I’m not a marketing major or a food critic or even a trained investigative journalist, but I will boldly attribute the Dot Cake’s rise to fame to two things: Social media and slime videos. Slime (or Gak if you come from my decade) serves one purpose in this world: to be stretched and squished and twisted. It films well, it’s satisfying to watch, and it makes up a huge percentage of the internet. The connection between Dot Cakes and slime became evident to me when, at the end of a recipe on how to make a Dot Cake at home, the baker performed a ritual I recognized as slime-video-coded; they scraped a spoon across the top of the sprinkled cake, producing that microphone-boosted crackle known as ASMR. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response is the brain-tingling nervous system response that became a staple of the visual internet in the late 2010’s. These easy-to-watch slop videos saturated YouTube, and while in 2005 you might watch someone go to the zoo, you now watch videos of people just touching things. Unfortunately, just touching things is the basis of existing in the real world, so I shudder at what this sublimation means for our place in the universe.

The amount of ASMR channels on YouTube is staggering, totaling up to 90 billion views across related videos in 2022. Imagine the entire world population each viewing ten ASMR videos. This number doesn’t even include the 47.5 million videos on TikTok tagged #asmr.

This isn’t just happening for free. Marketing professionals Amra & Elma claim that the ASMR influencer industry is a market of about $1.2 billion. That means that content creators are getting a monthly paycheck just for squishing slime, crunching dry leaves, typing on mechanical keyboards, and crumpling newspaper. I’m happy that they’re getting their bag, but I also acknowledge that it comes at a cost: popping bubble wrap used to be fun, and now it’s a marketable skill.

This form of cultural criticism is a tightrope act. The easiest option is to just give up and say “the old days were better,” which I’ve always thought is one of the most insightful admonitions of Ecclesiastes. “Old good, new bad” is just narrative positivism—the idea that we are departing good and arriving at bad. Many people hold this opinion because it’s the natural conclusion of nostalgia. The harder and more honest choice is to engage in historical dialectics—to admit that every era was terrible, and was also wonderful. While there’s a surface-level purity in popping bubble wrap for free in the 90’s, we have to remind ourselves that it was also the era of the AIDS epidemic, magazine-cover-fueled eating disorders, and historic unemployment. In many ways, things have become objectively better. We see more equal representation of people groups in media, HIV is no longer univocally claimed to be God’s punishment for homosexuality, and keeping up with long-distance relatives and friends has never been easier. To engage dialectically with culture is to acknowledge that some things have gotten better, and other things have simply gone to shit.

I always chuckle to myself when I see the term viral foods, because someone in a pre-internet era would assume that everyone is excited about getting influenza from fast food. It’s no accident that we settled on the term viral to describe these trends, because other than connotations of rapid globalization, the phenomenon bears other resemblances to viruses.

• The trend seems to crop up out of nowhere, but by then everyone has it.
• The fever reaches a climax, where it’s the only thing we can think about.
• After recovery, the trend fades into the background, resurfacing in small ways periodically.

Not only are viral food trends propagated solely through social media slop, but they piggyback ASMR. Think of any viral food, and there is often a crunchy aspect to it. If social media over-saturates and destroys our dopamine centers, and crunchy foods trigger a dopamine response, then pairing crunchy foods with social media is beautifully symmetrical. Running a spoon over the crackly top of a Dot Cake. The satisfying crunch of ketaifi in the middle of Dubai chocolate. The candy coating of tanghulu shattering like tasty glass. Taking a loud bite of crispy fried chicken alleviates, for a moment, the overwhelming stress of living in a violently capitalist system.

The Big Crunch is not the only feature of viral foods. Another prerequisite to virality is that the food photographs well. After all, if you haven’t posed with your cup of matcha, did it even happen? (I’m making a mental note to later write a polemic about the existential attention economy of social media.)

