If January 6th was violent projectile vomit then the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Freedom 250 event on the south White House lawn this weekend was the miserable subsequent spew of diarrhea from our sick electoral body. 

I spent the weekend ambling around the grounds that sit in the shadow of the Washington Monument, watching as it was transmogrified into a grotesque mishmash of a NASCAR rally and the Gathering of the Juggalos. America's vast, sunburnt underbelly of sunglassed men with names that end in -ayden and their vacant-eyed girlfriends descended on DC to, at least in theory, celebrate President Donald Trump's birthday and watch dudes beat the shit out of each other in a ring sponsored by crypto casinos, the now-unwoke Bud Light, and Saudi real estate, soundtracked by Godsmack and Diddy. The winning fighters received a special red, white, and blue raspberry "liberty juice" from Monster Energy to drink on camera and $425,000 worth of Trump's crypto tokens for their trouble.

I went into this weekend with a fairly open mind. There is something actually endearing about opening up the White House grounds to the public for a fun event that families can go to. But after 48 hours throwing back some of the most disgusting $30 margaritas I've ever had the misfortune of suffering through, my conclusion is that UFC's Freedom 250 could have only been dreamed up by a president and a fighting league that fucking loathes their own supporters. 

I haven't experienced this level of profound pity for the average person attending an event since I used to report on crypto conventions. Which is appropriate, seeing as how Crypto.com was one of the high-level sponsors this weekend. At events like Ethereum Denver and Bitcoin Miami I met the same nice, normal-ish people looking for a good time, dropped seemingly unaware into a system designed to drain every last dollar out of them. If you are a UFC fan and you are reading this, please listen to me. I have now seen the machine up close. UFC CEO Dana White hates you. He doesn't even think you're a human being.

(Just guys being dudes.)

Panic World producer Grant Irving and I won free lottery tickets to the two-day watch party, held on the Ellipse, the area just south of the White House lawn where Trump held his Save America rally right before the insurrection in 2021, incidentally. Behind the giant stage and screens, we could just make out the tip of the UFC's Octagon. Based on the stories we heard from fans we interviewed, I doubt the watch party was sold out. People told us they applied last minute and got accepted. UFC announcers on Sunday claimed there were 85,000 people there. I'd estimate maybe, if we're being extremely generous, there was about half of that.

On Saturday, we showed up early and still waited in line for nearly an hour in the blistering sun before we could get into the park. It got so bad that organizers started half-heartedly throwing water bottles at us. I joked that maybe the delays were because the TSA was running the security, only for my jaw to drop when we reached the gate and discover that, in fact, yes, the TSA was manning the metal detectors. Every guest also had to be searched by a Secret Service agent.

UFC reportedly paid $60 million to hold the fight at the White House. White, in a press conference on Sunday, said they would never do it again because of how expensive it was (they made about half the cost back in sponsorships). But it's unclear if they also paid for all the different law enforcement agencies to work the event. Aside from TSA and Secret Service, I spotted Homeland Security officers, US Park Police, DEA officers, the National Guard, and a whole bunch of local law enforcement. I am the last person to whine about the sanctity of law enforcement, but even I found it monstrous and depressing that our various law enforcement agencies were reduced to festival security.

Once we got into the Ellipse, there was shockingly little to do. You could take a photo in front of a WWE championship belt (both the UFC and the WWE are owned by the TKO Group), drink the aforementioned expensive alcohol, eat at a handful of food stands, take a photo with Monster Energy Drink booth babes, watch a guy rev a car in place at the RAM pop up, visit Meta AI's VR exhibit, and mindlessly stand in the field and watch Turning Point USA commercials play on a loop all day — complete with a Charlie Kirk voiceover. On the second day, they at least added a mechanical bull.

Beyond the TPUSA ads on the big screens, there was very little in the way of actual programming. On Saturday, there were some brief interviews with UFC fighters no one watched, the official weigh-in, which was bungled in ways we'll discuss in a sec, and a performance by the Zac Brown Band, where I watched what was quite possibly the worst guitar solo I've ever heard in my entire life. The night ended with, I'm not kidding, one single firework.

On Sunday, before the fight, there was a live taping of Logan Paul's Impaulsive podcast, which featured the Kick streamer Ninadrama, real name Nina Marie Daniele. The men in the crowd around me all started asking each other who she was. I'm not a prude and I am very aware that the entire weekend was based around a sport where men beat each other to a bloody pulp, but I, again, felt a bottomless pit of despair in my stomach looking around at all the families watching Paul and Daniele talk about how she should sell feet pics and why her Instagram followers keep making jokes about fingering her. Is this the best we can do? Is what we are? If Logan Paul's podcast is the result of 250 years of the American experiment then it was a failed experiment.

Even if the weekend programming had been good, it wouldn't have mattered much. The team running the visuals and sound clearly had no idea what they were doing. During the weigh-in, the wrong graphics and video packages kept playing, and very little of what was happening on stage was filmed. Joe Rogan has never looked smaller than he did on Saturday, flanked by giant men, and even bigger, completely dark screens that someone forgot to turn on.

Though I'm not sure the complete lack of amenities — and places to sit (I guess chairs are woke) — mattered to the UFC diehards that traveled from all over the world to watch the fight on Sunday night. I spoke to fans from across the US, Canada, and even further, none of whom seemed to be thinking particularly deeply about any of this. For what it's worth, they were all fairly nice. And the majority of them didn't even realize the event was connected to Trump's birthday until I reminded them. The big focus, instead, was gambling. Based on my own personal survey of attendees, it was split fairly evenly between FanDuel and DraftKings. And it seems like even the Trumps were trying to get in on the action.

UFC announcer Daniel Cormier is wrapped up in a bizarre controversy at the moment. Right before the match, he posted screenshots to X that were purportedly DMs he had received from Eric Trump, asking if the fights were fixed and who he should bet on. Cormier deleted the post and claimed he was hacked, saying, “I got hacked or something, who believes stuff like this?” But his account did post them, the replies still exist. And Trump posted and deleted a claim that the messages were AI. Here are screenshots of the whole saga if you care.

By the time the fights started on Sunday night, the crowd was drunk and bored. Fights — between eventgoers — broke out across the field. Watch party host Laura Sanko, in between rounds of the professional fights, threw out "$100 cards," which she quickly reminded the crowd were "only good online." Lightning and thunder cracked behind the Octagon, where, inside, the people who actually matter to Trump and White oscillated between open corruption and psychotic jingoism, all of it drenched in such a radioactive level of toxic masculinity that it would, in a sane world, qualify as a mental illness. Between rounds — and naps — the president marveled at the shirtless, bloody brawlers marching through the Oval Office, all of them honored at the chance to subject themselves to traumatic brain injuries in front of the whole country. That is, except for one.

UFC fighter Sean Strickland was chased away by law enforcement at both the press conference on Friday night and the watch party on Sunday and has said that he's banned from the White House. He's been vocal about Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein and the bombing of Iran. But Strickland is not the norm. The norm for UFC is Josh Hokit.

Hokit celebrated his victory last night by yelling, "Michelle Obama is a man" into the microphone. The Washington Post reported some in the crowd were booing. Maybe, who knows. The crowd was also booing Hokit all weekend because he plays a heel and riles up fans. I've also seen some pundits on X contort themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that the attendees in DC this weekend were salt-of-the-earth types who just wanted to finally have a good time. That they even deserved a White House fight night after so many years of liberal elites celebrating poetry or art or whatever. You can believe that if you like, but I was standing in that field with them all weekend and I can't play along with the noble savage reimagining of the vape store class. Every single fan I spoke to identified as Republican, but they weren't even enthusiastic ones. It was a sea of people who are conservative in the same way a fish is wet.

I've also seen pundits make some anemic argument that this whole thing was good because this — the gaudy, trashy ugliness — is actually what America looks like. And that our nation's capital should reflect that. Well, fine, ok, if this is what America looks like, I don't want to fucking live here anymore.

(Joe, who tied your tie, brother?)

It wasn't just the question of "what is America" that loomed over the whole weekend for me, though. I also wondered whether this was all even worth it. Not just White's $60 million investment, but, also, Trump's continued endorsement of hypermasculine gutter culture. Can you feed a political movement with jalapeño vodka slams, Monster Energy Drinks, and potato chip skewers? The modern Republican Party has always been a coalition of vampiric aristocrats and a roving tailgate of redneck dopes, but at least the party of Reagan and Bush was smart enough to LARP as some mythic cowboy archetype. Do the JD Vance's and Marco Rubio's of the world think there is a path forward after Trump if they can capture the "guy who wears an Affliction T-shirt in the pool" vote?

As annoying as this weekend was, however, I actually think it's made me more optimistic about American politics than I've felt in a decade. I have seen what the combined power of Trump's oligarch cronies and their money can do. How weak and lazy it all is. How little impact and support $60 million buys them. A barren field, a sporting event that you had to buy Paramount+ to even watch, a bunch of "celebrities" no one's ever heard of, an undersold free event full of people who literally forgot it was Trump's birthday party! 

And on Saturday night, after filing out of the Zac Brown Band concert, I got back to my hotel, opened up my phone, and saw videos of New Yorkers celebrating not just The Knicks' NBA Finals win, but the city itself. Watch parties so large they spilled out onto the streets around them. An actual community that came together that didn’t need to be bribed with gift cards and crypto giveaways. Which is why I've never been more convinced that this hideous, obnoxious, idiotic era of politics is coming to end. The only people engaging with it are the people who don't give enough of a shit to notice it’s even happening. The fever is breaking.

(I do think they should do like a free summer concert series on the White House Lawn though. I think that'd be neat tbh.)

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A Little Bit Of News Before You Go!

So those of you who read the very excellent Status newsletter may have already seen this, but we have some truly huge, gargantuan news to announce. Garbage Media is hiring our first COO. Her name is Lisa Tozzi and she’s, quite literally, the best in the biz.

Starting today, Lisa will be overseeing the different parts of our business, including newsletters, podcasts, live events, and consulting, and working closely with me to really supercharge our little media company. She's built some of the most innovative and exciting news operations in the world and her vision for the next stage of Garbage Media is incredibly exciting.

The fact that we can continue to hire and expand is all thanks to you, the reader. Without your support none of this would be possible. I am so, so, so excited that Lisa is joining us (it doesn’t feel totally real lol) and I can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

Some Stray Links

• “Knicks Give Their City Something New: Impossible Joy”

• “Into the Right-Wing Dreamworld​”

• “Building Back The Bidens”

P.S. here’s a really good World Cup fan.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Kalshi, The Knicks, And The Clear Channel Internet

New York City is having a good week. The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time in nearly 30 years and they’ve won their first two games against the San Antonio Spurs. The streets around Madison Square Garden have quickly turned into huge parties and, like all parties in 2026, they’re beginning to produce viral content.

The big clip of the moment is a Knicks fan yelling into a camera, “My mayor: Muslim. My bagel: Jewish. My Christian: Dior. Knicks in four.“ I’m not going to lie, it goes hard. Though, few have seemed to notice (or care) that the microphone the Knicks fan was yelling into has a Kalshi flag on it.

@itsbingbot

Knicks in 4 #nba #nbafinals #nbaplayoffs #knicks #newyorkknicks

The account that shared the clip is called @itsbingbot, which, per its bio on TikTok, is an account for “Kalshi's robot.” There are more posts of the robot in action on its Instagram. It appears to be a Unitree G1, created by Unitree Robotics, and it’s shown up to a handful of NBA events recently. Unitree has been using the robot’s ability to play basketball as a performance benchmark and has tied that into their marketing, I guess. This robot, which I suppose is called Bing Bot, wears a Kalshi-sponsored Knicks jersey and has been interviewing and dancing with fans all week in Manhattan. But Bing Bot is only the most visible tip of the Kalshi Knicks psyop.

