The Business of Grifting Groypers

The Washington Post published a very interesting article last week about the superfans of Nick Fuentes, leader of the far right Groyper movement. As you’d expect, they discovered a new Type Of Guy so bizarre that scientists previously thought him to be impossible:

Read more

This wasn’t a subject that the guests wandered into during the course of a conversation. The topic was explicitly chosen and the guests were curated to have an entire conversation about the ethics of crime, and both guests and the host basically came down on the side of “haha, crime is so cool and justified, right?”. Piker and Tolentino, with Spiegelman egging them on, bloviated at length about how stealing from grocery stores is good, perhaps even heroic, it’s an act of anti-capitalist resistance, and nobody should feel bad about it. They eventually migrated into talking about how stealing from art museums is good, blowing up pipelines is good, and killing CEOs is technically not good if you’re a square but extremely understandable and sympathetic and *wink wink*.

Given the topic and the personalities involved, social media predictably exploded. I won’t waste your time documenting every reaction except to note that there were a lot of them, and this graduated into a capital-D Discourse.

It’s easy to point out the basic problems with the theft-is-good worldview, and better writers than I have already done so. As Kelsey Piper notes, stealing is not just morally wrong, the effects of widespread shoplifting also make your community poorer and a worse place to live. Derek Thompson made a great point about CS Lewis’s special exceptions for immoral behavior - everybody has some cutesy reason their particular crime is excusable, but special exceptions can’t create a just society. Cartoons Hate Her points out that shoplifting paradoxically tends to be a middle-to-upper class behavior, done for thrills by the affluent and bored rather than done by the desperate to survive.

But if I’m being honest, pointing out that theft is bad is the intellectual equivalent of cage-fighting a toddler. The more interesting problem with shoplifting discourse comes from the fact that we’re talking about this at all.

The core issue with Shoplifting Is Moral Under Leftism discourse, like so many discourses before it, is that our social media algorithms select for this kind of ragebait. We exist online in a system that is designed to find the most childish and inflammatory opinions and amplify them to millions of people.

In an earlier age, gatekeepers existed to stop morons with puerile or reprehensible views from being heard. I’m not the first (or even the hundredth) person to note that all the gatekeepers are gone and we now live in a permissionless, anything-goes media environment. The death of gatekeepers is why you’re reading this blog on Substack, it’s why I can make my living from writing here and podcasting over at the New Liberal Podcast. There are real benefits to allowing anyone to create and distribute their work without having to break through a stultifying, bureaucratic system.

But the death of gatekeepers also has downsides. Today, even the New York Times seems to be chasing clicks any way they can. Invite the hot doofus on your show to say blowing up stuff is cool and shoplifting is good but plastic cups are a moral travesty. Why not? That’ll go viral. You’ll probably get a bonus. Watch everyone get mad while you bask in all the attention. This mercenary attitude has always existed in independent media, but now it’s everywhere.

Maybe it’s pointless, but I feel the need to stand athwart the tide of history and yell that gatekeepers still matter. And it’s a joke that our biggest institutions deny that they have any choice in the matter.

There’s a predictable pattern that happens when people get mad at the publication of a stupid piece of content. Most media types, when confronted with an argument that they published something idiotic, deny they have any influence at all. They’re just publishing what the people want to see. They are but leaves upon the wind, blown about by the gales of public discourse, unable to truly chart their own path in any meaningful way. They abdicate responsibility, blaming societal forces larger than themselves. Their job is simply to follow whatever’s popular. And hey, everybody’s talking about this column, so even if you hated it I guess I did my job in the end?

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen to Nadja’s boss, lead culture editor Sia Michel of the New York Times, from last year when the paper axed a bunch of its cultural critics:

We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in American culture. New generations of artists and audiences are bypassing traditional institutions, smartphones have Balkanized fandoms even as they have made culture more widely accessible than ever, and arts institutions are facing challenges and looking for new opportunities.

Our readers are hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms. Our mission is to be those guides…

…it is important to bring different perspectives to core disciplines as we help our coverage expand beyond the traditional review.

Oh yes, ‘guides’ who can ‘bypass traditional institutions’ on various ‘platforms’ beyond the ‘traditional review’. The translated version of this corporate gobbledygook is that serious criticism is out and trend-chasing is in, taste and judgment are passé and clickbait is the new normal. ‘Traditional institutions’ with their gatekeepers and judgment are dying, so let’s make sure to at least be popular as we chase whatever the mob is talking about.

I hate this argument so, so much.

In the days when dinosaurs walked the earth and newspapers still existed as physical products, everyone understood the value of a gatekeeper. Editors, critics, publishers, and other cultural tastemakers took their jobs seriously. They had a civic duty. They were custodians of the public discourse, entrusted with sorting signal from noise and introducing audiences to what actually mattered. Music critics did not view themselves as mere reporters whose job was to dutifully describe whatever was already popular. And newspapers did not imagine their role was merely to print whatever excited the crowd. They occupied a privileged position, and they knew that with that privilege came a real responsibility to the public, an obligation to put forward ideas that actually mattered.

That sense of obligation is gone. Only the good lord above knows what’s in Nadja Spiegelman’s heart, but my guess is that if you asked her to justify why her New York Times podcast is promoting the idea that shoplifting is good, she’d say some version of ‘people were already talking about it’, or say that her job is to reflect culture rather than build it. Odds are good that she’d simply deny that her position involved any moral responsibilities at all.

I’ve heard that too many times from too many people in the media. And it’s bullshit.

The less cynical version of this argument is that the people involved don’t really have a choice. They might be aware of this dynamic, but the ravening beast that is social media has them completely at its mercy. If you don’t chase the crowd, you won’t get the attention, and the only options are to capitulate or die. There’s at least some truth in this - the problem is larger than any single person or institution.

But the more cynical version of the argument says that gatekeepers do have a choice, they’re just failing it. Lots of media companies are dying, sure. But the New York Times is not one of them. They’re highly profitable and they’ve thrived by leaning in to quality. They have an incredibly strong brand. People trust them. If the Times wanted to continue acting as gatekeeper, as arbiter of what matters and what’s worth discussing, they could. They simply choose not to. The temptation is always there to court controversy, to publish inflammatory nonsense from culture war figures and bask in the attention. Posting is the most powerful force in the universe, after all.

Maybe I’m the hidebound dinosaur for being mad about this, destined to go extinct as I stubbornly insist that people in important cultural institutions do actually have moral obligations to society to use their positions well. But what I can tell you is that I put more care into a relatively unimportant Substack than many legacy media employees seem to put into any of their work. I think hard about the things I cover, what I choose to put in your inbox, whether it matters and why it matters. And it’s fucking infuriating that people with a thousand times my reach seem to do none of this, throwing their words out into the discourse and proclaiming zero responsibility for how those words might affect our politics or our culture. Have some fucking pride.

Some people may object to this line of thinking by pointing out that the shoplifting podcast was in the Opinion section - isn’t it fine to publish controversial opinions? This argument fails because even the opinion section should exhibit thoughtful curation. Why do Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat have podcasts at the Times instead of Jimmy Dore and Alex Jones? Because the editorial team believes they are the most responsible versions of their political philosophies. They’re trusted to exercise judgment and to create engaging content that addresses the most important issues of the day in an intelligent way.

Editors do the same thing when publishing op-eds. In practice, the New York Times has a nearly infinite number of op-ed submissions to choose from and a nearly infinite number of topics to discuss, but only publishes a select number of columns and podcasts each week. What you choose to publish is a matter of taste and judgment. Occasionally you’ll run something morally awful because, say, a powerful US Senator is saying it, and there’s public interest in knowing what Senators are saying. But when it comes to random influencers there’s no reason to give a platform to whatever idiocy they just farted out.

To state things as clearly as possible: when you have an enormously large audience, and when you run influential institutions, you have a moral responsibility to the public. You are an arbiter of what matters and what does not. You need to take this role seriously and exercise discernment and good judgment when you choose what to publish.

Your position is a privilege and a responsibility. The things you publish have a real impact on our culture and our politics, and you have an obligation to exercise some damn thoughtfulness about what you put out into the world. The Times failed that obligation with their micro-looting podcast. They chose to chase inflammatory clickbait rather than talk about something, anything else that actually matters.

It’s one thing to have serious debates on controversial topics. But the podcast in question is not William Buckley debating Gore Vidal, or even close. It was a host giving off the vibe of ‘omg I am so stoked I get to hang out with u guyssssss’ as the guests promoted straightforwardly idiotic and destructive behavior with very little pushback. This is a podcast whose practical purpose was to allow middle-aged millionaires to say edgy nonsense so that sociopaths on the internet will continue to think they’re cool.

Even institution curates what they publish. The only question is whether they acknowledge that responsibility, or ignore it and let the algorithms do the curation for them. I worry that even places like the Times are losing the idea of stewardship, and that the world is becoming a little bit worse as a result.

The subreddit, which is dedicated to chronicling the ups and downs of prominent live streamers, had a post alleging that the livestreamer ExtraEmily was viewbotting. Viewbots are tools that create an army of fake accounts to make a stream look like it’s more popular than it actually is. They’re against the terms of service of every major streaming platform, but nonetheless are often used by large streamers. Appearing popular is the first step towards actually being popular, so when evidence emerges that a streamer is using viewbots it’s a big deal.

In this case, ExtraEmily appeared to accidentally show a window on her PC with the ‘ViewBot.ai’ URL running in the background. But the original post on the topic, despite being quite popular and not breaking any rules, was taken down by a moderator. Users tried posting it again, only for the new posts to be taken down as well. In the end, a post was finally allowed, but users were incredibly suspicious of why the moderator team had intervened in the first place. Some redditors formed conspiracy theories that the moderation team was filled with ExtraEmily fans who wanted to protect her image.

In this case, the conspiracists were correct. Days after the incident, the mod team for /r/LiveStreamFail put out a statement saying that a single moderator was responsible for the drama, and had essentially tried a cover up to protect a streamer he liked:

Today, it started to become more apparent that this moderator may have lied, or fabricated the claim of a pop-up, to seemingly protect ExtraEmily. Through more digging, we were able to confirm that they are an avid Extra Emily clipper, poster and a very active member of her community and Discord… we have decided to remove this mod from the team.

On the surface, that’s where the story ends. Reddit moderators are power-tripping fools obsessed with niche bullshit? Quelle surprise! But I think it’s worth digging in a bit further. The moderator in question wasn’t just a ‘fan’ of ExtraEmily. They are a superfan. They are an obsessive fan, a no-lifer, a fanatic, to return to the literal and original meaning of the word. ExtraEmily has streamed for 57 total hours so far in the month of April. The moderator in question commented in her livestream chat more than seven thousand, four hundred times this month. That works out to a rate of two comments per minute, every single minute that ExtraEmily streams, which looks something like this:

Those 7K+ chat messages don’t include the time this individual spent in ExtraEmily’s Discord channel, the time they spent posting about her on Reddit, or the time they spend clipping her stream into short videos for other platforms. This person is essentially working a frenetically paced full-time job just to be the #1 ExtraEmily fan. It’s almost certainly why they sought a position as a moderator on /r/LiveStreamFail - to be able to influence conversations about her.

The important thing to realize, as you look at the astonishing amount of parasociality that some people are capable of, is that this is not really all that unusual. Most of the people you meet online are freaks.

It’s no secret that Reddit moderators tend to be extremely weird, antisocial losers.1 Whether it’s the autistic non-binary part-time dog walker who went on Fox News to complain that work is slavery, or the former head moderator of LiveStreamFail who recorded perhaps the most cringe open letter in human history, Reddit’s history is filled with moderators embarrassing themselves. But Reddit isn’t an exception here. Every part of the internet is dominated by this kind of person.

On Wikipedia, the top 5,000 editors are responsible for about one third of all edits on the site:

5,000 represents 0.01% of all Wikipedia editors - that’s not one percent, it’s one hundredth of one percent. The same pattern emerges even if you attempt to control for edit quality (PWV here is a type of quality-adjusted edit count):

At the end of this period, the top 10% of editors (by edit count) were credited with 86% of PWVs, the top 1% about 70%, and the top 0.1% (4200 users) were attributed 44% of PWVs, i.e. nearly half of Wikipedia's "value" as measured in this study.

