Everything Is Content

Does anything exist for its own sake any longer?

It’s been a hot second since we had a Weekly Scroll, so this week’s edition is coming in two parts. Today’s edition is free for all subscribers, and tomorrow’s edition will be for paid subs. Today we’re talking about right wing clubbers, power-tripping Reddit mods, ICE’s desire for social media clout, TikTok censorship, and more.

Nightmare Blunt Rotation

Noted sex trafficker Andrew Tate, Mexican white nationalist Nick Fuentes, ‘looksmaxxer’ Clavicular, black Nazi Myron Gaines, and a few other right-leaning content creators all hung out last weekend in what I can only describe as an all-time nightmare blunt rotation. The cursed hang got a lot of attention online and inspired a lot of words about What’s Wrong With Culture, and there’s a lot of angles I could approach this from:

• How theoretically nonpartisan subcultures like ‘looksmaxxing’ end up in the right wing orbit, and how these right-wing influencers network themselves into those spaces.

• The strange identity politics of pro-Nazi non-white influencers like Gaines and Fuentes.

• How Andrew Tate just got his face bounced off the floor by a failed reality TV star.

• How homoerotic the entire thing was - on X, Clavicular was criticized by right wing accounts for paying attention to attractive women in a nightclub, rather than focusing on Andrew Tate’s biceps:

But really, what I want to talk about is how sad the whole thing seemed. Watching the footage of this group gives me a very through-the-looking-glass vibe, like asking for a pet cat for Christmas and instead getting a Cubist painting that resembles a cat if you squint. None of the people involved were actually having fun. They were doing vaguely fun-shaped activities while plastering on fake smiles for the camera. It was a simulacrum of a good time, if you will. Kat Dee called Andrew Tate the loneliest bastard on earth and I’m inclined to agree. The entire thing looked miserable.

The highlight of the gathering (and the most viral clip, naturally) was the moment when the group managed to convince a nightclub to play Kanye West’s song ‘Heil Hitler’:

None of this is fun. This is the public performance of ‘look how much fun I’m having’, which is normal for influencers but even more grotesque than usual given that the moment involves, you know, chanting Heil Hitler.

But if they’re not having fun, why are they doing it? To farm clips. To create viral moments. To take the supposedly cool parts of life and turn them into cash via the attention economy.

To use the word we all hate, content.

Reddit Mod Goes Power Crazy

Anyways, here’s a seemingly unrelated story - a moderator on Reddit last week had one of the most spectacular crash-outs I’ve seen in years.

The top moderator for /r/LivestreamFail was caught promoting a scam centered around a fake reality show called ‘Million Dollar Fan’. The show was supposedly going to pair popular streamers with their superfans to compete for money, prizes and glory, which would be a cool premise if the entire thing wasn’t fake. You don’t need all the details¹, but essentially the entire thing was a scam to get fans of livestreamers to spend money to win a chance to be on the show. The head moderator of /r/LivestreamFail was involved with the scam, and tried to use his position as head moderator to funnel people from the subreddit to the scam site, where they could spend money on a show that didn’t exist. He was caught and Reddit admins removed him as a moderator for violating the site’s code of conduct.

In response, our intrepid hero put out a 20 minute video that… just… ok, look. Picture a ‘Reddit moderator’ in your mind’s eye. Then click the video below. I regret to inform you that he lives up to whatever you’re imagining:

If you can’t make it through the video, I don’t blame you.² He calls for Reddit to help moderators get brand deals, talent managers, legal help so they can… moderate better? He calls the subject ‘of deadly seriousness’. There’s a lot to make fun of, but there’s something interesting underneath the terminal levels of cringe. This moderator states up front he became a moderator because of how powerful moderators can be - and that’s true!. I’ve written before about how Reddit is the one site where power users actually have a bit of power, due to how much control moderators are given over their communities.