Kalshi-sponsored accounts are also staging viral moments at Knicks celebrations that are getting shared organically by fans and then boosted by affiliated clipper accounts. A TikTok user, who does not appear to be working with Kalshi, named @jpthejuggernaut, filmed a Knicks fan calling the Spurs pussies in a video that did nearly two million views on the platform. That video was then shared to X by an account called @LakeShowYo, a Verified clipper account affiliated with Kalshi Sports. @LakeShowYo also shared the Christian Dior video, which is what made it really go viral, racking up nearly 20,000 shares on X. And @LakeShowYo’s account is a fascinating glimpse into how vast of a content operation Kalshi is running in New York right now.

@LakeShowYo shared a video from a TikTok channel callled @offtheglasstv, which is a sports apparel brand that’s currently running Kalshi promo codes. And @offtheglasstv has been following Bing Bot around Knicks celebrations, as well. Best as I can tell, many of the “crazy Knicks fans” that are showing up their videos are plants (they appear across multiple videos). The Christian Dior guy seems legit, but we’re less sure about the person who brought all this into the field of play. The fan who ran onto the court near the end of Game 1 of the finals was reportedly doing it to promote his memecoin “$Attention”.

This is not totally new. Every tech bubble seems to recreate the flashmob from first principles. But what Kalshi is doing in Manhattan right now is easily the most insidious version of it. Not only are many of the fans planted by Kalshi-sponsored accounts, but the seemingly random accounts promoting the clips are, as well. It would be absurd to say that the Knicks fandom has been completely astroturfed by Kalshi, but they are clearly trying to co-opt it. Though, it’s unclear exactly how much of this being directed by Kalshi.

According to Semafor, a bunch of Kalshi influencers went renegade last week. The prediction market was sponsoring big right-wing accounts like @GuntherEagleman when they started posting conspiracy theories about the Los Angeles mayoral election. (Polymarket influencers were doing the same thing.) So it’s possible that Kalshi doesn’t even know that their funding some weird tweetdecking operation and these accounts are just trying to make as much money from various video rev share programs as they can. The end result, though, is effectively the same.

All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people. And there are really on two outcomes here. One possibility is we just slowly accept that nothing we see online anymore is genuine and accept that social media is just a new worse version of TV now. The other, much more interesting possibility, is that people realize the internet is infinitely big and you can always just make a new version of it.

I’m not a huge sports guy, but I think that’s also true for basketball and every other cultural institution that feels totally and completely locked in amber by huge corporations right now.

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Spring Is Here

Instagram post

(instagram.com/reels/DWCItAKEbU3)

We’re Going To The UFC White House Fight lol

Panic World producer Grant Irving and I will be in DC this weekend for the UFC White House fight. It is sure to be a nightmarish kaleidoscope of insanity and we’ll be covering it here in the newsletter next week and in the podcast, but if you want updates as we go, be sure to follow Garbage Day on Instagram. I’ll be dumping everything into a story over there all weekend.

It’s Probably Time To Know What Digital Circus Is

—by Adam Bumas

Weekend box office reports say The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act made over $35 million around the world since it opened on Thursday. It’s not putting up the same numbers as other internet hits like Backrooms or Obsession, but the barrier for entry on this is a lot higher. Not only is The Amazing Digital Circus the last episode of a web series, it’s also intensely and forbiddingly online.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic. The series is easy to get into by the more all-encompassing standards of YouTube. The show follows ordinary humans who are trapped in a mysterious, kid-friendly digital world. They have to survive both by learning the secrets of the game and dealing with their mature, complex emotional dynamics. 

Any cartoon about adult themes is all but guaranteed attention online, but the internet appeal of Digital Circus goes deeper. The show combines too many niche web communities to list here. It has all the unfolding mystery of an ARG, the gaming-based drama of a Minecraft SMP, and takes inspiration everywhere from classic science fiction to the YouTube “object show” Battle for Dream Island (ask the most indoor kid you know). The show features both its own proprietary Backrooms and its own proprietary Obsession. And, unlike those other two, you can come to the theater in cosplay!

(Garbage Day/Adam Bumas)

I took this picture of cosplayers Laila and Annie on Digital Circus’ opening night, where I asked a bunch of attendees about their relationship to the show, as well as the last thing they had seen in movie theaters. When I asked the same questions opening night of Iron Lung I found plenty of regular moviegoers, including some who barely knew who Markiplier was. Here, everyone was fully up to speed on the show, but many of them hadn’t been to a theater in a year or more. Which means this is probably a much better sign of the times than horror movies that anyone can sit down and watch.

Where Did Lizzo’s Audience Go?

Lizzo has been trying to restart her career after she was sued in 2023 by former dancers for allegedly sexually harassing them. She also stopped being vegan in 2024, which lost her the support of the vegan community at large. Part of her return to public life is posting pretty much nonstop on X. Amid her flurry of posting, she’s been surprisingly candid about how she, well, doesn’t have much of a career anymore. Last month, she was complaining that social media algorithms were scrambling her ability to communicate directly with her fans on platforms like Facebook (I actually buy it). And over the weekend, she answered a question about why her fanbase suddenly vanished.

“The industry changed so much in the last three years. Streaming replaced radio and I was a radio darling. That’s how my fans discovered my music,” she wrote. She also complained about the “public attack” on her career, which isn’t how I would describe what happened, but it did likely impact things, as well. I want to focus on the radio-to-streaming shift, though.

I’ve tended to think of Lizzo as an internet-first artist — largely because she was so tied to late 2010s social justice and got her start on TikTok — but I think she’s right that her music was primarily for radio listeners. There is clearly a sound or a vibe that does better on streaming than on the radio and we all recognize that radio is no longer where popular music is found these days, but I haven’t read anything particularly good about what the differences is between artists that did well on the radio versus artists that do well on streaming. Even more interesting, though, Lizzo framed it as an audience access problem. I’ve seen some other users on X making lists of other artists that are also likely locked behind the crumbling radio ecosystem, like Meghan Trainor, Lil Nas X, Katy Perry, and Kesha. Which feel broadly true?

The Great Hardcore Show Banana Costume Debate Of 2026

A lot of concert discourse flying around right now. A whole bunch of Phoebe Bridgers’ stans are claiming its ablest or classist that she’s doing a phone-free tour. I will spare you the play-by-play there, but some of the arguments are pretty mind-bending. Elsewhere, though, there is a debate raging over whether it’s ok to be mad at a guy wearing a banana costume to a hardcore show. Allow me to explain.

Twitter tweet

A guy wore a banana costume to a Toronto show for the hardcore band End It. The band told the crowd to tear the costume off him, saying, “You wanted the attention and now you have it.” The crowd was very happy to oblige.

One user on X astutely connected the banana man to the trend of Death Grips fans dressing up in pinwheel hats, which is actually a trend we covered here in Garbage Day way back when!

To tie up both the Phoebe Bridgers and End It stories here, I’ll just say that establishing a new normal for concerts post-COVID is going to take a lot longer than I initially assumed. Waiting to see which prediction market figures out a way to monetize this first.

“We Are Charlie Kirk” Has Crossed The Great Firewall

Twitter tweet

Some Stray Links

• Ryan was on Critical Darlings talking about Backrooms!

• “Polymarket Lets You Bet On Vibes” (Adam wrote this!)

• “AI Grifters Are Making Anti-Data Center Slop With AI”

• “Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse”

• “Hey! Hipsters Did Not Listen To Stomp-Clap”

P.S. here’s an important update from the tunnel woman.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

How India’s “Cockroach Janta Party” Conquered Instagram

—by Adam Bumas

We normally send out our monthly Garbage Intelligence trend reports on the first Friday of every month. They’re usually for paying subscribers, but we’re sharing this story with our whole audience today because we’ve come across something more popular than any trend or post we’ve ever recorded. It’s smashed all of our records. It’s an AI-generated cockroach on Instagram.

It’s the mascot of the “Cockroach Janta Party,” an Indian student movement that exploded into the national conversation last month. The account has been described as a parody, but its style of humor is nothing we haven’t seen from global politicians in the past decade. In India, however, the joke is new enough, and its messaging clear enough, that it got an astounding 22 million followers on Instagram in the last two weeks of May. We’ve never seen anything like it.

(instagram.com/cockroachjantaparty)

Let’s start with the name “Cockroach Janta Party.” It’s a joke on the Bharatiya Janata Party (janta and janata mean “the people” in Hindi), the Hindu nationalist political party that’s ruled India since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even a joke on the party’s name is a genuine risk. In the past few years, Modi’s government has gradually imposed tighter restrictions on anything online that criticizes the government, with further censorship targeting internet randos on the way.

Not coincidentally, Modi’s official accounts have appeared at the top of our “most popular” lists many times before, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (back when it was called that and we had access to its data). Looking back that far shows how impressive these numbers are. We’ve only seen 10 million Instagram followers gained in a single month once before, for the Brazilian YouTuber Felipe “Felca” Bressanim last year. Felca’s followers came after he uploaded a documentary on content creators exploiting children. The video was such an important political talking point that when Brazil passed a new online age verification law this March, official news sources called it the “Felca Law.”

Of course, it’s not as if banning kids from the internet isn’t enormously popular around the world, with or without YouTubers. Meaning that explaining all those Instagram followers is a chicken-and-egg question. Did Felca lead a movement, or capitalize on one that already existed? You can ask a similar question of the Cockroach Janta Party.

The group’s name comes from an old-fashioned political gaffe. On May 15th, Surya Kant, India’s Chief Justice, compared young people who couldn’t find jobs and supported anti-government activism to “cockroaches.” Abhijeet Dipke, a recent graduate from Boston University, created the Instagram account the next day, and got more followers than the BJP’s official account in four days. As a side note, Dipke himself had the third-biggest account on Instagram in May, with more than a million new followers.

But one stupid comment isn’t enough to summon a movement like this. To use a US comparison, “basket of deplorables” didn’t win the 2016 election any more than “nasty woman” lost it. But the issue of activist youth has been enormous in South Asia. Last year, we wrote about how Nepal elected a Prime Minister via a Discord poll, after the government was overthrown by a viral student movement inspired by posts from a similar one in the Philippines.

In India, the driving force of the student movement has actually been standardized tests. Earlier in May, the government cancelled all results from this year’s NEET test after the answers were reportedly leaked, forcing 2.2 million students to retake the exam — or else risk becoming the other meaning of NEET. The protests only got louder after another exam, the CBSE, gave students suspicious results from its new digital grading system. One student went viral on X after posting the official answer sheets for his “unexpectedly low marks,” claiming he had been graded for another student’s work.

Most of the Cockroach Janta Party’s political positions are related to these protests. One of the account’s first posts was a “five point plan” for reforms, but their more recent posts have been focused on calling for the resignation of India’s Education Minister. They’ve also been posting weird AI-generated campaign videos, chatter about Dipke’s media hits, and an official song with a title taken from an old commercial.

Instagram post

(instagram.com/p/DYpPrqFs1Dz)

This is all astonishingly good posting. Good as in “effective,” not necessarily “I like it.” Personally I’m mixed on the posts — sure, the song goes hard, but why is the AI cockroach wearing some kind of Tron hoodie?

Regardless of my tastes, the Cockroach Janta Party has a truly impressive sense of balance between serious political organizing, submitting to the algorithm, and Having Fun Online. Dipke, who started websites and petitions at the same time as the Instagram account, seems to deserve a lot of the credit for this. He has previous organizing experience in India and a degree in public relations from a US college. So he has both institutional knowledge and youthful authenticity in multiple different cultures, at a time when those linguistic barriers are starting to break down.

