Garbage Day

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you consume undisclosed ads on X, the everything app.

MrBeast’s X video (not a porn thing) is being promoted as an undisclosed ad, except not exactly. It’s showing up in people’s videos without a label, which has led many to believe X was breaking the law. But I spoke to an X employee about this and think I understand what’s happening here. There is a pre-roll ad from Shopify in front of MrBeast’s video. X’s pre-roll feature is called Amplify, and when a post contains a video that has an Amplify ad in it, the post is boosted like an ad, but without the label. Because technically, MrBeast’s post is not the ad and thus doesn’t require one. The ad is the Shopify pre-roll, which is correctly labeled as an ad for users who press play. This would also explain all the other not-an-ad boosted posts you’re seeing. The ad is loaded in front of the video inside of the post. Get it?

Bluesky dropped their moderation report. My interest in Bluesky ebbs and flows, but I really appreciate how pragmatic they’re being about moderation. Their central philosophy seems to be that giving users more mod tools alleviates some of the pressure on a social network’s trust and safety team. I’m watching this closely because it’s possible that that’s true. It’s also equally possible that this approach is the digital equivalent sweeping bad content under the couch.

Those “ghost trends” on X aren’t new, but we can see them now. The user WilburTheBulldog dropped this in the Discord and it’s a really fascinating look at how bad X is falling apart. I first saw these on a work trip to Mumbai back in 2015. They’re very common in India, where groups called “IT cells” are constantly manipulating trending topics to the point where they no longer work. And without moderation we’re now seeing the same thing in every country.

Reddit is eyeing an IPO. Well, that explains all the self-destructive behavior over the last year! As Reuters points out, this would be the first big tech IPO since Pinterest’s back in 2019.

This is my favorite take on the Vision Pro at the moment. It’s from a Threads user named Greg Palmer who argued that the Vision Pro is an “expensive developer beta device” and will have terrible reviews, but is a good step towards a decent mixed-reality wearable, but also a worrying sign of desperation from Apple, who may have hit their innovation ceiling. This is where I’ll plug my big gripe with Apple, which is that they’re still bizarrely obsessed with hardware-specific operating systems. There should be a wearable OS, touchscreen OS, and keyboard device OS, and they should spend all of their energy making those as similar as possible lol. All computers are the same now.

Ryder Ripps has to pay Yuga Labs $7 million in damages and fees. This comes after Ripps and a collaborator launched “parody” apes that a judge found infringed on Yuga’s copyright. The bulk of the payout is Yuga’s legal fees.

Nvidia is creating AI-powered video game NPCs. Neat. Though, I’m fairly confident this actually sucks major ass and undermines the entire point of an NPC in a video game. Why would I want an NPC that can chatter about anything, rather than an NPC that could, idk, further the story of the game along by sticking to a script?

Google News is filling up with AI junk. To put on my tinfoil hat here, I’d say that if I ran a tech company and was sick of dealing with pesky news publishers demanding things like compensation, I’d be pretty excited about turning that particularly annoying corner of my information empire into a digital trash heap so you can eventually sunset it due to user disinterest.

This is what an entirely AI-generated “film” looks like. I don’t think this is good btw. But I do think it’s worth watching to see exactly what this tech currently capable of, if only so you don’t fall for overblown claims about it. Also, this was for a contest sponsored by an AI company, so I get why traditional filmmaking tools weren’t used, but 80% of this could have been easier and look much better if you just used After Effects.

This is an extremely crazy video about Gameboy Advance ROMs. As one commenter wrote, “This whole thing feels like watching someone reproduce an almost perfect replica of the food they ate via throwing up violently.”

Hatsune Miku is playing Coachella. Miku was supposed to play in 2020, but the pandemic had other plans for the Japanese vocaloid. She is still the only interesting thing anyone has done with a “virtual pop star”. You know? She’s mostly open source.

I think we broke TV. And here’s a recent rumor from r/Fauxmoi that supports my theory. Up until like 2015, I’d say, we had prestige TV on cable and the regular, but manageable release of streaming shows, all buoyed by standard TV shows playing on broadcasters, essentially, all of the time, except for a couple of months in the summer. Now, we don’t even really know what a TV show is or how to define it or really know where to watch them and they also seem to never be on anymore.

Marques Brownlee weighed in on the all YouTubers quitting. About halfway through he attempts to address the core problem, which is continuing to be creative and making things you love, while balancing what is essentially a small media company completely dependent on the algorithmic whims of a big tech monopoly.

There’s finally something to see in Chicago other than bad improv comedy: The rat hole! Because both American journalism and Google News (read above) are broken, I had to go to the rat hole’s Wikipedia page to answer a question I’ve had since this all started trending, which is whether the hole was actually caused by a rat. Neighbors say it was likely caused by a squirrel.

Filming yourself getting laid off is the hot new meme. With these sorts of things I’m always torn between two reactions. On one side, I think better visibility to all parts of life, no matter how ugly and messy, are probably a net positive. But on the other side, internet content is never truly authenticate and I do think this kind of thing can quickly spiral into a weird kind of performance.

Condé Nast is folding Pitchfork into the GQ brand and gutting the staff. It’s a ridiculous move and Casey Newton over at Platformer has a good rundown of how much online platforms played a role in Pitchfork’s demise. But here’s what kills me most about this. Pitchfork could have easily been reinvented for the modern age, a la Rolling Stone. Instead of pivoting, like Rolling Stone, into a news-and-politics-through-the-lens-of-culture publication, it could have gone the other way, and really deify the Pitchfork score as the defining cultural signifier for Gen Z. I mean, Gen Z is pathologically obsessed with coolness, but they have zero frame of reference for it. Pitchfork would have been perfect there. But I think there’s now a new rule we can cite as far as media trends go. The minute a big brand gives up on something, in this case criticism, it’s about to be huge again. Which will eventually mean the big brand has to scramble to catch the wave in like 2.5 years.

X users are raging over a podcast clip of a pornstar again. Unlike the previous times this has happened, this does appear to be from a real show. It’s called Inside OnlyFans and the woman telling the story about hooking up with Uber drivers is a pornstar named Adriana Chechik. You know, I’ve always heard jokes about conservatism being powered the doom loop of self-loathing and horniness, but I’m not sure I ever believed it until I started spending on time on X. (I had assumed greed and fear were also factors, but now I think it’s really just this stuff.)

British delivery company DPD replaced their customer service chat feature with AI. I always hated dealing with them when I lived in London lol. They make Fedex look like NASA. Good to know they’re still committed to constantly finding ways to be worse.

Japanese Twitter users just discovered the Shinzo Abe “have sex” meme. Know Your Meme has a section on this. But the simplest summary I can give is that around 2017, 4chan users started a conspiracy that Abe was ordering the production of anime like Darling in the Franxx and Spy × Family in an attempt to increase Japan’s birthrate and specifically convince weebs to start families.

Russian law enforcement is investigating Skibidi Toilets. The investigation is into whether or not the videos are having a negative effect on children. I mean, yes, they’re probably making children more annoying. But children are always annoying, on the internet, especially so.

China’s new IP-location display regulations turned their internet into 4chan’s /pol/. New Scientist had a great piece on this, as well. Basically, the Chinese government turned on IP locations underneath posts on social media. Which quickly created a near-identical form of factionalism and racism you see on 4chan’s /pol/, which uses a similar flag emoji system to denote geodata about users. Hear that anti-anonymous weirdos? Knowing more about the people you’re talking to online actually makes you MORE awful.

• An impression of Jennifer Coolidge as a villager in the upcoming Minecraft movie

• Pretty good modern Seinfeld bit

• Important bit of polyamory discourse

• A weirdly fascinating documentary about probably the best competitive Pokémon player

• Sick new wearable

• An American Girl book illustration that looks like a Junji Ito panel

• The best “We need jungle, I’m afraid” remix

P.S. here’s a real good anime opening.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

On Monday, MrBeast uploaded a video to X titled, “$1 vs $100,000,000 Car,” which is, of course, exactly what it sounds like.

The upload comes weeks after Musk started pathetically begging MrBeast to post his videos to X. Also, last week, declared that X was a “video-first platform”. So he’s now spinning MrBeast’s first full-length upload as a big win to celebrate. MrBeast had previously said he wasn’t going to post anything to X because his videos are too expensive to waste them there. (My words, not his lol.)

Neither Musk or MrBeast, however, have acknowledged that this wasn’t an exclusive video for X, nor is it even a new video. It premiered on his YouTube channel back in September. But the fact MrBeast has finally soft-embraced X, the everything app that is also now a video-first app, is useful for measuring X’s current level of decay.

As of this morning, the original upload of “$1 vs $100,000,000 Car,” on YouTube has 212 million views. After about two days on X, it has 78 million. Which seems pretty good until you realize those are views for the X post the video is embedded in. It seems like not an accident that we can no longer see views on X videos anymore. The post has 29,000 shares, which means it’s getting about an average of 2,600 passive views every time someone shares it. Though, I’m sure a bulk of those views come from Musk’s followers. And, unlike when you watch it on YouTube, there weren’t any ads that played ahead of it when I watched it. There is a sponsored segment towards the end of the video, which may be why they used this one. And there were a few (disclosed) ads in the replies beneath it.

“I’m super curious how much the ad revenue will make,” MrBeast posted. Musk didn’t respond to that, but separately replied, “It’s a great time to be a content creator on 𝕏.” My guess is it will not make nearly as much as it made on YouTube. Based on rough estimates, the original video probably made around $1 million when it was originally uploaded.

It’s also worth noting here that a huge chunk of the replies underneath the video are from transphobes raging over MrBeast’s long-time friend and collaborator Kris Tyson, a trans woman, who appears in the video. And as journalist Rachel Gilmore pointed out on Threads, the fact that MrBeast primarily makes videos for children and is now generating headlines by bringing those videos to X, almost certainly means at least some of his audience is going to see the absolute hell that are X replies. Though, I’m pretty sure most children are seeing just as much hate speech in YouTube comments these days. Also, before it gets lost in the shuffle here, I think MrBeast being unflinchingly normal about Tyson’s transition is a truly radical act considering the size of his platform and he does deserve credit for that.

The most interesting thing about all of this, though, is how differently MrBeast and Musk approach the internet. For folks who only know MrBeast as the comic sans thumbnail man, you might not realize he’s optimizing his videos for maximum views on each platform he posts on, with specific videos and edits for TikTok, Instagram, and even Facebook. While Musk has an almost opposite philosophy, if you can even call it that, where he just assume the internet — and reality — will bend to whatever insane whim he comes up with. To point where he thinks MrBeast, someone who exclusively makes all-ages content aimed at tweens, should be publishing on an app that, at this point, has degraded into a platform almost entirely populated by neo-Nazis, OnlyFans models, and uncensored videos of horrific violence. I mean, the other day I saw an ad on the site for a gator park in Florida, which, you know, seemed cool, I guess, but it’s not really in the same league as the ads playing on MrBeast videos on YouTube.

But, also, this entire “X isn’t actually a failing social network, but the beginning of a video app that can beat YouTube” narrative from Musk is just a mad scramble to keep investors from repossessing the site. It’s the start of a new pyramid scheme to invest in. And it’s especially ironic to try and convince MrBeast to get involved when the only thing he has ever done throughout his entire career is convert internet traffic into ad revenue by obsessing measuring how different platforms print money.

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Over the years, some readers have rankled a bit at how I have covered things like cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and, more recently, generative AI. But I basically use the same methodology for everything, which I think straddles a line I’m comfortable with between outright doomerism and unhinged optimism. And it basically goes like this:

Whenever there’s a new thing, I try and play with it and use it to look for some fun culture angles. Then, as I learn more about it, I try and assess if there’s any real long-term juice to it. If there is, I start turning up the heat a bit and asking bigger questions. If there isn’t, like, say, with the live audio fad, I typically go scorched earth and move on.

But the reason I try to keep an open mind (try) is because there have been countless things in the world of tech over the years that I thought were pretty stupid and wrote off entirely, only to be very wrong. The iPhone, Spotify, and TikTok were all things I assumed, uh, would pass. Whoops! So now, I try not to do that, if only so I don’t have to play catch up later.

But it’s 2024 and generative AI has had a few years to figure itself out and now I think is the right time to really ask where all of this is going. So… where is this all going?

Well, OpenAI has a new GPT store, which is sort of like an app store, but for ChatGPT wrappers. I wrote a piece about the concept back in November, but it’s finally live. Journalist Scott Nover recently wrote a great piece about trying to find some use for it. He had mixed results.

“When I engaged with the hiking chatbot, I wondered why it needed to be a chatbot,” Nover wrote. “Wouldn’t a map do better? I navigated to the AllTrails website and found a very engaging experience with maps, weather data, user-generated reviews, a warning about mosquitos, and directions. Isn’t this a better experience than a chatbot?”

Which is basically, more often than not, my feeling on the entire generative AI movement now. None of it seems to be making anything better, just a different kind of annoying.

This story is wild. An illustrator from Colombia named Geraldine Fernández told both her followers on social media, as well as local newspapers, that she personally animated thousands of frames in the recent Studio Ghibli film, The Boy and the Heron. The story started to go viral, because if true, that would be pretty shocking, and was quickly debunked by users in both Latin America, as well as Japan.

As one user put it, she was claiming she, once again, personally animated 35 minutes of the movie, while working as a freelancer who sells planners and notebooks on Instagram.

El Heraldo, the local newspaper that profiled her, deleted their original story and has posted two updates. The first just simply apologizes for falling for the hoax. The second is an interview with Fernández, where she says that she was given an uncredited “freelance contract” by Ghibli for specific spot illustrations on different frames. She says she exaggerated her role on the film and it spun out of control. Though, she also couldn’t provide El Heraldo with any proof that this was true, either, saying that she lost her contract because she got a new computer lol.

Anyways, Cartoon Brew spoke to GKIDS, the American distributor for The Boy and the Heron, who confirmed that there is zero proof that Fernández was involved in the film in any way.

A furry named Rantis figured out how to move his avatar’s ears using brain waves. You can watch a demo of it here. In a follow up post, he wrote, “The hardware and software is reading off my brains alpha, beta, delta, theta, and gamma waves and using that to move my ears through OSC. How this managed to work out on my end is me sitting in front of a mirror and thinking of moving my ears, I got better at it with practice.”

“Facebook has spent billions of dollars on ‘metaverse’ stuff and can’t get legs working right,” one user wrote. “Furries have jury-rigged EEG setups into their home computers to control their fursona’s EARS as hobbyists out of their homes.”

You simply love to see it.

A post in r/LegalAdviceUK went real viral this week. To give you a relatively SFW summary, a woman in England modded her version of Skyrim so that different kinds of non-human enemies could “non-consensually mate” with the player. Basically, an omegaverse mod.

A man who hit on her at a party and was turned down, then reported her to British law enforcement as revenge, according to the Reddit post. What many Americans did not realize until this went viral this week is that this kind of Skyrim mod could actually be illegal in the UK.

First off, the UK doesn’t have the first amendment. And, second, back in the late 2000s, the country passed a law against what it classifies as “extreme pornography,” which largely pertains to depictions of bestiality, but other kinds of content fall into this category, as well. The illegality of “extreme pornography” largely depends on how realistically its rendered.

I first learned about all of this back in late 2014, when there was a big extreme pornography case that played out right around when I was moving to London, which centered around tiger porn.

Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker interviewed the 19-year-old Yemeni pirate that recently went viral on TikTok for being handsome. (What a world, etc.) The pirate goes by Rashid al-Haddad, but has been nicknamed “Timhouthi Chalamet”. His account was swiftly removed by TikTok after it went viral.

During the interview, Piker asked al-Haddad if he had ever watched the anime One Piece (it’s about pirates). And al-Haddad said yes, he’s been watching it since he was a kid. Here’s a timestamp.

The interview has pissed off liberals and conservatives for being too sympathetic and pissed off leftists because Piker didn’t donate any money to the Houthis at the end. Which was probably a good move, considering the Houthis were designated a terrorist group by the US this morning. But I’d say the interview is worth watching, if only because of how well it illustrates the absolute lunacy of our current media environment.

Anyways, the Menswear Guy has yet to comment on al-Haddad’s fit.

The dog’s name is Peanut Butter and he played a game called Gyromite using a custom controller with big buttons. Kotaku has a bunch more details about Peanut Button’s incredible run and you can watch a clip of it here.

Kyle Gordon, the creator of last summer’s viral hit, “Planet Of The Bass,” is releasing a bad-on-purpose emo song called “My Life (is the Worst Life Ever)” and I noticed a very interesting detail in the video.

Gordon is wearing a very similar outfit worn pretty regularly by another very, very terrible TikTok emo act. Also, Gordon’s song is actually pretty good? As one user on X wrote, “This guy understands what fundamentally makes third-wave emo work better than most modern ‘emo’ artists just cashing in on the trend...and this is a SATIRICAL song.”

• I wrote about the downfall of Twitch for Fast Company

• I also wrote a story for Fast Company about the return of good fight choreography

• This podcast industry story blew my mind

P.S. here’s a “live Skibidi Toilet performance”

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

I’m not totally against AI art. There are probably real ways to do it ethically and I think some generative-AI tools could easily fit into existing applications like Photoshop or After Effects. If you hate it and think it’s evil, though, that’s fine, I get it. But when I grew up in the early days of Wikipedia, Photoshop, and music piracy and you’d be surprised how quickly attitudes change around this kind of thing.

That said, there is a question about AI art I keep coming up against that has slowly consumed me. It’s a question that is never asked by the endless AI evangelists on X, breathlessly posting about the limitless potential of generative AI. The completely interchangeable tech guys with names like Törbend and Jorsh, who all dress like Kanye West at the Life Of Pablo release party. The guys with newsletters about AI that boast hundreds of thousands of subscribers even though you’ve never heard of them before. That start all their threads with question prompts like, “what’s the best passive income hustle? The IRS doesn’t want you to know about these.” And “Will OnlyFans models be put out of a job? I asked my AI girlfriend and what she said will blow your mind.” And that question is why.

Why would anyone need to make a lot of low-effort digital content? Who is the actual person that would ever need to generate hundreds of meaningless JPGs? Why not just draw or commission one good image or video instead of asking a machine to fart out a hundred terrible ones?

But I actually think we’re beginning to finally to get an answer: The only real use case for AI art is flooding social media with a bunch of worthless garbage. And the only reason to do that is to advertise something or scam people.

Earlier this month, Wizards of the Coast appears to have used AI images in tweets promoting a new Magic the Gathering campaign. And Wacom, the company behind a line of popular digital art tablets, had to apologize for using AI-generated art in a tweet, as well. Interestingly enough, Wacom claims they purchased art from Adobe’s image library which was likely not probably tagged as being AI-generated. Then, last week, Futurism discovered that Amazon has filled up with AI-generated product listings, many with names like “I Cannot Fulfill This Request It Goes Against OpenAI Use Policy”. While 404 Media discovered a large-scale network on YouTube using AI-generated celebrities hawking a medicare scam.

In the early 2010s, big social platforms transformed the internet from a place of mostly text into a network of visual content. In 2011, Twitter launched the ability to embed images directly into tweets. And a year later, Instagram was purchased by Facebook and began its slow morph from hipster Polaroid app to Facebook 2.0 for millennials. After that, our social feeds became primarily visual. This was doubly true for brands. Every algorithm suddenly required some kind of image to break through. And after Instagram launched Reels in 2020 to compete with TikTok, you began needing video, as well.

Nowadays, user-generated content platforms are basically just widgets for JPGs. This is especially true for brands using these sites. Which is a problem because digital media is a game of scale and if you need a team of designers, if not an entire video production workflow, to catch the attention of an algorithm, it quickly stops being useful.

This is so far, the only problem I’ve seen AI art fix. But, of course, it’s not even a real problem. It’s just a bunch of dumb publishing guidelines imposed on the web by tech companies that decided they were better for engagement metrics. But it turns out AI art isn’t even really good at that because it all feels like spam now.

This is something the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka actually argued last year as the most likely outcome of generative AI, writing, “Algorithmic feeds have pushed content creators to conform to the acceptable aesthetic and cultural average; AI generation will just automatically produce that average from the start.”

Which is a sentiment I saw repeated again over the weekend, albeit much more critically. A user on X talking about Nicki Minaj’s new AI-driven Gag City marketing campaign, wrote, “You know what I realized about AI images in your marketing? It sends out the message that you've got no budget. It's the digital equivalent of wearing an obviously fake Chanel bag. Your whole brand immediately appears feeble and impoverished.”

