It ain’t easy being twee

About the author

Alex Creece

Alex Creece is writer, editor and collage artist who lives on Wadawurrung land. She works in editorial roles for Archer Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review...

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Non-fictionThere was once a simpler time when influencers were mostly known for spurring within their audiences feelings of aspiration: the 1 per cent of fashion bloggers flaunted business-class flights to international fashion weeks while clad in mortgages’ worth of goods. They sold us repositories of taste and performances of modelling, role modelling and role playing by providing templates for mimicry through highly parasocial sales tactics. The aspirational internet seemed straightforward: buy these things and your quality of life will improve. But the commodification of everyday life carried more far-reaching implications.

Scrolling to the end

IntroductionOur contemporary content malaise feels very recent, yet the twentieth-century media scholars Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman predicted our technological capture decades before Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates devised a neat way for their fellow Harvard students to connect online.

You will be seen now

PoetryI saw a fin- ger loosen the zipper,the bag’s tan exterior animated by teeth. Beneath knuckle-white shades, faces surfaced–witnesses in a waiting room. Pareidolia or paranoia?Malice etched in putty. Everything...