There are individual editors with millions of edits, who have been on the site for twenty years and who post edits at a rate approaching one-per-minute for the last twenty years straight.

Another example: Last year I got into a little tiff with tech influencer and reporter Taylor Lorenz. I suggested that Lorenz ultimately wants to be an influencer, after which she accused me of calling her an attention whore and being a misogynist. I did not and would not call Lorenz an attention whore, because that would be a very mean-spirited thing to do. But I did note that Lorenz, in the same week that she denied wanting to be an influencer, posted 433 times just on the X platform. Assuming she sleeps 7 hours a night, that’s a post every eight minutes she’s awake, seven days a week.

And that’s just on X - she’s also highly active on BlueSky and Threads, where she likely had hundreds of additional posts. That week she had also posted four YouTube videos (each around a half an hour in length), several podcasts, several multi-thousand word articles, numerous TikToks, Instagram Reels, and more. She’s remarkably prolific and I, quite frankly, admire her work ethic. I wish that I worked a fraction as hard as she does. But just like the Reddit mod or Wikipedia editors above, she’s a freak when it comes to online behavior. She is insanely online. She did an interview with Wired recently where she admitted her screen time was nearly 17 hours per day, and said “Listen, if I could put the screen inside my brain, I would”.

There are more stories like this than I have time to recount. The top 1% of OnlyFans creators take over a third of all revenue on the site. On Polymarket, the top 0.23% of wallets account for 63% of total trading volume. 98% of Reddit users never comment or post at all. This rule applies to places you’d never believe, including jihadi forums:

The Mujahedon forum first appeared on 5 October 2005 and has grown steadily. As of 1 June 2006, 1039 members were listed, with some 22,307 posts between them. An analysis of user activity reveals that the vast majority (87%) have never posted on the forums: they are passive or casual users; 13 percent have posted at least once; 5 percent 50 or more times; 1 percent 500 or more times. A small but vocal, active core posts new content, initiates debates and responds to questions posed by newcomers.

Everywhere you go online, the people you’re most likely to interact with are not normal people. They’re people who are so freakishly online you’d struggle to believe they’re real.

As crazy as some of these statistics are, I worry they actually undersell how deep this pattern is built into our online communities. Much of what we’re talking about can be explained by the 90-9-1 rule of online communities - no matter where you are, 90% of users lurk and never post, 9% of users may comment or post infrequently, and 1% are the true creators, those actually creating original content or commenting voraciously.

But the consequences of the 90-9-1 rule are amplified by algorithmic platforms. Imagine a stylized platform with users who contribute according to a rough 90-9-1 rule, where 90% of users post once a month, 9% of users post ten times a month, and 1% of users post a ninety times a month. Theoretically, you’re equally likely to run into a post from any of the groups, because (0.9 * 1 = 0.09 * 10 = 0.01 * 90). But in reality, the 1% heaviest users almost certainly have larger followings on the platform and get large advantages in the platform’s algorithm for being such frequent contributors. They’re likely mini-celebrities. Their 90 posts a month all reach a large audience, while the 90% posting once a month are shouting into the void.

These kinds of super users also tend to seek out other ways to influence discourse. They volunteer as Reddit moderators to make sure their favorite streamer isn’t criticized. They post not just on one site, but on many. They’re in the Discords and group chats, strategizing with other superfans on how to best crush alternative points of view. This is what they’ve chosen to do with their life, and by god they’re not going to miss a chance to let you hear about it.

Let’s say you’re a casual fan of a TV show like The Pitt, and you want to see what people are saying online about it. You aren’t going to end up seeing posts from other casual fans like yourself. You’re going to end up seeing the posts from a guy who has posted more than eight hundred irate messages in the last week about how the show runners are evil for having a bias against Dr. Samira Mohan.

The same dynamic applies everywhere. Want to chat about a livestreamer? The comment section you’re in is likely filled with either the streamer’s superfans or super-haters. Want to debate some edits to a Wikipedia article? The guy debating you has probably spent a decade memorizing how to wield Wikipedia’s complex internal rules to crush your idea. Editors like him don’t just make the most edits, they also create the rules of the game. Want to make a bet on a prediction market? The other side of that bet isn’t another random amateur like you. It’s a guy who bets on prediction markets for a living and is more than happy to win a new sucker’s money.

The internet is run by and for freaks and insane people. These are individuals who have devoted so much time to such incredibly niche topics that only God himself could possibly fathom why they do it. There are times when this is amusing, like when GeoGuessr pro Rainbolt has every rock in the world memorized. There are times when it’s helpful, like when you have an odd question about which brand of baking soda works best in carrot cake and someone in /r/Baking has already put together a spreadsheet testing twenty different brands. But there are also times when the freaks online drive everyone else to ruin. Fandoms are becoming ever more obsessive and ever more deranged. Political discussions are dominated by extremists and lunatics. And the freaks are driving out the rest of us who simply don’t have the time to keep up with them.

For the first time in years… X is getting… better?

I don’t want to unduly alarm you. But after years of continually degrading itself, the shambling corpse of Twitter that we now call X might… just might… be getting somewhat better?

In the last edition of the Weekly Scroll, we talked about how Nate Silver got into a fight with X’s leadership over their promotion of low-quality political slop like Catturd, Gunther Eagleman, etc:

The New York Times has 53 million subscribers but their posts linking to hard-hitting, important news stories often get only 60-100 likes. That does not happen in a vacuum. That is an algorithmic design choice explicitly made by Nikita Bier and Elon Musk, and no amount of quibbling about Nate’s particular graphic can erase that reality. If they wanted to boost high quality journalism, they would. Instead, they chase the cheapest forms of engagement so that somewhere a KPI on a dashboard hits the level that it’s supposed to hit.

While I’m sure Bier would deny there’s any link, Nate’s criticism seems to have landed because last week, Bier announced a set of changes to how creators would be paid out:

This action targets the lowest quality accounts on the site, accounts that copy posts from other users, copy videos from other social networks, do a lot of meaningless quote tweets like “Good point”, or overuse gimmicks like “🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨”. It’s a fantastic change, and users could immediately tell it was working because a bunch of low quality accounts immediately started shrieking about it.

The wailing was loudest amongst conservative political accounts and conservative/bro leaning aggregators:

It’s pretty close to an iron law of the internet that if you whine about your impressions or your creator payouts, you are terrible and your existence makes whatever site you’re on a worse place. Left or right, political or non-political, no exceptions.

I cannot imagine anything more humiliating than logging on to X Dot Com The Everything App and typing the words “What am I supposed to post so that the algorithm doesn’t punish me???”. Bitch, you’re supposed to post because you’re mentally ill and addicted to the internet, just like the rest of us. We post for love of the game, not to eke out a few more ElonBucks. Have some goddamn pride.

Meanwhile! X also released a change a couple weeks ago that has made the site notably more interesting - automatic translation. In-app/on-site translation has been available for a while now, but now instead of having to hit a ‘translate this post’ button the site simply does it for you. Like magic, users from different countries began interacting.

The most notable interactions have been between American X and Japanese X. There are nearly as many Japanese users of the platform as there are American user, but until a few weeks ago they were invisible because the algorithm simply wouldn’t show English language users Japanese language posts. But with the auto-translation feature (and likely some algorithmic changes), Japanese posts started popping up in Western feeds and English language posts in Japanese feeds. And it’s been incredibly interesting.

The first big trend to come out of the cross-contamination was… Barbeque. Japanese users were apparently crazy for authentic, Texas style barbeque and their new American friends were more than happy to show them all about it. Later, there was a genuinely heartwarming moment where an American user’s post about Fukushima went viral. Apparently, many Japanese people think that foreigners view Fukushima as shameful and hate Japanese people because of it, while the post argues that most Americans think Fukushima was a tragic accident and view the workers there as heroes. This post went absolutely nuclear (pun intended) on the Japanese internet and may have single-handedly improved US-Japan relations.

This sort of thing is happening all the time now. Another big trend I’ve seen is Russians being shocked that not everyone hates them and posting about how they dislike their own government as well. As best I can tell, this is the first instance in the history of the internet where cross-language posting is this seamless, and it’s leading to unprecedented new conversations and discourses.

Of course nothing gold can stay, and I’m sure some of the feel good cross-cultural exchanges will give way to fighting about geopolitical nonsense soon enough. The Japan-US lovefest is already being tested by a battle over copyright protections - Japanese users seem to strongly view any form of piracy whatsoever as evil, whereas American users are far more nonchalant about it. But for now, the predominant feeling is good vibes and fun. And that, combined with the decimation of the 🚨🚨BREAKING🚨🚨slop accounts, has led to the first real improvement in X’s quality in the past few years.

Why do you believe in God?

@morepestopleaseSorry I had a blue Gatorade

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

How’s streaming doing these days?

You may remember back in 2023, both the Writers’ Guild and SAG went on strike, paralyzing much of Hollywood. One of the biggest concerns for the unions was that an increasing amount of industry revenue was coming from online streaming platforms, and they didn’t believe that actors and writers were getting a fair cut of that revenue. There were many areas of disagreement, but one specific topic that came up over and over was the lack of clarity around the viewer numbers for streaming shows - there was no real way to tell who was doing well and who wasn’t. As part of the labor agreement that ended the strike, platforms agreed to provide more analytics and data for each show and to grant bonuses to streaming shows and movies that did particularly well.

Now, three years later, some interesting data courtesy of Bloomberg:

Read more

Subscribe today to get access to every single post from Infinite Scroll.

Meta Removes Anti-Meta Ads

Here’s a fun scoop: Meta is removing ads from Facebook and Instagram seeking plaintiffs for lawsuits against Meta. This seems to be something they’ve given themselves the power to do via some obscure clause in their terms of service… but it also seems a little bit like scoundrel behavior… but honestly I get it?

You might have a mental model of lawsuits against big companies that goes like this: someone is harmed by a big company, then the victims find lawyers and sue the big company, and sometimes this works and the victims get compensated for the harm while the lawyers also make some nice money. This model is intuitive and also mostly wrong. The way it actually works is that lawsuits are mostly conceived by enterprising lawyers, who then go looking for victims. Yada yada yada, I’m skipping lots of nuance, but there’s a real sense in which lawyers are the ones hiring clients rather than the clients hiring lawyers.

And if you’re an aggressive lawyer who’s noticed that hey, Meta just lost a lawsuit and had to pay several million dollars to a young woman harmed by their policies, where better to find more victims of Meta’s bad behavior than on Meta platforms? Of course they wanted to run ads on Facebook and Instagram! That’s where the mentally ill, addicted-to-social-media teens are! Where else would you find them? And Meta’s now saying no, we would prefer not to participate in our own destruction.

This does kind of illustrate the point I made a few weeks back when the lawsuit against Meta was concluded: It’s hard to see how social media as a business survives if they can be held liable for things as vague as ‘using your service made me depressed’. The potential overall liability here, when judged at a ‘millions of dollars per depressed user’, is enough to put them out of business. And as much as I talk about how bad social media can be, I don’t think it should cease to exist based on that kind of nebulous legal regime.

Real 5th Century Vibes

How crazy is social media really?

Read more

• Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

• Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll

• The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes

• The Conspiracists by Noelle Cook

I first read Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This1 a few years ago. Unlike all of the books I’ve covered in this series before, No One Is Talking About This is a work of fiction. The nameless main character is a famous poster on what she calls ‘The Portal’, a social media network that seems to be inspired by the classic Twitter of the mid-2010s, who is catapulted to international fame after posting “can a dog be twins?”. Lockwood herself was a well known poster during that time and reportedly got the idea to write about this type of character after her famous Miette tweet went viral:2

The book is loosely based on experiences from Lockwood’s own life, and it’s a remarkably unique experience to read. I want to talk about why I love this book, what makes it unique, and an underrated political reason why certain pieces of art seem to resonate so strongly.

The first thing you will immediately clock about No One Is Talking About This is the book’s style. It’s written in machine gun bursts, with short sentences coming at you in rapid succession. It’s fragmented and chaotic. There are fast cuts to random new thoughts every paragraph or two, recreating the feel of reading a Twitter feed. There have been a lot of books over the years that have tried and failed to recreate the feeling of being online. This is the only book I’ve ever read that gets it right. Lockwood’s novel feels like scrolling through your For You feed in a way that no other book ever has.