But isn’t it a bit weird to outright admit that you’re only an internet janitor because you want power? Shouldn’t you be in it for the good of the subreddit, because you like the subject at hand? In a perfect world, yes, But subreddits aren’t just communities, they’re also engines of engagement, drivers of attention. They have all that content and all that energy, just waiting to be directed. And online attention is money. This guy’s main sin was that his attempts to monetize his position was so foolhardy that it was immediately discovered.

ICE raids as grist for the content mill

Content, as you can see, drives everything. The first two examples were very online subcultural examples, but this applies even in the real world. Two weeks ago, after Renee Good’s shooting, I wrote about how what’s happening in Minnesota is driven by the Trump administration’s desire for content:

We have video directly from ICE agent Jonathan Ross’s perspective because while he was killing Renee Good with one hand, he was holding up a smartphone and filming the encounter with the other. And that’s because the purpose of ICE is not just to track down illegal immigrants, it’s to create content and build a culture of fear.

ICE is spending millions of dollars on collaborations with pro-ICE influencers, and Ross was likely filming himself because, as the Washington Post has reported, ICE agents have been explicitly instructed to pump out more videos of confrontations and arrests.

Everything we’ve seen since then reinforces this point. The New York Times recently reported that, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, FBI director Kash Patel’s first instinct was to figure out what to tweet:

The Trump administration, first and foremost, views every situation through the lens of how it will play on social media.

This is especially true in Minnesota. The entire ICE strategy can be traced back to a feud between DHS head Kristi Noem and designated ‘border czar’ Tom Homan. To be clear, both of these officials are staunch immigration restrictionists. Both want to deport lots and lots of illegal immigrants. But Homan wants to do it in a moneyball-esque way where he gets the maximum amount of deportations for the minimum amount of political blowback, while Noem wants to create a public spectacle. Noem is the reason ICE was directed to film more arrests so they could post clips on social media. Noem and Homan despise each other, Noem won a power struggle last year, and the chaos in Minnesota is the result of her deliberate desire to create that chaos. It’s also why, with Trump nervous, Homan has been dispatched to calm things down in Minnesota and is making statements like “I didn’t come here for photo ops or headlines”.

But Patel and Noem’s obsession with social media isn’t unique. It’s the default attitude that starts with the White House and trickles down. One of the most illuminating things Trump said about the raid to capture Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela was that it was “like I was watching a television show… if you would have seen the speed, the violence…” Understand that is the highest possible praise - he wishes we could have seen it because it was great content. He judges his cabinet members and advisors by how well they defend him in cable news segments. Meanwhile, the White House twitter account is using AI to make memes out of arrests:

When it was pointed out this was a deepfake, the White House posted “The memes will continue”, because that’s what really matters. Everything is grist for the content mill. Is the woman in the picture above actually going to be convicted of a crime? I doubt it, but that doesn’t matter, because we got a sweet meme of her weeping. Is ICE actually doing their job effectively? No, lol, Minneapolis is not a hotbed of illegal immigration and the operation there isn’t actually pushing big deportation numbers. But it’s succeeding in a different way - it’s created a hell of a lot of content.

If we return to the neo-Nazi group at the front of this post, they’re more honest about it than nearly anyone else. The blog How To Do Things With Memes pointed this out:

On stream with Sneako this past week, Clavicular (real name Braden Peters) appeared to get a text from his (purportedly) 17-year-old girlfriend saying she was pregnant. Later, while streaming themselves sipping drinks at a restaurant, he said to Sneako:

CLAV: Maybe I’ll have a kid, though. That’d be a W segment.

SNEAKO: Bro, your brain’s so cooked. Having a kid as a segment?

CLAV: Well, all I think about is content, I’m sorry bro. Like dude, I literally only think about content, you’ve gotta understand.

SNEAKO: Having a kid is a good collab.

The next night he was at the club with Sneako, Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Tate blasting Ye’s “Heil Hitler.” Clips of the group saluting at a club went viral across X and other platforms.

