Trendsspeaking topic
Do we like things because other people like them? Is trusting that whatever is popular must be good a faith in the crowd's taste, or a fear of being alone?
— video essay topic
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- When the camera was invented, painters declared painting dead; instead it fled into abstraction and dream, and photography became its own art. Is AI another threshold like that, or is it truly different this time because what's being imitated isn't a technique but the human itself?
- Cottagecore was born on Tumblr as a queer escape from heteronormativity, then became material for tradwife and ecofascist rhetoric. If the same pastoral image can be both liberating and reactionary, does an aesthetic's politics live in the image, or in whoever uses it?
- Remote work gives you freedom but slowly erodes your professional relationships.
- When an aesthetic says 'clean, minimal, calm,' it can quietly declare a certain class, skin tone, body, and budget the norm. Are aesthetics innocent matters of taste, or do they silently decide who looks 'right'?
- The argument about splitting the bill on a first date never dies online. What is that argument really about underneath the money?