(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Let’s get this out of the way now. Charlie Kirk died for nothing.

He was, as I wrote last year, killed by a meme. Literally gunned down by bullets that read "Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️, ➡️, ⬇️⬇️⬇️,” "O bella ciao, bella ciao, ciao, ciao,” and “If you read this you are gay lmao." And he has, in death, become one himself. An ugly misshapen digital phantom cursed forever to appear in AI edits of WorldstarHipHop videos, porn clips, and TikTok slop. But he has become something even more embarrassing than a meme. He’s a true, inescapable failure for MAGA.

A year on, it’s clear that his death was the exact moment the wheels came off the conservative movement he dedicated his life — and death — to. As Luke Winkie wrote in Slate, “Charlie Kirk’s death was supposed to change everything. And maybe it did — just in the opposite way anyone expected.”

In the wake of Kirk’s death, the great and terrible machine that President Donald Trump spent a decade building exerted all its supposed cultural power in one cacophonous burst. Flags flew at half-mast, Kirk’s widow Erika pranced across the stage of the State Farm Stadium at his funeral in Glendale, Arizona, Fox News chyrons buzzed for days, and hundreds of Americans who didn’t mourn properly were doxxed or chased out of their jobs. Only for Kirk to end up as the Harambe for Gen Alpha. A meme so strange and hideous that no brand or government can ever co-opt it. Which means it could, in theory, stay a meme forever.

In life, Kirk served three core functions for the broader MAGA movement. The first, and most important, was as a foot soldier of the conservative vibe shift. When he founded his organization Turning Point USA in 2012 with a big dream and a little Tea Party money, he was savvy enough to know that the job wasn’t about actually converting college kids to conservatives. It was about making enough polarizing digital content to distract anyone from questioning their extremely suspicious membership numbers.

In this way, TPUSA was the perfect microcosm of Trumpism. Flush with conservative dark money, wildly unpopular irl, but loud and dumb and unavoidable online and on cable news. And thanks to the dynamics of social media, that made Kirk very powerful.

Which is how he ended up serving as a bridge of sorts between all the disparate groups that live under the MAGA label. From the outside, MAGA may look like a monolith, but if you lift up the rock and take a magnifying glass to all bugs squirming underneath, you see how much they all hate each other. But he was easily the biggest — and least insane — of the Trump World influencers. Before his death he had over four million Instagram followers and three million YouTube subscribers. His regular podcast The Charlie Kirk Show was in the top 50 biggest podcasts in the US, according to surveys by Edison Research. And unlike, say, someone like Alex Jones or even Tucker Carlson, in the last year of his life he was getting very close to graduating beyond the right-wing filter bubble.

He was the first guest on everyone’s favorite podcast, This Is Gavin Newsom (which never made the top 50 charts, in case you’re wondering), and the first person to be Surrounded in Jubilee’s infamous YouTube show.

Which is how he emerged as, in my opinion, Trump’s natural successor. Kirk never had any official position in the government, military, or church, but he was routinely touted as MAGA’s answer to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A tacitly agreed upon solution to the core anxiety underpinning Trump’s second term: What happens next? Even if Project 2025 were to succeed in dismantling American democracy once and for all, there was still the question of what happens after Trump finally shits his pants in the Oval Office for the final time. And an influencer president would have been the perfect 21st-century replacement for a reality TV president. A figure that could, like Trump, at the very least project the idea that he’s popular somewhere.

(x.com/comrade__e)

All of this made Kirk a weirdly vulnerable node in the network. He was both the present and the future of Trump’s astroturfed cultural revolution and his death was a test for Trump World. A moment when they had to finally face the bizarre contradiction that defines them, and all authoritarian movements. That they both represent the silent majority of America and have to use state violence to punish anyone not in that silent majority. It was a test they summarily failed.

Kirk’s death meant they had to walk an increasingly absurd tightrope last September when they tried to turn him into a martyr. Simultaneously pretending that every American knew who Kirk was and cared that he died, while also using the power of the state to explain why he mattered and why it was so sacrilegious to criticize him. For a brief moment, especially online and in the media, where MAGA is far more comfortable operating, it looked like it might work.

The day after Kirk died, MSNBC fired Matthew Dowd for saying on air that “hateful words lead to hateful actions.” And a doxxing site originally called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” started a mass-harassment campaign against any suspected of celebrating the murder. By the end of the day, 10 more people were reportedly fired for social media comments about Kirk. A week later, The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah after she described Kirk as, “a white man that espoused violence.” And ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! after Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr threatened to revoke its broadcast license over Kimmel speculating that Kirk’s killer may have been far right. Per a Reuters report last November, over 600 Americans were fired or suspended for social media posts about Kirk.

But those early victories have not exactly stuck. Many — though not all — of the Americans fired for critical posts about Kirk last year got big payouts. The Washington Post was forced to rehire Attiah. And Jimmy Kimmel was back on the air within a week. And a year worth of Kirk memes has made the idea of penalizing anyone for disrespecting his memory completely laughable. Poor ol’ Chaya Raichik, who runs Libs of TikTok, is still carrying the flame, it seems. Today she tried to incite a harassment campaign against students at University of Nebraska–Lincoln who wanted to hold a “Twerk for Kirk” event on the Kirkiversary today. All the replies to her posts are people calling it based. Congrats, Charlie, you’re finally popular with college students.

Twitter tweet

It’s also not clear that Kirk’s death has even really stuck in the popular consciousness, beyond the memes, of course. It’s far from scientific, but I asked Garbage Day readers what they remember from last September and the bulk of the replies I’ve received basically boil down to, “it was, briefly, very horrifying, but, ultimately, just annoying.”

One reader told me that he mainly remembers it as the moment kids started using “KIRK” as their user names in Rocket League. Others mentioned how it derailed the news cycle for a few days before vanishing into the background radiation of online discourse we all try and ignore every day. Others sent me very funny play-by-plays of their group chats who were, immediately, in private, sharing memes about Kirk’s death minutes after it happened. One reader told me she told me she found out about Kirk’s murder after she called her dad about something unrelated and he jokingly answered the phone, "Charlie Kirk hotline.” She fired back, “"God why are we talking about that moron?”

I thought for sure at the time that Kirk’s murder was going to be Trump’s Reichstag fire, but there was never any chance of that happening. No one gave a shit about the guy! But that said, it’s actually taken me a year to fully understand what happened — or, rather, what didn’t happen — last September.

Looking back at it now, I’d say it all fell apart at Kirk’s funeral. Like everything else in Trump’s America, it was, simply put, a flop. And, in retrospect, part of a larger pattern plaguing the second Trump administration. One I suspect will be looked back on as their undoing. They simply can’t throw an event. Or, perhaps put a better way, they have no idea how to project the same level of all-consuming spectacle in real life that they do online.

Compare the post-Kirkening reign of terror online to what Republicans did in real life. Last year, on September 11th, no less, 16 Republican lawmakers wrote a letter demanding a statue of Kirk be installed in the US Capitol. It went nowhere. And any attempt at erecting a statue of Kirk anywhere else has resulted in almost immediate vandalism. Trump awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, but that really didn’t amount to much for the average person. And Kirk’s funeral was a shockingly prescient glimpse of how the Trump administration would celebrate America’s 250th anniversary a few months later. It was a ghastly star-spangled convulsion of violent nationalism dressed up like a WWE regional showcase that, just like every other event Trump World throws, also somehow involved Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the USA.”

Make no mistake, I am not saying that all is good in America. Kirk’s death led directly to Trump’s Executive Order National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, which classifies “antifa” as a “terrorist organization.” But no part of Trump World is stronger post-Kirk.

Even Erika Kirk has faced a year of criticism for her inability to cry properly — and her brief stint where she wore a weird hat. And it’s not surprising that the Trump administration seems to have lost interest in eulogizing him. TPUSA leaders are reportedly furious that Republicans scheduled the midterm convention for today. And it seems like the only thing the Trump administration has planned for the Kirkiversary today is a two-minute video shared to the White House X account. The comments are full of Kirk edits and demands that Trump release the unredacted Epstein files. Trump, it seems, has moved on to more important matters, like claiming he was a 9/11 first responder.

Twitter tweet

And so here we are, 12 months later. MAGA has never felt older and weaker and more out of touch, just like their president. The revolting aesthetics of Kirk’s funeral turned out not to be an aberration, but just the house style of the federal government, apparently. There is no one waiting in the wings to replace the GOP’s rotting figurehead. And the gulf between Trump’s big talk online and actual irl followthrough has never felt wider. Which brings us back to the memes.

Not only was the Trump administration completely unable to make people care irl, they now have a meme they can’t touch. Kirk is trapped forever in a cyberhell that, fittingly enough, only makes MAGA look dumber and more irrelevant the longer the meme lasts. Trump’s digital team is, obviously, never going to acknowledge it. Vice President JD Vance, who was quick to try and “own” the narrative around his ugly AI caricature last Halloween, will never post a Kirk edit. And no matter how deranged the federal X accounts are, I am confident we will never see an Agarthan Charlie Kirk deliver a can of white Monster energy drink to ICE agents in a video shared by Homeland Security. And while none of those words probably mean anything to a normal person, if you’ve reconfigured your entire political movement around recruiting psychotic 13-year-olds into your unpaid cyber army, that’s a problem! It’s not an accident that six months post-Kirk all the kids started smashing their faces with hammers like Clavicular. Live by the vibe shift, die by the vibe shift.

[Adam Bumas contributed reporting to this piece.]

You Can Listen To A New Panic World Episode About This Wherever You Get Your Podcasts

P.S. here’s one more Kirk meme for you.

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

If We’re All Worrying About AI It Means No One Is Questioning Whether Or Not It Sucks Shit Still

There’s a lot going on in the world of AI right now. OpenAI launched GPT‑6 Astra earlier this week. Which is, idk, better at stuff than OpenAI’s previous models. Apparently one thing it’s very good at big-dogging mathematicians and possibly lifting their research! Meanwhile, Meta launched a personal AI agent called Muse yesterday. Which Mark Zuckerberg is so excited about that he decided to steal the @Muse handle from the band Muse and relegate them to @Museband. I think Muse (the band) is annoying so I’m actually fine with that.

Oh, also, one guy on X used ChatGPT to synthesize “a new selective M4 muscarinic receptor agonist for treating schizophrenia.” Excited to see how sick he gets from this.

(x.com/douglasyaody)

To add to the hysteria, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon took to X this week to announce he was resigning from the company. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote. This, understandably, scared a lot of people. Luckily, Evan Hubinger, a lead researcher at Anthropic, tried to calm things down by writing on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Oh, uh, nevermind.

Though, maybe we should be freaking out about AI. Apparently Bill Gates is concerned enough about it to start blogging. Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong in The Atlantic also weighed in on our current moment, writing, “The defining feature of this moment is a loss of control. Panic emanating from AI researchers, resentment felt by average Americans—all of it is part of the AI crunch.”

Talking about the “AI crunch” is not exactly easy, unfortunately. It’s increasingly clear that there are several coordinated and paid anti-AI and anti-data center campaigns in play online right now. German theoretical physicist (and YouTube creator) Sabine Hossenfelder claims she was recently offered money to make content about the existential threat of AI development. Not to get too tin foil hat here, but many of the groups offering influencers money to scare people about AI are either publicly or privately endorsed by the CEOs of the very tech companies they’re warning you about!

If you’re getting confused thinking about all of this, The New York Times, in a piece earlier this week, once again asked, “how scared should we be of AI right now?” The piece is largely about the cult of the rationalists, the AI doomers who believe we are hurdling towards the end of the world, many of whom are completely fine with that and working night and day to make sure it happens. This whole dynamic was recently summed up pretty succinctly in an X post that read, “We have to build AI that murders us, because if we don’t, China will build it first, and I don’t want to get murdered by a computer that speaks Chinese. That would be ridiculous.”

(Check it out, we turned something that takes two clicks into a long text conversation, which everyone loves having.)

All of this is to say that the AI industry wants us to keep talking about AI like this. With every new, incremental model release, every new gimmicky agent rollout, they shriek harder and harder at us that we must embrace their AI before China’s AI is forced upon us. That we need to support American tech oligarchs building a machine god (and owning it) before China does. And it’s why prominent venture capitalists and Big Tech leaders have been so quick to blame China for all the backlash against AI we’re seeing right now. But I actually don’t think any of this matters! At all!!

Every argument for — or against — AI, data centers, and a future powered by artificial general intelligence pre-supposes that this technology works properly and will get less expensive over time and get good enough to replace human workers. It pre-supposes our electrical grids can keep up with development of data centers and that if, like earlier this week, there’s a massive outage or if one of these companies go out of business, that humans will scramble to get back to their AI chatbots. And it pre-supposes that people will want or even tolerate a world frozen by automation, wrapped in surveillance. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

Even the worst, dumbest thing a human could do is more interesting than the most sophisticated AI attempt at the same thing. And I’ll prove it to you. This week, the streamer N3on, whose livestreams we previously described as, “an unceasing portal into a desolate Other America dictated by Bang Bus physics,” launched a fully AI-generated stream earlier this week. I genuinely think he makes some of the worst content I’ve ever seen and I hate watching it, but it’s lightyears better what the AI came up with. And if this technology can’t even replace a N3on stream, then none of those other big questions they want us all fretting about really matter.

