The Sublime Cringe
Is cringe the ultimate internet aesthetic?
Welcome to BLOG by LAN Party, the monthly newsletter by Vienna Kim & Benoit Palop that investigates and critiques how we engage with curation, art & culture in the digital and onchain era.
Currently we are participating in Internet Real Life (IRL), a series of webinars organised by Peter Limberg and Katherine Dee that explores the concept of ‘Internet Realism’. As a part of the programme, a weekly writing prompt is provided. We have taken up the challenge to respond to these weekly prompts as a writing exercise, and share our thoughts as free posts throughout the month of April.
In this text, Vienna responds to artist Molly Soda’s IRL talk from the 4th April, 2025. Molly talks about her artistic practice, cringe internet aesthetics, and the way we perform our identities online.
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Week #1 Prompt: How do internet aesthetics reflect and reinforce cultural anxieties?
Key words: cringe, failure, playing to lose, sublime, sacred
Perhaps the greatest universal anxiety concerning life online is doing something cringe. Sharing your work publicly only to be met with mockery, critique, or worse–silence. Posting a Live Laugh Love-esque graphic with cursive text and floral motifs in dead-pan seriousness. Oversharing.
Sarah Perry describes cringe as ‘the experience of witnessing failed emotional manipulation’, or ‘an attempt and failure to induce a sacred experience’, whereby, in internet terms, the sacred experience may be to touch people in an emotional manner, perhaps even galvanise them to some sort of action, or to find communion with like-minded folk.
Cringe is a largely negative sensation that results from uncomfortable social settings. To avoid such discomfort online, many individuals resort to lurking or, at the very least, creating anonymous profiles through which they may have greater freedom to post their online experiments and motivational videos with reduced risk of the emotional backlash should things turn awry. However, Perry also states that feelings of cringe reveal that at least someone has attempted something, and that this effort is worth a measure of respect in itself. Experimentation in any field results in inevitable failure, much of which can be experienced as deeply cringe, but such experiments–and importantly, how they are measured and assessed for improved iterations or analysis–are an essential aspect of human development and understanding.
But what happens when cringe becomes its own goal, its own sacred state? After all, on the internet, cringe content often goes viral, which serves to negate its failed status and consequently sublimates it.
When Molly Soda puts on her blue eyeshadow for a Youtube tutorial, I want to grab her by the shoulders, look her dead in the eyes and earnestly demand wtf are you doing??? The camera feels way too close, the focus isn’t behaving, and she claims to be teaching how to apply blue eyeshadow though she is clearly not a beauty guru. I’m sure everyone has stopped to reflect at some point during the video if the artist is being sincere or satirical, as surely no one would proudly publish such a video in earnest. Much too cringe. It is precisely this ambiguity that throws the video off the tracks of failure and into a limbo, a purgatory whereby it awaits its judgement: Cringe or Sacred?
And so we go to the comments. Comments, as Molly Soda herself has observed, are where content consumers go to affirm their own beliefs. Am I the only one that thinks this video is cringe? Does anyone else wonder if this girl’s being serious? Is this art?? If someone else, or better, multiple people feel the same way I do, then what I believe must be true. The comments are where wandering netizens and pilgrims congregate for communion.
Looking back 8 years after the initial publication of the video, the comments section of Blue Shimmery Eyeshadow Tutorial does indeed reveal viewers’ confusion over whether or not the video is satire or genuine; some have posted derogatory remarks about the artist’s appearance. However, the overwhelming response is a flood of messages in defense of Molly Soda, calling out aforementioned haters and trolls for their cruelty and lauding the artist for her ‘confidence’. Before such a deluge of support, I find that my doubts around the video dissipate and I, too, want to protect Molly Soda. Though deeper down, I suspect that the woman in the video doesn’t care at all what I think or do. Whether I defend her or berate her, it does not phase her. Suddenly, it is my emotional overreaction to the video, the comments, and the parasocial relationship I’ve developed with the subject that feels cringe. I want to be the woman in the video who does not blink twice at a drama in the comments section; who doesn’t take the internet seriously enough to hesitate before posting cringe content. I want to be that confident woman online. I want to be Molly Soda. I want to wear the blue shimmery eyeshadow, and all that it represents.
And thus, the cringe is sublimated. The object of cringe becomes an Idol.