If you haven’t been following the Gag City meme, Minaj’s fans have been using AI generators to promote a fantasy world based on her music. TechCrunch recently called it a “viral win” for Minaj, which I agree with, but its quickly losing steam, like all AI memes. The more Minaj has embraced it, the tackier it has started to feel.

Because these tools can’t create anything new. They spin together the most basic aesthetics of digital art into a slurry that feels immediately dated upon creation. Which is why, less than two years after DALL-E 2 launched to the public, ushering in a new age of AI, the content these tools produce has quickly gone from shiny new toy to visual shorthand for e-waste. They are basically a high-tech version of a Bitmoji.

And even if company’s like Midjourney and OpenAI figure out the copyright issues, I’m not sure you can fix that.

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

There are many reasons the internet feels less fun in this moment than in other eras. I think the biggest one is that so much of our online lives are now dictated by algorithmic feeds, recommendation equations that constantly guess what we might like and often get it wrong. I wrote my new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture to break down that ecosystem of algorithms and point the way toward a better way of consuming culture — online and off.

Filterworld is available from all the online retailers and will be in stores tomorrow, January 16. To make my own algorithmic recommendation: If you like Garbage Day, you’ll like this book. I’ll be on book tour in the coming weeks in Washington DC (1/16), NYC (1/17), Boston (1/18), LA (1/23), and SF (1/24). Hopefully I’ll meet some other Garbage Day readers on the way!

Let’s all have more fun on the internet,

Kyle Chayka

—by Adam Bumas

Josh wine is having a big week online. Thanks to a single post on X on January 6th that got picked up by the algorithm, the cheap wine with the fun name has become the subject of hundreds of silly memes, puns, and the things I’ll probably never be able to stop calling “tweets”. My favorite so far:

I’ve seen a lot of “explainers” for the meme going around in the past few days, but Josh was already mega-popular, as wines go. It’s at that sweet spot of being the third least expensive thing in the store, and it has unusually simple branding without seeming inferior. These are marketing strategies that have worked for decades, and the meme is happening because they’re getting a chance to work in new spaces.

In terms of explanations, I think it’s more valuable to step back a little and note how indistinguishable memes like this are from regular purchasing trends. It’s not new, but it’s getting more common to have the central element of a meme just being a product people enjoy. Stanley tumblers, Big Red Boots, even Barbenheimer. There’s interesting stuff to be said about subcultures and expression with all these memes, but the core concept always comes back to just being a thing you need to buy.

I don’t put every single meme about a product in this category. I’m sure McDonald’s made a lot of money off the Grimace Shake videos from last year, but it was its own absurdist trend. It was drawing off all the jokes about lean in the 2000s that got revived on TikTok in 2021. Similarly, the Sleepytime Tea Bear gets a new crop of memes every year or so, but they’re maybe 5% about the actual tea and 95% about the bear’s cozy, honk-shoo vibe. Josh wine memes aren’t following the same kind of tradition. There’s no central joke other than the name, and there’s no creative element like the shakes or social element like Icing a decade ago. 

It’s purely commercial, and that’s why I was surprised to find that Josh has virtually zero presence on TikTok. The most popular videos mentioning the wine in the past week only have a few thousand views, and they’re mostly people asking what the deal is, or reposting memes from other sites.

It surprised me because TikTok Shop and partnered videos are one of the main things driving this commodification of meme-hood. I’ve seen people complain that their entire FYP is nothing but TikTok Shop videos, only broken up by regular ads. That definitely sounds like a saturation point. Would you watch TV if the only channel you could watch was QVC?

I wrote about this app before in Garbage Day. I was a big fan! It was essentially a news reader that used a bit of machine learning to send you push alerts for content it thought you might care about. And I used it pretty much every day.

It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of Instagram, and they published a blog post after announcing the shuttering of the app over the weekend.

Interestingly, Systrom and Krieger dedicated the final paragraph of their post to the “existential” crisis of the American news industry:

News and information remain critical areas for startup investment. We are at an existential moment where many publications are shutting down or struggling, local news has all but vanished, and larger publishers have fraught relationships with leading technology companies. My hope is that technology can find ways to preserve, support and grow these institutions and that these institutions find ways of leveraging the scale that things like AI can provide.

Which sounds nice, except the near-unanimous consensus about where Artifact went wrong was shoving a bunch of awful social features into their app. About nine months into the app’s short life, it morphed into a horrible Pinterest/TikTok hybrid that basically broke it. Oh well…

Jacqueline Piñol is the voice actor for Rio Morales, the mother of Miles Morales, in Insomniac’s Spider-man 2. And on New Years Eve, she posted a NSFW-ish image of her character created by the NSFW Blender artist QuickEsfm.

Interestingly enough, a few days later, Piñol told her followers that she’d be keeping the image up on her account, writing that, “as an actor, I am part of bringing this multi-dimensional female character to the screen. I do like the convo about it being OK for moms to feel like they can still be sexy too!” Alright!

Admittedly, I was a bit confounded by this whole thing, but Garbage Day researcher Adam made a good point that sharing NSFW content is actually a pretty good growth hack X. In fact, Piñol has even tweeted about how many views her post got. So beyond this just being a weird thing, it’s also a good example of how all viral content on X is sort of collapsing into porn in a way we haven’t really seen on a mainstream platform before.

If you go to his page, he actually does A LOT of these kinds of videos. But I think this one is especially impressive.

• I was on the Some More News podcast!!!

• “We're Similar. We're Compatible. We're Perfect.”

• An incredible story about a hi-fi stereo

P.S. here’s some good Final Fantasy content.

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

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you migrate your newsletter.

We’re getting a bit more clarity on how Threads will federate. The post I linked to is very long, but it’s worth even just skimming. Especially the roadmap section, which reveals Meta was imagining an initial blended Mastodon/Threads hybrid experience. The post also brings up some important concerns about Meta colonizing the fediverse, possibly in an attempt to snuff it out.

Users already figured out how to hack TikTok’s new e-commerce features. You make a store on TikTok. List a product, doesn’t matter what it is. Tag the product in a video. Go super viral. Stanley cups are only the beginning. There’s going to be so much viral e-commerce junk emerging over the next couple months.

X appears to be readying a new mid-video paywall feature. The way it would work is that certain videos will only play a snippet unless you’re a paying subscriber. This is actually so idiotic that I’m having trouble fully articulating why. Depending on how this is done, it will result in either two things: Users making super short videos to skirt the paywall or just a completely drop in engagement on the app. There is, frankly, no video content exclusive to X that I could imagining anyone paying for — including the porn.

Right-wing video platform Rumble is being investigated by the SEC. Fascinating how every right-wing social platform eventually devolves into a rats nest of financial crimes. I wonder why that keeps happening!

Fox News is reportedly exploring blockchain-solutions for dealing with AI scraping. This is a real “let them fight” situation. According to Axios, the Verify blockchain protocol would be used to track content that’s going into AI databases as a way to negotiate licensing deals. Honestly, internet publishers turning into NFTs to broker better deals with massive AI companies is just whacky enough that I’m kind of into it.

The SEC was hacked because they didn’t have two-factor authentification on. The hack resulted in a tweet with false information about the very real decision this week to approve Bitcoin ETFs.

I, respectfully, do not agree with this take from Om Malik that Apple’s Vision Pro is a TV killer. Malik argues that a good use case for the Vision Pro is a replacement for a home theater, which it could be, sure. In most cases except for the one I would say is the most important. You still can’t share anything you do inside of a headset with others. Which I think is a real dealbreaker still for most people. Even as we spend all of our time inside of little smartphone-powered filter bubbles, we can still physically lean over to one another and go, “look at this.” You can’t do that with a headset. lol and while I’m being respectfully contrarian, I also don’t agree with podcaster Peter Kafka’s complaint that the Vision Pro will basically just be “goggles to use the same apps that are on your phone or Mac.” That’s exactly what it should do. It’s 2024, there should be, in my opinion, literally not functional difference between the screens we use and wear. Which leads me to…

The question everyone keeps asking, where is Apple’s AI product? This is coming around again due to the mega-hyped announcement of Rabbit’s new AI “pocket companion”. Which, to completely contradict what I said above, I do think is neat. Anyways, it’s actually beginning to feel weird that Siri is still so bad.

The AI George Carlin stuff is a mess. Former Mad TV comedian Will Sasso has a podcast (that sucks) called Dudesy and I guess the gimmick is that it’s sorta-kinda produced by AI? I am unclear how and, honestly, I don’t care. As part of their AI gimmick they produced an hour of AI “comedy” (that sucks) done in the style of George Carlin. I saw some folks on X saying, “please don’t watch it to give them attention/views.” But actually, I think you should, just to fully understand how absolutely fucking terrible it is. Also, the voice model they used for Carlin sounds like Joe Biden. Here’s a link. And, just to be clear, all the stuff they’re claiming is being run by an AI or whatever in their show is almost definitely not an AI and is almost certainly faked.

Are AI girlfriends becoming an actual problem? I am skeptical of this. Not skeptical in the sense that I don’t think it’s real, I just think “AI girlfriends” might be replacing like anime body pillows or other kinds of pre-existing niche sexual behavior. I mean, the Cult of the Radiant Gadget was 14 years ago at this point and there have been guys marrying video game characters and holograms since forever. So I’m not totally ready to accept just yet that AI is somehow making this more prevalent.

The Internet Archive has the entire DatPiff mixtape catalog now. This was sent to me by a reader named Milos. There are over 350,000 songs in the collection.

A YouTuber made a “Nintendo Playstation”. Every single minute of this video was, frankly, terrifying. I completely expected it to explode several times. Great content.

We’ve reached peak YouTuber burn out. A handful of big creators are walking away from regular YouTube schedules to some degree. This does happen fairly often and tends to be generational. Every five years or so, a whole cohort of creators decide it’s time to leave the internet (couldn’t be me). But I do think there’s a big shift in terms of what YouTube, as a platform, wants from its creators: Consistent output that can be watched on televisions. And I could see that being especially oppressive to the 2010s creators who were able to get big from making algorithmic content that didn’t fit in traditional formats.

YouTube is beefing up their podcast tools. Honestly, I think this is a huge idea. Not sure civilians, as it were, are aware of how annoying it still is to get a podcast up on the internet. Even the easiest services, like Anchor, are terrible once you start having more than a couple episodes online. YouTube has a lot of issues still, but you can’t deny that their CMS is really, really good.

Food TikToker Lynn Yamada Davis died. This is really sad! I loved her videos. They were a really special thing and I’m really happy she and her family got to have fun online making them for as long they did.

A redditor has two very rare goldfishes. Their names are Chicken Nugget and Tater Tot.

Here comes the weird internet again (maybe). Glitch CEO Anil Dash argued in Rolling Stone that the current internet landscape is beginning to resemble the digital wilderness of the late 2000s. I definitely see the similarities, but I also try and stop myself from sliding too comfortably into nostalgia glasses for the web. (I’m not always successful.) I think the internet is cyclical and things do come back around again, but they tend not to really ever be exactly the same. Much of the 2000s internet was defined by connection speeds. So maybe another way to think about the return of Weird Internet is that the web of the 2020s is what the web of the 2000s would have been like if we all had 5G.

The Proud Boys are dwindling down to nothing. Look at that. All it took was law enforcement sleepwalking through the better part of a decade, allowing them to organize an insurrection, and a few dozen indictments.

Is The New York Times just Facebook? It’s another argument made by Glitch CEO Anil Dash recently. (His second mention in this week’s issue.) This I totally agree with.

Inflation in Argentina hit 200%. I’ve seen a lot of leftists making jokes about this, but what the country’s new president, Javier Milei, is doing is madness and a lot of people are going to get hurt. Possibly even Milei if the majority of the country starts getting paid in milk and Bitcoin.

British internet is having a big moment over jungle (the EDM genre (sorry British readers, need to explain this a bit for Americans)). Here’s another good remix.

Controversial streamer Johnny Somali is being deported from Japan. He was in jail for weeks and has to pay a fee and most likely won’t be ever allowed back in the country. Based on everything I’ve ever heard about the Japanese legal system, he is very lucky that’s all that happened here.

• Good opossum video

• I think this is an Undertale thing, but it still made me tear up

• An adorable TikTok

• A capybara meeting some small cousins

• Powerful suctioned meat

• Things are big and small

P.S. here’s a good review of the smoking area of Belfast International Airport.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

I decided I would give Substack the holidays to get their shit together. I also wanted to hear from readers — and I’ve heard from many of you. But, most importantly, I needed some time to research where Garbage Day could move to if this truly was the breaking point for my relationship with Substack.

I’ve only ever hosted Garbage Day on Substack. So most of its form and features were created using the site’s CMS. And between the litany of coupons I gave out early on and the new third price tier I introduced for Garbage Intelligence last year, moving has become somewhat daunting. But after the last few weeks, I can’t stay here anymore.

Substack has always had moderation issues, like every big platform. But, unlike every big platform, the company has a habit of turning these, frankly, fairly basic trust and safety problems into weird political fights that drag on for weeks. They did it in 2021 when trans writers were getting doxxed and harassed — by newsletters that are still very much publishing and monetizing on their platform — and they did it again last month after The Atlantic reported that neo-Nazis were publishing on the site. They were in my comment sections, as well.

Right before Christmas, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie published a truly boneheaded post responding to the Nazi controversy, which contains what is may be the single worst paragraph ever written by a tech founder:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

My man, you’re not supposed to acknowledge actual Nazis are using your product. Even Elon Musk doesn’t do that.

Following McKenzie’s post, I spoke with a lot of other writers on Substack, as well as folks at Substack directly. I agreed to keep my conversations with Substack off the record and I will honor that. Of course, most of what they told me was then given as a statement to Platformer almost verbatim this week. Which makes things easier for me. Substack’s new strategy essentially boils down to asking for users and writers to flag objectionable content. As they told Platformer, “if and when we become aware of other content that violates our guidelines, we will take appropriate action.”

None of this had to happen. Ghost, a Substack competitor, has almost no real moderation to speak of, but no one seems to care. You know why? Because it’s not trying to jam all of its users into one feed to compete with Twitter or whatever. Substack, meanwhile, has insisted on adding more social features over the last three years, instead of making their email product better. Which is still missing tons of pretty basic features. And so they, predictably, ended up creating a poorly moderated network that was attractive to extremists. It’s been a decade since ISIS uploaded their first videos to social media. We know that this is what extremists do. And you can’t protect your social network on a case-by-case basis when you “become aware” of it. And don’t even get me started on silly a feed-based social platform is when you don’t have any ads on your site. Also, the funniest irony here is that their social features don’t even work! I asked around to make sure it wasn’t just me and it’s not. The Substack app doesn’t actually convert any readers.

In the last year, I had 5,000 people sign up for Garbage Day through the app. Of those 5,000, only 37 people converted into a paying subscription. Meanwhile, one of the best conversion methods for me has been gift subscriptions because, surprise surprise, my own readership is much better at recommending my newsletter than the divorced too-racist-for-LinkedIn losers sharing graphs about phrenology on Substack’s app. If only Substack had invested time and energy into building more products like that instead of making a new right-wing playpen.

I don’t think newsletters like Garbage Day leaving will make a dent in Substack’s bottom line. And, honestly, part of me would feel better if they just said, “conservatives make us more money, so we’ll do what they want.” Though, that tends to only work in the short-term because conservative media is a race to an oftentimes violent and always irrelevant bottom.

I really liked using Substack and have had great interactions with their team over the years and don’t actually want to move tbh. But it’s clear that it’s time. So, over the next month, I’ll be migrating off the site. I think I’m know where I’ll be going, but if anyone has any particular thoughts on that, shoot me an email. Thank you for being patient with me. You can still sign up and still pay for a subscription (and I hope you do lol). All of that should move seamlessly with me.

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—by Adam Bumas

Enormously popular YouTuber MatPat (real name Matthew Patrick) announced yesterday that in March, he’ll be stepping down as host of his videos. He’ll still be involved and make occasional appearances, but leaving his show Game Theory and its many spinoffs marks the end of an era. An era that I I think a lot of people hadn’t even realized had started in the first place.

Game Theory’s heyday was the early-to-mid 2010s, back when all the heavily-layered internet-native storytelling that forms the lifeblood of the show was just starting to solidify. MatPat’s videos were all new perspectives on games and media, in theory (lol). Their real influence, though, was synthesizing all these ideas from secondary media, academic analysis, fanon, creepypasta, TVTropes, and so on, into a simple and easy format.

The viewership obviously skews very young, but MatPat was a valuable resource for anyone just coming to grips with how the MCU operated or the notion that you were supposed to put work into assembling a backstory. It was a great primer for how players were intended to think about video games like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Undertale, and definitely had a hand in their enormous success.

Whatever happens next for MatPat, we’re only just starting to see the culture he helped to shape hit it big. He had a predictably embarrassing cameo in last year’s FNAF movie, which I said at the time was a bellwether for Gen Z culture hitting the mainstream. I wouldn’t exactly say he’s done the same, though. This is definitely an early retirement, rather than moving on to bigger and better things.

I saw this on Threads after it was shared by Bloomberg columnist Dave Lee, who wrote, “Obsessed with this emerging ad format. Totally real podcast ep with the bros.”

While the video is clearly an ad for the brand Vuori Clothing, I got curious if the podcast was totally fake. I didn’t recognize any of the hosts and part of me wondered if the fake podcast clip trend had become so widespread that now brands were setting up fake studios and casting actors to make these. Which seemed as crazy as it did possible.

After digging through Vuori’s account, I found other clips featuring these guys and in the comments one horny user asked who the main guy was. His name is Sal Di Stefano. He’s a health and fitness coach who does, in fact, have a podcast. It’s called the Mind Pump Show.

So weirdly enough, this is a real podcast. They produce hour long episodes and they recently featured Jordan Peterson’s daughter Mikhaila as a guest, to give you a sense of how it aligns politically lol.

I am unclear if Vuori paid Mind Pump for the sponcon (I have to assume so?), but regardless, the brand then cut up the clips and are using them as ads on TikTok.

Actor Josh Hutcherson has finally had the “Whistle Song” meme explained to him, which is something sorta similar to a Rick Roll, but based a lot more in Gen Z fandom nostalgia. Like a Rick Roll, the joke is you slip it into an edit or you link to you without telling people. He talks about the meme above with Jimmy Fallon and he told ET Online that his brother sat him down and showed him a bunch of examples. “I don't get it, but I'm here for it,” he said.

If you’re still having trouble wrapping your head around how the meme works, here’s another pretty good explainer.

Humane, the company behind that incredibly expensive AI pin, is laying off a chunk of its workforce before their launch in March. Seems not good?

But the shaky ground that AI hardware startups are building on hasn’t scared off a bunch of different companies from Entering The Arena. This week, at CES, a startup called Rabbit launched their AI “pocket companion,” which I actually think is sort of neat.

It looks like a synthesizer that would cost too much on Kickstarter, which I appreciate. And I like that Rabbit seems to be really trying to rethink the smartphone and app store concept. I, personally, hate smartphones and have pretty much from the jump and agree that the way we use the web has grown beyond what can fit in a smartphone app. *Big deep breath* All that said…

Trying to replace the smartphone with an even more limited piece of hardware — what is essentially a microphone, an even smaller screen, and a camera — does not seem like a good way to fix these problems. I’m even less clear on how this is meant to fit into my life. Do I carry it around along with my phone? If so, why would I do that? And if not, do they really think this could reliably replace everything I do with my phone? Nothing in their keynote has convinced it could. (I will probably still buy one lol).

Twitch announced this week that they’re laying off over a third of their staff, which has rightfully spooked a lot of streamers. Back in December, I really laid into Twitch for, well, not being a better website. They completely bungled their pandemic head start and I’ve struggled understand what how they’ve been operating last couple years.

And the layoffs this week seem to prove it wasn’t just all in my head. Something is very off inside the company. If I have any current or former Twitch employees that read Garbage Day, shoot me a message. I’m desperate to get a better understanding what happened here.

Meanwhile, yesterday, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan highlighted a bunch of new streaming features the platform is adding, which is certainly interesting timing.

YouTube streams now have a “Channel Activity” section that gives you a bunch of new moderation tools. It’s smart. The only real thing Twitch still has over its competitors is its live chat and that seems fairly easy to build elsewhere else. I think it’s just taken a while for platforms like YouTube to realize that was Twitch’s secret sauce.

