What Hawk Tuah and trad wives tell us about the internet in 2024

When asked to describe the internet in 2024 in one word, culture critics Jackson Weaver, CT Jones and Samantha Cole chose the words "decay," "lucrative" and "vertigo." 

They join Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion today to explain their word choices and hash out some of the biggest internet stories from Hawk Tuah to trad wives. They also discuss what societal anxieties unify this year's chaotic trends. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: This massive trend that we saw online this year is the trend of the trad wife. You see videos of women glamourizing what it's like to be a stay-at-home wife. They're baking from scratch, they're pushing family values, they're dressing modestly. 

If you pull together the idea of trad wives, the idea of "very demure, very mindful," the idea of mob wife aesthetic. We are working through some gender stuff on the internet. CT, what do all these conversations tell you about the anxieties maybe that are coming out in these trends? 

CT: There's a reason why we're seeing quiet luxury, old money aesthetic, while we're seeing all of this trad wife content. Because the focus on the internet right now is about money…. For a 19-year-old, she doesn't understand that the woman on her screen is a millionaire trying to do an act to get more cash from her. She's seeing this as, "This is a dream for me. I didn't know that this was a possibility. And wouldn't it be so nice if there was a world where I didn't have to work, I wasn't working 45 hours a week, where I could even think about having children and not be concerned about the lack of abortion access or the lack of health care in the United States?" So all of this is coming together, saying, "We're having a lot of systemic problems." And there are just people online who have figured out how to sell proverbial answers, and people don't realize that they're being sold to. 

Elamin: Jackson, you've described this year on the internet as a year of decay, the idea that the internet is dying. That's very distressing. Why do you feel that way? 

Jackson: I mean, it's not my theory at all. The "dead internet theory" is something that you see on the internet and breaks down to: when the internet started, this was a way for us to navigate and source information, for humans to interrelate with one another. Now, because of exactly what CT was saying, the internet is a place to make money, and the best way to do that is to outsource your time to bots. And now the internet is a place for bots to post content. You go on Facebook, see like a shrimp Jesus or AI-generated disinformation about floods and fake disinformation based news. 

There's this creeping disinterest in truth among a lot of people. If you saw disinformation and misinformation in the past and you realized it was fake, you just had this implicit reaction of negativity like, "This is fake and that's wrong implicitly." It's wrong. But now, somebody says, "Wow, this movie made $1 billion." Somebody will be like, "Actually, no, it made like 800,000." Then they'll be like, "Why do you care? Why are you fact checking me?" This implicit removal of just the principle of wrongness or rightness being good or bad things has disappeared. And the internet for that reason is dead, because there's no real way to interact with somebody to change their mind if they don't care what is true. And it makes me very sad, decay and profit put together. 

Elamin: My word of the year to describe the internet would have been something close to Jackson's. Which is to say, there's a lot of detritus, there was a lot of ephemeral detritus, things that happen and they feel significant, and then we move on — and we move on so quickly that it almost like feels like you can't make sense of the thing that just happened. It's all these fleeting moments that command so much space, but it's so ephemeral and then it just kind of goes away. 

Samantha, what do you think that suggests about the health of our online culture right now? The idea that so much of what we're taking on is this detritus, it doesn't mean anything, it's not going to stick around for very long. And we're not even trying to use it to learn how to move in the world.

Samantha: I think a lot of people say "the internet is forever." That's a phrase that people use, but it's really not at all anymore. The old internet has crumbled and what little of it was being archived is under threat. Links die, link rot is a thing, archives of journalists' articles about truth are being deleted because corporations shut them down and lay them off. So yeah, it's definitely a very scary thing because even though things are moving so fast, and the history of the internet is relatively short — like 35 years — we still need that institutional knowledge like, "This is not new. This is something that we've dealt with before." Whether it's moderation or community spaces or whatever it is, we need to be able to say, "This is what birthed this, this is what didn't," and how to move forward from there. 

We need people to remember how it was or be able to say, "This is not how it has always been. It's not always been the case that Meta is so strict about sex stuff. It's not always been the case that Twitter was full of neo-Nazis." We're losing a lot of that and that's on purpose because, like Jackson said, we're always moving. It's built to keep your attention. To keep your attention, you have to constantly be refreshing and changing. So that combination is a little bit scary to me.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Amelia Eqbal.