Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a lot of people complaining that the internet is no longer fun. There are plenty of reasons to justify that position and it’s hard to argue against them: increased censorship, oversaturation of AI slop and bots, hard-right hijacking of any and all discourse, endless ads and trends, and the almighty algorithm’s tendency towards toxicity. It’s terrifying, yes, but there’s also an undeniable tedium to it all. It’s not just that things are scary; it’s that they’re inane and repetitive and kind of inexplicable. Case in point: Labubu Crumbl Dubai Chocolate. The final boss of late-stage capitalism is stupid as hell. Was it ever going to be anything else?
But first, a few explanations as to what all of these things are, because some of us are over the age of 21 and have limited space in our brains for this stuff.
Labubus are a brand of plush collectibles released by the Chinese retailer Pop Mart. They’re like fuzzy elves with big eyes and sharp teeth. While they’ve been around for a while, they exploded in popularity over this past year, partly because Blackpink singer Lisa was spotted with one on her keychain. Pop Mart has currently released about 300 different Labubus. They’ve done multiple big-name brand tie-ins and collaborations, including with Coca-Cola and the anime One Piece. Demand has grown so high for them that fake versions, nicknamed Lafufus, have flooded the market. What differentiates Labubus from other trinkets and fads of a similar vein, like Beanie Babies, is that they’re sold in blind boxes. You don’t know which one you’re getting until you open it. So, it’s not just tat: it’s gambling.
Crumbl is a cookie brand known for its ultra-rich and high-calorie varieties that seem to be everywhere on social media. They experienced rapid growth on sites like TikTok in the years following lockdown, as well as speedy franchise expansion. By July 2025, the company had over 1,000 locations across the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. They remain focused on influencer-based advertising and recently collaborated with the Kardashian family for a special line of treats.
Dubai chocolate is the general name given to chocolate bars filled with pistachio-tahini cream and kadayif (shredded filo pastry.) It was invented in 2021 by Sarah Hamouda, a Dubai-based engineer who was craving something specific during her pregnancy. It became a product you could buy in 2022 from the online shop Fix Dessert Chocolatier. The bars are made by hand and in limited amounts. You can only buy the original ones in very specific places, but because social media virality made it the must-have treat of the moment, every candy company began creating its own version of Dubai chocolate (the recipe is not trademarked but there are issues around use of the name.)
Everybody got that?
The “labubu crumble dubai chocolate” meme is, evidently, an irony-poisoned shibboleth that is mocking the trend, but it’s also part of the consumption cycle. It’s adopted by brands and influencers alike to keep the fad going, to drive it into newer and more ludicrous heights. Everyone shows they’re in on the joke by semi-seriously engaging in the rot, whether it’s through Dubai chocolate mukbangs involving increasingly ludicrous sizes of bars or unboxing dozens of Labubus at once (or making a Dubai chocolate Labubu, a sentence that makes me feel 200 years old when I type it out.) Corporations latch onto it, turning hyper-consumption into a way of life that nobody can escape from. It’s meant to be a joke, a maximalist self-reference we all laugh at, but how does that work when you’re still participating in it? The gag doesn’t work if you’re doing the thing you’re meant to be mocking. Such is the horror of brainrot capitalism.
In general, capitalism is designed to beat the dead horse to dust. Everything you liked will eventually become insufferable, but not before it’s been milked dry and oversaturated every aspect of the market and your life. This isn’t a new concept. We were all there for the Beanie Baby craze. What feels different now is the sheer speed of the process. Social media and the brainrot era has hugely accelerated the progression, forcing it all down our throats at record rates. Think of how quickly a woman making a d*ck-sucking joke on a TikTok turned into a crypto scam. It’s not just that the consumption cycle will devour everything; it’s that we’re expected to jump onto the profit wagon as soon as possible. Get your bag by any means.
And, of course, the dark side of these products must go unchecked: Crumbl’s child labour violations, the exploitative market of bootleg creations, drop-shippers and scammers, oversaturation, and over-farming. The drastic increase in popularity of these things has also impacted their quality. Crumbl fans have complained frequently about how the cookies aren’t as good as they used to be. Labubus are the latest thing kids are bullying one another over on the playground, and the blind box system of sales is clearly a gamified decision to encourage irresponsible purchases from impressionable young fans.
There are plenty of recent fads we could include in the brainrot era of overconsumption. We had the Stanley Cup craze, where people got into literal fights over tumblers and began collecting dozens of an item that was designed to be used for a lifetime and reduce waste. There are the pumpkin spice flavours that become a seasonal craze, or Drunk Elephant skincare products that were obsessed over by tweens, or Lululemon leggings, or even cosmetic surgery trends such as buccal fat removal or BBLs. Algorithmically driven social media pushes it all to the forefront of our minds because popularity is a snake eating its own tail. It feels like everyone is doing or buying something, and even though we know that’s statistically impossible, you become worn down by its unquestioned omnipresence. You see the same handful of people getting rich off it while everyone else scrambles to keep up or cash in. The joy feels artificial. The purpose is unknowable. Why do it all? Because what else is there?
And the consumption is the aesthetic. Think of how many influencers you’ve seen on your feeds who have garnered millions of likes from unboxing products or collecting shelf after shelf of the same thing. It’s an overwhelming glut of content created from purchases that seek to glamourise mundanities and make them aspirational. It’s not special to own lots of make-up but showing off the untold thousands of dollars you’ve spent on hauls and organizing it as though they’re Faberge eggs is the new status symbol. Everything is a product, even a meme.
Overconsumption, perhaps ironically, feels like a major recession indicator. We cope through our purchases because our options have dwindled so spectacularly in such a short amount of time. It wasn’t that long ago that millennials were chastised for buying avocado toast instead of saving for a mortgage, but the attitude is the same. We know that many of us will never have financial security. We’ll never have our own home or a sturdy pension to retire on at a reasonable age. Wages stagnate while inflation goes up. So, when we have a few dollars to treat ourselves, why wouldn’t we say ‘f*ck it’ and buy the cookie or chocolate bar? Why not enjoy the brief dopamine hit of spending $40 on a box and finding out what’s inside? The world’s ending, so treat yourself. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of these brainrot trends are rooted in nostalgia or evoking a childlike sensation in consumers.
But irony can only offer so much of a distance from the sheer brain-melting nightmare of capitalism. You can only tweet so many times that you’re ‘lol obsessed’ with the dumb thing before you’re simply a fan of it. And it will stop being cool and satisfying quicker than you expect it to. The Stanley cups are already filling up charity shops. Eventually, the Labubus will be next to them. Brainrot demands more and more slop. It needs more mini hits of dopamine to survive, even though it’s systematically designed to offer increasingly unsatisfying results. It’s meant to be used up quicker, to be discarded, and to be as cheaply manufactured as possible. The performance needs players to survive, and it doesn’t care if they’re doing it ironically.