A Glitchy response from the Generation labeled anxious
2024 marked a year of intense focus on the mental health challenges facing younger generations, a theme central to Jonathan Haidt’s widely discussed book The Anxious Generation. Beyond the many analyses offered by experts, cultural commentators, and influencers hunting for unclaimed perspectives, attention, and traction, what does the generation at the center of these debates have to say about it?
A critique of contemporary society, driven by chaotic collages and visual mashups, has been compared to the Dada movement’s revolt a century ago against the absurdities of its own time.
These aesthetic critiques consists of chaotic collages of clips in random order—“a collage of out-of-context clips,” as Ella Glossop (2024) describes it. They are labeled “deep-fried” because they appear overly edited, grainy, and heavily filtered—not just aesthetically, but also in how references are distorted to the point of absurdity and apparent meaninglessness. Ryan Gosling in Blade Runner edits is popular in corecore memes, as are clips from the film Wall-E, which depicts humans on the spaceship Axiom as deeply dependent on technology and entirely inactive, both physically and mentally.
Another term that has made its way from internet slang to mainstream is 'brainrot,' which was recently named Word of the Year by Oxford (Oxford University Press 2). The concept is defined as: “Brain rot is defined as the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.” It reflects the feeling of mental exhaustion and emptiness that comes from scrolling through endless streams of meaningless content—the state that corecore comments on and reacts to with its chaotic collages. According to Oxford Language, the term 'brainrot' gained renewed attention this year as a concept that encapsulates concerns about consuming large amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. Usage of the term has increased by 230% between 2023 and 2024.
A Glitchy Moodboard
Corecore has been described as a glitchy moodboard and a reflection of the struggles in an overwhelming digital reality, where meaningless and fragmented content is consumed in an endless stream. It’s an online movement that ironically and chaotically showcases the absurdity and meaninglessness of contemporary life, much like the Dada movement did a century ago. But whereas Dada deliberately used absurdity and deconstruction as media and social critique, corecore is only a movement in the sense that its many video clips and memes are tied together by a hashtag in TikTok’s algorithmic loops.
Kyle Chayka calls it “The DADA era of internet memes,” and while the parallel doesn’t entirely hold, 2020s internet culture subtly nods to the protest-laughter of the 1920s. In the Meme Studies Research Network article "The HaHa of Digital Deterritorialization: Looking at Memes through the Lens of Dada Laughter," Natalia Stanusch discusses parallels between the Dada movement’s use of humor and memes as a cultural phenomena. According to Stanusch, Dada was built on such deep distrust of modernity that it even turned into a self-critique of its own inherent modernity. Similarly, corecore memes highlight the absurdity of the very act of referencing and reproducing an endless stream of meaningless and fragmented culture. By mixing absurd video clips, memes, and quotes, corecore creates a form of irony that not only mocks society’s absurdity but also the very idea of categorizing and making sense of everything.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q (1919).
Analyzing three forms of laughter—laughter as mockery, as a weapon, and as a process without purpose—Stanusch explores how memes can be understood through the spirit of the Dada movement. “Dada laughter,” also described by Daffyd W. Jones in Dada 1916 in Theory (2014), was playful, mocking, and often ambiguous, as in Marcel Duchamp’s work L.H.O.O.Q., where the Mona Lisa is given a mustache. It is up to the viewer to decode the wordplay and speculate on the target of the laughter: “Is it the Mona Lisa, commercialized art, the museum institution, modern artists, or the museum visitors themselves?” Stanusch concludes that memes share Dadaism’s nihilistic laughter and its ability to challenge the norms of their time. Both employ absurdity and satire to deconstruct meaning and engage audiences in critical reflections on the state of society.
Corecore: Incels joining
While Corecore has been celebrated as a memetic response to the absurdities of the attention economy, like all internet culture, it is far from simple. Global Network on Extremism and Technology calls corecore: “a TikTok Trend as Initiation to Incel Ideology “ and argues that certain strands of the movement borrow heavily from extremist ideologies, particularly incel narratives, framing men as victims and women as antagonists in a highly selective and manipulative way. These narratives are often cloaked in irony, found footage aesthetics, and emotional montages, making their messages both compelling and insidious.
As Noa Rusnak outs it: “corecore videos can act as the first step in the incel pipeline, as there is an underlying incel narrative present in their editing. On the surface, these videos present themselves as being about men’s mental health and men’s suffering, potentially attracting men who may be struggling with sex but do not yet hold any incel beliefs.”
Corecore exists at the intersection of mainstream TikTok trends and deeper, more radical internet subcultures, creating pathways—or rabbit holes—into increasingly niche and potentially harmful ideologies. This dynamic highlights how seemingly benign online phenomena can serve as gateways to more troubling narratives.
Corecore, then, is neither an idealization nor a neutral cultural critique—it is a complex phenomenon that reflects the anxieties of the digital age while also revealing its vulnerabilities to exploitation by harmful ideologies. Recognizing and interrogating these elements is essential to understanding its true impact in a hyper-mediated world.
EXPLAINED: FROM CORE TO CORECORE
Normcore, cottagecore, hopecore, and more. Using the suffix “-core” has long been a way to define a specific culture or aesthetic online. From normcore’s embrace of the ordinary to cottagecore’s idealization of simple living, “-core” expresses identity and perceptions of society.
According to Know Your Meme, corecore originated on Tumblr in 2020 but exploded in popularity on TikTok in 2022 as a distinct aesthetic within NicheTok, blending pop culture fragments from films like American Psycho and audio clips. As described in internet slang: “The aesthetic predominantly manifests into stylized video edits and meme compilations of glitzy, moldy, and deep-fried shitpost videos akin to schizoposting and Gen Z signifiers.”
Corecore comprises video clips that, on their own, might not make sense but evoke a mood, consisting of recurring motifs and references from pop culture. By the end of 2022, the hashtag #corecore had amassed over 39.8 million views on TikTok. It was TikTok user heksensabbat who introduced corecore to the platform with a video collage featuring scenes from Taxi Driver, Good Time, and Family Guy.
And sometimes, it’s just for fun. As popculturechat notes on a subreddit: “TikTok has a new trend called corecore—making fun of all the other ‘-core’ aesthetics.” Or, perhaps, it’s a trend striving to be an anti-trend. As Chance Townsend points in his article Explaining corecore: How TikTok's newest trend may be a genuine Gen-Z art form: “Through its name, Corecore makes itself sound like the antithesis of genre itself; its content can be anything, and its creators can use any type of media to convey a central premise.”
Sources:
Chayka, Kyle. The Dada Era of Internet Memes. The New Yorker April 24, 2024.
Glossop, Ella. Corecore is the Screaming-Into-Void TikTok Trend We Deserve . Vice. January 24, 2023,
Jones, D. W. (2014). Dada 1916 in Theory: Practices of Critical Resistance (NED-New edition, 1, 1). Liverpool University Press
Stanusch, Natalia. (2022). The HaHa of Digital Deterritorialization: Looking at Memes through the lens of Dada Laughter. Meme Studies Research Network
Rusnak, Noa. Corecore: a TikTok Trend as Initiation to Incel Ideology. Insights. Global Network on Extremism & Technology. 5th August 2024
Townsend, Chance. (2024) Explaining corecore: How TikTok's newest trend may be a genuine Gen-Z art form. Mashable. January 14, 2023.
Know Your Meme about Corecore