Midweek Scroll: Woke Puritanism

Slack Espionage, Evil Scientists, and RIP Hamster Forums

A Horrifying Influencer Scandal

Harry Sisson is a 22 year old TikTok influencer with 1.8M followers. He’s mostly known for covering politics from a progressive/liberal angle, and gained prominence in 2024 for his coverage of the presidential election.¹ This week, Sisson has been hit with what seems like the most Gen Z/2025 scandal imaginable.

According to a viral set of posts, Sisson is accused of texting with around a dozen young women on social media, while not being exclusive with them. The women that have come forward say that he convinced them to send him nude pictures, and never told them that he was texting with other women. And… that’s it. I’ve looked for allegations of abuse, or anything else, but no. Sisson never even met any of the women. ‘Lots of flirting’ is apparently the entire thing. Here’s a sample:

The scandal seems to be that an extremely famous single guy in his 20s flirted with a lot of women on Snapchat. And was too good at it? He was too convincing and charming in being able to get women to send him nudes, I guess, and now there’s remorse. Trying as hard as I can to be charitable to the women involved, the most damning thing you could say about Sisson is that he lied to some of them that he wasn’t texting other women at the same time. Lying is uncool, sure. He might be kind of a jerk? This is moderately bad behavior for someone who calls himself a champion of women, I guess? Like a 2 out of 10 on the badness scale.

But how do I say this… Look. I don’t want to call people stupid in their moment of emotional distress. But come on girl - this guy has millions of followers, you’ve never met him IRL before, and he DMs your random account with a few hundred followers out of nowhere? He calls you hot and asks for explicit pictures, and then claims he’s only into you and you alone? Come on girl. There’s a baseline level of social awareness here and you’re failing it badly. A guy you have never been within five hundred miles of called you ‘wifey material’ and you thought he was serious?

Lmao how am I supposed to hate this man

The videos that the women have been making (examples here and here) use the language that we’ve come to expect from accusations during the #MeToo movement. They use phrases like ‘seeking accountability’, they emphasize the bravery of the women for speaking up, and the overall tone is grave and serious. But it’s style over substance, it’s the sizzle without the steak. This essentially amounts to getting the ick from consensual flirting.

It’s weirdly puritanical, which is something we’re seeing a lot more of from Gen Z these days.² We know that Gen Z is having less sex than any previous generation. Society used to be sex-negative because anything sexual was assumed by default to be sinful. But today Gen Z seems to be sex-negative not because sexual behavior is assumed to be sinful, but because it’s assumed to be predatory. It’s puritanism, but woke. It’s a generation of never nudes who are terrified of Sabrina Carpenter.

I think it’s interesting that the biggest/most viral thread on the topic is from a Republican operative. Republicans as a party these days don’t give a shit about sexual misbehavior given their embrace of Trump, the Tate brothers, and the assorted universe of creeps in GOP-world. But they’ve realized they can copy progressive language to smear people like Sisson, and that it’s a useful social media tactic to go after left-leaning influencers. You can imply that serious crimes have been committed solely through progressive accountability language.

Ultimately, I do feel bad for the women involved. Not because there were some women who sexted with a celebrity that was playing the field. But I do feel bad that this isn’t going to work out the way they thought it would. The mental model they’re working from is likely “I will be considered brave, strong, and morally righteous while Sisson will be cancelled”, but that’s not how this is going to play out. Sisson is going to get more famous from all the attention, he’s going to get even more women DMing him because he’s got a playboy vibe now, and he’s not going to be cancelled at all. Meanwhile, they’re going to be remembered as that girl who was convinced to send nudes by a line like “The verdict is you are sexy as fuck. Court adjourned.”

RIP to the Hamster Forums

We’ve talked many times before about the absurd and idiotic things the UK has done to screw with online ecosystems. And now those actions have taken down a titan of social media, The Hamster Forum.

On the one hand - yes this is a bit silly. It’s a tiny forum that describes itself as ‘The home of all things hamstery’. Society can weather this blow. But on the other hand, this kind of quirky site is what makes the internet great. The UK’s Online Safety Act is a deeply stupid piece of legislation whose impact will be shuttering independent sites like this, not protecting children in any real or meaningful way. A few weeks ago we talked about platform lock and the open web, and this is another way in which giant platforms thrive while independent sites die - only the biggest platforms actually have the budget to comply with bureaucratic nonsense like the OSA.

Corporate Espionage via Slack

Rippling and Deel are two companies in the ‘workplace productivity software’ space who frequently compete for business. Their actual businesses are cripplingly boring so we’re not going to talk about that at all. But what is exciting is that we’re apparently now doing espionage/counter-espionage tactics in SaaS³ sales Slacks.

Per Bloomberg:

Workplace software company People Center Inc.—known as Rippling—is suing its chief competitor over alleged corporate espionage.

Both companies were valued in excess of $10 billion in recent funding rounds.

