The Year of Garbage Internet Trends ⇥ vox.com

Rebecca Jennings, Vox:

Sea shanties are the framework with which I view a great many things that happened in 2021, because so many of them were entirely meaningless fads: blips on the radar lasting only for a moment but just long enough to obscure some larger, more important picture. It is fascinating to trace the origins of these glitches of nothingness: inconsequential tweets that turned into inconsequential TikToks that turned into inconsequential news articles that somehow, suddenly seemed more consequential than anything else that day.

Perhaps we are all living in a nihilist fog of trends birthed by Twitter and TikTok — which does not sound great.