It’s like chicken soup for the sick TikTok brains of Generation Z youth. The hashtag #corecore gives you a warm feeling, but it doesn’t cure. Corecore is an aesthetic movement on TikTok that is characterized by a succession of clips from well-known films, memes and other internet content. It is fighting emptiness with emptiness; critique the bombardment of trends and memes on the internet by firing even more trends and memes at people.
“What do you want to be when you are older,” a boy is asked in a TV clip. “I will become a doctor later,” he replies. “How much do you want to earn?” The child replies, “I’m going to…make people feel better.” You hear depressing, melancholy music. Next you see clips of a rainy evening crowd in a shopping street illuminated by billboards; into a frustrated screaming Ryan Gosling Blade Runner 2049; a dozen seniors lined up behind slot machines staring hypnotized at the screen as they all press the button in front of them at the same time; a real chicken wearing VR goggles who lives in the Metaverse as a free-range chicken; a horde of people storming a store on Black Friday. This video has been liked more than 2.3 million times.
The confusion that the video evokes is its purpose; it saddles you with a certain feeling of loneliness, lostness and boredom. Videos with the hashtag #corecore have been viewed almost 800 million times in total. The films capture the empty feeling that technology leaves behind and that many young people who are chronically online have to deal with. A bit like the chicken with VR glasses from the TikTok video must have felt. Corecore fans call the trend digital poetry.
Cottage core, goblin core, barbie core
The phenomenon started as a movement to wake up people and try to convince them to find a lifestyle that does not consist entirely of consumption. The videos that were shared a few months ago were therefore anti-capitalist and environmental activist.
The suffix -core comes from the music world and is used there to categorize the different genres, of which ‘hardcore’ was the first. But on the Internet, the suffix is now pasted on the most diverse trends.
As an anti-trend, the movement mocks this incessant stream of trends on TikTok. Cottage core, goblin core, barbie core; one short-term core follows the other nonsense core. They almost always want to make you buy something. The cute cottage core is floral dresses and straw handbags. With the greedy goblin core, it’s snacks and fast food. And with the plastic barbie core, it’s pink platform heels and eyeshadow. And so there is now a -core that serves all -cores at the same time, thus depriving them of their meaning and thereby trying to render them harmless.
While writing this article, I saw #corecore as a kind of Bowser – the final boss in Mario – of the meme world. When you achieved it, you knew you had beaten the game. Finally, you could escape the technological trend tsunami.
Until this morning I opened my TikTok app for my own consumption and was confronted with the hashtags #corecorecore and #corecorecorecore. After hours of TikTok research for this piece, I had let my algorithm drag me into the platform’s backrooms. This isn’t just Mario Inception. There is no escape from this vicious virtual circle.
@flicksaga Yes #nichetok #corecore ♬ The Sound of Myself – Disaster Peace