The Core of Corecore

During a weekend in New York this past spring, I happened upon a staged and orchestrated production of the unpublished works of Jonathan Larson. In the 1990s, Larson’s songwriting transformed theatre — his now-famous musical “Rent” redefined how performance art engaged with contemporary issues. But Larson tragically died at 35 years old the morning of the first off-Broadway performance of “Rent.” Much of his other work was left unfinished or unrecognized and is only now being rediscovered. The unpublished songs I saw performed, with titles such as “White Male World” and “The Truth Is a Lie,” were refreshingly unencumbered by any pressure a famous artist might have experienced to produce a mainstream hit.

Larson’s lyrics are often structured as a deliberate arrangement of itemized lists. For example, the first verse of “White Male World” begins simply: “Bryant Gumbel / Decaf coffee / French vanilla / Ultra slim / Pert shampoo with extra body / Clinique, Neutrogena.”

Strangely, this writing style reminds me of “corecore,” an internet trend that overtook my Instagram feed in 2021. Corecore videos, as a genre, are usually compilations of random media footage that lack any apparent throughline. A corecore video might contain a news clip, a mountain view, a home video, and a screen recording of someone else’s feed — all shown in rapid succession.

But while the collage-esque medium of both corecore and Larson’s writing seems similar, their functions are radically different. Larson is politically incisive, conveying a clear and specific argument about current events through the lists he curates in his lyrics. On the other hand, if corecore is trying to say anything at all, I can never quite put my finger on it.

How can such similar content have such different effects?

The genealogy of corecore begins to answer this question. The internet (by which I’m mostly referring to social media sites) is largely curated by algorithms designed to reward form while remaining blind to content. In theory, this democratization of content means that all types of opinions, ideas, and storytelling can find a platform so long as they capture attention. But in practice, much of what is successful on the internet is slop that maximizes the form’s effectiveness while deprioritizing (or even intentionally diluting) the actual significance of the content. Even the term “POV” lost its meaning on the internet as it gained popularity — when individuals tried to replicate the format of the trend without engaging with the content, it led to misapplication of the term until its use was barely related to “point of view.”

Corecore is the ultimate example of how the meaning of an internet trend becomes diluted as the form’s proven success gains priority. Originally “-core” was a signifier of an aesthetic trend — “cottage-core” and “gorp-core” were words to describe collage-esque content that served a specific inspirational purpose and curated an aesthetic. Corecore was born as a mockery of these trends, retaining the proven success of the compilation medium while ignoring the purpose. While previous iterations of “-core” had the goal of capturing something specific, corecore videos maximize the format by reproducing the greatest possible breadth of modern experience. Corecore reflects the medium of the internet itself — clips of clips, videos of videos, and content of content gathered from sources across the digital world. Its conceit is that there is no conceit.

The concept of “forced perspective” in photography elucidates how these two creations affect their audiences. In Larson’s songs, he communicates what he finds important by zooming in on details that are only meaningful from his viewpoint. Decaf coffee and Neutrogena gain prominence not because they are inherently important, but because they occupy significant space in the narrative according to his particular perspective. The listener’s experience, then, is a process of piecing together how he sees these items in relation to each other. The listener eventually gains a cohesive picture of his view on the world.

In a way, the medium of the internet also forces perspective. Much of the popular discourse about the internet focuses on its curated political extremism. Here, too, the maximization of medium over substance plays a role — shocking and aggressive political content is more likely to succeed algorithmically, and thus creators are incentivized to produce it.

But I imagine I don’t speak only for myself when I say that my experience being chronically online is less one of political rabbit hole-ing than what corecore captures: sheer randomness. The internet, by design, gives us access to a huge variety of perspectives. While every individual piece of content might provide a brief snapshot of how one person sees the world, the next video will be radically different. Everyone is constantly documenting their experiences and ideas all the time — 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and nearly a hundred million photos and videos are posted daily on Instagram. Moreover, all this content is shared in practically the same format.

The incomprehensible quantity of content is especially difficult to navigate because the medium is identical. Whether it’s presidential addresses or Fortnite streams or movie clips, we consume them through our 2D screens — mostly as short-form, vertical videos. Online, we experience everything with equal weight.

And because corecore replicates this breadth, to piece together what is captured by a corecore video would mean to somehow comprehend the significance of the entire span of the internet. As a result, trying to extract meaning requires the viewer to adopt a constant, Shepard tone-like zooming out, to encapsulate more of the internet’s breadth. This has a flattening effect — by broadening so far, you can no longer examine the relative significance of different ideas and truths.

