Final evening, SNL weighed in on a contemporary annual ceremony: taking inventory of the previous 12 months by data-driven retrospective lists. However the standard train in mapping one’s consumption patterns quickly reworked into an uncomfortably actual humiliation ritual.
The commercial spoof started innocuously, introducing the 2025 version of Spotify “Wrapped”—the streaming service’s widespread year-in-review characteristic that repackages knowledge gathered from particular person listeners into brightly hued, shareable statistics—which the present additionally tackled final 12 months. When Spotify revealed to Andrew Dismukes’s character that he’d jammed to 2,705 minutes of Steely Dan since January, his character smiled knowingly: “Yeah, that tracks.” In her position, Ashley Padilla was equally thrilled to be taught that she’d listened to sufficient Sabrina Carpenter in 2025 to be one of many pop singer’s prime international listeners.
Then, the commercial launched a special manner of measuring “who you really had been this 12 months,” because the voice-over cheerily proclaimed: “Uber Eats ‘Wrapped.’” When individuals had been confronted with a glance again on the meals orders they’d positioned, the temper immediately curdled. “Oh, no. No, thanks,” frowned Ben Marshall’s character. Within the sketch, the food-focused “Wrapped” (which doesn’t at present exist in actual life) used related techniques as Spotify, crunching numbers to point out customers which particular meals objects had them in a “chokehold” over the previous 12 months. “I simply don’t like that and don’t need that,” mentioned Dismukes, incredulous that he’d apparently eaten extra hen nuggets than 99 % of customers worldwide.
The horrors escalated from there. Primarily based on an individual’s order historical past, the service’s knowledge workforce additionally calculated one’s Uber Eats age—a riff on Spotify’s new, controversial “listening age” metric, which cheekily tells listeners how their music style skews age-wise: “My prime meals was churros, and my Uber Eats age is ‘Lifeless’?” requested a stupefied man performed by James Austin Johnson. Worse, the service additionally tallied up precisely how a lot one spent on supply that 12 months, presenting individuals with ragged images of themselves selecting up their meals from supply drivers’ automobile home windows and their very own doorstep. Upon realizing that he’d spent $24,000 on Uber Eats, Marshall’s character merely screamed right into a pillow.
Spotify Wrapped has been a success for the platform; this 12 months’s record-breaking version reached 250 million impressions in simply three days. Listeners have continued to share their stats advert nauseam on-line within the decade because the service debuted its year-end metrics. The annual characteristic’s reputation keys into cultural fixations with optimization and “maxxing”—prioritizing self-improvement milestones to excessive levels, typically by monitoring units, equivalent to Oura Rings and Apple Watches, that log knowledge together with the variety of miles run, hours slept, and grams of protein consumed.
However the SNL sketch implicitly famous how somebody taking part in knowledge assortment for their very own edification rejected the observe the second they had been confronted with one thing embarrassing, equivalent to how a lot Taco Bell they’d ordered in a single 12 months. Tellingly, these revelations didn’t encourage resolutions to eat fewer Crunchwrap Supremes or spend much less cash on Frostys, however reasonably alarm and even outright denial. Later within the sketch, Sarah Sherman’s character acquired a personalised video from Wendy’s, with an enthused retailer supervisor informing her that her fixed supply orders from his department had made it essentially the most profitable within the nation. In response, she chucked her cellphone out the window.
By exhibiting individuals’s pleasure morphing into existential dread when their less-flattering consumption habits had been revealed, the SNL sketch grew to become a delicate commentary on the shocking line People have drawn in relation to firms monitoring essentially the most intimate elements of their lives. “It’s important to inform individuals you’re going to do that,” Padilla’s character mentioned into the digital camera, agog. Because the sketch underscored, knowledge assortment has been deeply normalized, rebranded by tech firms as leisure and a chance to gamify one’s productiveness. Padilla’s character could not keep in mind that by signing up for Uber Eats within the first place, she’d agreed to such monitoring, giving up details about her location and late-night cravings. She most likely didn’t suppose it might ever come again to hang-out her in such a visceral manner.
