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YouTubers at the Box Office

A million years ago, when television networks still had drawing power and dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was a bright line between online fame and offline fame. The real world had real celebrities - Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Steve Jobs, etc. Everyone recognized the real celebrities, and it was normal chat about them and to know details of their lives. Online celebrities existed, but they normally had names like Numa Numa Guy or CaptainSparklez or PewDiePie, and while a lot of people knew about them it was vaguely embarrassing to admit you knew who they were, or to talk about them at all. “Hey did you see the news about PewDiePie?” said literally nobody with a mortgage, ever. Online creators and personalities existed in a kind of cultural ghetto, a less real version of fame that was shoved away into a corner like an unloved stepchild.

One of the trends I’ve been following here for years is the disappearance of that gap. The lines between online celebrity and ‘real’ celebrity are thinner than ever, if they even exist any more. Traditional celebrities and creatives are increasingly flocking online to start YouTube shows, podcasts, and other online projects. They’re guests on internet-native shows like Chicken Shop Date or Hot Ones. They both intermingle with online celebrities and adopt their successful tactics as their own. But what’s even more interesting is how online celebrities are slowly infiltrating traditional media.

Last weekend, the two biggest movies at the American box office were Backrooms and Obsession. Obsession is directed by 26 year-old YouTuber Curry Barker in his theatrical debut, and Backrooms is directed by Kane Parsons, a 20 year-old YouTuber making his theatrical debut. Both are massive, massive hits made on tiny budgets - Backrooms debuted with an $81M opening weekend on a budget of $10M, while Obsession is on track to make around $250M total gross on a budget of only $1M.

Last weekend was an inflection point. This isn’t the first time YouTubers have struck gold in mainstream entertainment. Markiplier directed and starred in Iron Lung earlier this year, and you can point to even other projects like 2022’s Skinamarink or 2025’s Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie as well. But this is the first time YouTubers have had this much success and made this much money in such a dramatic fashion.

There are a number of interesting things to note here. First is that horror is by far the dominant genre for these young, unproven filmmakers. Horror movies are typically cheap, and horror fans are typically down with weird/experimental concepts and don’t need celebrity casting to draw them in. It’s easy for studios to throw a couple million at a young director with only short YouTube films to their name and see if some magic happens.

But the films above are also capitalizing on ‘online fame’ in very different ways. Markiplier’s Iron Lung was an exercise in flexing a fanbase - the film was self-financed, self-produced, and Markiplier heavily promoted the film to his 30M+ subscribers. The majority of buzz and money for Iron Lung came from the fact that Markiplier is massively famous online, and his fans would flock to see his work even if he had to work outside the major studios. But the directors of Obsession and Backrooms only had low single digit millions of subscribers, and were nowhere near as famous as Markiplier. Instead, they used YouTube as a proving ground, directing short films that got them noticed by major studios. And in the case of Backrooms, the actual concept of the film came from an old series of 4chan posts.1

Hollywood is a town of copycats, and anything that makes money will be pushed to its absolute limits (see: every superhero movie of the last decade). So don’t be surprised if you see 20 horror movies by unproven YouTubers in the next year or two. The lines between creator and traditional star have never been blurrier, and my guess is that at some point it won’t even make sense to separate the two concepts any longer.

The Odyssey as Taskmaster

Checking in on AI

Oh boy.

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This morning I’m in The Argument with a new piece, arguing that Bo Burnham’s Inside is the artwork that defines the 2020s:

Five years ago, Bo Burnham released Inside on Netflix to near-universal acclaim. Inside is a fantastically rich comedy special and probably the single best piece of content made about the COVID-19 pandemic in any medium.

But looking back at it five years later, Inside feels like more than just a very good comedy set, more than just a statement about the pandemic. It feels, if you’ll forgive the pun, special.

It’s always a risk to call a race before we’ve reached the finish line, but with some trepidation, I’ll take that chance: Even though the decade isn’t over yet, the 2020s already have their definitive piece of art. And we got it in 2021.

A definitive piece of art needs to embody the main trends of its time. Its strengths and flaws should be the quintessential strengths and flaws of its era. It should ideally anticipate the trajectory society is headed in. And it hopefully has something meaningful to say about the technological, social, and cultural currents people are navigating.

Inside does all of these things better than anything else produced this decade.

Check out the full piece over at The Argument!

On to the post! And become a subscriber if you haven’t already!

The Ethan Klein Lawsuit and the Limits of Fair Use

Ethan Klein is a YouTuber/podcaster who’s run the channel h3h3Productions alongside his wife Hila since 2011. In the 2010’s they mostly produced reaction videos and sketch comedy, but in the past 6-7 years they’ve shifted into podcasting, news cycle commentary, and getting into political beefs with other large content creators.

I would normally rather peel off my own fingernails with a pair of rusty pliers than recount the sordid nonsense that comes along with political podcasters yelling at each other about which of them is really the most fascist. But there’s some genuinely interesting and impactful stuff going on with Klein right now, so stick with me through the stupid drama, because we need to talk about the Content Nuke Lawsuit.

The background: Klein and Hasan Piker used to be quite friendly, and even had a podcast together called Leftovers. The podcast ended abruptly after they recorded, you guessed it, an episode on Israel/Palestine. Klein is an American Jew, his wife is Israeli, and Piker is Piker. Since their acrimonious breakup, they’ve had a long-running feud where each has harshly criticized the other, and last year Klein released a video titled Content Nuke: Hasan Piker which attacks Piker as part of the ongoing feud.