This flattening is harmful for several reasons. Although the lack of barriers means social media can be a useful platform for marginalized voices, it also means that voices with no expertise, let alone accurate information, can spread content with the same veracity as experts and professionals. Arguably, the rampant misinformation that fuels today’s political landscape can largely be blamed on this equalizing medium — and its corresponding opacity of trustworthy sources.

Long before the internet as we know it today, one philosopher was already predicting how technological advancements would flatten perspective. In 1967, media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “It’s impossible to have a point of view in the electric age and have any meaning at all. You’ve got to be everywhere at once whether you like it or not. You have to be participating in everything going on at the same time. That is not a point of view.”

Nearly sixty years later, McLuhan is eerily correct. The bottomless scroll constantly reminds us — or at least me — of the gap between the little I have consumed and the vast quantity of information, ideas, and sources out there. There are so many causes to mobilize over, tragedies to be devastated by, and memes to keep up-to-date on that it becomes impossible to feel educated enough to have a point of view on anything at all. Instead, the expansiveness of the internet makes me want to perpetually retract and observe. The work of acquiring knowledge never feels finished. When will I possibly be ready to begin the work of meaning-making?

Over the summer, I asked my mom what she thought was my greatest strength and weakness. In classic parenthood fashion, she said they were the same: “You’re able to see so many sides of an issue,” I remember her telling me, “but because of that, you never really have opinions.”

I wasn’t sure how to explain to her how arbitrary opinions seemed to me — how every side of every argument is just selectively utilizing different combinations of facts; how I think Larson’s forced perspective allowed him to say one thing, while another set of names and products could have been a song with the opposite message.

As a generation, I think we are living with constant access to a tool that deprioritizes the specificity of an individual’s point of view on the world. The rapid swirl of digital stuff rushes through us at such speed that it’s impossible to find solid footing from which to view the world. We are privileged and burdened with the awareness of just how much stuff is out there, demanding our attention to zoom out instead of finding a grounded perspective where some things can be seen as more acute than others. The internet robs us of our ability to form a frame of reference.

Perhaps this is my dissonance: I find irony in the already-ironic genre of corecore, in that I keep trying to extract meaning from something inherently unmeaning. And perhaps it represents an unfortunate symptom of the internet, the risk of all media to cave in on itself: depoliticized politics, recordings of reactions to recordings, and fiction incorrectly contextualized in nonfiction.

Even writing this essay, I’m falling into the trap of losing specificity to generality — trying to engage with one specific genre of internet content pulls me into diagnosing the internet in its entirety. In trying to metaphorize corecore, to extract something meaningful from something that intentionally discards meaning for the sake of breadth, I lose my own point of view on the genre.

Here at the magazine, my job is recruitment and training. One of the most important (and most difficult) lessons to teach new writers is how to “find the angle” of a piece, or establish the lens through which to tell a story. To find their angle, I ask them to slow down and narrow their perspective, promising that looking closer at a small thing will give them more to say about the world than trying to take it in all at once. Well-told narratives require the author to have a point of view: a writer who sees every fact as equally meaningful to the story provides no viewpoint from which the reader can become invested.

Perhaps I should take my own advice.

I’m encountering what McLuhan predicted: “The greatest discovery of the 21st century will be the discovery that Man was not meant to live at the speed of light.” Though we know there are many overlapping truths available at our fingertips, it’s a matter of channeling the constant consumption of content just enough to proactively decide what you want to be meaningful. We cannot all be activists on every issue or experts on every topic even if it all seems to matter. To play an active role in the meaning-making of our lives, we must dedicate space in our field of vision to particular things above others. Having opinions necessitates grounding ourselves in a point of view.

Larson’s lyrics are world-renowned because they are deliberate and specific — not because they are corecore, encapsulating the breadth of the human experience. Meanwhile, corecore’s self-reflexivity justifies both its significance and insignificance online: even as it demonstrates the precise weakness of the internet medium at large, it proves its unimportance as just one more trend to add to the perspective-less digital swirl.

The internet still feels too big for me to critique. But in the spirit of Jonathan Larson, and for my mom, perhaps I can zoom in enough on one impact of the digital world to frame this small idea as meaningful: You deserve to have a perspective.

—Associate Magazine Editor Kate J. Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com. Her column “The Meta-Internet” examines internet phenomena to explore the tensions we embody through life online.