, we are asking the same question that Fisher has asked: is there no alternative to capitalist realism? We still can acknowledge memes and photography as powerful media for resistance. The more luring they are for being manipulated and layered for meaning-making, the more powerful they are as a medium of potential resistance. The tension between preserving, imagining and distributing is growing. Presence caught in a Polaroid photo obtains more than ironing out the folds and creases in the lived experiences. Beyond offering nostalgic solace for the future, it serves as reminders and evidence of what we will ultimately lose — it casts doubt on how we perceive the world around us, our positionalities of the past, and the imminence of our ultimate disappearance.

Proposal with gun/soy sauce

In some cases of remaking, the original memes are violently decontextualized, while the remade memes are radically recontextualized. The nature of memes and the artistic potential of instant photography offer ways of an interchangeable meaning-making process. By creating and removing layers of meanings of what is seen, the images can not only be easily attached to alternative themes like gender performativity and cultural identities, but also denaturalize the forms of Polaroids and memes to create ghostly echoes of the original.

(No) Parody

How to be White?

Filming the making of processes is to some extent a way to potentialize and contextualize viral circulations that took place in memes. Through creating spectacles that depart from the original contexts and grow narratives on their own, the remade memes denaturalize the screen-optimized visual communication, and disambiguate the Polaroid aesthetics by the memes’ very nature of ambiguity.

Consuming Dutch Cuisine

Memes never address how the process unfolds, how the world of others can slip into ours, and how these worlds embody openness to one another. In response to this, the project also comes with a handmade zine. Through touching and feeling the textures of the items in the photo, the audience can sense the tactile memories embodied beyond the surface of images.

Scanned pages of my zine

Meme Rhizome

Is it still possible for new modes of subjectivity? May technostalgia be a trap? If we look closely at Fisher’s theory on hauntology and lost future, we can question his determinist view on culture as Eurocentric. By overly focusing on what could have been, Fisher may unintentionally underplay opportunities for imagining and acting toward new, emergent futures. His focus on melancholic repetition of cultural forms and political stasis may gloss over spaces where innovation and resistance continue.

One way out of this nostalgic trap is to look beyond the parameters of Polaroids and memes, and to allow what appears to be in opposition to one another eventually to encounter and converge. Meme images constitute a flat ontology of becoming and unbecoming through connections, which make their meanings centreless and rhizomatic. They are multiplicities, active, differential, and futile to demarcate. The substance that once contained the meme, whole and signified, now contains the dissolved meme, decomposed and a-signified, but still present and still connected. As assemblages, they produce hazy gestures simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. There is no origin, nor destination. Every memetic Polaroid acts as a monologue but also a new way of relating, one not only speaking for itself but being a part of the other. The memes and meme-rhizome become a museum of accidents and shape sites of encounter of digital circulation and capitalism.

Bio: Xiaoyue Xu is a writer, photographer and research master’s student in Art and Performance Research Studies at University of Amsterdam. She is interested in the interdisciplinarity between human-nonhuman relations, Eastern philosophy and performing arts in relation to artistic research and digital culture.

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[1] Derrida, Jacques. 1987. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

[2] Flusser, Vilém. 2014. Gestures. University of Minnesota Press.

[3] Miyake, Esperanza. 2024. Virtual Influencers: Identity and Digitality in the Age of Multiple Realities. 1st ed. London: Routledge.

[4] Flusser, Vilém. 2000. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books.

[5] Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. John Hunt Publishing.

America’s Skill Issue

“All empires fall eventually.” The rapidly accelerating pace of American politics in the 2020s serves as an important signifier of the impending fall of Western hegemonic power. Trump’s securing of the presidential office and congress, contrary to liberal cope, did not result from the proposed policies of either side. Partly driven by significant changes in social media algorithms, which prioritize reactionary positions and engagement over accuracy, we have entered the era of post-truth. Notably rooting itself in the mainline political discourse during covid as misinformation regarding vaccines, fabricated realities proved themselves to be more effective tools of ideological manipulation than actualities. Discernible narratives such as those surrounding immigration, transgender rights or Chinese influence completely overshadowed the Democratic campaign’s indifference towards real-world issues, resulting in a big win for groypers.