I have been completely obsessed with these TikToks from a user named Luke Blovad, who, best as I can tell, lives inside of a simulation of 2003. One of Blovad’s videos went viral again on X recently, with a user declaring, “white person of the century,” and I had to understand more about what was happening here.

Blovad is a streetwear fashion influencer and skater. The videos you’ve probably seen from Blovad are the Ed, Edd n Eddy-core ones, but there’s a lot more. But Blovad posts a lot of different fashion content, along with some very genderfluid lewds. Light NSFW warning if you head over to Blovad’s Instagram. But the TikTok page’s main focus is promoting Blovad’s music, which is pretty decent hyperpop and emo trap.

So I guess the 2000s nostalgia stuff is just a growth hack thing? Unclear. Like a lot of Gen Z content, it exists in a netherworld between earnestness and satire that I find both deeply compelling and extremely confusing.

• “How Twitter activists turned a viral story about Orthodox Jews into a modern blood libel”

• “Twitter Explodes With Antisemitic Misinfo After Secret Tunnels Found Under NYC Synagogue”

P.S. here’s some good Canadian content.

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

I first noticed the prevalence of the Stanley Quencher H2.0 FlowState™ tumbler last April when I wrote about #WaterTok. I’m still unclear what to make of #WaterTok, but I eventually settled on the idea that it’s several subcultures overlapping — weight-loss communities, Mormons, and those people who don’t like the “taste” of water. But in the majority of the #WaterTok videos I watched, people were using Stanley’s Quencher to carry around their liquid Jolly Ranchers. And the ubiquity of the cup has sort of haunted me ever since.

I grew up in the suburbs, but I don’t live there anymore. So every time the great silent majority of American basicness summons a new totem to gather around, I can’t help but try and make sense of it. Was this a car thing? A college football tailgate thing? An EDM thing? Cruise ships? Barstool Sports was of no help here, so I filed it away until this Christmas when it exploded across the web and forced me to finally figure out what the heck was going on. And it turns out, the Stanley cup’s transformation into a must-have last year is actually, in many ways, the story of everything now.

CNBC put together a great explainer on this. Stanley, a manly hundred-year-old brand primarily aimed at hikers and blue-collar workers, was rediscovered in 2019 by the bloggers behind a women’s lifestyle and shopping site called The Buy Guide. They told CNBC that even though the Quencher model of the cup was hard to find, no other cup on the market had what they were looking for. Which is a bizarrely passionate stance to take on a water bottle, but from their post about the cup, those attributes were: “Large enough to keep up with our busy days, a handle to carry it wherever we go, dishwasher safe, fits into our car cupholders, keeps ice cold for 12+ hours, and a straw.”

The Buy Guide team then sent a Quencher to Emily Maynard Johnson from The Bachelor after she had a baby because “there is no thirst like nursing mom thirst!” Johnson posted about it on Instagram and it started to gain some traction. The Buy Guide then connected with an employee at Stanley, bought 5,000 Quenchers from the company directly, set up a Shopify site, and sold them to their readers. According to The Buy Guide, they sold out in five days. All of these things are very normal things to do when you discover a cool bottle.

After mom internet started buzzing about the tumbler — a corner of the web that is to dropshipping what dads are to Amazon original streaming shows — Stanley hired Terence Reilly, the marketer credited for reinventing Crocs. Reading between the lines of what Reilly has said about his work at Stanley, it seems like his main strategy for both Crocs and the Quencher was capitalizing on internet buzz and growing it into otaku product worship. Or as Inc. phrased it in their feature on him, he uses a “scarcity model” to whip up interest. Cut to three years later, now we’re seeing mini-riots over limited edition Stanleys at Target.

My reference point for this kind of marketing is the Myspace era of music and fashion, when record companies and stores like Hot Topic and Spencer’s Gifts were using early social media to identify niche fandoms and convert them into mainstream hits. In this allegory, Target has become the Hot Topic of white women with disposable income. And their fingerless gloves and zipper pants are fun water bottles and that one perfume everyone in Manhattan is wearing right now.

I’m always a little wary about giving someone like Reilly credit for single-handedly jumpstarting a craze like this — and I am extremely aware that he is a male executive getting credit for something that was, and still is, actually driven by women content creators — but this is the second time he’s pulled this off. Which, to me, says he’s at least semi-aware of how to pick the right fandoms. He may not be actively involved in the horse race, but he clearly has an eye for betting on them. And, yes, the Stanley craze is very real.

It’s turned into a reported $750 million in revenue for Stanley and both Google Trends and TikTok’s Creative Center show massive growth in interest around the bottle between 2019 and now. With a lot of that growth happening this year. On TikTok, the hashtag #Stanley has been viewed a billion times since 2020 and more than half of that traffic happened in the last 120 days.

And with all viral phenomenon involving things women do, there are, of course, a lot of men on sites like Reddit and X adding to the discourse about the Quenchers with posts that essentially say, “why women like cups?” And if you’re curious how that content ecosystem operates, you can check out my video about it here. But I’m, personally, more interested in what the Stanley fandom says about how short-form video is evolving.

Over the last three years, most major video sites have attempted to beat TikTok at its own game. All this has done, however, is give more places for TikToks to get posted. And so, the primarily engine of TikTok engagement — participation, rather than sharing — has spread to places like Instagram, YouTube, and X. If the 2010s were all about sharing content, it seems undeniable that the 2020s are all about making content in tandem with others. An internet-wide flashmob of Ice Bucket Challenge videos that are all, increasingly, focused on selling products. Which isn’t an accident.

TikTok has spent years trying to bring Chinese-style social e-commerce to the US. In September, the app finally launched a tool to sell products directly. If you’re curious what all this looks like when you put it together, here’s one of the most unhinged Stanley cup videos I’ve seen so far. And, yes, before you ask, there are affiliates links on the user’s Amazon page for all of these.

[Ed. note: A previous version of this essay did not take into account the existence of hockey, which may have influenced some Google Trends data I referenced lol. It has been updated accordingly.]

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I saw this X post from writer Dean Kissick going around X over the holidays and I had initially intended to cover it here (pretty sure I didn’t, I checked lol). Kissick’s screenshots are from media brand-run Spotify playlists, which all feature the same handful of songs from artists like Lana Del Rey, Ice Spice, and Olivia Rodrigo. Kissick, incorrectly, said this was an example of a “cloying, suffocating monoculture,” when they, actually, reveal the opposite.

Writer Emilie Friedlander had a good response to this, writing, “If you've ever sat in a room where these lists are made you know they're less a rendering of what people on staff actually think than a very carefully constructed branding/traffic exercise based on projecting an ideal reader's taste... problem is, every publication's going after the same people.”

It’s been a few years since I was last part of one of these “branding/traffic exercises,” but this was what I saw, as well. The logic from most culture editors I’ve seen goes like this: You can’t pick truly huge hits because everyone knows them, you can’t pick truly underground stuff because no one knows them, and you can’t pick what actual human beings are listening to because it’s tacky and undermines your own expertise as a cultural arbiter. For instance, one of biggest stories in music right now, at least based on number of listeners impacted, is probably Slipknot’s implosion. Have you read anything about it?

The reason all of this is notable now is because this coastal elite poptism, perfected by outlets like Pitchfork and VICE in the 2010s, looks really silly now! And even less reflective of pop culture than it used to. Especially in the context of a Spotify playlist! It’s like going to Whole Foods and trying to find hidden gems.

An X account called Historic Vids screwed up over the weekend and accidentally posted a video without any sound. This wouldn’t be that big of a problem except the whole “joke” of the video was the audio. In the actual video, it’s a Kazakhstani news anchor doing a tongue twister.

So you’d expect that Historic Vids’ video would have flopped without the audio. Except it didn’t. It has 30 million “views” and almost two thousand retweets. And the hundreds of replies beneath the video are all from other verified novelty accounts promoting their own content.

This has led to a bunch of people sharing the “dead internet” theory, which argues that majority of the web is actually just bots talking to each other. I don’t think that’s true for the whole web, but I am beginning to think that it is probably true for X.

This is one of those memes I tried to cover here over and over, but it’s just never made the final draft. If you have never seen this video before, it’s a promo for a song called “Mega Man” by the rapper Jay Eazy. It’s slowly taken on a life of its own with a ton of remixes and memes. Obviously, my favorite is the emo version.

Yesterday was January 7th, the one-year anniversary of “Mega Man” dropping and Jay Eazy performed the song (along with some help from a Kingdom Hearts cosplayer) at the Luminosity Makes BIG Moves Super Smash Bros. Ultimate tournament in Manhattan. The videos are really wonderful.

I don’t know how to explain it, but I was very surprised that the guy who read out his TENET Powerpoint on a date and filmed it was from San Fransisco. The whole thing feels extremely 2014-London-coded. Anyways, the video is sort of cringe and the Powerpoint is fine. In case you’ve missed why we’re talking about TENET right now, it’s because a director Christopher Nolan’s Peloton instructor roasted him over it.

I love TENET and it’s one of the only movies I have ever watched where I immediately sat back down and just watched it again. But I also don’t think it’s that complicated of a movie once you wrap your head around the inversion stuff. Though, I’m from the Reddit-guides-to-Primer microgeneration. So maybe I’m just more used to timey-whimey stuff. Make a Powerpoint about Netflix’s Dark and read THAT on a first date.

The two-year anniversary of the Insurrection was over the weekend. In an effort to preserve important commentary from the day, here are the three most important posts about January 6th, according to me.

First, here’s the “Mr. Blue Sky” video. Second, here’s the Azealia Banks “meth behavior” screenshot. And, finally, here’s a 4chan post that is, arguably, the best political writing of the 21st century.

• “2024 is the biggest global election year in history”

• “What We Lost When Twitter Became X” (I make a little cameo in this)

P.S. here’s a good Douyin video.

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

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you read through 1,037 unread emails.

The Epstein doc drop turned X into a large-scale libel machine. It was also borderline impossible to follow what was actually in the docs. For instance, the Stephen Hawking chalkboard thing is not real. This is a somewhat decent explainer about why Hawking was mentioned at all. Though, that brings me to my other point here, which is that all the junk on X is both filling a vacuum left by clear, non-paywalled explanations of what was actually revealed and also egged on by numerous outlets teasing the release of the docs like it was an album drop. I’m not sure there was ever going to be a world where the release of something this salacious and politically charged was going to go smoothly, but coupled with an out of control X/Twitter and an essentially non-existent Google News made things much, much worse.

Chrome has disabled third-party cookies. Here’s a good thread on why that might be an issue, specifically for publishers. This will essentially be an extinction level event for a lot of outlets still coasting on programmatic advertising. Is it one that should happen? Yeah probably, but it won’t make the online news desert any easier to navigate, especially as we enter an election year here in the US.

Why is Threads suggesting a bunch of TERF posts? I have not opened Threads since December 24th, because it’s not a fun app and all of the content on it is as entertaining as the stuff you see on LinkedIn, so I missed the TERF invasion. Though, I will say, Threads is overwhelmingly neoliberal and if you put enough airport self-help book readers in one social network TERFs will show up because that crowd is pathologically obsessed with gender essentialism.

I am fairly confident that there is no AI involved with the “AI” Spongebob drill thing. The music isn’t AI generated, the video definitely isn’t — this is about as good as you can get AI video production right now — and I don’t the voices are either. Though, it’s possible with a bunch of effects. But the tell is that they’re rapping on time with almost no audio artifacts and coherent emphasis on specific words. But the fact so many people are willing to believe it’s AI is notable. And not in a good way.

Homer Simpson singing “Iris” by The Goo Goo Dolls is AI, however. It was created by an app called Voicify and the animation seems like stock 3D assets set in time to the beat. The account that posted it posts a bunch of AI covers, but this one is really, really good.

Midjourney is imploding. A database of artists its AI was trained on was leaked. You can see an archived version of the “proposed artist” list here. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of a thousand lawsuits being filed.

OpenAI will not let you make an Epstein GPT to ask questions to the Epstein docs. Aw rats, I thought maybe that would fix the infopocalypse.

Tetris has finally been beaten — sorta. You “beat” the game by playing it up to level 155 or so, until it runs out of memory and literally crashes. It’s never happened before, but this week a 13-year-old became the first human to ever do it.

Is the Taylor Swift backlash finally coming? Probably time. Though, the pieces I’ve seen seem to be bending over backwards to argue that there’s some sort of sociopolitical reason needed when you can just say, “she’s everywhere, her fans are extremely aggressive, she’s a billionaire, and I’m sick of her now.” (I also think her lyrics are increasingly not great, but that’s a me thing.)

The CW Spider-Man thread was the best thing I saw over the break. It also inspired a DC version, which is pretty good too.

If you know a British man with a well-organized shed, offer him your condolences. YouTuber Tom Scott is shutting down. Well, he’s shutting down his main channel, at least. The reason why is because he’s facing the same issue every creator faces, one I’m even beginning to understand: At a certain audience level you either have to franchise, become a manager for that franchise, and turn into content factory. Or you do what Scott is doing and chill out. You either die a burnout or live long enough to see yourself become MrBeast, I guess.

This Embedded piece on how streaming has turned back into cable is really good. And it’s true, but the comparison I’ve been using (in my head and in conversations with bored loved ones) is an all-inclusive resort. These platforms sprang up promising us everything for a small monthly fee and hoped they could lock us in before their money ran out and they had to start reducing services and charging more money. And it’s not just true for streaming, but pretty much all web 2.0 apps. The problem, especially with streaming, is that while you can’t easily pirate, say, a resort’s private and well-maintained beach, you can absolutely pirate a TV show or a movie.

I am going to write more about the Stanley Cup madness next week. Though, I think this was probably the wildest Stanley content I saw over the break. If you’re looking for a good answer as to why this is happening, I don’t think this totally explains it, but it’s a good place to start. And this is a good watch after you read that.

It’s probably time to talk about the “black and Chinese” thing. There’s a weirdo on X who is using AI on photos of mainly e-girls into to make them look black and Chinese. That’s basically it. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Gyspy Rose Blanchard is out of jail and on TikTok. I don’t have the time to summarize Blanchard’s whole story here and I figure if it’s something you care about, you already know it. I wish her the best and I hope the internet is somewhat kind to her. Also, this feels like maybe a good place to stuff a hot take I’ve been sitting on for a while that’s not entirely connected to Blanchard. I think social media should be allowed in prisons.

The Hard Times’ gaming vertical, Hard Drive, launched a Patreon. Not everyone is exactly thrilled about that. The Hard Times is the punk version of The Onion and in recent years they’ve experimented with more traditional online publishing. But unlike The Onion, The Hard Times has been pretty aggressively riding social traffic from the beginning. I think it’s a safe bet that this will not be the first online publisher to make this move this quarter.

The developers of the lame Steamboat Willy horror game deny being neo-Nazis. It’s up to you whether you care enough about this to believe them or not. But just think how much drama could have been avoided by not making a crappy video game to cash in on an expiring copyright.

I don’t find the Paris New Years video all that grim tbh. Also, to be clear, I am only like 80% certain this video is real. I tried checking on Google News, but, you know… Anyways, yes, I get the impulse to look at this and say, “oh wow, we live in a nightmare from which we cannot wake,” etc. And I think the common comparison to photos and videos of people on their phones to photos and videos of people smoking a fifty years ago is apt. All that said, I do think you can look at a video like this and also see it as something somewhat beautiful. Thousands of people taking a video with the intention of, at least in theory, sharing it with someone else. It’s sort of sweet if you ask me. If it’s real, of course.

A Japanese real-time disaster tracker was rate-limited during the earthquake last week. I was a bit confused by this because the tracker is called NERV, which is the fictitious government organization from the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it’s a popular service even if it isn’t official. Unfortunately, there are still no other platforms with X’s scale that offer a replacement for real-time information.

• “Skibidi toilet knockoff merch has officially hit the Jersey Shore boardwalks.”

• A very NSFW video that is also very good

• “My girlfriend’s family doesn’t know I’m playing 100 gecs at their Hanukkah party”

• The Onion Weigher is building an onion weigher

• The only video we would ever need to show aliens what we’re all about here on Earth

P.S. here’s a good scarf.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

After today, I’m going dark until the first week of January. If you need me, I’m reachable on email and I’ll be lurking in the Discord, as well.

The plan was to make today’s issue a fun round up of stuff everyone liked in the Garbage Day Discord. And that’s here too, further down below. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t just get to be a bunch of fun stuff because Substack has, once again, stepped in it. I put a version of what I’m about to say here in the paid issue over the weekend, but after stewing on it — instead of enjoying the holidays!!!! — I decided I should put this in the main issue, as well.

Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie posted a real bad statement this week about the platform’s Nazi problem. A bunch of writers I respect are leaving the platform and I think I will be, as well. To be clear: I don’t want to move actually. Substack, at least as a product, works incredibly well and there are lots of good people working there who have been super helpful over the last few years. But I don’t think it’s worth staying there anymore.

I’ve tried to make the case a few different times as to how Substack should moderate themselves. I don’t even think it’s that complicated. But it goes nowhere and they clearly don’t care. And so, at this point, I’m just annoyed. Substack is, essentially, my primary business partner and their pathological need to virtue signal to the worst people in the world is exhausting. And I am, frankly, sick of waking up every few months to deal with the fallout after they release a statement that pisses off all my readers.

To put this in language they seem to value (more than moderation), they are, increasingly, making it harder to do business with them. Not only do they refuse to enforce literally their own terms of service, but they also can’t stop blogging about it. If I had a chief technology officer who was constantly posting about people’s right under the first amendment to sell Nazi memorabilia I would feel the same way. So, yeah, I’m probably out. I’ll be spending the next few weeks looking into where I’ll move to, but whatever happens, it shouldn’t affect how you receive issues (hopefully).

OK, now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to the good stuff.

I collected a bunch of reporting I did this year and put it all together into a video essay that I think tackles what was, for me, the biggest trend of 2023: Rage bait. And particularly, rage bait from TikTok.

Pornstars with fake podcasts, #WaterTok, dress re-selling on Depop, NPC streaming — this video covers it all. Enjoy!

The Content Mines Our Unified Theor(ies) Of 2023We thought we’d jump back on mic and talk through the weirdness of 2023, our first year since COVID that we didn’t put out a podcast every week. Luke thinks 2023 feels weird because millennials are no longer relevant. Ryan thinks 2023 feels weird because the internet has reverted back to what it was like in 2010. Maybe both theories are correct! Or mayb… Listen now2 years ago · Ryan Broderick

We thought we’d jump back on mic and talk through the weirdness of 2023, our first year since COVID that we didn’t put out a podcast every week. Luke thinks 2023 feels weird because millennials are no longer relevant. I think 2023 feels weird because the internet has reverted back to what it was like in 2010. Maybe both theories are correct! Or maybe it was some other third reason. Either way, we spend a lot of time arguing about TikTok.

—by Adam Bumas

Alright, here’s what you’ve all been waiting for. Just like last year, we opened up a special channel in the Garbage Day Discord and asked everyone what their favorite piece of content was this year. I couldn’t fit everything in, but I hope I did it justice. If this looks like a good crowd, you can join by hitting the green button below.

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I noticed that there was a lot more emphasis on events than posts. We got a bumper crop of great videos, insane takes, and timeless tweets (Just think! In January they were still called “tweets!”), but I saw way more reminiscence about the times something big enough happened that everyone was talking about it. Here’s the biggest moments of the year according to the Discord:

• The Paris trash strikes in March (first mentioned by Discord user Alyx). 

• The OceanGate submarine disaster in June (first mentioned by yellojkt).

• Colleen Ballinger’s ukulele apology later that month (first mentioned by albertinho).

• Barbenheimer in July (first mentioned by HarryJ).

• The Boston cop’s slide at the beginning of August (first mentioned by ppyajunebug).

• The Montgomery riverfront brawl a week later (first mentioned by nickweird).

• Burning man getting rained out at the end of August (first mentioned by SunglassesCats).

• Lauren Boebert at the theater in September (first mentioned by Mo).

• The Eras Tour and its film version in October (first mentioned by Dr. Jo).

• Henry Kissinger dying, not even a month ago (first mentioned by JRo).

I know it’s silly and maybe a tiny bit tactless to link together all these wildly distinct events, but they all shared at least a little grain of the vanishing monoculture. They brought the Discord together in conversation and I assume they did the same for a lot of other communities out there.