When the Content Nuke dropped, this sparked a frenzy amongst the too-online livestreamer drama community. Creators like Klein and Piker are big enough to have ‘orbiters’: smaller creators circling larger stars who praise their content, criticize their enemies, and build relevance and clout as part of the larger streamer’s extended universe. A number of Hasan-adjacent orbiters decided to livestream the Content Nuke video, and that’s where the trouble comes in. It’s fairly common practice in livestreaming to watch other people’s content and provide your own thoughts and commentary along the way, but in the case of creators Frogan, Kaceytron, and Denims, each explicitly framed their stream as an attempt to prevent Klein from making money. Denims closed her stream by saying “If you enjoyed not giving any views to that terrible video, follow, subscribe, throw a prime”, asking her audience to compensate her for Klein’s video in place of giving money or views to Klein. Afterwards, Klein sued those three creators for copyright infringement, alleging they were rebroadcasting large portions of his content with minimal transformation or commentary and intentionally trying to deprive him of ad revenue.

Of the three accused, Kaceytron folded first. In December last year, she posted one of the most remarkable apologies I’ve ever seen, practically a hostage video where she read in monotone a series of statements about how she was guilty, was paying the Kleins, and gave a detailed, groveling apology for being an awful person. Seriously, if you happen to have a humiliation kink (no judgment), this video will keep you going for weeks:

Meanwhile, it appears that Frogan simply didn’t show up for court. Last week, a U.S. District Court in California entered a default judgment in favor of the Kleins after Frogan failed to enter a plea. Frogan, who raised almost $40,000 to pay for her legal defense, appears to have opted for the bold strategy of pocketing the money and not defending herself at all. Which leaves only Denims actively fighting Klein’s lawsuit.

Denims has defended her rebroadcast of the Content Nuke as fair use, a transformation of the original content allowed under copyright law. Ironically, Ethan Klein was involved in one of the precedent-setting fair use cases for online commentary, Hosseinzadeh v. Klein, in which Klein defended himself from a similar claim and won. The details of Denims’ case are genuinely interesting and could be interpreted in multiple ways by a court. In her defense, the experience of watching the Denims stream was much different than watching the video itself. The video is about an hour and forty minutes, while Denims’ stream was nearly four hours and included more than 200 pauses where Denims provided her own thoughts.

The blue bars above represent times when the video was paused and Denims was providing commentary, the gray represents time when the video was playing. If you watch the stream, Denims does engage with the content, often disputing Klein’s arguments and pushing back on claims he makes.

But it’s not enough to provide some commentary. Transformative use exists on a spectrum, and Klein argues that Denims’ reaction video is not truly transformative. In the case Klein won defending himself against copyright claims, the length of his commentary was more than three times the length of the original video. Denims’ ratio is almost one-to-one, and the commentary is often incredibly surface level or flat-out unrelated to the Content Nuke. She frequently let the video play for long periods of time uninterrupted, and even left the room at times - leaving just an empty chair and the copyrighted content playing.

Plus, there’s the small factor that she literally said on air the purpose of the stream was to deprive Klein of ad revenue. And her audience certainly understood it that way - from Exhibit K in the lawsuit:

Prognostication time: I think Klein is likely to win this suit on the merits. But it’s not a sure thing, because the copyright issues around reaction videos aren’t yet fully worked out. This case may end up defining exactly how transformative a reaction video must be before it can be considered fair use, and it’s all because two podcasters couldn’t stop yelling at each other about Israel. What a world.

AI Attempts to Pronounce WWE

Here’s an AI-generated professional wrestling news channel on YouTube attempting to pronounce WWE. However weird you think this is about to get, I promise you it’s funnier and weirder than that:

What Happens in a Zero Search World?

Is Google Search dying? And more importantly, is Google voluntarily killing it? Maybe so, as TechCrunch reports that the era of ten blue links is officially over:

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

Tech pundits have long wondered whether or not AI chatbots would kill search engines. It’s a fair question. Personally, I still use search for most mundane searches - but these days when I have something more complicated I often just ask ChatGPT to find it for me. Search makes up about half of all revenue for Google, so they’re surely aware of this competitive threat.

But despite the hypothetical and anecdotal arguments above, Search isn’t actually struggling right now. Search brought in $175 billion in revenue for Google in 2023, grew to $198 billion in 2024, and then grew again to $224 billion in 2025. That’s a 13% year-over-year growth rate, which is pretty phenomenal for what is literally one of the largest businesses on the planet. So far the age of AI hasn’t displaced search at all.

Despite that, Google seems to be determined that if anyone’s going to kill search, it’s going to be them. AI-mode isn’t the default experience, but it seems clear we need to attach a ‘yet’ to that statement. Google is signaling pretty hard that in the future, more and more search queries will be answered with AI-generated boxes or a fully AI-built experience.

I can imagine an argument in favor of this strategy. Kodak was early to digital camera technology, but famously failed to take advantage of that early start because they were worried about how it might impact their physical film business. Google may be trying to avoid the same error here - if search is as doomed as film photography, better to disrupt yourself rather than wait for someone else to do it. And to be fair, Google is both a hyperscaler and a leading competitor in cutting-edge AI models. They’re well positioned to make this transition.

