A Disconnected Adult’s Guide to Kids’ Culture: the “Flip the Camera” Trend
No one likes to talk about it, but bullying is a big part of growing up, and it’s especially relevant this week. Kids are using cameras to mock people in creative ways, TikTokers are parodying bullying in viral videos, and Instagram seems to be taking on cultural/political bullying (or meme bullying, depending on who you ask). Even God himself is making fun of the poor tripod fish.
What is the “flip the camera” trend and why is everyone so annoyed?
The “flip the camera” trend is a new and innovative form of bullying that works like this: a group of kids asks another kid to film them dancing or something similar. Then, while the video is being filmed, one of them presses the “flip the camera” button on their phone, making the cameraman the subject of the video. The resulting video is then posted to TikTok.
When I heard about this, my reaction was, “So what?” But if you dig deeper, it turns out it’s not necessarily a harmless prank. The idea isn’t to laugh with your peers, but to give the camera to some weirdo/weakling/lamer/whatever and make fun of them. This is the first video of this format, so you know what I mean:
Although it can be done harmlessly, like these cheerleaders making fun of their teacher:
videos where this is clearly done with the intention of mocking someone outside of their “group” are truly sad:
Over the past few decades, we’ve made significant progress in convincing people that bullying is truly wrong, but young people are still willing to go to great lengths to exploit it. However, the number of videos under the hashtag flipthecamera that frame bullying as bullying is encouraging.
Viral Video of the Week: Disney Bullies
Every yang has its yin, even in online bullying. TikToker @MannytheMann1 went viral thanks to a video of his gang harassing strangers on a college campus, but he uses the tactics of Disney Channel bullies—backward baseball caps, exaggerated self-confidence, and incredibly cheesy dialogue—for comedic effect. These pranks are all jokes, and perhaps a commentary on the stupidity of both bullying and Disney Channel shows.
It all started with this scene:
Since then, Manny’s street improvisations have become more elaborate, featuring dance battles and a group of sycophants lining up to support the hooligan:
This video has been viewed almost 60 million times:
What is a potato patch?
There’s no shortage of opinions online about the best way to sleep. This week’s trend is the ” potato patch.” The idea is to create the coziest sleeping space by stuffing as many pillows and elastic blankets as possible so they surround you (and sort of pin you down). Here’s a video demonstrating how it works:
It would be easy to dismiss this as a passing trend, which it likely is, but it, like the popularity of weighted blankets, could also indicate that Generation Z is the first generation of young people to take the “you need more sleep” advice seriously. It also sounds like a rebuke to the “24/7 sleep” mentality that was fashionable a few years ago. Or perhaps it’s simply because winter is coming, and everyone wants to get cozy.
TikTok’s Tripod Fish Obsession
The internet loves tragic animals, and many social media users are literally obsessed with the tripod fish , an animal whose fate is perhaps the most tragic of all creatures on earth. Fans and well-wishers are posting tributes like this one:
and videos like this:
Sometimes they are moved to tears by the fate of fish .
So what’s so bad about the life of a tripod? Almost everything. Tripods (Bathypterois grallator) hatch from eggs and spend their first years swimming and trying to avoid predators the only way they can—by going completely limp, hoping to be mistaken for a piece of jellyfish and left alone. If they live long enough, their eyes begin to melt, and long bony protrusions grow from their fins. Deprived of the ability to see and swim properly, the tripods drown. When they reach the bottom (sometimes as deep as 4,000 meters), their bony spines embed themselves in the mud.
Almost motionless and nearly blind, the tripod fish waits at the very bottom. If food floats by or sinks, it can direct the currents of water to its mouth and perhaps eat something. If not, it dies of starvation. Its only companions are parasites that feed on its blood, essentially stealing most of the food it’s lucky enough to catch.
Tripod fish don’t even mate with other tripod fish. Instead, this hermaphroditic marine animal releases a mixture of eggs and sperm into the cold water. If lucky, genetic material from another tripod fish will mix with the eggs, fertilizing them. If unlucky, they’ll fertilize their own eggs. So maybe your life isn’t so bad, huh?
Instagram is targeting meme aggregators.
I’m old enough to remember the internet before memes, when people were expected to post things they’d made themselves, or at least credit the creators. Instagram seems to be taking us back to those days: the social network has started flagging meme pages as duplicate content, effectively declaring war on posting nonsense.
On November 7, many Instagram users who posted unoriginal content (essentially meme farms created solely for the purpose of reposting massive amounts of anything remotely interesting) received a notification that read: “Content you recently shared may be unoriginal,” along with a list of posts that violated the duplicate content rule and a recommendation to delete them to avoid penalties in the form of post limits or shadowbans.
This policy essentially bans the distribution of memes, which is a strange decision for a social network, given that people love sharing memes. Many believe the warning is targeted at a specific type of meme: the notifications were sent just as Charlie Kirk face-swapping memes (meaning people sharing images of almost anything with Kirk’s face) were gaining popularity. While Kirkification seems more absurd than politically charged, it likely upsets some people, and that may be the reason for Instagram’s decision. Or perhaps the company simply wants people to create their own content.