In addition to crunching and posing, a third and inescapable aspect of viral foods is their connection to commerce. These trends seem to come out of nowhere, but I have to cultivate a suspicion that they aren’t as accidental as they look. When an influencer tells me to search TikTok for “My Five Guys order,” and then go to Five Guys and order the first thing that comes up, there are three people benefiting in varying degrees.

Firstly, I benefit by enjoying a meal that I can imagine was tailor-made for me based on my algorithm, when there’s no real evidence that that’s the case. The benefit is emotional and social, because now I can tell my friends that I had my digital palm read, and they should do it too—the result is a sense of bonding within my social group. Secondly, the content creator who posted the video benefits from views, engagement, and subsequently, monetization. The influencer wouldn’t exist without an audience to influence. The third person to benefit is the company providing the product. Without running a single TV or radio ad, they now have thousands of peoples rushing their doors to satisfy not only their physical but their social hunger—if my friends did this trend, I should do it, too.

Unlike the intentionality of viral trends, tradition is often unconscious and quiet. We blow out birthday candles, we keep our elbows off the table, and we avoid splitting the pole. Often the needs that gave birth to these customs have long since vanished, but the habit remains. Modern morgue practices have eliminated the need to mask decomposition with flowers, but we send flowers anyway. People don’t carry swords up their sleeves anymore, but we continue to shake hands. We’ve outgrown the belief that sneezing ejects the human soul, but you’ll still reflexively exclaim “Bless you,” even to strangers. And even though my native language is English, during my time in Asia I learned to avoid giving gifts in sets of four.

While viral trends connect us in a high-stakes, immediate way, the practice of tradition gives us a more sustained feeling of belonging across time and space. The stronger a tradition, the less you think about it. Clinking before drinking is both time-honored and unconscious. Stepping over cracks in the sidewalk can become a nervous system response rather than a choice. These habits tend to be harmless, and don’t get in the way of life. These practices also tend to travel slower, having to pace themselves to make the long journey across thanksgivings, wars, family reunions, and nationbuilding. For a practice to make its way into traditional discourse, it must stand the test of time. The difference between trend and tradition is ultimately a quesiton of language; trends are trends because they’re short lived, and traditions are traditions becuase they play the long game. One can’t become the other without switching terms; trends and tradition are exclusive by definition.

The assumed crux of this article could be that viral = bad, traditional = good, but that’s not my point at all. The takeaway I aim for is that viral trends carry a market incentive. Buying a bar of dubai chocolate will grant you fifteen minutes of perceived inclusion, but making your great grandmother’s chocolate cake recipe from WWII reminds you that your grandchildren will still be making the same cake after you pass away. The difference? There is no single World War 2 Cake Company making money off of your great grandmother’s recipe, while someone makes money every time you try a matcha latte “just to see what everyone is talking about.” I’ll even throw myself under the bus to show my commitment to this think piece: drinking a daily Diet Coke profits the Coca Cola Corporation a lot more than it does me.

In the beginning, we thought the term “social media” referred to online fellowship, but as time goes on it has become clear that the “social” referred to is less about hanging out and more about group psychology. While it may have once been about keeping in touch with friends, social media has become a platform for discourse that fuels the capitalist machine. You can’t help but become part of it. In 2018 I bought a fidget spinner as a gag gift, but the bottom line is that I bought a fidget spinner. When I post this, even though I critique $8 Dot Cakes, I am also participating in the machine that made Dot Cakes famous. If you’ve never heard of a Dot Cake, after reading this you may experience a craving for one, and that’s now my fault. No press is bad press, and in social media even criticism is engagement. So while I criticize viral trends, I have also written an unpaid advertisement for Gak, Dubai chocolate, and Five Guys and Fries.

So you may claim that you discovered the Dot Cake while browsing your For You Page, but in fact it was selected For You by the people at Meta from a pile of stuff. This is not a call to action to stop participating in viral food trends, but rather a plea to realize that the choices we think we are making were already made for us.