Weekly Scroll: New Popes and Cooked Kids

Plus! Meme Wars and 16th Century TMZ

I was once again featured in The Dispatch this week - they’ve also been kind enough to offer Infinite Scroll readers a 15% discount on membership with code ‘JEREMIAH’ - if you’re interested you can join here.

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The New Pope

We have a new pope! If you’re like me, you found out the normal way one learns these things - from fried chicken brand accounts:

On just the second day of the conclave cardinals chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to be the new pope, who will be styled as Pope Leo XIV. Prevost was a long shot who prediction markets had at less than 1% just moments before he was announced. He’s the first American pope and was considered an ally of Pope Francis.

As you’d expect, the internet rushed to do two things. First, and most importantly, jokes. We now live in a world where the the cardinals are rawdogging the conclave and the Pope has done shots of Malört. Because he’s a White Sox fan, he should have plenty of experience with living in purgatory. The new pope’s twitter account was so obscure that you probably had more followers, but hey, at least he’s going to be one of the few elected officials from Illinois not to go to jail.

The second thing people did was, of course, examine the new pope’s social media accounts to try to score political points. And the new pope seems to be closely aligned with Francis as a staunch critic of the Trump administration. He isn’t particularly active on Twitter/X, and went the entirety of 2024 without tweeting or retweeting anything at all. But he did return in 2025 for two reasons - to wish Francis better health, and to dunk on JD Vance’s face. His sparse online presence indicates a history of criticizing both Vance and Trump.

Imagine being JD Vance. The last pope spends his dying days telling you that you suck. So you kill him, but then they choose yet another pope that hates you. You might be the second most prominent Catholic in the world, but the first most prominent keeps telling you what a slimy douchebag you are. I have to imagine that “The Pope hates me, specifically and in particular” is like a personal 9/11 if you’re an adult convert Catholic.

Anyways! Let’s see how MAGA is handling this development:

To the tune of Pink Pony Club

So yeah, about what you’d expect.

For a slightly more serious analysis, this is an interesting pick in a number of ways. The cardinals chose a pope on only the second day, and they ended up picking the guy who was in charge of appointing bishops and cardinals (it figures that a Chicago guy would get elected with the help of a little patronage). But really, I do wonder what we can read into this choice as a response to the political moment.

It’s almost always a mistake to see internal church decisions as commentary on American politics - they operate on an entirely different set of ideological axes. So I’m warning you in advance not to take this section too literally.

But with that said! This sure as hell looks like it’s aimed at the specific moment of American politics. The church seems interested in rebuking Trumpism as an ideology, especially because Vance is such a prominent Catholic. So it makes sense they’d pick an ally of Francis and yet another critic of MAGAism.

But it wouldn’t have the same impact if it was some European guy - too easy to dismiss as ‘that guy doesn’t get America’s issues’. So they picked a MAGA critic specifically from America’s Midwest, just to screw with JD’s head. They’re leveraging an American voice to speak against America’s worst instincts, and a voice that can’t be dismissed or intimidated by Trump’s bully tactics.

Again, this take comes with a grain of salt, maybe even the whole salt shaker. But there might be something there! Congrats to Leo XIV. The founders are rolling in their graves at the idea of an American pope but to hell with ‘em, raise a glass of Malort.

Meme Wars

India and Pakistan are in a low-level war after militants killed 28 civilians in Indian-controlled Kashmir and India responded by missile striking Pakistani territory. Both sides, at least for the moment, seem to be fairly careful in not escalating too much. There have been air-to-air fights, drones deployed, but no major clashes involving troops.¹ It’s not a war war yet, but it’s not not a war, if that makes sense.

Anyways! While the actual military actions have been cautiously chosen, social media about the topic has been a mess. Keep in mind there are an enormous number of Indian users of sites like YouTube and X (India is the biggest country on YouTube and the third biggest on X). They’re the dark matter of social media - you rarely see their content thanks to the algorithm, but they’re everywhere.

As you’d expect, pro-Indian and pro-Pakistani accounts are hurling all kinds of insane abuse and rhetoric at each other, creating narratives, memes, etc. But it’s not just random accounts. The Pakistani secretary of defense is also sending pro-Pakistan memes:

I hate patting myself on the back,² but this is something I’ve been talking about for years. In the piece Real Wars are now Flame Wars I said:

Watching [the Gaza conflict] play out in real time, it struck me that we will likely never again experience a war without a corresponding social media battle for public opinion. This is now a permanent feature of modern conflict. Social media is just another combat zone, and often a crucial one. Posts are strategic assets. The discourse is a battlefield. All real wars are now Flame Wars…

What should we expect moving forward? Expect that all future wars that clear a certain level of size and profile will exhibit these dynamics. Modern propaganda is different from what we saw in previous generations. We should be aware that from the moment we find out about a conflict, we’re already being subjected to competing narratives about the conflict. And we’re not going to be passively consuming those narratives - we’re going to be in the middle on the fight watching our friends and acquaintances do active battle for control of the message. We’ll be surrounded by the screaming.

