In that nebulous space between December 24, 2024, and January 2, 2025, I encountered a TikTok video that forced me to confront a disturbing trend: the emergence of digital mystic entrepreneurs who market themselves as cultural archivists and spiritual guides, often claiming to revive “lost” traditions that never actually died. For those of us who grew up with these supposedly “lost” traditions, watching our lived experiences being repackaged and sold back to us is both painful and alarming.
Internet users are experiencing a renaissance of interest in mysticism and folk practices across social media platforms. This process has been on the rise over the past few years, with a significant explosion of interest during the COVID-19 pandemic. During an arguably fascinating political year, the hashtag #WitchTok even surpassed #Biden by over 2 billion views by 2021. Witches garnered more attention than our swiftly evolving political situation in the United States. This increase is most marked for younger generations, especially Gen Z.
Commodifying culture
The surge in fascination with mysticism parallels two interrelated trends: a broader movement toward practices seeking spirituality and what some scholars call “workstyle migration”—a phenomenon where digital nomads increasingly blend work, travel, and often the commodification of local spiritual practices. But there’s a darker side to this trend: the misleading adoption and reproduction of stigmatized identities into marketable content by those who hold a safe, privileged distance from the realities of those with lived experience.
Deep in the Carpathian mountains of Romania—a region that was part of Hungary until 1918 and remains home to a significant Hungarian minority, my mother taught us our traditions. Doing so was an act of resistance under Ceaușescu’s brutal regime, which targeted Hungarians as a political threat. While the government banned our language, erased our history from textbooks, and systematically starved our communities, these traditions became a lifeline. Our mountain walks, where she introduced us to medicinal plants, weren’t just about healing—they were about survival. During Easter, our practice of Locsoló saw young men and boys moving from house to house with bottles of perfume, reciting ancient poems about spring and renewal. Women and girls would be gently sprayed with perfume, their laughter mixing with the scent of flowers, and in return, they would present intricately decorated eggs. These weren’t forgotten practices waiting to be “discovered”—they were living traditions that sustained our community’s identity and resistance while people disappeared from villages for daring to speak Hungarian or celebrate our customs.
The narrative being sold by WitchTok influencers—that older generations “abandoned” these practices and they need revival—is not just historically inaccurate; it’s a form of painful erasure that disempowers the very communities who fought to preserve these traditions. My cousins in Transylvania work as migrant laborers in Sweden and Germany as part of a massive economic migration—an estimated 3 to 4 million Romanians now work abroad in Western Europe, many in factories and construction sites earning minimum wage. Unable to monetize their authentic cultural knowledge, they join the ranks of Eastern European workers whose cultural heritage is commodified by others while they themselves perform manual labor for subsistence wages. This pattern mirrors other forms of privilege-based exploitation, such as Indigenous artisans whose sacred designs are copied by fast fashion brands while their communities remain in poverty or immigrant restaurant workers preparing their traditional cuisine for minimum wage while celebrity chefs profit from popularizing those same dishes. In each case, those with privilege can more easily package and profit from marginalized cultures than the communities who preserved these traditions through generations of struggle.
Monetizing and controlling information
This commodification becomes even more concerning as platforms like TikTok increasingly demonstrate their power to shape narratives and manipulate access to cultural content. The platform’s ability to control what content reaches users was starkly demonstrated during recent events, when access to TikTok became a tool of political propaganda days before the US inauguration, showing how easily cultural narratives and conversations can be amplified or suppressed at will. When platforms wield such power to orchestrate mass attention and withdrawal, the stakes for cultural representation and preservation grow even higher: those who control these algorithms effectively control whose truths gain visibility and which remain hidden.
Dr. Min-Ha T. Pham’s work on “racial plagiarism” demonstrates, taking as a case study Marc Jacobs’ 2017 fashion show, how dominant groups can exploit and devalue marginalized cultures while profiting from them. When Jacobs used dreadlocks on white models, his stylist described it as taking something “so street and so raw” and making it “sophisticated and fashionable,” effectively erasing Black cultural authorship while claiming the authority to “improve” and commodify Black traditions. The same patterns play out on social media, where dominant groups can more easily package and profit from marginalized cultures than the communities themselves.
