The Digital Evolution of the Culture Vulture

A dance goes viral on TikTok. Within hours, it’s everywhere: on influencers’ feeds, in brand campaigns, in compilation videos that rack up millions of views. It is instantly recognisable. The person who created it is not. When that creator is Black, they are even more likely to disappear entirely.

At the centre of this dynamic is the “culture vulture”, a figure who appropriates the characteristics, mannerisms, and cultural expressions of another ethnic or social group to construct a commodifiable identity.

While this is usually framed as a failure of credit, the digital landscape we now live in makes this narrative too simple. Where in the early stages of the digital age the issue could be attributed to inconsistent credit, the problem now is that digital culture itself does not prioritise origin in the first place.

Cultural appropriation, in its earlier form, was something visibly borrowed or adopted by someone else, often a celebrity, who would take something as their own and profit from it, while those at the margins were dismissed or overlooked, hence the word “appropriate.” Take Khloé Kardashian’s boxer braids as an example. The same cornrows that were once deemed inappropriate on Black women in certain social settings became acceptable, even desirable, when rebranded on a different body.

In this sense, the “culture vulture” was once identifiable because it had a face. Yet online, appropriation no longer depends on individuals alone. It is embedded within the system itself, where, in an algorithm-driven environment, culture becomes something like an ultra-processed product: stripped of its origin, optimised for consumption, and redistributed according to what generates the highest engagement.

Black culture, central to global popular culture, becomes particularly vulnerable to this. It generates engagement,but in the process, it is often detached from those who produce it.

To understand what has changed, it helps to look at how culture used to circulate. Appropriation, while exploitative, was often traceable: it moved through identifiable industries, mediated by gatekeepers, and unfolded in discernible moments where culture was taken, repackaged, and sold. Aesthetic changes could be mapped: from the subculture up until the celebrity. The line of transmission, though unequal, could still be followed. 

Digital platforms collapse that process. Algorithms prioritise what is repeatable and engaging. A style becomes a trend. In this environment, authorship becomes unstable.

New-school social media and its culture of short-form content makes this visible. Black creators frequently spark trends that rapidly spread across platforms. While, arguably, the digitilisation of Black creativity has allowed it to bear witness to its largest audiences, aided by greater visibility, this algorithmic advantage has also opened up Black culture to a more menacing vulnerability. The more it circulates, the less attached it becomes to its source.

The same logic applies to the ways in which language and humour have evolved in the digital age. Meme culture relies heavily on Black expressive forms, from AAVE to reaction images to distinct styles of delivery - tone, timing, cadence, and gesture.

It becomes a kind of digital blackface, where non-Black users perform Blackness as a communicative style, detached from lived experience.

Repost accounts accelerate this detachment. Tweets and videos are reuploaded without attribution, generating engagement and, in many cases, revenue.

What makes this even more unsettling is when it moves beyond human interaction altogether. When something appears to be created from nothing, and the system itself becomes both the author and beneficiary of its own circulation.

Specific instances, like the AI rapper FN Meka reveal how cultural production can be absorbed at an even deeper level. Marketed as a Black cyborg artist, FN Meka was built drawing heavily from the aesthetics of Black musicians, synthesising several patterns, extending imitation beyond its traditional limits. The backlash against the project, particularly around its reliance on racialised stereotypes, and its detachment from the lived realities of the culture it mimicked, makes clear the issue at hand: black creativity becoming simply an input to be processed, then regurgitated without reference to origin. 

While it would be easy to treat this as an isolated incident, a pattern emerges. Culture circulates widely, generates value, and produces visibility. But the relationship between that value and the people who create it becomes increasingly tenuous.

It becomes an infrastructural issue.

If digital platforms enable the rapid spread of culture, they also enable the separation of cultural expression from the people who produce it. Blackness becomes something that can be performed without requiring engagement with Black life itself.

“They want our rhythm but not our blues” feels familiar because the pattern is not new. What has changed is the scale at which it operates. Online, Blackness is reduced to tone, gesture, humour, and aesthetic. It becomes a set of signals, easily adopted and endlessly replicated without accountability.

Digital blackface makes this explicit. Reaction GIFs, linguistic patterns, and performative expressions allow users to inhabit Blackness as a kind of emotional shorthand.

Culture becomes something that exists independently of the people who created it.

But that independence is an illusion. It is sustained by systems - namely the algorithms created by the owners of social media platforms that favour a specific demographic, and also the users who consume  such content - that extract, reorganise, and redistribute cultural production while obscuring its origins.

With AI, this conversation has taken on new urgency. As generative systems begin to replicate not only Black cultural production but also the work of commercially dominant artists, concerns around authorship, copyright, and creative labour have expanded. What was once treated as a marginal issue is now being taken seriously, as the same mechanisms of extraction begin to affect those who previously benefited from them. This shift is evident in recent legal and political interventions, such as FKA twigs’ testimony before a US Senates subcommittee, where she revealed she had developed her own AI deepfake to maintain control over her likeness.

The question, then, is not simply who is appropriating culture. It is whether ownership can survive under conditions of constant circulation.

In a system that rewards speed, replication, and engagement, attribution becomes fragile. Credit is easy to lose and difficult to enforce. Value flows toward those who are most visible, not necessarily those whose ideas the trend originates from.

This raises a deeper tension. Cultural production has always been shared, adapted, and reinterpreted,but digital platforms accelerate this process to the point where origin itself becomes unstable. When culture travels faster than credit, ownership becomes harder to define.

The culture vulture, in this sense, is no longer a person who takes. It is a system that distributes without remembering where something came from.

We are used to thinking about appropriation as an act: someone takes something that does not belong to them. However, in this digital economy, appropriation is less an action than a condition.

Black culture continues to shape the internet; it remains central, influential, and widely consumed. Yet, influence does not guarantee ownership, and visibility does not guarantee recognition.

The problem is no longer just who is stealing culture. It is whether a system built on circulation can sustain the idea of cultural ownership at all.