But other barriers, like the BJP’s censorship, are standing strong. The Cockroach Janta Party’s website was reportedly blocked in India, and its official X account was suspended — just like so many other accounts critical of Modi’s government. These silly shitposts are genuinely dangerous, and the 22 million followers all understand that.

Seeing movements like this, or Felca’s, centered on Instagram can be surprising when the platform’s algorithm keeps it so stagnant. But when something gets big enough on Instagram to start changing things, that same inertia keeps it in motion, and the algorithm will keep the users’ demands in the conversation. An important lesson for anyone feeling pessimistic about the state of things right now.

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Please Like And Subscribe And Buy Tickets

Hollywood is buzzing right now about the massive success of Obsession and Backrooms. Obsession has made close to $150 million, with ticket sales actually increasing in its second weekend, and Backrooms just had an $81 million opening weekend. Not only are both movies are trouncing established IP like Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu, they were both made by 20-something first-time (male) directors who got their start on YouTube. And in the case of Backrooms, we can now say that there is a hit movie based on a 4chan post. Excited for Pepe: The Rise Of Soyjak in 2028.

Obsession and Backrooms solidify a trend that really took shape at some point between 2024’s Shelby Oaks and last year’s Sorry, Baby. Though, you could maybe argue that 2022’s Skinamarink, directed by YouTuber Kyle Edward Ball, really kicked all of this off. Online video creators are taking big swings at feature films and it’s broadly working. As Steven Zeitchik at Hollywood Reporter declared over the weekend, “The movie business is about to get VidCon-ized.” Though I think that implies that all of these movies are leveraging the internet and, specifically YouTube, the same way. Which I don’t think is true. Let’s actually break down what’s happening here.

(4chan)

First, yes, Hollywood is being invaded by young and young-ish filmmakers who all cut their teeth online. The majority of these filmmakers are making horror movies, for reasons we’ll get into in just a sec. But they’re making inroads elsewhere, as well. On the comedy front, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol (who got their start on YouTube) released Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie last year and online sketch group BriTANicK made Pizza Movie earlier this year for Hulu. The aforementioned Sorry, Baby, directed by online video creator Eva Victor, was sort of a comedy and though it didn’t get any nominations, it did have Oscars buzz this year. And then you have the huge pack of horror movies from YouTubers. Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung, Shelby Oaks, Talk to Me, Bring Her Back, there’s been a lot of them. And Seán William McLoughlin, better known as Jacksepticeye on YouTube, is producing a film adaptation of the gothic horror video game Bloodborne.

As for why horror is having such a big moment right now and why YouTubers are having great success in that world, I think it’s fairly simple. Horror movies are fairly inexpensive to make, they’re fun to watch in a crowd, and diehard horror fans are pretty famously up for anything. Also, the modern world is a nightmare from which we cannot wake, so horror is a pretty good way to make art about that. And as Backrooms has apparently revealed to the mainstream public, YouTube — and the internet at large — has had a strong and dedicated horror community that’s been largely undisturbed by algorithms since the 2000s.

Within this YouTuber invasion, though, there are, roughly, three distinct things happening. There are YouTubers adapting their homegrown IP for the bigger screen like Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, Backrooms, and Skinnamarink (kinda). YouTubers being plugged into original films like Obsession, Talk To Me, and Shelby Oaks. And YouTubers effectively being the pitchmen to get people in the door like Iron Lung and the upcoming Bloodborne movie. The Iron Lung case is a little complicated because it’s a video adaptation. But the writer, director, producer, and star Mark Edward Fischbach, better known as Markiplier, was quite literally the face — the only face — of the film.

Separating these three lanes out is important because we’re still trying to figure out what the value of a YouTube audience is exactly. Are YouTubers creatives? Are they producers? Are they undeveloped IP? Based on success so far, in typical messy internet fashion, I think the answer is “all of the above, but, also, it depends.” I actually don’t think a single YouTuber, even at the MrBeast or Pewdiepie level, is big enough to launch a hit movie on their own. Being hugely popular on YouTube might even preclude them from doing well with a feature film actually. Over the weekend, YouTuber and animator Joel Haver, who has experimented with feature films, dropped an interview with YouTube long-hauler and filmmaker Freddie Wong and the timing didn’t feel coincidental. As if to almost say, “Hey Hollywood, remember us?”

Of all the movies I’ve listed here the only one that truly adapted their online video channel was Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie and that was only after a nearly 20-year hiatus and their old videos becoming lost media. While with Backrooms, yes, there is a Backrooms YouTube series, but it’s also a seven-year-old meme and the film adaptation is a completely standalone story. The point being that we may be watching the final rungs of a real ladder between YouTube and Hollywood emerging, but it’s not linear and it’s definitely not as simple as just putting a long YouTube video in a theater.

But there is clearly juice there. The trick for studios rushing to hand out blank checks to random creators will be figuring out exactly what kind of creator (and audience) they’re tapping into. I assume there are going to be a lot of misfires. But it’s also very possible that by the time the Oscars start airing on YouTube in 2029 a YouTuber-led movie will win one. A sentence that would have been unthinkable to type out even five years ago.

Meet Garbage Day’s First-Ever Summer Intern

Her name is Selia Hooten and she is officially our very first intern. This is super exciting. She’ll be running Garbage Day’s Instagram for the summer so please head over there and say hi! And if there’s anything you want us to do with that page, let us know.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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A Cool Recipe

@homemadewithgrace

Peppermint Patties from mashed potatoes 1 cup of plain mashed potatoes 1 1/2-2 lbs of powdered sugar 1 1/2 tsp of peppermint extract D... See more

The AI Companies Are IPOing, Which Means It’s Time To Panic

Last week, I wrote about the eerie similarities between the dot com bubble and the current AI boom. Both were based on feverish speculation, the extremely short-sighted belief that a single feature of the internet is its own industry, and a desperate need to buy up some form of internet real estate. My argument for a while has been that some form of generative AI is here to stay and will continue to evolve, but standalone AI products and AI companies are almost certainly doomed to fail. This is basically what always happens — websites, digital media, crypto — and it almost always happens after a handful of the bubbly companies du jour decide to go public.

The New York Times reported today that Anthropic is eyeing an IPO for as soon as this year. Meanwhile, SpaceX has just rolled up xAI and is eyeing an IPO of its own. No word on OpenAI filing for an IPO, but it’s clearly coming. As for how these IPOs will play out, well, here’s a shotgun blast of bad news from the AI world for you.

Bain & Co. has a survey out revealing that nearly half of AI companies with more than $100 million in revenue are basically not making enough money to exist. Michael Burry (The Big Short guy) is posting full-on red-string-corkboard diagrams on X now, claiming Nvidia’s balance sheet doesn’t make sense. And, finally, GitHub launched token-based billing and users are burning through their entire month’s budget after barely a full day of work. Oh wait, also, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said today that the AI boom is “50x bigger” than the dot-com bubble and that “there may be some correction, but that will be the best investment opportunity to me.”

Buckle up, folks.

Why Did Kalshi Email Me About Running An Ad In Garbage Day?

Here’s a little mystery for you. Back in March, a member of Kalshi’s “Growth” team reached out to Garbage Day, asking if we wanted to promote their billion dollar college basketball bracket. This was confusing for a few reasons! First, we almost never cover anything related to sports in this newsletter. Second, we’ve written quite a bit about how prediction markets are, by definition, evil. And, third, the spokesperson from Kalshi believed that the campaign would “align” with our audience. Brother, our audience doesn’t want us to even mention X, crypto, or AI, you think they’d want us to advertise Kalshi?

What I do know is that we weren’t the only ones Kalshi reached out to. As The Wall Street Journal reported back in March, Kalshi has been doing a huge influencer marketing push this year. I’ve reached out to Kalshi several times over the last few months, hoping to get some more information about how we got put on the influencer list, but they haven’t responded.

If you work at Kalshi and would like to talk to us about this, my Signal is ryanbroderick.69420. Excited to hear more about this!

It’s Actually Very Weird That TheBurntPeanut Is Doing Brand Collabs

TheBurntPeanut is a VTuber — or PTuber — that uses a peanut avatar and is, at least in theory, very popular. Though, as we’ve written before, his popularity is more than a little dubious. TheBurntPeanut is also, not to be too woke, kind of a mess! He has a regular segment on his stream called “Slur Saturday.” He’s also just extremely annoying. But that hasn’t stopped both AT&T and Fortnite partnering with him.

(What if we all just died?)

AT&T sponsored an esports tournament called The Annihilator Cup and then changed their X profile pic to TheBurntPeanut until people started complaining. Their post calling out TheBurntPeanut’s fans, the “bungulators” (groan), is still up, though. And users are equally upset that TheBurntPeanut is going to be added to Fornite this week.

Look, when this guy has a large-scale Dr. Disrespect moment, at least you can say you heard about it hear first.

I Would Like To Try The Kool-Aid Pineapple Spears

It’s summer, baby, so we are being inundated with dumb viral food trends. I don’t have enough data to back up the idea that idiotic food content is seasonal, but I fully intend to ask our researcher Adam about this. Last week, I wrote about dot cakes, which have taken over TikTok. Meanwhile, on apps like Instagram and X, Kool-Aid Pineapples are blowing up.

It is, as the name would imply, a big jar of Kool-Aid with pineapple chunks it in. And a lot of the Kool-Aid pineapple videos are filmed in parking lots, which makes me think this is actually a Facebook Marketplace phenomenon. If you’ve purchased one, let me know! One Kool-Aid pineapple video, in particular, has gone very viral because the teenage boy in it has one of the most remarkable accents I’ve ever heard in my life. Here’s an interview with him. Apparently the kid’s name is Bubba Harrelson. And I believe he is saying, “that be tough, that be good.”

Twitter tweet

A Good Post

(x.com/wendellsandico)

Some Stray Links

• “That Collective Feeling”

• “Travis Scott’s Camp Worked With Alleged Smear Conspirators”

• “Leaked Docs Claim Nick Shirley’s Rise To Fame Was A White House Op”

P.S. here’s some good journalism.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

What Does A Burst Bubble Actually Look Like?

Hi, Ryan here, I’m back from vacation and very sunburned. Still catching up on all the posts I missed while I was away, but it seems like using AI is officially a sin for Catholics. So I think it’s worth taking a closer look at the AI bubble. If you haven’t been following it closely, it’s looking a lot more bubbly these days.

The big headline scaring AI guys this week is from Business Insider, which reported out some comments made by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald on the Rapid Response podcast. To paraphrase Macdonald (he’s not a super concise speaker lol), he said replacing human workers with AI is still too expensive. And he’s not the first Uber executive this year to make the same claim. Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information something similar back in April. Earlier this month, noted AI critic Ed Zitron wrote a piece putting a lot of this together, titled, “AI Is Too Expensive,” if you’d like to go deeper there.

But the simple fact is that, aside from all the problems AI models still have producing work that is error-free or even useful, it’s also just expensive as hell. And it continues to get more expensive all the time. I’ve seen folks like X super-user Aakash Gupta, who definitely writes almost all of his posts with AI, claim that the recent comments from Uber executives is “the strongest AI bull signal anyone has published this year,” but I don’t think people who use terms like “bull signal” are actually ensouled individuals.

There are other warning signals across the AI industry that are flashing bright red right now. Starbucks had to roll back an AI inventory tool because it kept hallucinating. The Verge reported that Microsoft is rethinking its dependency on Claude Code. And Duolingo’s stock price has tanked in the last year, after the company went all-in on AI. Oh, also, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has never met an emergent tech industry she didn’t want to crush into dust (complimentary) is going after AI companies now, as well.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that these are not isolated incidents. And if more companies come out of the woodwork and say that AI is too costly and/or bad to rely on, it puts AI companies in a pretty terrible bind. It would mean that their products are too expensive (for them) to make any real money from consumer-grade products and too expensive (for corporations) to make any real money from enterprise-level products. Here’s a totally unrelated link to a Bloomberg piece about the circular financing driving the AI economy.