With a less skilled writer, the result might be jarring, disorganized, or messy. But Lockwood makes the format work. You feel a sense of the narrative progressing, despite how scattered the main character’s thoughts are. It helps that the book is very, very funny.

It’s often hard to recommend humor to other people. Especially internet humor. Especially especially internet humor from a different era of internet. I’m aware that I’m a millennial, with a millennial’s sense of humor, and that online humor styles age badly. And yet I tell you anyway: this book is very, very funny. It will make you laugh.

The book progresses through events from the protagonist’s real life, thoughts from her time scrolling, conversations with her husband, posts she sees, posts she writes, and dream-like musings. She’s well-known enough to be invited to prestigious conferences on the What The Internet Means For Society, but spends most of her time just staring at her phone. While it’s funny, there’s often edge and insight to the main character’s thoughts:

It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.

-

The people who lived in the portal were often compared to those legendary experiment rats who kept hitting a button over and over to get a pellet. But at least the rats were getting a pellet, or the hope of a pellet, or the memory of a pellet. When we hit the button, all we were getting was to be more of a rat.

-
All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals being weird about the blues, with possible boner involvement.

Our protagonist frequently confronts the idea that social media, which she dearly loves, might not actually be all that good for her, or anyone else for that matter:

Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian.

-
A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.

As our hero asks these questions about what it means to be a person who lives their life online, she also ruminates on the politics of the day. The main character, much like Lockwood herself, is intensely progressive. But Lockwood writes the protagonist with a kind of self-awareness that perhaps the progressive politics required by social media aren’t actually all that consistent, and that perhaps the messengers of said politics aren’t all that principled. The book doesn’t really strike you over the head with it. It’s not on every page. But amongst all the references, the quips, the stories, and the meandering stream of consciousness, about every dozen pages you’ll get a fastball like one of these:

Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.

-
Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.

-
We wanted every last one of those bastards in jail! But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turned men to pigs.

The book is sly enough to never marinate on these moments - it’s always immediately on the next thing, just like the For You feed it’s emulating. But it’s clear that Lockwood is both deeply enmeshed in progressive circles while being skeptical of their worst qualities.

This sly political commentary is an significant feature of the book, because it points at an important idea. It’s an idea that I don’t know if Lockwood even intended, but being Death of the Author-pilled I’m fine assigning it to her regardless. What makes the book deeper and better than just being a collection of funny musings is the idea that some of the best art comes from progressive authors forcing progressive characters to confront conservative ideals.

If you haven’t read the book but plan on reading it, now might be a good time to stop (you can buy it here). Or continue! But there will be major spoilers in the next section, so you’ve been warned.

HERE BE SPOILERS

A little more than halfway through the book, the narrative of No One Is Talking About This takes a hard left turn. Up to this point, the book has been the protagonist doing a lot of humorous navel gazing, talking about posts, preening and theorizing, being goofy with her husband, debating whether “chuck e cheese can munch on my u-know-what” is clever enough to post, etc. It’s a roller coaster that as I’ve mentioned, feels like being on the infinite scroll, surrounded by one ridiculous thing after the next.

And then, out of nowhere, the protagonist gets a text from her mother.

Something has gone wrong

How soon can you get here?

The book completely, utterly changes in that moment. The protagonist is ripped out of her online world into a much scarier place, where her sister’s baby is in danger of dying before it’s even born.

Her sister’s child is diagnosed with a rare, fatal condition while in utero. The baby has no chance at a normal life - doctors expect her to die almost immediately after being born. Our main character almost violently wrenches herself out of the online world and goes to be by her sister’s side while she carries the baby, and when her niece unexpectedly survives and gets to go home from the hospital, she remains with her sister for the next six months until the baby ultimately passes away.

This section of the book is gut-wrenching. Unless you have a heart of stone, you’ll find yourself tearing up at several points. And what makes it so effective is that the character is dealing with moral values that are outside her normal experience.

The protagonist is presented as urbane, educated, left-leaning. But when her sister gets the news of her baby’s condition, abortion is never in question. The protagonist’s extended family is pro-life, and more than anything her sister just wants to spend any time she can with her baby. It’s a miracle that the baby lives past a week, that the baby gets to go home, and that they ultimately get to spend six months together. And the protagonist, while living out those six months helping mother and child, has to grapple with profoundly conservative moral ideas:

• What is the value of a child’s life, even when that child has no chance to live?

• Are grounded, hometown connections inherently more real than online spaces?

• Is loyalty to one’s family more meaningful than fame or virality?

• Can you derive meaning from righteous suffering? From carrying a burden for someone else?

These questions are small-c conservative in nature. It would be all too easy, like so many books these days, to have a left-leaning author writing a left-leaning character who deals with a left-coded issue - racism, homophobia, class discrimination, capitalism, etc. It’s more challenging and more rewarding to have that same character deal with conservative-coded issues like honor, family, loyalty, or the innocent virtue of children.

The book’s protagonist is pro-choice, and remains that way. But through her niece, she discovers for the first time the idea that something can be truly sacred. She’s spent so much time online chasing the high of posting, but that high is ultimately ephemeral and meaningless:

“A minute means something to her, more than it means to us. We don’t know how long she has—I can give them to her, I can give her my minutes.” Then, almost angrily, “What was I doing with them before?”

Jonathan Haidt’s moral foundations theory tells us that sacredness (or what Haidt would call sanctity or purity) is not a moral dimension that liberals normally care about, so the second half of this book is like watching a character whose morality is set on a two dimensional plane suddenly discover an entirely new axis on which they must measure their actions. She discovers that she loves her doomed niece with a frightening intensity. Her niece’s value is not discussed or debated, it’s intrinsic and obvious. She has to deal with grief and love and family and sacrifice, in a way that is real, raw, and completely foreign to her previous experience as an internet-famous influencer. She accepts the duty and burden of caring for her family rather than living her own life, because how could she possibly not?

In 2024 I wrote a review of the play JOB touching on this same idea:

Everyone knows that liberals and progressives dominate our cultural industries. It’s uncommon to see authentic conservative worldviews represented in elite arts culture. This is true of music, film, books, television and more, but I would argue it’s especially true of live theater. It is hard to overstate how absurdly left-leaning the Broadway community is. Being a vaguely centrist liberal who still likes Hillary Clinton might put you in the top 1% most right-leaning workers in that industry. So while I’m not a conservative myself, it’s a genuinely new and enthralling experience to watch facially progressive characters grapple with questions of conservative philosophy. Is the world fundamentally evil? Should we rehabilitate that evil, should we work through bureaucratic systems, or is it right to take matters into our own hands for the most heinous crimes? Is standing as a shield between the depraved and the innocent a morally righteous calling - even if it means sacrificing your own sanity?

In that play, a progressive character grapples with ideas about vigilantism, protecting children, and whether or not evil can be redeemed (she’s leaning towards no). And just like in Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, it makes for a much richer artistic thesis and for a more fully realized character journey.

The main character in this book, for all her cleverness and wit, cannot fix what has gone wrong. She cannot joke or theorize or post her way out of her sister’s grim reality. She finds meaning not in solving the problem, but in being there for her sister and niece in the brief time they have together, and in insisting that even a painful, doomed life can have significance and dignity. What makes the novel interesting isn’t that it makes this an explicit political message. It doesn’t. But it does show what sort of things melt away when we’re faced with real loss - and what remains through the hardship. And that makes for great art.

Dispatch articles require a subscription, but as always I’m happy to make sure Infinite Scroll readers get a gift link to read everything I write for free. And if you want to subscribe to The Dispatch, you can use code ‘JEREMIAH’ for 15% off.

There’s a particular type of lie that dominates American political discourse these days. It’s not a factual lie, but a conceptual mistruth: the promise that you can make life more affordable without actually making anything cheaper. Call it affordability theater.

It’s easy to propose ideas that make things feel more affordable without actually making them less expensive. And while both parties traffic in this kind of theater, the GOP— especially under President Donald Trump—has turned it into a governing ethos.

The formula is simple. First, Trump will create an affordability problem through his own policies. Then, instead of fixing the underlying cause, he will propose to paper over the problem with a subsidy, a tax gimmick, or a check.

Tariffs are the most obvious example. Trump returned to office in 2025 in no small part because of voter anger about inflation and the cost of living. And his signature policy move was to tariff nearly everything Americans buy from abroad. Tariffs are taxes that raise prices, and analysis from the Budget Lab at Yale shows the costs of tariffs mostly manifest as higher prices for consumers. How does Trump aim to square this circle? Tariff stimulus checks. After worsening the cost-of-living crisis, Trump and his allies floated the idea of sending rebate checks to offset the pain.

It’s hard to imagine a cleaner example—make life more expensive, then offer to partially compensate you for the pain while taking credit for both moves. But after the check is spent, life is still more expensive than it was before.

The same pattern plays out with Trump’s farm policy…

Check out the full piece over at The Dispatch!

I’m someone who enjoys the bizarre parts of the internet. I like weird subcultures. But there’s a part of me that dies inside when I realize that, thanks to Kristi Noem’s husband, ‘bimbofication’ has somehow become nationally relevant, and that I’m the person who understands the political and cultural implications of said bimbofication.

It’s sicko content, but someone needs to explain it and this is the lane I’ve chosen for the newsletter. So! Here’s your guide to how bimbos ended up as part of America’s politics, where the subculture came from, and why it matters. Because this one is a bit spicy, it’s going behind the paywall, along with updates on old vs new media, the Democratic debate over Hasan Piker, and more.

Why we’re talking about Bimbofication

Earlier this week, The Daily Mail released a set of very embarrassing photos of Bryon Noem, the husband of recently jettisoned Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. Specifically, they showed him with literal balloons under his shirt as he pretended to be a woman with enormous boobs:

Read more

Let’s kick off with something that was, for the most part, incredibly wholesome. The App Formerly Known As Twitter changed its algorithm last week and started promoting more posts into the For You feed from other countries, automatically translating using AI. In practice, the two biggest languages on X are Japanese and English1, so this meant a lot of English-language posts showing up for Japanese users and Japanese posts for English speaking users.

X/Twitter has always been wildly popular in Japan - there are actually more daily active Japanese users than any other country, including America. And the collision of two userbases that had existed completely separately until now has been pretty fun!

There’s cultural sharing of all kinds. Americans are explaining the nuances of ‘lowkirkenuinely’. Japanese folks are talking about how friendly Americans are. Both sides are creating race and language-swapped versions of each other’s memes, including this Japanese chad:

For some reason, the main topic for Japanese users has been American Barbecue. Seriously so, so many posts about BBQ. Turning loose Japanese posts has been incredible for the quality of my timeline. But as Ben Braddock points out, the ease of this change suggests that a lot of the miserable shit you normally see on the X feed is there by choice. And because it’s the hellsite, the Japanese racists and American racists have found and started promoting each other.

The Final Stages of EnKirkification

The parody post from comedian Druski titled How Conservative Women in America act is currently sitting at 1.2 million likes and 180M views. It’s legitimately one of the biggest videos of any kind on X in years, and it’s worth talking about how both Charlie and Erika Kirk became such enormous memes in the wake of his death.

Charlie Kirk was always fodder for memes, even before his death. Whether it was TP-USA formatted memes or just his face getting continuously smaller, he was always a figure of fun and derision for everyone who wasn’t a diehard pro-Trump conservative.

After Kirk was murdered, the political right spent a great deal of energy and effort to deify him, and turn a man who was effectively a digital Rush Limbaugh into Martin Luther King. People were fired from their jobs for making Kirk jokes. And the backlash to this How-Dare-You attitude is what led to Kirk’s memeification:

The practice is so widespread and Kirk’s face is being plastered on so many different kinds of images that it may actually be poisoning AI inputs and causing every image to look like Kirk. And it’s a direct backlash to the attempts to make him a martyr, as analyst Aidan Walker notes:

“The internet wanted to take control of his image. People took these Kirkification memes and used them as a way to destabilize whatever image conservatives wanted to create. And so I don’t think anyone will be able to look at Kirk 100 percent seriously now.”

