TR.BIZ: 8.6.2026

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re talking about space trash’s existential threat, the appeal of plain slogan tees, a drag duo covering Wham!, and solar panels in America.

I’ve been thinking a lot about space since reading the mid-July Guardian interview with physicist Laura Grego. This part made my palms sweat —

Rather like the race for generative AI, or in fact mutually assured destruction, the companies themselves have a momentum that creates facts before anyone has properly thought about what those facts will entail. “Commercial companies are bumping up against what they see are the restrictions on them. Like, ‘If I can’t appropriate, it’s not clear what I can do. But do we all interpret this the same way?’ And that does engender a bit of a race to the moon. You don’t want to be second. You’re not clear that you’re ready to be first, but nobody wants to be second, because there are some places on the moon which are particularly useful, that have near-perpetual sunlight and access to water, like near the south pole. You’re not allowed to claim it for your country but if you’re there building infrastructure” – which is effectively claiming it – “how do we deal with that? And if you have many powerful nuclear-armed countries trying to jostle for the same things in a distant place, that’s another place where you might spark a crisis.”

I really, really hate that, almost as much as I hate another recent development from this summer: the approval of space mirror technology, so night can be illuminated via reflections in the sky that create miles-wide flashlights. “We’ve got to get someone in here to stop this right away,” meteorologist Todd Gross explained on TikTok, pointing out that there isn’t a regulatory body ensuring things like this don’t happen. “Do you see any benefits to having the world lit up at night?” As I said a few weeks back, killing night would be killing ourselves — and environments and ecosystems too! This news gets worse, as The New York Times recently wrote at length on the rise of space trash falling to earth — and how there is no local or global regulation of what happens if property or people are harmed by this. This is key, especially as both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are adding excess junk into to the sky and crashing shit into the moon), not to mention countries like China and France. The story explains —

People are more likely to be struck by lightning than by falling space junk. The only documented case is of an Oklahoma woman who was hit by debris in the 1990s. She survived relatively unharmed. But those odds are shifting. A study for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration concluded that by 2035, debris from SpaceX satellites alone could kill or injure someone every two years.

By the way: none of this is to mention drones and satellites used for war, as we’re seeing in Russian and Ukraine. I share this not to worry us about death by falling space junk, but to become concerned with how none of this is being monitored or regulated or thought about beyond the very specific people benefitting in the short term: it’s fuck-shit-up, ask questions later mentality that hangs over from the destruction of the 20th and early 21st century — which is exactly what is happened with social media and AI, which people are trying and failing to pump the breaks on now, lest we repeat the ramifications of unchecked oil use via gas and plastics. Space is, in many ways, the “final frontier” and — while my money continues to stay on sustainability tech with a side of robots as “the future” — space wars that threaten our literal backyards are increasingly becoming a quickly approaching existential enemy brooding in the opposite corner. Is anyone going to regulate this? Is anyone protecting we regular people? Or the animals and environments that will also be harmed? Will there be a strong enough body to rise up to prevent catastrophes here, learning from our failures to tackle issues like climate change? This is another sign and signal we are speedrunning our own death and that we are in desperate need of someone or something in power to stand up to protect the whole of humanity.

I was recently gifted the viral “DO NOT TALK TO ME ABOUT AI I WILL KILL MYSELF” shirt, which I am obsessed with for obvious reasons. It also forced an obvious trend connection: these plain text tees are breaking out for the second year in a row, aren’t they? The kickoff came last year via designer Conner Ives’ “PROTECT THE DOLLS” tee. That shirt was a lo-fi echo of the 2024 resurrection of the “I TOLD YA” shirt for Challengers, which inspired a bigger trend two years later as both celebrities and designers are playing with simple statement tees with cheeky messages but have evolved to sincere political pleas. The difference is the appeal of the very basic Times New Roman, old-style serif font that seeks to blend in with its cultural pervasiveness while projecting sincerity in its mirroring documentation and legalese. In dehumanizing times, the calls to protect people from the state and tech require earnest statements that are easily legible on camera and that do not leave room for confusion, which is a small evolution from a slang-driven statement (Someone could easily confuse “dolls” for not-trans-women.) and into a direct call to action (Your interests in AI are literally murdering me.). It also plays with the idea that we are all ads — and some ads are political, some ads are for your information. I know there are several other shirts in this style that go in and out of this trend, but it says a lot that our clothing is having to plea for us because our words aren’t as powerful. Really says a lot about these times!