before there was girl, there was core

and tiktok's magical algorithm is the culprit behind it all

at the ~all-grunge, all-girls~ show, my eyes departed from the church stage to the butterfly flying on a girl’s upper back. her tattooed wings matched the ones spread across my shoulders, the ones i swore i wanted to match my mom’s fairy wings, and absolutely not because of the multitudes of hot girls with butterfly tattoos ive seen online. before passing my phone over to my boyf, i wrote in my notes app:

is this how i look from da back

they nodded and laughed in agreement (an action that often occurs when dating a comedian like me).

i pouted and continued in the app:

dimes coded 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

referring to the fact that one of the performers that night is associated with the neighborhood (at least in my head since they are clouted w downtown manhattan vibes) and managed to bring its crowd along the 42-minute commute to ridgewood — a feat in itself. with my zoe kravitz in x-men-type wings, which resemble nothing like my mom’s, i signified myself as one of them, although my true twenty-something ridgewood local persona isnt far off. we’re all transplants with an inflated ego that convinces ourselves our talents make up for gentrifying and barely surviving in the city. next to the girl with the butterfly tattoo was a bleach-blonde friend with a shade similar to my own over-processed tresses.

i’m blonde like everyone too .. 😭 i can never jus BE

i was overly dramatic, but right (as always). since developing an understanding of Taste, i have been stuck in a cycle of thinking: i finally found myself — just for everyone else to slowly start dressing in the exact same way. somehow, my newfound interests and personal styles always become a summarized meme for Girls Just Like Me. initially, it was through a starter pack, then those transformed into some type of core, and now it’s developed into girl something.

the discourse around such transition, which relies heavily on barely-there critiques of fast fashion, even faster trends, and ~gender essentialism,~ is trite, tiresome, and one big distraction. online publications are only rewording the same message to position themselves as progressive, ethical, and somewhere along the political left without adding any additional thoughtful premise. fast fashion sucks, and tik tok killed personal styles, and cant girls just have fun online! 

and obviously, i agree to an extent. im a typecast, after all...! BUT! in my humble opinion of my brilliant, sexy mind, i think it's much more interesting to look at how these cores and girls, ultimately created by an algorithm, objectify while trying to appeal as some feminist liberation — two things that cannot logically, rationally coexist but “happen” all the time! must I remind you, We Live In A Society...

within this society, apps have been created as a technology form to socialize, connect, and share through user-generated content. interactions between users become the livelihood of the app, and without them, the apps would cease to exist. this is an obvious statement, but it’s also a crucial one. social media is disguised as democratized platforms to form communities while primarily relying on the never-ending — often isolating — doom scroll. platforms don’t want you to actually foster interpersonal relationships because if you did, you would spend less time on the app. instead, it’s about the illusion, about the possibility.

timelines and feeds, or whatever you choose to call them, used to be organized reverse chronologically, displaying posts created by those you follow or are “friends” with based on the time they were published. in 2011, that changed when facebook introduced an algorithmically curated news feed. 5 years later, both instagram and twitter followed suit. these new systems prioritized virality, showcasing posts based on predicted engagement rather than displaying users you actually follow. our oomfs are gone; randos take their place, changing the apps from a place to curate connection, community, and kinship to one where we strive to become an overnight sensation — even if we refuse to admit it. no app has been as successful as tiktok.

i’m not on tiktok because the algorithm’s accuracy scares me, but from what I gather — through listening to friends' experiences and reading a 3-part series by sf-based writer and technologist eugene wei — it's the most addicting and most convincing. in his essays, wei explains how the app’s interface, which displays a single video, continuously expands and provides a large data set, training the algorithm to accurately digest users’ reactions for peak performance. the app relies on a positive feedback loop, connecting videos to viewers within their specific, secluded taste (foodietok, booktok, movietok, etc) without needing to follow people or grow an audience. in this way, tiktok becomes an entertainment app, rather than a social app, but masked in authenticity as videos are created by normal, common people. we trust them since we can relate to them (hello marketing 101).

but as theodor adorno and max horkheimer theorize in the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception within late capitalism, entertainment is commodified into a mass-produced industry promoting conformity and reinforcing existing power structures. they write, “furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance,” which sounds awfully similar to the reasoning behind facebook’s decision to turn the news feed into a “personal newspaper.” the change is supposed to serve us better, it highlights the posts we hypothetically want to see. but “the result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. no mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest.” tech oligatchs behind the algorithm, international men who know little to nothing about the Hell Of Being A Teenage Girl, have engineered it to have a mind of its own, allowing it to curate culture on their behalf. they are then weaponizing it to mold us into consumer pawns for the dominant class.

tiktok’s magical algorithm reads behavioral patterns and studies time interactions. it does so much more than a non-stem human can conceptualize or fully understand, with the sole goal of keeping you hooked, keeping you addicted. for the girlies, this means flooding feeds with videos about mini-micro trends, creating one — or even two — for every personality. the fact that most of these micro aesthetics overlap and are repackaged versions of each other doesn’t even matter; instead, it's actually necessary. as adorno and horkheimer later write, “marked differentiations… depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers. something is provided for all so that none may escape.”