This is the backdrop for the 1.2 million likes above mocking Erika Kirk. I’ve resisted doing any commentary on Kirk’s widow for almost half a year now, out of the basic belief that grieving family members should be given some grace and shouldn’t be subjected to the discourse cycle if they don’t want to. But as Kirk has continued growing her own profile, giving speeches, raising money, and making herself a political figure, that stance can’t really hold.

I don’t really care to get into the why of Erika Kirk. Maybe she’s just publicity and fame hungry, maybe she’s a true believer, or maybe she’s just been unwittingly sucked into a machine that profits when she makes embarrassing public appearances. But whatever the reason for her publicity spree, Druski’s video seems like the dam bursting, the final nail in the coffin of the Kirk family’s efforts and seriousness and respectability. The meme has spread so far that non-Kirk conservatives are getting hit with collateral damage.

Is Section 230 in danger?

A jury in Los Angeles found that both Meta and YouTube were negligent in a landmark trial concerning young people and social media, and awarded $3 million in damages to a young woman who said that she became addicted to the platforms. Just a day earlier, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico court to pay $375 million for violating state law and endangering children.

Long time readers will know that I’m very aware of the potential harms that social media can have on young people. I’m Haidt-pilled. And yet I’m pretty uncomfortable with the logical consequences of allowing individual users to sue platforms for emotional distress. The argument in this case was essentially that as a minor, the plaintiff was depressed and the platforms made her addicted and even more depressed with clever algorithmic design, infinite scrolling, etc. I hate to hand it to Taylor Lorenz, but I’m not sure she’s wrong here:

‘Social media made me depressed’ just doesn’t seem like a valid reason to be able to sue social media companies for millions of dollars. Imagine saying the same thing about cable news, or Spotify, or any other digital product. If reading the New York Times makes me anxious, is that worthy of legal damages? Can I sue Spotify’s algorithms if they realize I like sad, depressing music and keep feeding it to me? And if the answer is yes - are you prepared for the ramifications of that answer? It’s hard to see how social media as a business model could survive if every mentally ill person has carte blanche to sue at any time. Section 230 shields websites from being sued on the basis of user-generated content (it’s why you can’t sue corporate Substack if an individual blog libels you), and the First Amendment protects publishers. I’m very curious to see if this ruling will hold up on appeal, because I don’t see how it’s compatible with those two principles.

Of course, given that Taylor Lorenz was involved she wasn’t content to let it sit with ‘Section 230 is good and trying to undermine it is bad’. She also said, well…

Far be it from me to tell Taylor what to do, but someone who admits they have a daily average screen time of more than sixteen hours per day probably shouldn’t be the face of ‘social media addiction is fake’.

Links

• Repeat the mantra - It’s always in Infinite Scroll first. This time, it looks like The Atlantic and The Guardian only took a year to figure out what vice signaling is. And not a single backlink, sad!

• OpenAI has shut down video-generating app Sora. There are two basic reasons why this is happening. The first is simply that generating video is brutally expensive, even when compared to other AI uses. AI companies are virtually all in ‘happy to burn money startup mode’, but there’s a limit. There were rumors that training the next generation of Sora was going to be so resource intensive and require so much processing power it would slow down timelines on the company’s main product, ChatGPT. The second reason Sora’s dying is that OpenAI was attempting to grow it as a social media platform, not an individualized consumer application like ChatGPT. Much like Meta’s Vibes, the idea of an all-AI generated feed never took off at all.

• Twitter’s head of product Nikita Bier announced that they would be demonetizing accounts that comment on American politics while being overseas. Twitter’s new monetization scheme has created an entire industry of right-leaning ragebait accounts, a political slop economy chasing impressions any way they can, and it’s become a real problem for the site. The change was almost universally applauded, with the sole exception of said right-wing international accounts… who appealed directly to Elon Musk and got him to suspend the change.

• It’s more than I had time to cover here, but friend of the blog Cartoons Hate Her had a great summary of why ‘anal sex’ and ‘reflect on the blowjob’ were trending last weekend.

• It’s been a rough week for Clavicular - first he was arrested for battery in Florida, he’s under investigation by the Fish & Wildlife authorities for shooting up a dead alligator, and was somehow banned from Kick, the streaming site whose allure is letting any malcontent freak stream anything at all. And don’t forget last month’s drug charges in Arizona! The predictable consequences of looksmaxxing and brain-minning, I suppose.

• For all the bizarre headline enjoyers out there - Charlie Kirk’s Mentor Jeff Webb, the Father of Modern Cheerleading, Dies in Freak Pickleball Accident

• CBS News is facing a catastrophic ratings wipeout under Bari Weiss.

• Baltimore is first U.S. city to sue over Grok deepfake porn as legal pressure mounts on Musk’s xAI.

• The rise and fall of Fruit Love Island.

Posts

• One more incredible Japanese crossover post from X

• They got Olaf 😔✊

• A new pizza

• Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz

• Filterworld by Kyle Chayka

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Modem World by Kevin Driscoll

• The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes

Noelle Cook’s The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging is remarkably straightforward in its premise. Cook warns you up front that she won’t be reviewing the entire academic literature on conspiracy theories. She won’t be doing a deep dive into each branch of the various conspiracy communities, she won’t explain every belief system in depth, and she won’t be able to provide neat solutions for how to counter conspiracism.

Instead, she aims for something much smaller. The Conspiracists is a book about two particular women who fell down the rabbit hole of conspiracism. Rather than taking a ten-thousand foot view, Cook zooms all the way in for an intensely personal look at how these women joined conspiracy communities, how their new beliefs have shaped their lives, and what we can learn from them. It’s a micro-ethnography of sorts whose primary goal is to understand just those two women. Along the way, Cook explores how women in particular are drawn into conspiratorial thinking.

The result is a book that is at various points fascinating, infuriating, and heartbreaking. I’m always glad when a book is specific in its aims rather than trying to be all things on all topics, and Cook easily passes that test. The Conspiracists is a relatively short, focused book and is well worth your time to read. But because it’s so focused, it does leave plenty of room for additional commentary and connections. In particular, I want to talk about what the book doesn’t focus on, and how that explains much of what you see online and in our politics today.

The two subjects of The Conspiracists, Tammy and Yvonne, were both a part of the January 6th riot and were both convicted for crimes they committed that day.

Cook traces the arc of their journeys to Jan. 6th through what she calls ‘conspirituality’ - the unusual blend of New Age beliefs, crunchy wellness culture, and right wing conspiracism. Tammy and Yvonne are both middle-aged white women in their 50s, and both fell hard into New Age spirituality culture before making the transition from New Age woo to QAnon and outright conspiracy. Both believe in soul contracts, starseeds, and an idea alternately called ‘Ascension’ or ‘Disclosure’ - a pseudo-apocalyptic event where spiritually prepared humans will experience total enlightenment and ‘ascend into 5D’. They don’t just sort of, kind of believe these things. They jump into them head first. They stop paying bills because Ascension is imminent. They lose friends and families and whole communities because they can’t stop raving about conspiracy theories. They proudly call themselves conspiracy theorists.

The book functions as an interesting explanation of how these two women, and women in general, fall into beliefs like these. The New Age community is overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly white. It’s also older than you might expect, filled with Gen X and Boomers. For many, there’s a deep loneliness at the heart of New Age woo. The beliefs are attractive because these women are looking for anything at all to connect with, and New Age fills a hole, a need for belonging. In many cases, it also ends up deepening that loneliness by isolating them from their previous communities. Cook speculates that conservative/religious women in particular are vulnerable to this dynamic, because of how unimportant middle-aged women are in conservative circles. The modern right wing celebrates Trad Wives, but it’s always a young, beautiful, idealized form of femininity. Nobody’s ever celebrating or posting about the life of the Trad Wife once she’s turned fifty. And given how women are shut out of leadership positions in the most conservative and evangelical churches, it leaves middle-aged and older women with a dearth of meaning.

The book is filled with observations like this, and while it doesn’t try to advance a full theory of conspiracism, it’s insightful. At various points it uses Tammy and Yvonne’s lives to talk about ideas like:

• How conspirituality can paradoxically can make conservative women more heterodox when compared to traditional evangelicals or conservatives, and even give them a few progressive-sounding ideas.

• Similarly, how putting conservative/conspiratorial women into New Age woo communities makes the women more heterodox - but the large influx of conservatives also makes New Age itself more conservative over time.

• How messy their belief systems are. New Age, QAnon, and similar communities operate on a sort of a la carte model of belief, where there is no central doctrine and you’re welcome to pick and choose whatever you’d like to believe.

• How many people in conspiratorial communities are dealing with unresolved childhood abuse, addiction, PTSD, and other massive forms of trauma, and how conspiracies often function as a coping mechanism and a form of hope for the future.

• How COVID was the first ‘awakening’ for a gigantic number of current-day conspiracists.

The Conspiracists doesn’t cover everything about the subject, but it succeeds at drawing an evocative portrait of its two protagonists, who are fascinating and troubled and worth examination. It’s an arresting read, a well written book whose pages flew by for me. If you’re interested in the subject you should absolutely buy it.

As I said above, I deeply appreciate a book that can define its scope and stick to it. So when I say that there’s a lot of ground The Conspiracists doesn’t cover, it’s not a criticism. But it does mean that there’s a lot of space for additional commentary and analysis - and there’s one particular idea that the author dances around without fully addressing. And it’s a topic that deserves a fuller examination.

Read more

Should we welcome our new robot overlords? Fear them? This week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll is all about AI THREAT LEVELS, for every celebrity, publication, profession and concept you can think of.

CELEBRITIES: THREAT LEVEL MINIMAL

Why would celebrities be under threat from AI? Ask Zach Braff, whose ‘I AM NOT DATING AN AI CHATBOT’ t-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by his shirt. Or ask Zendaya, whose own family and friends were fooled by AI-generated wedding pictures of her and Tom Holland. Welcome to the future, where all men are gooning with chatbots and all women have deepfakes floating around. Still, these are minimal threats to the celebrity industrial complex - if there’s controversy, that only serves to stimulate more interest in the celebrities in question.

Meanwhile, Hollywood is all worked up about the newest AI creation, Tilly Norwood. Our dear Tilly is an ‘actress’ entirely generated by AI, and in order to showcase her talent ‘she’ has released a music video for her new single ‘Take The Lead’.

I’m struggling to describe to you how bad this video is - halfway through the video, my mind had already wandered into thinking about how the video would be improved if Tilly was to be suddenly and violently torn apart by orangutans. I was fantasizing about the death of someone, who I must remind you, is not technically alive. Seriously:

If you can watch that all the way through without pausing or vomiting, leave a comment and I will gift you a free month on your subscription.1 I think the celebrities and actors are safe for now. The video above is a technical marvel, yet has absolutely no artistic value whatsoever. It also just doesn’t give you a reason to care. We follow celebrities for the storylines, for the drama. Wake me up when AI is capable of hitting its own child in the face with a chair, that’s the kind of thing that gets the public going.

The one exception I see is how conservatives are following ‘influencers’ that are obviously AI by the millions (and even subscribing to the AI characters’ OnlyFans page). Not sure if this is a story about how porn is being automated, or about how Trump fans are just very, very dumb.

BASIC TASKS: THREAT LEVEL MODERATE

One of the paradoxes of current AI models is that they’re astoundingly capable in some areas, while being astoundingly incapable in other areas. Think about the most impressive thing you’ve seen AI do in the past month or so. Perhaps it created a beautiful work of art from a short prompt. Perhaps it gave you a deeply researched report on a niche academic topic, complete with many helpful citations and summaries. Maybe it helped you vibe-code a website.

With those capabilities in mind, watch ChatGPT’s bleeding-edge model fail to count to 200 dozens of times in a row:

Read more

A Simple Model of Influencer Endorsements

Imagine that you’re a well-known influencer. Your main source of income comes from sponsorships and product endorsements. You’re able to sell those endorsements and sponsorships because you have an audience that is both large and trusting of your recommendations. And so you make your content (YouTube videos, TikToks, Instagram posts, etc) and most of that content is Brought to you by HelloFresh or perhaps Sponsored by SquareSpace. It’s a cash for influence business.