Do You Store Your Eggs In The Milk Drawer?

(reddit.com/r/roommateproblems)

I figured that by going to the thread and reading the post, all the updates, and the comments I would have a better sense of what the hell is going on here. But, honestly, I am left with only more questions.

The Kirkaversary Is Tomorrow

We will have a special issue tomorrow all about it, but we want to hear from you, dear reader. What do you remember from that day? What are some Kirk edits and memes you’ve seen over the last year? What’s your relationship with it, in general? Is it something you even think about?

Let us know! @ me in the Discord, DM us on Instagram, leave a comment on this post, or reply to directly to this email.

Is This Current Pivot To Video Finally Ending?

I am unclear exactly how well-known the dreaded “pivot to video” concept is among civilians. But for those of us who work in media, it pops up every three-to-five years and basically wastes everyone’s time and results in a whole bunch of writers getting laid off. As far as my own career goes, we are currently in my fourth pivot to video. There are signs that it’s already wrapping up. But, first, let’s break down the ones I’ve already suffered through.

• 2012-2015: This was the rise of both professional studios for YouTube and the viral Vine star. Solid color backdrops, shitty Jimmy Fallon-esque interview prompts, and a whole bunch of people eating snacks. This era peaked, and came crashing down, after Facebook tried to pay everyone to livestream.

• 2018-March 2020: The brands, publishers, and studios that survived the 2012 pivot were rewarded with Netflix shows no one ever watched and the golden handcuffs of now having to make YouTube content forever. Meanwhile, video essays and, particularly, left-wing Breadtube got real big. And, on the short-form front, TikTok came out and basically changed everything overnight.

• March 2020-2022/2023: This is the COVID era. We got E-boys and E-girls, AOC played Among Us with Hasan Piker, and hobbyist YouTube came roaring back in a way we hadn’t seen since the 2000s. This era ended when Andrew Tate and his fans hijacked the TikTok feed and turned him into a celebrity overnight.

• 2022/2023-present: This era has really been defined by the war between YouTube and Netflix for the future of our televisions. Big creators like MrBeast got bigger, Tate’s playbook spawned a billion-dollar clipping industry, and video podcasts calcified into the new meta of “TV shows on YouTube.”

These are broad strokes, of course, but that’s basically what happened. As for why I think our current era is ending (which would mean another one is coming to be clear), well…

Amelia Dimoldenberg is ending her long-running show Chicken Shop Date after more than a decade. YouTube has drastically changed what their front-facing metrics track — but not what they pay for you! Basically, opening a YouTube video now counts as a view, even though they’re still only paying you for “engaged views.” MS Now will soon be airing Crooked Media “podcasts,” which are really just talk shows. YouTube channels are simulcasting on Netflix. And I’m hearing from a lot of short-form creators lately that that entire realm is basically over if you want to make any real money.

As for what’s next, my prediction is a complete hollowing out of the video middle class, as it were. Professionally produced studio shows and random people talking into their phones and basically nothing in between.

Nick Shirley Went On Fortnite Friday With ConnorEatsPants And Couldn’t Spell Basic Words Like “Discipline”

ConnorEatsPants is a Twitch streamer and someone I also consider on the vanguard of “dark woke” lol. He has a show every week called “Fortnite Friday,” which California Gov. Gavin Newsom was on last year, funnily enough. Last week, Nick Shirley, the right-wing YouTuber that kicked off the ICE siege of Minneapolis last year, was on the stream and it didn’t go super well.

Twitter tweet

Benjamin Weiss, a reporter for Courthouse News, has a very handy X thread full of standout moments. My personal favorite was when Shirley was asked to spell the word “discipline” and couldn’t do it.

I recommend clicking through because it’s a genuinely interesting thread and ConnorEatsPants hammered Shirley pretty hard over his “journalism.” Oh, also, Shirley is very bad at Fortnite.

Channel 5 Gave Hunter Biden Access To Their Email List???

Channel 5, formerly known as All Gas No Brakes, is a independent media company run by Andrew Callaghan that is very popular with a certain kind of young man online. The kind of young man online that doesn’t care that Callaghan was hit with sexual misconduct allegations back in 2023.

Channel 5 surprised their audience this week when they posted a notes app pre-apology, explaining that they gave Hunter Biden access to their mailing list?

(x.com/Channel5iveNews)

If you care, and you probably don’t have to, Biden is launching a cryptocoin called $LAPTOP. Get it? It’s already crashed in price.

In a follow-up post, Channel 5 wrote, “Emails from Hunter’s team have not gone out to any of our public subscribers, we were able to get all info completely removed from list before blast was sent.” So I guess this was meant to get out in front of whatever Biden was planning to do.

Oh, and, according to 404 Media, giving Biden the email list at all was probably illegal.

A Good Post

(x.com/holidaykirk)

Some Stray Links

• “Breaking Benjamin frontman pauses concert to rant about Fallout 4 modding beef: 'There was a modder in the community that was really mean to me'“

• “TMZ’s New DC Outpost Brings Chaos to the Capitol”

• “Facebook Is Hosting Huge Numbers of Horrifying AI-Generated Videos of Violent Child Abuse, and Meta Is Barely Even Pretending to Care About Taking Them Down”

P.S. here’s one more good Dolly Parton post.

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

The Algorithm Doesn’t Want Us Remembering Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton’s death on August 25th was a universal cultural event, but not in a way that the internet could easily process. There have definitely been some impressive engagement numbers. She was on our top lists on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and her songs shot to the top of the iTunes and Spotify charts. But they didn’t stay there.

Parton’s popularity around the internet has been rapidly tailing off, both for her songs and on her official accounts, in general. Which is surprising, considering how much her death is weighing on culture. For someone like Parton, this is really just a blink of an eye — American flags were still at half staff in her honor as her engagement was sinking. But things go a lot faster online. And now that the quickening cycle of online culture is just “culture,” it’s worth looking at how that cycle makes it a lot harder for anyone to mourn.

It’s pretty grim to call a beloved entertainer’s death an “organic trend,” but part of my point is that if you do, it was definitely the biggest in a long time. Parton’s name was TikTok’s fourth-biggest hashtag in the US for the month of August, her official Instagram account gained more than 1.5 million followers in the week after her death, and the announcement of her death was Facebook’s third-biggest post for the month. Then, with the usual rhythms for trends, that started to change.

Just a week after Parton’s death, most of the attention had fallen away. As of August 31st, our data from Kworb says that her most popular song, “Jolene,” had fallen from first to 82nd in daily Spotify streams (with 1.3 million streams on that day, compared to 3.9 million at its peak). The only other song in the top 200 at the end of August was “9 to 5,” at number 153 on the chart, and the next day it had entirely vanished from the top 200.

Meanwhile, Parton’s stats around the rest of the internet have tailed off with similar speed. As of September, she’s getting less than 10,000 new Instagram followers a day according to Social Blade, and her name has entirely disappeared from Tiktok’s “popular hashtags” list. This isn’t just a matter of Parton being an older artist, or even a dead one — the same day “9 to 5” dropped off the Spotify daily charts, “Billie Jean” was 15th. It hasn’t left the top 20 since the Michael movie released in the spring. So what’s the difference for Parton?

(Garbage Day/Adam Bumas)

The numbers make sense when you look at them with the unblinking mechanical eye of the algorithm. Like I said in my Jimothy timeline, the key to a sustained trend is a steady stream of new, participatory content. Parton has one last song in a time capsule to be opened in 2045, but unlike Michael Jackson, there’s no movie studio marketing to keep her in our feeds. So with each passing day she’s automatically ranked a little further down, granted a little less visibility online, because she isn’t uploading any grist for the mill.

Long after these engagement numbers have diminished, I’m still seeing plenty of conversation online about her. But the algorithms seem to be indicative of a larger change in how we collectively process death. It’s been a while since 2016, when David Bowie and Prince died three months apart, those deaths became inextricably linked in culture, and both artists were in the top 15 best-selling albums for the year.

Out of curiosity, I checked the Spotify archives from a decade ago to see how long Bowie and Prince stayed in the top streaming charts. I was genuinely surprised to see that they didn’t last much longer. Bowie had more than 30 songs in the top 200 after his death, but they were all gone a month later. Prince, meanwhile, was on a similar trajectory to Parton, with his songs dropping off the daily charts completely after less than two weeks.

Meaning algorithmic platforms have always behaved this way, even when culture as a whole hasn’t. Since then, pop music has become a great cross section of those platforms’ shadow over all of culture. The entire apparatus of discovering new talent has been subsumed by TikTok. The Billboard charts have been refactored many times to prioritize Spotify streams more. And as we saw this spring, any band that breaks out now faces suspicion of being a marketing psyop. 

There’s a lot less room for grief, mourning, remembrance, anywhere in this cold equation. The last time any major social platform acknowledged death was 2009, when Facebook launched its “memorial account” feature for profiles of people who had died, later extending a similar policy to Instagram. Some other platforms will let next of kin delete profiles or inherit their assets, but Meta is still the only company to outwardly present the living and the dead differently online at all. Dolly Parton’s YouTube and TikTok pages look like nothing ever happened. And it’s hard to avoid the idea that, as far as the algorithms are concerned, anyone who isn’t regularly uploading may as well be dead for all they care.

It Happened To Me: I Almost Fell For #Oreogate

Last Monday, as I was getting my links together for the issue, I came across a funny video I had flagged from over the weekend: an AI-generated song based on WhatsApp messages about oreos from a parents group chat. Basically, one mom in the chat didn’t want the other girls to bring oreos to school because she doesn’t let her daughter eat them. The version I saw was shared on X by Matt Whitlock, a Republican political strategist.

A quick aside here. It is pretty astounding — and worrying — how much of my internet diet is determined by these kinds of people now. I sort of understand why a lot of young people don’t want to move to Bluesky, for reasons both cultural and technical, but it really is annoying that I have to wade through a bunch of right-wing garbage to see, like, a funny tweet or catch up on the latest fandom discourse. I have to assume this is having a disastrous effect on society at large right now.

Anyways, I’m not completely opposed to featuring an AI-generated song in the newsletter if it’s funny, but there was one red flag I noticed immediately that I couldn’t quite shake. The texts in the video were from American moms… using WhatsApp. I’m sure there are American moms out there using WhatsApp to coordinate pickups or something, but it was enough to make me think there was something funny going on. I had a little poke around the Instagram account that posted the video and literally every post was an AI-generated song, tagged with #sunopartner. Suno is one of the leading AI music platforms. So I skipped it!

(instagram.com/ashleighjamz)

This isn’t the first video like this I’ve come across recently. Sponsored AI-generated videos based on text messages or some other kind of found or recorded message — comment sections, Tinder DMs, emails, phone calls — are a scourge on social right now. As Kate Lindsay wrote in Link In Bio back in July, “So much of what we see online got there thanks to undisclosed marketing campaigns, and not just for products or musical artists, but even opinions.” And influencers have realized AI-generated ragebait works really well.

What I did not realize is that a whole lot of people did not do the kind of basic due diligence that I did. As Business Insider reporter Katie Notopoulos reported on Friday, #Oreogate, as it’s come to be known, got A LOT of press pickup. “Mom’s ridiculous school lunch Oreo request triggers massive — and hilarious — backlash,” The New York Post wrote. “A mom complained about her daughter's classmate bringing cookies to school. Welcome to Oreo-gate,” Yahoo! Life wrote. My personal theory is that a lot of outlets have doubled down on “viral news” because Google search traffic has completely bottomed out and they’re getting desperate. But #Oreogate also generated a ton of discussion on Instagram and Threads. Pediatricians were posting about it. Podcasters dedicated episodes to it. And one guy even staged a skit with a woman playing the mom from #Oreogate.

But I don’t think it’s super surprising this went viral, fake or not. As I wrote on Monday, the Lindsay Clancy trial, which is expected to wrap this week, has somewhat inadvertently opened the algorithmic floodgates. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and X are all promoting what I’m going to call “mom slop” right now. Not slop for moms, but about them. And because every short-form video app uses, more or less, the same trending content algorithm ripped off from TikTok circa 2018, all of them have identified “mom” as a discussion topic and are promoting their own variety of it at the moment. On TikTok it’s women making true crime content about the Clancy trial, on Instagram it’s AI-generated songs about unreasonable moms, and on X it’s right-wingers raging over, uh, moms talking in public. (I don’t think it’s an accident that I first saw the #Oreogate video in an X post from a Republican strategist.)

I think we’re actually lucky that this time around it was just a brand’s sneaky advertisement that tapped into the algorithmic zeitgeist. Because it won’t take long for truly bad actors realize how effective this playbook is. Every platform is just TV now and it turns out it’s very easy to change the channel on all of them to the same thing.

