It’s become impossible to swipe through social media apps without coming across examples of content presented as racialised dystopia. Framed for British consumption, these usually take on the same visually disorienting tone — a busy local high street, two or more racialised, sociolect-speaking protagonists, and a sprinkling of mild, often innocuous, chaos. Such dramatised scenes, which would be the envy of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, are a new optical shorthand for the age-old anxiety of the decaying metropolis, threatening to infect the entire Empire with its morally wayward inhabitants and ways. Often, it’s the mere presentation of these urban sites as racially diverse cultural melting points that’s seen as self-evidentially harmful.

The reimagination of this classic genre is, precisely because of its contemporary, pixilated nature, far more explicit — and therefore potentially convincing — to audiences in our present, ahistorical context. These cultivated assaults on our feeds act as a kind of inverted Pinterest, scrapbooking all of society’s most undesirable — or in this case, supposedly mildly irritating — quirks. And this trend, which initially fixated on what was seen as the inevitable and highly condemnable result of British liberalism, has gone international.

America has its own metro-centred, rat-heavy version of these based on Mamdani’s New York. Canada, consistent with its more jovial reputation, has a less coherent digital narrative that switches between exaggerated footage of immigrant communities and their own unique and admittedly caricaturist Toronto youth-speak. In the case of the UK, it is, naturally, London Town — the erstwhile site of The Great Smog — that is the most common subject of such populist ire and ridicule, though Birmingham, Bradford and other multiethnic areas are subject to it too. Such videos often depict suburban outposts, away from the seemingly more refined centre, where a heady mixture of slightly dishevelled, chicken-shop-dominated local backdrops, urbanisms, and ethnic minority communities are enough to present as totemic of civilisational decline. Of course, it is the UK in particular which is held up as a kind of warning of the extent of social decay that can occur through ‘open borders’.

Typical of digital culture, this now familiar aesthetic has its own term: ‘Yookay’, to reflect the global weight these Isles hold in this genre of contempt. In its current use, Yookay disdainfully refers specifically to black and Muslim British culture, and its contemporary use, in another digitally predictable way, is nebulously attributed to 4Chan users in 2003 (isn’t everything?).

Tellingly, this neologism has a previous life, in the work of Marxist theorist Raymond Williams, for whom it took a totally different meaning. Along with Tom Nairn’s less popularised ‘UKania’, both monikers were used to critique the British state from its Celtic fringes, at the tail end of Britain’s imperial influence. In a sign of increasingly abject economic times, it is no wonder this criticism has bifurcated from punching up to punching decidedly down, at immigrant and working-class communities, as it has. A natural evolution from the ‘chav’ laden pejoratives of the noughties, and the more recent neologism of ‘Londinistan’, these newly coined terms crystallise increasingly right-wing sentiments and pessimistic attitudes towards both Britain’s current destination, and its much contested future — based on their increasingly racialised, and economically disadvantaged, demographics.

‘Yookay’ as it’s now used is a rare contemporary example of the ‘eye-dialect’, defined as a deliberate use of non-standard spelling, which in this case, portrays a use of ‘low-status’ language; it mimics urban pidgin English pronunciation of the UK, poignantly, with prolonged emphasis on the U. According to the academic George Philip who devised the term, eye-dialects are literary devices: ‘a friendly nudge to the reader… which establishes a sympathetic sense of superiority between the author and reader as contrasted with the humble speaker of dialect.’ Consistent with most forms of language snobbery, which are particularly cutting in how they wield the tool of official language to malign the linguistically dispossessed, the expression references another racial trope: the inarticulate outlier, this time projected on black and Muslim communities. In the post-literate world, where the hierarchy is not between the lettered and unlettered, the term loses some of its potency. Its contextual and phonetic structure is also unique for its time — born from the crevices of the internet, it is indiscernible in oral expression; certainly one would have to be fully entrenched in internet lore to recognise the auditory reference of it. Its power lies in its ironic use online, where far-right sentiment germinates and spreads.