But it’s unclear to me whether this transition needs to be made at all - and beyond that, what the impacts are for the rest of the internet. The failed pivot to video and the enormous decline of social media traffic are two examples of transformations that decimated independent publishers, content creators and businesses online. But the rise in zero-click searches - where a user’s search query leads to no clickthrough and thus no traffic for any website other than Google - threatens to be even more catastrophic for the independent web. The Verge calls this Google Zero, and we may not be far off from the day when traffic from search engines to independent websites does literally hit zero.

What happens then? The social internet that I grew up with, the internet I loved and obsessed over, was built not by giant platforms but by a million hands doing weird stuff independently, a middle class of creatives who made the web great. In a world where traffic from both search engines and social media is near-zero, how does anything independent ever grow? How can any business be financially viable outside a small handful of giant platforms? Let’s think through the consequences of a world where the biggest companies in the world hoover up all of the text and data on the internet train to their AI models, then use those models to deny the people writing the text any traffic. I’m not sure I like where that’s going! I’m trying and failing to see any outcome besides the collapse of the middle class of online creators, permanent lock-in to closed ecosystems, and a degraded set of incentives to produce new and meaningful work.

Meanwhile! Here’s what happens now when you google the word disregard:

We might be destroying the internet as we know it, but hey, at least the AI’s also broken.

They Invented a New Kind of Guy

Links

• Along more serious lines - a great piece from Derek Thompson on the decline of virtue in politics. This might be familiar to those who remember the Vice Signaling debate.

• Man who spent 37 days in jail for posting a Charlie Kirk meme wins $835,000 settlement.

• Roblox is finally getting serious about growing with users 18 years or older.

• The metric that ruined every website.

• How deepfakes tore apart a high school.

• A bizarre but funny niche Wikipedia scandal.

• How Disney erased FiveThirtyEight.

• Are ‘Dad Books’ dead?

Posts

• Zohran Mamdani streamed on Twitch for the first time - with an open chat - and it went about how you’d expect.

• An apt metaphor for engaging in online discourse

• A crucial annotation

• Sisyphus FM

• 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

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

Like, Follow, Subscribe by Fortesa Latifi is a book about momfluencers, family vloggers, and the impact that putting one’s life online has on parents and children. It is not the first work of its kind - see Momfluenced, or reporting on child influencers from the New York Times - but it’s one of the most thoroughly reported books on the topic that I’ve seen. The book doesn’t have a particularly insightful philosophical angle, or a persuasively argued grand theory to push. What it does have is a surprisingly large number of frank, on-the-record conversations with influencer parents and kids, and those conversations are incredibly illuminating. If you want to better understand the business and culture of family influencers, Like, Follow, Subscribe is a good place to start.1

The book has a number of strengths. There’s a very interesting section on snark communities and the particular oddities of parasocial relationships (more on this to come in a future post). There are chapters about the history of mommy bloggers, the Mormon influence on parental influencers, the economics of making money on TikTok and YouTube, dealing with online predators, and legislation concerning kids who perform on social media. But the book’s core strength is in its candid conversations with internet-famous families.

Reading Latifi’s conversations with parental influencers, you can practically taste the cognitive dissonance. Almost every single parent in the book who puts their children all over social media realizes, on some level, how fucked up what they’re doing is. They understand the problematic nature of being a child influencer and the negative effects it has on their children’s development, on their relationship with their children, and more. But they bounce back and forth between acknowledging those problems and then excusing what they do anyway.

The justifications given are myriad. Some are relatively high-minded - we’re helping other families! We’re ‘shining a light’2 for the world! We’re showing people the real side of parenting! What we do is inspirational, or it’s promoting the idea of strong families, or it’s one of a dozen other supposedly altruistic motives.

Sometimes, the parents are more honest. Several parents with giant social media followings express ambivalence or reservations about putting their kids front and center for the world to see, but admit that it’s how they pay the bills so they aren’t going to stop. There’s a lot of “How else am I supposed to make money this good? I don’t have any other skills and I didn’t go to college. This is what pays my mortgage and puts food on the table.” And to be fair, the money some of these momfluencers make can be staggering. Several larger accounts are earning millions per year, and brand deals for even mid-level influencers can be equivalent to what they used to earn in a year.

On the more delusional end of the spectrum, many parents insist that their kids really just love being in videos every day. It’s certainly the case that some kids are born entertainers - the future theater majors of America, you might say - but the book is also littered with deeply uncomfortable stories of children who clearly do not want to be filmed but are forced to do so by parents on a deadline. One parent resorts to bribing their reluctant children with $100 bills, and when their miserable kids reject that offer, escalating to $500 and even $1,000. Another recalls panicking because they were on deadline for a brand deal, and their kids refused to cooperate. They’re very open about how they cajole, pressure, and at times outright bully their children into participating in the family’s content machine.

Why do they do it? Because it’s universally recognized that family content that includes kids does bigger numbers than content without kids. Featuring your children (as opposed to purely mom-centric or dad-centric videos) leads to more likes, more comments, more engaged fans, bigger follower counts and more virality. This is not a secret - multiple families talk about how they feel pressured by their own fans to show their kids, or how they’ve been explicitly instructed by brands to include the children in their branded product videos or the deal is off.