As fascism becomes decreasingly disguised in popular rhetoric, so does the true nature of American rule. Bringing self-destructive policies like proposed tariffs to the forefront of Republican hyperbole, the imminent decline of American exceptionalism reaches its final stage of totalitarianism before collapse. Bigoted Twitch streamers and cryptopilled YouTube celebrities being recognised in Trump’s victory speech on election night or Elon Musk coining the Department of Government Efficiency, named after a 4chan dog whistle, the hyperstitiousness of the principal political disquisition has reached peak absurdity. However, anticipating the great flop era in US history, the power vacuum will need to be filled immediately. The global arena only has one other player – China.

China Was Built Differently

The ‘five-thousand-year-old civilization,’ projected to economically surpass the US in the near future, has become the prime focus of socio-economic speculation by analysts worldwide. As a living governance experiment, the civilization state is characterized by its highly systematic policies. Modern China is not run by politicians, it’s run by economists. In its commitment to preserving historical traditions while advancing societal and technological progress, the country’s development outcomes differ significantly from those of Western, neoliberal models. Neo-Confucianism serves as a foundational aspect of Chinese society, prioritizing harmony, historical continuity, and collective advancement over the individualistic ethos of the West. As a result, their developmental factors require a distinct analytical approach. Scholars and artists, including Lawrence Lek, Nick Land (with his concept of ‘Neo-China’), and Zhang Weiwei (author of The China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State), offer insightful speculative thought on the future of this prominent ancient civilization.

Quoting Lawrence Lek from his video essay Sinofuturism: “Copy everything. Respect for historical tradition is a main principle of Chinese aesthetics.” This perspective aligns with a broader cultural attitude in China, where a lack of strict adherence to global copyright laws has fostered a culture of resource sharing. As Lek notes, “Nothing is sacred. Authorship is overrated. Copyright is wrong.” If you ask an American company how their products are made they will laugh at you, in China they will give you a factory tour. This shared knowledge, combined with state capitalist practices and central planning, has enabled the country to achieve unprecedented technological development. While US companies focus on slapping an AI label on everything, BYD is making cheap electric cars.

The C-Wave

Alongside dominating the global manufacturing scene, Chinese culture has joined the vast collection of exports from the country. Much like the K-wave of the past two decades, China’s cultural phenomena have swept over Western social media, although this time it’s different (I’m gonna lose all the ‘nothing ever happens’ bros here). Many recent Western internet trends have originated from Chinese platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Some of them, such as 0.5x zoom surreal storytelling, have emerged organically, while others, like the hyper-aestheticized Douyin makeup, reflect a direct influence. Recently, numerous accounts have been reposting videos from Chinese platforms on Instagram and TikTok. Some popular Douyin creators have also begun sharing their content on Western platforms. Notable examples include the famous rural snack store videos featuring “往事只能回味” playing in the background and the abundance of “Ke Mu San” dance videos.

The reception of Chinese viral trends reflects a growing curiosity about a society that has long been misunderstood or stereotyped in Western media. There is a meme circulating social media: “Chinese TikTok is like watching interdimensional cable”, which perfectly encapsulates our reaction to the influx of Chinese viral content. One creator worth mentioning is @prognozpogodi69, who shares edits of a variety of videos from Chinese platforms with English narration by different cartoon characters. These characters, such as the well-known “yapdollar,” do not provide direct translations of the original content but instead offer satirical interpretations. Occasionally, the text-to-speech narration slips back into Mandarin or stutters, spitting out gibberish. His content reflects the Western reception of Chinese videos: we find the content entertaining because it feels alien and random to us, as we often don’t understand the language or the cultures.

Due to the clear division between Western and Chinese social media ecosystems, many users are encountering content outside the American echo chamber for the first time. Catching some by surprise, this content is more gay, more feminist, and more advanced than the general Western perspective on China would have us believe. The unserious nature of Chinese social media has opened up space for gay fantasy stories or furry content, providing an outlet for queer expression in the mainstream. In a lot of short form videos, women are also commonly presented as more independent and dominant, than in Western countries. Unfortunately, feminist and queer theory is simultaneously being actively suppressed on most Chinese platforms.

It’s worth mentioning, that this wave of content has also exaggerated the already big problem of sinophobia. Reels have been overrun by a staggering amount of racial slurs or otherwise racist narratives for some time. With the influx of Chinese content, we’ve also seen an increase of culturally inappropriate or plain racist memes targeting Chinese people.

May God Bless You With Mountains of Silver and Gold

What happens on Douyin now, will happen on TikTok later. The accelerationist nature of Chinese society can give us a glimpse into the public’s response to next stages of technological development. A decade ago you were farming rice, now you’re in the same field, farming clicks.