most girls come into my day job for products they hear about on the app. in 2018, drunk elephant dropped d-bronzi bronzing drops, but we didn't constantly sell out of them until early this year after they went viral. it was the same thing with charlotte tillbury’s flawless filter and contour wands. now it’s happening with one/size’s setting spray. when i worked the register, most items i checked out came from tiktok wishlists. rare beauty liquid blush, refy brow sculpt, glow recipe watermelon toner, summer friday lip balms, etc, etc.

and through their purchases, i hypothesize each girl’s personality, internalizing the algorithm. the girl who put her new dyson airwrap in her alo tote loves green smoothies, bullet journaling, and manifesting positive vibes. she’ll also say she’s in a hurry after i ask her if she wants to use her points because she thinks i have a personal vendetta to waste her time and not because it's part of my job. the girl asking if her medium-dark makeup by mario contour stick is too dark (it always is) doesn't actually want to know the truth — she’s too busy imagining how her new sculpted face will match her fashion nova sculpted body.

through these observations, i'm participating in the system that objectifies women — not sexually, but in the word’s root meaning. i'm erasing these girlies from their individual feelings, experiences, hopes, and dreams, while turning them into an object. i assume which mental illness they have — eating disorder if they post girlblogger whisper confession memes, depression if she's stuck in tumblr 2014, bpd if lana del rey is her top spotify artist. this may be true — which 21st-century girl living in Modern Society doesn't suffer from disordered eating, depression, and/or bpd, etc, etc. it's a symptom of our conditions within a racist, patriarchal, capitalist world. BUT! these niche aesthetics are transforming Real Issues With Direct Causes into glorified #justgirlythings. girls become nothing more than a pinterest mood board; mental illnesses become nothing more than a checkbox.

i couldn’t do this without the app though, and all of the conversations and memes that follow. together, they transform our consumptions into easily digestible identities while removing personal agency. these become bigger than the app itself, steeping into real life through girl-coded ads and girl internet discourse.

one may think blaming a computer process for fabricating fashion crazes is a reach, but it’s nothing new. remember when escape room appeared as a genre on spotify out of nowhere? on tiktok, there’s no proof of a set plan for a video to go viral. actually, a user usually has one popular post while the rest of the account remains in the shadows. the fyp, the page organized by the algorithm, is where the majority of users’ time is spent, where publications pick something to dissect, where sales flourish. and it works because we try and try and try and try to go viral because of what it may bring our way — from a million think pieces about the new trend you predicted with links to your account (see oldloserinbrooklyn) to an exclusive interview with a hot magazine (see subway sessions). continuing with Adorno and Horkheimer, “capitalist production so confines [us], body and soul, that [we] fall helpless victims to what is offered [us]… the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. immovably, [we] insist on the very ideology which enslaves [us].” shit, even see me currently writing this piece, hoping to be called the voice of this generation or sumn. . . . 

after an unheard-of cutesy name is given to an existing style, respectable, honorable publications run pieces declaring the newest aesthetic mania and rising girl practice as a subversive exercise breaking traditional binaries. we saw it with bimbocore and the reappearance of dissociative feminism through fleabag eras and other femcel related catchphrases in 2022, with girl dinner in the summer, and now we have progressed to ultimate girlhood reclamation by tying bows on everything. but how radical could these ideas actually be if mainstream media reports on it? how radical can regressing to hot dumb girls actually be — especially if that’s what has always been expected of us? how radical can caring about absolutely nothing apart from ourselves and our consumption habits actually be? those in power, those in control of narratives, those who created the algorithm will always be looking for ways to manipulate our daily decisions to serve the status quo, to distract us from the reality that our lives aren’t as progressive as we like to think they are, to undo the developments intersectional feminists have fought for.

before all of these microtrends, before the internet was even integrated into our daily lives, frutiger aero was the dominant aesthetic of new technology. in the early 2000s, developers virtually transformed nature into glossy greens and crystal clear blues to ease our y2k bug fears. the windows’ grass hill desktop wallpaper is aptly named bliss, welcoming us to a new hopeful utopia where anything is possible with the world wide web on our side. and these tactics worked — we trust these technologies so much that we mindlessly accept cookies daily.

earlier this year, i-D and dazed ran op-eds on fruitger aero after noticing the aesthetic reappearing on social media. these nostalgic posts appeared shortly after 2022 was named the year of the micro trend, and fashion intellectualism — specifically, thinking critically about said micro trends — started growing. this wasn’t coincidental. the algorithm pushed these tiktoks to multiple fyp to, once again, relieve our nerves into trusting the internet, into trusting niche aesthetics. its just silly girl internet, like silly bubbles and fish! it’s hard to engage in any thoughtful analysis when this is the framework. and that’s exactly the point, that’s exactly why starter packs blossomed into core, which then bloomed into girl.

but to accept this girl and that girl with open arms is to accept the culture industry’s continuous practice of commodifying ourselves — and often doing the work for them. when living in a visual-based society, it's hard not to. it's quite literally how we fulfill our need to belong while often making light of our current situations. i mean, even i still proudly self-identify as a tumblr sad girl. however, these microtrends and niche aesthetics shouldn't be where our feminism starts and ends — especially since they are created by a system that wants to perpetuate cultural and social hegemony. instead, we should use them as case studies to critically engage with the world around us while pushing back against the idea that our consumptions define and flatten us.