PEAK CRINGE | REELWORLD

writer | 2025

If social video is our new universal language, cringefluencers are mainstreaming its metafictional slang. In my first original essay, PEAK CRINGE, the formal video properties of cringefluencers like Veronika Slowikowska are traced back through their Toronto roots in the media theory of Marshall McLuhan and his comedy acolyte Lorne Michaels. Spanning the entire history of 21st century video metafiction from from the mockumentary to the TikTok ban, PEAK CRINGE suggests that platform nationalism might just well be undermined at the formal level of cringe.