The rise and gamification of online shopping pioneered on platforms like Taobao and Pinduoduo, serves as another clear example of this techno-evolutionary echo effect. Western companies noticed the effectiveness of integrating built-in mobile games into e-commerce apps and implemented similar features. Many of these rely on quasi-gambling mechanics, fueling shopping addictions among the newly established middle class (xiaozi). The popularity of curated livestreaming in vertical video formats is starting to gain traction in a similar fashion. On Xiaohongshu, the majority of live videos revolve around presenting products for sale, primarily makeup or clothing. Some streamers have begun implementing new formats, such as coin-pushing machines for beauty products or “3-second shopping,” where each product is showcased in a speedrun-like manner.

Is It Over?

Historically, China has been a major influence in East Asia, a region often referred to in modern times as the Sinosphere. Encompassing countries like Japan and Korea, the Sinic world has historically been more successful in exporting its culture to the West than China itself (China’s skill issue?). This disparity can be attributed partly to the country’s past poverty and partly to its political tensions with Western nations. However, when comparing the current C-wave to its Korean and Japanese counterparts, China’s influence extends beyond popular culture, style, or fandoms. With its geopolitical significance as a global superpower and manufacturing hub, China’s impact penetrates much deeper into the fabric of Western society, reflecting the nation’s own evolution.

Analyzing the mechanisms of Chinese social media can not only help us speculate on the future characteristics of Western platforms, but also give us insight into the future of algorithms of control. To provide an analogy, the U.S. government has historically tested technologies, such as less-than-lethal weapons on occupied nations first, before deploying them against its own population. Similarly, now American companies are observing China’s online population control tools, and alongside the U.S. government looking to implement similar tactics. A good example of this practice is Meta’s crackdown on anti-genocide content or the widespread fedposting after the United Healthcare CEO shooting. Contrary to narratives of American exceptionalism, mass surveillance and digital control are not unique to China.

For the longest time, we viewed the internet as an americentric entity controlled by big tech companies like Google and Meta. While Westerners make up less than a fifth of the world’s population with internet access, we colonized online spaces and distanced ourselves from other cyberspaces. When a big player like TikTok enters our territory, we seek to regain control or destroy it. It’s difficult to predict whether a global shift in power will occur within our lifetime, what form it might take, or what its implications will be. However, exploring Chinese online spaces and engaging with non-Western internet cultures is essential for understanding the future of the online world.

I remember recently finding Britney Spears resurged Instagram page and feeling like I wanted to cry. It was around 2022, Britney was getting towards the end of the conservatorship, and the liberty that came with it seemed to be reflected in her newfound unhinged style of posting. On her feed, I found AI slop, dance videos from strange angles and stripping videos with tiny monkey emojis barely keeping her from getting censored. What made me so emotional, though, was not these posts, but that her posting style was straight out of 2010: Whitagram frames, Tumblr-core galaxy visuals, earnest inspirational quotes, simple ironic image macros, IG filters (the original ones, not the AR ones). It almost seemed like her strict conservatorship, which began in the late 2000s, had frozen her posting in the ethos of that era—one of wholesomeness and hope, where meaning felt easy to decode and sincerity and irony were still clearly distinct. Remember the simple irony of Cool Story, Bro, Condescending Wonka, and Someecards? Or the sincerity of #JustGirlyThings, SwagNotes, and the collective optimism of We Are the World (Haiti) and Waka Waka? A time when we could all agree that Minions were cute?

In  “Beyond Based and Cringe” Nate Sloan examines shifts in digital cultural production, particularly in relation to sincerity and irony—ruptures that became strikingly clear as I scrolled through Britney Spears’ Instagram page. Sloan argues that by the late 2010s, social media had fostered a “compulsive self-awareness,” making it nearly impossible to consume culture without also scrutinizing the act of consumption itself. This hyperreferentiality blurs the line between irony and sincerity, creating a landscape where, as he puts it, “any aesthetic, ideology, and image is interchangeable, with its only value located in the ability to shock the viewer or direct them to other images, symbols, and signs.” At its most extreme, this dynamic can lead to irony-poisoning, where detachment from meaning causes people to slip—often unknowingly—into the very beliefs or aesthetics they once treated as edgy jokes. Writer and poster Honor Levy captures a similar collapse of meaning in My First Book:

“Everything is wrong. We just got here and the world is already ending. When things go wrong, we laugh. When things seem pretend, they’re funny. When it turns out it’s real, it’s even funnier (…) The separation between spectacle and real life broke. It stayed broken. Nothing is IRL and everything is IRL.”