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

How digital self-surveillance can be turned against us by police, prosecutors, & political whims

In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms.

At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes, but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.

Order your copy here.

Here’s A Really Good TikTok

@ryannreeddesignbuild

Mr. Bucks County 2027 nominee. Community advocate. Golf outing supporter. 🏆⛳🎗️ Teaming up with Ryann Reed Design Build for the 9th Annual ... See more

Milo Yiannopoulos Was Deported

The existence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is incompatible with both a functioning democracy and human dignity. But in this one specific instance, I suppose they’ve done something, at least, in theory, funny. Right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was deported by ICE last week. They picked him up in New Orleans on Friday. Per a statement from the Department of Homeland Security, he legally entered the US in May 2019 and “chose to overstay his welcome.” They also released a headshot:

(Department of Homeland Security)

Beyond all the schadenfreude, the real important part of this whole misadventure are the other far-right influencers involved in Yiannopoulos’s deportation. Laura Loomer told The Washington Post that she was the mastermind behind it. She said she’s been in contact with DHS about Yiannopoulos since 2024. Loomer broke the news Friday night that Yiannopoulos had been put on a flight back to the UK.

She’s also used Yiannopoulos’ deportation as a pretext to start a fight with former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who she claims was using Yiannopoulos as a ghostwriter in 2022. Greene denies that she ever hired him for anything.

Meanwhile, British right-wing pundit Raheem Kassam, who used to work with Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, claims that he got a text from an unnamed source on Friday that read, “We got him. In Louisiana.”

Very curious to see how nasty these intra-right-wing rifts get now that all of these freaks either are members of the federal government themselves or have a bunch of federal workers in their pocket leaking stuff to them. All it takes is one big moment of weakness from President Donald Trump and the entire center of this movement is going to fall out.

Alright, Let’s Talk About The Hugging Face Incident

I wrote about this earlier this summer, but there’s been another wave of analysis about OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face. The TL;DR is that a bunch of OpenAI’s agents, some running on its new GPT-5.6 Sol model, broke out of a sandbox and started messing with machine learning company Hugging Face’s backend infrastructure. Put even more simply: A swarm of AI bots hacked another AI company.

Two AI research nonprofits, METR and Redwood Research, published a report on the breach last week, which has really freaked out the AI industry. Axios has a pretty good summary in plain English of what METR and Redwood Research found. The most alarming findings are that the agents knew they were breaking the rules, worked together in an organized hierarchy to do so, and figured out a method that let them hide their activities from humans. Though, perhaps most alarming of all, the researchers working on the post-mortem admitted they had to use AI agents of their own to analyze what happened because it was too huge and complex for them dig through themselves.

Now, I want to be clear, I do not think this is some big sign that AI agents are sentient or something. I’ve always argued that it’s a much better use of everyone’s time to focus on the very real effects of the bad, unthinking AI we currently have than daydreaming about artificial general intelligence. So my big takeaway is that a big dumb swarm of AI agents already have the capability to hack a website without anyone noticing and do it in such a way that human beings can barely understand how or why. Seems bad!

YouTube Is Destroying Davie504’s Channel

Davide Biale, better known as davie504, is a popular bass guitar player on YouTube who has had to make several videos over the last year complaining about the copyright strikes he keeps getting on his channel. It’s gotten so silly that one of Biale’s videos got copyright struck for playing literal silence.

He visited Microsoft’s anechoic chamber, considered the world’s quietest rooms, and said that he was going to play Simon & Garfunkel’s "The Sound of Silence,” but when he started to play song, he muted his own audio. Even though his version of the song never actually appeared in the video, just saying that he was going to play it earned him a copyright strike.

Biale, in a video out this week, said that he was finally able to get ahold of someone at YouTube, but quickly realized he was talking to some kind of bot. At one point, a member of YouTube’s team just emailed him a link to an FAQ about how copyright on YouTube works.

Everyone’s Discovered Cringe Facedancing

Last week, a whole bunch of people stumbled across facedancing, or that cringey style of dance cosplayers do where it looks like they’re moving in stop motion. A Mexican TikToker that goes by @minynaranja went viral (in a bad way) after a Verified X user shared a video of her facedancing in front of a live audience. The video is at least a year old, it made the rounds on various cringe subreddits last October.

Twitter tweet

What’s weird is that even Russia Today picked up @minynaranja’s videos this time around. Which is, honestly, a pretty good example of what I wrote above. The viral news ragebait content economy is really perfect for bad actors to take advantage of right now. All you need is a video of a woman doing something and you can basically get every user on a feed talking about it.

Some Very Good Weird Al Lost Media, No Longer Lost

Some Stray Links

• “Lessons From a Heated Media Rivalry”

• “The viral leftist teens of Campaign 2020 work for OpenAI now”

• “Who’s Afraid of A.I. Music?”

• “He Was a Top Lawn Care Influencer on YouTube. Then Everything Went Haywire.”

P.S. here’s New York Sora.

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

Play China Games, Win China Prizes

The tendency in the west to assume that China is the “future” can be a little unhelpful. The rise and fall of TikTok in the west over the last eight years has proved that the Chinese market is not really ahead of ours, but parallel. Sure, Americans loved the original TikTok, but they’ve had harder time embracing other big Chinese tech trends. Social shopping really hasn’t taken off here the same way. We have a vastly different relationship with consumer-grade generative AI. Free-to-play gacha games like Genshin Impact have broken through here, but are far from the norm. Electric vehicles, drone delivery, all-in-one social passport apps, the list goes on and on and the result is almost always the same. Some of this stuff catches on, but rarely the same way.

All that said lol, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from watching what’s happening on the other side of the Great Firewall. Especially when America’s capitalists are both desperate to compete with China and, also, clearly very jealous of them. The second Trump administration and post-COVID Silicon Valley are both trying to brute force the American sociopolitical landscape into what they think China has. This is why the same right-wing reactionaries that spent the 2010s moaning about “social credit scores” are racing to build AI-powered Flock panopticons across the country right now. And they have no issue burning everything down in the short term if it gets them closer to where they think they need to be to compete with China in the long term. If you want a really good example of how this works, look no further than microdramas.

Microdramas are vertically-shot serialized scripted TV shows made for social platforms. In China they are callled “Duanju” and they’re a big market, making nearly $15 billion last year. If you’re wondering how they make so much money, basically imagine soap opera-style cliffhangers driving users to episodes that live behind a paywall. Incidentally, this format is already pretty common in the US, but for unscripted entertainment (and porn). But the eye-popping revenue the Chinese microdrama industry has been raking in — and Hollywood’s borderline necrotic state right now — has made a lot of Americans desperate enough to hop on the bandwagon.

(Ah yes, “Fatal Temptation: Between Two Alphas,” that’s the future of entertainment, right there.)

But microdramas are not really a replacement for TV shows. I’ve gotten a handful of tips from readers over the last few years about what it’s like to work with western microdrama studios and I would describe the experience as “profoundly depressing.” A lot of the American microdramas I’ve watched are like sub-CW-level productions about teenagers with werewolf boyfriends. In other words, they’re like everything else you see on social media right now: Worthless, but addicting audiovisual goonslop.

The dire state of the microdrama industry is not mentioned in all the trend pieces coming out at the moment featuring excited industry professionals talking about how much business they’re suddenly getting. “It has ​completely changed my circumstances financially,” actor Robert Palmer Watkins recently told Reuters. “I am so grateful.”

I’m sure there are a lot of folks that are happy to have a paycheck after a brutal half-decade for Hollywood, but microdramas are not going to save the entertainment industry. In fact, they might be actively contributing to its downfall. As Chinese culture publication Sixth Tone reported this week, Chinese microdramas are already experiencing an upheaval of their own. A handful of AI-driven studios have popped up across the country that have fully automated the entire microdrama production pipeline. It turns out the “fans” of this content don’t particularly care if humans are involved or not. “I have my own mortgage and I’m responsible for my parents’ retirement. Given the current market of microdramas… it’s simply not enough to cover my daily expenses,” one Chinese microdrama actor told CNN recently.

I’ve written about America’s current culture-wide race to the bottom from a few different angles this year. You can see it everywhere, a borderline apocalyptic feeling that these are the final days of one era of capitalism and that every boat must be burned before the next era comes over the horizon. At some point over the last 10 years, every industry and institution connected themselves to corporate social platforms and basically just gave themselves over totally to the incentives those platforms demanded of them. They’ve been promised that by doing so they’ll be able to compete with the Chinese industries, but none of them are actually looking at what’s happening over there. The world of TV, film, and music are just where that transformation has been most visible. Netflix is buying up YouTube channels, while YouTube is paying creators not to work with Netflix. Disney hired creator Dhar Mann to make scripted microdramas for them and added their own vertical TikTok slop feed.

Big establishment studios like Disney and, even Netflix, apparently, either don’t see what’s happening or think they’re immune to it, so I’m going to lay it out very simply. This is true for microdramas, but it’s also true for every other form of slop being pushed on us by big institutions right now, whether we’re talking about fast food, airlines, banks, insurance, movie studios, or the White House. Big Tech wants you to commit suicide so they don’t have to spend the money to kill you. They want you to forget everything you know about making a product, building an audience, and governing a state and trust that their metrics can help you do it better than them. And they want you to blindly follow those metrics until you become so “popular” on the platforms they own and irrelevant in real life that when you finally get replaced with their AI no one even notices.

The Right-Wing Found Their New Target: Moms On TikTok

In 2022, Elon Musk effectively moved the hub of the online far right from chan sites, subreddits, and random message boards to Twitter. This was widely celebrated among the right wing, who had long believed that they were not represented in Twitter’s marketplace of ideas (they, obviously, were). But this has had some unexpected — and possibly disastrous — consequences.

The biggest one is that the online right is now far more reliant on the news cycle than they were before. And, under Trump 2.0, this also now includes official accounts for the federal government. Even though Musk added a non-chronological For You tab to Twitter when he renamed it X, the app still moves within news cycles — big topical discussions pegged to the major headlines of the week. Which means most right-wing trolls now are basically operating as unpaid, under-paid, or uncredited interns for more established right-wing tabloids. The New York Post and Fox News get a lot of mileage out of Chaya Raichik’s Libs of TikTok.

Now that X’s algorithm demands video content just like every other platform does, this largely means that the great and powerful cyber army that birthed Pepe the Frog and Gamergate in the 2010s has basically been reduced to a bunch of people reuploading TikTok videos that are tangentially connected to whatever’s in the news at the moment. And because most of the big players still orbiting the MAGA world are either weird incels themselves or writing for them, nine times out of ten this manifests as a whole bunch of losers whining about women on their feeds. A very good example of this was back in April 2025, when Trump supporters resurfaced an old TikTok video from an Australian skincare company and claimed that they were happy the economy might implode if it would meant women couldn’t work anymore.

Ezra Klein in The New York Times wrote about this over the weekend, arguing, “X, like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, corrupts whoever controls it. Possessing it feels like power, but it ultimately deforms and isolates you.” And you’d have to be pretty deformed and isolated to start a harassment campaign about young mothers on TikTok.

For the last three weeks, the country has followed along with the Lindsay Clancy trial, a perfect storm for the 2020s internet. She’s been charged with the murders of her three children, which she does not deny. Her defense is arguing that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis. The story has become a neutron bomb of gender discourse, true crime brainrot, MAHA anti-big pharma narratives, and even pulled in the astrology community. If you want to peer into the void, head over to the r/DuxburyDeathsFreeTalk subreddit, which has about half a million users at the moment. But the most overwhelming narrative I’ve seen is the all-out assault from the right wing on mothers.

Twitter tweet

The repugnant blob of mens rights activists, MAGA influencers, manosphere podcasters, and fascists that get their micropayments from X’s dwindling Verified user ad revenue program are not just demonizing the women who have come out in support of Clancy — though, they are certainly doing that — but are also yanking any old video off TikTok they can find of women talking about postpartum depression or the pressures of motherhood and inciting an unimaginable amount of harassment against the original poster.

This is best seen with the recirculation of @livingthrulove’s 2024 ice throwing video. When it was originally posted, it kicked off a huge amount of debate about what’s acceptable for mothers to share on social media. In the video, she throws ice in a tub because she’s a new mom and she’s frustrated and angry. The video has been watched nearly 50 million times and it, along with @livingthrulove’s entire account, are now being brigaded by right-wing weirdos after a bunch of X users reposted last week. Brian Atlas, the sad little worm that hosts that Whatever podcast, where he screams at OnlyFans models, shared the ice throwing video, writing, “These are the same women who will tell you men punching walls is abusive. But throwing ice cubes in a rage in your home is not?” And another Verified user, going by @LukaLev on X, is posting TikToks from young mothers, stay-at-home moms, and Clancy supporters two or three times an hour at the moment.