What’s even more disturbing are the conversations Latifi has with these momfluencers about the types of content they film. It seems to be a poorly-kept secret that the worse a child is feeling, the more engagement a post will get. “My child got hurt!” is by far the most reliable way to go viral. Multiple parents admitted to sticking a camera in the face of their sobbing, sick, or injured child to adequately capture the scene for social media, rather than just being a parent in that moment. Following close behind sickness and injury is embarrassment - making a video about your kid wetting the bed, throwing a tantrum, getting their period, or revealing a private moment is another surefire way to get big numbers.

These parents spend nearly the entire book justifying what they do, but half the time it feels like they’re trying to convince themselves and not us. It’s not clear how many of them really believe their own justifications. For many parents, the tension between the lucrative business of family vlogging and the harms it might be doing to their kids is palpable. Almost every single parent takes time to criticize those other family accounts who are abusive, driven by ego, etc - and every single one seems to think they’re an exception, ‘one of the good ones’.

The book isn’t perfect. The section on Mormonism is a little dry. It’s not bad, but it’s a reheated microwave dinner of a chapter, whose facts and arguments I’ve seen several times before. The few moments where the book delves into politics range from surface-level bland to embarrassing. There’s a chapter on legislation that feels tacked on and just isn’t very deep, and there are a few portions of the book where Latifi half-heartedly advances a “neoliberal capitalism and our economic decline is forcing desperate moms to take up social media” argument that is laughably thin and supported by literally incorrect facts. But despite a few weak points, I enjoyed the book because it offers such a rich, layered look into the lives and thoughts of family influencers.

In the very early days when I was still figuring out what Infinite Scroll was, one of the best things I wrote was a piece called There Are No Ethical Momfluencers. It makes the case you’d expect from the title, and there are a lot of parallels running between that piece, reporting Latifi has done in other publications, and the new book she’s released this year.

Not to flatter myself too much, but one of the reasons I enjoyed Latifi’s book is that she and I seem to have independently reached a number of the same conclusions about the nature of momfluencers and family vlogging. In that essay, I made several arguments about why even the ‘good’ momfluencers were navigating a moral minefield:

• Children can’t meaningfully consent to being in capital-C Content (which is different from just being in family videos or photos for Facebook).

• Lack of protections on hours worked, working conditions, etc, that child actors have had for decades.

• The blurring of a child’s personal life and their performing life - child actors learn that the set is a set and home is home, but momfluencer kids have no time they can really be ‘off’.

• The child being used for content doesn’t have any rights to the content.

• The blurring of the line between parent and boss, and the guilt that comes with knowing your family relies on your public performance to pay the bills.

Latifi hits on basically every single one of these points, and in far more depth than I possibly could because she spends so much time documenting and interviewing specific families. She followed up on a lot of this in an interview with Anne Helen Petersen:

I remember the first story I wrote about influencer kids, where I talked to a young woman I called Claire who grew up in a vlogging family. At one point, she went to her Dad and said “I don’t want to do YouTube anymore.” And he was like, okay fine, but we’re going to have to move out of our new house and Mom and I are going to have to go back to work and there won’t be any money left over for “nice things.” And so she ‘decided’ to keep doing YouTube. But, in that context, is that really a decision?

Latifi also extends this analysis into a discussion of how different early mommy bloggers were from modern TikTok momfluencers. What’s interesting about the early mommy bloggers is how focused they were on motherhood itself. While most of them would post photos of their kids, the meat of the content was about the moms and not the kids. The way they talked about motherhood was revelatory - the gross parts, the tiring parts, the good and the bad rolled together. Post-partum depression, the pain of stitches popping out, and conflicted feelings about motherhood weren’t things women really discussed before mommy blogs. But where vulnerable and deeply personal written essays used to be the norm, modern momfluencers are shortform video focused and the large majority of successful accounts strive to show perfect, glowing, happy families at all times. They show their children far more than the early bloggers did, and in far more performative roles. You can see the same trend in content about teen moms - the show Teen Mom was at times quite dark, and showed its stars weeping and breaking down under pressure. Modern teen mom vloggers, by contrast, are perky, beautiful and impeccably curated, performing a highly aesthetic (and brand-safe) version of teen motherhood.

I want to close here by noting that while it’s easy (and correct) to blame the parents in influencer families for all of this, an honest examination of this ecosystem needs to place some blame on the audience as well. The parents we’re talking about are supplying something that the public clearly demands, and both sides of that equation are ethically fraught. If you follow family influencers, consider whether or not that’s a good thing to do. Hell, I spend time wondering about my own role in this. We’re now 1600 words into a newsletter about family influencers that I’ve written and that you’re reading. Are you and I part of the problem as well? I’m less sure of the answer than I’d like to be.

Attention is the currency of social media, and family influencers are competing for attention just like the rest of us. But that attention isn’t a magical force conjured out of the aether. It comes from somewhere, from us. Maybe the uncomfortable reality is that unethical family content only works because millions of ordinary people are happy to treat a child’s life as content. It’s easy to condemn the parents for turning childhood into a product. It’s harder to ask why the rest of us keep buying.

Notes on Internet Fame

The arrest of ChudTheBuilder last week led to an enormous amount of chatter online about the topics you’d expect - white nationalism, the legal rules surrounding self-defense claims, toxic livestreamers, etc. But one of the more interesting critiques of the entire situation centered around clipping and the nature of online fame.

