\n<\/p>\n
Sydney Sweeney is inexplicably reclining and also buttoning up her jeans. She\u2019s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath. She\u2019s attempting to sell some denim to women, and appears to be writhing while doing so. In a breathy voice, the actor recites the following ad copy as the camera pans up her body: \u201cGenes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.\u201d When the camera lands on her eyes, which are blue, she says, \u201cMy jeans are blue.\u201d The commercial is for American Eagle. The whole thing is a lot<\/em>.<\/p>\n The jeans<\/em>\/genes<\/em> play is a garden-variety dad pun. But when uttered by Sweeney\u2014a blond, blue-eyed actor whose buxomness and comfort in her own skin seems to drive everyone just a little bit insane\u2014it becomes something else. Sweeney does not speak much about her politics (for interested parties, there are potential clues, such as a 2020 tweet supporting Black Lives Matter and a mention of having conservative relatives), but this hasn\u2019t stopped the right wing from framing her as one of their own. Her mere appearance in a plunging neckline on Saturday Night Live <\/em>led the right-wing blogger Richard Hanania to declare that \u201cwokeness is dead.\u201d Meanwhile, speaking about the American Eagle ad in a TikTok post that\u2019s been liked more than 200,000 times, one influencer said, \u201cIt\u2019s literally giving Nazi propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n For some, the ad copy about parents and offspring sounded less like a dictionary entry and more like a 4chan post\u2014either politically obtuse or outrightly nefarious. Across platforms, people expressed their frustration that \u201cSydney Sweeney is advertising eugenics.\u201d One of the posters offered context for their alarm, arguing that \u201chistoric fascist regimes have weaponized the feminine ideal,\u201d ultimately linking femininity to motherhood and reproduction. Another said that, in the current political climate, a fair-skinned white woman musing about passing down her traits is \u201cuncreative and unfunny.\u201d(To further complicate matters, before the controversy, American Eagle announced that a butterfly insignia on the jeans represented domestic-violence awareness and that the company would donate 100 percent of profits from \u201cthe Sydney Jean\u201d to a nonprofit crisis text line.) Are you tired? I\u2019m tired!<\/p>\n The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual<\/em> Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content\u2014search Google\u2019s \u201cNews\u201d tab for Sydney Sweeney<\/em>, and you\u2019ll get the gist. (Even this article, which presents individual posts as evidence of broader outrage, unavoidably plays into the cycle.)<\/p>\n Although the Sweeney controversy is predictable, it also shows how the internet has completely disordered political and cultural discourse. Even that word, discourse<\/em>\u2014a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet\u2019s meat grinder\u2014is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant\u2014be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments\u2014are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else\u2019s statement. People are not quite talking past one another, but clearly nobody\u2019s listening to anyone else.<\/p>\n Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on<\/em> the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether\u2014an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for us all, our institutions, politicians, influencers, celebrities, and corporations\u2014virtually everyone with a smartphone\u2014operate inside this ecosystem. It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape\u2014all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.<\/p>\n Did American Eagle know what it was doing when it made the Sweeney advertisement? The company hasn\u2019t addressed the controversy, but the ad\u2014not unlike the famous and controversial Brooke Shields Calvin Klein campaign it appears to be playing off of\u2014seems like it was perhaps meant to walk a line, to be just controversial enough to garner some attention. Casting Sweeney to begin with supports this theory. Her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she\u2019s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs. (Sweeney\u2019s cultural associations with conservatism have also been helped along by an Instagram post she made in 2022 featuring photos from a \u201csurprise hoedown\u201d party for her mother\u2019s 60th birthday; online sleuths found separate photos depicting guests in MAGA-style hats and \u201cBlue Lives Matter\u201d gear, which led to a backlash.) A marketing executive with enough awareness of Sweeney\u2019s image and the political and cultural conversation around her might have figured that an ad featuring her talking about her good jeans would draw eyeballs.<\/p>\n This does not mean that some of the outrage isn\u2019t culturally significant. Those who have spoken out about the advertisement aren\u2019t doing so in a vacuum: Fears over eugenics creeping into mainstream culture are empirically grounded\u2014just glance at some aspects of the very public and loud pronatalist movements, which have been supported by influential people such as Elon Musk. Proud eugenicists have found purchase in mainstream culture on platforms such as X. The Trump administration is making white-supremacist-coded posts on X and enacting cruel immigration policies, complete with military-style ICE raids and imprisonment in a makeshift gulag in the Florida swamps. That\u2019s the real context that the ad was dropped into. It makes sense that, as one commentator noted, the ad might feel like it is part of \u201can unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n But all of this reality is stripped away by opportunists across the internet. The right-wing-media ecosystem is excellent at cherry-picking examples that look, to their audiences, like egregious examples of so-called snowflake behavior. MAGA influencers and Fox News prime-time segments feed off this type of content, which allows their audiences to feel morally superior. Very real concerns about the political direction of the country and the emboldening of bigots are reduced to: Democrats are triggered by cleavage<\/em>. The right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeney stuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump\u2019s Epstein-files debacle.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not only the right that cherry-picks. In their rush to publish viral news stories explaining the controversy, the media credulously grab examples of supposed outrage\u2014regardless of whether the accounts in question have tens of thousands of followers (and actual influence) or just a handful. One BuzzFeed<\/em> story quoted an Instagram comment from a user who is not a public figure, just a person with 119 followers. This kind of amplification, where nonpublic figures become stand-ins for public opinion, is a dangerous game. It distorts the conversation, sending a flood of attention to posts from small accounts, often in the form of other users who pile on and excoriate the original poster. In turn, this leads to the otherwise inconsequential post taking on the appearance of relevance, causing more outrage.<\/p>\n What ends up happening in these scenarios is that everyone gets very mad, in a way that allows for a touch of moral superiority and is also good for creating online content. The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse<\/em>, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about.<\/p>\n The polarized discourse obscures the real possibility that the majority of people encountering this ad are uninvested, passive consumers. Rather than having any conviction at all about the entire affair, they\u2019re consuming this discourse the way that people consume sports content about player infighting in a locker room or the way that people read celebrity gossip. Perhaps this is why American Eagle hasn\u2019t issued a panicked statement about the ad or why its stock price, barring a small fluctuation, hasn\u2019t changed much. For some, the stakes are high; for others, this is content to be consumed in a moment of boredom.<\/p>\n The internet loves Sweeney\u2014not as one might love, say, a person, but as one might love an object, an atomic unit of content. Her image is fawned over but also analyzed, co-opted, and monetized. She is savvy enough to get a piece of this action too\u2014hence selling her bathwater and these jeans. But the internet loving you, it should be said, is not often a good thing. Its desire is limitless. It ingests a person and slowly turns them into a trend, a main character, a thing that people struggle to speak normally about.<\/p>\n Perhaps the impulse to label these predictable culture-war moments as discourse reflects a need to make all the anger and fighting mean something. Discourse<\/em> suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there\u2019s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we\u2019re consuming isn\u2019t discourse; it\u2019s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we\u2019ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they\u2019ve won and lost at the same time.<\/p>\n