India’s official military account is slinging hashtags and slick graphics to promote their missile strikes. Pakistani officials are practically posting fancams. If we’re lucky the insanity stays localized to social media and the actual fighting doesn’t spread into a wider conflict. But social media now plays a crucial role in real wars, and the incentives on social media are always to stoke engagement through tribalism and conflict. There’s a real risk that social media posturing and memeing actually makes it harder to calm conflicts like this one and leads to more deaths.

Are The Kids Cooked?

One of the most read articles from this week (and the one that generated by far the most discourse) was about college students and ChatGPT from NY Mag.

The piece centers on one student, Chungin “Roy” Lee, who gained online fame after he was expelled from Columbia for cheating online job interviews and encouraging other students to do the same. Lee admits that he’s basically never done much real work - he used AI to get admitted to college, he used AI to do all his coursework, and AI to land several plum internships (which were revoked after he went viral for having cheated his interviews). Lee’s not suffering though - he recently went viral again for having raised more than five million dollars for a startup that aims to have you ‘cheat on everything’ including, creepily enough, first dates.

But the broader strokes of the story aren’t really about Lee. The real story is about how ChatGPT and other AI chatbots have completely upended academic life. By most surveys, the vast majority of college students are now using generative AI to complete their coursework. Professors often feel powerless to stop it, from multiple angles. They bemoan a lack of institutional support for taking AI cheating seriously, and they also admit they can’t really tell for sure when a student uses AI (unless it’s really obvious).

Students give quotes about how they’re now dependent on ChatGPT, with one student saying “I use AI a lot. Like, every day. And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

This, of course, spawned numerous discourses. The actual problem of stopping cheating is fairly mundane - just return to written, in-person, timed exams.³ But the broader question I’m interested in is “Are young people who use ChatGPT - aka most of them - screwing themselves?” And I think the answer is yes. If you’re using AI to do your work rather than doing it yourself, you’re cooked from two different angles. Your skills will end up stagnating rather than growing over time. And separately from your economic prospects, you might lose your soul.⁴

Let me cover stagnation first. There’s nothing complicated about this - if you use AI, you’re not learning. You’ll have no skills of your own, and you’ll only ever be as good as an AI. Other people will learn and grow and develop skills and you won’t. You’d better hope that the singularity comes fast, because if it doesn’t then you’re just going to stagnate and screw yourself over. And ironically, you’re likely to be the first one whose job gets automated, because as the economy changes you’ll have no ability to adjust. The person who just types prompts into a text box is the easiest person to automate.

But I also think people who use AI are shortchanging themselves on a more profound level. That’s because there’s a deeper point to education than just getting a job and having productive skills. I want to quote from one of the best pieces of advice ever written, David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger…

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

I’m not going to state this more eloquently than DFW, so let’s just keep rolling:

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship […]

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I love this so much, and I read this speech at least once a year. If you’ve never read it before, it only takes about ten minutes and I cannot recommend strongly enough that you click the link and go take it in. Education is not just memorizing trivia and learning a couple neat skills so that you become employable. It should be more than that.

Perhaps the deepest and most fundamental choice we get as human beings is the choice of what to care about. What will you spend your life thinking about, caring about, acting on? Education is at the core of learning to make that choice. If you’re automating your way through education, in a real sense you are automating away your life’s agency. Don’t turn yourself into a mental cripple. Do the work, kids. Learn how to analyze and how to think and how to write, and you end up learning how to choose and how to be a person.

Links

• Repeat the mantra - it’s always in Infinite Scroll first. Rolling Stone and Garbage Day talk about how dangerous the ChatGPT therapy trend is after we discussed it here last week.

• The decline of the open web continues - Google searches may actually be falling in some categories for the first time, as AI tools take market share from search engines. This will further hasten the decline of web traffic, lead to the silo-ization of the internet, and harm independent sites that rely on web traffic (subscribe to Infinite Scroll!)

• More news from the Trump administration’s insecure data practices: Tulsi Gabbard re-used the same weak password for all her accounts and the Signal clone the administration uses was hacked. Oops!

• American Eagle is joining Substack. This trend of publications (like Allure and NYMag) and brands (like Rare Beauty) joining Substack is likely to accelerate over the next year or so. Substack’s growing too fast and becoming too influential to ignore, and it’s inevitably going to join the ranks of X, Instagram and TikTok as places any serious brand needs a social presence.

• Peacock launched an accelerator for creators. Now it’s picking up their scripted shows.

• Kai Cenat launched a ‘streamer university’ and supposedly got more than a million applicants for 150 spots.

• Hawk Tuah girl finally gave her first major interview months after her meme coin fiasco. How did it go? She said “I don’t know” more than 20 times, so take a guess.

• There was yet another BookTok IRL event that ended in disaster.

Posts

• 16th century TMZ

• Short Kings

• Wawaweewa

• A common expression

• Interesting Weather

1. As an example, India has so far only struck militant groups with missiles and avoided hitting any official Pakistani army positions.

2. Editor’s note: Jeremiah actually loves patting himself on the back.

3. Or oral exams, or Google Doc histories, etc.

4. To be clear, we’re talking about students who use AI to do the vast majority of their work, not students who use AI as a companion tool or helper but still put in the work themselves.