The critique, which I saw in several places online, went something like this: ChudTheBuilder’s not even famous. He streams on an obscure fourth-rate streaming site. Looking at his livestreams, he doesn’t even have that much of an audience - a few thousand at best. He’s only famous because people like you react to him, you inadvertently spread his clips by commenting on how awful he is, and if we all just ignored his rage bait clips, he’d still be obscure.

I think this critique is correct, but that it also misses the point and manages to completely misunderstand how the attention economy works online. Clips are no longer just a promotional concept for other content. Clips ARE the content. They’re the whole thing.

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White nationalist livestreamer Dalton Eatherly, who goes by ‘ChudTheBuilder’ online, was arrested yesterday and charged with attempted murder1 after allegedly shooting a man near the Montgomery County Courthouse in Clarksville, Tennessee.

The best description of Eatherly, and the one surest to piss him off, is that he’s essentially a neo-Nazi knock-off of Johnny Somali. Somali made his name by traveling the world and trying to enrage the locals, pulling stunts like mocking Hiroshima in Japan, putting images of Jeffrey Epstein on the Wailing Wall in Israel, and performing lap dances on a statue honoring sex slaves in Korea. His antics in Korea earned him a jail sentence of six months hard labor earlier this year. Eatherly has the same instincts as Somali - film yourself violating social norms in the most egregious and offensive ways possible to impress a large crowd of hateful idiots on the internet.

ChudTheBuilder’s particular schtick as a streamer is to walk around in public, find black people, and start calling them racial slurs in the hopes of provoking a confrontation. He’ll drop the hard-r a bunch of times, then if anyone gets upset he’ll put on a shit-eating grin and ask them if they’re going to ‘chimp out’. He’s awful enough that he streams from something called Pump.fun - a crypto site that appears to be an even worse version of Kick - after getting banned from Kick, which proudly hosts a variety of other racists.

Yesterday he got his wish, which was to shoot a black person. You don’t have to take my word for it - he’s been very clear about what his ultimate goal was:

There’s a lot we should say here. What happens legally will depend on the specifics of the case - but the police certainly didn’t waste any time charging him, so things look grim for Eatherly’s case. Contrary to popular belief, you can’t deliberately provoke confrontations while planning to escalate them to the level of deadly force. If I was a prosecutor, the posts above would be Exhibits A, B, and C in establishing what kind of person we’re dealing with here. And I’d very much like to see someone pick apart the phrase “premeditated self-defense” in a courtroom.

Chud is obviously a vile racist, one of the worst people on the internet. We should also note that Chud is just kind of a sad excuse of a person in general. He’s faced drug charges before, he was arrested recently for theft, was arrested late last year on harassment charges, and was near the Montgomery County Courthouse yesterday because he’s being sued over unpaid debts. He also managed to shoot himself in the arm during the incident, so, you know, silver linings.

When it comes to Chud specifically, this outcome seems like it was inevitable. But how did we get to the point where this happens?

The performance of edgy, shocking material isn’t new. The art world has a habit of making provocateurs like Duchamp, Pollock, and Warhol famous. Lenny Bruce was repeatedly arrested for his obscene and shocking stand-up comedy. Howard Stern and other shock jocks offended our sensibilities over the airwaves, and the boys who made up the Jackass crew made a living doing stupid stuff in public.

I’m being extraordinarily generous to even mention ragebait streamers in the same breath as artists like Warhol or Lenny Bruce. But if you squint at the history of provocative artists and shock entertainers, you can trace a line from those who were relatively more tame and enmeshed within institutions to those without any boundaries whatsoever. Duchamp’s stunt with a urinal was shocking, but not nearly as shocking as Lenny Bruce. And Bruce’s standup was vulgar, but people like Howard Stern and Andrew Dice Clay were even more vulgar.

As much as I have a soft spot for them in my millennial heart, Jackass is probably the dividing line between the old school shock entertainers and artists and the new school. The specific innovation of Jackass was that much of it took place in public - they’d have a grandpa shoplift, or stage a boxing match in a department store. Whereas previous provocateurs stayed within specific arenas - art galleries, radio broadcasts, or comedy clubs - Jackass made the unwilling public a part of the spectacle. What used to be confined to a stage is now everywhere, with an entire generation of Jackass copycats doing ‘pranks’ on YouTube. Everything idiots like Johnny Somali or ChudTheBuilder do is downstream of blowing air horns on a golf course.

Tracing the line of shock performers through history, what’s been happening is that the line between performance and reality has totally collapsed. Chud is not an artist trying to make controversial art. He’s just a racist who realized he can make money from racism. And while the good lord above knows that isn’t unique to the modern world either, the particular set of incentives provided by social media are.

What Somali and Chud have in common is that they’re both engaging in rage bait. They provoke the maximal emotional response they can, hoping this will drive engagement, making you mad and them famous. But where we’ve traditionally understood ragebait to be a digital tactic, something you do in replies and comment sections, they’re doing it in real life. They are the embodiment of rage bait in the original meaning of the term embodied - physically present in a space with real, non-online people.

The vast majority of people want nothing to do with this, but in the modern digital environment it’s algorithms and not people that make celebrities. Conflict leads to engagement. Even being humiliated just means more virality and more eyeballs on you, as long as you’re brash enough to never back down afterwards. Perhaps the worst lesson that Donald Trump taught us about society is that there’s really no need to ever apologize - shame is an outdated concept. Instead of backing down, double down on whatever horrible thing you did. Triple down. Proclaim how proud you are of the terrible thing. Laugh at the people who get mad at it, as if their anger was proof of weakness. What would have been a career-ending scandal in a previous era is now just another reason for your fans to rally around you.

