Weekly Scroll: Escape your relatives by reading this online nonsense
The holidays are here, but the internet stops for no man
Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays! We all know the best part of Christmas cheer isn’t spending time with your loved ones. It’s not eating delicious meals, exchanging presents, or deepening the bonds of human connection. It’s ducking away from your family and friends to read about internet nonsense.
I’m happy to deliver my readers their own Christmas miracle, because the internet never stops. And hey, if you want to spread the holiday cheer, sign up for a paid subscription to Infinite Scroll! Have a great holiday y’all.
We Did It Reddit
The sad case of the Brown University shooting concluded last week when Claudio Neves Valente, the main suspect in the shooting, was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, having committed suicide there.
These kinds of mass shootings aren’t something I normally comment on, but this case wasn’t solved the way most cases are. Remarkably, the case was first cracked by a Redditor posting in the /r/Providence subreddit:
This Redditor was completely correct - the exact car and person he identified was indeed the shooter. He was explicitly credited in the arrest warrant and hopefully he’ll be getting the $50K reward authorities were offering for information.
Reddit has a bit of a history when it comes to providing assistance to police investigations. After the bombing of the Boston Marathon in 2013, redditors started a subreddit called ‘FindBostonBombers’ and began collecting evidence and clues. The mob eventually identified Sunil Tripathi (who, in a strange coincidence, was a student at Brown!) as a suspect. Tripathi had been reported missing a month earlier, and the amateur detectives of Reddit were sure that grainy photos linked him to the crime. Except that, you know, oops, Tripathi was completely innocent and was missing because he had actually committed suicide. The Boston bombers incident remains one of Reddit’s most infamous moments, and is often mocked with the celebratory We Did It, Reddit! cheer, which is generally used whenever a Reddit mob has fucked up a situation through lack of impulse control.
Given that history, it’s remarkable that the information leading to the suspect actually did come from a tip on Reddit. It’s a redemption arc, a “We Did It, Reddit” moment but finally without any irony.
There’s still plenty of danger in this kind of wisdom of the crowds, open-source style of investigation. It symbolizes the best and the worst of the internet - you might discover niche information that’s incredibly useful, or you might run into a hateful mob. But this kind of thing is going to keep happening in the future, and frankly the Reddit version of this story is better than what happens on the rest of social media, where right wing ghouls on X happily smeared a Palestinian student simply because he was the kind of ideological enemy they hoped would end up being the shooter.
Timothee Chalamet is NOT EsDeeKid
The background: EsDeeKid is a British drill rapper who is always masked, and fans online had speculated that the good Sir Kid was actually Timothee Chalamet in disguise. As best I can tell the evidence for all of this was extremely tenuous (one might say, Boston bomber-levels) and made no sense, especially because EsDeeKid has a thick Liverpool scouse accent. But the internet whipped itself into a frenzy, and Chalamet decided to debunk the rumors in the most fun way possible - by recording a drill song with EsDeeKid
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It’s not bad! Chalamet isn’t exactly a great rapper, but he’s not terrible either. Perfectly cromulent. The stunt is fun on its own, but it’s even more interesting when put in the context of Chalamet’s unhinged promotional blitz for his new ping-pong movie Marty Supreme. He’s climbed to the top of the Las Vegas Sphere, posted fake ‘leaked videos’ as some kind of performance art, blimps, and appeared with bodyguards wearing giant ping pong balls on their heads. He is everywhere on social media, and the bizarre press blitz seems to be working, with Marty Supreme scoring phenomenal early box office numbers in its limited opening.
I’ve talked before about my admiration for Chalamet’s unashamed ambition - he’s not shy about wanting to achieve greatness, and I think society could benefit from a little bit more of that. But this blitz is interesting beyond his personal ambition and beyond this movie, as it raises the question of how we even sell things in the age of social media. The traditional press tour for big-budget movie means sitting down with journalists, profiles in magazines, and a couple of appearances on late night television. In the last few years social media has become an inescapable part of that formula - you need to go on Hot Ones, on Chicken Shop Date, on various podcasts, etc.
But Hot Ones is mainstream now. It may have been cool and surprising seven years ago, but now it’s just another stop on the press tour. Podcasts are mainstream. YouTube is mainstream. Everyone’s doing it now, and when everyone’s doing a promotional strategy, that strategy can no longer really differentiate you from the dozens of other movies and shows competing for attention. Chalamet - who perhaps not coincidentally is dating a member of the Kardashian family, the family that may understand how to grab and use attention better than any other family alive - seems to realize that to truly capture the public’s eye, you need to do something fresh and new that nobody else is doing. And in 2025 that means rap videos and Sphere promos and blimps, I suppose.
The Same Grift
Presented without comment:
Bari Weiss
I don’t want to be one of those people in the media who spend all their time screeching about Bari Weiss. God knows there are already enough of them. But it is notable and concerning that Weiss is now just openly yanking pieces critical of Trump off the air, like she did with a 60 Minutes investigation into CECOT, everyone’s favorite Salvadoran torture gulag.
