TikTok goes a little too far when it comes to classifying every last aesthetic into its own microtrends. Spotify Wrapped calling your music taste goblincore or strangely ending up at a charity gala in San Francisco and having a tech exec tell you that her teenage daughter is obsessed with cottagecore. I notice it when asked if there is (yes, this happened by chance). myself). Add the suffix “core” to any noun and you are good to go.
There is no more natural ending to this phenomenon than ‘core-core’, the meta-aesthetics of ‘nichetok’. It uses nihilistic video clips to create something so absurd and nonsensical that it somehow makes you come back and feel something. We lean into our urge to mask all our emotions with 12 layers of sarcasm, but we get so serious in the process that it may not be sarcasm after all.
Check out undoubtedly the most popular Koa Koa video with 2.2 million likes. It starts with clips of Payroll Transparency accounts, where people ask strangers what they do and how much money they make. The kid said he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up, and when the host asked him how much he wanted to make, he said, “I… make people feel okay.” Then it is immediately exposed to a fast cycle clip. Timelapse of a busy street. screaming man. Elderly people playing slot machines in a casino. He’s a TikToker talking about chickens living in the Metaverse. People jumping out of the garage in danger.
Some core-core videos seem to come out of over-the-top documentaries that tell us some very obvious truths about how social media makes us lonely. Others make little sense. But most of these videos are tied together by a general malaise. In other words, the fear that life has no meaning and that technology is alienating us from each other. , a demo of the new VR headset, and clips of Elon Musk’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. This lack of trust in corporate innovation is in stark contrast to the ubiquitous “live your days as a tech employee” trend, which, surprisingly, is not a psyop of top-down corporate propaganda ( … or so).
Corecore has been popular on TikTok since late 2022, but with Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Salesforce all making massive layoffs within weeks, the doomsday vibe of techno-futurism is especially fitting. It feels like These niche-tok posters are probably not responding to the state of tech employment, but to something bigger that encompasses it. How we are influenced by the whims of a handful of billionaire tech folks who can decide whether to buy Twitter or make the word ‘metaverse’. Ordinary people think And of course, with the added layer of irony that corecore is also part of that ecosystem. People have created his TikTok account dedicated to creating their own corecore compilations, promising things like “revealing his face” once he reaches 10,000 followers. An anti-capitalist, lonely aesthetic to acquire social capital.
Corecore isn’t the first meme of its kind. At any given moment in internet culture there is usually some kind of absurd meme in circulation, whether it’s corecore, fried food memes, weird Facebook, bad animation videos, or repetition of loss.jpg. That’s because making nonsensical art in response to a world that seems to make no sense is almost cliche and commonplace at this point. As we all know, this is how Dadaist artists responded to the tragedy of World War I. And now how modern meme creators react to the horrifying realization that we’re all addicted to scrolling through short-form videos. It’s how the best minds of the weird internet react again when it feels like too much.
After all, the only thing that really makes sense about corecore is the fact that it exists.
