From Sydney Sweeney’s jeans as a eugenics dog whistle to tradwife aesthetics permuted into “princess treatment,” media discourses have felt inescapable, a beast of their own. They model a new format of engagement that has become increasingly common online, and spell a clear trend towards conservative cultural dominance.

This “discourse” is not a conversation en masse or a mesh of individual interactions. Rather, it consists of two clashing self-contained dialogues — and conservatives are setting the terms.

These media blackouts — instances where it seems the whole of the internet is shouting about the same thing to no avail — have become a strategic tool of the right to dismiss and delegitimize liberal critique. This successfully spews further division and paints liberals as fragile and perpetually outraged, lessening the credibility of the “woke left” that can no longer unite around a cohesive political agenda, whereas the right can and does.

The result? Conservatives are winning the media discourse.

Take the response to the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad. The infamous ad features the white, blonde, blue-eyed actress posing in a pair of AE jeans and slowly drawling that “genes [“jeans”] are passed down from offspring to offspring…my genes are blue” as the camera zooms in to her blue eyes. Tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” feels loaded when the wordplay hinges on Sweeney’s presentation of “desirable” white, blonde, blue- eyed genes.

Mass amounts of backlash circulated following its release, deeming it creepy at best and endorsing eugenics at worst. Then came the subsequent wave of reactions: a mass of comments, tweets, and posts saying people were reading too much into it, that American Eagle had just happened to pick a blonde, blue-eyed actress, that — the dreaded phrase — ”it’s not that deep.” That wave of dismissal fueled the discourse itself, and by insisting critics were overly sensitive, conservatives set the terms of debate and ensured the ad was replayed, argued over, and circulated even more widely.

Exploiting humankind’s instinct towards the extreme is no novelty for social media creators. As actions once considered progressive are increasingly normalized, the countercultural alternative is radical conservatism in order to amass likes and views. Cue the rise of tradwife content: TikTok user Courtney Joelle’s video, in which she describes refusing to even speak to a waiter before her husband arrives at the restaurant as “princess treatment,” has a whopping 8.2 million views at the time of writing.

The “moment” here is not the video itself, but the reactions that have caused videos such as these to rack up millions of views and countless comments. Viewers either condemn or praise the creator’s commitment to traditional values and femininity. Extreme conservatism paired with a spectacle driven algorithm is a recipe for engagement from hate-watchers and sympathizers alike. These seemingly random viral flare-ups are engineered to spark backlash, and the resulting liberal outrage becomes the fuel to boost conservative visibility and reach.

Amidst an atmosphere of outrage and radical extremes, conservative-coded imagery settles comfortably into the mainstream.

Audience engagement with each of the summer’s spectacles indicate a pendulum swing away from the 2020 cancel culture era of “woke censorship,” which pushed political correctness and positioned everyday people at the mercy of an internet mob. This was a time when it felt like the entire internet was against the same things, regardless of private, personal beliefs. Backlash was quickly quieted, and TikTok Trump supporters were no match for the crashing wave of the PC police. Framed as accountability, cancel culture instead stunted personal growth, pushing people into silence out of fear of misstepping and setting the stage for today’s post–cancel culture era.

Now, we’re seeing the opposite: no one is afraid to say anything. Emboldened by Trump’s unconventional approach to public speaking, a tone shift has taken place in American media that has been quickly exported worldwide. We are now in what some might describe as the post-cancel culture era.

Neither extreme is preferable, but it’s important to notice how the tide has turned. Outrage- driven discourse online has shifted from a cultural tool for progressives to being strategically weaponized by the right. “Ragebait” content and its subsequent “it’s not that deep” dismissals serve to delegitimize liberal voices and normalize conservative values in mainstream culture. If the summer’s talking points can teach us anything, it is to recognize the patterns that keep us trapped in outrage cycles and note who really benefits from them.

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Lola Kingsley, @lolakingz on Instagram
Lola Kingsley is a Montreal-based film photographer and recent Concordia graduate who has worked with clients like Vans Canada, Eddie Bauer, and i-D Korea. Her minimalist style and investment in analog photography allows her to strip any excess and focus solely on revealing her subjects authentically. This process lends a distinctively nostalgic and spontaneous air to her work. Her most recent exhibition, Goodbye This Is…, explores youth culture and the concept of coming of age, charting a visual narrative of transition in the context of urban cityscapes.

Rakim Jah, @rakimjah on Instagram
Rakim Jah is a Beninese animator and multimedia visual artist based in Montreal whose striking 2D graphics and acrylic paintings depict existential Afrocentric scenes in rich, deep colour. His work deals with themes like digitalization, ancestry, interpersonal dynamics, assorted cultural influences, and the interplay between spirituality and the human body.