The TikTok creator I encountered exemplifies how social media enables false claims of expertise. They declared themself an ethnographer of Transylvania—a scholarly title that implies years of academic training, research credentials, and deep regional knowledge—despite having no credentials, regional ties, or expertise. By adopting this authoritative academic title and building a following through hashtags and a website, they amassed millions of views and positioned themselves as a legitimate cultural expert. For a fee equivalent to nearly a week’s work at a German factory in Transylvania, they are giving workshops on Transylvanian coffee readings at coffee shops in Chicago. Creating a skewed, simplistic, and false understanding of Roma and Transylvanian traditions and identity is not a form of plagiarism—it is a dangerous lie offered to unsuspecting consumers of social media under the guise of a trusted authority (Transylvanian ethnographer).
People are increasingly learning about Transylvania—not from actual Transylvanian ethnographers with expertise and lived experience, who struggle for recognition, but from TikTok. Further, because of the popularity of WitchTok, this person may have undue influence. Within a few hours of posting, this video had amassed nearly 6,000 views. The problem lies not just with social media platforms but with a broader system that rewards simplified, marketable versions of cultural traditions. This is not new. According to the sociologist and cultural critic Dr. bell hooks, “Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.” This dynamic creates two intersecting forms of harm: content creators profit from the distortion of cultural practices, while platforms are able to amplify these distortions to consumers eager for digestible cultural content. This constitutes digital colonialism—the systemic extraction and commodification of marginalized cultures through digital platforms, where those with privilege can claim ownership over traditions while the original communities lose control of their own narratives. As media scholar Payal Arora argues, digital colonialism becomes increasingly dangerous as platforms’ algorithmic systems concentrate power over cultural narratives in the hands of tech companies and content creators rather than cultural communities themselves.
The economics reveal the true nature of this trend. While practitioners and scholars from these regions struggle for recognition and resources, and while over one-quarter of Romania’s population lives on less than $5.50 a day, social media entrepreneurs with the right marketing approach can tap into the multi-billion dollar “spiritual services” industry by monetizing these practices through online courses and digital products. The cruel irony is that those closest to these traditions often find them too stigmatizing to monetize effectively. The distance created by privilege becomes an asset, allowing entrepreneurs to selectively choose the most appealing aspects of a tradition while avoiding the real costs of cultural stigma.
This problem is best illustrated through the realities that many Roma people grapple with in Transylvania, and most of Europe, yet their practices are commodified by many who are associated with WitchTok. Communities in Transylvania face real consequences such as workplace discrimination, housing barriers, physical violence, and deep cultural stigma that force them to hide their traditions and identity. But within this increasing trend, white women influencers adopt mystic identities to distance themselves from “mundane whiteness” while maintaining privilege. By claiming a connection to persecuted identities—particularly those with a hint of the exotic—they can present themselves as uniquely enlightened without facing any of the real consequences that come with those identities.
Confronting digital colonialism
As social media platforms become increasingly powerful tools for shaping cultural narratives, it is crucial to recognize how digital colonialism intersects with algorithmic control. True cultural preservation happens in communities through relationships maintained not for profit but for survival. The question isn’t just about authenticity—it’s about power, privilege, and who gets to tell (and sell) cultural stories in the digital age. When someone presents themselves as uniquely positioned to “revive” traditions that never died, they’re not preserving culture—they’re participating in its commodification and the erasure of the resistance that maintained these cultures through the well-documented oppression of the past under Ceaușescu’s authoritarian regime and the concerns of the present.
As platforms enable new forms of cultural appropriation and algorithmic manipulation, there is an urgent need to recognize and resist these modern violations of cultural rights—including the right to cultural self-determination, the right of communities to maintain and develop their cultural heritage, the right to practice and transmit traditional knowledge, and the right to benefit economically from their own cultural practices. These fundamental rights, enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, are undermined when platforms amplify commodified versions of traditions while marginalizing authentic cultural voices. Protecting these rights means not just safeguarding the practices themselves but also the agency and humanity of communities who preserved these traditions through generations of struggle.