Weekly Scroll: Striking Out
General strikes, Opinion Blunders, and Yassified Shrek
Welcome back to the Weekly Scroll, your source for the week in culture, technology and politics on the social internet. Thanks to all of you who are subscribed to Infinite Scroll - you make this blog possible! Let’s jump into it.
The Economic Strike Strikes Out
I’m so tired y’all:
Did all you readers out there have a good time during the economic strike on Friday? Some of you likely saw this all over social media last week, while some of you probably didn’t realize it existed. In my experience, it was heavily influential on particular sites - especially Instagram and BlueSky - and nowhere to be seen on Twitter or the front page of Reddit. The concept is pretty straightforward. As a means of protest, spend a day without buying anything or participating in the economy at all.
I hate to be nothing but a font of negativity, so let me try to say something nice before I get going. That’s a cool looking rabbit. I would totally get a beer with that rabbit. He looks like he knows how to hang. That’s all I got. This is enormously stupid.
Nothing about this is real. The boycott doesn’t actually have a stated purpose beyond ‘protest’. It’s not aimed at anything in particular other than, like, the general state of things. It was dreamed up by a grifter who’s also been criminally convicted of sex crimes. It has no strategy and no theory of change. It’s the exact same kind of performative bullshit that I wrote about in Activism is Not a Social Club.
The cherry on this extremely stupid protest sundae is the completely incoherent messaging. Don’t buy stuff! On this one specific day! But small business ok! But not small businesses that are fast food or gas! We totally have power! Some of the instructions and tips given out by popular accounts were completely self-defeating, like this instruction to buy gas on Thursday so you won’t need it Friday:
We’re going to overthrow capitalism by buying things on Thursday instead of Friday. Good work team, very proud of you.
We’re Headed Back to Venice
At least the Venetian guy was elected?
Bezos Goes Posting
Last week, Jeff Bezos announced that the opinion page of the Washington Post would shift from an ideologically neutral tone to a specific point of view that endorsed two core pillars - personal liberties and free markets. Some selected quotes from the announcement:
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
I’m actually ok with the principle behind this decision. Bezos makes a really interesting point - in previous generations, the opinion page really did function as the ‘public square’ where competing ideas would duke it out. But that’s no longer the case. Social media is now the public town square, and opinion pages are more like elevated sideshows to the main event. Given that, it might not be as important for every single newspaper to remain ideologically neutral. Many don’t! We all know, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal leans conservative. And things are fine, even though some papers have a distinct point of view.
All of that makes sense in the abstract. But in the concrete here and now, Bezos’s decision raises a number of questions. For instance, will Bezos allow his newspaper to opine on the threat the MAGA movement poses to individual freedom? Will they take Donald Trump to task for his tariffs, which are a blatant attack on free markets? I’m skeptical. If Bezos took a principled stand for this stuff during a Democratic administration, that would be one thing. But the timing of this announcement one month into Donald Trump’s second term make it pretty clear this is yet another attempt by a tech billionaire to kiss the ring and avoid retaliation.
It certainly doesn’t make business sense. The Post’s best financial results in the last decade came when they went all in on resistance-lib-style reporting in 2017 and tripled their subscriptions in less than a year. The Post lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers last October when they refused to endorse a candidate, and they’ve already lost 75,000 subscribers as a result of this decision.
It’s a terrible business decision - from the perspective of the Washington Post. From the perspective of Jeff Bezos Inc, it might be a good one. Cynically, Trump is the kind of guy who can be bought off. And he’s the kind of guy who might go after Amazon or Blue Origin if he doesn’t get this type of gesture.
New Button is 100% Legal
The feds don’t want you to know this, but clicking this button is completely allowed within the law. They can’t stop you! Paid subscribers get access to even more internet nonsense.
They Yassified Shrek
Shrek 5 released its first teaser, and fans are not happy that DreamWorks has apparently redesigned Shrek:
Maybe I’m a cultural philistine, but this doesn’t bother me that much? I know the rule is that everything from 20-25 years ago is untouchably cool, will never be matched again, and attempts to bring back the magic must be criticized at all costs. But really, who cares?
Magic mirror absolutely got buccal fat removal though.
Claude Plays Pokémon
The latest AI stunt - you can watch Anthropic’s most recent AI model attempt to defeat the Elite Four on the Twitch channel Claude Plays Pokémon.
This is a call back/tribute to Twitch Plays Pokemon, the massive experiment that took place a decade ago to see if the chat of a Twitch stream could beat Pokemon by collectively inputting commands from chat.
On the one hand, this is very cool in a number of ways. The AI hasn’t beaten the game yet, but it’s gotten three out of eight badges. It passed the famous Mt. Moon level after 78 hours of wandering around. It’s impressive that a generalized AI with nearly zero context can do this.