As I see it, the structures of our online communities are becoming disconnected enough that these events are now feast days. They’re occasions to reach out and connect in kindred spirit, even if that spirit is dunking on a centenarian war criminal. Like Garbage Day’s motto says, “Love to have fun online”, and people had fun online with all of these.

Here are some more of the Discord’s favorite pieces of content this year.

This was shared by lusername.

This comes courtesy of Daniel Entertainment Cheese.

User hypirlink shared this video from last week. It’s a whole-ass short film, and one perfectly in line with everything about community I wrote up there in that last section. User Sean also noted “It’s more like thriller than comedy,” adding “and it’s just so sad lol”.

This video was shared by user the-jim, who said “I liked the AI Biden/Obama/Trump content but this is my favorite hands down.” The trend was definitely big for a few months there, and I think it ended simply because people got bored of the new toy.

This was shared by SunglassesCats. You can click here to see it in all its glory if you haven’t yet.

This comes from user moxie.

This one is a bit tricky to explain, but, essentially, a user in the Discord named Michael was pestered for months to go to California Pizza Kitchen. Last month, he finally went. Except he didn’t actually get pizza. He got tortilla soup and jambalaya, apparently. Either way, it was a big moment on the server this year and, I realize while writing this, completely indecipherable to outsiders. Welcome to the new internet! As user cissy wrote, “I'm worried about the lesson we've all learned about how internet bullying is good actually.”

The Password Game was shared by user Alyx. It’s made by Neal Agarwal, who’s made a ton of fun Garbage Day-adjacent stuff, and I was surprised how enjoyable of a challenge it was. User zreese also noted “password game is good but I don’t think it was elevated to true art until Kitboga used it against call center scammers”. 

This comes courtesy of Webthing.

That’s all, folks! Thank you all for reading and supporting Garbage Day. This year has been a blast, truly. This is the best job ever. I’ll see you in the new year!

P.S. here’s a good belly rub video, recommended by Lucas in the Discord.

***Any typos in this email are due to drinking too much egg nog***

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you try and survive literally the most unnecessarily stressful days in modern life.

Substack has, once again, stepped in it. Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie posted a real bad statement this week about the platform’s Nazi problem. Popehat has a good take on all of this, but here’s what I’ll say: I have given up trying to argue that moderation should matter and I am now just annoyed. Substack is, essentially, my primary business partner and their pathological need to virtue signal to the worst people in the world is exhausting. And I am, frankly, sick of waking up and having to deal with the fallout after they release a statement like this. So to put it in language they seem to value (more than moderation), they are, increasingly, making it harder to do business with them. If I had a chief technology officer who was constantly blogging about people’s right under the first amendment to sell Nazi memorabilia I would feel the same way. So I’m going to think on this a bit more over the holidays, but if this is truly the path Substack wants to go down, then I’ll have to find a new business partner.

CES has not actually partnered with X? They aren’t even paying for their verification lol.

Etsy is filling up with junk. I actually noticed this recently. For the Garbage Day live events, I use a couple programs running on MIDI to play videos, show slides, etc., and went over to Etsy to see if I could find a custom controller I could use on stage and was shocked with how it has basically just turned into a worse version of Amazon. I’m not actually sure how you fix this other than, of course, stricter moderation, which, you know, no company ever wants to invest it (see above). But even then, it seems tricky because you’d have to verify exactly where products are coming from. I think the bigger takeaway is that the internet is an ecosystem and you can’t really ever gate yourself off from the rest of it.

God, I hope the fediverse works. If you haven’t been following this, news reader app Flipboard is federating via ActivityPub and bringing along a whole bunch of news outlets with it. Threads is finally federating, as well. I have not seen a good articulation of why users would want this or care, but, at this point, it almost doesn’t even matter. Let’s federate as much as we can and figure out how to make it exciting for the average person later. I also think this could finally be the thing that makes Mastodon matter, less as a proper social network, which I still don’t think it’s very good at, and more as the most established client for ActivityPub.

I think Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses are actually starting to blow up. Do I love that they’re made by Meta? No, not really. But this is the first real sign that consumers are ready for a new piece of hardware and I think we need it.

The Guardian’s Wilfred Chan became a DoorDash delivery driver to test out New York’s new minimum wage law. The good news is that, at least for now, yes, delivery workers are making more money and having to grind slightly less to get it.

Midjourney V6 is a significant upgrade, but the question is upgrade to what? You can check out a bunch of examples of what the new model is capable of here. It seems like the biggest change is in photorealism, which Midjourney has always been better than its competitors at. There’s also a lot more consistency between prompts. The question, which I asked at the top, is why? I’ve gotten over my initial “this is cool” reaction to this tech and now I just want to know what the intended use is.

Suno AI has emerged as easily the most sophisticated AI music generator. I asked it to make a hyperpop song about sending emails and it’s not, you know, a good song, but it sounds like a song. Here’s another example of what it can do.

Don’t want to pay for ChatGPT? Try using Chevrolet or Expedia’s new chatbot instead.

Alternative Press has a great year-end list of new emo albums. I can’t recommended the new Teenage Halloween record enough.

War Thunder players leaked sensitive documents again. I basically had to stop covering this because it was happening so often, but it’s the end of the year, so what the heck. If you are unfamiliar with the War Thunder fandom, they play a hyperrealistic military combat simulator and they’re so intensely obsessed with it that they routinely leak classified material to win arguments about it on message boards. The most recent leak wasn’t classified, but was sensitive enough to get yanked down almost immediately.

Snyder Cut weirdos are absolutely astroturfing Rotten Tomatoes to support Zach Synder’s new big stinker, Rebel Moon. To come back to something I’ve argued a few times this year, I genuinely think that at a certain level of enshittification, leaderboard services like Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads just can’t exist anymore.

Mark Wahlberg’s Apple TV+ movie is the platform’s most watched ever. And season two of Reacher is the most watched Amazon Prime show of the year. As writer Sonny Bunch posted, “America's Dads are the dark matter of the streaming wars.” Finding out a lot of normies like something is, of course, not new for Hollywood, but I do think it’s fascinating that streamers are getting more comfortable admitting this. I assume as long as the normie content being watched en masse is an original production, they’ll continue leaning into it and giving up on a lot of prestige products, just like every other form of digital media that gets big enough.

OnlyFans has apparently produced three seasons of a cooking show. The contestants are a mix of established pornstars and homegrown OnlyFans creators. I cannot imagine what kind of person is watching this, but I do think the business funnel for this is smart. Make SFW content that builds up parasocial relationships with creators and then send users down a monetized funnel to watch them have sex or whatever.

The guy who coined Godwin’s Law says it’s ok to compare Trump to Hitler. Godwin’s Law, created by Mike Godwin, states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” As Godwin wrote in his recent Washington Post piece, “We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.”

Guys, T-Pain’s new live performance is so good. Just watch it. It’s really good. I embedded it above. It’s great.

It’s all kicking off in the Trolls fandom. So, as I understand it, fans of the Trolls movies are fighting over whether or not it’s ok to make incest fanfic about a bunch of the trolls? I think that’s what’s going on here? The real internet is still out there if you know where to look, folks.

I agree with Semafor, the Republican primary should probably be covered by the media! Do I think the mainstream media is capable of responsibly covering and not just blindly platforming the dangerous whackos currently running for the Republican nomination? No, of course not. That’s not what corporate media and, especially, cable news, was designed to do. But I think they should try!

Protests are erupting all over Argentina. The country’s new very deranged gamer president, Javier Milei, repealed a bunch of laws this week, essentially declaring open season on Argentina’s various institutions.

India is testing out AI tech for predicting extreme weather. Only half-related to this, but Apple’s show Extrapolations, which was like Black Mirror, but even more neoliberal and primarily about climate change, was one of the worst things I watched this year. BUT its fifth episode, “2059 Part II: Nightbirds,” which takes place in India, is one of the best hours of science fiction I’ve seen maybe ever.

• A good TikTok

• POV: your band is playing at the grocery store and this man is hallucinating his arrest but also honestly really vibing to your set

• Some important PRB content

• Experience the magic of Blackstone’s holiday video

• Brian Jordan Alvarez is back with another banger.

• Brazilian X-Men

• Good Tumblr post

P.S. here’s deep fried ham bomb.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

This story is a bit of a mess, so let me run through exactly what happened first before we get to any sort of deeper analysis.

It all kicked off on December 12th, when X user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a video with the caption, “Just made this video. Let me know what you think!” The video was a short animation from the artist JoCat. You can watch it below:

The @ZeroSuitCamus joke post was a classic Twitter gag. You find something your followers will immediately recognize as cringe and ironically claim that you made it. And @ZeroSuitCamus’s followers knew exactly what to do. Their post has over a thousand replies and almost two thousand shares. And the majority are extremely vicious, with many going so far as to claim JoCat is a child abuser — for liking cartoons, I guess?

Defining the groups involved here is tricky in the way defining any cluster of internet users never feels quite right, but I would broadly say that @ZeroSuitCamus and their followers are loose coalition of Weird Twitter users, trans shitposters, and dirtbag leftists (if those people even still exist). While JoCat’s fans are, well, goofy YouTube nerds, adult cartoon fans, and queer gamers.

By the end of the discourse cycle, @ZeroSuitCamus has since sorta-kinda apologized for the post, while also blaming JoCat for amplifying it in the first place. And JoCat published a lengthy blog post explaining the context behind the “I Like Girls” video. It was an inside joke, riffing on Lizzo’s “Boys”.

“I still want to make things, but perhaps I should just keep them to myself for the time being,” JoCat wrote. “I will be taking an indefinite break from posting anything online. It’s a decision I’ve considered ever since the first hate wave from about a year or so ago but wanted to sit on it and see if the feeling would persist. I know now this is the best choice for me.”

I assumed our Bean Dad days were dying out with Twitter. And, to be clear, this is absolutely not at that level. But I also think it’s a useful example of how the worst impulses of peak Twitter are still with us and may be long after X finally goes bankrupt.

The late-2010s mindset that things online can’t just be bad has only gotten more pronounced. This line of thinking emerged in the Trump era and, for progressives, means that bad content must reflect some kind of moral failing from the creator. There’s also a more aggressive strain of this among stan armies that argue that celebrities that age poorly are aging poorly because they are somehow less morally good than others that age gracefully. Even your bad photograph on my feed must reflect a deeper truth of your innate badness. For leftists or leftist-adjacents, bad content and, more typically, cringe is, instead, a sociopolitical failing.

JoCat’s dumb video can’t just be dumb, it’s, as one deeply unhinged user wrote, “a Funko Pop shelf of fictional women, it’s a display to other like minded people for the only reason of validation of a hobby.” (Please go outside.)

But here’s the thing. If you did not grow up in a very specific internet filter bubble, I’m pretty confident in saying you wouldn’t even know to be embarrassed by “I Like Girls”. For those who did, though, it’s a visceral reminder of a deeply mortifying period in your life. And even if JoCat’s video isn’t activating your personal cringe muscle, there’s something like it out there that will.

And so, to zoom out even further, I’d say that as we look towards 2024 and next year’s election, I would caution to not overlook the politics of self-loathing. We now have two generations of adults that grew up almost entirely online. Which means there are 150 million American adults who have some form of data trail attached their childhoods, making the cringe of their youth feel a lot more inescapable. Your old posts about the Annoying Orange or your embarrassing Superwholock Tumblr are out there still, somewhere, in the digital void. And bonding over the cringe of seeing the content you grew out of is a very powerful tool for mobilizing engagement. Finding someone still enthusiastically still making that kind of content and mercilessly dunking on them is even more powerful.

It’s $5 a month or $45 a year for Discord access and Friday issues. And it’s $150 a year for all of that plus monthly insights reports. If you’re already a subscriber, you only pay the difference for upgrading.

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Earlier this week, an X user named Josh Lekach uploaded a TikTok to X and claimed that it depicted a high school student getting rejected from Cornell University because he was white. It didn’t. The student in the video eventually DM’d Lekach telling him to the take down the post. Which Lekach did, but he also told the student to be “careful of what you post online in the future.” Which is ridiculous and reveals a disturbing lack of human empathy, but, also, I’ve been following Lekach for a while and this is very much his brand.

The Daily Beast has a good post with more details about how the TikTok was weaponized by right-wing freaks on X. I, instead, want to highlight something I learned about Lekach back in November.

Last month, X was promoting his tweets A LOT. And underneath all of them he advertises a horrible redpill loser guide called The Manual. I started getting curious what this guy’s whole deal is and that’s when I made a fantastic discovery. Before Lekach rebranded as a men’s right activist influencer, he had a very different job.

He was a producer on a little film called The Hottie & The Nottie.

Apple’s big selling point for their new headset is spatial video. It allows you to literally walk around your “memories”. It’s already brought one early user to tears. Apple clearly thinks it’s the killer feature for the Vision Pro. And considering Apple isn’t using the term “virtual reality” in its marketing, it seems like the company is hoping the Vision Pro is unique enough to jumpstart a paradigm shift similar to the first iPhone or iPad.

There’s just one problem. And it’s an issue that all headsets suffer from, whether they call themselves VR or not: You can’t share the experience. In fact, in a recent CNET demo of spatial video on the iPhone 15, they couldn’t even show it and instead just asked a guy what it was like.

It’s been 16 years since the first iPhone and I think it’s very easy to forget that while there were a few cool things you could only do on an iPhone, part of the reason it caught on was because it interfaced with desktop computers on the web and it was fairly easy to share what you were doing on the iPhone on blogs and early social platforms like Twitter.

I don’t think the Vision Pro will be a flop because it’s main feature can only be experienced inside the headset. But I do think there is a space for a mixed reality headset that can more easily fit into our existing tech landscape.

Alex Novell, a journalist and video producer, used an AI of Louis CK to trick Alex Jones into interviewing Manuel Oliver, the father of one of the students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The video above details how Novell set it up. Honestly, you could have told me Jones was an AI too because he doesn’t exactly seem to be able to follow what’s going on.

Analyst Eric Seufert put together a fascinating look at how Chinese apps like Temu, TikTok, and Shein are dominating app stores right now. I will say, I’ve never used Temu, but, anecdotally, Temu bags are quickly starting to replace Amazon boxes in my apartment’s mailroom.

In a followup post, Seufert argued that Temu’s rise, in particular, is thanks to the company’s huge advertising blitz this year, but I wonder if there’s something simpler happening.

I suspect the popularity of Chinese apps might also be connected to a general malaise of western platforms. It’s possible users, especially younger ones, just want something different and Chinese tech companies are the only ones right now that aren’t just recycling the same widgets over and over again, but are also big enough to achieve the same scale as their western competitors.

I had to check a few times to make sure this wasn’t just Grimes’ account. And I’m still not entirely convinced. The AI posts pretty naturally and a lot of times they’re pretty funny too.

You know, I’m beginning think there’s a real chance that whatever Grimes ends up settling on with AI is actually a lot more successful than what Elon Musk does.

• Flaming Hydra launched!!!

• “What Do AI Companies Want With the Media?”

P.S. here’s dog hate snowman.

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

I’m still on X, unfortunately. I was lurking on 4chan fairly regularly up until around 2014 and then was still using it for work basically up until the pandemic. So while X’s standards are sliding very fast, I think it’s still a useful app from an academic standpoint. Also, Threads, even though it’s a lot less of a mess, is not fun. It is simply not a place that I want to look at on the weekends.

And tbh watching X die has been fascinating, when it’s not nauseating. Though, trying to divine the weird changes Elon Musk is making to the site has been difficult. The app’s “For You” feed feels different than it did even two months ago — and I’m not the only one to notice that. Though, the question is whether it’s the algorithm that’s changed or if it’s just that users figured out how to game it better.

When you make the decision to algorithmically sort and monetize your social network, you also enter into a permanent adversarial relationship with your users. They will try and game it and your new job is to prevent that. Some platforms like YouTube or TikTok take a light touch, while others like Facebook are much more draconian. Musk, as far as I can tell, does not realize this yet — or just doesn’t care. I never know if he’s doing something because he’s stupid or because he’s lazy.

But regardless of which it is, it has resulted in two posts completely taking over my X feed this weekend. To the point where there was basically no other content on my app other than quote posts of these two posts. As of this morning, I’d say it accounts for over 80% of my feed. And, interestingly enough, they’re both from the same account.

The posts come from a user named @lovechazelle, who has around 3,000 followers. No one I know follows them and, from what I can tell, they aren’t running any kind of scam. They have a Letterboxd profile, but not a particularly big one. In other words, they’re just a stan account, specifically for the director Damien Chazelle.

I have a few theories as to how this happened. First, they’re exactly what X’s algorithm prioritizes. Back in February, I did an experiment with X’s then-new algorithm that worked way too well. Even though dials seem to have been adjusted since, X’s For You page still consistently rewards not just quote posts, but quote posts of already viral content, along with videos and replies from Verified users. And @lovechazelle’s posts check all of those boxes.

It’s also very possible that the shrinking of X — and the team that runs it — has reached a point where there are only a handful of truly engaged-with posts now. Tumblr felt like this around 2018 and 2019, as did Myspace towards the end. But I also think the subject matter is important. I don’t think it’s an accident both posts require users sharing old videos of celebrities. It’s one of the few things we can all still talk about together.

In lieu of any big 2024 predictions post, I’ll drop my main one here: The most important story in both tech and politics going into 2024 (an election year, mind you) will be the lack of cultural consensus in America. After almost 15 years of platforms semi-reliably tracking our national conversation — or at least giving the illusion that they were — we’re now beginning to realize they don’t. We already can’t figure out if something’s really trending or not or what caused it to trend if it is. But we now live in a world where our media and political apparatuses require that kind of information to function. The loudest and oftentimes most influential parts of American society have been looking at what’s online and repackaging it back to us for a decade and now that trick doesn’t work anymore.

What I’ve been struggling to fit into this framework has been the explosive monocultural moments that are happening simultaneously amid this shift — figures like Taylor Swift and MrBeast and memes like Barbenheimer or Skibidi Toilets. Long time readers know one of my worst impulses is creating a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything and then spending all of my time agonizing over why it’s probably wrong.

But as I wrote last week, I think what we’re actually seeing is the middle of the attention economy disappear. The space where viral animals, random videos, silly trends, and bizarre subcultures used to inhabit. Those things aren’t gone, really, but they aren’t turning into national level discourses as often anymore. I’ve been following Jeremiah Johnson’s annual Worst Tweets bracket this week and I’ll confess I hadn’t actually seen a fair amount of them and my job is literally to stare at this stuff all day. It also seems fitting that the Worst Tweet this year was a Very Bad Tweet about the conflict in Israel and Palestine, which was an undeniably monolithic story from this year, regardless of how politically divisive it’s been.

On our new vapor web, conversations are glomming together. We’re reaching out in the dark looking for ways to still communicate and it turns out there isn’t much. And this is especially apparent on websites like X that are, well, objectively more poorly run than others. And this was also true during the era of peak 4chan. The rot of the larger internet is always most visible on sites with the lowest standards.

—by Adam Bumas

This was shared in the Garbage Day Discord by user Alyx, along with a lot of other videos from TikTokers who are currently taking the Ultimate World Cruise. The ship set sail from Miami on December 10th and is set to last until next September. Accounts posting regular videos from the cruise are becoming the center of a nascent fandom after only a week.

So far, that fandom is mostly powered by the excitement of discovery. All the most popular TikToks are devoted to the ludicrous scale of amenities and logistics a nine-month cruise needs. For instance, anyone who gets pregnant on board the ship needs to leave at 23 weeks. That kind of content won’t hold interest for long without something more dramatic and constantly developing and a lot of creators are beginning to tease juicier content.

I can't remember seeing this specific kind of anticipation before: TikTokers who aren’t on the ship are setting themselves up as commentators, making Bingo cards of possible dramatic moments, and describing the cruise as “a nine-month TikTok reality show”.

But reality shows don’t have nine-month seasons. Cultural cycles are so fast, especially on TikTok, that I think the novelty will wear off, even if the passengers start deliberately engineering drama. The only thing I could see keeping me checking for daily updates is if they get stuck in the Suez Canal. Or maybe a Lord Of The Flies situation?