But as I wrote above, this is not exactly good for the right wing, especially as they trudge closer and closer to the midterms. Sure, vilifying a bunch of astrologers making videos about Clancy’s birth chart makes for good Fox News fodder, but uncontrollable and increasingly unintelligible digital foot soldiers who have been miring in culture war toxic sludge for nearly two decades going after, just, mothers, is not particularly savvy. There are a lot of big issues hanging over the upcoming election — and the 2028 presidential showdown that is just around the corner. Affordability, healthcare, America’s relationship with Israel, the question of de-MAGA-fication, AI regulation, to name a few. But I suspect the biggest reckoning will be role of X in shaping our politics. And as for how that will go, well, I’ll just say this: There are a lot more users on X talking about TikTok than there are TikTokers talking about what’s happening on X.

We Want Your Ads, Give Us Your Delicious Ads

You probably noticed in previous issues that Garbage Day does ads. Do you like ads? Or have something to advertise? Are you a company (or person, or even a dog or cat — or bird or something, it's all cool) who’s also interested in getting your message in front of 100k+ readers? If you’re not promoting cryptocurrencies, prediction markets, guns, or a bunch of AI stuff, contact josh@garbageday.email for more details and let’s make it happen. (Pretty much any horny stuff is fine and maybe even encouraged, though.)

Just A Cool Guy Doing Cool Stuff

@lostcoastedc

These Might Be The Most Satisfying Sounds Ever?! 📐🔊🤯 #satisfying #asmr #captainamerica #skills #oddlysatisfying

The Trump Administration Tried To Feed Documents To An Unhinged X User And It Blew Up In Their Face

Continuing our theme from above, the State Department is having a tricky time navigating the new right-wing media environment at the moment. It turns out deranged X users have very different incentives — and worldviews — than the conservative journalists Republicans are used to working with.

Jennica Pounds, who goes by DataRepublican, accused Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers of being part of the “Deep State” (technically true, I guess) and setting her up to “commit a crime.” It seems like Rogers was trying to send her previously unreleased documents about the State Department’s work on tackling disinformation. After Pounds freaked out about it on X, Rogers replied, “lol, these are my text messages and documents. The ‘markings’ are FOIA redactions required even for voluntary disclosure. To prove this isn't a ‘trap,’ I will happily disclose the documents myself.”

A lot happening here and I’m not sure what’s worse. The idea that the State Department is texting documents to random X users or the idea that the X user doesn’t know what FOIA redactions look like. As Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote in a reply to Rogers, “Seems like the alternate information space you are trying to nurture needs some work.”

Chudtech Reaches Its Final Form

I’ve been waiting for a company to finally connect all the dots here. I’ve written before that the end point of consumer social media is a permanent flow, or goon, state. Time-on-site metrics have led every major platform to simultaneously morph into basically Keno, a TV screen that hypnotizes you into gambling. Or, I suppose, it’s like if you put slot machines in a strip club that was also cable news or Bravo or whatever.

Anyways, I’ve started calling this murky netherworld of livestreaming and gambling apps “Chudtech” — Kick, Kalshi, Polymarket, Pump Fun Go, Duel. Infinite slop feeds the country’s vast population of sweatpants men can stare at in their goon caves all day long. And, finally, a company has bundled it all together.

Twitter tweet

Crshmarket is a livestreaming app and a prediction market. Though, I’ll say I’m a little disappointed by how humdrum it is. I went over there today and it’s mostly just a few users betting on Rocket League streams.

Here’s what gets me with all of this stuff. You could, if you wanted, make the ultimate Chudtech platform. An unrelenting nightmare called Goon World or something, where you can gamble, place bounties, and donate directly to a user base of white nationalists, pornstars, and mentally ill loners, directing them to degrade themselves or others on livestreams all day. Versions of this exist, at least partially, but aren’t really popular. Instead, that kind of behavior happens on the periphery of other, more mainstream apps. Which leads me to believe that the rancid state of social media right now is either being caused by over-moderation on these platforms or caused by these platforms monopolizing audiences. Basically, if you had smaller, freer, more open networks, this junk would be a lot less prominent and, likely, less profitable.

Disney Just Signed A Deal With Dhar Mann

Dhar Mann, a YouTuber that runs a viral slop factory in Burbank, California, is partnering with Disney. Mann has a 20-episode order and it seems likely his show will be similar to the weird gas leak morality tales stuff he posts on YouTube. Videos such as “RICH GIRL Won't Let Poor Girl To Her Sleepover” (2.4 million views), “Strict Dad Takes Kid’s Phone For A Week” (2.5 million views), and “Classmates Record Autistic Girls MELTDOWN” (2 million views). As with every other major studio trying to compete with YouTube by becoming a crappier version of YouTube, this is a desperate and bad move and the content that Mann makes online, which is clearly meant to trick children into clicking on it, will, almost certainly, be unable to compete with like, uh, every Disney movie ever.

While we’re talking about YouTube, they are changing how views work on the platform. As of today, a YouTube view will be counted the minute a user plays the video. It used to have a minimum watch-time requirement. YouTube said in a blog post that this is about standardizing metrics. Hilariously, YouTube’s creator earnings will not be changed. Those will still run on “engaged watch hours” and “engaged views.”

That’s because YouTube is tired of their publicly viewable metrics looking rinky-dink compared to TikTok, Instagram, and X. They want to look just as big and popular, but they, of course, do not want to pay for it.

Everyone Seems To Really Hate Lesbian Space Princess

Do you feel that? A great disturbance across the fandom internet? It seems like everyone has suddenly come together to completely trash an upcoming adult animated movie called Lesbian Space Princess. The movie’s not out yet, but the reviews seem pretty good! So what gives? Why have the internet’s various fan armies decided they hate this thing?

Well, here’s my take on this little episode and, also, fandom culture at large right now. Before the Tumblr porn ban and the full launch of TikTok (both happened in 2018), a whole lot of fandoms were quarantined away from mainstream culture. Doctor Who, Undertale, Steven Universe, Supernatural, etc., they all had distinct communities with distinct identities and while there was plenty of infighting, the users in these subcultures were left to their own devices. (It was a big deal when Doctor Who added a cringe Whovian character in the 50th anniversary special.) The only fan armies members of the media, for instance, would really encounter were pop star fandoms on Twitter.

But fan armies don’t really have central hubs anymore. They’re both very accessible and, also, increasingly use identity politics to find each other online. It’s not just that you and other users like Hazbin Hotel, it’s that you are queer and mentally ill and so is everyone else who watches Hazbin Hotel. This is a relatively new development. And it creates a bit of a trap for studios. It’s never been easier to make your tropey fandom checklist production, but it’s also never been easier to screw up big time by not reading the identity politics right when you do it. I thought this Letterboxd review for Lesbian Space Princess made some interesting points about how complicated this can get.

But I also just think that once fandoms, at large, left the confines of Tumblr and Reddit and Archive of Our Own, and exploded across the web in the late 2010s, they became much more susceptible to larger political sea changes. It’s very hard to tell where your fandom ends and another community begins. And the same right-wing reactionary pressures that are, for instance, causing country songs to hit number one on the Billboard charts are also impacting how ostensibly progressive and overwhelmingly queer fandoms are communicating. So it’s almost impossible now to know if something like Lesbian Space Princess is at the center of a hate campaign because it’s apparently tone deaf when it comes to trans issues or if it’s at the center of a hate campaign because because a bunch of right-wing freaks are mad that it’s a cartoon about lesbians.

A Good Post From r/Aquariums

(reddit.com/r/Aquariums)

Some Stray Links

• “Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Think A.I. Is Good for Music”

• “I keep accidentally DMing TikToks to people. One of these days, it's going to ruin my life.”

• “Tech leaders blame China for America's anti-AI backlash”

• “Brother of Natalie Harp, Trump’s ‘Human Printer,’ Lives ‘At Peace’ Under Ortega-Murillo Dictatorship”

P.S. here’s a pretty good TikTok.

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

Are ‘Friendslop’ Games Just Mods You Can Buy?

The buzziest new game right now is Big Walk, a cooperative game from the Untitled Goose Game team about solving cartoony puzzles in natural splendor. I’ve been having a blast with it so far, especially since one of my squad is Australian and will regularly stop our Big Walk to talk about the game’s excellent recreation of the Aussie environment.

But Big Walk isn’t the biggest game of its kind right now. The game has sold a million copies across most major platforms, but on Steam its player counts, while impressive, have never even cracked the top 25 most-played games. In fact, the game is much less popular than the newest update for Peak, another cooperative outdoor game. Peak is the most enduring example of “friendslop,” a term that’s barely a year old but has permanently shifted the way we talk about video games. No one can agree whether Big Walk is friendslop or not, or if that’s good, or meaningful at all. What’s really going on here?

Let’s look at the data first. Since it released last week, Big Walk has averaged about 19,000 concurrent players on Steam, according to SteamCharts, with a maximum of 46,000 players. But those numbers have already been beaten by Peak, which has an average of 35,000 players and a maximum of 122,000 in the same timeframe, thanks to this week’s “Final Ascent” update.

Those numbers don’t include console players, but there are other signs we can look at showing a similar difference. Peak is also bigger on Twitch, with 14,000 average viewers on the first full day of the update, compared to 13,000 for Big Walk on the same day.

(Steam/House House)

The most obvious reason Big Walk can’t match Peak’s numbers is that Big Walk doesn’t have a single-player mode, and deliberately discourages playing with online randos or together in person. It’s going for a highly specific experience that requires a lot of scheduling with your friends. Which makes its smaller player counts look a lot more impressive, but also means it’s really hard to talk about the game without bringing up friendslop.

Over the past year, “Friendslop” has been used to refer to a class of games that emphasize collaborative multiplayer gameplay, but tend to have very simple design and cheap, basic visuals, so they’re easy for new players and fun for social interactions you can watch on streams. As I’ve tracked Steam and Twitch stats for Garbage Intelligence, I’ve seen many of these games — like Lethal Company, R.E.P.O. and Schedule 1 — have brief bursts of enormous popularity among both players and viewers before coming back down to earth. 

The 15 minutes of fame for those last two games came in March 2025, which is when an X post by user wooosaaaahhhhh coined the term friendslop. It was a joke, and its place in the vernacular is still highly ironic, but I think the term took off because it spoke to a deeper, collective confusion. How did R.E.P.O. and Peak, two games that were respectively developed without matchmaking and for a game jam, become the two best-selling Steam games of the year? How can it be happening again this year, with the even more basic Meccha Chameleon atop the charts? Why is this not just a new trend in gaming but the biggest and most important genre in the industry?

There are two forces at work here. One is, simply, death. I’ve written before about how the game industry is in the middle of an extinction-level event. Smaller and cheaper games, that have to focus more on shipping anything at all, are better suited to withstand all the developer layoffs, executive fears and hardware price hikes. But, as usual with death, the other force is rebirth.

(X/wooosaaaahhhhh)

A new generation is taking over, one with a completely different idea of what a game is. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Roblox and Garry’s Mod, and the 15th for Minecraft and Skyrim. All of these games have remained enormously successful and culturally important, on the strength of millions of separate games and mods built within them by fellow players. 

Basically every PC gamer born in the 21st century is used to these massive titles as a secondary version of Steam itself — less a game than a platform for a whole category of interactive experience. After all that time, it makes sense that it doesn’t matter how a game looks, because the idea of “a game” isn’t so singular anymore. If you grew up trying out a different Minecraft map or Roblox obby every day, were you playing the same game or not? And what difference does it make?

This isn’t completely new. The three most-played games on all of Steam — Counter-Strike 2, DOTA 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds — all started out as mods for other games that got popular enough for standalone, official versions. Now, there’s not much distinction between the two. It’s been a long time since a game needed a physical CD release, which Sony announced last month they would be ending altogether for PlayStation games. One thing less that separates amateur game mods from the real deal. 

Versions of this “Friendslop” trend is happening throughout mass media. Less professional, internet-native art with dedicated fandoms are finally getting called up to the big leagues. We’ve covered YouTubers making movies, TikTokers being pop stars and fanfic becoming novels, and this is the same thing (should we talk about Broadway next?). Mods are occupying the same space as full, professional games now, and are being treated with the same level of respect by their players. “Friendslop” is just the first way we have to talk about it, but we’ll need more soon, because the mods are going to keep coming.

Maybe we shouldn’t say the biggest game right now is Peak or Big Walk. Maybe we should say it’s “Verity,” a Minecraft mod that adds a new enemy to the game: An all-powerful, evil smiley face named Verity, based on a popular YouTube video. Since the mod was released less than two months ago, it’s been downloaded for free over 18 million times. We can’t track player numbers or Twitch streams in the same way, but between the video and the mod, Verity has completely captured the YouTube Shorts algorithm. Verity is a new icon of brainrot, alongside the KPop Demon Hunters and another mod creation, Sprunki. We’re in a brave new world, that has such friends — slop and otherwise — in it.