Things normally go like this: You read some gushing, flattering copy about the quality of HelloFresh’s food and how wonderful and easy they are. HelloFresh gives you money for doing this. Some fraction of your audience will click the link, purchase HelloFresh meals, and make the whole enterprise worth it.

When you say “This is the easiest it’s ever been for me to make fresh meals at home! I’m a satisfied customer myself! I weep uncontrolled tears of ecstatic joy every time the package comes!” does your audience believe that’s literally true? Does it even matter if it’s true? Probably not. Your audience has seen you read or write ad copy for dozens of sponsors. They’re aware that you probably don’t actually cook HelloFresh every night and that you are not actually filled with ecstasy every time the HelloFresh delivery arrives. What they do probably expect is that you won’t endorse something that’s genuinely terrible - that HelloFresh won’t taste extremely bad, poison them, or scam them out of money. And since HelloFresh easily passes this standard, life for you as the influencer is good. Your standard is this: You can lie, but only a little.1

Shein’s Influencer Tour

Shein is a Chinese ‘fast fashion’ retailer. If you’re not familiar with the concept of fast fashion, it’s essentially mass-produced clothing from the developing world using cheap materials at cheap prices. There’s a focus on trends and ultra-fast iteration periods. The clothing is intended to be worn for a few months and then discarded, rather than made to last.

Fast fashion as an industry has come under a huge amount of scrutiny for sweatshop labor practices, environmentally unsustainable practices, and rampant intellectual theft.2 Shein is the ultra-hyper-mega version of fast fashion. Competitors like Zara or H&M might be cycling through tens of thousands of unique products, but Shein is cycling through hundreds of thousands, or even millions. By reputation Shein is the cheapest, makes by far the most unique items, and turns them around the fastest.

They also have a super-sized amount of controversy. Rather than list it all out, I’ll just link to their Wikipedia controversy section, which includes fun sections like ‘Xinjiang Controversy’, ‘Lead Toxicity’, ‘Rampant IP Theft’ and ‘Human Rights Violations involving Slave Labor’. You can easily lose several hours investigating it all.

So what’s a brand to do with so much controversy? Well, Shein is already popular among a certain set of online influencers. Shein hauls - videos where you order dozens of items at time, showing off a giant haul of cheap clothing - have been a well-worn video archetype for years. If you’re Shein, why not have all these influencers endorse you and say nice things? Even better: why not bring them to a carefully controlled Chinese factory and have them directly rebuke all those supposed controversies?

That’s exactly what Shein did, and that’s where Shein misunderstood the relationship between influencers and their audiences.

You Can Lie, But Only A Little

Shein arranged a tour for a group of influencers3 to come to China and see Shein’s factories. Specifically, one very carefully stage-managed factory. The Potemkin village of factories, you might say. The influencers ate it up, proclaimed everything was wonderful, and said that people should reject the ‘narrative fed to the US’ about how Shein is bad. The internet predictably dragged these folks mercilessly for thoughtlessly spouting Shein propaganda, and the influencers were forced into video deletions, backtracking, and defensive non-apologies.

As is usually the case here, I believe the least interesting part of this story is the ‘Is Shein Evil?’ component. I’m sure Shein has done a lot of unsavory stuff4 en route to fast fashion dominance, but plenty of people are already writing about that. It’s more interesting to ask why the internet exploded with anger at this particular moment. After all, Shein has a been a prominent retailer among influencers for years!

As an influencer, you’re not expected to be 100% honest with every endorsement you give. If you’re a personal finance influencer and you are sponsored by Charles Schwab retirement accounts, it’s understood that you may not actually have a Charles Schwab account yourself. It might not be the best retirement account ever as you’re describing it. But that’s ok as long as Charles Schwab is trustworthy enough. On the other hand, if you’re a mainstream personal finance influencer and you start touting memecoins and sketchy crypto sites, your audience will be extremely angry. You can bend the truth, but not break it. You can lie, but only a little.

Fashion influencers doing simple Shein haul videos are on the correct side of that line. Even if Shein is evil, your audience will forgive you for being a little ignorant of that. They’ll let you ignore the horrible practices, to some extent. What they won’t let you do is actively participate in hiding the horrible things, or in making the propaganda yourself. In terms of Shein’s perceived problematic behavior, these influencers moved from ignorant to complicit. Never cross the line from ignorant to complicit.

There’s also an interesting interplay here between fans and influencers that doesn’t exist in traditional marketing. If Burger King or Shein or Home Depot engages in deceptive marketing, people might get a little mad. But they won’t usually feel outraged or betrayed, because it’s expected that brand marketing is essentially propaganda. On the other hand, if an influencer personally engages in propaganda on behalf of one of those brands, they risk a much more severe backlash.

Every influencer is a business, an operation that trades audience size and influence for cash. But they’re also a person, and their power is built on their reputation and their parasocial connection with their audience. That’s the duality of life as an influencer. If the audience feels an influencer is lying to them or engaging in unethical behavior, they’re going to feel personally betrayed. It’s far more severe violation of trust. Parasocial relationships can be ruined in a way that a relationship with Home Depot or Coca-Cola can’t be.

Ultimately that’s the lesson I take from this entire outrage cycle - if you’re an influencer you need to hoard your credibility like gold. When you’re trading your influence for money, you can lie a little bit. You can fudge the truth, exaggerate about your sponsors. Sure, you ‘use NordVPN everyday’, wink wink. You can even sometimes ignore problematic aspects of the companies giving you money. But there is a line. Endorse especially horrible things, or actively participate in the deception, and you’re not just risking your own audience turning on you. You’ll potentially face the wrath of the wider internet as well.

I’m also guessing that like many of you, my brain is a little bit broken from being on the internet for so many years. I have a tendency to think of major geopolitical events in terms of pop culture references and memes, and while it’s often an annoying habit I can’t entirely shake it for two reasons. First, because the damage from being so online can’t easily be reversed. And second, because while it sounds insane, memes often carry the perfect amount of information density. They’re metaphors to explain complex situations in terms that people can intuitively understand. References become heavily memetic because they work so well at explaining and spreading ideas.

That’s why I’ve spent the last two days wondering how it is that America has come to be ruled by Underpants Gnomes.

There’s a classic episode of the television show South Park titled ‘Gnomes’, where a group of secretive gnomes are stealing the underpants of children all around the town. When confronted, the gnomes claim to be master businessmen who have a foolproof plan to make big money:

At the risk of dissecting the frog, the humor obviously comes from the missing segment in the middle. It’s the most important segment! Oh, you crazy little gnomes!

The gnomes know what action they’ve taken. They know what ultimate result they desire. They just don’t have any concrete plan to connect action with outcome. There’s no mechanism to make that happen at all.

The Trump administration’s adventures in policymaking are increasingly gnome-like:

The US military was capable of taking out the Ayatollah and killing a bunch of high-level officials. So what? They’ve already elected a new interim Supreme Leader and it seems highly unlikely the government will collapse. Sure, the US and Israel are eliminating a great deal of Iran’s military capabilities via missiles and bombing runs. What’s next? There’s clearly no appetite whatsoever for boots on the ground, and you can’t force a regime change solely through air power. Iran’s opposition is fractured and unarmed, and the Iranian regime has already proven themselves willing to kill tens of thousands of peaceful protesters. Trump directly told Iranian citizens to “take over your government. It will be yours to take”. How exactly is bombing Iran going to allow them to do that? It’s Underpants Gnomes logic.1

The same logic applies to the operation that kidnapped Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela:

The ‘kidnap Maduro’ phase was accomplished easily. Full success! The capabilities of the American military were never really in question. Trump proclaimed that America was going to run Venezuela after the operation finished. “We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. We don’t want to be involved with having someone else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country.”

And yet months later, nothing in Venezuela has changed. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez stepped into the role of President. The socialist party PSUV still rules the country. The military, judiciary and legislature are all still dominated by regime allies. The removal of Maduro did not magically break down institutions that have retained power for decades.

The Trump administration says it’s aiming for certain outcomes. It takes decisive action. But it fails to have any idea whatsoever how to connect those decisive actions to the outcomes they supposedly want.

The same logic applies to a wide variety of the Trump administration’s signature policies. Trump has placed tariffs on nearly every country in the world, across a dizzying array of industries and products. When he’s not claiming the tariffs are for negotiating leverage, or for national security reasons, or just because someone was mean to him on a phone call, he tends to associate tariffs with the revival of American manufacturing. But how? How does putting tariffs on vanilla beans and bananas promote American manufacturing? The data shows that manufacturing has been in decline under Trump, despite the tariffs. Economists are screaming to anyone who will listen that tariffs end up harming more manufacturing jobs than they create, because they raise input prices for things like steel, lumber, and intermediate parts. But Trump doesn’t care. Step one - massive tariffs. Step two - ???? And step three, voilà - manufacturing is back. We’ll figure out the big ???? in step two at some point.

The more you look, the more you’re going to see this pattern. Want to control the border and reduce illegal immigration?

• Step one - Masked agents run rampant through that notable hotspot of illegal immigration… Minneapolis.

• Step two - ????

• Step three - The border with Mexico is now secure.

Mad at China? See them as a geopolitical rival who needs to be contained and isolated?

• Step one - Tariff, insult, and piss off every major American ally.

• Step two - ????

• Step three - China is now isolated and contained.

This has gone about as well as you’d expect, with Canada signing new trade deals with China in response to threats to make them the 51st state.

The common thread in these cases is a reliance on intuition, a vibes-based approach to governance. Trump understands politics in the same way he understands professional wrestling. It’s a clash of wills, a contest of bravado. Loud spectacles are better than quieter, more careful approaches. Trump builds his politics around big, showy moments without any idea how those showy moments will translate into lasting results.

His administration will identify an objective - eliminate a dictator, secure the border, make America great again - and take some bold action that symbolically aligns with that objective. But there’s almost never any real plan for the symbolic action to lead to the desired outcome.

The Underpants Gnomes believed that collecting underwear would eventually lead to profit. They just never explained how, or even realized that they had a massive hole in their logic. Trump is an Underpants Gnome, convinced of his own genius, completely oblivious to the gaping chasms in the middle of his plans.

Sometimes you’ll see people desperately trying to work out some sort of secret logic behind Trump’s actions. Surely there must be an explanation, a plan, a memo that explains it all. Surely the people running the most powerful government in the world aren’t total idiots. They have access to intelligence we don’t. They have expertise that would make the missing middle step clear, if only it were revealed. Surely Trump is just playing five-dimensional chess and we mortals are too stupid to keep up.

Over time, that charitable assumption becomes harder to believe. There are simply too many instances of grand declarations followed by actions that bear only the faintest relationship to the stated goal - with the grand declaration later quietly abandoned, thrown down the memory hole like so many Infrastructure Weeks.

Watching this all happen creates an uncanny form of political despair. It sucks here, being governed by Underpants Gnomes. You’re left with two choices, both miserable. You can choose to believe that the people making the decisions are genuinely incapable of understanding the world around them, idiots who can’t recognize the gaps in their own logic, stumbling from one clueless decision to the next. Or you can choose to believe that the stated goals are not the real goals at all. Maybe our politicians are simply liars, and that they have no shame about being liars. They don’t even bother to lie badly any more. In the words of Senator Dasi Oran, that’s the final humiliation.

What makes this especially maddening is the sense of powerlessness it produces. We’re all asked to treat each new administration policy as serious statecraft. We’re reduced to debating the merits of actions whose underlying theory of success has never been articulated. Commentators scramble to reverse-engineer the logic after the fact, like scholars trying to decipher an ancient text whose middle pages have been burned away. It sucks. And meanwhile, we all have to live with the very real consequences of all these actions - wars, economic disruption, diplomatic decay, and more.

It’s incredibly difficult for me to be calm about all this, and maybe for you as well. I feel a kind of impotent rage at the entire Trump administration, whose causal logic appears to mostly consist of a blank space labeled “?????”. We shouldn’t have to put up with this. I shouldn’t be required to write, here at the end of this essay, that in politics it’s actually pretty crucial to understand how your actions will lead to the results you want. To state the obvious, what happens in the middle step is massively important. Policies that skip those middle stages - where all the hard and thankless work takes place - are doomed to fail. That’s where you build institutions, align incentives, maintain systems, and make sure that all the tricky details are correct.

