Weekly Scroll: Trolling the President

Gavin's gambit, the UK's tech woes, and a good Philomena Cunk post

Can Gavin Newsom Meme His Way To The Presidency?

Democrats aren’t in a great place right now. Republicans have unified control of the government and are currently using it the way a toddler uses a set of markers - with great enthusiasm, very little skill, and utter disregard for what they might be ruining as they go. Democrats feel alternately angry, helpless and depressed at the way things are going. The party’s base clearly wants someone to step up and fight. But given the GOP’s hold on the Supreme Court, Congress and the Presidency, it’s not even clear what fighting looks like.

Gavin Newsom apparently thinks it looks like this:

Over the past week, Newsom and his comms team have begun doing a Trump impression on social media… and surprisingly, it seems to be working?

Newsom’s engagement is off the charts - his posts are now getting at minimum 10x the likes/replies/attention they used to get. Conservatives in the replies to Newsom’s posts are furious (and not in the fake engagement bait way). Fox News is getting upset, with hosts saying “I don't know what he's trying to do but it comes across as childish… what are you doing?”.

The point, of course, is to mock Trump and highlight the hypocrisy of people who cheerlead Trump’s style of posting but get upset with Newsom does it. But even beyond the all-caps ranting, Newsom’s comms team needs a raise. Anyone who can come up with bangers like “Tomi Lahren’s account is basically Yelp for toilets now” is a certified poster. They’re leaning into the messiness, asking when the Epstein files will be released, telling Trump supporters to Be Best,¹ making fun of Don Jr. for hawking phones, posting thirst traps, and using the same style of AI-generated slop Trump often posts:

Newsom has basically been running for President since the moment he became Governor of California.² But while his name recognition is extremely high, pundits have always been skeptical. He doesn’t have a clear lane - he’s not quite a moderate, not quite a wonk, not a firebrand progressive. This move seems like Newsom tactically staking out the lane of “I hate Republicans more than anyone has ever hated anything and I will fight as dirty and stupid as they do”.

It seems to be working? The most common sentiment I’ve seen from liberals is roughly ‘I cannot believe this schtick is actually working on me’, like the account SASForPres who said “I want to lib out so hard, i’m trying to resist the newsom wave but it’s so hard”. Everyone knows Newsom will be running in the 2028 primary, and he starts as a favorite in prediction markets due to his name recognition. Many pundits assume he’s going to fall because he lacks a clear lane, his net favorables are poor, and he looks like the villain from every 1980s movie. But our last couple of presidents show that’s not always the case - both Trump and Biden were early leaders in polling, pundits assumed they’d drop at some point, and they just never did. Democratic voters want a fighter, and Newsom is by far the most visible Democrat actually fighting with Republicans on social media.

Podcasting to Nobody

Speaking of Gavin Newsom - he’s one of the many politicians who’ve recently started a podcast. While a handful of those have been successful, the vast majority of politician’s podcasts get almost no viewers, per Chaotic Era:

A very weird sentence for me to write: despite releasing around one episode a month, the Infinite Scroll podcast averages more monthly downloads than all but four of these. It’s utterly baffling to me how low these numbers are. It shouldn’t even be possible for a Senator to get this little publicity.

Join the Chat!

I’ve recently added a Subscriber Chat, which should be available on your laptop or on the Substack app. Come join in and share whatever weird internet things you’re seeing!

The UK’s tech nonense continues

A few weeks back we talked about the UK’s very bad, no good Online Safety Act. The UK is now requiring you to take a government approved selfie before you get to jorkin’ it online, which could never go disastrously wrong in predictable ways. I regret to inform you that the fallout from the OSA continues to get stupider - the Brits may soon end up functionally banning Wikipedia.

The OSA classifies Wikipedia in the same way it classifies major social media networks like TikTok or Reddit, and therefore requires Wikipedia to ID-verify its users. Wikipedia will almost certainly not do this - it has a decades long commitment to allowing anonymous editing - and it sued the British government to challenge their classification under the law. Unfortunately Wikipedia lost in court last week, and the decision leaves the site with seemingly two options:

• Demand ID verification from every UK editor, and potentially every editor whose edits are visible in the UK, which right now is all editors everywhere

• Block the site from the UK

I can’t imagine the UK government would let it come to that, but a plain reading of the law seems to indicate that’s what will happen if nothing changes.

Elsewhere in British tech policy - the British government is simultaneously lecturing American tech firms about the need for free speech while also making it explicitly illegal to express favorable opinions of controversial political movements. And they’re passing around official recommendations people should save water by deleting old photos and emails.

I hope my British friends won’t be too offended when I say that this is not a serious government and not a serious country. The UK has isolated themselves from Europe for no good reason. They have no ability to build housing (or much of anything else), they’ve isolated themselves from the rest of Europe, and they seem content to meander through the next several decades nanny-stating over trivial bullshit while a literally exponentially growing portion of their GDP is sent to pensioners. The UK is a country in managed decline, and I can’t see how they break out of it.

Links

• Something incredibly interesting has been happening on the Spotify charts over the last month. Seven of the top ten songs on the most-streamed chart are from the hit Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters, about a KPop girl group who - you’ll never guess - moonlight as demon hunters. This is unprecedented for a streaming platform release, and it makes me wonder whether streaming shows and movies will soon come to occupy a similar place to TikTok in driving new musical trends.

• Howard Stern’s multi-decade career on radio may be coming to an end. Stern paved the way for much of today’s media - his conversational tone presaged modern podcasts, his penchant for controversial stunts predicted today’s virality-chasing influencers, and his shock-jock proclivities are now common everywhere from YouTube to Barstool Sports to the White House. If Stern is retiring, he leaves an enormous legacy. But people are already starting to question that legacy, especially how cruel Stern could be to women.³

• The Atlantic jumps in to cover the sorority dance culture war over nothing. Remember - it’s always on Infinite Scroll first.

• I appeared on the Frames of Space podcast talking about liberalism and the internet.

• Doctors are reporting that they’re seeing LLM-induced psychosis more and more often.

• Viewbotting on Twitch may be more common than anyone, including the company, wants to admit.

• Reddit is blocking the Internet Archive from preserving its pages, citing concerns about unauthorized AI scraping.

Posts

• Good shower tip

• Going to the dark web

• A good Philomena Cunk post

• Abbott and Costello vindicated

• A transhumanist future

• A good retirement strategy

1. A reference to Melania Trump’s confusing and vague First Lady initiative

2. arguably even before that

3. Stern, for his part, seems to have publicly realized over the years that his past behavior was terrible and made efforts to change.