Surreal celeb turns and creeping surveillance: Goodbye 2025’s endless bummer

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August is one of the most intense months of the year. It spans the middle of summer and the end of summer; the lager-soaked delirium of long days, scorched grass and the Jet2holidays jingle, and the washed-out nostalgia as the calendar begins to turn its page to the season of change, legacy TV, and American Football’s first album. It’s an emotional spin cycle. Rapture, chaos, relief, grief, and a major bank holiday weekend all contained within 31 tumultuous days. On top of that summer 2025 has been, in the enduring words of Santana featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty, ​“a hot one.” Droughts sweeping across North America; a wildfire in the French department of Aude that grew to the size of Paris; heat across Europe more blinding than Ibiza Final Boss’s veneers. It’s been so dry for so long in London that the trees have dropped half their leaves to conserve water, and the ground at All Points East kicked up enough dust to rival Burning Man’s ​‘Orgy Dome’. Goodbye Iced Matcha Labubu Dubai Chocolate Summer, we hardly knew you.

This intensity has been reflected in the cultural miasma, too. There have been strange goings on in high profile, formerly ​“blog-era coded” circles. For instance, Justin Bieber appears to have completed the final stage of his dirtbag transformation and is now just relentlessly posting thirst traps and day-in-the-life-of flexes like a girl with a mysterious source of income. Having reanimated his critical darling status with a new Mk.gee-produced album and completing his first year of fatherhood, Bieber is maturing like an original pair of Levi’s. More lived in, more beat up, found in all pockets of society. This funny lad on Reels, Josh Pray, described him as entering his ​“unahuman era,” which is when someone acquires the ability to ​“move about communities with absolutely no problem,” fitting in everywhere from the cookout to the Costco counter. Stan Twitter is obsessed with the idea of him crashing out and harbouring ill-will towards his wife, but it seems to me that he’s simply continuing to enjoy the fruits of his freedom after an ascent riddled with control and exploitation, which isn’t the worst trajectory for a child star. If he wants to upload a collage of himself ripping a bong in sliders or publish eight different grid posts rubber ringing down a river like a Louisiana meth dealer, allow him. Looks like he’s having a perfectly swaggy summer.

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I’ll tell you who is not having a swaggy summer, however, is Lana Del Rey. The queen of Americana has undergone some life changes since her last album, 2023’s Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. She got married to an alligator swamp boat captain, got in trouble for taking a selfie in a white bow dress holding a gun after the 2024 Grammys (where she lost – quite funny tbf), and has dropped a very noticeable amount of weight. She’s also had a new album in the works for a while, which promises to be a country affair called ​‘Stove’ (previous titles include ​‘Lasso’ and ​‘The Right Person Will Stay’). All signs have been pointing to a vibe shift, but the vibe that has been materialising recently is, I have to say, not looking great.

In mid-August, Lana shared a snippet from a new song on Instagram – a(nother) floaty Jack Antonoff-produced piano ballad that opens with the lyric ​“Ethel Cain hated my Instagram post.” It goes on to reference ​“the most famous girl at the Waffle House” (a headline The New York Times gave a profile of Ethel Cain in 2022), as well as similar photos both artists have taken with Salem’s Jack Donoghue (friend of Ethel’s, ex-lover of Lana’s). There appear to have been some catty remarks thrown around privately in both directions, though overall I’d say it’s fairly undignified for a 40-year-old legacy star to be mining three-year-old gossip with a much younger artist for material for an argument. These seem like the movements of a drunk aunt at Christmas, which isn’t helped by the drama being immediately followed by a W Magazine cover shoot that has her looking like she pushed a child out of a lifeboat on the Titanic.

Hours after the track teaser dropped, Ethel Cain posted an Instagram story saying ​“Lana Del Rey has blocked Ethel Cain on Instagram” and hasn’t mentioned it since. Jack Donoghue, for his part, has contributed a photo of himself topless in the woods wearing a pair of boxing wraps. We can only hope that Stove doesn’t lean full tilt into a 1960s Valium housewife with her meat in jelly and her head in the oven aesthetic with no hint of camp, but it does seem like that’s where we could be headed. More updates as they come.