Like last week, when I said it was time to imagine what an internet after Google Zero might look like, I think it’s also time to imagine what an AI bubble burst would actually mean. They are, effectively, the same thing, actually. A hard reset to an online wilderness period. And the closest analog from recent history we have for imagining an AI crash is either the dot com bubble of the early 2000s or, if things get really gnarly, the Great Recession. But let’s go with the dot com bubble because it’s a less terrifying prospect. If it ends up being the other one, I’ll find you at a campfire in the wasteland in a few years and tell you what I think.

(Photo by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images)

The biggest losers of the dot com bubble were a whole lot of IPOs you probably don’t remember, but here’s a good Reddit thread with some examples. But the bulk of these companies were web portals — for search, for e-commerce, for proto-cryptocurrencies. The bubble was similar to a land grab and when it popped it wasn’t totally different from a housing crash. The tech is different, but the driving force behind our current AI gold rush echoes it pretty closely. Get in early and colonize the internet. Except the internet is, by definition, infinite, which makes any kind of internet real estate pretty worthless. Newer tech companies have realized that what they really need to colonize is attention, but that creates a myriad of other problems, like understanding taste and coolness and the psychology of mass media. Stuff that has, for the bulk of the social media age, been automated by algorithms because rich loser nerds don’t understand it. The (false) process of AI is that it’s finally a way to colonize online real estate as well as attention.

What caused the dot com bubble to finally pop was speculation and over-spending. Buying up catchy domains just wasn’t the growth industry people thought it was. But the most important takeaway for me, one I have argued here several times, much to the dismay of my own readership, is that the dot com bubble did not kill domain names or websites. In fact, even with the open web’s several anemic state currently, there are more websites than ever. But simply owning one is no longer its own industry.

My most reasonable prediction about all of this is that an AI crash will play out similarly. Investing in an AI model will probably sound as silly as stockpiling domain names. Even if many of the big AI companies of the moment might implode and the term “AI” might even be so poisoned that it ends up being called something else, like “machine learning.” The tech, though, is probably here to stay. It may, like the humble website 25 years ago, even become more central to our daily lives, depending on what people end up doing with open source models, in particular. Before you yell at me, I’m not saying this because it’s what I want to happen, merely that there’s historical precedent. File types, protocols, algorithms, specific features, they all cause a gold rush before just being another thing anyone can add to their particular stack.

And while I’ve already got you hot and bothered over this take, I’ll double down and argue something even spicier. If companies like Google and Meta cannibalize their core product — search and social respectively — and go up in flames chasing AI that might actually be a good thing! Well, not for people who work there lol. But we both found content and one another online before they existed and there are more tools than ever now to do so now without them.

This is a question I keep asking myself about, well, the entire internet lately. “What if this all just doesn’t work this time?” What if AI companies can’t replace search? What if streaming video can’t replace Hollywood? What if short-form video apps can’t replace social media users? What if Silicon Valley can’t brute force their products — and ideology — onto the masses again? To take it even further, what if the dot com crash and the AI crash are actually part of the same 25 years epoch of technological stagnation? I’m not going to lie, I find this line of questioning exhilarating.

Anyways, the fact that crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek bought the domain AI.com for $70 million earlier this year, in what is considered the most expensive domain sale of all time, feels worth mentioning here.

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Note: Ryan’s taking a well-deserved holiday break today. This is Adam’s issue.

Fine, I’ll Get On The Discourse-Powered Skincare Bus

This week brings us a new milestone in the internet bleeding into real life. For two weeks, starting tomorrow, there will be a free public bus route in New York City that wouldn’t exist without a round of discourse on X from earlier this month.

This isn’t an official part of the city’s public transit, it’s a pop-up by the skincare brand The Ordinary. But the website for “The Ordinary Bus” treats it like serious municipal infrastructure. Which means that today I get to talk about New York’s MTA, which I’ve probably spent more time and energy studying than anything to do with the internet.

The inspiration for the bus seems to have been a post on X written on May 2nd, by @nazzobetweeting, who wrote “i love having to go through manhattan to go from brooklyn to brooklyn”. They added an image of Google Maps’ recommended public transit route between Williamsburg and Prospect Park, where the quickest option really is to go all the way into Manhattan and back.

(x.com/nazzobetweeting)

nazzobetweeting is nowhere near the first New Yorker to complain about this — as the only NYC-based member of the Garbage Day team who doesn’t live in Brooklyn, this is part of my job. And I’d think about it even if it wasn’t, since I’ve been keeping up with online chatter about the trains and buses since my earliest days online. I was a member of the NUMTOTs while I was still in my teens, Before that, I was an avid follower of Andrew Lynch, who got so much attention with his “future maps” of the subway system that he started an activist group for one of the most popular options — maybe calling it “the retinol of Queens” would work better.

Because this one post seems to have made its own waves. The “brooklyn to brooklyn” post has received over 2 million views and 14,000 likes on X, and kicked off noticeable discourse about getting around in Brooklyn. This one bit of impulsive frustration seems to have been enough to shape the route the Ordinary Bus will take, if not inspire its creation outright. The free bus goes from one corner of Prospect Park to the west side of Williamsburg — without the post, I would have expected its northern end to be somewhere in Bushwick, which has inspired its own share of viral discourse.

Doing all this because of one X conversation cycle isn’t crazy in terms of the actual resources being committed. All The Ordinary had to do was rent a bus for a couple weeks, hire a driver, spin up a website and announce it. It was probably simpler and cheaper than their previous vaguely populist-looking pop-ups, like the indictment of celebrity endorsements they did last year, which didn’t stop them partnering with influencers to show it off.

Free idea for anyone in Brooklyn: Invite some friends and turn this into the down with cis bus.

Here, they’re treating the bus as something similarly noble. Their announcement starts “Brooklyn has a transit gap that shouldn’t exist”. The website gets even more high-minded, saying the company’s philosophy “doesn’t stop at skincare”, and they’re applying it to “the city itself”. Which is a little out of pocket if it’s really happening because of one person’s annoyed post. But one post isn’t the only factor here.

Free buses were a signature policy of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign — there were some pretty idiotic complaints when he took office the same day as a fare increase. The bus wouldn’t be the first pop-up directly inspired by one of his campaign promises. That honor goes to the free grocery store that the prediction market Kalshi briefly opened in February (Polymarket opened their own not long after). It seems to barely matter to these companies that Mamdani is a politician — he’s a popular online figure, and whatever attention they get from these promos will primarily be downstream from him, like they’re guests on his show.

Even so, mass transit is a lot more serious of a space to play in. The Ordinary’s ad copy shows they understand that, and they’re cosplaying urbanism for the audience of a single X post anyway. In some ways, it’s the same thing I’ve called “LOLgislation”, treating random posts, ads, and serious government policy as one and the same.

But this is one of the few times I’ve seen the process work on a policy I don’t just support but personally yearn for. And it’s definitely given me perspective on how intoxicating it can be. In my very earliest days of browsing the web, going through the archives of NYCSubway.org on my parents’ iBook G3, the whole thing felt impossibly magical. The idea that if enough people complain about the buses online they’ll just start a new one is similarly magical.

It’s not real infrastructure, but everything has to start somewhere. And if it really does make Brooklyn travel a little easier for a brief time, then I’ll take all the cleanser samples they give me in the bargain.

The following is not an ad, it’s some good old fashioned promo for promo. If you’re interested in advertising, email Ryan at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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Some More Public Transit Glazing

Instagram post

(https://www instagram.com/reel/DYU78AENGpl/)

Who Is The Bad Art Chatbot?

Earlier this month, the literary magazine Granta published “The Serpent in the Grove”, a prize-winning short story. Last week, people who actually read the story began accusing it of being completely AI-generated (people almost universally agree it was). The magazine released a statement, saying they tested the claims by…uh, asking Claude and shrugging. Others are questioning whether the story’s author exists at all.

The most interesting take on this shitshow came from Tuhin Chakrabarty, who ran searches on each string of text in the story, and found that many of the weirdest turns of phrase came directly from stories on AO3 or Wattpad, which were then awkwardly shoved into new contexts.

 It’s all a massive example of “genre glitching,” where AI-generated text briefly uses completely inappropriate registers of language. It’s most noticeable when the chatbot starts talking like a commercial — or, as I found, vice versa. I did my own searches for the weirdest phrases Chakrabarty isolated, and found verbiage directly from the story in places like a Wisconsin construction company or a German tourism site. In a bigger smoking gun, I also found it in the AI-generated response to this Quora question about using more descriptive language in creative writing.

Ruining Graduation Ceremonies Is So Hot Right Now

May is graduation season, and recently that’s meant a lot of commencement speakers getting booed by graduates for bringing up AI. There’s been so much discourse that even AI people who haven’t made speeches are being asked to join the trend. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to roleplay the scenario by the New York Times’ Borg Cube bureau chief Kevin Roose.

There’s one point that hasn’t been brought up much in the debate. AI programs are speaking during graduation, too. More and more schools are leaning on AI-generated voices for announcements during ceremonies, and a lot of them are completely mispronouncing the students’ names. 

It’s a great example of what all this booing is expressing. It’s not as if this never happened before AI. The difference is now there’s no specific human who can be blamed for the mistake, or who can *puts on mortarboard* learn from the experience.

Sir, A Second Animated Movie Leak Has Hit The Internet

Last month, the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender movie was leaked to the public. Last week, it happened again, to an animated series it’s even harder to be normal about. The upcoming finale of The Amazing Digital Circus, set to release in theaters June 4th, was uploaded online by someone who had access to the Brazilian Portuguese dub. Everyone saw this coming so far out that the distributors cancelled its Korean release over fear of this exact thing happening.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the show and its fandom when the movie is properly released, so for now I’ll just say the fandom is deranged even by the impressive standards of kids’ cartoons about fucked-up adult themes. That’s been great for business, since the finale’s theatrical release has already broken presale records with weeks to go. But it’s been tough to handle for a lot of the audience, who have started debates over whether or not a web show in theaters is gatekeeping, paywalling, or losing its indie cred.

The leak has just turned up the temperature of all of these arguments — not to mention, all of the other arguments over what will/should happen in the actual show. It’s also made things worse for the show’s creator, a trans woman who goes by Gooseworx. Months before all this, she was getting so much backlash on anything she posted she deleted her Reddit account. After the leak, she posted on Bluesky that she “shouldn’t be the figurehead” of the show at all.

I Guess Digital Publishers Are Allowed To Just Not Pay Writers

Valnet is one of the few digital media conglomerates that seems to be doing well for itself in 2026. We recently learned it paid $20 million to acquire Polygon from Vox last year, to run it like a ”digital media sweatshop,” just like all their other niche news sites. Now, it’s trying to figure out ways to stiff its writers entirely.

Kotaku reports that contractors for their site TheGamer were presented with new contracts that would pay on a sliding scale based on the performance of the articles they wrote for the site. The scale pays out better for high performing articles, but it bottoms out at zero. If the piece doesn’t get enough clicks (meaning less than 1,000) the writer isn’t paid at all.

The site’s staff — or their contractors, who make up almost the entirety of the site, meaning they’d all be subject to these new contracts — are reportedly in “open revolt”. One speculated this is really a “soft-layoff” to shut the site down entirely.

Some Stray Links

• “Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing”

• “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything”

• “Sam Altman Won in Court Against Elon Musk. But, Really, We All Lost”

• “Kill Grogu”

P.S. here’s succulent Chinese wheels. (This was shared in the Discord by Omnishambles!)

