What #corecore was actually about

December 2023

Psychology

In 2023, a TikTok trend called #corecore became briefly significant before dissolving back into the general noise. The format: unsettling compilations of images and sounds, calm in tone, vaguely dreamlike, usually set to ambient or melancholy music. Text overlays suggesting themes of alienation, meaninglessness, the uncanny feeling of modern life.

Most analysis treated it as aesthetic experimentation, or gen Z nihilism, or the inevitable output of too much irony. I think it was pointing at something more specific.

Start with Freud's concept of the uncanny: the strange feeling produced when something familiar becomes unfamiliar. A face that's almost right. A building you know rendered in dream logic. Something that fits the category but violates your expectation of it. Freud argued this feeling emerges when the unconscious scaffolding of our worldview — the assumptions we need to function — becomes briefly visible.

The surrealists in the 1920s weaponised this deliberately. Breton, Dalí, Ernst: all working to create images that activated this feeling by combining familiar things in impossible arrangements. The intention was to crack open the normal perceptual apparatus and reveal something underneath.

Corecore didn't need to construct unfamiliarity artificially. It just collected it from the ambient culture and put it in one place. The ordinary texture of 2023 — AI-generated images of real celebrities, viral sounds decoupled from their context, aesthetic templates reproduced across millions of accounts, the uncanny valley of everything becoming slightly too smooth — was already doing the work. The trend was a curation of what was already there.

This matters because the uncanny feeling isn't arbitrary. It's the cognitive system detecting that something doesn't fit the model — that the representation of reality has diverged from reality itself. When that detection becomes chronic rather than episodic, it produces what Kyle Chayka called "the uncanny valley of everything": a pervasive low-grade wrongness that's hard to name but impossible to ignore.

Behavioural science has identified around 188 cognitive biases, but a 2023 paper argued that most of them are better understood as the outputs of three core beliefs humans need to maintain: that they're generally good people, that the world is generally understandable, and that they belong to groups that are generally right. When these beliefs come under pressure, cognition distorts to protect them. The biases are symptoms of the pressure.

This is what made corecore accurate rather than aesthetic. It was capturing the experience of those core beliefs coming under systematic pressure — from information overload, from AI-generated inauthenticity, from the acceleration of everything beyond the processing capacity of the systems meant to make sense of it.

Dostoevsky wrote that consciousness of helplessness produces inertia. When you understand clearly that you cannot act on what you know, the knowledge becomes a burden rather than a tool. Corecore felt powerless because it was. The trend had no ask, no call to action, no implicit solution. It just pointed at the wrongness and left you there.

This is what it was actually about: the psychological experience of being conscious in an information environment that moves faster than consciousness can process, producing a permanent mild state of uncanniness that has no obvious resolution.

That's not nihilism. That's an accurate description of a real problem.