I Cringe, Therefore I Am
The only thing to cringe at is cringe itself.
Whaddup y'all — I'm Quinten, a senior director of content at Artemis Ward. Welcome to my column, where I get lost online and return with a new way of understanding what’s going on in the world around us. This week's topic: why brands and creatives should stop fearing “cringe.”
Tyler, the Creator released his latest album — Don’t Tap the Glass — last month, and as part of his album rollout, he put out the following statement on Twitter (emphasis mine).
I asked some friends why they don’t dance in public, and some said because of the fear of being filmed. I thought, damn, a natural form of expression and a certain connection they have with music is now a ghost. It made me wonder how much of our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme, all for having a good time. I just got back from a ‘listening party’ for this album and man was it one of the greatest nites [sic] of my life. 300 people, no phones allowed. No cameras, just speakers and a sweatbox. Everyone was dancing, moving, expressing, sweating. It was truly beautiful...
“It made me wonder how much of our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme.” It’s a profound question, one with an answer that gets at the heart of how the algorithm has warped the way we interact with each other.
Less than a generation ago, the internet was a place of self-driven exploration and discovery. Today, it’s a never-ending trough1 of content where the lowest common denominator always wins. The technology that powers all of our digital platforms — from TikTok to LinkedIn, Netflix to Goodreads — is weighted to prioritize engagement, and few things drive engagement more than cringe: content that evokes a secondhand embarrassment that’s impossible to look away from. When it comes to cringe, the rules of the trough are simple: eat to your heart's content, but never under any circumstances put yourself in a position to be eaten.
We children of the internet have spliced these rules into our DNA, resulting in an insatiable appetite for awkwardness and an acute fear of being served up next. We’re not dancing at clubs, we scrub any hint of sincerity from our dating profiles, and we cling tightly to the belief that it is uncool to try. We have been cool-pilled.
In place of reality, we've chosen to live in a world where the specter of embarrassment haunts every movement. To be cool-pilled is to be stuck in a type of analysis paralysis where the risks of being awkward outweigh the rewards of taking action. It’s to be self-conscious to the point of paranoia, trapped beneath the weight of a single question: Sure, but what will everyone else think about me?
Has Your Brand Been Cool-Pilled?
Modern brands, too, are born from the internet, and they share the same mortal fear of humiliation, the same need to present self-assuredness at all times. To the cool-pilled brand, success demands unwavering fidelity to positioning. It means saying the right thing at the right time at all times. It means never making a mistake. Ever.
Sound familiar? Who among us hasn’t seen a largely inconsequential creative decision run through countless layers of review? Pressure testing, running it up the flagpole, sharing for visibility — all euphemisms for a cringe-driven complicity where everybody takes turns sanding the edges off an idea until all that remains is a perfectly polished orb of ambiguity. Because why take the risk of saying something when you can be secure in not saying anything at all?
Toward a Post-Cringe Theory of Brand-Building
Fortunately for us, there exists an alternative. Like Tyler the Creator, Taylor Swift, the rapper Lil B, and a growing number of people online, you can reject cringe as a construct, become indifferent to it, and accept that “effortlessness is a myth."
This small but vocal cohort sees cringe not as something to be feared, but as the key to self-actualization. They believe that only with a radical acceptance of cringe can one truly become their best self. Baby, don't fear the cringe-lord. Memento horrere.
In the video essay Post-Cringe, Faux-Cringe, and Cringe Accelerationism, the YouTuber JREG describes cringe as “a tool of the status quo,” a self-imposed electric fence designed to contain thinking within the bounds of what’s conventionally acceptable:
...if no one's cringing then is it cringe? If a 14-year-old badly covers a song in the middle of a TikTok forest and no one is around to cringe at it, is it cringe? You may think to yourself...Uh, but like when the furries get together is that not cringe? Is that what you're trying to tell me? Because I feel so gutturally in my heart that it is indeed cringe. But what does it mean for those furries to get together? It means they have identity, community, wouldn’t you like that, hmm? You can’t accept that that’s something you want, so you call it cringe. It’s cringe, you say, but where’s your identity? Where’s your community, huh? Wouldn’t it be nice to be a furry?
In creative industries, the status quo is death. We create in order to stick out, not blend in. To establish new rules, not adhere to tired ones. To break down walls, not erect taller ones. Be it in branding, marketing, advertising, whatever — the whole point is to do something that hasn’t been done before, to see wide open spaces where others see electric fences. As creative professionals, if we’re not gleefully transgressing the status quo, we’re not doing our jobs.
Which brings us back to Tyler, the Creator's dance floor room where — free from the digital panopticon — people were able to rediscover a form of authentic human expression. In creative life, it’s always easier to be the wallflower, to avoid missteps by remaining motionless. To stand safely on the sidelines while others discover new forms of self-expression. And therein lies the cruel irony: it’s hard to dance when you're afraid of making any sudden move. In trying to avoid looking foolish, you've become the most pitiful figure in the room.
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Fittingly, the defining feature of the social internet is named “the feed.” Yum!
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