By Miao Chen

You are now looking at a Dreamcore post on RedNote, a Chinese social media platform. With the photo of an old-fashioned cake shop in the 2000s in China, the post evokes nostalgia and brings the viewer back to their millennial childhood.

Dreamcore is a post-pandemic social media genre in China. Circulated on social media, it invokes millennial themes that originally migrate from the American Y2K web culture. At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged many promises of globalization, people turn to Dreamcore for nostalgia. As if nostalgia will bring them back to the 2000s, when the economy was growing and people worldwide still believed in the global village. Chinese social media platforms, like RedNote and WeChat Channels, are prominent sites of dreamcore circulation.

A Dreamcore post combines low-resolution images of 2000s scenarios (childhood homes, school hallways, cake shops etc.) with nostalgic text and music. Dreamcore content is ephemeral: it is continually created and virally spread approximately since 2020 but is hardly ever archived. People grown up in the 2000s keep creating and consuming Dreamcore content, as Dreamcore gives them emotional console and a chance to reflect on the problematic of their time.

Difficulty of Archiving Dreamcore

In their camera-recorded conversation documented by Echographies of Television (2002), Derrida and Stiegler have heralded the short-circuiting of history by media (93): distinguishing testimony from evidence in the Western law, they see how a recorded testimony, though making the testimony stay, problematizes its distinction from evidence and short-circuits historiography. (93–95) Archiving dreamcore—media that bears testimony to a post-globalization era—therefore has historiography at stake. However, archiving Dreamcore is difficult: not only is the fair use of social media posts for archiving debatable, but also in theorizing there is a risk of damaging its uncanny ephemerality. Archiving Dreamcore challenges the uncanniness of materiality that resists capturing. Much like the fashion of Y2K, Dreamcore posts are intended to be ephemeral moments in time. They are meant to be slippery and easily overlooked. Ken Liu’s science fiction The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary (2011) provides an analogy for this difficulty: when a historian time-travels back to the scene of history to bear witness to it, he faces a danger to “consume” the past once that past is seen. (114) Liu’s sci-fi model explains a risk of consuming dreamcore’s material ephemerality.

An Experiment with Cakes

Acknowledging the uncanny ephemerality of dreamcore, I venture first to archive Dreamcake, a subgenre of dreamcore featuring fantasized Western cakes. A classic Dreamcake is crowned with fancy whipped cream and a red cherry. Its color is highly saturated, which hints at the artificial pigments. Images of Dreamcake are filtered by dazzling, fluorescent effects, making Dreamcake resemble jewelries.

While Dreamcake is stored in shabby glass cabinets in a 2000s Third-World cake shop, it nevertheless plays the metonymy of a fantasized 1970s white American girlhood. It is only to be purchased as an award for children’s good grades or birthdays by their parents. Cakes are baked to be eaten, while Dreamcake is consumed digitally. It is digitally baked and reenacts millennial children’s contemplation at a “bright future” promised for them. Such belated contemplation, however, only points a media user’s attention ruthlessly to the sugar-coating nature of a whole generation’s cake dream, a dream baked by globalization. Cakes are tangible but dream cakes speak of what is not tangible. I therefore see Dreamcake as the most ephemeral of Dreamcore ephemerality. Archiving Dreamcake best takes up the challenge of archiving Dreamcore.

Singularity of Chinese Social Media

Archiving Dreamcake requires a proper way to archive Chinese social media writ large. Echoing research on Chinese social media, it is an inquiry into “the very meaning and nature of social media” (Wang 55). Various archival frameworks also shed light on the problematic of archival practice. Embedded in archival practice is a Western anxiety for classification. In his book Archive Fever (1996), Derrida is concerned about archival practice classifying memories. In her book An Archive of Feelings (2003), Ann Cvetkovich points out a division between public and private that overlooks women and queer experiences. Judith Butler also points to how selective mourning has been performed after 911 in her book Precarious Life (2004).

In scholarly work on the English internet, platformization stands out as the major concern, most prominently in some Australian quantitative approaches to digital media culture. Kieran Hegarty emphasizes how a shifting set of rules established and enforced by platforms has significantly influenced web archiving. In their work on “#nostalgiacores”, Maria Gemma Brown et al. also deployed critical platform studies on Instagram and TikTok. Classification and platformization seem to have jeopardized archival practice in a neoliberal era, and web archiving only stands out as the worst. Does the same ring true to Chinese social media?

 I raise this question perceiving a possible singularity of Chinese social media in its potential of critique. The “Great Firewall” has demarcated the mainland internet as an arena of more than “cyber sovereignty”, but also the digital remains of socialism and patriarchy inherited from the socialist time and imperial dynasties. Speaking from my experience, such an ideological arena has long encrypted the language of the premodern literati and modern intellectuals. It is semiotics that leans towards politicization; when there is a need to politicize, such semiotics can co-opt platformization. This is an important condition of Chinese social media and Dreamcake.

Go Interactive!