But we’re governed by a man whose model of the world involves none of that. And eventually you realize the explanation is never coming, the question marks aren’t a placeholder for some secret plan. They are the plan.

Last weekend, a controversy exploded at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards. During the ceremony John Davidson, a man with Tourette syndrome whose life inspired a BAFTA-winning film, repeatedly interrupted the show with obscene outbursts, including shouting the n-word as black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were presenting an award. The episode instantly dominated online conversations; it pitted two historically disadvantaged groups against each other—black attendees subjected to a racial slur, and a person with a disability who routinely faces ostracization. The “Which marginalized group is really worse off here?” nature of the incident led to a firestorm of controversy, at the center of which is the idea of inclusivity—that despite the challenges that Tourette’s poses, excluding individuals with Tourette syndrome would be wrong.

Reacting to this debate, a user on the Tourette subreddit stated, “You are allowed to exist in public.” At the risk of sounding like the villain, I’m not sure that slogan is universally true.

To be clear, society should absolutely make reasonable accommodations for people who have conditions like Tourette syndrome. Historically people with disabilities have often been segregated or shut out of public life entirely, and we shouldn’t accept that as normal. Disabled people shouldn’t be discriminated against in housing or in professions where their disability isn’t material to their work. We should all have patience and understanding as they navigate daily life, and people with disabilities like Tourette’s deserve dignity like anyone else.

But if you are someone who literally and physically cannot prevent yourself from screaming the n-word at black folks in front of thousands of people (and millions watching at home), I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that you should perhaps stay home from the BAFTAs and send in a pre-recorded message instead. Inclusion doesn’t require that every single space accommodate every possible behavior, regardless of the cost to others.

At the BAFTAs, for the benefit of one person—who described himself as “deeply mortified,” left the ceremony partway through, and likely had a miserable time—two presenters had to withstand racial slurs, thousands of guests had their ceremony disrupted repeatedly, and millions of people heard the slurs broadcast. That level of “inclusion” did nobody any good. Instead, it alienated far more people than it included.

Karl Popper introduced the idea of the paradox of tolerance—that by tolerating intolerance, you erode the conditions that make tolerance possible. Here, we see a paradox of inclusivity. When inclusion becomes unconditional—when no behavior is too disruptive, no boundary legitimate—shared spaces collapse. The BAFTAs were so inclusive they ended up excluding people.

Award ceremonies themselves are low stakes. The millionaire movie stars will be fine. But this same dynamic applies to much more consequential parts of our lives…

The Dispatch normally has a paywall, but Infinite Scroll readers get a gift link - check out the full article over at The Dispatch!

The Weekly Scroll is usually paywalled, but this week it’s 100% free! If you enjoy the newsletter, please join as a free or paid subscriber to show your support. Paid subs make the newsletter possible and get every single update.

It’s Time For Trans Discourse (Again)

Last week, The Argument published an interesting piece arguing that the public backlash to the trans rights movement is real and significant. They commissioned a poll that showed public support for various transgender-related policies backsliding - as one example, a majority used to oppose ‘bathroom bills’ that would force trans people to use the bathrooms of their biological sex but now a majority support those bills. It’s not just hardcore Trump fans either. A huge chunk of independents and Democrats oppose policies like puberty blockers and surgery for minors, trans women in sports, etc.

Progressives on social media took this post in the way you’d probably anticipate, by attempting to shoot the messenger 10,000 times directly in the face. Activist/poster types on X were angry, and those over in the BlueSky echo chamber were apocalyptic. “Lakshya has always been trash”! “They want to murder me and everyone like me”! “[Lakshya], since we were mutuals for a long time: fuck you, I hope you and your bullshit publication fail.” And those were some of the nicer messages!

Why would they freak out so badly? The article wasn’t arguing against trans rights - it was purely describing the results of a poll. If an issue that’s important to you was deeply unpopular, wouldn’t you want to know?

Long-time readers will recognize this as yet another instance of Arguments As Soldiers:

There are two ways to argue on the internet. One way is to argue at an object level - is this thing true or not? What are the facts? What is the clearest way to interpret this data? You’re trying to reason and debate your way to some version of what the ground-level truth is. This way of arguing is productive, beneficial, and rare.

The more common way to argue is to treat the discussion as a war. The person arguing against you is an enemy combatant, and arguments are soldiers. The purpose of an argument in this paradigm is not to discover the truth or reach some mutual level of understanding. The purpose of an argument is to crush the enemy.

Most people treat political arguments online like a battlefield, and any concession that the other side has anything at all going for them isn’t a sign that you’re being humble and evidence-based in your thinking. It’s a sign that you are a traitor. Admitting that your arguments are unpopular is the same thing as stabbing your own soldiers in the back in a time of war! For Lakshya’s critics, publishing polling that shows left-leaning trans policies are unpopular is akin to giving aid to the enemy. It’s even worse than being an enemy, it’s being a traitor.

Plenty of people did come to Lakshya’s defense, but you’ll rarely see as clean a divide between what Julia Galef calls the Scout Mindset vs Soldier Mindset.

In other trans-related news! Every time there’s a mass shooter now, conservatives rush online to declare the shooter was probably a mentally ill trans person, and progressives rush online to declare the shooter was probably a neo-Nazi Trump supporter. It was probably only a matter of time before we finally had a shooting where the shooter was both a mentally ill trans person AND a neo-Nazi Trump supporter. Welcome to politics in 2026, baby.

Woke 2.0 Has Arrived

A Theory of Clavicular

I want to make an admission here. I’ve written about Clavicular and looksmaxxing memes/drama a few times, but I had kind of assumed this was going to be a flash in the pan. Here today, forgotten tomorrow, the latest in a long line of ephemeral online nonsense. Damn, Daniel but for smashing your face with a hammer.

I was wrong! I was so, so wrong. The chadmaxxing/mogging conversations have continued and even surpassed Clavicular himself. There’s an entire ecosystem of absurd men and they’re the most clippable people on the planet. Remember the ASU frat leader who brutally frame mogged Clavicular? Well an Australian looksmaxxer has sworn to avenge him:

Unfortunately for Androgenic, his status as a TERA-CHAD and his #2 ranking on the Official Chad Leaderboard did not help him when he was brutally exposed as a fraud by a low-tier jester. The video below has no right to be as funny as it is.

Androgenic, may the lord rest his soul, dropped from #2 to #53 (below Piers Morgan????) on the global Chad leaderboard:

The ASU Frat Leader (who is never referred to by his actual name, just ‘ASU Frat Leader’, like he’s an eldritch horror in a bad fantasy novel) has taken this as a sign of total victory. He’s been streaming, clubbing, celebrating and living large ever since he successfully framed mogged Clavicular and saw his rival Androgenic get caught fraudmaxxing his hairline. When ASU Frat Leader rolls up to the club, there are people shooting off fireworks and carrying signs proclaiming his Chad-ness:

I love every part of this. I love the sudden rise and fall of Androgenic. I love that Clavicular is so focused on steroids and hitting his face with a hammer that he’s never heard of Zohran Mamdani. I love that ASU Frat Leader may not even be in a fraternity. I love the way that every single one of these guys looks like an AI-generated male sex doll and talks like their brain is made out of mashed potatoes. I love the way that every cultural or geopolitical event is now described in terms of mogging, maxxing, and cortisol spikes.

But mostly, what I really love is that social media has, at long last, reinvented soap operas and professional wrestling (which are the same thing, just gender-swapped) from first principles. Bizarre looking characters? Dramatic storylines? Weird terminology? Fighting that doesn’t end up being real? We’re hitting all the boxes. But unlike soaps and WWE, which relied on professionally written pre-planned narratives, this is completely distributed storytelling. What’s really driving this are a non-centralized army of clippers who comb through livestreams looking for short videos that can go viral on X, Reddit, and TikTok, and compete to see who can find the weirdest and most viral clips. If there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s creating lore out of random events for no earthly reason at all and then somehow making it incredibly funny and memorable. I can’t wait to see what happens next episode.

12 years since Twitch Beat Pokémon

Speaking of how the internet can create lore out of absolutely ridiculous situations - It’s been 12 years since Twitch played Pokémon.

If you weren’t around back then, I’m so sorry. You missed, without any exaggeration, one of the most magical episodes in the entire history of the internet.

The experiment started in early February 2014, and had a very simple setup. A programmer started a game of Pokémon and streamed it live on Twitch. Rather than using his own inputs, he coded a bot to take whatever button press commands were typed into Twitch chat (up, down, left, right, A, B, Start) and use those to control the game. The concept quickly attracted tens of thousands of concurrent viewers, all inputting commands and trying to control the character simultaneously. It was the gaming equivalent of 10,000 monkeys on 10,000 typewriters trying to write Shakespeare, and exactly as absurd and glorious as you’d think.

This crowd-controlled play style made even the simplest tasks in the game nearly impossible at times. But somehow, the crowd was able to slowly progress through the game. Fans created a ridiculous amount of lore around the incredibly bizarre situations the main character was forced into. Eventually, with a few unbelievably lucky breaks, Twitch chat managed to beat the entire game. This consumed nearly the entire social internet in early 2014. I recall literally calling in sick from work to watch the final few days of this, and I know I wasn’t the only one. It was a moment that probably won’t ever be recreated, but I still get nostalgic remembering it.1

NBA Burner Drama

Kevin Durant is a 16-time NBA All-Star, a 2-time NBA Champion, a former MVP, and one of the 20 or so best basketball players in the history of the sport. He also appears to be an incredibly petty bitch on social media, as evidenced by the fact that he’s been caught talking shit about his teammates on a burner account.

The account, named ‘getoffmydickerson’, has not been definitively proven to be Durant’s. But it’s been an open secret in league circles for years that Durant keeps burner accounts where he talks about hoops, and the account (now protected) only ever interacted with accounts that were mutual followers of Durant’s and exclusively talked about Durant’s teams and teammates. Other NBA accounts would ask Sir Dickerson questions as though he were Durant, and he’d answer them. The leaks include group chats where Durant compared former teammates and coaches to Stalin and Hitler, called a current teammate ‘lowkey retarded’, and joked about sending drones to Gaza.

Perhaps the wildest part is that the group chats aren’t even with other celebrities or famous NBA players. They’re with a collection of his online stan community.

Remember the founding thesis of this blog - posting is the most powerful force in the universe. You really, truly cannot understand the internet unless you internalize this deep in your soul. Durant is one of the greatest basketball players of all time. His net worth is in the hundreds of millions. He’s impossibly famous, rich, and accomplished… and he still has a burning need to talk shit online so he can look cool to random teenagers in a group chat.

Links

• This is the first scandal of its kind that I’m aware of - a prominent journalist for The Guardian has been credibly accused of using AI to generate his articles in their entirety.

• College students would need to be paid $59 to delete TikTok - but would PAY $28 for someone to force them and all their friends to deactivate it at the same time.

• OpenAI has finally discontinued ChatGPT 4o, famously the most ‘boyfriendable’ of all the mainstream chatbots. The AI-relationship community is not taking it well - see a great recap of the drama here.

• Welcome to Substack, George W. Bush and Grindr.

• The Internet’s Nihilism Crisis

• Welcome to the Group Chat

• Child’s Play

Posts

• One of the funniest interviews I’ve seen this year

• Why do hedgehogs have spikes?

• The best AI generated song I’ve ever heard

• Extremely important potato ability

Think back to February 2020.

If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren’t paying close attention. The stock market was doing great, your kids were in school, you were going to restaurants and shaking hands and planning trips. If someone told you they were stockpiling toilet paper you would have thought they’d been spending too much time on a weird corner of the internet. Then, over the course of about three weeks, the entire world changed. Your office closed, your kids came home, and life rearranged itself into something you wouldn’t have believed if you’d described it to yourself a month earlier.

I think we’re in the “this seems overblown” phase of something much, much bigger than Covid.