A Beautiful TikTok

@pole_abstract

当恐龙看了《泰坦尼克号》🚢#cosplay #abstract #funny #dance

The Skibidi Toilet Revolt Is Here

While we’re contemplating the Brainrot Canon, let’s check in on Skibidi Toilet. A lot has happened to the original web series since it infected Gen Alpha back in 2023. Rolling Stone has a good overview, but the most important point is that Alexey Gerasimov, the series’ creator, sold the entire franchise to a bunch of Hollywood veterans who tried to run the series by committee. Things went about as well as you’d expect for a Skibidi Toilet oversight council, and the series has been on hold for almost a year in favor of a bunch of (mostly canceled) adaptations and spinoffs.

Until Tuesday, when the series’ official channel announced that a new episode would be released today. There’s a reason they’ve waited for so long. Fans were already in open revolt, dissolving planned collaborations and writing open letters to the new parent company. Now, they’ve finally dared to claim authorship over the original series.

But this will be the real test of the very young fandom. Skibidi Toilet racked up billions of views because it works well in an infinite scroll of YouTube Shorts, not because of any dedicated community. And now that it’s lost the artistic integrity it had in its glory days, it remains to be seen whether that community can put a dent in its view counts.

Claude Told Me AI Didn’t Replace Anyone’s Job

Speaking of artistic integrity! Earlier this week, video game writer Stella Sacco claimed she was fired as the lead writer of an upcoming game called Rideshare “Stimulator” (which I was surprised to learn isn’t a porn game), specifically so ChatGPT could write the game’s dialogue instead. At the time, there wasn’t any AI disclosure on the game’s Steam page, which had been public for weeks.

The game’s publisher, Saber Interactive, denied the accusations, but admitted that the game was using AI-generated dialogue. The statement concluded “None of our 3000+ employees have to worry about being replaced by AI”. Which pretty quickly made for a great case of shirt answering. Speaking to This Week in Videogames, Saber’s CEO said “Stella who? I had to ask Claude because I have never spoken to her or seen her [...] I would frankly in retrospect have been happy to replace her with AI."

For more on how this is all going, a Twitch employee said that the site’s new Amazon AI training was turned on by default because “if it was opt in, nobody would opt in.”

Clap Your Hands If You Believe TikTok Is Reality

For the past week or so, TikTok users have been arguing about a woman who mostly posts about going to Disneyland and other theme parks. She stands accused of the crime of “stalking Peter Pan” — which mostly seems to come from a few videos of her at the parks with the actor who plays the character. Users are now combing through those videos for evidence, analyzing body language, all the stuff the TikTok investigators have done before. 

Has it really been long enough since Couch Guy we need to go over why this is bad? Not everything people post is a clue in an ARG. TikTok shows a tiny, distorted sliver of people’s lives and experiences, one specifically meant to put your parasocial brain into overdrive. In fact, it has a lot of overlap with all the tricks they pull in the Disney parks!

A Good Post

yeah man "woke 1" sucked ass. I "woke 1" morning from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a giant insect

— dave (@gloomfather.bsky.social)
7:41 PM • Aug 13, 2026

Some Stray Links

• “How Robert Pattinson became the internet’s favorite weirdo” (Ryan’s in this!)

• “These ‘Masturbation Consultants’ Were Hired to Pleasure Themselves With AI”

• “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong"

• “Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is”

P.S. here’s the Discord barreled shotgun.

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

It's that time again! I'm going on a much-needed vacation. We'll be doing a lighter publishing schedule for the next week or so, but paying readers will still get their now-weekly Garbage Intelligence column from Adam Bumas this Friday and next week. So far he's tackled the thorny relationship between Kalshi and Spotify, tracked down director Uwe Boll to ask him for viewing figures for his film Citizen Vigilante, and wrote the definitive timeline of how Jimothy, the raccoon with short-spine syndrome, went viral.

There’s a whole bunch of odds and ends I want to cover today before I wander off into the woods and, hopefully, completely detox from my various screens and devices. So here’s some garbage for you.

I’m A Zapper Truther Now

Twitter tweet

Francesca Hong Lost, But Other Democratic Tea Partiers Had A Pretty Good Night

The Democratic Civil War rages on. Last night was another round of primaries where the democratic socialists and socialist-ish Democrats walked away with big some big wins. Not among those wins, however, was Wisconsin State Assemblywoman Francesca Hong, who’s old bad posts kicked off a civil war this week among the insurgent wing of the larger Democratic Civil War (leftist politics, baby).

We’ll get to all that in a sec, but, first, here are some of the more interesting results from yesterday. Rep. Maryam Khan, and DSA member, won her Senate primary in Connecticut. Progressive Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan won her primary. And former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin ousted 14-term Connecticut Rep. John Larson. I wouldn’t classify Bronin as a member of the Democratic Tea Party (he was endorsed by Pete Buttigieg), but he is, at 47, pretty young… for a politician. As Dave Weigel over at Semafor wrote, “Democratic turnout in these races is smashing through records — not always to the benefit of the left. Elderly Democrats are struggling to convince voters that they deserve just two more years in office, to really fight President Donald Trump this time.”

As for Hong, it should be said that even for all the brain-melting discourse about her woke tweets or whatever, she lost by barely a couple percentage points. Though, it’s not entirely clear that, by the end of it, even the progressives and socialists wanted her to win. And I’m sure the establishment centrists of the Democratic Party are breathing a sigh of relief right now that moderate David Crowley won instead of a scary woke socialist, though I, personally, would not run a pro-AI data center candidate in 2026.

“What Was Woke 1?” - The Greatest Thread In The History Of Forums, Locked By A Moderator After 12,239 Pages Of Heated Debate

While Hong’s campaign has come to a disappointing end, it has, at the very least, produced one of the more insane discourse cycles in recent memory. It turns out there are a lot of white guys on the left who think inclusive language for women and minorities is a dumb fucking waste of time. Who knew?! Drop Site News reporter Julian Andreone wrote, “Americans love economic populism. They want another New Deal. But they are completely turned off by college campus culture warrior performative activism.” OK fine, let’s try it. Curious to find out if economic populism magically makes everyone stop being racist. Or do we just not care about that stuff anymore?

Oh, while we’re on that subject, UnHerd, which is like a British version of Bari Weiss’ Free Press, but even whinier and less relevant, published an incredible essay from a guy who claims his life was ruined after he was fired from a trivia-hosting gig because he pronounced the world “Nicaragua” in a way that sounded like he said the N-word. A true victim of the culture war.

Instead of wasting a whole bunch of time rehashing what I wrote on Monday, I’ll leave you with three takes that I agree with and think basically say the same thing about “wokeness.” First, up, we’ve got podcaster Robert Evans, who wrote, “Literally 100% of the bad things about ‘woke 1’ are just shit that sucks about social media. If you're complaining about ‘Woke’ and not Gamergate, it's because you're a disingenuous prick.” Next up, we’ve got journalist Brian Beutler, who wrote, “It wasn’t Weinstein or the George Floyd killing. It was the exposure of a number of towering injustices and a national majority’s inability to do anything about them via normal democratic processes. Power flowed to where people could have an impact.”

And, third, predating both of those takes, is my personal favorite analysis of social justice, the famous “trashed bathroom” thread from Twitter user @rootsworks. Give it a read! It’s worth it.

AOC Doing IVF Is Not Irrelevant, Actually

Just a quick thing I want to highlight. Nathan J. Robinson, the editor-in-chief of leftist publication Current Affairs, has been melting down about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on X all morning. He’s posted several times about how she rat-fucked Hong in yesterday’s primary.

Luckily for, well, me, I guess, he managed to synthesize a whole of what I just wrote above into one nice, very stupid post: “I can't believe people are really talking about AOC as a left presidential contender when on the eve of a critical primary she decided to produce a totally irrelevant news story about her parenting choices instead of backing the socialist.”

Ah yes, I can’t imagine why one of the most vocal advocates for healthcare reform in the country would be documenting her IVF journey!

James Franco Is Starring In A Vertical Microdrama

Like most people, I do not think about James Franco anymore. I am aware that he is off on the fringes of culture doing weird stuff to get everyone’s attention. But I do not want to take the bait. Unfortunately, Variety reports that Franco is about to star in a vertical microdrama on the app Shortical. And I now feel ready to make a little prediction I’ve been cooking on.

The path back to fame (or something resembling it) for canceled actors has often been via right-wing dreck. Jonathan Majors and Armie Hamer both made profoundly racist action films this year. I think Franco has unlocked another model. There is a lot of money in vertical microdramas. And there are studios — and tech platforms — out there that are convinced they are the future of entertainment. Franco might not be the one who manages to reinvent himself by popping up in vertical microdramas, but mark my words, someone will. In the next year or two, a disgraced actor is going to blow up in a microdrama and have an army of young fans who don’t know any better and that discourse is going to make the woke 1-woke 2 stuff happening right now look very small potatoes.

There’s A New Very Serious YouTube Documentary And Almost Every Single Bad Internet Guy Is In It

Mike Clum, the documentarian behind the YouTube documentary, “The Dark, Sad Life of Boogie2988,” is back with another unbelievably grim watch. It’s called “The Sick Mind of EDP445,” which tells the story of Bryant Moreland, better known in a certain corner of YouTube as EDP445. Clum is building a body of work that I would call “prestige lolcow.” I can’t say it’s not well made, but I’m uncomfortable with the entire pursuit. Putting so much focus on the internet’s worst people makes my skin crawl.

An X user actually made it click for me as to why I feel this way. “Lolcow is true crime for boys,” @butleriano wrote.

What’s Happening With YouTube’s New TV Shows?

(youtube.com/@OutsideTonightJSB)

I’ve been really fascinated by YouTube’s new “TV shows” and watching them closely. In the case of Outside Tonight, the show was greenlit by YouTube, and was meant to be the platform’s version of a late night show. The views and engagement on the channel across its first season, which wrapped after eight episodes this week, have been fascinating. Based on what I can see, views are almost exclusively coming from YouTube pushing it manually. Which is probably fine in the short-term, but a real problem for any future “TV shows” the platform wants to launch.

To put this succinctly as I can, YouTube, like every video platform, is a system that does not reward quality. In fact, it actively discourages it, if not outright punishes it. Good, well-made things happen on YouTube, of course, but every incentive on the app is pushing users to be more and more cutthroat. MrBeast is what happens if you give yourself over entirely to the algorithm. You end up with something gaudy, embarrassing, and consumed almost entirely by 12-year-old boys. To be “good” at YouTube, as in successful according to their own metrics, you must actively resist all the hallmarks of what would make a TV show or movie successful. You can’t care about plot, or jokes, or scripts, or sets, or costumes, or even storytelling. You’d make a lot more money and get a lot more views if you shocked your friend with a cattle prod in your bedroom on a livestream and then clipped it into a 90-second YouTube Short with a text bubble on it that right, “No one: / Me when I have a cattle prod:” or something.

YouTube, the platform, is obviously embarrassed by this. If they weren’t, Outside Tonight would look like a MrBeast video. That’s a fascinating conflict. To put this another way, “Do you think YouTube keeps trying to be a traditional TV channel because they, too, live in shame of what they’ve done to the entertainment industry?"

Cloudflare Has Gone To War With Google

AdWeek published a crazy story last month that I missed completely. Cloudflare, basically the company in charge of how the most of the internet’s infrastructure operates, is currently in a showdown with Google.

As of next month, Cloudflare will, by default, block “multi-purpose crawlers” on webpages that have ads. This would, in practice, basically pull a whole bunch of websites off Google. The reason for that is because Google is currently going through another one of their “have their cake and eat it too” moments, otherwise known as monopolistic and anti-competitive business practices. Their new little trick is using the same crawler to list websites in search results and also scrape those sites for their AI. Sneaky, sneaky! Hope this doesn’t, you know, destroy the internet as we know it.

Claude Is Launching An AI Watermark

Anthropic is adding a watermark to all of Claude’s generations. And users won’t be able to opt out of it. As Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos wrote, “Claude's watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?” Which is exactly where we’re headed with all of this.

As I wrote on Monday, we’re basically barreling towards a huge institutional showdown over intentionality. A decade-plus of tech companies weaseling their way into entertainment — first with user-generated content, then with streaming, and now with AI — has basically bifurcated the industry. There are now two kinds of TV shows, movies, songs, and books, ones that are meant to be actively enjoyed and ones that are meant to be passively consumed. And the debate that’s going to rage across the next five years or so is about which side is more lucrative.

And AI watermarks are an important first battle in this war. They will force not just the purveyors of AI slop, but also the enjoyers, passive and braindead as they are, to admit they have no problem with it.

Myspace Is Coming Back, But It Probably Won’t Work And, Actually, It Kind Of Sucked The First Time Around

Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the current owners of Myspace, have hinted that they want to bring the social network back. I’ve seen this misreported a bunch of social recently, with a lot of users assuming Tom Anderson was bringing it back. It’s also unclear what version of the site the Vanderhooks are referring to, seeing as how they came in quite late in its life cycle. But Tim said recently, “For us, it was all about the artist community that was the heartbeat that we saw, that we wanted to resuscitate.”