On the other hand, Twitch Plays Pokémon was a collection of thousands of idiots frantically mashing buttons, and it beat the game entirely.1 So, you know, AI is still worse than a collection of thousands of idiots? I’ve watched the stream for a while - Claude was much, much worse than the Twitch hivemind at understanding what to do in a given situation, but was better at executing a given idea. It just couldn’t get the right ideas most of the time, which is why I watched it walk in circles in Viridian Forest for 5 hours.
It’s fascinating that Twitch plays Pokémon could beat the game when Claude still can’t. AI has become astonishingly good at coding, and it can solve highly complex mathematical problems that would stump 99% of humans. It can do tasks that are objectively difficult with ease, but it can’t beat a game that, frankly, most 7 year olds could beat without that much trouble. There’s a lesson about the nature of intelligence in here somewhere.
MAGA is Too Online
We’ve talked several times about how the Trumpist right is very, very online. This week saw a flurry of news which confirmed that thesis is more true than ever.
First, Trump nominated podcaster and conspiracy theorist Dan Bongino to be the deputy director of the FBI. Bongino appears to have virtually no qualifications for the job other than ‘used to be a cop’. Next, Trump announced he’d be creating a strategic cryptocurrency reserve which makes sense to virtually nobody except for the crytpo moguls who backed his campaign and some online memelords.
Then the Trump admin invited a bunch of MAGA influencers like Mike Cernovich, Libs of TikTok and DC_Draino to the White House for this very ghoulish Epstein file release event.
I don’t know man! It’s very weird to hand out classified documents to a bunch of randoms with popular Twitter accounts. But that’s now a thing that happens in the Trump administration? If I was being handed a bunch of files relating to sex crimes against children, I would try not to smile like the Cheshire Cat. Especially when Trump just bailed out sex predator Andrew Tate (another sign he’s far too online).
All this terminally online nonsense has frayed the unity of the MAGA crowd. Lots of them seem to think the crypto reserve is stupid, and that Andrew Tate is perhaps not the best guy to be associated with. And the Epstein files were a dud - they apparently contained zero new information. This led several of the influencers involved to start melting down, and Attorney General Pam Bondi to start a fight with Kash Patel about whether not the FBI is withholding the Epstein documents. And for some reason the House Judiciary committee decided this was a good time to Rickroll America. Welcome to the most online political movement in American history, I guess?
Links
The Bro Economy that consists of sports gambling, meme crypto coins, and day-trading meme stocks continues to produce bleak news. A man who lost money trading meme coins shot and killed himself live on X. I continue to struggle with how clearly awful the results of legalizing gambling on this scale have been - I lean towards having libertarian instincts on this stuff, but the outcomes are really bad everywhere I look. It’s appropriately grim that this happened on X, the Everything App.
An update on the UK’s attempts to dismantle encryption worldwide: In response to British government demands to build backdoors into their encryption, Apple simply disabled encrypted storage on iCloud as an option for UK users. The British government’s requests here are frankly insane, and would compromise the data safety of not just British users but Apple users worldwide.
Ethan Klein from h3h3 and the /r/Fauxmoi are fighting. Ethan is a Jewish streamer and Fauxmoi is a lefty pop culture subreddit, and this drama seems to be an extension of the broader Israel/Palestine drama that never ends on social media. It’s exhausting and everyone involved seems to suck.
Someone hacked the televisions at the Department of Housing & Urban Development show an AI video of Donald Trump licking Elon Musk’s feet.
A bug in Instagram’s code caused Reels to show users videos of murder victims, animal abuse, and other violent content.
Central banks and their cringeworthy attempts to reach young people on Instagram
Subreddit of the week - /r/ThatsABookLight, where people point out the mundane origins of movie props
The NYT actually made the Lemony Garlicky Miso Gochujang Brown Butter Pasta
MrBeast is raising money to expand his business at a five billion dollar valuation.
Somehow Fyre Festival is back. I’m sure it will go great this time?
Posts
Technically they moved into a ‘democracy’ mode to beat a couple of the hardest parts, but the purely chaotic version with literally nothing but button mashing got further than Claude.
The economic boycott drove me nuts but I tried to be normal about it and not rain on anyone's parade. I saw two people I know locally go on a posting spree of all the local businesses they shopped at like it was small business Saturday. Felt like it was defeating the point?
Surprisingly news of the blackout reached my mom and she even participated. Was shocked it had that kind of reach - I guess a good sign that people are pretty fed up even if they don't know how to channel that energy.
I got into some heated social media spats last week on Discord because I chuckled derisively at the idea of a general strike, knowledge of which is the sort of thing that separates normal folks from those who who should have just gone to art school.