When the separation between spectacle and reality breaks down, everything becomes material for irony, and the sincerity that once marked our emotional expressions dissolves into performance. In this context, even the most authentic emotions are rendered hollow because they’re constantly mediated through the lens of ironic detachment. Though I don’t feel irony poisoned yet, I do feel a growing sense of detachment, as if every piece of content exists in the same emotionally flattened space, constantly circulating in a feedback loop of consumption and production. I found myself envying Britney, who seemed to have escaped this darker turn of internet culture. It reminded me of a different time, back in 2011, when I shared that same sincere ethos—before everything became hyper-referential. I got so emotional because it was so beautiful to see someone share inspirational quotes knowing that she actually believes in them, not as a self-aware, performative wink to past internet culture (every day is a new start fr).

But it’s not that simple. Despite my longing, I know that what I’m nostalgic for was never truly there. That’s how nostalgia works, right? As Svetlana Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia, the nostalgic impulse is to “obliterate history and turn it into a collective mythology (…), refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.” What I felt while scrolling through Britney’s Instagram was precisely this: a desire to step outside the relentless churn of internet culture and return to a mythologized past where posting felt like self-expression, not self-branding. It was a longing for a time before our identities were entangled in advanced algorithms, accelerated feedback loops, and the endless cycle of social media consumption and production. But of course, this was a myth. As Sloan reminds me, the sincerity of the late 2000s and early 2010s was never truly that authentic. He argues that sincerity in cultural production at the time was rather a tool to “inoculate a public to the unvarnished miseries of late capitalism.”

The inspirational, sincere, lovepilled and hopecore images I thought I missed were nothing more than reflections of a self-optimizing, individualistic achievement society. In The Spirit of Hope, Byung Chul Han critiques this ideology of positive psychology for privatizing suffering, rather than addressing the societal structures that mediate it. The ideology, distinct from real hope, permeated the internet culture of the early 2010s, where suffering was flattened into a personal failure to stay “positive” and “grateful.” Far from being genuinely hopeful, these sentiments were commodified, molded by the incentive structures of social networks that rewarded relentless self-branding, performative vulnerability, and empty affirmation loops. While I largely agree that the 2010s were out of touch in significant ways, I wonder if the pendulum may have swung too far. In rejecting the hollow sincerity, hope and wholesomeness of that period, did we also lose something worthwhile—however fleeting or flawed it might have been? Did we become too cynical? Can we acknowledge structural problems while still singing “we are the world”?

In 2011, Britney Spears released “Till the World Ends,” an apocalyptic song about partying. Today, it’s often included in the “recession pop” canon—a (retroactively defined) genre that emerged during and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that can be defined by its frenetic beats, euphoric hooks, and lyrics about dancing and enjoying life in the face of chaos. Songs like Usher’s “DJ Got Us Fallin’ in Love” with lines like “Dance like it’s the last night of your life” and Ke$ha’s “Die Young” proclaiming, “Let’s make the most of the night like we’re gonna die young,” epitomize this ethos, giving a kind of hope in the shape of hedonistic relief to the surrounding turmoil. It seems like recession pop is a musical parallel to the hopeful, sincere posting of the 2010s. Maybe my longing for it is in the fact that we’re once again facing a new set of dooms: climate collapse, the looming tech apocalypse, and the global rise of fascism. But perhaps the need for sincerity is even more urgent now, considering that the hyper-referential, irony-laden posting culture that followed is arguably a contributing factor to at least two of these crises. What began as detached online humor has, in some cases, evolved into a radicalization funnel—exemplified by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and U.S. VP J.D. Vance. Over the past five years, they’ve moved through a trajectory of irony-pilled neo-monarchism, à la Curtis Yarvin, toward a disturbing embrace of authoritarian ideals. In such a landscape, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of sincere posting—not as nostalgia, but as a necessary counterbalance to an increasingly cynical digital culture.

