If I have read one more butter yellow text carousel using the classic Instagram serif font to declare what is "kinda chic," I am going to lose my f*cking mind.
Please stop.
Over the past few weeks, this specific format has completely colonised my timeline.
And it’s not the first time I’ve watched this play out. A minor micro-trend starts in a corner of the app. The interest-based algorithm flags it as high-performing. And within forty-eight hours, every lifestyle creator, brand account, and mainstream celebrity is executing the exact same copy-paste script.
We are hit with an endless, mind-numbing parade of proclamations asserting that it is “kinda chic to be underestimated,” “kinda chic to read in the sun,” or “kinda chic to wear mismatching socks.”
I am actively losing brain cells reading them.
I can only describe it as cultural brainrot. And it has officially ruined the word "chic" for me, and potentially, an entire generation.
Historically, chic wasn't a checklist of mundane personal wellness habits or a casual phrase you slapped onto a lifestyle post to give yourself a superficial pat on the back.
It was a deeply nuanced, rare, and sophisticated distinction of personal style and carriage. An effortless, understated edge that was few and far between.
By flattening it into a generic, airheaded internet hook, the social media machine has successfully stripped the word of any remaining artistic or cultural significance. And it's transformed a concept built on individual mystery into the ultimate indicator of mindless, basic-bitchery.
The rapid proliferation of this trend exposes a much more terrifying reality about the architecture of the modern web.
Nothing, and I mean nothing on the internet is original anymore.
We are living through a long, hot summer of systemic plagiarism. The contemporary algorithm doesn't reward creative experimentation, risk-taking, or unique human perspectives. Instead, it heavily prioritises homogeneity.
Creators have realised that trying to engineer an original thought or draft a unique narrative format is a low-yield financial gamble. The machine explicitly rewards you for borrowing proven, pre-packaged hooks that the pixel already knows how to categorise and distribute to a passive audience.
The result is a digital landscape that functions like a giant, uninspired photocopying machine.
And we all just drool and clap and participate.
And it makes me sad. Because when an independent thinker does create a genuine, interesting pattern-interrupter, the system immediately incentivises ten thousand other accounts to copy it frame-for-frame, word-for-word, until the original spark is completely smothered beneath a mountain of derivative slop.
It’s the wholesale lobotomisation of creative talent.
Creators who call themselves "artists" or "directors" are willingly acting as automated distribution agents for an algorithmic loop. They're trading their creative sovereignty for a brief, transactional spike in their engagement dashboards.
This ecosystem creates an invisible, tyrannical filter where true originality is actively suppressed.
If your work doesn't fit neatly into the strict, pre-optimised parameters that the platform guidelines demand, it simply does not get pushed to the feed.
It stays buried in the dark, while the most shallow, repetitive, and recycled trends are rocketed into the millions of views. This forces the entire creator economy into a race to the bottom of the attention span. One where success is measured not by the depth of your craftsmanship, but by how quickly you can jump on a trending format before the novelty completely curdles into self-parody.
And it’s embarrassing to witness.
The only way to survive this era of copy-paste culture is to develop a fierce internal boundary that refuses to validate the trend machine with your participation.
Know this: personal style cannot be crowdsourced from a trending timeline. I’ll keep the low views, y’all can have the copy-paste basic bitchery.
-Sophie Randell, Writer