Dreamcake is ephemeral. Like any culture baked by Chinese social media, Dreamcake affords a potential of critique. How do I make my archive, one that does not harm but sparkles with inspiration, does not extract but generates? This extends Derrida’s spectral archiving and takes up the Australian scholarship’s alert for platformization. I leaned towards an archive of Dreamcake that is slippery, that does not smash the cake but bakes the cake. My archive is intended to work along and against the grain, as proposed by Ann Laura Stoler in her book Along the Archival Grain (2009): this archive should keep the texture of Dreamcore posts, as they were on the social media platforms.

I turned to the interactive design learned in the film school at the University of Southern California: I designed a webpage that crafts a narrative, where myself as a researcher-artist born in the millennium was also put in it. I did a post-by-post acquisition from RedNote as much as I needed to put together a full idea of Dreamcake. For two kinds of posts that cannot get consent from RedNote users: white girlhood fantasies (cakes of Alice’s Wonderland and Barbie) and actual bakers’ advertisements, I either filled in my reenactment (also a post on my RedNote account) or made a parody. My RedNote collection, analysis and archiving have been based on 106 RedNote post collections: the first 90 were collected on November 7th 2025 between 9:30am–1:30pm GMT-7, 6 more between November 8th–17th 2025 and another 10 on November 18th. My search used “梦核蛋糕” (literally “Dreamcore cakes”) as keyword and followed these hash tagged topics:

Hash tagged Topic	Translation	View Number	Discussion Number
#生日蛋糕	Birthday cakes	6.2 billion	22.2 million
#蛋糕	Cakes	12.7 billion	34.6 million
#ins蛋糕	Instagram cakes	2.0 billion	3.8 million
#cake	Cake	251.5 million	1.1 million
#复古蛋糕	Nostalgic cakes	733.1 million	1.3 million
#老式蛋糕	Old school cakes	37.5 million	80.7 thousand

Table 1. Data collected from the RedNote on November 18th 11:37pm GMT-7

Baking a Dreamcake Memorandum

Dream cakes are partial products of algorithms. Data traffic created by Dreamcake posts is monetization, and it is usually females, professional content creators, art school students and people in 20s who created these posts. Through Dreamcake posts, these users lead an imaginary white American girlhood without paying the cruel price of white American housewife-hood that, for instance, led to Sylvia Plath’s suicide. As a critique of the neoliberal globalization in decline, Dreamcake has instantiated a politics that advocates an immediate realization of any dreams.

My IRL Dreamcake

Dreamcake was a part of my childhood myth. The Dreamcake images were so tempting that I baked the first cake in my life with a rice cooker. It was a very enchanting process; I took photos and recordings and made a vlog. Among everything auratic (Benjamin’s aura), frosting the layered cake with apple sauce from the school pantry turned out to be the most auratic part. The cake tasted just like a proletariat cake from the cake shop (not a bakery) back in the 2000s in China; but the apple sauce frosting, despite its good look, tasted sour because I did not add sugar. Much to my surprise, after sharing this vlog with my classmates in Theorizing Food, I learned that frosting is the real “proletariat” part of cakes, which “just tastes like sugar”. What is cheap? What is proletariat? What is frosting and white American girlhood all about? Mao’s “revolution is not a dinner party” seems to be reversed by a Third-World Alice’s Dreamcake.

This led me to name my archive as “Dreamcake Memorandum”. Less than a manifesto and more than a recipe, a Dreamcake memorandum reminds us to bake in whisper, tempted but cautious. It whispers a politics of balance check across borders and right-away realization of any alleged dreams. This is the politics of Third-World spectral infrastructure; it speaks of bringing infrastructure about.

“Bake it,” whispered Dreamcake, “bake your Dreamcake memorandum.”

A Dreamcake for You

And now you are very welcome to flip through this Dream Cake Memorandum. It all begins with you stopping by a dream cake shop, like mine…

https://mariahchenmiao-lgtm.github.io/dream-cake-memorandum.github.io/

 

Works Cited

Benzon, Kiki. “Interactive Practice Assignment.” CTCS 505: Survey of Interactive Media. Spring 2023, University of Southern California.

Brown, Maria Gemma, et al. “Finding the Future in Digitally Mediated Ruin: #nostalgiacores and the Algorithmic Culture of Digital Platforms.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 30(5) (2024), 1710-1731. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241270669 (Original work published 2024).

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.

Hegarty, Kieran. “Web Archives after Platformization: Reading Social Media Collections along the Archival Grain.” Information, Communication & Society, 28(12) (2025), 2175–2190. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2420033.

Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Duke University Press, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz, The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques, and Stiegler, Bernard. Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews. Translated by Jennifer Bajorek, Polity Press, 2002.

Liu, Ken. “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary,” https://kenliu.name/blog/2012/01/06/the-man-who-ended-history/.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Wang, Xinyuan. “The Social Media Landscape in China.” Social Media in Industrial China, 1st ed., vol. 6, UCL Press, 2016, pp. 25–56.

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Miao Chen is a doctoral student in the Department of East Asian Studies in the College of the Humanities at the University of Arizona.