At Peace in Pieces

“You are already dead, now live” says a short TikTok of @joy8nate, who in a suggestive, melancholy video-collage, as if from an Adam Curtis Film, uses the hashtag of the debated trend named Corecore. It originated as a twin of the #nichetok viral trend, which connected peculiar representations of stylized meme compilations and shitposts referring to various fandoms and subcultures, expecting insider knowledge of internet culture and TikTok-specific algorithms. They are usually only 15–30 seconds long and interspersed with funny dances, anime clips, internet rap and low-quality video game clips. Their charm relied in their connection of pleasant, peculiar sounds into unexpected combinations capturing the transient nature of feelings and the unexplainable atmosphere of an almost dada collage of bizarre elements, which are best characterized as “gibberish”. The wild montages soon shifted into slower meme-poems or video montages reminiscent of trailers for dreamy coming-of-age films, encapsulating feelings of sadness, confusion, and oversaturation by the “content” of the post-digital world.

What makes these videos interesting is their shift in content towards a moodiness balancing between a romanticization of contemporary nihilism and a critical emphasis on the symptoms of a contemporary disillusion. They are to wake up the numb consumer from aphasia caused by an infinite loop of algorithmic social media channels. As if words were no longer enough to capture inner experience, TikTok viral trends attempt to illustrate systemic processes on the delirious level of a digital hyper-object, which is sometimes associated with the Schizoposting hashtag. It includes so-called “wall of text” posts, mixtures of incomprehensible or pseudo-scientific words combined with bad grammar or absurd argumentation, appearing on social networks such as Reddit or even Facebook. The most popular #corecore videos combine films, YouTube videos and political speeches with tracks by producer and DJ Aphex Twin, to speak of something touching or eerie; about loneliness, disliking one’s own body, but also a critique of global capitalism, consumerism, and the worsening climate crisis. Another interesting aspect of #corecore is its definition by the act of categorization itself¹, considering itself the ultimate “core” which in a meta manner surpasses or interlinks all other viral movements such as #goblincore, #cottagecore, #weirdcore, #clowncore and so on. However, unlike them, it does not imitate a specific aesthetic and does not take on a form of a life phase, but suggests a methodology of “consistent inconsistency”². And, through this language doubling it returns to a certain fierceness carried by the originator of the entire viral trend nomenclature – the radical music genre of hardcore. However, this attribute was introduced to the internet by the now-defunct trend-forecasting platform K-Hole, which introduced the complex social concept of #normcore, which was through misunderstanding later flattened into the mere aesthetics of a simple outfit. “Core” is now a label for emerging microcultural moments in the form of discernible aesthetics and their variants while creating its own logic of identity categorization through indexes and representing a form of archiving. By this means it enables the creation of discernible patterns in the chaotic mass of information, which through this naming gains a greater intensity in the form of a focusing, saturation and concentration. In this sense, #core is a magic formula, a cycling feedback loop of intensification³.

Katharina Korbjuhn, the founder of the Paradigm Trilogy digital platform, also points out that “core” viral trends represent, by their essence, the central node of identity commodification. However, these are unstable structures, because the moment of their naming is also the moment they are left behind, as a sense of urgency to immediately move elsewhere emerges. The mutability of the simultaneously overlaid identities, often with many inner paradoxes, is fueled by the logic of capitalist presenting in the process of a growing need for constant novelty. If artistic movements used to last years or decades, viral movements of today last only a few days. The result of this techno-economical structure is the #core, capturing contemporary forms of weltschmerz – one’s literal exhaustion caused by the world and a sense of melancholy caused by paradoxes. It is a stopping, or at least a turning down of volume of the noisy cacophony of automatically playing videos in our newsfeeds.

#corecore stems from this awareness of life’s change into a media object and is a search for a moment of distance, which is also rooted in the post-ironic character of internet culture. It links a shamelessly sincere critique of capitalist consumerism (for example in #hopecore, one of its viral branches), while laughing at the artificial nature of its actions. The platforms’ post-digital capitalist condition does not allow them to delimit their boundaries between authentic self-expression and mere algorithm fuel. This confusing and porous aspect of media content is also rooted in the crisis of overproduction – not only in terms of economics, but also the senses. Franco Bifo Berardi calls this situation semicapitalism, which is rooted not only on the production of material goods, but also on psychological stimulation. The mental environment is so saturated with signs that it leads to a sort of unending excitation, permanent excitement of the senses, all the way to collective collapse – which media critic Shumon Basar symptomatically called #endcore⁴.

A certain strategic key to understanding the dynamics of social media and digital technologies, without pointlessly reducing them to a dualism of body and mind, or virtuality and physical reality, is a turn of affect. The central concept of this approach is affect, which encapsulates intentionalities or visual phenomena with a certain capacity for interlinking – of emotions, emotions and moods. However, these can differ in various aspects – in intentionality, duration and their specific capacity to have an effect. Canadian theorist Brian Massumi emphasizes an important aspect of affect, its capacity to work as an autonomous force that penetrates human and non-human bodies, having an effect on their and its own agency⁵. As such, it names an unconscious, non-representative, pre-language, continual and corporeal form of being, in contrast to emotions, which it considers representational, conscious, and of language. Affect is thus unconscious experience and intensity, which is not fully realizable within language, because it requires conscious processing.

In this sense, theory of affect opens up an understanding of viral trends (such as #corecore itself) as specific affective structures constructed in relation to an affective atmosphere that we share, and allows us to observe the means through which they can create social structures and identities. Newer forms of #core get caught in the loop or recycling the same content from American Psycho and Taxi Driver, and the attempt to be thrillingly attractive becomes a repeated mechanization – as if the creators couldn’t escape the emptiness they represent. Massumi’s understanding of affect also opens a way towards a post-human perspective in which the intermingling of our identities with technologies may turn out to be an important and forgotten horizontality – that is because affects are capable of spreading rhozimatically into idiosyncratic non-forms, and can spread among non-human objects and individuals. This means that affect truly moves through individual bodies, but also outside of them. This breaks the conservative idea that humans “own” emotions and that their propensity towards a certain self-expression stems from their own internalized zone. Although #corecore perhaps illustrates this chaos the best, it remains a question to what extent it is only a cathartic penetration of an emotional blockage, and just how much can it work with the deeper layers of the collective affective atmosphere towards a genuinely emancipatory movement.

Image captions

1 | Printscreen from TikTok: User account M4ddynero, 2023

2 | Printscreen from TikTok:User account Nate, 2023

3 | Printscreen from TikTok: User account Kylemakesshotfilm, 2023

4 | Printscreen from TikTok: User account Corehcore, 2023