Because even people like Chud have fans. In one day, he’s raised around $50,000 for his legal defense fund.2 You can’t discuss his case on X without a legion of racists jumping in your replies to defend him. He’s essentially Nick Fuentes but stupider, if it were possible for that to be a thing. His innovation from previous prank YouTubers is that where they would do something awful and then run away screaming “It was just a prank bro”, Chud does the awful thing and says with his whole chest how much he believes the awful thing. In the era of livestreaming and clipping, all it takes is an oversized amount of bravado, some form of extremist ideology or behavior, and a devil-may-care attitude towards authority, and the views and fans are almost guaranteed to come pouring in.

Chud is the culmination of several trends - the surge of white nationalism, the performance of hyper-masculinity, rage bait engagement tactics, a post-modern form of politics drenched in irony and obsessed with aesthetics, and livestreaming creating a world where society itself is just more fodder for content. We built a society where attention is economically valuable, it’s easier than ever for extremists to gain a large platform, and where there’s no downside to bad behavior. I’m not sure why we’d be surprised that enterprising shitheads have figured out how to industrialize the production of antisocial content.

This shooting incident may actually end up being a relatively good outcome, all things considered. Dalton Eatherly shot someone, but at least the victim seems to have survived and Eatherly seems likely to get a lengthy prison sentence. I had an eerie feeling of relief when news of Eatherly’s arrest broke, the feeling you get looking at a fiasco while knowing it could have been a catastrophe. So here’s a grim prediction: Eatherly is not the culmination of this trend. Nothing in the underlying media or political environment has changed. The incentives that lead to the embodiment of rage bait are all still in place, and we’re going to see things get significantly worse before they get better.

If you’ve been following the war in Iran on social media, you’ve probably seen the Lego videos.

One AI-generated clip features a Lego version of President Donald Trump eating pizza from a box labeled “Epstein Island,” depicts him as a clown and a pig, and shows Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walking him on a leash, among other things. “Whole world watchin’ a tantrum, talk big from a gold-topped mansion,” a voiceover raps in another, showing Lego Trump shouting into a golden megaphone. “Snowflake ego so fragile, can’t handle the smoke, MAGA waking up, country going broke,” sings yet another while insinuating the recent shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was staged to distract from Trump’s wartime failures.

Other videos portray Trump crooning as an ’80s pop star, begging Iran to let ships through the Strait of Hormuz or show Lego Shahed drones taking out cargo ships in the waterway. And the memes aren’t limited to AI-generated Lego figures or songs. Iranian diplomatic missions are engaging in their own brand of “wolf warrior” posting, with the Iranian embassies in Tajikistan and India showing Jesus punching Trump and Trump bowing down in front of an Iranian warrior. The Iranian Embassy in Zimbabwe responded to one of Trump’s ultimatums to make a deal with “8 P.M. is not that good. Could you change it to between 1 and 2 P.M., or if possible, 1 and 2 A.M.? Thank you for your attention to this important matter. I.E.Z”

Iranian accounts, both official state-run accounts and affiliated groups, have spent much of the war shitposting about the president’s ineffectiveness, insulting him, calling the war a distraction from domestic troubles like the high cost of living and the Epstein files, and in general refusing to take Trump’s threats seriously. The Iranian Embassy in South Africa joked that “regime change” had already happened by posting an image of high-ranking U.S. defense officials recently fired by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

Propaganda flows both ways, but it’s remarkable how little ability the Trump administration has had to counter these wildly viral Iranian posts, which can rack up millions of views each. Trump’s frequent rants on social media are the subject of mockery, prime material for late-night hosts and fodder for those who say the president is suffering a decline in his mental faculties. Former Trump administration officials are ignoring official messaging in favor of glumly posting about how the Iranian regime is going to survive and the U.S. will likely have to tuck tail and leave.

And Trump’s own wartime messaging campaign has done little to inspire confidence.

On the fields of Gettysburg in 1863, Abraham Lincoln declared that “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Following the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed that “the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Ronald Reagan demanded in 1987 that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “tear down this wall.” Trump, by contrast, posts things like:

This is pure bluster, and observers on both sides know it. There’s a meme war that’s happening concurrently with the real war, a meme war that Iran is winning. And that has real implications for the future of U.S. foreign policy.

Propaganda has always been a part of American military conflict. William Randolph Hearst’s yellow journalism following the explosion of the USS Maine in Cuba helped push the United States into war with Spain in 1898. The late Sen. Hiram Johnson of California once noted that the first casualty of war is truth, and while that saying has become a timeworn cliche, like so many cliches, it remains relevant because of how often it’s shown to be true.

The propagandists of World War I are famous for depicting Germans as apes and brutes, but it was during World War II that the United States began making a concerted effort to spread propaganda abroad, not just at home. Radio broadcasts targeting foreign populations became more common, and dropping leaflets over enemy territory was so popular in the Second World War that the U.S. devoted an entire squadron of B-17 bombers to the task. Other countries adopted similar tactics—during the Vietnam War, Hanoi Hannah broadcast several radio segments a day designed to demoralize American troops. Radio Free Europe was a mainstay of the Cold War, as was the Soviet funding of communist literature in the West.