Yaël Legris, @puff.bby on Instagram
Yaël Legris’ surrealist acrylic and digital paintings depict figures in ambiguous, swirling backgrounds imbued with spirituality. Her work is moody and ephemeral, typically done in a palette of dark blues, deep rusty oranges, and shades of black and grey. Her paintings are often informed by her own feelings and personal history, representing states of mind or important moments in her life.

Stanley Wany, @stanwany on Instagram
Stanley Wany is a successful visual artist and graphic novelist that has garnered recognition for his distinctive large-scale painting installations and shadowy, sketch-style drawings and comics. This medium serves as the perfect conduit for themes of personal history, identity, ancestry, colonization, and climate change. His multimedia installation work includes the striking 2022 installation For Those Who Chose the Sea and Unpredictable Spaces last year at Galerie de l’UQAM.

The post Five Black Montreal Artists to Check Out this Black History Month appeared first on The McGill Daily.

High-profile BookTok titles include A Court of Rose and Thorns by Sarah J. Maas and past viral novels such as The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Many books have become bestsellers through the generative power of TikTok’s ripple-effect-style spread of information. The formula is simple: one person reads a book and posts a review or recommendation, causing others to read it and do the same. Soon, the book is trending, with posts constantly springing up reacting to content in the novel and encouraging others to read it as well.

The influence of BookTok on young adult reading patterns is unmistakable. Indigo, Canada’s largest bookstore company, boasts a “Trending on BookTok” website section. Barnes and Noble, Indigo’s US counterpart, has a “BookTok Favorites” section online and in stores. Even an Amazon search for “BookTok books” will generate a list of recognizable YA fantasy and romance titles. The largest North American book retailers have recognized and organized around the unquestionable market force of BookTok.

According to BookNet Canada, a 2023 Canadian Book Consumer Report found that 62 per cent of books purchased by Canadian book buyers were fiction, with the top genres being fantasy, suspense or thriller, and romance – categories which align with the top genres of BookTok recommendations. It is evident that the TikTok culture surrounding reading that developed in the past few years has had direct real-world manifestations.

BookTok itself has become a distinct and identifiable social media subgroup, a community of like-minded individuals who have either recently come to love or have always loved reading. BookTok is candles, fairy lights, glasses, and bookshelves: a certain, broader aesthetic that social media users can tap into at any point (literally).

Yet, in today’s internet landscape of increasingly niche aesthetic subgroups, there are pockets underneath the umbrella of BookTok in which certain books act as subcultural identity signifiers. Where BookTok on the whole sings the praises of romance and fantasy novels like The Cruel Prince by Holly Black and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo, a certain subgroup proclaims books like My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh and Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik, signalling membership to a more specific group.

BookTok culture online is complicated and differentiated, but there is an unmistakable subsect of Orion Carlotto-following, Reformation-wearing, Sally Rooney-reading, pink cursive font-using self proclaimed “cool girls.” In carefully styled book recommendation videos (“books about female rage,” “books about Hollywood in the ‘60s,” “books about motherhood”), they signal to their audiences exactly which online aesthetic they align with. The words “intellectual,” “fashion-oriented,” and “third-wave feminist” are not explicitly stated but implied, intuited by the keen eye of the viewer who subconsciously understands how to decode social media messaging.

This paragraph could be replicated with countless other specific sects – the key is that books have come to function as tokens online, identity signifiers which gesture towards different aesthetic groups in the same way certain clothes or haircuts do. To equate ownership of a certain item to participation in a broader aesthetic social category is a consumerist conception of identity that is pushed by the internet. On a visual platform like TikTok, the actual quality or content of a novel is inconsequential – it is quite literally the phenomenon of judging a book by its cover, prioritizing style over substance. A video displaying a collection of books with a certain style of cover art allows a reader to intuit not only the content of the suggested novels, but the aesthetic orientation of the creator.

As internet culture develops and becomes more specific, distinct, and intricately organized, it is important to recognize the way everyday objects can be co-opted to serve as signifiers towards pre-packaged aesthetic groups, not by the fault of any individual, but through the invisible guiding hand of the internet that pushes for commodification and categorization. There is nothing wrong with reading what the internet recommends or having genre preferences, but we should seek to read a differentiated, nuanced range of stories rather than according to a certain aesthetic – always reaching for diversification and depth rather than neat aesthetic cohesion, resisting the urge to judge a book (or a person) by its cover. Online culture has real-world consequences, as evidenced in current book sales mirroring TikTok trends. The categorizing, flattening gaze of the internet can quickly become transposed to the world of literature with detrimental and limiting consequences.

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