***Any typos in this email are Adam’s fault today***

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I Talked To Someone From Rwanda Running A Slop Video Account On X

The national meltdown over clipping that started at some point between Clavicular overdosing and the band Geese being branded a psyop has, like all things in America, officially become a moral panic. Everyone is suddenly convinced that every conversation online is being astroturfed. Not exactly a bad way to operate, considering how rotten our feeds are lately, but, still, it’s become a bit of a baby with the bathwater situation. New York Magazine and The New York Times both published big stories over the weekend interrogating the authenticity of the content on our feeds. According to New York Mag, everything we see online these days is probably fake. And according The Times, that’s doubly true for anything political.

Amid the backlash against fake video views, users spent the weekend dogpiling New York Times reporter Joe Bernstein, claiming that he was somehow tricked by clippers into writing a big feature about Clavicular back in February. Bernstein told Garbage Day he has been covering the looksmaxxing subculture for years at this point and Clavicular was a big fixture in those circles long before he was streaming (and being clipped). That said, Bernstein thinks the clipping conversation is long overdue.

“It's good for the public to know about this,” Bernstein said. “We know the algorithm has been manipulated. That people are messing with the algorithm to make their stuff more popular.” But Bernstein was also quick to make a point that I’ve made here several times. “If anyone could become a viral star through clipping, you know, they would,” he said.

What has made the discourse around clipping so scrambled is that it’s both flattening a bunch of different viral marketing strategies and, also, only one downstream effect of a much larger issue plaguing the web right now. This is something esports commentator and journalist Rod Breslau jumped into my DMs recently to (rightfully) argue with me about. Clipping started among pro-gamers and livestreamers he told Garbage Day and has recently morphed into an unhelpful catch-all for everything. “We are absolutely at the inflection point now that short video is being pushed and monetized so much since the launch of TikTok and then Shorts that it's all the same thing,” he said. An entire broken, even fraudulent, media economy propped up by a handful of major tech companies.

But the top-level discussion, especially among mainstream media outlets, is still largely stuck on misogynist livestream clips and marketing firms larping as fans of Netflix shows or whatever. But the entire internet — well, the four biggest apps we use to navigate the internet — has, quite suddenly, morphed into a horrible new version of television, seemingly programmed entirely by low-paid worker-users in the global south. Fake fans and fake shares abound, as every social media platform starts to devolve into some bleary combination of 9GAG and WorldstarHipHop.

Kick streamers play a part in this new world of slop, of course, but it’s much bigger than them. Though, thanks to Kick streamers like Clavicular and N3on just… sharing their clipping stats and budget, we have a working idea of how much money is being sunk into shortform video at the moment. Using N3on’s video metrics we can do some back of the napkin math and say that it currently costs about $1 million a month to generate around 600 million combined views across 35,000 videos. Roughly, $28 a video or about $1 per 600 views, depending on how you want to look at it.

Which is a much bigger budget than what mainstream media outlets can spend on their own shortform video. Probably why the glut of pearl-clutching clipping features from big outlets sound so panicked. British reporter Jim Waterson revealed over the weekend that between March and May he made about £140 for 1.5 million views on his TikTok channel. Considering the clips that livestreamers (and Hollywood studios and music labels and politicians) are paying for are, by definition, not original content, there’s basically no incentive to risk doing anything original on TikTok. These shadowy clipping operations are also not trying to make individual videos go viral, but instead trick algorithms on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and X into thinking that whatever is being clipped is part of a larger trend and promote it accordingly. It’s the big box store effect, but for digital video.

Missing from this whole conversation, however, is any kind of insight about why someone would clip — or even just share these clips — in the first place. How do those aforementioned low-paid worker-users look at all of this? It’s something I’ve been desperate to learn more about.

Over the weekend, I came across what looked like, to me, a tweetdecking or clip-sharing operation run out of Rwanda. A group of Verified users all sharing random viral videos with one-line captions that, almost always, don’t make any sense. I reached out to a few accounts and one user, going by @whotfisrw, actually got back to me.

@whotfisrw identifies online as a student at the University of Rwanda, but they told Garbage Day that sharing video clips is their job. They said they often get paid to post videos and that the bulk of those offers come from AI companies. “Usually it’s either a fixed payment per post or a short-term promo arrangement depending on reach and engagement,” they said. They declined to share how much they’re making from sharing videos. Their X account is tagged with Ryne AI, a “humanizer” that can “pass” AI detection software like Turnitin and GPTZero. They said it’s more of “affiliation,” rather than “a full corporate thing.”

They said they got Verified “mainly for credibility and branding” because they wanted their account to look more “established and trustworthy.” As for where they get the videos they’re sharing, aside from paid posts, they said they usually just reshare whatever they see on X. “I mainly post directly on X, though sometimes I source clips or inspiration from other platforms and communities,” they said. “I do interact and collaborate with other accounts sometimes — mostly through reposting each other’s content, sharing ideas, or helping boost posts.”

It’s all, ultimately, not that deep. “If you're underemployed and you're just spending all your time watching the internet all day anyway, like this is a con. This is like a way you can make money, for sure,” Bernstein said.

But also none of this even new. Shadowy digital marketing firms and scammers and propagandists have been flooding the zone with shit — and been paid to do so — for over a decade now. The only thing thing that is new, I’d argue, is that there are more users now like @whotfisrw than there aren’t and, apparently, a whole bunch of young internet users who seemed to have been believing everything they saw on their video feeds up until like a week ago.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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The Pope Did The 6-7 Meme

We Found A Copy Of The Illegal Russian K-Pop Mpreg Fanfic That Got Its Author Sentenced To 18 Months Of Hard Labor

—by Adam Bumas

On May 8th, a Russian woman named Alexandra Kuzyk was sentenced to 18 months in a labor camp for posting gay fan fiction. Even though the fanfic was free, it was found by a court in Yekaterinburg to be illegal pornography. Ever since 2023, when Russia declared the country’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group to be an extremist organization, they’ve made multiple efforts to criminalize anything gay on the internet.

Naturally, the biggest question on my mind was, “can I read this criminally gay fanfic?” Russian state news reports noted Kuzyk was writing about the K-Pop band Stray Kids, but didn’t give any other details. Luckily, Kuzyk herself spoke to the Russian queer news website Parni Plus, which noted the title of the fanfic and the site where it was posted. That site was Ficbook, the largest Russian-language fanfic site on the internet, with millions of stories and comparable web traffic to some of the country’s biggest news websites.

Ever since Ficbook was blocked from Russian ISPs in 2024, it’s had strict limits on anything with queer tags, so Kuzyk’s fanfic isn’t on the site. But since it was popular enough to get legal attention, there were outside links that led me to an Internet Archive backup of the table of contents and the first few chapters. Reading a machine translation, I didn’t have to get very far to find this was a college AU omegaverse story, where Stray Kids member Hyunjin is an alpha and his bandmate/classmate Felix is an omega (look it up if you really need to). This of course means Kuzyk’s case is the second legal case involving omegaverse, and has ended with a much worse result than the first for all the pheromone fans out there.

Everything On The Internet Feels Like Porn Now

Fifteen years ago every major social media company decided to adopt a new way to measure the success of their apps. This was disastrous mistake that has basically turned the internet into a nightmare gooner world where everyone is completely insane all the time. This is video is how the time-on-site metric devoured the internet.

How Many Hollywoods Is One YouTube Worth?

lol I wish I could say that the digital video implosion — or whatever you want to call it — was almost over, but there’s a lot happening in the space right now. If you’re wondering why, we’ve basically hit a point where tech companies feel like they can finally topple Hollywood. Specifically, YouTube. I actually don’t think they can and that it’s possible that YouTube will have to hard pivot back to being not-TV very soon, but it’s interesting to watch them — and their users — try and make a go of it.

Kristen Stewart told reporters at Cannes this weekend that she wants to just start releasing weird short films on the platform. Stewart said she was, like many actors, sick of waiting for studios to take risks on anything. Bloomberg has a good piece this week about YouTubers like Subway Takes’ Kareem Rahma, who recently started airing a TV-quality show called Keep The Meter Running on YouTube. And British YouTuber Look Mum No Computer just competed in Eurovision.

That last example is an interesting one, actually. Look Mum No Computer, who I am a huge fan of, has nearly a million subscribers on the platform and he couldn’t translate that audience into a single vote in Eurovision. He came in last. It’s a bit of a unique story, Eurovision is probably not a great venue to flex a YouTube following, but definitely something to consider as more and more stars decamp from Hollywood to the platform.

Boys Fans Are Mad About The Boys Again

The Boys ends its fifth and final season this week. The show has had a fascinating relationship to both its own fans and the internet, at large, for most of its runtime. Its largely male audience had be scolded by showrunner Eric Kripke back in 2022 for empathizing so much with its villain, the sociopathically violent Trump-stand-in Homelander. And, now, as it wraps up, fans are mad again that the show is, well, kind of blowing the ending. I’ll reserve my personal judgment until after the final episode drops, but Kripke was the showrunner on Supernatural, which had such a horrible finale that fans of that show came up with the concept of “turbo hell.”

(instagram.com/reels/DYR_BjAyvz8)

Well, it seems like the stars of the show have finally had enough of it. Both Karl Urban and Laz Alonso jumped into the comments of an Instagram Reel from some dweeb complaining about season five and pointed out you can’t be mad that The Boys is full of dick and fart jokes when your Instagram handle is literally “@soupypoopy69.”

Is Nathan Fielder Secretly Managing Boy Throb?

OK, I’ve seen this rumor a bunch and I am starting to believe it…

Some Stray Links

• “After the Feed: Trust, connection, and the next era of social technology”

• “Drake Is Flooding the Zone”

• “Why are L.A. restaurants so freaking loud?”

P.S. here’s a good Drake song.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

The Bluesky Bubble

Let’s check in on Bluesky, shall we? Last night, newsletter writer David Roberts caused a big brouhaha over there after he posted what I think is a largely accurate observation. “It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Bluesky has been a net negative for US politics,” he wrote. “They corralled everyone on the left into a little glass fishbowl where they shout at one another and everyone else ignores them. Meanwhile, all the [politicians] and institutions stayed on X and are being dragged farther right.”

I said “largely accurate” up at the top because while Roberts gets a few things right here, I think he’s also misdiagnosing what’s actually happening. Let’s break it down.

First up, is Bluesky a net negative for US politics? I think that’s a bit overblown. “Getting worried that what I post here isn’t influencing Rust Belt voters,” podcaster Patrick Monahan snarkily wrote on Bluesky this morning.

Bluesky doesn’t have a ton of big homegrown political victories to point to, but I have heard from multiple parties over the last year that it’s actually a huge driver of progressive donations. The growing consensus among Democratic operatives seems to be that Bluesky is garbage for driving traffic or even influencing culture, but there are a ton of users over there who are super interested in spending money. In fact, Illinois congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh told me that Bluesky was basically her main platform for campaign funding during her failed run earlier this year.

Roberts’ next point, that Bluesky is a “little glass fishbowl” where everyone just shouts at each other and is broadly ignored by the rest of the world is, of course, objectively true. He’s also right that most politicians and political organizations have stayed on X, where the right wing sets the agenda. This is true for the media, as well. The number one complaint I hear from journalists still working in traditional newsrooms right now is that their (usually older, Gen X) editors have also stayed on X. And while those editors may not be posting, they are still assigning stories based off the right-wing talking points they’re inundated with on the platform.

So, even in its significantly decayed state, X is influencing our politics, the media, and, downstream of that, all of pop culture, to some extent. “If I wanted to talk about Twitter I’d go back to Twitter. This is Bluesky. We talk about Bluesky here. And it sucks,” musician Patrick Cosmos wrote on Bluesky this week, likely subtweeting (subskeeting?) Roberts. But talking about Bluesky, more often than not, means talking about what the CHUDs over on X were talking about 12 hours ago. If you prefer Bluesky to X, that’s fine, but let me tell you, as someone who uses both apps fairly equally now, Bluesky is basically just a libbed-out reader service for X. In other words, for all of Bluesky’s growth over the last few years, X still rules the world.

