Germany · de.indymedia · · 2h
Breakpoint: In step with the cowboy boots
Deutsch (original) · Auto-translated to English
Trends and labels rob us of the opportunity to express our personality. They make us uniform and pave the way for a speechless society that submits to authoritarian constraints because we forget how to break the rules.
If I'm being honest, I've always thought the new way of wearing cowboy boots was stupid. I find the trend of wearing the same plastic cowboy boots in white or black or burgundy together with a white miniskirt to go out terrible. It seems unnatural, forced, inauthentic.
But after seeing this outfit about a thousand times on my Instagram feed and a hundred times in bars and clubs in countless major European cities, I don't think it's that bad anymore.
Maybe I'm a clean, messy, hot, cool It girl, Instagram baddie, demure, whimsy Type B person after all. And maybe it really is kinda chic to wear cowboy boots and miniskirts.
The cowboy boots aren't the real problem, as unfashionable as I find them. What should worry us is how easily masses of people can be persuaded to behave in very specific ways.
Flirty Cowboy Core
On social media, every behavior, trait, and aesthetic has its own label. This is kinda chic, that one is whimsy, the other is fairy core or coquette.
Young people no longer describe themselves as individual beings, but rather as trendy objects that can be categorized. They use Newspeak optimized for the Instagram algorithm.
Instead of expressing their own personality, users label everything they do and everything they are with one of the countless labels that fly across their screens. They adapt all too smoothly to changing trends on a weekly basis. You write about yourself without saying anything about yourself.
Social media trends determine what people say about themselves, how they dress and what music they listen to, but not their own interests or tastes. So they disappear into the flow of the clean girl aesthetic or in cowboy boots and miniskirts in some bar. Chic.
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Trendy, like everyone else
However, the trend economy of social media does not offer young people any new opportunities for expression. Instead, this linguistic homogenization deprives people of the vocabulary with which they express themselves. This loss of language that young people use to describe themselves goes hand in hand with the loss of individuality.
Last yearhttps://netzpolitik.org/2025/breakpoint-individuell-uniform/">haveI wrote about it, which is why social media trends are the end of individuality and subculture. At the time I wrote that young people, in the urge to become more individual and their own, are instead becoming more and more uniform - because the aesthetics of certain subcultures have become mainstream and everyone, in an attempt to be different, is becoming more the same.
A year later, I believe that this theory is still true. Meanwhile, another motive is driving the increasing uniformity of teenagers and young adults: not the desire to be individual, but the urge to conform.
Because nothing is easier than doing what hundreds, thousands or millions of people have done before you. However, it is difficult to deviate from the norm and not conform to the labels.
The urge for conformity is by no means intrinsically motivated, but rather a product of a political and cultural zeitgeist in which it is becoming increasingly uncomfortable and even dangerous to stand out from the mainstream.
Individuality is sometimes embarrassing, sometimes cringeworthy or sometimes even offensive. But that is precisely what makes them so valuable in an age of a new cowboy-boot conformism, in which people are moved to be indistinguishable, controllable, obedient.
Raised to follow
Following trends is nothing new in itself. There have always been trends and fashions that young people in particular have followed in large numbers. And yet social media acts in a special way as a catalyst for this same culture of uniformity. We have never been as connected as we are today. And never before has conformity been so rewarded with attention.
Following and following trends is not about what boots you wear. It's about the extent to which you are still able to form your own will and develop your own personality if your behavior is based exclusively on what big tech platforms dictate. Trends and labels are templates that gradually shape the will, taste and mind of users.
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That may sound dramatic. However, the fact is that social media accounts for a large part of young people's leisure activities, social contacts and cultural impressions. And thus creates character-shaping experiences in the realities of children, teenagers and young adults.
Conformism as a control element
The push for conformity comes at a time when the mainstream is becoming increasingly conservative, right-wing and authoritarian. The platforms that spread the idea of this new conformism and the limitation of one's own self-expression belong to Tech Bros. They dream of an authoritarian technological and political-cultural turnaround. And they use their algorithms and designs to control what content we see, what patterns are trending – and what behavior is rewarded.
The conformity propagated in their social media, which is reinforced by algorithms and attention, makes us predictable, controllable and compliant - as consumers in markets, but also as political subjects who are becoming increasingly controllable.
Once you've been raised to conform, it's hard to get rid of this trait when it's not just about fashion, TikTok posts and music clips.
It plays into the hands of authoritarian and fascist movements when we gradually give up control over our own tastes, our self-description and our self-image.
A year ago, I concluded my column on this topic by saying that it's okay to give in to the uniformity of trends, as long as you don't think you're being individual. Today I see it differently: I believe that if we emulate every algorithmized trend, then we are increasingly becoming controllable followers of a cultural change that wants to force us straight into this conformist controllability.
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Become part of this unique community and support our public interest-oriented, advertising- and tracking-free journalismhttps://netzpolitik.org/spenden/?via=rss">nowwith a donation.
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Source: de.indymedia