The post compares the current moment in AI development to the weeks before COVID really blew up - a time when smart people could see the world was about to change, even while most people were unaware. The post might be the first X ‘article’ to have ever escaped containment and actually spread beyond just X, and inspired yet another round of AI discourse.

There’s a pattern these debates normally follow. You have your AI boosters who think everything is going to change. There are dozens of rapturous essays floating around about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw1 and how AI agents are going to revolutionize absolutely everything. If you don’t have an army of agents running tasks for you right now, what are you even doing? You’re not gonna make it. Closely intertwined with the utopian evangelists are the doomers who believe the same future is coming, but that this is a huge problem that leads to mass unemployment at best and literal Terminator scenarios at worst. There are some folks warning about the destructive risks coming from AI, and it’s not just random people - it includes Mrinank Sharma, the head of safety at Anthropic, who resigned last week in a very public open letter.

You also have AI skeptics who think the entire thing is fake, a house of cards about to collapse. It’s a time bomb, proclaims Ed Zitron. They don’t even have a business model, claims Ross Barkan. They are not ‘smart’ in any sense of the word, says Tyler Austin Harper.

I’m normally hesitant to jump into giving hot takes on the future of AI. It’s not my area of expertise, everyone involved is speculating, and I’m not sure that the thousandth version of AI Gods Are Inevitable, And That Is Great/Awful or AI is a Giant Scam, You Utter Fools is particularly useful to anyone. But what I am interested in, and what I like to think I’m good at, is examining the social dynamics behind discourses like this. And what I notice about every side of the AI debate is how deeply committed everyone involved is to posting their way through it.

In truth, Something Big Is Happening is not the first article of its kind. There have been dozens of articles written like this before - usually on less public sites, like the EA Forums - and there have already been imitators that have popped up in its aftermath.

But the trajectory of these kinds of posts has changed recently. They’ve become more frequent and more evangelical in nature, perhaps rationally so as AI keeps advancing. But in addition to the frequency and the tone of the posts, this debate is far more public than it’s ever been. It’s not enough to believe in a particular theory of AI, you have to post about it publicly. You have to write an article. You have to write a long letter explaining why you joined a company, or why you left.

There are a lot of reasons why people might be posting more frequently. The original author of the letter is the CEO of a small AI company, and may just be a grifter - he’s got a history of hyping slop, and has been accused of fraud and cheating benchmarks before. There have been increasingly fervent rounds of discourse about OpenClaw, MoltBook, and this particular hype article, and it’s likely some of that is opportunist bandwagoners trying to make a buck. Less cynically, it’s clearly the case that many of the people working inside AI have very strong feelings about it. Mrinank Sharma is an AI safety researcher, it’s natural and predictable that if he thinks AI is heading in a dangerous direction, he’d want to express himself.

But Mrinank isn’t alone. OpenAI Is Making the Mistakes Facebook Made. I Quit, wrote OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig in the New York Times. A former DeepMind employee is speaking out in Time Magazine. xAI cofounder Jimmy Ba left the company last week with an announcement on X, as did Tony Wu and almost a dozen other prominent xAI figures. Every single one had a public post explaining why they left, how they felt, and their general feelings about the coming AI revolution. And all of these examples are from the last ten days! That’s a genuinely crazy amount of public posting in a short time, but if you go back further, you can find many, many more instances.

You can’t just believe things about AI quietly. You have to announce what you believe. You need to vague-post about how ‘Something is Happening’. You need an article, a manifesto, a capital-T Theory of the Case. You need a Substack, or god forbid, a podcast. It’s easy to overlook this, or say that things have always been this way. But posting is the most powerful force in the universe, and we forget that at our peril.

What’s happening here, underneath the surface, is that we’ve lost the ability to contextualize meaning independent of social media.

A few years ago I wrote a post about how technology profanes the sacred where I said:

People crave sacredness and ritual… They find meaning in these social connections and cultural practices. It’s a way to link yourself to something important - whether it be a wider community, a holy text or a God, other people that you love, a beautiful and breathtaking physical space, or a cultural tradition that goes back generations. And social media by its nature degrades that kind of practice.

After all, imagine a sacred ritual you’re undertaking with other people. It could be a wedding, a religious service, etc. What’s the most embarrassing, thoughtless thing you could do during the middle of it? Have your smartphone loudly ring and buzz, repeatedly. Or use your phone in the middle of the ritual, paying little attention to those around you.

We instinctively recognize, even if we don’t always put it into words, that some places are not meant to be profaned with technology. I cannot imagine how mortified I would be if, while sitting in the shrine of St. Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey with other worshippers, my phone rang. Typically, we’re able to shame people into behaving correctly in instances like that. But for the private rituals that can give us meaning - a morning walk in a forest, quiet coffee with a loved one, a night time prayer - it’s all too easy for technology to intrude.

For as long as humans have existed, we’ve created meaning out of ritual. Sometimes these rituals were religious in nature. Sometimes they were built around community or family. Sometimes they were long standing cultural practices. But they existed to ground our lives with purpose and significance.

What we have today is an algorithmic system where people increasingly try to construct meaning out of social media. Why does every view on AI need to be publicly declaimed in a viral post, an op-ed, or a public statement? Because we no longer know how to find meaning if we don’t post about what we believe. If we don’t have quantifiable metrics from social media, or if we can’t literally count how viral we are, how do we know if our worldview is valid or not? If your letter about why you left your company doesn’t get at least 5,000 likes, is it even worth leaving?

There’s a thin line between actually believing in something, and giving the public performance of believing it. And while only the lord above can judge any specific individual, I feel pretty confident that at least some of the people above are performing their opinions for approval of the crowd.

Technology has become a filter for meaning, and nothing seems to have meaning if it’s not algorithmically approved of. And technology is terrible at this. Our current systems of social media are built to maximize engagement, to feed you a constant drip-drip-drip of content that doesn’t enlighten and doesn’t really even entertain as much as it distracts. There is no way to construct purpose out of an infinite scroll that aims to continually micro-dose you on dopamine hits so that you don’t close the app and harm KPIs on a dashboard somewhere. This is not where meaning comes from, but it’s where we’re trying and failing to find it. And the people working at frontier AI labs are just as vulnerable to that dynamic as the rest of us.

I said near the beginning of this post that I was hesitant to give hot takes about the future of AI, but against my better judgment I’m going to try. Let’s go back to the original post we were talking about - the one that compares today to February 2020. And let’s do the author the courtesy of taking that analogy seriously.

We all know what happened in 2020. COVID was a minor story until, in a very short amount of time, it completely changed the world. That’s the thing with exponential curves - they can easily be mistaken for a flat line right up until the point they go exponential. COVID altered so many things about human society on a fundamental level. It changed how we work, how we ate, how we connected to people. It constrained us in physical spaces. It caused booms in some industries while nearly destroying others. It shook governments, businesses, families and every level of society… for a while.

Then we adapted. We figured out workarounds, we developed vaccines, and we got on with life. A few years later, society is plodding along just fine. That’s how you should think about AI.

AI is going to change a lot of things. It might revolutionize a lot of different parts of society, harming some people and boosting others. It might radically reshape some of our institutions. But you know what will happen? Humans will adjust those institutions, we’ll tear some things down and build newer, different things, and we’ll keep on going. Just like we did with COVID.

Here’s what I don’t worry about. I don’t worry that AI is going to kill billions of people. I don’t worry that it’s going to lead to mass unemployment or a permanent underclass. I also don’t think it will lead to a near-term utopia, or that we’re going to experience the Singularity.2 Will things change? Sure. And just like COVID, that transition will cause disruption. It won’t be pain free and maybe we’ll have some scars from the rapid change, the stretch marks of birthing a new world. But it won’t be an end, it’ll be a transition. It won’t change everything immediately, it will take many years. Society will, for the most part, be fine.

Here’s what I do worry about. We live in a world where we’ve increasingly replaced backyard barbecues with scrolling TikTok in an isolated bedroom. More and more people, despite immense material wealth, are lonely and frustrated and bored, digitally bowling alone through lives they’re not sure have any deeper meaning. I’d like to reverse that trend, but I worry that AI will accelerate it.

It’s bad enough that we now use likes and follows to construct meaning. But what does meaning look like in a world dominated by AI? What happens to human connections when you can have an AI companion rather than real friends? What happens when posting is even more effortless and frictionless, when the velocity of AI-generated content is overwhelming? What happens to intellectual pursuits when you can simply have an AI think for you? We started this essay discussing the article Something Big Is Happening, which positions itself as a form of warning. And I think it is a warning, but not in the way the author intended. The article itself is pretty clearly written by AI, leaving me to wonder - is the author actually capable of making the argument without the assistance of AI? Or is he merely picking up a idea he’s heard secondhand and getting an AI to create a worldview for him? Has he turned himself into the stochastic parrot, dully repeating the output of his chatbot’s prompts, unable to think independent thoughts or analyze the world without an AI to guide him?

The same things matter to people that have always mattered. Human relationships. Community. Family. The pain and joy of struggling for a worthy cause. The determination to do hard things, to create beautiful art, to contribute to something larger than oneself. These are still what bring meaning to life, and I worry that they’re becoming harder to reach. If you’re worried about anything with AI, worry about this - that if we’re not careful, technology will disrupt the things that make us human in the first place.

In this episode of the sporadically-released Infinite Scroll podcast, I talk with Congressman Jake Auchincloss about his new bill, the Parents Over Platforms Act. For the most part, I am someone who has been skeptical of many past efforts to regulate child safety online. I think there are a number of ways those efforts could go very badly. But I’m also increasingly skeptical of the idea that we should simply do nothing. Congressman Auchincloss’s bill, at least to me, seems more nuanced and less likely to have negative repercussions when compared with other bills on child safety, and even if you don’t agree I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Not a paid subscriber? Join today and get 30% off by clicking the button below!

Get 30% off here

Clavicular goes Jestergooning

There are times writing this newsletter when I realize the words on the page are indistinguishable from a schizophrenic fever dream. I’ll try to explain what’s happening online to an offline friend, only to find them slowly backing away and signaling for help.

Anyways!

You’re laughing? Clavicular is out there getting brutally frame mogged by frat leaders and you’re laughing?

Clavicular, you might recall, is one of the characters from Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes’s nightmare blunt rotation a few weeks ago. As best I can tell he’s not a dedicated bigot the way the Tates and Fuentes are. He’s instead part of the incel-adjacent ‘looksmaxxing’ community, which uses controversial methods to maintain attractiveness like steroids to build muscle, crystal meth to stay skinny, and ‘bone-smashing’1 to build prominent facial features. He obviously leans to the right (nobody hangs out with Nick Fuentes by accident), but to give an idea of this guy’s level of political sophistication, here are his thoughts on a Gavin Newsom vs JD Vance presidential race:

Comparing the relative merits of Mr Vance with Gavin Newsom, the 19-year-old Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, said that the California governor was a “liar” and a “degenerate” but said he would vote for him “100 times over”, purely based on looks.

“JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom mogs,” Mr Peters told The Daily Wire, using internet slang meaning to outshine someone. “[Mr Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three ‘chad’.”

Another choice quote - “All I think about is content. I’m sorry, bro. Like, dude, I literally only think about content. You’ve got to understand.” There’s not a lot going on upstairs, but Clavicular has shown a knack for getting attention online the past few days. In addition to getting brutally frame mogged above, he was also interviewed by the New York Times and tapped out by a shit talking liberal on the jiu jitsu mats. Also, this post went viral:2

First - if you understood what this sentence is saying, you will never see the kingdom of heaven. A real Curtains For Zoosha moment. Second - you may be wondering why any of this is worth covering. What we have is a bunch of loser rage bait accounts using incel slang to make stupid posts about a very stupid influencer go viral. What’s the big deal?

Here’s where I really sound like a crazy person - there is zero daylight between this kind of incel-coded manosphere influencer and the current presidential administration running the United States of America. On the same day the post above went viral, the Department of War was posting incel slang memes like Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing. The entire reason Pete Hegseth is obsessed with renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War is because it ‘mogs’ like a ‘chad’. Groypers who speak in incel slang now dominate the young conservative movement. And if all of this is a little too abstract for you, here’s JD Vance ignoring his wife at the Olympics to talk to sentient neck tattoo Jake Paul. Someone should hang this image in the Louvre, because I don’t know that we’ll ever get a better symbolic representation of what Vance actually values in life.