But, also, Bluesky still isn’t consistently growing. According to our data, across eight out of the last 12 months, Bluesky growth across its largest accounts has been down month-to-month. I’m increasingly of the opinion this is probably as big as Bluesky can ever be.

So the interesting question here, one Roberts didn’t really try to answer, is why Bluesky is ignored by the rest of the world. Why is it garbage for driving traffic or even influencing culture? And it’s not just because its users are annoying. Users on every website are annoying. But the annoying users on X or even Reddit have much more impact on the world than Bluesky. So what’s the deal? Well, I think it’s fairly simple actually.

The first issue is that Bluesky is just as inhospitable to outside links as X is, even without an algorithmic For You feed. Its users just don’t click on anything. It’s a cultural problem with no real fix. Regardless of what kind of publisher or creator we’re talking about, no one I’ve met is getting any meaningful traffic from Bluesky. (If you are, I’d love to hear about it!)

For example, we share almost every Garbage Day post on Bluesky and some of those posts have thousands of shares. In the last year we’ve only had around 600 people from Bluesky sign up to our mailing list. We get more traffic from Substack, which we aren’t even on anymore. And if no one is clicking on links, that means the only thing worth posting on Bluesky is native content. So all of Bluesky’s impact needs to go in the other direction. In other words, if Bluesky isn’t sending traffic elsewhere, it needs to pull traffic towards it. Ten years ago, Twitter worked this way, ruling the internet via screenshots. There were years where Instagram and Reddit (and viral listicles) were basically just glorified galleries of tweets. But the internet is different now. Short-form videos are king. And Bluesky’s video features are still very bad. Videos have to be under 100 MB, which is extraordinarily small. So not only can Bluesky users not upload short-form videos from other platforms, they can’t meaningfully post original content that could then be shared to other platforms. The end result is an internet where everyone else is talking about short-form videos and the digital cul-de-sac of Bluesky is talking almost entirely to itself.

You may think, as I do, that short-form video is a scourge, but if the entire internet has settled on a new atomic unit of attention and Bluesky can’t support it on a technical level, they’re going to be, by definition, left out of the conversation.

Now, here’s where I’ll say that none of this matters if you are a normal person who just wants a chill place to spend your time online. If you aren’t an activist or a journalist or a creator or anyone who has to care about the attention economy in anyway, then this is actually probably a good thing. But the general consensus I see from Bluesky users is a sort of indigence or confusion as to why the rest of the world is trapped in a right-wing echo chamber that they don’t care about. And it’s because their little doomsday bunker has not really affected the apocalypse raging beyond their walled garden. Which, again, is fine if you don’t care about that. But I sorta think most Bluesky users do care. Which means you’re either going to have to make your bunker more attractive to new members or venture out and face the horrors outside.

Like Television, But Worse

Here’s an odd thing thing that keeps happening. It seems like people are starting to ask more from the influencers on their feeds. Two recent examples:

Last week, Jake Shane, the little guy that sometimes asks stupid questions on red carpets, asked Kacey Musgraves an impossibly stupid question during a recent episode of his podcast Therapuss With Jake Shane. The question was so stupid that Musgraves was visibly taken aback during the “interview.” Shane asked her to explain a line from her song “Slow Burn.” The line is, “In Tennessee, the sun's goin' down, But in Beijing, they're headin' out to work.” And Musgraves had to, uh, walk him through how timezones work. Back in March, Shane caught a bunch of heat online after he asked a bunch of celebrities if they thought that the child actor in film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was “annoying.”

People are also having a meltdown over a food influencer that goes by @newt on TikTok who has close to 10 million followers. He decided to post a recipe for the Korean dish bossam that was also a gossipy recap of the d4vd murder case. It is honestly worse than you could even imagine. Not directly related, but a comedian named Nic Zicari posted a video that went viral on a few different platforms over the weekend titled, “You watch a food influencer with no personality,” which eviscerates, well, food influencers with no personality lol.

@newt

Bossam 🇰🇷🐖

Oh, actually, here’s another for you. Writer Emma Camp made a video for The Wall Street Journal, asking the question, “Why does everyone sound like a teenager?” The one-minute video was meant to be some weird scoldy takedown of a recent interview with Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, where they joked about how shoplifting is based (waow). Except, people quickly pointed out that Camp spends her whole video talking — and mugging for the camera — exactly like a teenager. “There is already a broader name for this. It's called engagement farming and this video is also doing it,” writer Matt Bruenig wrote in the replies on X. You believe we should stop engagement farming, yet you participate in the attention economy. Curious!

All of this is pointing to a general malaise with digital video. One that certainly started with the clipping mania last month, but feels larger than that. And to explain what’s happening here I’m going to make a couple assumptions that I think are broadly true.

The first assumption is that the majority of users on the internet do not understand the economics of digital video. And, specifically, they do not understand that most of what they see on their feeds is being made by people who are not making much money from it. Here’s a data point to back that up. In an episode of The New York Times’ Popcast (who do get paid real salaries to make content), the comedian Druski said that he recently spent $100,000 on his Instagram skit about church pastors and didn’t make that money back from the video’s performance on social. Druski made the point that spending a few million dollars on a production isn’t that big of a deal for Hollywood studios, but big-time creators like him are spending their own money to make these videos.

Another assumption I’m going to make is that the average user on a platform like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram can no longer discern the difference between a legacy media podcast like Popcast, Druski’s one-man Comedy Central on Instagram, Jake Shane sitting on a couch with Kacey Musgraves, and a guy recapping murder trials in his kitchen. Which means all four kinds of videos are held to the same standard, though not how you might think. Instead of users expecting everything on their feeds to be professional, audiences have kind of settled into a weird middle ground where they want videos to feel like a friend with perfect media training casually FaceTiming them from a professional newsroom. A tough balancing act to keep up, for sure.

And my last assumption is that all of this has reached a point where the average user has begun treating their feeds like television, but a version of television that feels worse in ways they can’t totally explain. I see posts like this all the time, but there was another one over the weekend, where a user racked up 40,000 reposts on X for writing, “Has anyone else realized there's nothing to fucking watch on YouTube anymore.”

What’s happened to digital video is, honestly, just the most visible microcosm of what’s happened to everything over the last decade. Tech companies promised us their apps would free us from the gatekeepers and institutions that lorded over the 20th century only to replace them with basically the exact same thing those institutions offered us, but worse. Oh look at that, YouTube is literally doing a TV upfronts presentation this week.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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A Good Geese Song

Twitter tweet

Thanks For Coming Out To Garbage Day Live, Everybody!

Our residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn wrapped up last week. I want to thank all of you that came out and I want to thank our amazing guests that stopped by. I also want to thank my amazing team who helped me put together a really unique live show. If you’ve been wondering what Garbage Day Live is like, I’m excited to announce we finally have some nice professional footage to put online. Here’s the show about that time I accidentally mogged Clavicular.

And stay tuned for some news very soon about what we’re doing with Garbage Day Live next! (We’ll also have some more clips for you soon.)

New Labubu Dropped

Alright, just the down and dirty facts for this one in case you encounter this stuff in the wild. The new viral meme toys are called mystery dumplings and they’re like big dumplings you open. They’re like big squishy balls you open up from a plastic dumpling steamer. They’re made by a toy company called RMS USA.

I can’t uh totally understand what makes a mystery dumpling good or bad, but people seem to be really excited about getting the glitter ones? Or, perhaps more accurately, child influencers are paid to be more excited on camera about glittery ones versus non-glittery ones? Is that too cynical?

@lunenook48

Dumping unboxing#glitterdumpling #blindbox #dumplings #fail #trend

The Mormon TikTok Conspiracy

A video of wives dressed like “goths” surprising their husbands at dinner went real viral last week. I will refrain from making any comments about whether or not any of the wives were actually dressed as “goths.” The video was filmed at an Olive Garden, we can just let that slide, I think. Anyways, a user on X shared the video, writing, “I’m not sure how to explain this, but 90% of influencer content online is spiritually Mormon.” Which got me curious. Was the original user Mormon? I did some digging.

@elizabethrayn

This was so funny 😆 @Skynelson @Anna Malinowski #gothgirls

The video was posted by Elizabeth Stroyan, a kindergarten teacher from Arizona. Her original upload of the video did 14 million views on TikTok. Her content definitely has like a super wholesome vibe, but I couldn’t find anything that was overwhelmingly religious and definitely nothing connected to Mormonism. I think she’s just a white lady lol.

While this video doesn’t appear to connected to the Church of Latter Day Saints, they do have a pretty huge presence on TV and social media right now. The Mormon-led #WaterTok trend of 2023 became so popular it led to the subsequent Stanley Cup craze and the current explosion of “dirty soda” at fast food restaurants right now.

Before you go say that there is some kind of massive Mormon social media psyop happening right now, I’d like to offer a different theory. I think “spiritually Mormon” content is doing so well right now for the same reason super horny and offensive transgressive content is doing well right now. Algorithms are just pushing everything to the extreme.

A Lot Of Right-Wing Websites Are In Free Fall Right Now

I want to keep saying, “sorry, one more video thing,” but I think it’s best to assume that we are at a real inflection point with digital video and there’s just going to be a lot of activity in this space for the foreseeable future. Case in point: X is cracking down on freebooting and clipping.

Also, as The Righting reported yesterday, it’s not just Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire that is seeing a total collapse of traffic right now. The Blaze, The Federalist, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, all of those freaks are seeing massive drops in website traffic right now. And interestingly enough, that’s reflected in what’s happening on YouTube, as well, according to Chaotic Era.

Fox News is far and away the biggest political YouTube channel, with around 500 million views in April, but every other political YouTube channel getting over 100 million views are left or liberal.

If we assume that all right-wing digital media publishers were running elaborate ad fraud schemes to inflate their traffic and viewer metrics than this means that the money has dried up somewhere in the equation.

Only Four Days Left Until “The Event”

(x.com/RadishHarmers)

Some Stray Links

• “OpenAI sued over ChatGPT’s alleged role in guiding FSU shooter”

• “Checkmate in Iran”

• “How Israel Turned Eurovision’s Stage Into a Soft Power Tool”

• “Inside the White House’s most inscrutable marriage. (No not that one)”

P.S. here’s an Australian town everyone on Reddit agrees is haunted.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Last month, in a ceremony at the Greek embassy in Washington, the US government officially returned 26 smuggled ancient artifacts to their home country of Greece. And a funny thing happened a week afterward. The news of the ceremony was broken first, not by a news outlet or even an official government account, but by an anonymous shitposter on X called @UpdatingOnRome.

@UpdatingOnRome, which posts under the display name “Daily Roman Updates,” alternates between posting memes about ancient civilizations and pro-Trump political commentary. The account is part of a community on X, often derisively referred to as “Roman statue guy accounts,” that has been elevated to, apparently, national importance since Trump’s second term began. 

Daily Roman Updates interacted with the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account before its exclusive scoop last month. But now the account has formed a much more professional relationship with DHS, operating as an semi-official propaganda channel for the administration. Both DHS and @UpdatingOnRome did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

We’ve covered the Trump administration’s obsession with X for months now. But this is the first time we’ve seen one of the app’s anonymous shitposters literally operate as a mouthpiece for the government.

