CHEERS TO…CJ HENDRY
Cheers to CJ Hendry…or should I say, to the deeply unsettling realisation that someone can be that culturally significant, that online, that widely adored and still somehow completely miss your corner of the internet.
My feed over the weekend looked like the world’s chicest felt florist had exploded across Sydney. Everyone was posting from this giant pop-up flower market installation in The Domain with armfuls of oversized plush tulips, beautiful people frolicking amongst petals and queue lines longer than a Sydney housing inspection.
And over and over again, one account tagged: “CJ Hendry”
Reader, I had absolutely no idea who this woman was.
Not vaguely. Not “oh I’ve heard the name”
Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero. Complete blank slate.
Which became increasingly humiliating the more people replied to my Instagram story with variations of: “EMILY HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW CJ HENDRY?!?!?!?”
Reader, that is a great question.
Somehow the algorithm has kept her entirely outside my orbit for years.
Which is wild when you work in marketing. Especially when your job revolves around understanding internet culture, audience behaviour, branding and creative ecosystems. I should have encountered her accidentally at least 400 times by now.
But that’s the thing about algorithms. We talk about them like they’re these all-knowing discovery machines, perfectly serving us the world based on our interests.
But, dear Reader, increasingly they don’t expand our taste. They refine it, narrow it and they trap it.
They become incredibly efficient at feeding us more of the same until entire pockets of culture - even wildly successful ones, evidently - simply cease to exist in our version of the internet and therefore the world.
So - cheers to CJ Hendry for apparently being one of the biggest artists on the internet while remaining completely invisible to me until a giant felt flower market forced the issue 🙈
(And cheers to the algorithm for somehow hiding her this effectively from someone so chronically online in the first place)
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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