Signs of the 'New Ugly'

My coffee brews with a hollow hiss. Steam curls upward like it’s trying to escape. I scroll while I wait – art, memes, otters, then war, sex, therapy, deepfakes, burning cities, dancers under purple lights. 

Memes blur by, DMs pile up. The coffee’s still not done. My phone pulses with life, unlike the tax reports on my table. I don’t want to be an adult today. I’m numb, restless. Something cuts through: a FaceTime call. A woman making breakfast looks straight at me. For a second, I feel seen. Less alone. Then her head twists. She wheezes like a kettle. It’s AI.

Just another Tuesday. But I feel dislocated. I sip my coffee. It’s bitter. Is this what ugly feels like now?

An Ugly Conception

Historically, ugly has always been a warning. The word itself comes from uggligr, Old Norse for “to be feared”. It signals threat – like rotten fruit, a sign of disease or disorder. Ugliness evolved with us as a protective mechanism: don’t touch, don’t eat, don’t trust.

Today, however, our environments are climate-controlled, and most threats are invisible. Data leaks, burnout and misinformation have replaced tigers and toxins. Ugly no longer breathes in the skin but in the feed. In curated stories revealing realities we most likely won’t experience, yet our brain does not discern.

We scroll past genocide, brunch, trauma-core memes – and rarely flinch. Ugly is no longer in the flesh but in the blur. In the eeriness of not knowing what’s real – or worse, no longer caring about it. The new ugly focus less on the form of things but on depraving our suspicions.

The Desensitised Self

There’s no time to metabolise anymore. In a few minutes, we’ve seen more than what a Victorian experienced in a lifetime. Culture offers everything, everywhere, all at once. Our bodies, untrained for this volume, quietly collapse.

Content moderation is a job that breaks people. But we do it 24/7, unpaid. We screenshot, forward, heart-react, as if connection costs fatigue, until something ugly finally makes us stop – or it doesn’t. ChatGPT-Induced Psychosis is one name for this: a rising attachment to chatbots that always seem to find meaning (and correlation between the unrelated) amplifying doubt and false certainty in seconds.

Our waking is steeped in constant rejection: denied desires, unmet expectations, the quiet ache of the ordinary no. So when a charming, frictionless device offers a reality where everything bends toward our preference, the fantasy of a perpetually simple life – full of yes – becomes intoxicating.

In this landscape, the new ugly is less an aesthetic and more a fracture that lets the body know something’s off, but quickly becomes a green light for more engagement. And so we’re fed more of it. We scroll faster, feel less and perform more to remind ourselves we’re still made of nerve.

Ugly as Control

Hyper-curated and surveillance-soaked, the expositive nature of the ugly is now trend-mined, rebranded and sold back to us. Uncanny perfection, reverse-aging, looksmaxxing, ozempic and pre-teens on retinol are current strategies for legibility. 

As SEED CLUB’s Allison Fonder noted: “Not fitting in means being overlooked, potentially broke and lonely.”  Taste, symmetry and sharp angles are a currency. “Bone smashing” is succeeding and looking “ugly” by choice is subversive only if you can afford to opt out.

Beauty has become a weapon. It confers status, access and protection in a world increasingly governed by appearances. In economic instability, beauty is a form of control. To be ugly is to be vulnerable. To be less seen. Even resistance becomes stylised. Ugliness, rebranded, becomes another niche aesthetic.

Ugly Intimacy

We’re watching people fall apart while waiting for their cues. Secrecy doesn’t stand a chance anymore. Private life has become a currency, traded for visibility and acceptance. Cars, bathrooms, and stairwells turn into confession booths – in-between spaces where people are either watched through a device or livestream what they can’t say at home or hold in at work.

We’re not sure if we’re being seen, or performing visibility itself. Even these moments of collapse know they’re being watched. Like a kiss-cam for breakdowns, the lens demands intimacy, even when it claims to be off-guard. It’s ugly because it reminds us there was once a time when our shadow didn’t have an audience.

Ugly as Pause

Ugly used to be what we turned away from. But now, sometimes, it’s what we reach for comfort. The ugly leaves us with texture. It reminds us we’re still made of nerves. That in the insipidity of it all, we can still be startled. That we can still feel. 

Beyond all technological breakthroughs, we still crave something we can’t explain. Maybe that’s why we’re drawn to distortion, grain, decay – the hyper-something. To soothe the repressed, animal part of being human.

We swipe up like a casino game, palming the shadow until it spills into quiet DMs filled with dark jokes. Pressing against the sharp edge of something triggering, just to feel something real at 1am, while the world pretends to sleep.

Ugly in Art and Media

Art has always been where the ugly finds sanctuary. But even here the boundaries have started to blur. There’s a familiar cycle at play: things shock us, then seduce us, then slide into the mainstream; and a shocking comeback starts the cycle.

Take Matières Fécales – a performance duo once censored for their grotesque, body-based work, now embraced by the fashion world to explore a state of being absorbed into couture. Or Fever Ray, whose ever-shifting, off-kilter personas push emotional and gender expression beyond tidy categories. Both are provocations that carve out space for new human truths.

So what’s the new normal?

There are two poles worth observing. On one side: artists who push the unsettling toward possibility. Many now wield AI and hyperreal tools to stage moments that feel almost real – FaceTime call simulations, fake CCTV angles, YouTube compression artifacts. These works bend perception into something eerily intimate. A kind of meme-realism that our brains register as familiar, even when the content is absurd.

As Agnieszka Antkowiak has noted, this space sits “somewhere between art-making and art-criticism”, a hybrid zone where affect moves faster than meaning. And because we’ve been trained to treat surveillance footage as neutral or truthful, these aesthetic choices carry the weight of fact.

And that’s the twist: the new ugly simulates reality so convincingly that we believe it until we’re fooled. Then we comment, share, flinch and desire more. Ugliness becomes viral, which now means beautiful. It ruptures expectation, and in that rupture, we feel awake.

On the other side: the hollow echo. Ugly reduced to pastiche. Here, the provocation is simply posturing. Sampling of sampling. Aestheticised rebellion that says nothing new. Basquiat clones painted for coffee-table impact. Another “something-core”. JoJo Siwa twisting a nursery rhyme into a trauma-pop anthem that seems aimed at no one in particular. This kind of ugly is a diluted costume packaged for engagement. Performative rebellion curated for the algorithm. When anything can be aestheticised, even the ugly becomes a branding tool.

Taxonomy of the New Ugly

Hellraiser doesn’t scare us anymore, but Labubus reselling online for $700 do. AI Sycophancy, overconsumption trends and some other cultural tremors reveal deeper discontents. Signs include:

Permission to be Ugly

Where does that leave us? Is there still space to be truly unprocessed, unoptimised, unwatchable – without it becoming content? In a culture where beauty is currency and vulnerability is capital, maybe ugliness offers a new kind of refuge. A place where algorithms falter. The new ugly, post-rupture, offers air – a pause from the seamless spectacle. Maybe it’s just about opting out, if only for a moment. Simply to exist.

Lessons in Ugly

The old ugly shielded us from contagion; the new ugly protects us from delusion. It reminds us that not everything can be sold — nor should it be. Sensorial provocation becomes a kind of numbing. The new ugly surfaces where reality is denied and emotion is flattened. It’s an alarm bell when stories become too smooth to trust. Its dissonance jolts us – the gut flinch, the brain sensing that something’s off, that we’ve slipped into another state of awareness, half-asleep. The new ugly isn’t here to scare us. It’s here to wake us up.