Wartime propaganda has always existed, but in the last five years or so the nature of the messaging has radically changed. Consider the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent rise of the North Atlantic Fella Organization, or NAFO, movement. The meme began in May 2022, with an artist who posted pro-Ukraine content using the popular Shiba Inu dog (of Doge fame). The posts quickly evolved into a community of pro-Ukraine social media users, with NAFO posters celebrating Ukrainian victories, raising money for equipment, and sparring with pro-Russian voices online. They were successful enough that Russian diplomats often just stopped posting entirely when targeted by NAFO accounts.

This all seems silly—cartoon dog avatars yelling at old Russian men and posting memes about Javelin missiles—but NAFO, alongside official Ukrainian efforts, had a real impact on the public’s perception of the war. Ukraine won the online messaging battle decisively, and that win has likely enabled the country to secure billions in valuable military aid from international supporters. Those cartoon dogs may have made a real, material difference in Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

As this trend shaped the Ukraine war, it also began happening nearly everywhere else. India and Pakistan engaged in a low-level conflict in May 2025, and as expected partisans on both sides spent an enormous amount of time bickering with one another. But what was new was posts by the Indian army’s official X account featuring slick graphics and video edits, and sensationalized tweets from the Pakistani minister of defense, including a clip from a shootout from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in which one character labeled Pakistan kills another labeled India. When Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, it started more than just a traditional conflict. It started an online propaganda battle between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian camps that is still raging to this day.

In a 2023 piece here at Infinite Scroll, I wrote about the changing nature of propaganda and identified three ways in which modern meme wars differ from traditional propaganda: immediacy, directness, and decentralization.

Immediacy. Meme wars take place at the speed of social media. What might have been an effective message last week has no guarantee of resonating this week. And social media messengers don’t have time to centrally plan a set of messages and themes; they need to post now. Real-time information is flowing about which buildings have been bombed, where troops are being transported, and what one’s adversary is claiming, so modern meme warfare requires users to be incredibly fast on the draw. Opinions are shaped online within minutes of any particular incident, and slow responders risk being left behind.

Directness. Older forms of propaganda were for the most part unidirectional. Dropping leaflets over a wartime enemy doesn’t constitute a dialogue. Radio Free Europe promoted pro-American viewpoints during the Cold War, but it was a one-way broadcast. Back then, your enemy might have internal propaganda radio programs that rebut some of your channel’s central claims, but the dueling points of view were not engaging in a live debate. They were separated by time and space.

Social media works differently. If users post wartime content, they need to be prepared for adversarial accounts to respond within minutes in the replies, or with customized rebuttals in their own posts. Propagandists are now fighting with each other directly, in real time, dueling it out in Discord channels, subreddits, and comment sections. What used to be a stately one-way messaging machine is now an omnidirectional free-for-all that is taking place all the time, everywhere, which leads to the last key difference:

Decentralization. In the past, propaganda was largely funded and directed by the state. Governments would craft a message, debate it, test it, and expend significant resources to spread it to the correct audience at the correct time.

Today, propaganda starts online, and governments have less control than ever over what gets said. It’s almost always the case that the first attempts to spin any new development come from anonymous, amateur commentary accounts that aren’t being paid to post by any government. They may be partisans of one side of a conflict, but like NAFO, they’re decentralized and fundamentally outside the government’s control. Many of the most prominent users posting about conflicts like the war in Iran or between Israel and Gaza have no real connection to the governments in question.

Propaganda today isn’t carefully crafted by mastermind government operatives. It’s chaotically created by armies of independent accounts all rushing to coin the next big slogan or viral meme. Governments around the world are along for the ride—they can try to direct their partisans’ energy, but they certainly can’t control what gets said in any real way.

But that’s not to say they haven’t tried. The second Trump administration in particular has leaned heavily into memes. Official accounts have shared mocked-up images of an immigration enforcement “Speedway Slammer,” posted ASMR deportation videos, and digitally altered images of detained protesters to make them appear as if they were crying. The administration named a new government initiative after the same meme dog that members of the NAFO community use in their avatars. MAGA is very online and highly meme-literate, which makes its failure in the current meme war against Iran all the more surprising.

The Islamic Republic is taking advantage of the nature of modern propaganda. Its Lego videos are produced and posted by independent contractors and have become so popular that even accounts without any affiliation with the regime have begun to copy their style. The posts are memeified—ironic and facially unserious, but with pointed commentary lurking underneath the surface. And because the public is so skeptical of Trump’s stated reasons for going to war, these messages are landing. The public is genuinely more receptive to an Iranian video in which a Lego rapper claims that the war is a distraction from Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein than they are to yet another Truth Social rant.

The U.S. military is clearly superior to that of Iran, but that hasn’t guaranteed success in the current conflict—in part because the American public’s appetite for war is so low. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Iranian propaganda expert Phillip Smyth noted how successful Iran’s digital campaign has been:

Something I found fascinating: We’re the only ones talking about those Lego videos. They’re not talking about them in Iraq, they’re not talking about them in Bahrain, they’re not talking about them in Lebanon. … We’re the ones talking about it, which means they’ve been successful.

For most of our history, Americans have assumed that we were the good guys. We have defended democracy, fought fascism, defeated communism, and championed the cause of freedom and prosperity worldwide. To the extent that propaganda was deployed in the process, Americans were confident it was for worthy ends.

