In 2011, the song “Friday”, by Rebecca Black, started trending online. Critics called it the worst song ever, making fun of its monotonous lyrics and awkward music video. Even though Friday made Black a millionaire through iTunes and Youtube ad revenue, everyone thought Black would go down in history as a laughing stock.However, the artist Jacob Ciocci suggested otherwise, in an essay entitled ‘The Value of Being Trolled’:

“No one “makes fun” of your video unless there is something important to make fun of. I’m not arguing that you have succeeded in creating social change or critical dialogue, but I am arguing that if you get people to make fun of you, you have the beginnings of what it takes to be a good entertainer. In the world of art and entertainment, being respected and being made fun of are interrelated.”

A decade has passed, and these pronouncements have become prophetic. Black is respected as a cultural icon in her own right. Her presence graces the queer stylings of Dorian Electra’s ‘My Agenda’ project.

We can only conclude that the epoch of Andy Warhol has come full circle. The name of its game is no longer glamour, but cringe.

In January 2022, the Atlantic published “How Did We Get So ‘Cringe’?”. In the article, Kaitlyn Tiffany writes that in a world where every facet of life becomes destined to be gawked at online, we have become painfully self-conscious about everything. Kaitlyn concludes that cringe has accelerated beyond an empathic response of shared embarrassment, into the realm of taboo.

In April, Vice took the opposite position, with the article ‘*Will Being Cringe Set You Free?*’ This article was the culmination of an onslaught of ‘cringe acceptance’ memes echoing the premise of a psychology book by Melissa Dahl, proclaiming cringe as everyone’s ‘true self’.

So is cringe a repressive force or a tendency towards radical acceptance? To answer this, we could do worse, than have a look at some concepts from the work of Pierre Bourdieu.Bourdieu was a social scientist who analysed taste, as a product of objective conditions of class and capital. In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he did an ethnographic study of France in the 1960s. Taste, to Bourdieu, is a form of something he calls Symbolic Capital.

Symbolic capital affirms that a person or institution belongs at the top of a social hierarchy. However, that affirmation hides the economic principles behind the person’s symbolic stature, and the working class misrecognizes symbolic capital as natural qualities that people or institutions innately possess. Bourdieu wrote that taste is symbolic capital that the ruling class uses to differentiate themselves from those below, in service of class hegemony. Art patrons have symbolic capital, because they are deemed as taste makers, as people mistake their buying power for authority. Symbolic capital also fulfils a function of naturalising economic and cultural capital for institutions. Taken in its immediacy, art carries values and sentiments that endear the institution to a general public. However, what they conceal is their economism: Art doesn’t gain traction just for their immediate, symbolic aura. They serve as tax dodges for real estate, or are exhibited because they fulfil a specific role in the marketplace of ideas.Because symbolic capital appeals to authenticity, anti-institutionalism itself has symbolic capital. Things that are excluded from the realm of the upper class always return in aesthetic form, for their symbolic capital.So if we were to think of Cringe as a kind of symbolic capital, what kind of cultural hegemony produces it?

This is hard to pin down, as cringe is a global social media phenomenon, emerging under conditions where class distinctions seem nebulous. Taste appears more relative than ever. What is cringe in one country may come off normal in another, what is cringe one month may be fashionable the next. Because standards are infinitely malleable in internet culture, it is impossible to tell if people are laughing with, or at others.It appears that Dorian Electra reclaims 4chan’s edginess for queer culture. But we should not forget that this could have only happened with the normalisation of what used to be cringe. People used to think of the act of posting controversial content as unsavoury behaviour, but this is now normalised in the "Hot Take" factory that is reddit, and twitter. 4chan used to be a space for pariahs, but now has an air of exoticism, mentioned alongside pioneers of post internet art.

The internet has also changed the nature of celebrity. Before Dorian Electra, back in 1999, the godfather of the cringe aesthetic was arguably Richard ‘Lowtax’ Kyanka. Lowtax became affluent and culturally recognised from the cringe comedy website Somethingawful.com, which crowd-sourced content such as photoshop edits, writing, and animation from its community’s message board. This was a predecessor to meme templates and shitposting. Something Awful is now recognised as the genesis for internet culture as we know it today. 4chan’s community branched off from people Lowtax banned, for posting anime.