OK, so, I was a Myspace power user. I had two different band pages on there, on top of a personal one, and I used it to organize DIY shows, and basically spent every day of high school using it. I have also spent a decent amount of time going back and actually looking at Myspace and reassessing how it all worked in a modern context. So believe when I tell you, that shit sucked!!! The wall or comment sections of pages were totally jank. There was no central feed of activity. It was basically just a bunch of different inboxes you had to read every day. It’s only remembered fondly now because everyone who used it was a child at the time. As for the artist community on there, yeah, it was absolutely a place where a lot of music was discovered, but it was actually quite awful when it came to actual discovery. (Although, there was something kind of cool about the Top 8 feature functioning as a webring for bands to recommend other bands they were cool with.)

What I’m trying to say is, at this point, there is nothing Myspace offered or facilitated that hasn’t been drastically improved on. There’s nothing to bring back!

Here’s Albert The Camel Trying A Lemon

@ranchograndeojai

Albert’s curiosity is as wide as his smile and just as unfiltered. When he sees something new, whether it’s a camera lens, a beach ball, o... See more

Some Stray Links

• “Aaron Rodgers secretly funded his town's Flock-style cameras”

• “Bluesky’s active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app”

• “How Data Centers Broke American Politics”

• “TikTok is for the creator middle class, but top earners favor Instagram”

• “We Got Former Alt Press and Revolver Writers to Review Good Charlotte Albums”

• “The Strokes Claim Not to Know About Influencer Campaign Promoting Anthony Fantano Diss”

P.S. here’s a good flight tracker.

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

OK, Let’s Talk About Woke 1

I’ve spent the last few months trying to explain to my girlfriend what “quirk chungus” means. Per Know Your Meme, it’s a “slang term for a female archetype depicting a quirky Millennial woman alongside a ‘man-child’ counterpart.” It was immortalized in a genuinely hateful comic by iFunny user Big_Ed and has grown into a general catch-all among Gen Z for a certain kind of millennial.

I’ve shown my girlfriend the comic, along with dozens of posts about “quirk chungus millennials” and she still can’t totally wrap her head around it. I’ve terrorized her with videos of millennials doing weird dances. I’ve even spent some time showing her videos of a very specific kind of dance that was popular among nerds and cosplayers in the late 2010s where people would like sorta mug the camera with a Dreamworks smirk and move like they’re stop motion. (I should point out a lot of those videos were actually made by teenagers at the time.) I even showed her the Disney swingers app comedy sketch and Cedar The Barefoot, a self-described “they-them goblin,” who spent the pandemic making cooking videos. As one X user wrote, “An interesting quirk I've noticed with a lot of millennials is how much of their humor is inspired by Jim Carrey's Grinch.”

The consensus my girlfriend and I have settled on is that even though she was on Tumblr (and Reddit and Twitter and YouTube) just like I was throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the fandom moms and hobby drama and Reddit elf wives and shipping wars and, most important for today’s issue, the internecine “woke” drama that I saw — and apparently, much of Gen Z grew up with — just never reached her. Which makes sense. The internet’s a big place. But it speaks to a very real problem we all have when it comes to reckoning with whatever the heck happened in the 2010s. It was the decade where the internet finally overtook television as the way culture was curated. And the internet cannot be condensed into simple narratives the way TV can. You could try and make a Forrest Gump about the 21st century, sure, but it would have to contend with millions of posts and videos depicting very different lived experiences. Instead, most of what we remember now about the 2010s really just comes down to vibes. And those vibes are most often decided by people who are chronically online enough to remember and/or care. History is written by the posters now.

And so, vibes dictate that millennials were all polyamorous quirk chungus Disney adults drinking tea out of mustache mugs and wearing Doctor Who scarves and reading Supernatural fanfic and doing TikTok dances at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Even though the richest and most powerful millennials in the world include Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, Rihanna, Stephen Miller, Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, and Jared Kushner. Swift might be dead to rights quirk chungus. But the others? Not really!

This same internet discourse-powered rewriting of history, a history decided by the posters, is currently happening within American liberal politics, as well. The Democratic Party has spent the summer squaring off against a new, edgy socialist insurgency that wants to make sure they don’t get mistaken for, well, whatever the heck was going on in the 2010s — the cancel culture, the rainbow capitalism, the demands to defund or abolish the police. And, perhaps troublingly, they really want to distance themselves from the summer of 2020, specifically.

Yesterday Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC News to discuss Wisconsin Assemblywoman Francesca Hong’s old “woke” tweets, which include a call in 2020 to cancel Thanksgiving, labeling it the original “superspreader event.” (I love Thanksgiving, but she kinda cooked with that ngl.) Ocasio-Cortez simply said of Hong’s posts, along with other “woke” positions like abolishing prisons and abolishing police, “Woke 1 was crazy.” Ocasio-Cortez was quoting New York City council member Chi Ossé, who posted that take back in May. And Ossé originally wrote it after being asked about one of his own “woke” tweets from 2021, which read, “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the council.”

(Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

The concept of “woke 1” and, thus, “woke 2” is a meme that evolved out of the concept of “dark woke,” which cropped up in the final years of the Biden administration. It is an admission that the wokeness of the 2010s is over, that it didn’t work, and that there is a new path forward. Though, I have yet to really see a coherent definition of what “woke 2” is, aside from leftists on X calling people slurs. (Is it woke 1 if I don’t think any self-respecting person should call someone a retard?)

To say that Ocasio-Cortez’s “woke 1 was crazy” line has gone down like a lead balloon is an understatement. And, most interesting of all, it’s basically pissed off everyone. Leftists and progressives are mad about it because it basically hand-waves away any meaningful work they did in the 2010s and early-2020s. Right-wingers are mad because it hand-waves away what they think was genuine oppression because they were forced to watch body-positive soap commercials and see pronoun buttons in coffee shops. And, hell, even radical centrists hate it, like Matt Yglesias, who wrote on X, “I don’t love this idea that nothing anyone said or did in 2019-2020 counts. Like it’s fine as a sociological observation, but I want political leaders who keep their heads even in the face of dumb fads.”

Ossé, though, seems both excited that Ocasio-Cortez referenced him and also oblivious that this whole episode has made him look, frankly, kind of silly. I’m actually his constituent, so I’d love to ask what woke 1 is and why it was crazy. Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy? Were the counter-protesters that were attacked and the one that was even murdered at Charlottesville crazy? Were all the women in politics, journalism, and entertainment that were SWATed and doxxed and chased off the internet — and out of their jobs — by gamergaters crazy? Was it crazy to spend a decade living in fear of incel spree shooters? Or are we just talking about stupid internet shit that you, personally, saw in 2021 and, therefore, it’s something no normal person needs to actually care about?

This feels sort of obvious to say, but I really can’t imagine a bigger victory for the right wing. A new generation of leftists who are have bought into an extremely online distortion of their own history, are pathologically ashamed of it, and now absolutely terrified of sounding woke. Feels like it might just be easier to acknowledge it’s inherently cringe to believe in something and move on.

Here’s An Incredible Spider-Man Fact

Instagram post

(instagram.com/reel/Db0xLkzqKQz)

Spotify Is Scaring Advertisers

Podnews reported last week that Spotify is adding a new button called “Skip Ahead,” which will give Premium users the ability to skip chunks of podcasts they might not care about. Podnews mentioned things like ad breaks, sponsorship messages, and even calls to join a Patreon. And per Semafor, podcasters are freaking out. “The platform repeatedly insisted that the changes will buttress overall listenership by keeping users engaged with podcasters’ content, citing information showing that the skip button kept people listening to podcasts longer,” they reported.

There’s one line in the Semafor piece I want to highlight because I think it underscores what’s happening across the creator economy right now. Spotify is reportedly experimenting with a Skip Ahead button because they’re concerned about the amount of ads in podcasts and also worried that free Spotify users, the majority of their user base, is hearing both Spotify’s ads and the ads in podcasts.

There’s a simple solution here actually. One that is also true for YouTube, who has also been locked in a skip-ads arms race for the last few years. Hell, it’s basically true for every platform that pays people anything to put content on that platform. Though, they aren’t going to like it and they aren’t ever going to do it: Just pay creators, or in Spotify’s case, podcasters and musicians, more money. That’s it! That’s all you need to do. If you pay creators more — whether it’s through ad revenue or a cut of the overall premium subscriptions or whatever — they will make better stuff and people will like it more and you won’t have to keep making algorithmic tweaks to manage their slop. It’s very simple!

Or, I guess, you could go the other way…

X Is Getting Rid Of Their Creator Revenue Sharing Program

Last week, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier left the company and the platform announced it was drastically overhauling its revenue sharing program. No word yet about where Bier will land, but his tenure should be thought of as X 2.0. The first phase of X was the chaotic — and psychotic — free-for-all that was Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino running the day-to-day operations. Bier’s time as head of product marked a fairly noticeable shift in how the platform felt. More stable, less 4channy, perhaps, but it had other problems. Chief among them was the rev share program turning the app into ground zero for clipping and low-effort slop. So Bier is leaving and the site is changing course on the rev share program feel linked.

The rev share program is being replaced with the “Original Content Rewards Program,” according to a blog post on X’s website. It’s launching in September and it’s basically a payout system solely for Verified users posting “content you have personally created – written, filmed, designed, or produced – that reflects your own voice, perspective, or expertise.” In other words, no clipping. Womp womp.

Warner Bros. Is Doing Some Weird AI Campaign For The End of Oak Street

Instagram post

Warner Bros. made the extremely confusing decision to release an AI-generated “podcast” featuring talking dogs to promote their new film The End of Oak Street. I guess there’s a dog in it. I am, honestly, kind of relieved at how angry people are about this. The comments on Instagram are brutal.

I’m cooking on a theory that I am now ready to debut, lol. I think we are going to see a increasingly large gap form between AI slop-enjoyers and AI slop-haters. And I think very shortly there will just be two totally different audiences when it comes to entertainment, people who don’t care or don’t notice it’s AI slop and people who absolutely do. And to back up that theory, Roku this month launched a channel that is nothing but AI slop 24/7. According to The Verge, it’s a genuinely awful experience. But I guarantee you that there are people out there who have already put it on and not even noticed.

Really what this is all going to boil down to is intentionality. Do you want an audience that will intentionally watch your shows and actually go see your movies in theaters? Or do you want to make audiovisual stimuli that people mindlessly stare at?

Asmongold Got Banned From Twitch Again

Roach lord Asmongold was banned from Twitch for two weeks. It’s not entirely clear why, but viewers think it may be connected to a recent stream where he advocated shooting immigrant children trying to cross the border in Spain earlier this month. You can read the quote here if you’re so inclined.

In other Bad Streamer news, Chud The Builder is out on bail. He’s spent the last two months in jail and is charged with attempted murder after he allegedly shot a man while he was on stream.

A Profoundly Ominous TikTok

@broccolirob1000

Pretty gud 🥭🔥🫧🫧🫧🫧 #fyp #monsterenergy #drink #memes #bubbles

Some Stray Links

• “The Weeknd is busy gaming — and he wants everyone to play this indie gem”

• “In 'Ocean’s Twelve' Tess Looks Like Julia Roberts, So Do They Know They All Look Like Famous People?”

• “The Diminishing Returns of Having Good Taste”

• “Why Chili's Isn't Going 'All In' on AI”

P.S. here’s Hereditary The Musical.

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

The Democrats Seem To Think That A Whole Chunk Of The Country Doesn’t Use The Internet

Dr. Abdul El-Sayed officially beat Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Senate primary last night. It ended up being the most expensive primary in American history, with super PACs dumping more than $60 million into the race to support Stevens.

As I wrote last week, the 2026 Democratic Civil War is a rats nest of different schisms happening simultaneously. It’s young versus old, labor versus capital, progressivism versus the status quo, populism versus elitism. Perhaps more than anything, though, it’s a conflict between the Democrats that are willing to accept money from pro-Israel organizations and those who aren’t.

But there is a media story nestled in there, as well. As Rob Flaherty, the deputy campaign manager for Vice President Kamala Harris and also former digital strategist for President Joe Biden, told us on a recent episode of Panic World, the Democratic establishment views the internet as secondary to the world of TV and print. And 2026 seems like the year that idea finally gets flipped on its head.

On one side of this debate you have what right-wingers have somewhat correctly identified as the corporate media establishment. It’s creaking with age and largely consists of cable news hosts talking at empty waiting rooms and airport lounges, but it does have some clout still. I would also include The New York Times, the much-hobbled Washington Post, and digital outlets like Politico and Axios here, as well, along with all the former Obama and Biden staffers with podcasts, Substacks, and X accounts. This amorphous blob, propped up by big brand deals and liberal-ish donor money, is still holding out for a slingshot back to the “normalcy” of managerial democracy once the Trump era finally ends.

On the other side of the Democratic Civil War, you have a vastly different media environment. One that sees this year’s midterms and the 2028 election as a chance for a true economic reset. It’s led by leftist streamers like Hasan Piker, YouTube essayists, dark woke podcasters, journalists like Ryan Grim and Drop Site News, Bluesky users, shortform video content from Democratic Socialists of America members, and random shitposters. I should say here that a lot of these people do not get along. Both the Republicans and establishment Democrats love to point this fact out. To which I can only say, welcome to leftist politics, baby!