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In years past, I’ve done a big independent audit of all my posts for the year. There were always problems with the data, but it was useful when I was still figuring out what worked and what didn’t for Garbage Day. This year, I’m going to use Substack’s own rankings instead, which seem to use an aggregate of a bunch of different metrics, including estimated revenue and open rate. And according to my dashboard, my top five posts this year were:

1. The algorithmic anti-culture of scale (89.3k views, 360 new signups, 48% open rate)

2. TikTok teens aren't stanning Osama bin Laden (77.3k views, 127 new signups, 45% open rate)

3. I remembered how awful it is to go viral (86.1k views, 335 new signups, 50% open rate)

4. This is what an unmoderated internet looks like (76.6k views, 88 new signups, 46% open rate)

5. The metaverse is cooked (79.1k views, 104 new signups, 51% open rate)

The biggest takeaway is that big swings on something topical do really well for me. It’s impossible to pump out a newsletter like one of these every week, but it’s nice to know I have a niche. It’s also nice to know that these posts are fairly evenly distributed across the year because I’m constantly terrified I’ll have peaked and not realize it.

In terms of other interesting stats from my dashboard, my yearly subscriber retention rate was 74%. I try not to look at my churn, but I feel like that number is a good one. My biggest US audience segment is in California and second-largest is New York. My biggest audience outside of the US is the UK. And, finally, I thought my top traffic sources were interesting:

• Email: 5.1 million views

• Direct: 617k views

• Substack app: 303k views

• Twitter/X: 83k views

• Google: 64k views

A few years ago, I wondered if email would end up becoming a secondary traffic source for me, but there’s absolutely no contest. That said, my open rate has slid this year, but it’s possibly just a side effect of scale. I gained just under 30,000 readers this year, ending the year at 67,344 readers, so my previous average of 45-47% has slid towards 42-44%. If it dips below 30, I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown.

Podcaster @TheWapplehouse reached out to someone who knows our mysterious hero irl and they revealed that he’s aware that his TikTok video has blown up and is mainly just happy that everyone realizes he clearly won the debate.

My favorite take on the video was from X user @maiamindel, who wrote, “Tiktok conservatives are like dodos or kakapos, they have grown fat and complacent due to facing no real threats. If Reddit atheists, their natural predators, end up descending on them... it doesn't look pretty.”

Digi is a new AI chatbot that is making a lot of AI guys have weird meltdowns right now. One prominent voice in the AI space even said the creators should go to jail for making it. And I’ve seen more than a few accounts say that this will eliminate whole bloodlines, the assumption being that weird men will fall in love with these chatbots and never procreate. I would argue that if you’re the kind of person to fall in love with a chatbot you probably weren’t going to procreate anyways.

But you’ve got to remember that for a lot of AI accelerationists, taking like this is part of the marketing. So let’s see what this thing actually is.

One of the lead devs on the project is Andrew Young, who previously worked with disgraced Rick & Morty co-creator Justin Roiland on an NFT marketplace (lmao). Young also wrote a couple lengthy threads about Digi as it went viral over the weekend. In one thread, he even admits that this chatbot is supposed to look like a Pixar character and that they worked with Pixar artists to design it. I probably wouldn’t admit that!!

And in a follow up thread, Young admitted that the demo is actually extremely misleading. The AI isn’t nearly as smooth and the voice is pretty wonky. Oh, also, the avatars look like absolute shit inside the app. But, of course, you can join the Discord to stay on the hype train.

Internet culture writer Jules Terpak had a great post recently highlighting a bunch of TikToks that are taking part in a new trend where you fake out viewers by revealing you’ve actually been filming the video the whole time on a pair of Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses.

And in the thread under Terpak’s post, social media consultant Rachel Karten wrote, “I can’t stop thinking about how this trend might be the thing to make smart glasses mainstream/cool/relevant.” Which is true. This might be it!

We’re basically one big trend away from smart glasses catching on and I hope they do! I also hope they don’t end with just camera glasses and we actually get something with a workable HUD display. Would this create all kinds of new problems with society and only further ingrain the decentralized panopticon we live in? Sure, but I think it’d be cool and I’m tired of looking at my phone all the time.

There are, of course, all kinds of ethical issues around platforming George Santos, but, also, if anyone’s going to do this and do this well, it’s Ziwe. And she does.

• “7 Months Inside an Online Scam Labor Camp”

• “Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore”

• “Facebook Is Being Overrun With Stolen, AI-Generated Images That People Think Are Real”

P.S. here’s a thread that will make you feel very old.

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

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you sit on a delayed New Jersey train waiting for a bull to get off the tracks.

Pornhub released their year in review report. You should absolutely take everything Pornhub releases publicly with a massive grain of salt because there is literally no company shadier than them. That said, their data is interesting. The average user is spending about 10 minutes on Pornhub a day, with traffic peaking on Mondays, usually at night, but it does seem like there are a good amount of remote workers who are, uh, taking a break in the afternoons, as well.

Threads launched in Europe. It does strike me as interesting that when Bluesky first launched, there were immediately a bunch of different cultural and subcultural clusters that popped up. Brazilian and Japanese Bluesky, furry Bluesky, leftist Bluesky, etc. But the closest thing Threads has to that are a bunch of industries using the new not-tags to silo themselves. I wonder if Threads expanding internationally will change that at all or if Threads will remain more LinkedIn than Twitter.

TikTok’s in-app purchases generated $10 billion this year. That is a lot of money! It’s also worth nothing here that TikTok coins are not dissimilar from what platforms like YouTube and Twitch offer. So the fact that TikTok is doing so well with those compared to its competitors, to me, says something important about TikTok’s ecosystem. It’s way more addicting than maybe we realize.

I hate the new Discord mobile app so much. That’s all I have to say. It sucks and I hate it.

Apple is betting on spatial video as the Vision Pro’s big hook. It’s a smart idea because, at least so far, no VR headset has figured out a way to really stand out. I also suspect that onboarding people to VR with something deeply personal like literally being able to walk around their own “memories” is much more effective than, say, playing Beat Saber or shopping for bull shit in a dead digital mall.

The band KISS is replacing themselves with digital avatars. They aren’t the first legacy band to do this, ABBA has a hologram show, as well. And, sure, why not. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Though, I do find the entire idea of boomers rocking out to digital ghosts slightly unnerving.

The Humane AI pin guy seriously needs media training. Humane’s co-founder Imran Chaudhri went on CNBC and couldn’t answer a single question about how or why people would ever use an AI pin, which I think is very telling. Also, Humane’s co-founder Bethany Bongiorno wrote a bunch of nonsense about the pin on X yesterday, arguing that “contextual compute — where the world around you becomes your operating system — is the future.” Which means nothing. Also, we spent the last 25 years transforming the web from something that was largely full of text to something full of visuals. So an extremely expensive smart device that doesn’t let you see anything is, frankly, idiotic.

Axel Springer is licensing its news content to OpenAI. *Doctor Strange voice* We’re in the end game now.

Non-consensual sexual image AI generators are advertising on X now. I have to imagine that X isn’t even looking at who’s advertising on the platform anymore because they’re so desperate for business. Also, banning these services should be priority number one for any policymaker trying to get ahead of AI development.

Did Elon Musk steal the Grok name from Grimes? Seems like it! She even trademarked the name first.

Hazbin Hotel is getting an Amazon show. I have done my best over the last few years to try and ignore Hazbin Hotel as much as humanly possible, largely because of the way the fandom behaves on Tumblr. So while it’s great that a show based on a Patreon-supported web series is getting a wide release, I also think it technically counts as a dangerous cognitohazard escaping its containment unit.

E3 shut down. I thought Gamesindustry.biz had the best piece on what that means. And Rock Paper Shotgun’s editor-in-chief, in an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, had the best take: “E3 had its problems, but at least the ESA didn't materialise as a single man who'd rather be talking to muppets and celebrities on stage than the games they're supposedly here to promote and celebrate.”

Twitch allowed artistic nudity on the platform about 24 hours before realizing that was a very bad idea. This whole thing started with a new Twitch “meta,” or meta strategy, where women streamers would stream topless with the camera cropping out their nipples. A normal platform would find a way to de-incentivize this kind of content algorithmically. But, of course, Twitch is not a normal platform. So, instead, they decided to tie themselves up in a big pretzel and still end up with no clearer set of guidelines for adult content on the site.

Tucker Carlson is launching a streaming service. It’s going to cost $9 a month and, unfortunately, how it ends up doing will probably tell us something very important about the future of media in America.

Twenty percent of YouTube is gameplay videos. Which is honestly wild considering how much content is on YouTube. It also connects a bit to Twitch’s current woes. I had assumed that as gaming got more mainstream, Twitch would, as well. But I think over the last three years video games-related media has completely outgrown Twitch and expanded across the whole internet and I’m not sure Twitch can ever regain that lead.

McDonald’s advertised a new “cookies ‘n cream pie” on Facebook. You can imagine how that went for them.

Know Your Meme published their favorite memes of 2023. They also quoted me, which is nice. I’ve been thinking about this and I think my favorite meme of 2023 was “Baby Gronk Rizzed Up Livvy Dunne”. It is still funny every time I watch it or say it out loud. Livvy even hugged Baby Gronk.

Everyone’s mad at the Balloon Guy again. Here’s the funny thing about this. His whole deal is taking quotes he finds on the internet, stripping them of all context, and putting them on a giant wall in balloons. And he’s almost constantly having to apologize or give more context later for one of his stupid posts. It’s almost like optimizing your content for maximum engagement is a deeply unnatural way of communicating and you just shouldn’t do it.

Yes, the album cover for Kanye West’s new project with Ty Dolla Sign is absolutely a nazi thing. You can read more about that here.

The Goodreads review bombing drama is all wrapped up. Thankfully, for me, The Mary Sue has a great explainer. Basically, debut author Cait Corrain reviewbombed a bunch of other authors, got caught, wrote a length apology on X claiming she has having a mental health crisis, and was then dropped by her publisher. Obviously, Corrain is to blame here, but I do think the outsized importance of Goodreads for a certain sector of the publishing industry deserves some blame, as well.

The EU is closing in on a big AI law. The Artificial Intelligence Act will create a legal framework for how AI tools are used and the data that goes in them and will also give users a way to opt in and out of AI systems. Great, let’s do that here, as well!

A game about being trapped in a never-ending Tokyo subway station is one of the biggest games on Steam right now. This is barely related to this at all, but when I was working in Tokyo I got desperately lost inside of Shinjuku Station more than a few times. Years later, I was playing the video game Persona 5, which opens with you trying to navigate Shinjuku Station and actually got too stressed out to keep playing the game. The trauma is still very real for me.

• DOOM thread

• Clear bacon

• Really important penguin video

• How it feels to drink a Dr Pepper

• Pickle breakcore

• Cool rock video

P.S. here’s an extremely comfy rat.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually, but with more of a carefree weekend vibe***

—by Adam Bumas

We’ve been using Newswhip's real-time tracking data to analyze the top posts, links, and publishers on Facebook since April. It's usually a mix of known publishers, some viral videos, and the occasional Taylor Swift post. That is, until November, when all 10 of the most popular links on Facebook were from a blog called Catholic Fundamentalism.

Catholic Fundamentalism first came to our attention in September, when the single most popular link on the platform for that month was “Do Catholics find ‘Life’ by being pleasing to God? The Psalms tell us! #17.” The page linking the post had 409,000 total interactions in September. For scale, the Associated Press obituary for Jimmy Buffet had 356,000 interactions over the same time. It was unusual, sure, but random sites spike inside of Facebook all of the time. What we’ve never seen before, however, is a single website dominate the platform like this completely. We’ve reached out to Meta for comment.

The blog and its Facebook page aren’t run by some think tank or even the Catholic Church itself (though the two pages are nearly the same size). Instead, the website that’s more popular than the BBC right now seems to be entirely run by a retiree in Pennsylvania. 

There’s some poetry here. Facebook was an extinction level event for blogging long before it ate the rest of the web. Also, the platform’s size and scale, you could argue, rivals the Vatican. And now the social network that has defined culture, swung elections, and reshaped the way we communicate has degraded to such a state that it’s been conquered by one guy blogging about Catholicism who may or may not be aware he’s even done it.

Catholic Fundamentalism is run by a blogger named Bill Adams. He prefers being anonymous nowadays because, according to an FAQ on the site, "an author who avoids payment and recognition" is more likely to be "worthy of your trust." (Not sure about that lol.) But he pops up in videos he's sharing to the page and interacts with readers using his personal account. We also found a lot of material on the Catholic Fundamentalism blog listed as previously published material from Old Drum Publishing. We've reached out to both Adams and Old Drum for comment.

For what we can glean from his posts, Adams is in his late 70s, lives north of Pittsburgh, and owned a manufacturing business until retiring a few years ago. But he's been publishing his thoughts on Catholicism in various places since at least 1993 and registered the catholicfundamentalism.com URL in 2002, where he's been blogging almost every day since late 2005. Monday was a milestone for him, since it marked his 6,000th daily post on the blog.

And since Adams started the Catholic Fundamentalism Facebook page in 2012, he’s done almost nothing with it aside from link to the blog (and experiment with a couple Reels). The actual posts aren’t anything particularly timely or even engagement bait. Nor does this look like a facade for a shady e-commerce scheme. Even so, they’re consistently among the most popular links on the whole platform.

According to Facebook's Top 10, a now-inactive Twitter bot by journalist Kevin Roose and internet studies professor Fabio Giglietto, Catholic Fundamentalism's page first started blowing up in September 2020, when it was performing slightly behind The Hill. But in 2022 and 2023, it started really doing numbers, regularly outperforming Ben Shapiro and Rolling Stone.

What makes all of this especially strange (well, aside from how strange this is just in general) is that no other big pages are sharing Adams' posts. For instance, in the case of the aforementioned Jimmy Buffet obit, its engagement was coming from all over Facebook, with hundreds of different pages sharing it. According to CrowdTangle, the Catholic Fundamentalism Facebook page is the only referral for Adams' posts.

The secret to Catholic Fundamentalism’s success may lie in an algorithm tweak earlier this year. Gizmodo reported in June that throughout the first half of 2023, Facebook traffic for pretty much all news websites had massively declined. A local journalist Gizmodo interviewed also noted that “anything that’s controversial or related to substantive policy news gets suppressed, but if it’s news about something relatively simple and happy, the algorithm amplifies it.” 

And, as you might expect, there are hundreds of Catholic Fundamentalism blog posts that would be deeply controversial in most religious circles (“A protestant is a person who willfully disobeys Any Word of Christ” is a doozy). But the way they’re shared on Facebook means that next to no one is actually clicking through to read them. In fact, according to the site’s own traffic counts, that anti-Protestant post only has 23 views, but its Facebook post has over 7,000 reactions and a thousand comments. And it's those thousand comments that are the key here.

We said above that the posts weren’t “classic engagement bait”, but as we’ve researched post-Meta facebook, we’ve seen weird new forms of engagement evolve from the sludge. Back in June, one of the biggest Facebook posts was a repost of a Tumblr post titled, “the potato of luck”. All the replies on Facebook were treating the potato like a holy relic, commenting “Amen” even though there wasn’t anything specifically religious about it. Those comments seemed to be the main reason the post got so big.

And, of course, all of the posts on the Catholic Fundamentalism Facebook page are dripping with “Amen” comments, regardless of other kinds of engagement they get. The post shows up in other people’s feeds, people comment “Amen” because that’s what people do now, apparently, and the cycle continues. But these Amen chains aren't boosting Catholic Fundamentalism’s popularity, as much as they are insulating the page from Facebook’s current suppressive algorithm.  

We first thought that perhaps this new no bummers landscape inside of Facebook was amplifying Catholic Fundamentalism. This was the case with Thinkarete Lifestyle, the last random tiny page we saw get this enormous on Facebook. Thinkarete was blasted with traffic after stumbling on to an engagement hack the algorithm seemed to prioritize. But Catholic fundamentalism isn't really doing any better than it was a year ago. It's just that everyone else is doing much worse.

Which makes Catholic Fundamentalism a useful yard stick for measuring at least one section of Facebook that is clearly in decline — publishers and third-party links. As its creaky machinery begins reassemble itself into a TikTok competitor, other parts of the platform — like, you know, where people used to share news — have become bizarre content voids where confused users are just commenting “Amen” over and over, turning Facebook into the final form of all declining internet communication: A chain letter.

If you want to get access to the monthly reports that this research comes from, hit the green button below. They’re $150 a year and you get all the other Garbage Day subscriber benefits. If you already subscribe, you only pay the difference.

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A new AI startup, aptly titled Channel 1, is promising a new news network powered entirely by AI-generated hosts. You can watch the demo here.

Deadline actually covered Channel 1 last month. It’s going to run on X, its own website, and a couple of the lower-level streaming services like Crackle. The company behind it is closely connected to the weird digital media conglomerate that Chicken Soup For The Soul has morphed into over the last few years.

If you haven’t been following this, there is essentially a subspace dimension of streaming services watched by, from what I can tell, no one, where ads play in between TV shows and movies that don’t exist. Like the streaming video equivalent of two cameras pointing at each other. And that is where these AI-generated news programs will launch initially.

Not to go too off topic, but my personal theory is that this content netherworld will eventually swallow every streaming service that isn’t Netflix, Amazon Prime and maybe Apple TV and Disney+, if it hasn’t already.

If these shows work, and I use “work” here very liberally, I have absolutely zero issues believing that they’ll start filling up other spaces very quickly. Basically, take every public screen that’s currently playing top-down cooking videos, reruns of Ridiculousness, or videos from The Chive and Refinery 29, and replace it with an AI-generated news anchor.

The first edition of Netflix’s bi-annual (two times a year lol) What We Watched report is out and it is fascinating. You can check it out here.

The most watched show for 2023 was The Night Agent and non-English titles amount for about 30% of all Netflix viewing. Which sounds like a lot, but is actually much lower than I expected considering how global Netflix is.

Another thing that jumped out was how prevalent Korean properties, in particular, are. There were three in the top 20. Also, Puck’s Julia Alexander, who has been covering Netflix for a while now, had a good point about the amount of non-original licensed properties in Netflix’s list: “It’s easier for Netflix to license Suits than it is for NBCUniversal to make Stranger Things.”

Bethany Cosentino, the frontwoman for seminal indie band Best Coast, recently caused a bunch of discourse after speaking candidly in a TikTok about how disappointed she was with the reception of her new solo record. I have to confess I saw headlines about “Bethany Cosentino” all week and had totally forgotten that was the Best Coast lady. Probably part of the problem there. Though, to be clear, I think what Cosentino is describing here is a real issue for non-TikTokable artists right now.

But Cosentino’s TikTok generated some interesting takes. Music critic and King Emo Ian Cohen wrote, “My only thought on the Best Coast thing is that it’s part of a bigger story about musicians, writers, and other industry folks who experienced the Peak Indie era adjusting to a new reality.”

And writer Jaime Brooks went a bit further, asking, “What if streaming wasn’t just the end of ‘peak indie’ but the end of ‘peak recorded music’ more broadly? What if the 1970s-2010s was a unique, finite boom period for the entire medium? What if it’s over now? Just a thought.” Brooks also compared the boom and slump of recorded music to a similar pattern that happened with sheet music after the advent of, you guessed it, recorded music.

I don’t think these are wrong ways to view this necessarily, but after I eventually remembered that Cosentino was the Best Coast lady, years of forgotten music blog discourse came flooding back for me, like the aging hipster equivalent of Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender opening his chakras. And I suddenly remembered how cliquey, annoying, and, most importantly, artificial the indie blog era felt as it was happening. The much more populist (and cringy) Myspace scene era was crashing and burning and, in its place arrived an increasingly elitist network of genuinely insufferable bloggers promoting — or obsessively attacking — bands based entirely around a Big Muff pedal with names like SVRRF DOG and §§§. And as these bands were “blowing up” it was extremely obvious that they just were a bunch of 20-somethings who had figured out how to game a new emerging media pipeline, hopping from Hype Machine to whatever show in Williamsburg VICE and 1800 Tequila were sponsoring to, hopefully, the ear of the guy at Apple who picked the iPod commercial songs. At the very least they’d end up with a Nylon profile about what kind of drugs they liked to do.

I’m not saying these bands didn’t build real fanbases in the process, but they were playing the exact kind of game artists play now. The machinery was just different. More human, less automated, but just as hierarchal. And for any Gen Z musicians that happen to get this email forwarded to them by their parents or whatever, yes, someday, sooner than you think, you will sound just like me right now when you talk about TikTok.

A redditor in r/energydrinks froze a bunch of Monster and is trying to figure out if it would change the effectiveness of the caffeine. The general consensus from the commenters is, no, it wouldn’t.