It is nonetheless a term that acts as an acute zeitgeist of attitudes towards multiculturalism and what was once tellingly deemed British ‘tolerance’ — a point of national pride. From multiculturalism’s very inception in the Blair era, to its apparent death knell (the Boris-wave), the sentiments behind derogatory coinage and the use of the term ‘Yookay’ document the falling out of love with the multi-ethnic epicentre of a bygone Empire: a feeling which appeared to climax in 2024’s explosive race riots. The terms’ singling out of black and Muslim communities, amongst the most economically deprived in the country, exemplify the complexities in how we perceive the overlap of race and class. While ethnic minority communities face additional structural disadvantages on the basis of race, they are also seen through a classless, vilifying lens. This is why debates concerning inequality erroneously focus on immigration. Many commentators hold a convenient blind spot which both otherises and excludes racialised communities, despite the common fight working-class groups possess, across the board.

The Yookay genre of post-irony content sits in the same vein as other online iterations, including the almost comically surreal AI-generated images of Muslim and racially dominated British spaces, complete with the contrived juxtaposition of prayer hats and union jacks. These pictures expose a kind of fever dream of racist sentiment that betrays the inconsistent and frantic thinking that belies such disdain towards immigrant and racialised communities, specifically at a time of falling birth rates, an ageing population, and a clear statistical decline in crime. In fact, the true question lies in why the second half of the acronym is left unscrutinised, despite the royal institution recently falling into such disrepute.

In the same way, such racist slurs used against any given demonised group are often refashioned and reclaimed by those very communities; there is a knowing, self-referential turn in the documented use of the term ‘Yookay’ online. Indeed, it is unclear where the unofficial mascot for this aesthetic, the self-titled X account, stands. On recent perusal, the account’s feed includes an eclectic mix of TikTok deconstructions of white supremacy, imagery of the repeatedly referenced multilingual tube station sign, and promotional reel footage of South Asian restaurants. They are posted without comment and possess a uniquely indecipherable standing; it is entirely unclear if the curator of the account is disdainful, tongue-in-cheek, rage-baiting, or simply documenting. What is clear is that the defining thread of this catalogue of media — contemporary British culture — is interpreted in multiple, often opposing ways on the ‘splinternet’. As in-group signalling for those on both ends of the divide, those whose culture it seemingly depicts, and those who feel vehemently and possessively, it is not their culture depicted. Because of the way ‘Yookay’ is used as a catch-all term, attached to any content which depicts non-white British, working-class culture, it reinforces racist sentiment which denigrates other cultures based on them simply existing.

The mystery surrounding the account has only deepened since X introduced a feature that identifies the geographical location of users. The function has exposed a potential link between the eponymous account and South America. If it is a part of a growing movement outside of the UK, designed to profit off racial tensions, then it would not only explain the disjointed content it pushes —‘woke’ and ‘ethnic’ being the two broad determiners — but also underscore how easily the flames of racism are stoked in Britain: such innocuous content is so inflammatory. In a twist of irony, another potentially pro-British, anti-immigrant account may not be so British as we might have thought.

Yookay culture, its aesthetic, and the competing tug of war over its use, reflects a country labouring to come to terms with its present. Its very existence as terminology betrays part of the time-honoured cannon of idealising a fictitious past, and projecting the concerns that it is not brave enough to deal with on society’s most undesirable, an economic underclass maligned through racialised characteristics. Its very evolution as a term (originally used to critique the powerful, and later turned inward to further marginalise the most economically disadvantaged) is certainly reflective of the change in political sentiment in the UK. The very questioning of our unity, rather than those that claim to preside over us, is itself a damning indictment of where populist thinking has got us. It should, in fact, present a vehicle for us to interrogate those inconsistencies — by pivoting our attention back to those at the top who often stoke differences, ‘yoonited’ under a revisited Kingdom.