Unfortunately, we will take a moment here to acknowledge the elephant in the room: Sydney Sweeney’s jeans. I can barely bring myself to engage with this controversy without wanting to take a nice long soak in the bath with an air fryer, but to summarise: Sydney Sweeney did an ad campaign with American Eagle. The tagline is ​“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” – a cheeky pun related to the actress being, quite famously, hot. Ten years ago something like this would have barely registered on the ​‘items of international importance’ scale, but things being as dumb as they are, it’s still acting as discourse fodder a month later. Commentators on one side of the fence are arguing that it’s ​“imbued with eugenic messaging” while commentators on the other are praising it as the end of ​“woke advertising.” The former feels overblown, the latter delusional. 

Sweeney – or, to be more specific, Sweeney’s body – has repeatedly been used as a battleground for the culture wars. Now, Sweeney is not a political figure and never has been (though public records suggest she is registered as a Republican in Florida). Regardless, people feel comfortable projecting their opinions and pathologies regarding everything from racial equality to women’s role in society onto her simply because she’s a cute blonde with big boobs. That is extremely weird. It’s mostly being driven by the political right (who fell over themselves last year to describe the mere presence of her cleavage on SNL as ​“double‑D harbingers of the death of woke”), but it’s not helped by academics and hysterics taking the bait either. Could American Eagle have issued a statement of apology? Maybe, but the charges – smuggling Mein Kampf in through the backdoor essentially – are simply too insane. Also, their stock price went up 23%, so as far as they’re concerned it’s a job well done. Meanwhile this poor woman (though I’m sure she got paid handsomely) cannot leave the house without being celebrated for / accused of dismantling the rights of an entire group of people. That seems like a bigger issue than a corporate clothing brand running with a tagline that only feels off-colour because of discourse manufactured by right-wing freaks in the first place. Everyone be less stupid, please.

Anyway, in actually serious news, one of the biggest issues of the summer in the UK has been surveillance technology. July’s newsletter covered the introduction of the new Online Safety Act, which aims to protect child users from ​“harmful” content by requiring age verification on certain websites, but has mostly resulted in a massive spike in VPN sales and people not being able to go on the Sims 4 subReddit. But an equally big problem that has come to a head this month is The Met Police’s use of live facial recognition technology, which maps a person’s unique facial features and matches them against faces on criminal watch-lists. 

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This technology is currently being used without any legislative oversight, and obviously raises massive issues around privacy. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has said that The Met’s use of live facial recognition falls short of regulatory standards, and is therefore unlawful. The EHRC has also been given permission to intervene in an ongoing legal challenge brought by Shaun Thompson, an anti-knife crime community worker who was wrongly identified as a suspect by live facial recognition technology. The civil liberties and privacy campaign organisation Big Brother Watch welcomed the intervention. ​“The rapid proliferation of invasive live facial recognition technology without any legislation governing its use is one of the most pressing human rights concerns in the UK today,” said Interim Director Rebecca Vincent, adding that ​“the Home Office and police’s investment in this dangerous and discriminatory technology is wholly inappropriate and must stop.”

In spite of this, the Met doubled down on their stance and liberally rolled out live facial recognition technology throughout August. An operation was conducted outside Brixton tube station on August 12, presumably as a precursor to the massive amount of cameras rolled out for Notting Hill carnival this weekend just gone (which also saw the Met deploy a dedicated drone team for thermal imaging). The Met also bragged that ​“there’s only been eight” facial recognition misidentifications so far in 2025. To be clear: that’s eight innocent people having their nerves shattered and lives upended by being falsely accused of criminal activity by unregulated AI surveillance technology. Nice one lads, sounds awesome. I feel safer already!

Emma Garland is a freelance writer and former digital editor of Huck. Follow her on Bluesky.

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