The Daily Roman Updates account, which says in its bio “The Empire is gone, our shitposting is not,” was registered in 2019. Initially, the account mostly syndicated posts from a Facebook meme page called “Daily updates on the Roman Empire.” The Facebook page was opened in 2018 and lists its location as “Rome, Italy,” which is likely a gag. The phone number listed on the page is also a joke. The page announced it was joining Twitter in March 2019, and the page’s owner has frequently posted identical material across Facebook and Twitter/X, as well as other platforms. So it’s safe to assume the Facebook page and the @UpdatingOnRome X account have some overlap in ownership.

Which is weird, because the Facebook page doesn’t look like it would attract much interest from the Trump administration. The group is a pretty standard niche meme page, posting both aggregated and original memes in the vein of larger groups like “Classical Studies Memes for Hellenistic Teens.” The page is still regularly updated with reposted images about ancient civilizations, without much overt commentary on modern politics.

The affiliated @UpdatingOnRome X account, meanwhile, has gradually moved to a more directly right-wing political tone. The account’s most popular posts are still reposted memes, but the page was posting pro-Trump memes as early as January 2020. Starting in 2023, it began posting original videos featuring cartoons of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and others in Roman wear. After Trump was indicted for financial crimes the same year, the account’s merch page began selling T-shirts with a drawing of Julius Caesar in the same pose as Trump’s mugshot.

Around the time the X account started posting pro-Trump content, it started getting noticed by future members of Trump’s second administration. On March 15th, 2023, Elon Musk replied to a joke from @UpdatingOnRome about the anniversary of Julius Caesar’s assassination. And Musk has continued to interact with the account, replying to it over 60 times as of 2026. The account has regularly replied to posts by official Trump White House members and departments since his reelection. The only one to reply back that we’ve found has been the official DHS account, which replied to @UpdatingOnRome with an approving GIF last October. As far as official government accounts go, DHS has been the most aggressive about shitposting lately. And now, they’re just straight up officially coordinating with shitposting accounts.

Last week, simultaneously with the department’s official press release regarding the Greek artifacts, @UpdatingOnRome posted the same images in what it called “an honest-to-god Daily Roman Updates exclusive.” The DHS’ X account quoted the post with another approving GIF, this time from Disney’s Hercules.

While Daily Roman Updates might have the most official connection to Trump World now, it’s not the first ancient Rome-themed X account to attract attention like this from the American right wing. Last November, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis replied to the account @RomanHelmetGuy, an even more vocally pro-Trump voice on X, who’s previously made videos with Daily Roman Updates. One X user called it a “total anon victory.”  But that just can’t measure up to a random shitposter being treated like a real news source.

Some Stray Links

• “Man Finds $1 Million Worth of Yu-Gi-Oh Cards in a Dumpster”

• “My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist”

• “Controversial Influencer Clavicular Facing Criminal Charges in Alligator Shooting”

P.S. here’s a really good video from Ryan’s home town.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Garbage Day Live’s final show is on May 5th in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — and we have not one but two guests: Comedian Wyatt Cenac and podcaster PJ Vogt. It's going to be a strange and wonderful evening.

Tickets are going fast. We have about 20 left. So if you want to join us for a weird and wonderful night, get your tickets below.

The Daily Wire Won’t Survive The MAGA Vibe Shift

Earlier this month, I wrote about all the evidence piling up that something has gone wrong with the right-wing content industry. Hungary’s new prime minister says he’s cutting funds for Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are publicly feuding with President Donald Trump, Ashley St. Clair is spilling Republican secrets on TikTok, and Tim Pool was complaining last year he can’t pay the bills. Something’s up in Trump World.

Well, here’s even more proof for you. The Daily Wire, the digital media company founded in 2015 by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro is crashing and burning right now. They’re laying off a significant chunk of their workforce (after a previous layoff last year) and they’ve lost nearly 90% of their YouTube audience since 2023, according to some estimates I’ve seen. There are some recent videos on Shapiro’s channel that have less than 25,000 views. A pretty massive drop, considering he was averaging millions of views a video barely four years ago. So what gives?

For those who do not follow the right-wing ecosystem, The Daily Wire has always been a bit different from other conservative digital publishers. It was much more focused on appearing like a legitimate news site. I’ve always found them easier to understand as a traditional neocon outlet in MAGA clothing. They invested heavily in Facebook and by the end of the 2010s, they were one of the biggest publishers on the platform. According to the Facebook data from Newswhip my team and I have been tracking month to month since 2023, The Daily Wire basically disappeared from the app around 2023, came back for a brief period during the 2024 election, and then vanished again.

On YouTube, the story is a bit different. Shapiro’s channel, which has always been The Daily Wire’s flagship, started dropping off last fall. Slumping around August, it saw a small bump back to baseline after Charlie Kirk died, and then completely fell off a cliff at the end of October.

Which, when paired with the Facebook traffic data, gives us enough information to put together a fairly definitive picture of what happened. The Daily Wire is actually in a pretty typical digital media death spiral.

(Playboard)

Facebook was The Daily Wire’s bread basket from 2018 to around 2022. This also appears to be the peak of their YouTube penetration. They were doing well enough to launch their streaming service DailyWire+ around then, as well. They were pulling in a lot of traffic and, assumedly, a lot of revenue. Though I think it’s safe to assume The Daily Wire, like every other right-wing publisher, was also getting a lot of dark money from pro-Trump organizations and using it to inflate their traffic (we’ll get to that in a sec).

But Facebook traffic started to dry up and then, after a spring 2024 update to the News Feed, was nuked entirely. That same year, tensions between Shapiro and Daily Wire host Candace Owens got so bad they fired her. Owens had been on an especially anti-Semitic tear at the time, which didn’t fly at a company run by Shapiro, who is Orthodox Jewish. But Owens being fired for anti-Semitism was a perfect launchpad for her own YouTube channel, which is now pulling in millions of views a month. Owens has similarly used her close friendship with Kirk to wage a one-woman war against the MAGA establishment since September. And it doesn’t get any more establishment than The Daily Wire.

So not only does The Daily Wire now not have Facebook traffic to fall back on, they also have Owens cannibalizing a huge chunk of their audience, who are hungry for more reactionary content. This isn’t quite a leopards eating my face situation. A closer metaphor would be an oxycodone dealer losing customers to heroin.

Owens is a deeply unreliable narrator, but she claimed this week that the majority of the traffic still going to Shapiro’s videos is completely fake. “He’s been buying views for his main show and you can tell by the comment ratio. (And the fact that I know the person who bought ads-per-view at DW),” she posted on X. Which is actually backed up by what we can see on Google’s Ads Transparency Center. The Daily Wire is running around 40 of Shapiro’s videos as ads at the moment. Ouch.

If you add the amount of money The Daily Wire has lit on fire over the last five years producing Tubi-original right-wing movies no one watches, a floundering streaming app no one is using, and a shrinking roster of relevant pundits to hire, it’s hard to imagine how they could reverse this. Speaking of relevant pundits, there’s also the Israel problem. The MAGA civil war that’s been happening since Kirk died largely boils down to whether or not American conservatives should support Israel or not. Kirk was something of a bridge there. The “cool” new far right, led by figures like Owens and Nick Fuentes are both anti-Israel and blatantly anti-Semitic, while Shapiro, of course, is not. The age old problem with working at the racism factory! They eventually make a new racism that includes you.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

Pulling back the curtain on Wikipedia's Articles for Creation process

There is enormous demand for new Wikipedia articles, especially from brands and startups looking to influence how they appear in search and AI results. But despite the promises of sketchy vendors, getting a new entry published remains extraordinarily difficult.

Lumino's exclusive audit of 1,009 Articles for creation (AfC) submissions offers a rare, data-driven look at how this process actually works. The findings challenge common assumptions about notability and reveal the structural dynamics shaping the encyclopedia's growth and guidelines. 

The full report is here. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, Wikify, to stay updated on the latest Wikipedia developments.

A Good Post About Boomers

(x.com/missmayn)

What’s The Deal With The Scientology Speedruns?

I’ve had some readers asking me about the scientologist speedruns. If you’ve missed this, packs of mostly Gen Z kids are breaking down the doors of various Scientology centers and trying to run as deep into the building as they can. Another speedrun happened over the weekend in New York City.

@berkismm

scientology raid nyc😎 #nyc #funny #urbex #scientology #cult

I’ve seen some conspiracy theories about how these speedruns started and why. And I’ve seen a whole bunch of rumors about why many of the most popular speedrun TikToks are no longer available on the platform. Well, I have a few answers there.

The user claiming credit for the whole trend, @swhileyy, said in a video yesterday that his original video was actually pulled down by TikTok, itself. He said that even though his speedrun videos were getting millions of views, they were all removed by TikTok. @swhileyy claims that The Church Of Scientology was behind the takedown notices, but there’s not a lot of proof to that. btw if you’re wondering what @swhileyy’s deal is, he’s like an obnoxious prank video guy and I think this was all just originally conceived as something that could get a bunch of attention online.

As for why TikTok would be taking the videos down, again, not much of a conspiracy theory. The videos are trespassing (and arguably religious-based harassment) and that is against the app’s terms of service.

And if you’re still scratching head, asking, “why Scientology and why now?” Well, it’s been about 16 years since 4chan’s Project Chanology, where they protested Scientologists, which is just long enough for a new generation to come up with a new way to hassle them.

Instagram Is Cracking Down On Clippers

Instagram post

Told you this was coming, folks. Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced a big change coming to Instagram this week that is cracking down on aggregators and going after accounts that don’t add anything to other people’s content. Mosseri said he wants accounts using the collab and reshare tools, rather than just uploading another version of the video.

Mosseri doesn’t say “clipping” in the video, but it’s absolutely clear that’s what this change is meant to deal with. This is what I’ve been arguing for the last few weeks. If enough people figure out an engagement hack it, functionally, becomes a new form of spam. And spam, for most platforms, is the ultimate red line when it comes to moderation.

Speaking of spam…

X Is Beefing With MrBeast Now

(x.com/MrBeast)

MrBeast did a stupid engagement hack post over the weekend that now has a million likes. It was obviously a stupid engagement hack post and everyone knew it was. It’s nothing new for MrBeast, it’s his whole deal. Turn money into engagement and turn that engagement into money, repeat.

X’s new head of product, Nikita Bier, posted and then deleted a reply to a post about MrBeast’s likes giveaway, writing, “Not getting paid for this cycle for this bullshit.” And MrBeast replied, writing, “Welp, I’m going back to calling this Twitter.”

Anyways, this is basically a microcosm of how the entire internet works now.

A Plausible Theory For Why The Pitt Fanbase Is So Unhinged

This comes off the back of Pitt actor Isa Briones having to beg her Instagram followers to stop showing up at her Broadway show and shouting stuff at her.

I found this on X and I think it makes a lot of sense. “I think because [The Pitt] is so technical and they don’t get into the nitty gritty of the relationship drama,” X user @kitdoesitbest wrote. “These people are just making shit up! They want what the show isn’t going to provide them.”

Even more interesting, this theory kind of works for every bad fandom. Basically, if a parasocial fandom forms around a work of fiction — or a band or a creator or a podcast or whatever — but it doesn’t have enough to sustain that fandom, the fans will fill in the blanks. This would, for instance, explain the deep and completely unintelligible lore K-Pop fans concoct around like two members’ hands grazing each other.

So The Pitt, which tells viewers essentially nothing about the characters’ non-work lives, is now managing a very vocal fandom that has created an entirely different show that episodes need to live up to now. And every new episode that doesn’t fit into the collective headcanon only makes the fans angrier and more unruly.

I’ve asked this question before, but, genuinely, how do you pump the brakes on this sort of thing? Is this just going to be something anyone making anything has to worry about forever now?

Finally, A Proper Workstation For Your iPod Nano

Some Stray Links

• “How the feud between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni led to a $300 million trial that could torch both their careers”

• “A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat”

• “When Trump posts about new policies, how often do they become reality?”