Weiss has become a central media figure because of how obviously she was installed to transform CBS into a right-leaning media arm useful to the Trump administration. Reports have come out that Weiss spent weeks ignoring the investigation, only to swoop in at the last minute, demand changes, and then ultimately stopped it hours before broadcast. Weiss’s demands were, at first glance, reasonable. She wanted to make sure the investigation actually reported new information. She wanted the reporters to try harder to get officials on the record. Etc etc. But I’d counter Weiss’s argument with wise words from another media figure:
“Only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated” - Weiss was perfectly aware of how editorial demands for perfection can be weaponized when it was the progressives at the New York Times doing it to her columns. She is, to the great disappointment of her critics in the media, not an idiot. She’s just fine with wielding that cudgel when she’s in power.
And of course, the demands for extreme quality are selectively applied. When her reporters want to report on the torture gulag, they must jump through every hoop, ensure originality and rigor and fairness, and make sure that every part of the piece has been checked seven times over. When she wants to talk about Erika Kirk, she publishes scores of interviews, think pieces, essays, reports, and clips without any of that rigor.
The funniest part of the entire episode is that someone at CBS fucked up - while they pulled the segment off the air in the US, they forgot to pull from online international platforms, so the whole thing is available on pirate sites now. Plenty of journalists have watched it and confirmed that yes, the reporting was good and the torture gulag is indeed very bad.
The Apex of Influencer Boxing
Over the weekend, 33 million people watched sentient gonorrhea pustule Jake Paul get knocked out by former heavyweight champ Anthony Joshua. It feels like a sin not to post the beautiful visuals, so here’s my Christmas gift to you all:
Paul has been the king of influencer boxing for several years now, and despite being a middling amateur talent has racked up an ‘impressive’ set of wins. He’s been incredibly intelligent about fighting retired boxers too old to really fight, or retired mixed martial artists who aren’t boxers by trade, usually with a large weight advantage. But all that came to an end when he fought Joshua, who is very much still an active, non-retired heavyweight and very much still a top ten level talent. Paul ran away for five rounds before getting KO’d in round six (Joshua was content to let Paul tire himself out rather than press for an immediate knockout). Still, respect for Paul for having the guts to get in the ring with a former heavyweight champion.
A much funnier, much more schadenfreude-heavy fight was the contest involving serial sex trafficker and role model for young men everywhere Andrew Tate. Tate’s entire brand is based around being an Alpha Male, a guy who can beat you up and take your woman. He markets himself as a former kickboxing world champion. So it’s very funny that he lost his fight on the undercard to a reality star named Chase DeMoor.
We should be very clear that DeMoor is the single biggest can the promotion could find to fight Tate. He’s a reality star with a limited history in boxing, whose technique is reminiscent of a dead fish flopping around:
And yet when Alpha Male Andrew Tate fought DeMoor, he somehow made DeMoor look like Rocky:
The truth is that Tate was the ‘champion’ of a 4th-tier kickboxing organization and was never even close to being a world-class fighter. It’s too much to hope that this fight destroys Tate’s credibility with young men, but Santa, if you’re listening…
Links
Trump Media Group, and I am not making this up, is looking to merge with a nuclear fusion startup. The idea makes more sense than you’d think - TMG’s actual social media business is relatively worthless and has no hope of making a profit, but they’re very good at selling stock to Trump fans at inflated values. So they have a big pile of money that should probably be invested in an actual business, and you know what kind of business needs lots of capital? Nuclear fusion research startups.
Welcome to 2025 - a show based on hyper-online queer hockey fanfic now has one of the highest rated TV episodes in history. Is the show actually that good? I’ve not watched, but I have my doubts. What I’m sure the show has is an army of absolutely insane, devoted fans willing to vote on IMDb. Oldheads here at Infinite Scroll will remember we talked about how insane the queer hockey fanfic community is a few years ago, when they sexually harassed a hockey player IRL who they were mad wasn’t playing into their depraved fantasies.
We likely have another prominent case of AI-driven psychosis. DeepMind AI researcher David Budden claims that using AI tools, he found a solution to the Navier-Stokes equations. Solving Navier-Stokes is one of the most important open questions in mathematics, and would be a stunning accomplishment. Hutter is a well-regarded AI researcher, but not the level of mathematician necessary to tackle a problem like this. He’s also made a number of high profile, high dollar bets with other mathematicians who insist he’s not actually found a solution. It seems likely that a smart guy has managed to drive himself insane via LLM, and it’s worrying that this can happen even to intelligent, seemingly normal people.
NYMag on how a phone ban saved New York schools.
Take the NYTimes 2025 online slang quiz.
Final message for the holiday season - follow Tom Scocca’s classic advice and have two drinks.
I believe it is Budden, not Hutter, claiming the proof
Merry Christmas!!!