Rippling, in its complaint, says Deel “cultivated a spy to systematically steal its competitor’s most sensitive business information and trade secrets,” in a deliberate attack that lasted for more than four months.

The alleged spy at Rippling—its Ireland-based Global Payroll Compliance Manager—was identified after he was observed accessing Slack channels and documents with no legitimate reason to do so, the complaint says.

Slack, the communications platform that asks “What if Discord was less fun and more corporate?”, is somehow at the centerpiece of legit spy movie stuff.

Rippling and Deel compete for the same contracts with highly overlapping customer bases, and don’t seem very fond of one another. Rippling began to suspect there was a mole after an investigative reporter reached out and had obtained access to the company’s internal Slack messages. They began scrutinizing various employees, and quickly identified someone who’d accessed channels they wouldn’t have a business reason to access - a potential mole. This Rippling employee was also doing a suspicious amount of searches for ‘Deel’ in the Rippling Slack. But how to prove it?

The smoking gun came earlier this month, when Rippling set forth a test, or what is known by security professionals as a “honeypot.”

To confirm Deel’s involvement, Rippling’s General Counsel sent a legal letter to Deel’s senior leadership identifying a recently established Slack channel called “d-defectors,” in which (the letter implied) Rippling employees were discussing information that Deel would find embarrassing if made public. In reality, the “d-defectors” channel was not used by Rippling employees and contained no discussions at all. It had never been searched for or accessed by the spy, would not have come up in any of the spy’s previous searches, and the spy had no legitimate reason to access the channel.

Crucially, this legal letter was only sent to three recipients: Deel’s Chairman, Chief Financial Officer, and General Counsel (Philippe Bouaziz), Deel’s Head of U.S. Legal (Spiros Komis), and Deel’s outside counsel. Neither the letter nor the #d-defectors channel was known to anyone outside of Rippling’s investigative team and the Deel recipients. Yet, just hours after Rippling sent the letter to Deel’s executives and counsel, Deel’s spy searched for and accessed the #d-defectors channel—proving beyond any doubt that Deel’s top leadership, or someone acting on their behalf, had fed the information on the #d-defectors channel to Deel’s spy inside Rippling.

Absolutely incredible. How do you figure out if your phone is tapped? You call a friend and say “Hey I’m leaving that really big shipment of drugs and loose cash under the park bench at 51st and Lexington tomorrow! Don’t forget!” and then you see if anybody shows up to the bench. An actual honeypot operation orchestrated on America’s most boring pseudo-social network.

In case you need additional proof - when confronted by Irish police, the individual in question apparently locked himself in a bathroom, flushed his phone, and then ran away.

(amazingly enough this was already a plotline on Silicon Valley)

People use Imgur for what?

If you’re one of the people who use Imgur as a social network, hit me up, I have questions.

Supervillain Scientist Memes

“Ethics is holding back science” declares Chinese scientist Jiankui He, who spent three years in jail for illegally CRISPR-editing the genes of several babies. He’s since gone on a bender of posting like a supervillain and his face has been everywhere in my X feed.

He’s become an instant meme since his ethics post about a week ago- there are parody accounts with tens of thousands of followers and countless memes. It really helps that it’s not just a random account saying this stuff - it’s a guy who actually went to jail for illegal science and who looks like a James Bond villain. See if you can tell which posts are memes and which are the real Jiankui before clicking. Answers in the footnotes.⁴

• Human will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution

• We must make all people bisexual

• Woolly mice is bioweapon

• Boys can be born without a foreskin. We have the technology, ethics is holding back progress.

Links

• Media Matters has an enlightening analysis of how far the online podcast/media ecosystem is tilted to the political right. A more quantitative look at some of the trends we’ve talked about when it comes to the question of a progressive Joe Rogan.

• Meta is apparently attempting to shut down the publication and promotion of a book by a former employee. The book, titled Careless People, contains embarrassing stories about Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to flatter Xi Jinping and alleges a culture of sexual harassment among executives. I’ve bought and will report back.

• Fired CNN anchor Don Lemon’s newest gig is apparently chasing subway trains to show people brainrot images. Should someone check on him? Is he ok?

• NBA stars are using professional social media surrogates to get big social followings in China.

• Is TikTok no longer able to create memes?

• The Snapchat move that leaves teen girls heartbroken.

• TikTok appears to make its users more Republican.

Posts

• A sad cookie

• A good vampire post

• Sissy hypnosis

• Bad Guy McWeirdson

1. Harry is also the kid from the ‘Navy Seal who killed Osama bin Laden threatens to make Gen Z influencer his sex slave’ incident.

2. I have an upcoming post on the differences between Millennial humor and Gen Z humor, and one of the big differences is how sexless Gen Z humor is.

3. If you already know what SaaS stands for, my condolences. No one should have to know what SaaS stands for.

4. Real, fake, real, fake