When everything is content, everything is measurement first and meaning second. “Hitler” is primarily a keyword denoting reliable engagement, not a name denoting immense evil. Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is rational because it makes more people watch your Kick stream.

The piece is spot on, and my only criticism is that it doesn’t go far enough into realize that it’s not just influencers who are contentmaxxing. It’s everyone - our influencers, our corporations, our public intellectuals and our elected officials.

The right wing club event wasn’t real friends hanging out, it was a simulacrum of a friend hang. The Reddit mod above doesn’t care about his community, he cares about content monetization opportunities. ICE hasn’t been doing real border control in Minneapolis (which is nowhere near the border), they’ve been doing a public performance of ‘border control’. Everything is a fake version of itself designed to be packaged and sold via memes.

It brings me no joy to tell you this, but if you want to understand the world around you, this is the lens you need to be analyzing things through. Everything, everywhere is driven by the desire to make (and monetize) content. Posting is the most powerful force in the world, some might say.

A fine selection of completely unaltered headlines

All of that got far too serious, so here’s this:

We can all relate - it’s just the worst when my beloved walrus penis is stolen.

TikTok Gets Throttled?

Over the past week, a number of TikTok users have reported that videos criticizing ICE, Trump or the MAGA movement were receiving far less engagement than usual, - or just not being seen at all.

Both regular users and high-profile celebrities like singer Billie Eilish and Hacks star Megan Stalter have been complaining about censorship, with many saying their anti-ICE posts showed zero views despite large followings. Separately, users have reported that direct messages with the word ‘Epstein’ trigger an error. But at the same time, TikTok was suffering widespread outages across the site, with videos failing to upload and view counts stuck at zero for posts on a wide variety of topics. The company denied accusations of censorship and said that a data center outage caused a ‘cascading systems failure’ leading to problems across the app.

It’s not clear to me whether TikTok is actually censoring content about ICE or just having a technical meltdown - I was able to log in and search for anti-ICE content fairly easily. But the ICE shootings in Minneapolis and the Epstein files are both massively sensitive issues for the Trump administration, and I don’t blame people for being suspicious. It’s especially bad timing for TikTok that these problems are popping up just days after a deal was finalized to transfer the US portion of TikTok to political allies of Donald Trump.

What’s striking about the episode isn’t just the outage itself, but how quickly it triggered widespread distrust among users (who are largely already suspicious of TikTok’s moderation practices). In response, some celebrities have promised to delete their TikTok accounts and some users have begun migrating to TikTok alternatives. UpScrolled, which briefly surged to #1 in the App Store, appears to be the primary beneficiary. I don’t want to overstate the importance of this single incident - UpScrolled is still extremely small and by far the most likely outcome is that absolutely nothing comes of this - but it’s worth keeping an eye on. If the TikTok censorship story has legs and the app actually does suppress anti-Trump political content, it’s the kind of thing that could gain traction over time.

Links

• Mark Zuckerberg approved giving minors to access AI chatbot companions even after being warned they were capable of sexual interactions, according to documents made public in a lawsuit this week. I’m no PR expert,³ but that seems like the kind of sentence you never want attached to your name under any circumstances.

• ChatGPT will start serving ads soon. This is what tech analyst Ben Thompson calls the ‘long road to Instagram’, where it seems like an inevitability that any service with ChatGPT’s scale and level of customer insight will eventually feature Instagram-style personalized ads based on what it knows about you.

• In the wake of Derek Thompson declaring that Everything is TV, Substack has decided they also wish to be TV.

• TikTok is launching a new app dedicated to microdramas.

Posts

• Chat, peep this bussin’ clay dish from the 16th century

• Why I’m switching

• Kafkaesque

• Why shouldn’t I keep it?

1. Full breakdown here, if you’re interested

2. If you’re a real sicko, there’s a second video.

3. This is a lie, I am totally a PR expert.