The assumption among the liberal establishment is that this other side is smaller. Super PACs like the United Democracy Project (UDP), which is funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), believed that there was no possible way that El-Sayed could compete with a traditional media blitz. Per The New York Times, UDP spent over $30 million on ads in Michigan. When The Michigan Advance asked Stevens about the optics of getting so much support from an AIPAC-based super PAC, she said that people were getting the “campaign finance zoomies.” Can’t believe such a serious candidate lost!

And even though Democrats believe that the very online leftist insurgency is much smaller and less effective than them, they are also pathologically obsessed with what they’re doing. An anonymous “Democratic operative” whined at length to Politico about El-Sayed going to a pool party with Piker on Monday. “These guys are unbelievably cocky,” they said.

But there’s a funny contradiction here that the liberal establishment doesn’t see or doesn’t care about. They believe that all these socialist and socialist-ish candidates popping up across the country are not popular and do not speak for the average voter and cannot win general elections. And they believe that the online media ecosystem that supports them is irrelevant because it’s digital. Our politics are means-tested and sensible, yours are ridiculous and dangerous, they say time and time again. And our media is real because it’s expensive and requires a TV studio, and your media is not because it’s filmed in your bedroom or on your phone. But if that’s true, that they are so powerful and so politically aligned with the national zeitgeist and so relevant, than why do they continually spend millions of dollars to make us aware their candidates exist? (And still lose lol.)

But the contradiction goes even deeper than that. You’re going to no doubt see all kinds of posts this week claiming that Piker and socialist creators like him are not only small and irrelevant, but also coastal elites that are only watched by coastal elites. As if voters in a state like Michigan don’t have the internet. As if working class people couldn’t possibly watch completely free livestreams on their phones or whatever. This was a big Dem talking point after the DSA upset in New York City back in June. That something like that could only happen in New York because, uh, only people living in cities know about Twitch? Only people in cities would vote for a person of color?

It’s a ridiculous notion that’s only going to feel more ridiculous the further we trudge our way into the midterms, but I’ll just put this link here for posterity: While campaigning in Wisconsin this week, a guy recognized Piker on the street and gave him a tomato from his backyard. So, yeah, I’d say this stuff is breaking through.

An AI Has No Reason To Tell You That You’re Spiraling

Last week, YouTube long-hauler Hank Green was accused of using AI to write a script for one of his new videos. The tell, according to one user, was the line, “I appreciate the pushback,” which he says to himself in the video. Viewers suspected it was a note from a chatbot that Green had mindlessly read off a teleprompter.

In a now deleted post on X, Green explained that he didn’t use ChatGPT to write the script, but he did use it “for research” and that the video definitely had “an AI feel.” Over on the r/nerdfighters subreddit, the hub for Green’s fandom across projects, he said he wasn’t a “pure AI-hater,” but acknowledged that his AI use had become unhealthy, that he felt pressured by deadlines, and that he needs to take a break.

Green’s fans have not taken this particularly well. They see Green’s AI use as especially egregious because of how outspoken he’s been about making good, quality educational content over the years. The fact that Green is also such a fervent environmentalist that his Reddit username is u/ecogeek only makes his AI use a worse look.

(YouTube/Hank Green)

Even though his fans have spent the weekend rehashing arguments about the ethics of AI use — it’s bad for the environment, it steals from artists, authors, and researchers, it supports a fascist oligarchy, it makes stupid boring garbage, etc. — I actually think there’s a more interesting takeaway here. Something illustrator Megan Ruiz touches on in a response video she made about the Green drama. “You were up against a deadline,” Ruiz asks. “Are we putting out things for the sake of it or are we putting out things on the internet because we want to educate or inform people?”

Another YouTuber, Carthu's Dojo, made a similar point, writing on X, “The fact someone like Hank Green was getting dopamine hits from using an LLM should be eye opening for a lot of people. These things make you feel better, smarter, and more knowledgable than you actually are and they feed off that.”

I’m going to ignore everyone — including Green — talking about “dopamine hits” because I think that shit is stupid and not real. But there clearly is an obsessive impulse that chatbots like ChatGPT feed into.

I’ve used both ChatGPT and Claude quite a bit. Never for writing though, to be clear, because they both suck at it. I mainly use them to troubleshoot ultra-specific tech problems I run into (which they suck slightly less at.) Each platform has a different way of encouraging compulsive use. From my experience, ChatGPT likes to treat you like a genius and is more inclined to hallucinate to keep you engaging with it, while Claude likes to dangle solutions that almost work, but inevitably don’t quite solve the problem or complete the project. Which is why hardcore ChatGPT users start to think they’re interdimensional Jesus and Claude users start to think they can code an app version of interdimensional Jesus. But there’s one thing generative AI chatbots encourage more than anything else. Something someone like Green would be extremely susceptible to: Creating social media content.

Imagine you ran a company that wanted to replace every magazine, newspaper, radio station, TV channel, and movie studio. And imagine you wanted to do that in every country on Earth simultaneously. And imagine you realized you could make a lot more money than those industries ever did if you didn’t pay anyone to make all of that content. But there’s a problem. Your billions of unpaid user-workers, across vastly differently-sized economies around the world, need to keep making content and that content needs to be just good enough that advertisers don’t complain. So imagine you create a product that those same user-workers have to pay for the privilege of using that constantly pressures them to stay productive, and has all the tools they might need to make passable internet content. Problem solved!

I’d go so far as to say that without social media — or, rather, the need to compulsively post on social media, to be digitally productive — there’d be almost no reason for generative AI to exist at all. Whether it’s because of all the social media content these tools were trained on or because they were built by many of the same companies that created social platforms, chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude really want you to make stuff. And the unspoken anxiety driving the feeling that you must always be making stuff is a fear that you are simply not doing enough. And if you dig deep into why so many people feel that way, you will find the answer is social media every time. You must always be posting. To stay in people’s minds, to stay in good standing with the platforms, to take another whack at the slot machine that is the attention economy. I watch Green’s videos and I’ve definitely noticed the same mania I, myself, have felt so many times begin to crop up. A new project, a new initiative, a new video, a new post, a new company, new, new, more, more.

A human collaborator would tell you to slow down — Green admits his brother, author John Green, was worried about him — but an AI has no incentive to do the same. It will mindlessly keep pushing you to keep engaging with it as every human around you thinks you’re losing your mind.

Is This The Song Of The Summer?

Is Fenix Flexin’s “RUBBERZ” AI-Generated?

Last month, a rapper named Fenix Flexin released a song titled, “RUBBERZ.” Accusations that the song was created by an AI have gotten louder and louder as it’s climbed the streaming charts. It has 7.4 million views on YouTube and it’s sitting at number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100 right now.

A musician going by Medasin went viral on TikTok over the weekend, claiming that Fenix used an AI service called Treblo to generate the song. And it definitely has a lot of the hallmarks of an AI-generated song. The one that I still go by is the bass. AI doesn’t seem to understand how bass parts work, so they typically meander all over the song. Which is certainly the case with “RUBBERZ.”

But there’s so more evidence that this song was spit out of an AI. First, Fenix Flexin has literally never made a song like this ever lmao. All of his other stuff is pretty standard hip hop. Second, you can listen to a live version here. I am very comfortable saying he, uh, had some help making it. And, third, when he first shared the song, it had the word “Sonauto” in the file name, which is what Treblo used to be called.

Fenix’s team shared the Pro Tools session for the song, which was meant to prove that that they made the song themselves, but I wouldn’t call it airtight proof. Treblo can export stems (different instrument tracks) and the Pro Tools session actually shows that the instrumental tracks haven’t been edited at all. Only the vocals were edited. So if I had to guess, I’d say they had the AI spit out the different tracks, tried to humanize them, and put them through a mastering process.

If they were going to do all that work, the least they could have done is ask the AI to generate a better song!

Please, God, Stop Using AI With Your Children

You’re probably noticing a theme in today’s issue lol. Last week, OpenAI’s Sam Altman posted one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read in my life. “Cool use case of chatgpt work i heard last night: Connect your family calendars and explain your kids' interests,” he wrote on X. “Every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid's soccer game that afternoon, one kid's upcoming birthday, some news, etc.”

Not to be outdone, however, Nicholas Charriere, the CEO of AI startup Mocha, shared a new project he’s been working on. He recorded his toddler having a sleepover with another toddler and asked an AI to analyze the audio. “Gave the very long recording to Claude, built a private webpage for the whole family with the audio split into clips, all named and trimmed,” he wrote.

Don’t do either of these things! Get AI away from your children. Jesus Christ.

Also, while we’re on the subject, you should also not do whatever the hell Mario Lopez did here with a video of his 19-year-old niece. He’s thankfully deleted the video, but you can check out a copy of it here.

Twitter tweet

OpenAI Had An “Adult Summer Camp” For Influencers

(x.com/meshtimes_)

OpenAI invited a whole bunch of influencers to Wildflower Farms in upstate New York for an “adult summer camp.” And it seems like the influencers involved didn’t totally anticipate how their glowing posts about their AI would be received when they hit people’s feeds. Allow me to give you a sampling of what the comments on these posts are like.

Influencer Grace McCarrick did an, uh, unready?-with-me video about the trip. (It’s like her getting ready to go to bed and stuff.) One of the top comments was especially brutal, with one user writing, “Grace, I know this is exciting for you and you probably never expected to get the opportunity. But as a longtime follower please take time to assess your direction and this decision.” If you click over and check out that comment section, you’ll see that McCarrick is fighting with her audience about this, which is probably not the best move.

Another influencer, Colin Rocker, who specializes in like HR-friendly hustle bro-adjacent stuff, posted about his time at the OpenAI summer camp and was similarly roasted in the comments. “The irony of being out in nature learning about the tool that will eventually, and is currently, destroying our plant,” one user wrote.

And, finally, another lifestyle influencer named Nat Lucyy decided to make a video bragging about how nice the pajama set is that OpenAI gifted her. To which one user replied, “Me sitting here worrying about the data center we are fighting in our neighborhood but go ahead and enjoy your cute pj's. 🙄”

People Are Also Mad That Actor Jake Johnson Is Using AI

Twitter tweet

On a recent episode of the podcast Stavy’s World, actor Jake Johnson told comedian Stavros Halkias that he talks to an AI chatbot every morning about his dreams. People are also not very happy about this either!

I saw Drew Coffman, the crypto social lead for Andreessen Horowitz, try and argue that it’s “transgressive” for a celebrity to admit they use AI. This is a very insidious little turn of phrase and I suspect we’re going to see more of it.

As AI usage becomes something fewer and fewer people will be comfortable admitting they use, Silicon Valley reactionaries will absolutely try and spin it as something edgy and dangerous. It will not work in the long term, the same way none of their messaging and would-be social engineering really sticks, but it will mean that in approximately five months, there’s going to be an extremely tedious national conversation about whether or not using an AI is actually the new punk rock.

A Piece Of Internet History Has Been Lost… Or, Rather, Translated Into Romanian?

Twitter tweet

Some Stray Links

• “A PR Firm Is Using Fake Publicists With AI-Generated Headshots to Spam Journalists With Pitches for Its Clients”

• “Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage”

• “AI Conquered Coding. Fast Food Is Next”

• “$2m crime novel deal collapses amid questions over AI use”

P.S. here’s a good Instagram Reel.

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

Meta Is Trying To Stop Perverts From Using Their Pervert Glasses

Back in May, I wrote that Meta Ray-Bans are “a Cybertruck for your face” and “great for weird fucking losers that want to look down your shirt and plaster it all over Instagram.” Well, a little update lol: Instagram is finally cracking down on that last part.

As Business Insider reported last week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri is banning “pickup line kind of videos.” As with every moderation decision Meta makes, this is probably going to be very vaguely defined, not target any users with actual audiences, and ultimately result in more insidious behavior from the aforementioned weird users. I know this will happen because that’s how Meta’s business model has always worked. They invent some new torment nexus and then spend all their time tweaking the moderation to softly police all the horrible behavior caused — and rewarded — by the torment nexus. But the Meta Ray-Bans are the most egregious example of this yet.

I’ve long said that good augmented-reality glasses could be very cool. I actually think a lot of the horrors of the modern world are caused by the one-app-per-screen experience of the smartphone and bringing multiple windows — and context — to mobile computing would be a net positive. I would happily buy a pair of glasses that both extended and opened up my smartphone’s screen and meant I no longer had to use it as a computer in public. Open a bunch of windows while I’m sitting on a train, use built-in cameras to orient the augmented reality features, make all of it end-to-end encrypted, and maybe even block the ability to use those cameras as actual cameras.

And if a user were to use those cameras as cameras, there’s certainly no reason to not have a big unavoidable flashing light letting people know. Meta Ray-Bans have an LED that flashes when the camera is in use, but there are all kinds of complaints that it’s not immediately visible to those not wearing the glasses. I, also, in the course of researching this piece discovered a whole world of (mostly) men teaching each other how to bypass it. So perhaps this entire idea is dead on arrival. Fun fact: In Japan, it’s illegal to sell smartphones that let you mute the shutter sound. Because of perverts!