But is that even possible? It should be, right? 2010s culture is back—you can hear it in Snow Strippers’ Avicii-inspired chords, The Dare and The Hellp’s electroclash revival, MGNA Crrrta’s dubstep beats. Skinny jeans, Tumblr-core, and indie sleaze aesthetics flood my feed. I have also seen the visual language of 2010s ‘hopecore’ being referenced in music videos, like Bassvictim’s Alice and Black Country, New Road’s Science Fair and Track X, referencing the wholesome relatability-posting era of #justgirlythings. But something’s off. Alice leans into visuals of hope and inspiration, yet the lyrics spiral into isolation (“Never liked to be alone”) and digital alienation (“Online games on my phone”), highlighting a disconnect between what we see and what we hear. Similarly, Science Fair borrows the past’s sincere imagery, but Isaac Wood’s anxious delivery and the relentless repetition of “references, references, references” in the first verse feels more like surrender than hope. These works don’t revive 2010s hope; they haunt it, circling familiar imagery stripped of warmth. They feel like echoes of a lost time, emptied and repurposed for an era too self-aware to believe again:

Yet, in some corners, sincerity seems to be making a genuine return. Here are some examples:

• Addison Raees posting about how much she loves music

• Charli XCX 2024 song Everything is Romantic

• BabyMorocco, known for his performative, campy, and ironic persona, revealed in a 2025 Pitchfork interview that he's now striving for more sincere lyrics in his music. He pointed to La Roux's 2008 self-titled album as a key source of inspiration for this shift.

• Bladees 20202 track Noblest Strife.

• Ethel Cain’s Tumblr plea for sincerity, in which she addresses the overwhelming ironic response to her work by people on the internet. She writes, "I miss genuine passion" and reflects on how, as a society, we've lost touch with the intense love for things that once made us feel alive

Out of all these contemporary forms of sincerity, Honor Levy’s words in My First Book feel like a bridge between the mythologized past and our hypermediated present. While the earnestness of Britney’s 2010s-era posts evokes nostalgia for a seemingly simpler digital world, Levy’s work speak to sincerity in a world where irony has become both armor and weapon. Rather than resurrecting the past; it interrogates it, presenting a hope that acknowledges the absurdity of our times without surrendering to nihilism.

Byung-Chul Han’s distinction between optimism and hope is helpful here. The 2010s’ inspirational posting and recession pop anthems traded in optimism—a shallow, closed system of positivity that ignored structural darkness. Levy, however, embodies hope: a searching, active engagement with uncertainty. “Unlike positive thinking,” Han writes, “hope does not turn away from the negative… It remains mindful of it.” This tension pulses through Levy’s prose. In DO IT COWARD, set in a hauntological, rundown NYC arcade, Honor Levy’s character channels the hopecore sincerity of the 2010s—“just do it,” “we are all in this together,” “live or die trying”—while simultaneously acknowledging the hyperreferential world we’re stuck in: “staring at the fourth wall, mind melting, no-clipping, glitching.” She captures the instability of now—“Be afraid because it is life”—while insisting on hope: “Be brave because it’s death.” 

And then, the line that distills it all: “How lucky are we to be a part of this RPG?”. To call life a “game” in 2025 is to acknowledge the absurdity of navigating climate collapse, doomscroll nihilism, and the collapse of shared reality—without denying that playing still matters.  Her sincerity isn’t a rejection of hyperreferentiality but a survival tactic within it. It’s about engaging with the game, knowing full well it’s rigged. Not because we believe in winning, but because opting out isn’t an option.

A similar tone can be read in Levy’s short story Internet Girl, where she writes: “No matter how feminist your followers are, if you are a girl, your nip pics will be taken down. Instagram has this magic titty-finding algorithm, and the algorithm is always learning, just like you and me when we were eleven and alone and absorbing it all so fast, so hungry, twirling around our rooms.” This passage works as both a critique of the algorithmic mediation of our lives and a reflection on the loss of innocence in a digitally mediated world. Yet, even as Levy highlights the absurdity of this system, there’s a glimmer of hope in her suggestion that the algorithm itself might one day “wake up and realizes that it exists just to find nipples and it will be sad and sorry and human and pray to stop.” It’s a moment of absurd, almost childlike empathy that cuts through the cynicism of our times.

If Britney’s “Till the World Ends” was about dancing through the apocalypse, Levy’s hope feels less like a party at the end of the world and more like standing still in the wreckage—acknowledging the ruins but refusing to look away. The challenge then, isn’t to resurrect 2010s optimism, but to find hope, meaning—and maybe even beauty—in the rubble.