“Len, you follow trends, don’t you?” my sister-in-law asks me one day when I’m over.
“Kind of. I mean, what are we talking here?” I said. She was in the dining room at the table, and everyone else was in the living room in front of the TV. I was having a beverage in the kitchen.
“Trends,” she says. “You know. Like…trends.”
“No, I know. But, like, what are you talking?”
“Trends,” she says again, as if I didn’t hear it the first three times.
“What genre?”
“Genre?” my niece looks up from her phone.
“They got genres for those now?” my brother says.
“Categories,” I say. “Everything’s a f—ing trend today. You gotta be more specific.”
“Yeah, well, I’m talking about internet…stuff,” my sister-in-law says. “Trends. On the internet. You know…”
“Trends,” my brother and niece shout at the same time.
“Well, what do you want to know?”
“Don’t say it,” my brother mutters.
“I was wondering about how things get so popular,” she says. “Every once in a while, I’ll see this article in the news about, like, why everyone is talking about this new craze on TikTok. Like, the other day, it was ‘mindful and demure.’ And I was thinking, like, how does something like that actually happen? What gets it to the point where everybody has to be talking about it so much?”
“Okay,” I said, “first off, we have to understand the nature of the thing we’re discussing here. Second, we have to understand human nature, and how it applies to the thing in question. And third, we have to understand the medium of transmission. You get all that, you got your answers.”
“The professor,” my brother says. “Get that man a blackboard!”
“What?”
“You do sound like you’re gonna give a college lecture, though,” my niece said.
“Well, it’s a complicated thing, which gets easier to understand the more you break it down, and understand the parts that make it up. Like anything.”
“Like a stool-monitoring toilet,” my brother says.
“Eww. They have those?” my niece says.
“Yeah.”
“Ewwwww.”
“Oh, you didn’t know?” he says. “I put one in already, upstairs.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“It’s been working like a champ since Christmas. Reading stools and whatnot.”
“Whaaaat?”
“It’s been uploaded to an online database now. For research purposes. Proctological. The data, I mean.”
“Nuh-uh. Mom, is he lying?”
“So, there’s a science to it?” my sister-in-law says to me, in the meanwhile.
“In the theoretical-framework-building-aspect of things, yeah,” I said.
“So, explain that.”
“Mom?” my niece said. My sister-in-law waved her off like a gnat.
“It’s a trickle-down chain of profit. You start with the companies who build the apps. Or buy them after someone else builds them. They profit from people tuning in. Mainly through advertisement. Then you get the people who tune in, who have this almost pathological desire to feel rewarded by interacting with it. They either profit financially, which is rare, or psychologically.
“I get all that. I think.”
“Mom,” my niece said.
“So, these apps have algorithms that boost posts—and even profiles—based on how many people click on them, or comment on them, or share them, or even save them. The only way for people who have little currency, meaning value—meaning, like, likeable content or popularity, even—the only way for them to gain is to ride on the coattails of others. That’s where trending comes in. I don’t how exactly they get started; I don’t think people who start the trends even know. But it almost always comes from something original that no one else’s done, which resonates with people, and it tends to originate with those who already have a lot of clout. Or, at least, they’re the ones who propagate it into going viral.”
“Right.”
“Mom!”
“Like, forget the internet. Take a fashion trend—like, any fashion trend. I mean, you could say Rod Stewart hair in the ‘80s, Jennifer Aniston in the ‘90s, people with sex appeal or outright secondary sexual characteristics like…what’s-her-face, but take a fashion trend. Someone designs it, someone heavily publicizes it, it resonates with people, and it somehow takes off in popularity. It’s cheap, influential people like it, tell you to like it, you get made fun of for not liking it, it appeals to your sense of disassociation or boredom with your current station in life, it gets publicized more because now publicizing it is a profitable venture, whatever. And so on, down the line.”
“But, where does the profit come in?” she asked.
“Popularity is profit,” my brother said. “Just look at Lorie’s stool photos all over the internet. People love that sh–.”
“Mom!” my niece laughed, half out of absurdity and half from agony. “Will you tell him to stop and tell me if there are pictures of my stool online?”
“I don’t know, Lorie,” my sister-in-law said, “go look it up.”
“Mom!”
“So, that was all mostly number three. The second thing is the people. That’s the most complicated part. But I think people want to think what they do is cool, at least some of the time, or their lives otherwise have a meaning they wish they had. To other people. Which, you know, manifests in different ways—whether reposting, or coming up with something half-or-mostly-original to post. Or just shouting at or arguing with people who form opinions they don’t like. It all depends on how those brainstem rewards systems activate. What gets that motor running. All people are different.”
“Fine,” my niece says, getting up. “I just looked up what a stool-monitoring toilet looks like, and if we have one of those upstairs, I swear to God…”
“Hear that, sweetie?” my brother said to my sister-in-law. “You better lawyer up.”
“Me?” she says back. “You’re the one who put it in.”
“Yeah, but I already got my lawyers,” he says.
I asked, “Why does she think you may or may not have a stool-monitoring toilet upstairs?”
“Don put a bidet in last winter,” my sister-in-law said. “I think that’s what might be confusing her.”
“Ah. So, that’s pretty much it,” I said. “The first point was just that someone always profits off a trend. Whether it’s a clothing brand or a fashion house or toy manufacturer or car manufacturer or record label or social media company. That’s really the driving force here. Money.”
“But, I still don’t understand. Who profits from ‘mindful and demure’.”
“Where’d you see it?”
“TikTok,” she says.
“TikTok,” I shrugged. “Plus, the probably top five or ten percent of people on TikTok who make the most content. And then the small fraction of them who make the really, really popular stuff. And then the stragglers, of course. They get trickled on, too. Social media ain’t no different than the real world in that regard.”
“Carrie,” my brother chimes in, “it’s like you when you thought you had the perfect recipe for fluffing cake.” She thought about that for a second. “Made it from rice, put bean paste in it, because no one else had thought to do that before. And you kept baking it over and over, tried to get funding for it. Put all those pictures up on Facebook. Remember? You even wrote to Betty Crocker to tell them, tell them how they could do it, see if they’d give you cash or credit for the idea. Something. Remember?”
“See, now that I get,” she finally said, looking at me.
“So, what happened with that?” I said.
“It was already a thing in South Korea,” she said.
“The entire Eastern hemisphere,” he said. Lorie suddenly stomped back down the stairs, flinging herself onto the couch. There was an awkward pause.
“Hashtag stoolsbylorie,” my brother says out of the side of his mouth.
“Screw you, Don,” she said, looking at her phone.
“Brat Summer has arriiiiived!” he suddenly shouts.
“It’s September, dingus,” I said.