P.S. here’s the quickpilled brown fox vibemogs lazy chud dogcel by jumpmaxxing.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

My researcher Adam Bumas keeps pushing me to celebrate Garbage Day’s anniversary every year and I have come around to the opinion that he’s right. We should. Yesterday, Garbage Day turned seven years old. What started a weekly roundup of weird stories my editors weren’t interested in has turned into a media company that now employs half a dozen people. Also, fun fact: I started Garbage Day after my former coworker Cates Holderness was laid off at BuzzFeed and I was kind of bored and lonely at work. The posts I was putting in those early emails were basically just the kind of stuff we’d usually share with each other throughout the day. And now she’s my managing editor! That’s crazy!

There’s a lot going on right now behind the scenes, so I’d love to pull the curtain back a bit and share what we’ve been up to.

The top line news here is that Garbage Media (the real actual name of our company lol) is growing, healthy, and profitable. I have serious PTSD from working in the viral content mines in the 2010s, where everyone’s eggs were in the Facebook basket, so we don’t rely on any one single form of revenue (or traffic) and that’s worked pretty well for us! A combination of paid subscribers, advertisements, live events, editorial partnerships, and, most recently, consulting, means our finances are pretty stable month to month. We’re in spitting distance of $1 million in revenue this year and even if we don’t make it, we’re still doing just fine.

On the newsletter front, we had a pretty crazy 2025. Our Charlie Kirk and Jeffrey Epstein coverage pushed us over 100,000 readers and, honestly, probably gave us a bit of an identity crisis lol. Sorry if we, uh, did do too much political coverage or, uh, not enough. We keep turning a big dial that says "Journalism" on it and constantly looking back at our audience for approval like a contestant on The Price Is Right. Our open rates took a bit of a dip last quarter thanks to a new change Gmail apparently made, but they still hover around 40% and we have a plan to clean up our list a bit. And thanks to free trials and partial paywalls, we have well over 5% of our audience converted to paid. Not too shabby. We also have a paid churn rate of basically zero. You guys seem very content lol.

Our podcast Panic World won two Signal Awards last year, which is very cool. And it’s currently getting around 100,000-200,000 monthly downloads, which is also very cool. But I think what I’m proudest of is the fact Courier, our partner on the show, was able to send my producer Grant Irving and I to Minneapolis back in January and record an episode on the ground during the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities. Felt like a real Growing Up moment for us.

Here’s one last data point that I find interesting: Panic World has a Patreon for bonus content and while it’s about half as big as Garbage Day’s paid audience, it’s growing at nearly double the speed. Which has raised some interesting questions. Is Panic World’s audience just more parasocial and engaged? Are podcasts simply better at converting a paying audience? Is it something to do with Patreon’s ecosystem? We can’t figure it out, but have theories we’ll be continuing to test. Let me know if you have any.

Garbage Day Live is probably the thing I’m most excited about right now. We think that we’ve got something really special that sets us apart from other indie media companies and also my stage manager Alex Petros and I just really enjoy putting on a show lol. We’re wrapping up a three-month run at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn next week. Our last show features podcaster PJ Vogt and comedian Wyatt Cenac. We sold out last month and we’re on track to do so again next week.

We’ve been talking a lot about what the future of Garbage Day Live is and the original plan was to tour it, but with gas prices surging, we’re currently leaning more towards making it a monthly show here in New York and coming up with recording and clipping strategy. Though we aren’t saying no to the right opportunities to travel with it. They just have to make sense. I’d love to take it to comedy or musical festivals. The goal, no matter what we do next, though, remains the same: Entertain people, connect with our audience beyond the screen, and, have fun.

While Garbage Day Live is what I’m, personally, having the most fun with right now, GDMI, our consulting group, is probably actually the most exciting thing happening at Garbage Media right now. We’ve had a ton of requests from our readers and it’s already become a massive revenue driver for us. In the last quarter it’s generated about a fifth of our total revenue across all of 2025. Wow! Perhaps selfishly, however, I just think the work is really interesting. The research projects we’re getting from clients are taking our team down internet rabbit holes that we would never normally explore. If you or your company want to work with our research team, you can email GDMI’s director, Lester Feder, at lester@garbageday.email and if you hit “yes” on the survey below, you’ll be added to a spin-off list we’re building for readers who are interested in receiving updates about GDMI.

As you all have probably noticed already, we’re trying to figure out video, both for Garbage Day and for our podcast Panic World. I’ve basically given up on short-form video as a concept lol. We’ll still be posting them, but we’ve had a lot more luck just really focusing on YouTube. Panic World just rolled over 10,000 subscribers over there and now we’re building up the Garbage Day channel with our new video editor Dan Méth, as well. I tend to see YouTube as more of a real estate play than anything else. It’s just TV now. And while I don’t love investing in an audience we can’t directly reach, like with email and RSS, we’re going to keep chipping away there. Our newest video dropped this morning.

Last but not least, though probably the most inside baseball of all of this, is our advertising business. Which I stuck down here because I assume the average person loathes digital advertising and never wants to ever hear about it, but maybe some industry folks are curious. We’ve been selling ads in our free issues for a flat rate of around $1,000-$2,000 and that has worked decently well so far. (I hate CPM deals.) Our ad calendar is mostly full for the next quarter. But my ad manager Josh Fjelstad and I have been trying to figure out something more interesting. Ads are kind of boring and we’ve been designing on a new sponsorship plan that we think could be more interesting for both readers and advertisers. Here’s what that looks like if you’re interested. And if you’re interested in any kind of advertising, feel free to email Josh at josh@garbageday.email.

Things are pretty exciting around Garbage HQ these days. I continually have to tell myself that the “problems” that we run up against aren’t real problems. Not really. We’re paying the rent and having a lot of fun, which is an extreme privilege these days. And I never really thought we’d get this big. Like My Chemical Romance after the release of The Black Parade, I am spending a lot of time now trying to figure out what’s next and what’s possible. What does our Fabulous Killjoys era look like? Etc.

Well, I’ll end here by trying to answer that question. I think companies like Dropout and Nebula have already given us a glimpse of where digital media is headed. If the creator economy used to be parasocial TV shows and personal brands, the future is parasocial TV channels and studios. Bundled newsletters, podcast networks, Patreon-supported content ecosystems that fans pay a single price to access. This is happening both because indie media has gotten good enough to make it interesting for audiences and, also, I think, because it offers people a moat for all the garbage on their feeds. I used to think of a paid subscription as the digital equivalent of an NPR tote bag. In a world of slop, I think the closest comparison would be fresh produce in a food desert.

We plan to invest more there this year, while, obviously, explaining all the garbage you’re seeing, as well. Thanks for all your support. We couldn’t have gotten here without our amazing community. Long live, Garbage Day.

Some Stray Links

• “Everything Is Poocrave Now”

• “How an Influencer’s Tweet About the D.C. Gunman Started a Firestorm”

• “The Kirkification of Our Troubled Times”

• “Indie music has been invaded by fake fans and cynical viral campaigns​. Here’s how deep it all goes”

P.S. here’s an incredible breakfast sandwich.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Garbage Day Live’s final show is on May 5th in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — and we have not one but two guests: Comedian Wyatt Cenac and podcaster PJ Vogt. It's going to be a strange and wonderful evening.

Tickets are going fast and we can’t guarantee there will be tickets available at the door! So if you want to join us for a weird and wonderful night, get your tickets below.

The N3on Blackhole

Alright, one last dispatch from Clip World…

I get a lot of readers coming up to me at events or messaging me on Discord saying some version of, “How are you doing? I can’t imagine what it must be like staring at the worst corners of the internet all day.” They tend to assume that monitoring far-right maniacs or sifting through deranged Reddit posts or whatever really takes a toll on me. Which is, honestly, not the case, though I appreciate the concern. All of that stuff is interesting, even if it’s oftentimes gross or offensive or upsetting.

But I am surprised by how completely and totally depressed short-form video clipping has made me. I can’t really think of something I’ve covered as a reporter over the last 15 years that has put me in as dark a place as reporting on the state of short-form video has this month. In fact, I think I’m slowly losing interest with the internet as a concept.

Bloomberg has a big piece out this week on the industrial clipping complex, picking up a lot of what we’ve covered here in Garbage Day. It features an interview with Anthony Fujiwara, the head of Clipping, the company responsible for the torrent of Kick clips invading feeds right now. “In the case of Clavicular, we take advantage of every single social media algorithm so he’s unavoidable,” Fujiwara told Bloomberg. All but admitting this whole thing is rigged. Also, worth mentioning here is that the company that owns Kick also owns the casino app Stake and almost all of these clips are not-so-covert ads for Stake.

But it’s not just that all of the views on all of these viral clips are completely inflated, whether by Kick itself or a company like Clipping. Though that’s certainly part of it. It’s also the content that’s in the clips that’s making me feel so insane. Spending the last few months consuming short-video gutter culture has made me seriously question if the internet is even a place I want to be anymore. I started putting stuff online to get away from these kinds of people!

At the very bottom of the algorithm across every platform right now, you basically only see a couple kinds of videos:

• AI slop

• The occasional meme, usually from years ago

• Movie and TV clips, with subtitles, AI voiceovers, and anti-piracy watermarks

• Softcore porn (and hardcore porn on X)

• Gambling ads

• Celebrity podcast clips

• And, of course, livestreamers

Viewing the world through clips is, frankly, awful. I would rather stare a wall in a dark room than spend my time watching the endless parade of sweaty vape store-tier sweatpants men sitting around staring at their phones in unfurnished McMansions, playing dorm room icebreaker games with bored OnlyFans models. An unceasing portal into a desolate Other America dictated by Bang Bus physics. I wouldn’t even say that Streamer World is part of the Zynternet. It’s something dumber and more hideous than that. A 12-year-old boy’s psychosexual fever dream of what life must be like outside of his gamer nest.

(The platonic ideal of livestreaming: Three random people standing around a completely unfurnished house screaming at each other.)

There’s one Kick streamer who you will, no doubt, encounter as you doomscroll to the bottom of the feed. His name is Rangesh Mutama and he goes by the username N3on. His team revealed earlier this month that he’s spending around $1 million a month on clipping. Have you ever heard of him? I searched our archives and I've never written about him. Without googling, do you even know what he looks like? I doubt it. Which leads to some profoundly unsettling questions about the internet right now. How can someone be spending over $12 million a year to promote themselves and still be a complete cultural nonentity? But even if the majority of his views are fake, he’s making enough money — or being given enough money — to inflate them.

Mutama’s content is a life simulator for losers, where he’s basically just bullied by more famous streamers and professional athletes and goes on awkward “dates” with whoever the popular Instagram influencer is at the moment. Like a Truman Show for the tweaker sleeping on your high school drug dealer’s couch. Also, sometimes Jason Derulo shows up. It’s not funny. It’s not entertaining. It’s not art. It’s not anything. Watching his videos make me feel like I am watching the end of the world.

I’m going to assume you don’t know who Mutama is. Why would you? He’s not even relevant enough to have a controversies section on a Wikipedia page — or even have a Wikipedia page at all. His name does appear in an article on viewbotting, though. But according to stats shared by Clavicular, he’s the fifth-most clipped streamer on Kick at the moment. Which means we can assume the four streamers ahead of him, all with equally fake view totals, most likely, are spending more money a month to clip themselves.

And if this is how simply how things “go viral” now, it defeats the entire point of the internet. What was once a place where you could directly connect with audiences and bypass the cost of legacy media is now a place where you have to spend millions of dollars to get anyone to see your stuff. And you don’t even get to be actually famous or important. At least Alex from Target got to go on The Ellen Show. Now, you have to beg a gambling company to make it look like you’re famous and all you get out of it is a livestreamed prison sentence where you have to sit in a room with Jason Derulo all day.