Also, a quick aside here. I don’t spend a lot of time in this sub, but it seems like the comments are split pretty much down the middle between wholesome suggestions for how to make slushies with energy drinks and commenters suggesting the original poster “boof” it. I’m going to do you all a favor and not explain what that means, but you can look it up on Urban Dictionary if you so choose.

I don’t know how to cushion this, so I’ll just come right out and say it. The jack off pants are real.

These pants went viral after Rob Denbleyker, the creator of the comic Cyanide & Happiness, spotted them being advertised on X. And, uh, yeah, they’re a real product. They’re called JO Pants and they’re designed for exactly what you think they’re designed for. Also, the use of the word “covert” in the ad is EXTREMELY troubling.

Who needs Disney when you have advertisers like this?

• Go read all The Verge Twitter stories

• “Dropout CEO Talks Doubling CollegeHumor Successor’s Streaming Subs and Content Output, Price Increase Plans and First Profit Sharing”

P.S. here’s a mysterious cookie cutter.

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

Late last week, Grok started rolling out to users and it’s a resounding flop. It hallucinates constantly, its “funny” answers aren’t funny, it routinely spits out text that seems to be directly from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, most likely because it was trained on tainted data, and, most disastrous of all, it’s too woke.

It almost doesn’t even matter what these guys think is “woke” about Grok, but just for the curious, the major complaints are that Grok acknowledges the existence of trans people, credits Black Americans with coining the term “woke” and calls conservative whining about the “woke mind virus” a distraction from real issues, and a lot of users seem to really want it to say racial slurs, which it won’t. Some are even saying it’s more “left” than ChatGPT. Oh no! Luckily, though, the cringefail CEO of Gab, Andrew Torba, said he’s building a “Based AI,” that isn’t trained on woke data. Whatever that means.

The thing is, even if Grok was transphobic and said slurs, it was never going to satisfy these people for the sole fact that it’s not OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And Grok is absolutely not going to replace it, which is the only thing conservatives want it to do.

Ten years ago, the online right wing learned three main tactics for waging their culture war: duplicate, infiltrate, and undermine. The order changes depending on the project and it usually functions as a loop, but it’s same whether we’re talking about a social network, cable TV, or school boards. These tactics are not really working so well in the AI age, though, because something like ChatGPT isn’t like a social network. You can’t infiltrate it because it’s a closed system, you can’t undermine it easily because its largely automated, and you can’t duplicate it because it's almost impossibly expensive to run and maintain. And it’s fascinating that Musk and his biggest supporters are only just now beginning to realize this.

The real dividing line for American conservatism online, the shift from angry bloggers racing for Drudge Report referrals to the organized culture war we have now started in 2012, when Steve Bannon took over Breitbart and started to reimagine the blog as a conservative equivalent to Gawker or VICE (duplicate). By 2014, the site was flush with Facebook traffic and assigned Milo Yiannopoulos as its de facto Gamergate correspondent (infiltrate). Which gave Bannon’s Breitbart a new demographic to target, angry young men, and a replicable playbook for repackaging internet chatter into coherent narratives that conservatives could weaponize (undermine). This would set the stage for Pizzagate, QAnon, January 6th, and, well, every facet of our lives now.

When these tactics work, they’re very powerful. I mean, all Donald Trump did as president for four years was make shitty right-wing knock-offs of existing institutions and infiltrate and undermine the ones he couldn’t. But it requires a locked in connection to people’s attention, like being the President or astroturfing a social network or institution people can’t live without. But when you lose that — or can’t get it — you end up looking super embarrassing. Which has become an increasing problem for conservatives since for the last two years.

On January 8th, 2021, Twitter joined the rest of the big social platforms in banning Donald Trump for incendiary content about the insurrection. For the right wing, Trump’s ban, following Trump’s loss at the polls the November before, was a Death Star level event. Twitter, especially post-COVID, was the main feed for news, politics, and culture in the US. So not only did conservatives not have the White House and couldn’t successfully steal it, suddenly their main man was also now, effectively, blocked from the only feed that still mattered. And so, for a couple years, conservatives were throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall trying to find a new way to hijack attention. That is, until Musk showed up on their radar.

Before the pandemic, Elon Musk’s Twitter presence was mostly surface level, at best. As Yahoo! Finance reported, it was mostly shitty memes about Tesla and SpaceX, until February 2020, when he started to complain about crypto spam on the platform. The pandemic supercharged crypto markets and Twitter, as the only non-algorithmic feed that still did real-time content, became ground zero for scamcoins. And a disproportionate amount of these were using Musk’s likeness in some capacity to give themselves a sense of legitimacy (can you imagine lol).

This newfound interest in Twitter as an influence network culminated in 2022, when Musk first announced he wanted to build a Twitter substitute (duplicate), before, in April, instead, offering to buy it (infiltrate). After his announcement, his phone started blowing up with texts from powerful folks in both tech and politics, including one still unknown sender who literally outlined a four step plan for reinventing Twitter that could basically be condensed down into “undermine, infiltrate, undermine, duplicate.”

As you can see, the assumption was that users and, more importantly, advertisers would stick around as Musk cannibalized Twitter. And now we know they haven’t. Users are fleeing, especially the important ones, and advertisers are finally beginning to move on, as well. This text is only part of the conversation, but it’s extremely funny that nowhere amid this supervillain monologue was it ever questioned if Twitter would continue to even be relevant as it transformed into Gab. Perhaps Musk didn’t have the “savvy cultural/political view” to pull it off.

Making matters worse, as Twitter has died, so too has the general interest in even having a site like that anymore. This is also why conservatives are now scrambling to legislate TikTok away. They can’t infiltrate it and undermine it because they don’t understand it and they can’t duplicate it because it’s too complex. All of which made last week’s launch of Grok, X’s new AI, all the more important. And it’s wet fart launch all the more funny.

The culture war only works as long as culture stays the same.

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Julia Reinstein, an excellent internet culture reporter, put together a list of the 21 best memes from 2023 for Rolling Stone and it’s real good. It’s also a really great portrait of what our first year of a decentralized internet has felt like.

There’s a couple interesting trends here I wanted to dig into. First, the fact that many of the biggest memes involve large corporate marketing campaigns doesn’t feel like an accident. Things like Barbie, M3GAN, the McDonald’s Grimace shake, and and Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka were huge this year because you need a lot more resources to truly make something popular now. Taylor Swift is not on Reinstein’s list — fair enough, she’s not really a meme — but I think her popularity this year would fit in this category, as well.

The other interesting thing with these memes is a lot of them aren’t just TikTok trends, but trends that originated on TikTok before mutating on platforms like X, like girl dinner or “Planet Of The Bass”.

All of which is to say that it’s not like internet culture isn’t happening anymore. In fact, more of it is happening now than ever, probably. But there does seem to be a middle missing, things like reaction images and more traditional memes have been replaced with concepts and trends. Though, it’s also possible those are still happening too, but have just become so localized and specific that you don’t really see them anymore.

I’m not totally sure why I can’t embed this as a TikTok, but I think it’s because there’s a “dangerous activity” warning on it. Anyways, if you don’t want to watch it on X, you can click over here to do that. He gave it a 0/10.

Also, I cannot verify this video of a person cooking a steak on an airplane toilet, but if you want to ruin your day, you can click here to watch that next.

I’ve written about this before, but music producers are filming themselves trying to remake popular songs as fast as possible. Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” is a popular one to try because it’s pretty simple to put together. TikTok user @prodrobtmb was able to get a version of the song together in under 17 seconds.

I am not going to be a boomer about this and say that it’s a dangerous new TikTok trend, but it is pretty popular. There’s a group of teenagers in a “group crawl cult,” where they go to stores in the mall and crawl around. Based on signs in the videos, I think they’re in Poland.

A user in the DALL-E 2 subreddit recently shared an album of photos titled, “A Date With Rapunzel (SFW),” which feature the character Rapunzel from Disney’s Tangled. The overwhelming reaction from users is that this is “weird” and extremely “unnerving”.

But a lot of other users are also impressed with how consistent the character came out across the different images.

The original poster was nice enough to clarify in a comment that Rapunzel in Tangled is 18 years old canonically. Uh, good to know, I guess. The OP also said that no matter how many people message, they’re not going to generate NSFW pics of her. Also good to know, I guess.

I assume everyone has seen this picture? idk maybe I’m Too Online. Anyways, Tumblr user meowllorydesigns recently shared the story behind the photo and it’s really interesting!

The photo was taken in 2014 during a research trip studying shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico. The isopods were deceased and being transferred to storage when one of the researchers saw the Doritos bag and staged the photo to look like they were eating from it.

• “ChatGPT is winning the future — but what future is that?”

• “Is Your Phone the Reason You Feel Broke?”

• “No Record of 'Russian Economist' Who Flew to LAX Without a Ticket, Didn't Remember How He Got Here”

P.S. here’s System Of A Down’s “Chop Suey” in the style of the B-52s.

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

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you try, yet again, to not to get mad about video games.

I think the dominant story for the 2024 election will simply be whether or not stuff is popular online. It feels very silly to say this, but you can see proof of it everywhere. And, yeah, this is largely focused on TikTok. Like this boneheaded post from the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Or the fact Nikki Haley incorrectly cited a shoddy survey about TikTok, claiming it was turning American teenagers into Hamas supporters. But it goes a bit further than that. Like when a bunch of Verified X users last week claimed that Musk was inspiring a big boycott of Disney+ and Hulu (he wasn’t).

Threads has hashtags, sorta not really. A lot of Threads’ weirdness — the lack of real-time news sharing tools, the lack of chronological search results, and this new only-one-hashtag-like-“category” per post — is supposedly meant to reduce spam on the app. But I feel like it only creates new forms of spam, though maybe it’s the kind of spam Meta is more comfortable with. For instance, these new not-hashtags can’t be written yourself, you chose them from a dropdown menu. Which just creates a new kind of bottleneck for Threads content, which is already pretty bottlenecked by site’s general slowness. And, sure enough, I woke up this morning, opened Threads, and was greeted with a dozen worthless posts all tagged under the same category. Because of course people are going to do that! It’s funny how a company so devoted to moving fast and breaking things is utterly terrified of that actually happening to their own platforms.

There’s also chatter about Meta having a big ActivityPub meeting today. This I’m pretty into. Federate all text feed-based social media and finally open it up.

Tumblr is working on a Communities feature. This is a cool idea and I’m excited to see if it catches on. It’s essentially subreddits for Tumblr, but it also feels a bit more informed by how Discord servers and Pinterest boards work. At least for now, you won’t be able to reblog content out of a community, only in. So I could see this being used by a fandom or even a group of creators like the Dream SMP to curate content. Also, here’s an insightful blog post from Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg about the reorg happening inside of Tumblr right now.

Gag City is an important step for AI content. Weirdly, there have only been a few traditional meme cycles involving generative AI so far. We had the explosion of DALL-E Mini screenshots way back when this all first started. And since then we’ve seen the fake pope and Balenciaga posts, the X did 9/11 trend, 4chan’s racist Pixar posters, and the recent “make it more” meme. But Gag City, which is a collaborative project by Nicki Minaj fans to build a fantasy world with AI feels more in line with one of my personal favorite AI fan projects. “Volcano (Shake ‘Em Up!)” was a fake My Chemical Romance song generated by an AI that went viral on Tumblr a while back. Why is it important? Because this is the exact kind of thing crypto evangelists could never get people to do with their hot new tech during their own hype cycle. And if generative AI is going to have an actual cultural footprint people who actually make culture are going to have to figure out how to use it.

The Google Gemini demo was faked. I mean, I thought it was? The demo looked fake. Also, Bard is still incredibly slow and constantly hallucinating and missing a lot of basic features that ChatGPT has had for months now. If you’re curious exactly how misleading the Gemini demo was, though, you can see the actual prompts used here.

I actually think things like this “Mid-Atlantic Xi Jinping” could be useful in certain contexts? I think, full stop, the ability to get better, faster translations is a net positive. I also think, like with the video linked to above, there’s a certain contextual power accents bring to translation. Could this type of thing be misused horribly? Sure! But it’s still neat.

Emo Internet is freaking out about Captain Jazz. Not Cap’n Jazz, but Captain Jazz. There’s like five layers of emo irony happening here and I figure if you don’t understand them, you’re not going to like this and if you do understand them, I don’t need to explain them. Anyways, you can check out the album here. It’s real good.

Here’s an interesting argument about Apple’s role in the indie music boom of the early-2010s. To follow the thread, you first click here, then you click here, and then, finally, click here. The crux of the argument, though, is that indie music champions like Pitchfork had already turned poptimist in the early-2000s, but when Apple started using indie music in their ad spots, it led to a renewed interest in underground music, which then caused publications like Pitchfork to lean back into it. The only insight I have here is that when I first saw the Feist iPod Nano commercial in high school, it rocked my entire world.

A Korean streamer talked on stream about the closure of Twitch in Korea. The streamer goes by HAchubby and she broke down in tears on stream talking about how Twitch’s exit from the country will force her to try and stream on YouTube, but she’s not certain that her viewers will follow her there. HAchubby also mentions how important Twitch chat, specifically, has been for her. Which is true for a lot of streamers. Twitch’s one undeniably good feature is its live chat. It’s even worth, I think, calling Twitch a chatroom company that happens to do live video. And none of the site’s competitors have come close to beating it.

Puck’s Julia Alexander has a good piece looking at the retention rates of users that binged Suits when it got stuck in Netflix’s algorithm. It turns out Hulu was the bigger winner. Over a third of Suits viewers headed to Hulu and watched more content. Fascinating!

Internet users have been searching for a song featured in The X-Files for almost 30 years. Here’s a thread about the song that recently went viral and here’s a good writeup about the search from Rolling Stone, who managed to finally track down the creators.

The disgusting TikTok sink food man made mashed potatoes in an airplane bathroom. OK, so, follow me here because I am firm believer in two opposing ideas existing concurrently. On one hand, this guy should be banned from both hotel rooms and planes — if not any form of communal sink — for life. On the other hand, this weird man has decided that making disgusting food in sinks is his art and I believe we are seeing an artist truly master his craft.

The Game Awards were last night and they were a mess, as always. There were labor protests outside. Protests online about whether the event should acknowledge the conflict in Israel and Palestine. And inside, they were telling acclaimed game developers to wrap it up with their speeches. Which makes sense because it’s basically a glorified upfront for game trailers. Look, I understand video games are a massive industry. And I understand that video games are possibly someday soon going to eclipse movies as the dominant form of entertainment that we consume. But right now, that entire world just looks like an absolute clown show.

It’s all kicking off in r/dataisbeautiful right now. A user named u/DrTonyTiger shared what might be the worst chart I’ve ever seen and people are losing it.

New deranged Goodreads drama dropped. The TL;DR is that a bunch of prominent sci-fi, fantasy, and young adult authors have accused a debut author of making a bunch of sock puppet accounts to review bomb other authors. It also appears that the author in question has ties to the Reylo fandom, the community that believes that Rey and Kylo Ren from the Star Wars sequels should have gotten together. This all makes perfect sense to me.

Elon Musk is considering unbanning Alex Jones. Yeah, what the fuck. Do it. It’s bad for the world, but might convince some of the last serious people still using to the site to leave.

A BBC presenter has gone unfortunately viral. BBC host Maryam Moshiri had an inside joke with her producer where she flipped off the camera as it counted down. Unfortunately, the footage aired. And now the world has a pretty incredible reaction image. Hopefully the BBC isn’t too harsh on Moshiri.

A bunch of Brazilian politicians appear to be editing their Wikipedia pages and using them for promotion. This was sent to me by a reader named Germano. We’ve definitely seen similar things in US politics, but this seems especially egregious. Apparently, one way they were stuffing their bios was by making be unsubstantiated claims and then linking to sources that mysteriously didn’t exist.

• Charli XCX pharmacy signs

• A sick punk vest

• Good Tumblr post about Godzilla

• Here is, unfortunately, a really good George Santos Cameo

• Good post about Chicken Little

P.S. here’s the rare aquatic mall level.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

Back in the fall of 2020, I was convinced Twitch was the future. It was missing a few bells and whistles, sure, but after the pandemic forced a majority of the world behind screens and webcams, it seemed undeniable that the newfound attention around livestreaming would be enough to finally help Twitch break through into the mainstream.

I was, of course, very wrong. None of the issues with the platform were ever meaningfully addressed — I’ll list them out in a sec. And the ensuing years since the pandemic have seen a wave of creator strikes in different markets, an exodus of top users following a proposed, and ultimately scrapped, change to the site’s advertising policies, and there are now more competitors to Twitch than ever, some of which that are literally buying its biggest stars. Even Elon Musk recently convinced Richard “Ninja” Blevins to stream Fortnite directly on X.

The company also has a new CEO, lost some of its top leadership, slashed hundreds of jobs, and, last night, it announced it was shuttering its service in South Korea, arguably the most important country in the world for e-sports. But even before the South Korea news dropped, I was beginning to get an overwhelming whiff of Snapchat vibes emanating off the company when Bloomberg reported that new CEO Dan Clancy was driving around the country in a van on a listening tour hoping to repair relations with the site’s biggest creators.

Before we try and answer why Twitch feels like it’s on shakier ground than ever, though, let’s tackle the Korean dimension of all of this first. According to a blog post last night from Clancy, “the cost to operate Twitch in Korea is prohibitively expensive.” That’s because South Korea uses a “Sending Party Network Pays” (SPNP) model. Here’s a decent explanation of how it works. Basically, both internet service providers and large online services pay for their network usage. If your next question is, like mine was, why we’ve never heard of other American companies dealing with this before, Netflix has actually been battling this in Korean courts for three years. They recently reached a settlement and some kind of partnership with the country’s second-biggest ISP to continue streaming there without, I assume, the exorbitant fees. Twitch, I guess, couldn’t get the resources from their owner Amazon, the fifth-richest company in the world, to go that route.

Based on some chatter I saw on Reddit this morning, though, Twitch probably already lost its hold on Korean e-sports long before this. Seeing as how Riot Korea and the League of Legends Champions Korea tournament already stream on YouTube and the consensus from fans seems to be that it’s an all-around better experience than on Twitch. And Korean streaming platform AfreecaTV, which apparently is an acronym for “Any FREE broadCAsting,” swooped in last year and started sponsoring e-sports teams and tournaments.

My comparison of Twitch to Snapchat isn’t totally one-to-one, but it’s not far off. Snapchat lost its exclusive hold on ephemeral stories to Instagram in 2016 and began its slow march to irrelevance. So too, it seems, has Twitch been watching both of its main niches get yanked away from it.

And that brings us back to the initial question: What is Twitch now? And to answer that I want to, first, define what a video platform even is in 2023. I tend to organize them into three overlapping categories. There are video apps that want you to make videos inside of their CMS, using their filters and tools, like TikTok and Instagram. And there are video apps that push you towards a certain level of professionalism, usually so your content looks better on a television, like YouTube. But there are also video apps that have, at least, unofficially, become places videos get clipped from, getting more views beyond their own ecosystem. Once again, TikTok is the best example of this, with its watermark spreading like a virus across the social web. But it was also true for Vine back in the day or when you would spot the specific font of Snapchat Stories or Instagram Stories out in the wild. What’s interesting about Twitch is that it is, in theory, sitting perfectly between all three categories. Except, in every instance, it sucks major ass.

Its mobile app is terrible for streaming irl and even worse at managing your channel. Its also a major pain in the ass to setup any kind of professional-looking streaming studio. And if you do, it’ll still look terrible on a television. And, as the redditors I linked to above even mention, it doesn’t have decent playback controls. The majority of the YouTube creators I watch use Twitch streams as a way to make content for clipping later, except Twitch’s native clipping is basically useless. And I haven’t even touched on the fact that most of its community features are outsourced to Discord and that it still only uses a basic category-based internal discovery tool inside of its app.

I thought that by the time I reached the end here, I’d have thought of a good example of a site that has been in Twitch’s shoes and corrected course. But there really isn’t one. Twitch had well-defined niches for both its user base and its core feature. It has lost both. Twitch also lost what was maybe the biggest head start coming out of the pandemic of any tech company, aside from maybe Zoom (though that’s been wobbly this year too).