Today, that confidence has eroded. Largely due to the rise of social media, Americans today are more skeptical of elites than ever before, and increasingly skeptical of their own country’s motives and moral claims. Large shares of the American public no longer believe the story their government tells the world, and it is in this context that Iran’s meme blitz has been so successful.

Two decades ago, it would have been difficult to imagine embassies posting like comedians, governments paying for animated Lego raps, and global conflicts unfolding in comment sections and chat rooms. But the distance between statecraft and shitposting is smaller than it’s ever been, and America is currently being left behind in the meme wars by nimbler and more creative combatants.

Earlier this week, Ben Shapiro’s conservative media company The Daily Wire announced a series of extensive layoffs. While no official numbers have been released, I’ve heard through the grapevine that roughly half the company’s employees were let go. Why? The baseline facts are that Shapiro’s popularity has been plummeting for several years now - take a look at his monthly YouTube views:

Shapiro, despite having more than seven million subscribers on YouTube, has a number of recent videos with less than twenty thousand views. That’s a brutal stat for a company that just a few years ago was in a rapid growth phase with wildly high ambitions to reshape the media ecosystem. And the few views they are getting might be inauthentic - they’re running dozens of Ben Shapiro videos as paid ads right now.

How did this happen? There are a lot of angles here. It’s very funny that major parts of the conservative media ecosystem seem to be in free fall after Viktor Orban’s money hose stopped showering them with money, but I don’t think that was a major factor for The Daily Wire. It’s also pretty clear that Shapiro got way, way ahead of himself and flew too close to the sun chasing dreams of a media empire. The Daily Wire founded a movie studio/streaming service to create a bunch of half-baked right wing productions that nobody really paid attention to, some of which were incredibly cringe (an anti-woke knockoff version of the children’s show Bluey) and some of which were amazing and which I fully supported (throwing Jonathan Majors out of a window). But even beyond the failure of their wildly over-ambitious plans to challenge Hollywood, the core business of Shapiro’s podcast and YouTube channel is floundering. What gives?

In early 2024 I wrote a piece about Shapiro titled Leopards Eating Conservative Faces that neatly explains, two years ahead of time, how the Daily Wire got here. If you’ve been here long enough you know what I’m about to say.1 Shapiro had a falling out with then-Daily Wire employee Candace Owens that I summarized at that time as “Shapiro, who is Jewish, loves dropping bombs on Palestinians whereas Owens loves thinly-disguised antisemitism”. The two personalities were part of a larger fight over the soul of the conservative movement - Shapiro representing the ‘cowards’, the traditional neoconservatives who desperately want to pretend everything is normal and focus on important things like making fun of purple-haired sociology majors at Sarah Lawrence, while Owens represents the grifter/freak wing of the party that proudly embraces antisemitism, conspiracism, and enough lunacy that they make Shapiro look serious and thoughtful by comparison. And what’s really happened to The Daily Wire is that the Candace Owens/Nick Fuentes wing of MAGA has thoroughly defeated the more ‘respectable’ Shapiro wing.

Quoting that 2024 piece again:

My first instinct is to sympathize with Ben Shapiro here, but I find that I can’t. Ben Shapiro made this bed, and now he’s going to have to sleep in it.

Candace Owens has been a known grifter as long as she’s been a public figure. Ben Shapiro knew she was a grifter when he hired her. He’s quietly tolerated or even promoted anti-semitic people and trends in his conservative movement for years. After Elon praised a Twitter post that said “Jews hate all white people”, who was there to rehabilitate his image? Ben Shapiro. Who hired Gina Carano after the actress was fired for comparing conservatives to Jews in the Holocaust? Shapiro again. He’s defended these people directly, and he’s also largely been silent as a massive amount of anti-semitic freaks became dominant in conservative circles…

Shapiro is a classic coward. He’s smart enough to know exactly what is happening in the conservative movement. But he stays loyal, he promotes the party, and he begrudgingly cooperates with the freaks and the grifters. He made his bed and now that the freaks have come after him he’s got nowhere else to sleep. That goes for him and the entire institutional conservative movement that hasn’t stood up to these people in any meaningful way.

Boreing, Shapiro, and the whole lot are gutless, spineless cowards. They’re still unwilling to directly call out racism. They’re afraid of confrontation. It would cost them too much. They’d lose viewers, their audience would shrink, they’d lose influence within the movement. They’re still trying to make peace with - and I cannot emphasize enough how literal and open they are about this - white supremacists, anti-semites and fascists.

Ben Shapiro is a coward who harbored antisemitic and conspiratorial leopards, and was shocked to find that those leopards wanted to eat his face as well. But he was too afraid of losing his audience to really fight the freaks, so he tried to make nice. But guess what? He lost his audience anyways! Trying to have principles inside the MAGA movement is flipping a trick coin - heads they win, tails you lose. Shapiro somehow managed to lose both his dignity and his audience and he has nobody but himself to blame.

Important Pandemic Update

Is New York Unaffordable? Or Are You Internet-Poisoned?

I’m going to do an incredibly self-indulgent thing here that Substack writers love to do, where I talk about a piece of minor internet drama I was involved in. But rather than re-litigating the specifics of the fight, I want to talk about how it reflects on our modern social media systems.

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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:

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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.

Every 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

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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:

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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?

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• 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.

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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:

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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.