The Kantian Sublime describes an experience of the divine, one that arouses at once feelings of terror and awe. When confronted with something that is sublime, one feels ‘a rapid alternation of repulsion from, and attraction to, one and the same object’, a ‘pleasure that is possible only by means of a displeasure.’ For Kant, such a sensation is evoked through experiences such as witnessing a breathtaking, tumultuous storm, or contemplating humankind’s finiteness when gazing upon the infinite nature of the cosmos. But on a more visceral, base level, the push-and-pull of pleasure and displeasure can also be found in the impulse we have to go back and have another whiff at a bad smell, run our tongue through the gap of a missing tooth, or poke at a bruise. Similarly, there is a profound sort of guilty pleasure, a magnetic pull, to cringe content online that, though–or perhaps because–it makes us uncomfortable, we can’t seem to tear our eyes away. It is this quality that makes such content go viral, and thus transfigures them to be memetic, replicable, and therefore revered. The Sublime Cringe.
Beyond Kantian aesthetics, the duality of pleasure arising from displeasure and the failed state of cringe can also be found in queer video game theory. In Bo Ruberg’s essay, ‘Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games’, the scholar asserts that intentionally failing against a video game (in a manner that is not intended or encouraged by the game design), can be a genuinely pleasurable experience, one that is inherently queer in a nonrepresentational sense: bizarre, unusual, against the grain of normative ways of being. After all, most people play video games in order to win, not to lose, but the ‘artistry’ that lies in the queer art of failure is in ‘being differently, of embracing self-destructive agency.’ I think of Molly Soda in the eyeshadow tutorial. In this view, the more fantastically one fails, the more one is able to revel in the pleasure that arises from displeasure. Failure is sublimated, it becomes an art. The description is practically a 1:1 identical experience with that of attaining the Sublime Cringe. The Sublime Cringe is inherently queer.
Ruberg remarks upon the Youtube trend of players posting footage of their own failed game play. What should be a frustrating or dismaying experience is proudly shared: ‘These players find pleasure, not shame, in the infinite replay of their failure, which comes to function as an inverted performance of non-skill and bravado.’ The types of people who enjoy watching these ‘fail’ videos are those who have already played the games themselves, and therefore have personally experienced the negative emotions associated with it. Turning the fact of being a loser into a shared experience online creates a safe, often humoristic, space for others to perform their own failures, or even simply be a failure. Once one identifies oneself in a piece of online content, it becomes replicable, it can be memeified. The communal power of ‘fail’ gameplay videos and viral cringe content relies on this memeification potential.
An enduring internet aesthetic that has sublimated failed states and embodies the Sublime Cringe is the meme trend of cute animals or characters finding themselves in various states of lethargy or paralysis in the face of an overwhelming world. To admit publicly that we are unable to take care of ourselves or that we have relinquished ambition, in a capitalistic society that judges the value of a human being based on one’s achievements, accumulation of capital, or social standing, is cringe. These memes narrow down on these failures to function in society, but do so in a way that cutesifies The Horrors and represents the NPCification of society. That is to say, they acknowledge that we are collectively subject to fearsome (Technocapitalist) forces beyond our control, have lost our agency, and consequently feel failure to liberate ourselves from our state of alienation. The popularity of these memes, beneath their adorable aesthetic layer that serves as a facile vessel to simultaneously smuggle in the cold hard truths of our estranged sense of purpose under late-stage capitalism and soften it, reveals that all our lives are cringe. But at least the pictures are cute and relatable, and we’re all in it together, so it’s like fine, right?
The Sublime Cringe, the apotheosis of internet aesthetics that at once reflects, reinforces and redeems these cultural anxieties, embodies the failed state of our online lives, but also our potential redemption. It does so in a way in which it is self-fulfilling, where its own goal is to enact even more fantastic failures that achieve greater virality and attain godlike meme status. It is self-contradicting, as once it achieves godliness, the Sublime Cringe negates its failure and becomes uncringe. This also means that it has saved itself. It tried, and failed, and tried again, and failed again, until it finally reached Nirvana.
This is why the Sublime Cringe, whose prophets include The Horrors meme trend, ‘fail’ gameplay videos, and Molly Soda, has become an inspiration to us all. After all, if, in our condition of alienation, we cannot curb the Cringe and our failures to perform well online or in society, then the only option is to reify it, to lean in to ‘self-destructive agency’. The fact that we do so collectively makes the cringe experience sacred. The fact that Cringe is the new Cool means we’re doomed.
Thank you for reading. ૮˶ᵔᵕᵔ˶ა If you liked this post, please share it or consider subscribing.ᢉ𐭩
“The fact that Cringe is the new Cool means we’re doomed.” Haha I love this thank you for taking us on this journey of cringe sublimation and the push and pull of internet culture!