All of that said, it’s not completely apocalyptic for Twitch. While the biggest Twitch streamers are in the US, like the aforementioned Ninja, who has over 18 million followers, dwarfing Korea’s biggest Twitch user, a retired pro league Of Legends player named Liu "Xsq" Han-Dong, who has around 650,000 followers, the fastest growing corner of Twitch is Spanish-language based content. Ibai Llanos, a streamer from Spain, holds the record for most concurrent viewers on the platform, which was 3.3 million. And based on numbers my researcher Adam and I have been tracking all year, Twitch streams for the Kings League, a Barcelona-based soccer league have been far and away the most consistently popular thing on the platform in 2023. (A South Korean stream never made it into one of our top lists this year.)

So it’s possible that the company throwing in the towel in South Korea indicates Twitch has noticed all of this. Maybe Twitch decided to lean away from their diehard gamer audience, towards talk shows and international soccer. Of course, if I was a website that fumbled becoming the ESPN or WWE of e-sports, I would probably not then spin around and try and compete with, uh, you know, the biggest entertainment industries in the world…

There are a couple ways to support Garbage Day. For $5 a month or $45 a year, you get Discord access and paid weekly issues. And for $150 a year, you get all of that, plus in-depth monthly intelligence reports. Hit the green button below to find out more!

Subscribe now

A lot of times I’ll attack a different idea across a bunch of different newsletters, which is fun, but means there isn’t any one specific place for the whole take. So I put together a big video looking at why the internet feels so bad now, how TikTok is largely to blame, why that convinced everyone that Gen Z was stanning Osama bin Laden, and how we can either fix it or, more likely, get used to it. Enjoy!

Earlier this week, Spotify cut almost a fifth of its workforce, including some beloved podcasts that were purchased by Spotify when they acquired the podcast production company Gimlet. Making all of this even stranger is that, as Scott Nover in Slate wrote this week, podcasting is good right now actually!

This has led many to wonder if this means Spotify is going to double down on their bizarre obsession with celebrity podcasts. Also, the app is now blasting me with recommendations for audiobooks, which are also entirely from celebrities.

Spotify, though, is absolutely not the only platform that loves to trot out a bunch of celebrities for their new widget. But I find it interesting that tech companies are still doing this. I mean, Instagram recently launched those weird AI chatbots that had celebrities’ faces, but not their names or personalities. (Did you also forget that happened two months ago?) Even as these tech platforms have fundamentally changed and, possibly broken, how celebrity works, they still fall back on this.

My theory is this functions as a sort of growth trap for enshitting platforms like Spotify. The logic goes like this: Elevate a select few of your own creators, usually the ones mass-producing cheap low effort content slop like Joe Rogan or that mean white woman who harasses rappers. They function as a carrot for your other creators to strive for, which you need as filler for your content library. Then you bring in Real Celebrities because they represent a possibly non-existent audience you believe is still outside of your own platform. You buy their name, a bit of their time, and a fleeting, almost worthless iota of their fanbase, which isn’t cheap, but juices your metrics in the short-term and is a lot easier to plan around than the long, hard work of winning Pulitzers and building real fanbases that last.

At least, that’s my theory.

Google’s Gemini AI is here. According to Google’s published research, it outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 in big ways. In fact, once again, according to Google, the only area GPT-4 still does better with is “commonsense reasoning for everyday tasks.”

Hilariously, as with all of Google’s AI products, it’s not nearly as simple as going over to a web app and trying Gemini, though it is supposedly now integrated into Bard. I asked Bard if it was running on Gemini and it could not “confirm or deny whether” it was “running on Gemini specifically.” Bard, also, is still very bad.

But Google’s big AI strategy, which is probably smart from a business sense, is going the opposite direction of OpenAI’s one-chatbot-to-fit-them-all model. Gemini will roll out across Google’s suite of apps, start integrating with the Pixel 8 Pro, as well as Google’s Generative Search, which I’ve had running for the last month or so and is, unfortunately for everyone who makes money directly from web traffic, getting better every day. No word on whether Gemini will roll out to Google Nest/Home smart devices, which only matters to me, the last person on Earth who still likes and uses them, apparently.

In many ways, this was the big AI rollout I’ve been waiting for. If — and that’s a real big if — Google can make Gemini work, they’ve got the hardware and the services ecosystem to lock in a lot of users with their AI.

A lot of Verified guys on X right now are having completely deranged meltdowns over random TikTok videos of users who identify as “DINKs,” which means “double income no kids.” You can imagine why these videos are so triggering to a demographic obsessed with race science and generational wealth and breeding your secretary or whatever.

I also didn’t know that DINKs called themselves DINKs out loud. It’s pretty impossible to not sound silly when you’re calling yourself a “dink”.

Anyways, this reminds me of one summer night a few years back when my friend and I were both in our hometowns grabbing a drink at a local bar. We ended up doing the math and realized that our parents would go to that very same bar when they were our age, except we both had already been born. We also found out that the bar used to even have a playpen for kids. Which made us realize that 25-30 years ago, there were people our age settling down at roughly the same time. Which meant that many of the things these DINKs say they get to enjoy because they don’t have kids were probably possible to do while raising children as recently as a generation ago. Obviously, it wasn’t perfect, I mean, it was the 80s, but you get the idea.

Anyways, probably nothing worth learning there. No, you either get to be a happy DINK, a miserable parent, or whatever the Verified X guys are. Oh well.

So, I’ve had a paid-only Discord for a few years now and I love it. I’m lurking in there all day basically. And I’ve left my comment section on the actual newsletter open to whoever wants to use it. Sometimes people come yell at me, but I actually find that pretty useful sometimes.

That said, Substack is clearly changing. There are white nationalists and neo-Nazis brazenly publishing and commenting on the platform now and Substack seemingly does not care. In fact, there are neo-Nazis even commenting on my newsletter now.

I got an alert this morning from Substack saying that there were “new comment reports” to review. Substack’s comment system isn’t the best, so I can’t tell if these are new comment reports or if it just hasn’t been pinging me. So I ended up with a page of reported comments from the last year. Including one user named Herr wolf.

The Herr wolf user has since been banned and their comments are gone, but I don’t want these people on my newsletter and blanket paywalling comments seems like the easiest solution, unfortunately. I’m going to weigh out what to do here over the next couple days, but if you feel strongly about keeping my comment section free and open, let me know.

This gets fairly NSFW towards the end. The probability of you finding this funny is probably directly proportional to how much Garbage Day you read.

• I was on a podcast!

• An a16z-funded AI is generating images that “could be categorized as child pornography”

P.S. here’s Grumpkin Spice

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

One idea I’ve been playing with recently is that the current hype around AI doesn’t actually have anything to do with AI. For instance, as I wrote last week, I think Big Tech is actually more jealous that ChatGPT isn’t an advertising business — and that it might destroy online advertising if it really catches on — than it is that OpenAI built a chatbot that can sort Excel sheets for you.

This is also connected to the emergence of what are, essentially, AI-focused doomsday cults popping up inside of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. On one side, the effective altruists see AI as an eventual cataclysmic event we must prepare for and, on the other side, there are the effective accelerationists that think it should happen immediately. Neither side doubts that AI will bring about the end of our current world and usher in a new one, only what the marketing for it should look like.

There have been little mind viruses like these pulsing through Silicon Valley since the very beginning, of course. One of the first generations of web developers believed that virtual reality would become a sort of cyber LSD that could bring about a new utopian age if we all logged on together. And, as Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman pointed out on a recent podcast we were on together, Mark Zuckerberg spent years crafting himself into the Pope of the church of global human connectivity, something writer Max Read was smart enough to spot back in 2017.

But we also literally just went through a round of this, with some of Big Tech’s biggest financiers promising us that hyperbitcoinization was imminent and that it would free us from the shackles of the old world. Which is proof, as far as I’m concerned, that the whatever the tech du jour is doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that the old world is smashed and tech companies (or their AI) get to the control the new one.

This has grown into the predominant — if not singular — attitude within Silicon Valley since COVID. Not only is a new age right around the corner, the hype cycles promise us, but when it arrives, tech companies will replace every “old” institution, whether it be democracies, labor unions, or publishers. And, more importantly, they will finally free themselves from the pesky social and cultural contracts they entered into with those “old” institutions at the start of the 21st century that allowed them to get so big. Their battle with journalism is part of this, as is their recent abandonment of moderation standards, and, also, now, their war against their advertisers. They don’t want to be beholden to the press, their own users, or even their own business partners. And all of this was finally put on full display last week when Elon Musk, Silicon Valley’s frothing id, had a meltdown on CNBC at the mere suggestion that X.com could moderate itself better and coax its biggest advertiser back to the platform.

But there is one institution, so to speak, that Silicon Valley, and, specifically, many of AI’s biggest proponents, have become particularly obsessed with demolishing. To the point where I feel comfortable calling their premiere obsession. It even played a role in Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It’s a refrain — or, really, prayer — we hear over and over again with every new AI release. The unwavering belief that this is the Shiny New Thing that will finally destroy it. And that institution, of course, is coolness. And, specifically, the kind of coolness that is determined by teenage girls.

Last week, a new AI model was released on GitHub called AnimateAnyone. It was created by Alibaba’s Institute for Intelligent Computing and you can read the white paper and see examples of how it works here. It lets you take a still image, apply a recording of movement to it, and then animates the image accordingly. Most of the examples in the white paper are VTtubers or other online avatars being animated via TikTok dances.

And due to what I suspect was a recent tweak in X.com’s algorithm, after I clicked on a post about AnimateAnyone, my For You feed suddenly filled up with Verified users quote-tweeting it, writing things like:

• “Basically the end of the TikTok influencer”

• “The days of HUMAN Onlyfans is over”

• “Girls lose status IRL because more guys will give up on real girls and choose AI gfs”

According to the folks who pay Elon Musk to use his website, this will render TikTok, OnlyFans and, possibly, even young women in general, irrelevant. Which is because teenage girls and, more broadly, what young women are interested in has been the real guiding force of technology in the 21st century. What pulled Silicon Valley out of the Dot Com crash wasn’t just better, more consumer-focused and practical tech, but tech that fit the aesthetics and needs of young women. Social media, online publishing, e-commerce, the creator economy, and even hardware have all been fundamentally shaped by what was cool. And coolness, whether we’re talking about the age of Elvis or the iPhone, has always been, largely, decided by teen girls.

Of course the difference between 80 years ago and now is that many of these technological tools have not just made TikTok into the most important app in the world and given young women more soft cultural power than ever before, but created real market power. Whether it’s individual creators like Amouranth investing millions to build business empires or fandoms like Taylor Swift’s generating ticket sales greater than the GDP of several countries.

And all of this leads me to another idea about AI I’ve been playing around with recently, which is that amid every chorus of “it’s so over” is actually a confession. That even with the hundreds of millions of users and billions of dollars that Silicon Valley is generating by forcing your search engine to talk to you, it still can’t automate coolness.

—by Adam Bumas

This was shared in the Garbage Day Discord by a user named Elsie, who noted that Abigail Thorn, known as Philosophy Tube on YouTube, successfully getting a play and movie produced made her an interesting contrast to Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson. 

And it’s true that someone as niche as PhilosophyTube succeeding begs the question: Why can’t the biggest YouTuber ever do the same thing? MrBeast has spent years trying and, seemingly, failing to find a way to create content within the established entertainment industry. He’s spoken openly about talks with Netflix breaking down, and other major streamers turning him away at the door.

A lot of Hollywood figures, from Ashly Burch to the guy who directed the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, have gotten their start on YouTube. Other than Bo Burnham, the biggest YouTubers have basically never gotten the same prominence once they make the shift. It seems like you have to pick either YouTube or Hollywood.

The big difference between all these people and MrBeast is that they were all happy to work in the traditional system. Burnham adapted his videos into stand-up comedy, while Thorn went even further offline, getting her play produced by a regular British theater. There’s also a whole group of people who have one foot in YouTube and the other in the industry, like how the crew of Markiplier’s upcoming movie have all worked on indie movies and Netflix shows.

MrBeast, however, has been very open about how he doesn’t want to work with regular studios or production companies. And no one in his crew has any experience there, as far as I can tell. Instead, he wants to treat the streaming services the same way he does YouTube, and forensically optimize his content for them in the same way.

But this is just not going to work at the larger scale and budget that MrBeast wants out of working with a streaming service. Traditional media isn't algorithmic enough for him to adapt to. At least, not yet.

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I told you last week that we’d be hearing a lot about effective acelerationists in the coming weeks! Over the weekend, Forbes published a great piece unmasking the “founder” of the “movement,” who up until recently went by the psuedonuym “Beff Jezos”. It turns out his name is Guillaume Verdon and he used to be a quantum computing engineer at Google. Interesting!

A whole lot of weirdos got mad that Forbes revealed Verdon’s identity because that’s just the meaningless knee-jerk reaction everyone has nowadays. But Verdon, in the piece, confirmed it in an interview with Forbes and seems largely unfazed by the whole thing.

If you still, in the year 2023, have an appetite for guys online rambling about memetic spirituality and “hypercognitive biohacks” or whatever, it’s a decently insightful look at how the accelerationists view themselves. But I think the main takeaway for me is that before moving directly into AI which his company Extropic, he made a bunch of money with NFTs. Which I think is the real story right now.

Crypto may have fizzled, but it did make some real money for certain people and, more importantly, connected and philosophically galvanized a group of tech workers that now just so happen to be sitting on a whole bunch of GPUs that are perfect for running AI models.

After seeing hundreds of memes about May December over the weekend, I decided to check it out and, wow! What a genuinely harrowing and upsetting movie that made me feel a type of soul-level disgust and existential emptiness I haven’t felt in a long time. We are so back, etc.

The movie has kickstarted a fascinating conversation about whether or not it should be viewed as “camp,” particularly in memes and posts online. I’m going to try not to spoil the movie here, but if you’re worried about that at all, maybe go watch it and come back.

For what it’s worth, the film’s director Todd Haynes doesn’t see the film as campy. Which is fine, but I disagree with him lol. And I actually think the internet’s inability to come to a consensus about how to digest the movie — including Netflix’s own social media team, it seems — actually enhanced it for me in a weird way.

As I wrote above, I heard about the movie via memes and had a vague understanding of what it was about. The movie is clearly framed, at least in the beginning, as a sort of pastiche of a ripped-from-the-tabloids Lifetime original movie, including some of the early camera work and, definitely, the score. But as the movie progresses, if you have even an iota of a soul, you start to realize the movie has been tricking you and pulling you in with irony and melodrama and then, by the end, rips it all away and turns it back on you, clearly hoping to make you feel disgusted with yourself about having even watched it in the first place.

And so, within that framework, the memes about May December taking over sites like Letterboxd right now act as a extension of that process. They, at least, set up me up for the eventual gut punch before the movie even began.

Anyways, it’s a good movie. People often make memes out of art that makes them uncomfortable. Charles Melton should win an Oscar. True crime-based entertainment is, by definition, dehumanizing. Five stars.

A TikTok user recently uploaded, and then deleted, a video of actor Josh Hutcherson getting asked about whether or not he knows he’s the new face of the Gen Z rickroll. He doesn’t, apparently. Which is honestly better for everyone.

If you haven’t heard about this yet, I think this is probably the most comprehensive piece I’ve read about how this meme started.

This was spotted by Zach Bussey, a writer who covers streaming and the creator economy. According to Bussey, Twitch is using AI to detect streams featuring Mount Dew branding, which then triggers a bot that promotes Mountain Dew in a streamer’s chat. AdAge has more about how the tech behind this campaign works.

I don’t think this goes far enough tbh. I think we need to start building this surveillance apparatus into every security camera so that Mountain Dew knows exactly when I’m drinking their soda and can reward me with more branded content. This is the future AI can really deliver.

• “How the Litigious Wrath of Taylor Swift Could Spell the Death of Deuxmoi”

• “How Israel uses AI to select bombing targets in Gaza”

• “Hyper-mediation, Sex On Film, And The Disavowal Of Desire”

P.S. here’s a fascinating and slightly-NSFW-ish video about bees.

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you’re driving your new Cybertruck.

Why were advertisers even on Twitter in the first place? It’s a question a lot of folks are beginning to ask right now. Also, where are all the middle-tier advertisers on X? Why is only brands like Apple and Disney and a bunch of hentai mobile games? Also, will this current X ad boycott last longer than YouTube’s adpocalypse back in 2017? A lot of questions! To condense all of this down into one take: Twitter was useful for big-name advertisers because the media was there and advertisers believed that legitimate publishers and mainstream outlets were still a priority for reaching audiences. The media has largely left Twitter, now X, and, also, in the last year, the cultural cache of the mainstream media has drained away with X’s relevance. So, to answer the last question, I don’t see major advertisers ever coming back because why would they? But I also think we’re only beginning to see how disastrous this all is for American media.

I go back and forth on the idea that Elon Musk is purposely destroying Twitter. I am currently of the opinion he is not. My guiding principle in life is that the dumbest, most embarrassing thing is usually true. This is why I believe in very few conspiracies and the ones I do sorta believe all hinge on the infinite capacity for human bumbling. And so, I currently believe that Musk is tanking X because he’s dumb and all of his ideas are dumb. Though, I also believe he’s trying to spin that into a culture war thing because he’s clearly beginning to realize how badly this is going.

Why is a “fake escalator” video from six years ago suddenly going viral? TikTok of course! NBC News’ Ben Collins recently asked me why his YouTube homepage was full of old “fake escalator” videos and I think I figured out what happened here. According to both Google Trends and TikTok’s Creative Center, interest for “fake escalator” on the former and the #fakeescalator hashtag on the latter spiked on November 21st. From what I can tell, it was due to a TikTok user named @ciberpandora, who uploaded a clip from an old YouTube video, titled, “Bobby Fake Escalator”. @ciberpandora’s clip was watched around 950,000 times. Not super viral for TikTok, but a day later, a different edit of “Bobby Fake Escalator” was shared to Reddit’s r/blackmagicfuckery, where it got around 35,000 upvotes. This led to renewed interest in “fake escalator” content that then spread back into TikTok and, also, Google. Interestingly enough, and possibly due to TikTok’s integration with Google Search, the interest was enough to generate these wonky topic cards on TikTok searches for related content. The reason I find this interesting is that it gets us closer to having a sense of scale for TikTok’s influence. A TikTok with about a million views is enough to start to shift YouTube recommendations.

My second brain search is, I think, finally over. A few months ago, I wrote about my quest for a solution to my bookmarking/second brain issue. Basically, I put long-form stuff on Pocket, which works great offline, but has the worst search in the world. And I put short-form stuff on a series of complicated Notion databases, which don’t work offline and actually just all-around suck ass. So I am very relieved to say that I have moved everything over to Raindrop.io. It doesn’t work offline, but it’s search is great, it integrates with Pocket, and, best of all, it let me pull over all of the links I had saved in Notion. So I haven’t lost my archive.

The Verge tracked down one of the companies pumping out what appear to be AI-generated news articles — and AI-generated writers. They’re called AdVon and they’re either using AI in some capacity to write articles for declining digital publishers or they’re bringing in contractors to churn bad content. Whatever’s happening here, though, is very grim.

Google researchers got ChatGPT to spit out some of its training data. The always-excellent 404 Media has a great piece on this. You be shocked to learn that a good majority of it is copyrighted material that OpenAI did not appear to license!

I have seen the future of media and it’s this terrible Adam22 post. In case you don’t want to click over (you shouldn’t), Very Bad Internet Man Adam22 posted, “I want to hire a full time in-house YouTube essayist to make content about the No Jumper cinematic universe. Never seen a podcast network do this before but it seems like it makes sense right?” Which is not an original idea, per se, Marvel has something similar, but I definitely think lore channels for long-running franchises could be real big.

Marques Brownlee got into the Cybertruck. There’s a ton of good info in this video, but the biggest takeaway is that the Cybertruck is a good deal smaller than it was advertised as. Oh, also, it has a weird ass steering wheel and when you drive it you can’t actually see the front of the car.

The stans that listened to Taylor Swift for hundreds of days straight this year were probably doing it to boost her numbers, right? Like there is no way a person was actively listening to Swift for over 200 days. It has to be some kind of automated thing.

I love the prank boyfriends. One is blind, the other plays pranks on him. It’s all very sweet and wholesome. You can check out their TikTok here.

Flo Rida used the Josh Hutcherson “Whistle Song” edit as his Spotify Wrapped message. The very short explanation for why a picture of Josh Hutcherson set to a Flo Rida song has morphed into Gen Z’s rickroll is basically thanks to a resurgence in the Hunger Games fandom. It’s kind of like how a couple years ago Tumblr users got super into sharing old memes about The Onceler.