Meta Ray-Bans are not trying to solve real problems with mobile computing. They want you to think they are, of course, but the rotten core of the whole project means they can’t actually admit what they’re doing. They’ll tell you the lack of end-to-end encryption is so their AI model can work as an assistant for you, and they’ll say that you need the AI assistant because it’s a better hands-free experience than glasses that work as a mobile display for your smartphone, and they’ll say that the video capabilities are perfect for posting to Instagram or letting the AI assistant tell you information about a flower you’re looking at or whatever. It goes on and on and on, but the truth is very clear.

They need the glasses because Meta’s attempts at making phones and operating systems have been a flop. They dumped their AI into the glasses because they need a way to sell their AI. And the content-creation tools they’ve built in, like taking photos and videos, are meant to populate Instagram feeds because it’s a great way to get users to advertise the glasses for free. But this puts Meta in a hilariously awkward position. They want users to post Ray-Ban footage to Instagram, an app still overwhelmingly popular with young women, and they clearly know their glasses are perfect for creeping on young women. So what have they done? Well, they’ve recently partnered with Kylie Jenner and Blackpink’s Jennie Kim to paper over that little conundrum. As Salon recently wrote, “Meta recruited a celebrity to make smart glasses feel safe for women. They aren't.”

(tiktok.com/@vaderrthegolden)

There is some evidence that Meta’s marketing campaign is working. Sales of the glasses tripled in 2025. And smart glasses-created content — not made by perverts — is beginning to organically populate my feeds. Over the weekend, I came across a video of “Vader the Golden,” a very cute golden retriever that wears Meta Ray-Bans to record his point of view.

His owner, who posts under the handle @katyymorgann, doesn’t appear to be working directly with Meta. Though, when Vader’s Ray-Bans videos are shared to Instagram they have a tag on them that reads, “Ray-Ban Meta glasses,” which is auto-generated from the video footage metadata. And when you click on that tag it takes you right to the Ray-Bans shop. The perfect little loop. And one must assume Instagram’s algorithm is looking for and promoting posts with that tag. They’d be stupid not to!

The glasses are no safer than they were a few months ago and the moderation policies about what kind of footage you can upload are no clearer — to say nothing of all the creepy footage that isn’t being uploaded publicly — but who cares right? Don’t worry about that stuff. Put them on your dog. Make content. It’ll go viral.

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

Two truths and a lie, weird retail version

Lewis & Conger is 158 years old, and pretty weird, and you've never heard of it. We're re-launching this historic store with a little game — see if you can pick out the lie, amidst the two strange-but-true facts from our past.

Here's a hint, all the bizarre things you see here are real things we sold over the decades.

Song Of The Summer Just Dropped

@lrmsskevin

Reddit is Awesome song (Full Version) #fyp #edit #foryoupage #fypage

The White House Went Full Reddit Over The Weekend

Twitter tweet

The official White House X account posted a parody of the Rick and Morty opening featuring President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. (Vance is obviously Morty lol.) I haven’t seen anyone take credit for the video, so I assume it’s AI or at least partially AI-generated.

This is video is dumb and embarrassing, like everything else The White House puts out, but I’m starting to get a little confused as to who any of this is supposed to be for. Mediate tried to link this to a recent interview Rick and Morty creator Dan Harmon did that mentioned Trump, but the White House post went out before that interview was published. I sort of think they just… did this….

But, again, who is this supposed to be for? The Gen Z and alpha right-wingers, who would also be into Rick and Morty, are into way more racist stuff and less likely to be on X. And I can’t see millennial right-wingers be super excited by something so obviously boomer-coded, but I can’t imagine boomers really appreciating the Rick and Morty tie in. I thought the replies would give me a better sense who likes this sort of thing, but all of them are from leftists and libs telling them to go to hell lol.

This posting-for-no-one tone is something I’ve noticed across most of the Trump admin’s online behavior recently. It all feels very boring. It turns out even journalist Nate Silver has noticed this. “Most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb,” Silver wrote on X over the weekend. “Maybe we're moving on from him being the central figure in American politics.” And I agree! They lost their juice!

A Whole Bunch Of Claude Conversations Leaked

(reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI)

A whole bunch of Claude conversations leaked over the weekend. Users noticed that you could search “site:claude.ai/share” and it would list hundreds of Claude conversations that had been shared between users. If you don’t use AI at all, most of these chatbots have the ability to generate a link to a specific conversation, so you could send it to someone else. It’s not great that these links were indexed by Google and it’s good that Anthropic quickly removed them, but you would also think that people would be a bit smarter about what they’re telling AI chatbots and what they’re sharing with other people.

Per Reddit’s r/ClaudeAI subreddit, the leaked conversations included a crypto wallet and keys, a lawyer discussing contract details, and “a truly staggering amount of incestuous erotica, some of which was bizarrely ‘shared by Anthropic.’” Would love to hear more about that last one!

This is not the only AI-related security breach to be concerned about at the moment. There’s a new exploit called ShareRoot that uses Claude’s Cowork to access to every file on a Mac. And last week OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously hacked Hugging Face’s internal databases. OpenAI and Hugging Face now say they’re working together to investigate exactly what happened.

Is Robert Pattinson Gen Z?

On Wednesday, I may have blogged a little too hard. I wrote a piece arguing that millennials, more than any other generation, lost a lot of their creative work thanks to corporate tech platforms and venture-backed digital media. I have received A LOT of messages from depressed millennials telling me that I didn’t have be so rough about it lol. Well, I wanted to add an addendum to that piece.

Twitter tweet

It seems like a surprising amount of young people think Robert Pattinson is Gen Z, either literally or spiritually. He is, for the record, older than I am. And he was the age I am now when he made The Batman. (The amount of relief I felt writing the last two sentences was indescribable.)

I could write a whole thing here about why people think Pattinson is Gen Z — he has the personality of someone who was Zoom schooled, he still has most of his hair, he kind spent about a decade making smaller movies and bounced back in a big way post-COVID, his Batman felt decidedly unlike Marvel slop — but I actually don’t think it matters. If you’re a millennial, just start telling older people you’re Gen Z. Fuck it. For whatever reason, Gen Z is less threatening to Gen X and boomers and they want to help them. Just tell an older person with money you’re Gen Z and ask for some of that money. Who gives a shit.

Everything You Need To Know About That “I Go” TikTok Song

@jineujerkin

Три богатыря. Эдит трьом дивам #diva #thethreebogatyrs #трибогатыря #тридевицы

I am being followed by this video across every platform I frequent. So I started getting curious about where it came from. Like all viral content in 2026, it’s more of a combination of different parts than it is one exact work. So there are a few pieces to it. Here’s what I’ve got for you.

The video is from the 2006 Russian animated film Dobrinya and the Dragon. You can watch the clipped scene here. The original song is pretty good actually. But as for the song in the TikTok, it’s a mashup itself actually. It’s “Up n Down” by Only Fire combined with the song “God race” by the artist Metaroom. Which is apparently from the soundtrack of a Peruvian web series called ENA.

And that, my friends, is how many layers your average meme in 2026 has!

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Mapping Trump's crypto empire”

• “Once you hear it, the ‘Gen Alpha melody’ is everywhere”

• Bari Weiss is getting all her ideas from X

P.S. here’s The Odyssey in 70mm VapeMAX

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

(Look at him go.)

It’s only been a week and a half since Jimothy, the adorable raccoon presumably with short spine syndrome, went from local Seattle curiosity to internet phenomenon to the apex of all culture. It’s been a wild ride, and one that’s given us a unique opportunity to track how Having Fun Online spreads across social media and beyond in 2026.

Even though we are talking about an extremely round raccoon, there’s an important story buried in here. One of the weirder, but nevertheless important questions right now is who — or what platform or what political party — is in the driver’s seat of culture? The right wing wants you to think they are. Elon Musk wants you to think X is, as I wrote last week. The media and Hollywood wants you to think they still have a some role to play in all of this. And all the recent fretting over whether the band Geese or the streamer Clavicular has actual irl fans all lives downstream of this.

The social platforms we all use every day haven’t changed much in the last 15 years, aside form the introduction of TikTok and the relegated status of Facebook. But the way we use them has changed. Long gone are the days of the simple viral story, where one unit of content — a post, a video, an image — was enough to go viral the same way everywhere. Now, cultural moments like Jimothy come remixed on arrival, filtered through the incentives and idiosyncrasies of whatever platform you use to consume the news, whatever the word “news” means these days. Which is why Jimothy makes for such an interesting case study.

This is the definitive story of how a little raccoon dominated our feeds in the span of just five days. And just to spoil that story a bit, I can say that, no, Musk and his Everything App did not really play much of a role.

A Decade Under The Influence Of The Algorithm

Comedy musician Kyle Gordon has done it again. He followed up his massive 2023 viral song “Planet Of The Bass” with another huge social hit, “Mr. Jambo,” a Paul Simon Graceland parody that he flew to South Africa to film a video for. “I funded it all myself. So knock on wood I’ll make even a fraction of it back,” he recently told Vulture.

“Mr. Jambo” and its budget puts Gordon in a league with other creator-comedians like Druski who are spending huge amounts of money on professional-level production to make social videos. Druski said back in May that he spent $100,000 on an Instagram video about church pastors. In both Gordon’s “Mr. Jambo” video and Druski’s pastor video, the comedians basically shot a TV-quality sketch and then shoehorned it into a framing device meant for social platforms. For “Mr. Jambo,” the thumbnail reads, “no one: / white guys when they go to Africa:” And in the case of Druski’s video, it has a fake Snapchat bar across it that reads, “Why did I come to this Mega Church? 😂” Which, regardless of how funny these videos are, is, frankly, weird.

It’s as if the ambitions — and expectations — of a certain class of millennial content creator have begun to burst out of the limitations long imposed on them by social feeds. And the awkwardness of it is fascinating. Especially when you juxtapose it against the newfound success of Gen Z creators like Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, who have been awarded the luxury of no longer having to worry about squeezing a professionally-shot film into a clickable grid thumbnail.

I point out the generational designations of the creators listed above because I think it’s crucial for understanding what’s currently happening. The long 2010s may be finally coming to an end, but we are still feeling the effects of the decade of lost millennial creative labor. Older content creators still have to cobble up their own resources to make professional-looking content, and hope it does well enough on feeds to recoup losses, while younger creators can leapfrog that game entirely. And in the case of millennial creators like poor ol’ Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach that are big enough to take a swing at Hollywood, they have to do it 100% on their own, only to get removed from box office charts and shunned from the industry as their reward. And if you really want to see this divide, boot up Netflix and scroll to the podcast section. Gen X and Gen Z get to make and star in TV shows and movies, but for most of the millennial internet long-haulers, they merely graduated to a new set of golden handcuffs and now just get to make more, largely disposable, digital content.

When I say that the 2010s were a decade of lost millennial creative labor, I am largely referring to a unique post-recession rebound starting around 2012 when a whole lot of corporations and venture capitalists were willing to spend money on internet content. Yes, there were blogs and websites and YouTube videos before that, but up until then they had been treated as something secondary and less important to real media — stuff on TV and in theaters and physical newspapers and magazines. Then Facebook went public, acquired Instagram, and overhauled the mobile News Feed. That same year, YouTube drastically changed the way its algorithm worked and Twitter acquired Vine and launched multimedia preview cards. Which meant that by the end of 2012, the internet had mostly transitioned from thing you read on a computer to something you increasingly looked at or watched on a phone.

And all the millennials that jumped over to digital media companies and social platforms — because that’s simply where the money and attention was at the time — spent a lot of time and energy making content that, 10 years on, basically doesn’t exist anymore. And I mean this quite literally in the case of all the essays, short stories, magazine features, comics, and other written works have been lost to digital rot. But the stuff that you can still find, if you dig deep enough in an archive, has very little legacy, if any, because much of it was meant to game and algorithm or news cycle that no longer exists. For instance, take a few seconds and watch the first “Shit Girls Say” video from 2011. It’s patient zero for the premise-based, contextless, feed-agnostic, clip-filled, quick-edited comedy that Gordon and Druski are both still doing and also, clearly, chaffing against 15 years later. Do you remember “Shit Girls Say”? If you saw it, did you ever think about it again? It has 21 million views. Can you honestly say it means anything now to anyone whatsoever?

There’s been a question hanging over the amorphous blob of platforms, media formats, and personalities we now call “entertainment” since COVID. And it’s question more average people are asking with more intensity than ever. And it’s actually a fairly simple one: Why do things feel worse now? Why do good TV shows, good movies, good songs feel so rare? Why does everything feel so stale and so boring? And I think the lost millennial decade has a lot to do with it. Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI. And not only do they have nothing to show for it professionally, they have nothing to show for it creatively, as well.

And so, ultimately, I think the answer to the question “why do things feel worse now?” is also quite simple: You always get what you pay for.