In related news, the President of the United States sent this video over Truth Social a few days ago:

The White House first defended the video, then after intense backlash from their allies deleted the post and blamed it on a staffer. At first I thought it was plausible that a staffer would post something like this, because about half of young conservative staffers are authentically racist. But on second thought, this was definitely Trump. Your groyper staffers like to post sonnenrads, groyper memes and incel slang. They like to be edgy and coded with 1488 symbolism. The partial deniability is part of the fun. But ‘black people are monkeys’? That’s boomer racism. That’s all Trump.

When the Department of War talks about ‘lethality maxxing’, that’s a 26-year-old heavily online groyper staffer. When Trump sends out a video on Truth Social that shows the Obamas as monkeys, that’s him. And this unholy alliance of old school racists and young online groypers is at the distressing core of the MAGA movement. I hate that these are distinctions you need to know about, but welcome to politics in 2026.

Will Stancil vs The Anarchists

Meanwhile in Minnesota, the progressive Politburo has exiled Will Stancil for crimes against the Party:

Read more

It’s hard getting older. It’s hard realizing you don’t know what all the kids are talking about these days, but don’t worry. If you’ve ever been confused and wondered what exactly a Roblox is, I’m here to help. This is everything you ever wanted to know about Roblox, but were too afraid to ask a 12-year-old.

Roblox is the biggest video game in the world

Roblox is the biggest video game in the world. It’s free to play, and available on nearly every platform - Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Android, iOS, and more. It’s known for bad graphics, user-generated experiences, and having an extremely young user base.

For many kids, Roblox isn’t just a game. It’s where they hang out after school, it’s how they express themselves creatively, it’s where they try on new identities and learn social dynamics. Roblox is deeply integrated into the formative experiences of childhood for a surprisingly large number of kids today, and is quietly one of the most important cultural forces in America.

How do you play Roblox?

Roblox is not really a video game in the sense most people understand video games. It’s more of a platform. When you open Roblox, you’re greeted with a wide variety of user-created games and experiences to choose from:

There is no ‘Roblox’ game to play - when your kid says they are ‘playing Roblox’ what they mean is that they’re playing one of the millions of games that other users have built. Roblox users have developed their own lingo for the types of games available, which often fall into certain categories:

• Role-play games

• Obbies (obstacle course)

• Tycoons (resource management games)

• Simulators

• FPS/Shooters

• Social/Hangout games

• Horror

• Party/Minigames

Logging into Roblox isn’t like booting up a game of Call of Duty or Mario Kart. It’s more like opening YouTube and choosing a video - if each video was an interactive, playable experience.

So Roblox is just a bunch of games?

I mean, technically yes. But if that’s your full description of the platform, you’re missing the point. CrazyGames.com is a site that I would call “just a bunch of games” and it’s not all that popular. Roblox is a fully realized digital platform.

Each game is a digital space you can walk around inside and explore. Inside those spaces, you can do more than just play the game - you can interact with other players. Spatial chat lets you voice chat with any player whose avatar is standing near your avatar. Think of it this way: Mark Zuckerberg has lit more than $80 billion on fire trying to make the ‘Metaverse’ happen. He renamed his company Meta! And he failed entirely, because the actual metaverse was Roblox the entire time.

For many kids, Roblox is the first digital platform they learn to navigate. It lets them build things, develop preferences, chat with their peers, hang out, and play. There are games where the narrow goal is a game-like objective to shoot or score or win - but there are even more games focused on creation, expression, and connection. Kids on Roblox navigate social status, try to make money, maybe get scammed, join communities, and experiment with identities. All the classic markers of childhood happen online now, and for a huge number of kids they’re happening in Roblox. Roblox is ‘just a collection of games’ in the same way that a thriving church is ‘just a room where people pray’.

So how big is this thing?

Roblox is the biggest game in the world right now, and arguably the biggest video game of all time. It dominates every metric you can judge a video game by. In late 2025 it averaged more than 150 million daily active users…

Wait, it’s HOW big???

Yes, 150 million daily active users. However big you think Roblox is, it’s bigger than that.

Here’s a chart showing monthly active users from 2024:

Roblox is twice as big as any other mega-popular game like Minecraft or Fortnite. But it’s also bigger than entire platforms. It’s twice as popular as the entire Steam ecosystem. More people play Roblox on a monthly basis than play the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox combined. And it’s not close! Roblox, at the end of 2024, had hit more than 380 million monthly active users, and it has almost certainly grown since then.

Individual games like Grow a Garden or Steal a Brainrot can hit peaks where more than 20 million players are playing them at the same time. Or as I wrote last year:

The subgame ‘Blox Fruits’ had almost as much total engagement in 2024 as the entirety of Blizzard Entertainment as a company. Roblox content dominates content - last year people spent twice as much time watching Roblox content on YouTube and Twitch as they did on the entirety of Disney+.

Roblox videos have more than a trillion views on YouTube. It’s very hard to overstate how massive Roblox has become.

Why are the graphics so terrible?

This is part of the genius of Roblox. While the platform’s engine is actually capable of hosting more graphics intensive games, most games have low-resolution graphics, blocky avatars and simplistic visuals. This helps in two ways - simpler graphics make the game more legible to young kids, and it allows anyone with any kind of computer to play the game easily. You might need a high-end gaming PC to play the latest AAA titles like The Witcher 4 or Grand Theft Auto 6. But Roblox can be played on virtually any laptop. It can be played on an iPad, or a phone. The game requires so little computing power it will practically run on a potato.

This is at least part of the story for how Roblox has become so successful internationally and with children. Kids and gamers in developing countries are two demographics who might not be able to drop thousands of dollars on a high end gaming setup, but Roblox doesn’t require that. You see the same dynamic in other hyper-popular games. Some of the very biggest games of all time - Minecraft, Fortnite, Among Us - all have deliberately simplistic graphics.

Do people make money off Roblox?

Roblox is free to play, so all its revenue comes from Robux, the in-game currency. Players can purchase Robux with real money, and use Robux in various games to buy in-game items, to gain power-ups, to access secret areas, to customize their avatar, etc.

To incentivize users to create lots of new games, experiences, and cosmetic items, Roblox has a program called the Developer Exchange program that allows creators to keep a percentage of the Robux that users spend in their games and convert it back to real cash. If your game becomes popular, you can start offering power ups and items for Robux and keep some of the real money people are spending in your game.

There are a few instances where Roblox developers have made huge money. Some teenagers have been able to create games that do millions of dollars in revenue per month, and sell those games for millions to larger game companies. One game, Welcome to Bloxburg, reportedly sold for $100 million. ‘Roblox creator’ is slowly becoming a real profession, just like YouTuber or Twitch streamer.

It’s important to note that for most users, the money is very small or non-existent. Roblox is a top-heavy platform, and while the most popular games have millions of players, most user-created games languish with few or no players at all. Much like how three-quarters of YouTube videos have zero comments, and even more have zero likes, the vast majority of Roblox games go unnoticed and unmonetized.

What else happens on Roblox?

When you develop a platform with 400 million users, there are a lot of possibilities for how you can use it. Roblox is branching out with video calls, generative AI creation tools, and a customized ad platform. The CEO has mused about opening a Roblox dating service. Like everything these days, a lot of Roblox games are concerningly close to gambling, with casino and lootbox-like mechanics. Last month, more than 12 million users logged in to watch a virtual Bruno Mars concert in Roblox.

Who wouldn’t want to get in on this hot concert action, I guess?

Roblox is such a flexible platform that it’s hard to capture everything that happens there, and I’d expect that in the future the number of things you can do on Roblox will continue to increase.

Is Roblox good for kids?

In some ways! It’s an excellent outlet for creative expression. There are a lot of kids on Roblox doing a lot of very dumb things, but kids have always done dumb things. Roblox can help teach kids how to create things, how to get feedback from your peers, how to express yourself, how to be entrepreneurial, and more.

There are a lot of digital experiences for children that involve extremely passive consumption. Most kids’ movies are like this, and so is the YouTube content they watch. Video games are more active, and games like Roblox that involve creation and expression are, in my view, a better digital experience than zoning out watching yet another YouTube video like a zombie. Not every kid playing Roblox will create their own games, but a substantial number of them do. And those kids are learning to solve problems, they’re often learning the basics of design and coding, and they’re learning how to collaborate socially with their peers. There are genuinely a lot of ways in which Roblox can be a very positive thing for children.

Is Roblox bad for kids?

Oh boy. The thing about Roblox is that it’s an absolutely massive platform filled with kids that lets you do all kinds of things, including fairly open communication. And that makes it prime territory for predators and pedophiles. I am normally not the kind of person to wring my hands about predators on the internet, but Roblox does seem to have a huge problem, and it’s one the site hasn’t done a great job addressing.

For years, stories have circulated about how pedophiles who seek to groom children and exploit them are all over Roblox, often promising children Robux in exchange for lewd pictures. One 10-year-old in California was kidnapped by a man she met on Roblox. In one instance, a woman convinced a different 10-year-old to try to kill a 2-month-old infant. There was a case in Chicago where a child was raped by someone they met on Roblox, and I had a hard time searching for it because that’s happened more than once just in Chicago. When you dive into this rabbit hole things can get very disturbing, very fast.

To offer a half-hearted defense for the company - when you operate at the scale Roblox does, there are bound to be incidents. Hundreds of millions of kids around the world play Roblox - it would be impossible that nothing bad ever happened to any of them. Longtime readers will know that I consider content moderation to be an impossibly hard problem in most cases. But that doesn’t excuse Roblox, which has at times been weirdly blasé and standoffish about their moderation policies.

The company claims, of course, to take child safety issues very seriously. But CEO David Baszucki did a disastrous interview with the New York Times podcast Hard Fork recently that highlights how that’s not really the case. He rambles, comes off as antagonistic, and generally does not seem to grasp why people are so upset with his company. At one point he calls the child safety controversy “not necessarily just a problem, but an opportunity as well”. It is astonishingly tone deaf, an absolute car crash of an interview.

So yes, to circle back to the original question, Roblox can be bad for kids.

This is horrifying! Is the government doing anything about this?

Roblox is facing at least 35 different lawsuits related to its child safety policies, mostly from families whose children were groomed, exploited or assaulted as a result of being on the platform. In addition to lawsuits from aggrieved families, they’re also facing lawsuits from the governments of Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Florida, as well as facing regulatory pressure in the UK. These lawsuits collectively allege that the company has known it has a problem for years, marketed itself as safe, and then didn’t do what it needed to in order to protect its underage users.

In response, the company recently rolled out a new age-verification system aimed at estimating user ages and only allowing users to chat with other users of similar age. This seems like a good idea, but you do have to wonder why it took until late 2025 for that sort of thing to be implemented in a platform where 40% of users are below thirteen years old.

Why should I care?

You don’t have to! But this is where Gen Alpha is hanging out, and for most adults it’s a massive blind spot.

Roblox is less like a video game, and more like a mall, a Discord, a game engine and a role playing community all jumbled up together. This is where youth culture is being created. This is where kids are learning to navigate the digital world, where they form new memes, and where they experiment with identities. It may seem silly to attribute any sort of culture to Roblox, but the line between the online and traditional culture is thinner than you think. The hit game Steal a Brainrot (mentioned above) is getting a major studio movie adaptation. And god help us, it’s probably going to make a lot of money.

Roblox is big enough it has a bit of everything. Your kid might start building their own game and learn to organize, to design things, to code. They might just waste time playing literal brainrot. They might meet people - with all the good and bad that comes with that. Roblox has tight knit communities, it has extremely petty drama, it has dangerous actors. It has opportunities to waste and to make money. In many ways, it’s just a digital reflection of the real world. You can stick your head in the sand if you like, but ignoring Roblox is, to some degree, ignoring the future.

YouTube Communism

There’s an interesting story that’s been developing on YouTube, and while it’s been a topic of discussion amongst YouTubers I’m not sure any of the other social-media-analysis-commentariat have really clocked it yet.1 YouTube, to put things bluntly, seems to have embraced view count redistribution.

Read more