Substack is pivoting to video (uh oh). Well, not really. Substack has had video features for a while now. But they’ve recently overhauled the whole thing. You can record video directly into the CMS and there are a bunch of AI-enhanced editing tools, as well. I was curious what kinds of newsletters were doing native video on Substack, so I went over to the page Substack built for video and it’s mostly just right-wing podcasts. Which is, uh, certainly a choice!

Congrats to Wikipedia user Asticky. They were the editor that raced to Henry Kissinger’s Wikipedia page first and changed all the “is”-es to “was”-es.

Chinese internet users are getting sick of western influencers pandering to them. Here’s a really great thread about it. My favorite detail is that Chinese internet users have started using the term “wealth password,” to describe a foreigner that starts getting super nationalistic to cash-in on Chinese social media. We should definitely start using that term, as well. A lot more concise than “selling out”.

There’s a cool project that’s trying to archive early Palestinian digital spaces. It’s called “Palestine Online” and it’s reconstructing what Palestinian Geocities pages and message boards looked like when they were still online and functional.

Rest Of World has a good piece looking at how the conflict in Palestine is changing how platform moderation works. I actually recently experienced the bizarre moderation around Israel and Palestine content. I made a video about the claim that TikTok kids were super into Bin Laden now and I shared it across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Threads. On X and Threads, it performed pretty normally. And on Instagram it actually did really well. But on YouTube it was clearly suppressed and drastically underperformed and TikTok forced it private and wouldn’t let me even publish it until earlier this week.

• Loving Elon’s new look

• Tater tot queen got the Chef Reactions seal of approval

• Good TikTok

• Rainbolt found the tree

• The Scottish snowplows are back

• Vibrator API

P.S. here’s shoes for empaths.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

What a sentence, huh? Earlier this week, an X account called @IrlagainstFash wrote a lengthy thread revealing the identity of the user behind @dogeofficialceo, an X account with over 200,000 followers, two of which include Elon Musk and Linda “It all happens on X” Yaccarino.

@IrlagainstFash’s thread, before it was taken down, accused @dogeofficialceo of being part of a network of far-right Irish users trying to pressure Musk into releasing an “Irish Twitter files”. The owner of the @IrlagainstFash posted an update on her personal account after getting suspended, writing, “The account I created to expose the far-right in Ireland and further afield has been removed from this platform. I speak on behalf of all our admins when I say this is a dark day for democracy and for free speech.”

Before we go deeper into why Musk is mixing it up with the Irish far right, though, let’s talk about why Ireland and why now.

As I wrote in last week’s Garbage Weekend, far-right hooligans rioted through Dublin last week, following a knife attack outside of a local elementary school. Several children and a school teacher were seriously injured and the attacker is currently in a coma. The violent anti-immigrant protests that followed were egged on, in part, by pro-fighter Conor McGregor’s X account, to the point where Irish law enforcement is investigating him for inciting violence. Also, the far-right riots started, it should be noted, before the nationality of the attacker was made public. As The Irish Times wrote recently, little is known about the attacker or his motive, but he moved to Ireland from Algeria in 2003 and eventually became a naturalized Irish citizen. He reportedly had little ties to the larger Algerian community in Dublin. Making the wave of anti-immigrant violence even more baseless, one of the bystanders who helped subdue the attacker was a Brazilian Deliveroo driver.

The attack has galvanized Irish right-wing X users and given them a clear talking point, however, which recently caught the attention of Musk. In an X conversation with @dogeofficialceo this week about the possible release of an “Irish Twitter Files,” Musk wrote, “Wow, this is bad!”

As for what was revealed about @dogeofficialceo, it was mostly just stuff from his LinkedIn and Facebook, the latter of which had photos of him in the X office standing next to Musk. Seems like he works as a social media manager for a US-based blockchain startup. In other words, he’s just some guy.

But Musk’s little Ireland side quest is one of many he’s currently pursuing amid a larger public hard-right pivot he’s been making lately. He’s warring with British misinformation monitors right now too. And while he’s made his conservative politics pretty clear over the last few years — well, aside from the much-needed government subsidies he uses to keep his businesses afloat — the last couple months have seen him dropping his formerly-liberal facade entirely. This week alone, Musk has endorsed the pizzagate conspiracy theory, compared Diablo 4 to a racist meme about interracial porn, used his AI to solve some weird racist trolley problem thing, and is currently leading a right-wing dogpile against a Deadspin writer. It’s been enough for the formerly sycophantic mainstream media to finally start asking, “what gives?”

I, personally, buy the argument that Bloomberg put together in a good piece this week, that it was the pandemic that really radicalized him. Which lines up with details in Walter Isaacon’s recent Musk biography, like Musk’s belief that his trans daughter was infected by the “woke mind virus,” which was purportedly being spread by Twitter, which was why he bought the site in 2022.

But I also don’t think there’s much explanation needed for why Musk is currently posting racist memes, colluding with an international network of fascists, and pushing far-right conspiracy theories. He has always pandered to what he thinks is cool and — more importantly — what he thinks will distract people from the fact he’s just a rich guy LARPing as a dumb guy’s idea of a smart guy. In the Obama era, he was doing Iron Man and Big Bang Theory cameos, wowing idiots with nonsense about simulation theory, paling around with fawning tech journalists, and loudly extolling the virtues of green energy. And now, after he’s seen the power people like Trump were able to amass doing the opposite, he’s switched it up for the vibe shift. It’s not complicated. It’s just marketing.

—by Adam Bumas

This was shared in the Garbage Day Discord by user Shaqsquatch. People were quick to mock Bethesda’s Todd Howard as one does, but it got folded into a much larger conversation about the culture surrounding video games in general. 

You see, there’s been a lot of upheaval in the past few weeks, not for the video game industry, exactly, but for the people writing about it. The owners of Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and a half dozen other websites announced today they’re looking to sell them all. Former staff from Kotaku and The Escapist have both launched new independent sites. And a new anthology of writers talking about games caused a fresh round of discourse, that’s ended up intensifying the usual kind we get this time every year thanks to the Game Awards and Steam sales.

Basically, everyone’s talking about how to talk about video games. And here’s a good thread from podcaster Jonathan Holmes that ties this all together. He points out that we’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of the GamerGate movement, which infamously claimed to be “about ethics in games journalism.” Of course, it was actually a coordinated campaign to hold video games back from opening up as an industry and art form, focused largely on harassing women and people of color working in and writing about games. And it’s more than a little depressing that nearly a decade later, it seems like it basically worked?

And Bethesda going after random Steam users shows that publishers don’t even respect the opinions of their fans anymore, let alone professional journalists. It’s also a bad sign for the power of the press that even after coverage from multiple outlets, Bethesda is still very comfortable being this Mad Online.

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It’s Spotify Wrapped day, everyone! Mine was my normal yearly mix of emo, pop punk, hyperpop, J-Pop, and folk music. I contain multitudes.

As for what normal people are listening to, according to Variety, Spotify’s top charts were overwhelmingly homogenous, released by artists who have been making music for at least a decade now. “Flower” by Miley Cyrus was the top song of the year, “Kill Bill” by SZA was second, and “As It Was” by Harry Styles was third. The only names I didn’t personally recognize on the list were from international artists, like Peso Pluma and Feid, who are from Mexico and Colombia, respectively.

Which links back to something Billboard actually asked about back in August, writing, “Why have so few major new pop stars emerged lately?” Well, I have a hunch as to why, based on my own interactions with Spotify’s algorithm this year.

Last spring, one of the platform’s artist radio stations introduced me to a musician that I started listening to all the time. Enough that he ended up in my Wrapped this year. Emperor X, he’s like if The Mountain Goats were based in Berlin. And then, a few weeks after discovering him, I went to go see him play live.

It was great, but it was also a funny experience for me, a millennial, who, for most of my life, had a music taste that was shaped socially, rather than digitally. I discovered music through friends, through tour lineups, through my local scene growing up, through subgenres of interconnected bands and the blogs that covered them, etc. And the shift over the last few years, away from discovering music like that towards, primarily, having it recommended to me by algorithms, is why my music taste has become a lot weirder and, I suspect, why I don’t go to concerts as much as I used to. They are still, for me, in the back of my brain, something I would go to with friends if we all liked the same band. And we don’t all like the same bands anymore. My music taste is now a personal set of recommendations that Spotify is delivering me. I still share music I like with my friends, of course, but it’s now secondary in the stack.

Which may explain both the majority of Spotify’s biggest artists are pre-algorithm acts. They are simply the last crop of musicians to get famous before culture fractured.

I’ve had a bunch of questions this week about e/acc, or effective accelerationism. Mainly, what is it and how does it interact with effective altruism. Well, here’s how the “founder” of effective accelerationism, a psuedononymous X user named Beff Jezos, describes it: “e/acc is simply a viral memetic metacognitive hack to cybernetically control the civilizational meta-organism to hyperstitiously induce an acceleration of its own growth and thereby produce massive widespread prosperity and cosmic hyperproliferation of intelligence as a whole.” Does that clear things up?

You’re going to hear a lot about these philosophies over the next couple months, I think. So I’m going to put a really quick summary here, so I don’t have to write it out over and over again (although, I most certainly will have to).

In 2009, a blogger, catgirl connoisseur, and Harry Potter fanfic writer named Eliezer Yudkowsky launched a site called LessWrong. It is ostensibly a place to argue about artificial intelligence, but through those arguments, several internet-native philosophies were born. The main one is modern rationalism, but other notable ones include the dark enlightenment, or neoreactionaryism, which is a type of anti-democractic techno-feudalism supported by folks like Steve Bannon. LessWrong also birthed the aforementioned effective altruism, the most famous supporter of which is crypto fail-king Sam Bankman-Fried. Elon Musk also now claims to be an effective altruist, but I don’t think he actually believes in anything. The main idea behind effective altruism is that long-term human happiness can be solved by maximizing capital.

Over the last decade, more and more effective altruists have inserted themselves in positions of power in Silicon Valley and, recently, a very small protest movement against this group has begun to spread, mainly as a meme. Which is effective accelerationism. Contrary to what you will be no doubt reading in the press in the coming weeks, these groups are not opposites in any way. The accelerationists want the same thing as the altruists, and also agree with them that AI superintelligences are coming and that capitalism is fucking sick. The accelerationists just want them to arrive as fast as possible and to smash society to bits in the process.

Horror director (and guy from Massachusetts like me) Mike Flanagan has a Letterboxd profile and a couple days ago updated his “Recommended Gateway Horror for Beginners” list. It’s pretty good! His gateway horror movies include:

• Gremlins

• Funny Games

• A Serbian Film

• Cannibal Holocaust

• Anti Christ

All perfect movies for people who want to tip their toe into the shallow end of the horror genre. As one user in the comments wrote, “mike flanagan is insane???”

It turns out if you tell an AI to generate a picture of something and then you ask it to “make it more” it will eventually create a version where it has become a being of pure energy. This one was my favorite:

This was spotted by X user @shindags. They stream under the name ConditionBleen and they film a stack of CRT screens, which is then streamed on to Twitch. You can check out their streams here.

• “Trauma Trooper”

• “I Bought The New Seven-CD Garth Brooks Box Set From Bass Pro Shops (A True Story)”

P.S. here’s a good Douyin video.

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

One of the biggest trends online since the start of the pandemic has been the rise of freemium internet platforms. Instagram and Facebook both launched paid verification, YouTube has YouTube Premium, TikTok is testing an ad-free paid version, and we all know about X’s subscription quagmire. Most of this has been blamed on enshittification, an assumedly natural gouging conducted by huge tech monopolies that have simply gotten lazier and want more money. But that explanation has always felt a little simplistic to me. I mean, digital ad spend for platforms like Meta is still very good.

Also, according to every metric I’ve seen, there are more users spending more time online than ever before. So why does it feel like big platforms are both dying and desperate to get people to subscribe as a way to stay afloat?

Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making everything feel smaller. Meanwhile, the social platforms we’ve been using for almost two decades still haven’t figured out how to evolve to meet this new reality of a user-broadcasted internet versus a user-generated one. And the feed-based sites are suffering most of all. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and the site once-known as Twitter, feel broken and boring because the majority of the content traveling around people’s feeds is coming from the same handful of accounts. This would also explain why Threads or Bluesky can’t seem to recapture the magic of Twitter — there simply aren’t enough users to make it buzz the same way and it’s likely they’re never coming back.

There are apps that are doing well right now, sites like TikTok, OnlyFans, Patreon, YouTube, and Discord, to name a few. But if the overall trend is towards users subscribing to a select few creators directly, rather than millions of users sharing random content with each other, interspersed with ads, then, yeah, every platform is trouble right now.

This is also, I suspect, why OpenAI’s ChatGPT is causing the freakout that is inside of Silicon Valley. Yes, the AI is exciting, but the fact the platform has over 100 million monthly users, over a billion visitors a month, and an estimated two million that are paying to use it, seems like the bigger deal. This is the same desperation that was behind the 2021 crypto craze and why every big tech company is now trying to figure out how to jam AI into their services. And, unlike with crypto, the experiments with implementing AI aren’t vague attempts to get people to buy JPGs of Nikes inside of a VR shopping mall, but, instead, drastic overhauls of existing services. Google and Bing have little AI-generated info cards at the top of most searches. Google’s Bard is getting integrated into Google Docs and Google Home. Apple is promising a big Siri upgrade soon. And, uh, Meta put their AI in a pair of Ray-Bans recently. Sure why not.

So where is this all headed? Well, my big prediction for 2024 is we’re going to see a wave of platforms trying to sell your own filter bubble back to you, automated with an AI.

Last week, I published a story over at Fast Company about OpenAI’s new Custom GPT feature, which basically does exactly that. If you haven’t played around with it yet, it’s fascinating — more fascinating, if you ask me, than all the pointless palace intrigue and blog drama happening inside of the company lately.

Custom GPTs are currently being marketed as OpenAI’s first real foray into apps, but really, they’re just a way to build a repeatable framework for how the ChatGPT chatbot works in a specific way, which you can then share with others. You can go really crazy with the instructions, uploading datasets and connecting third-party API “actions,” but you can also just tell it, in normal old text, what you want it to do and it’ll do it.

And so I was surprised to see a screenshot circulating late last week of a similar-ish feature being tested inside of TikTok. You write a couple sentences in a chat window, telling TikTok what you want to see more of on your For You Page, and it’ll supposedly deliver it. I don’t have this yet, so I can’t test it out, but my assumption is that it involves AI if it’s taking semantic text and translating it into instructions for the app’s algorithm.

Meanwhile, over on X.com, Elon Musk is promising a “Grok analysis” button is coming, which will show, idk, automated slurs underneath posts or something? It’s not really clear, and almost certainly won’t happen the way it’s currently being advertised, and not really important, aside from illustrating that there is a clearly a new trend happening here. Subscription-based AI-hybrid platforms are coming.

What’s ironic about all of this, of course, is that it was the platforms a decade ago that unbundled traffic from publications and created the creators, in the first place, which is an industry now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Back in 2013, Facebook, in particular, began its slow crush of digital media, forcing newsrooms and studios to pay for traffic, while boosting accounts making native content on their platform. A million layoffs later, everyone has a favorite YouTuber, but no one works for a media company anymore. Except, now the platforms are panicking because the big creators figured out how to do something the platforms never could: get people to pay for content.

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Happy Cyber Monday! I’ve always wanted to do a little end-of-year gadget guide, so Garbage Day Researcher Adam Bumas and I put our heads together and came up with 10 things we used this year that made our lives better that involve cords, code, or contraptions. Enjoy!

Steam Deck: The only game console I’ve owned since 2017 was a Nintendo Switch and, about a year ago, I started to really feel like I was missing out on Culture by not having anything that can play AAA games on. But I travel a lot and hate playing games on a TV. So the Steam Deck has been perfect for me, though, I wish the PC side of the device was better. Also, I highly recommend buying the Baseus 6-in-1 Docking Station rather than Steam’s official dock, it’s cheaper and works perfectly.

iROBOT Roomba 694: I tried a vacuum robot a few years ago and it wasn’t very good, but they’ve come a long way since then and iRobot’s 694 is fairly inexpensive and, best of all, does exactly what I want it to without a bunch of extra junk.

Black + Decker 6-Cup Rice Cooker: Guys, I’m not sure any gadget has changed my life more drastically than this $20 rice cooker. I love it so much and basically talk about it all the time. Why yes, I am over 30. Why do you ask?

iPad Mini 6: I think my iPad Mini is my favorite device I own? I upgraded it this year to get more storage, but its physical size is perfect. And I genuinely can’t understand why Apple hasn’t made a new Mini since 2021 (rumors are a new one is coming next year).

Davinci Resolve: I’ve written about this before, but I have to plug it again. It’s free. It makes sense. It’s easy to use. It doesn’t take up a huge chunk of your hard drive. I don’t think I can ever go back to Premiere.

Anker 315 Wireless Charging Pad: I’ve lost multiple phones to the charging port becoming unusable. The last time it happened, I couldn’t budget for a new phone, so I got a wireless charger instead, and now I’m never looking back.

SodaStream Terra: I find literally everything about the process of using the SodaStream enjoyable, except maybe needing to get more gas canisters. The bubbles just don’t get old for me.

Wekity Toothbrush Holder: You just shove the brush into the little alcove and it squeezes toothpaste right on for you. I live with roommates, and so this has completely transformed the entire tooth-brushing experience for all of us.

NY Times Games app: I have the full New York Times subscription, so I get cooking and Wirecutter and so on, but I unequivocally recommend the games app on its own. The Times has published many things this year that I disagree were “fit to print,” but it’s hard to argue with Wordle and Connections.

Belkin USB-C to HDMI cable: I’m one of those people who carries around a bag with stuff for every possible scenario in it, and that’s why it has this, along with a mobile charger and granola bars and so on. Everyone has a TV and a computer, but vanishingly few people can connect the two.

This is Anna Indiana, yet another AI pop star experiment. “She” looks and sounds terrible. And her “songs” are like three notes away from triggering a lawsuit from Taylor Swift. Also, isn’t it fascinating how all of these AI influencer projects are always meant to look like young women? Speaking of which…

This “digital creator” named Aitana was created by a Spanish “AI modeling agency” (lol) called The Clueless (also lol). They recently did an interview with Euro News, where they said that Aitana makes around 1,000 euros per branded post. She also has a page where she posts lingerie photos on an OnlyFans competitor. Extremely grim stuff.

Though, the punchline here is that the team behind Aitana created her after they realized that they were losing business because of how flaky and annoying human influencers are to work with. Which, honestly, fair enough.

Maybe the only good thing about X.com is that now, at least once a week, a Verified guy makes a big long thread excitedly describing something impossibly bleak, seemingly unaware of how awful the thing is that they just described.

And so, over the weekend, a “founder” named Jake Ward wrote a big thread detailing how he downloaded a competitor’s site map, took the titles of their URLs, AI-generated 1,800 articles with those titles, and “stole 3.6 million total traffic” from them.

Unfortunately for Ward, he didn’t blur his site’s name well enough and people figured out what the URL was and are now talking about doing the same thing to him. Whoops!

The new “random girl on TikTok that proves western civilization is over” is this video which is currently making the rounds on X. Two versions of the video I’ve seen have around 10 million views.

The video was posted to a small account on TikTok back in October that I’m not going to link to. From what I can tell, it was shared by a mom who thought it was kind of a funny thing and her comments are full of deeply unwell people saying she’s a horrible parent???

Anyways, it’s fascinating how after conservative internet users took over Twitter and all the normal people left, they basically now just spend all day scaring each other with random videos of teenage girls. At least 4chan users bust out Photoshop every once in a while and make a new meme or something.

I was half-convinced this was a bit, but it seems like it’s real. Mega-viral musician Seth Everman, after months of saying he would, has really quit the internet. This weekend, he livestreamed for six hours, saying goodbye to fans and revisiting some of his biggest videos.

Everman, at the end of the stream, explained that he had finally reached a point where he couldn’t take being a fully-time creator anymore. Hey man, I get it!

This is exactly what the title describes. A redditor’s boyfriend wants to watch the Avatar sequel every time they hook up and it’s beginning to cause issues. The reason given for watching the movie every time is because the boyfriend says he’s using it as a, uh, timer.

The comments are fairly divided between people suggesting other long movies they could watch together, other people who think this is just bait, and a very vocal contingent who say that OP should check his boyfriend’s internet history because maybe he’s a lot more into Avatar than he’s letting on.

• “Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?”

• “Disney’s Wish Fails on Every Level”

P.S. here’s a dying Hit Clip.

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