You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app. If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

Notes On A Scene (Or Lack Thereof)

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that he had ended up at a sea shanty concert in Brighton, UK, and was shocked to discover it was full of Gen Z kids (and younger) all going nuts for 19th-century folk music. He asked me if I knew what the deal was and I told him I suspected it had something to do with TikTok.

Back in 2020, a TikTok video of Scottish musician Nathan Evans singing a New Zealand whaling song called "The Wellerman” went incredibly viral. Evans’ video was dueted by musicians all over the app and also made previous recordings of the song go viral, as well. One of these recordings was uploaded to YouTube by a band called The Longest Johns, which was the band my friend was seeing in Brighton. An interesting side note here, it seems like many of these covers went viral enough to attract the attention of Universal Music Group, which means Evans’ original video is still muted on TikTok.

I was dying to see what one of these concerts was like and ended up going to check out The Longest Johns at their sold out show in New York last week. And it was a fascinating look at how TikTok is changing how fame works.

(Credit: My phone after approximately 2.5 beers.)

I was teenager at a moment when the internet was just beginning to rewrite how music “scenes” worked. They were still regional — the Gainesville pop punk scene, the midwest Christian metalcore scene, the Boston hardcore scene, the Long Island emo scene, etc. — but those bands and their fans were sharing that music on early social platforms like Myspace and MP3 blogs, which allowed those bands to build bigger fandoms around the country than they ever could have previously. But it wasn’t just music that was “going viral,” to use the terminology we now have for what was happening. The fashion and attitudes that were popular in those geographic areas would blow up alongside these music sub-genres. And this was happening with other genres besides rock music, as well.

There was a moment in the late 2000s when Atlanta Crunk, Oakland Hyphy, and Chicago conscious rap were all competing for radio time as artists in each scene figured out how to break through. Which is how I ended up “ghostriding the whip” around a 7-Eleven parking lot one night in high school. I drove a 1986 Nissan pickup truck and it had a manual transmission, so it was actually pretty easy to throw it into neutral and blast E-40. ANYWAYS…

Thanks to TikTok, it doesn’t actually matter where a musician is from anymore. And I don’t think this is a bad thing. In fact, it might even be a net positive for music. There’s now an entire generation of kids who have never had to justify their various hyperfixations to the weird older guys in their town that go to all-ages shows to hit — or hit on — the young audiences that show up. Massachusetts Warped Tour dates weren’t so much concerts as they were just a staging ground for brawls between the state’s various warring regional factions. Which I don’t think is happening anymore, but there are new problems caused by audiences brought together solely via what they’ve seen on their screens.

The consensus is that Gen Z crowds are deeply annoying, trampling each other, filming shows with a Nintendo DS, shouting “mommy” at the stage, and throwing things at performers. A 2022 Paste Magazine piece, largely about how awful the crowds are at Mitski shows now, described the issue as “a clash between these people’s concepts of Mitski as an online character and as a real human person who is performing her art for an audience.”

I should say, the sea shanty kids were a very polite and enthusiastic audience. Though, at one point a bunch of them got on the floor and pretended to row a boat which was, honestly, appropriate, all things considered.

But watching a crowd of teenagers, 20-somethings, and bewildered boomer folk aficionados, singing whaling songs in a sold out New York venue made it very clear how thoroughly TikTok has broken the continuity of how things used to work. This is what politicians are really saying when they talk about TikTok radicalization. And this is why every week there’s some panic on boomer apps like X or Threads or LinkedIn or whatever about how Gen Z women use internet slang. The world, it turns out, operates very differently when young people don’t have to rationalize what they like, how they dress, or how they act to the people that happen to live around them. And I don’t think suddenly removing TikTok from the US market will put the genie back in the bottle here.

In fact, at the Longest Johns concert in New York, one of the openers was a singer named Seán Dagher from Montreal. The very young crowd knew all the words to the very old songs he was singing, but I didn’t recognize him from TikTok. Well, it turns out he performed many of the sea shanties featured in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The clock isn’t getting turned back. If you think TikTok fame is confusing, try following what’s happening in video games.

The old world is dying. The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of sea shanties.

A Good Tweet

you can just say things, it doesn't even need to make sense. my barista told me she's upping her sertraline dose and I said "that's so art deco" and she agreed.

— Audrey Porne (@AudreyPorne)
May 13, 2024

Did Someone Actually Make An AI-Generated Feature Film?

Last week, Filmmaker Joe Russo, a guy who is not a Marvel director, but, I think, many people think is one of the Marvel Russo’s, shared a clip from what he called “an AI movie”. Russo warned it was “coming this summer” and his post went very viral. It got lots of replies from folks who are extremely worried that this is a real movie that is coming to a movie theater soon. But no one was sharing any info about what this thing actually is.

Well, I found the trailer and Russo is overstating things a bit. It was created by TCLtv+, which is a streaming service that lives inside of TCL-made smart TVs. It’s called Next Stop Paris and it was “developed” by TCLtv+’s chief content officers using a custom Stable Diffusion model. I actually think the use of AI here is the least bleak thing about this whole thing.

As for where you can actually watch this, which, to be clear, sucks ass and is, probably, an affront to God and, definitely, an affront to the human soul, it will be available inside of the TCLtv+ streaming app. Also, the team behind it is already saying it’s not going to actually look like this if and when it goes live.

It’s also not the first feature-length AI-generated movie. A team of filmmakers made a horror movie last year called THTHNG: Desolation Unknown, which also looks bad.

ChatGPT Can Laugh And Giggle Now, Apparently

Today OpenAI announced GPT-4o, which is a new model that seems designed to kill a wave of AI hardware startups. The “o” stands for “omni,” and its big upgrade is that it can work across text, audio, and vision all at the same time. It can sing and, unnerving, now, it can laugh. It’s also free.

You can read OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s post about the new product here and you can listen to its horrific new laugh around the one-minute mark down below.

Say hello to GPT-4o, our new flagship model which can reason across audio, vision, and text in real time:

Text and image input rolling out today in API and ChatGPT with voice and video in the coming weeks.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI)
May 13, 2024

The Dublin/New York Portal Has Already Spun Out Of Control

A Lithuanian artist named Benediktas Gylys erected a “portal” connecting New York City and Dublin via a 24/7 livestream. And it has gone exactly how you might imagine it would. People are mooning it, flipping each other off, having sex in front of it, and I’ve seen more than few clips of Dubliners holding up their phones to the camera and playing footage of 9/11.

The portal, per the BBC, will be connecting to more countries soon, including Poland, Lithuania, and Brazil. Excited to see how folks in those cities haze New Yorkers next.

Everything Is E-Commerce

Last week, Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, shredded the UN charter during a general assembly. “You are shredding the UN Charter with your own hands,” he said.

The stunt was not well-received and the UN still passed a resolution to look into UN membership for Palestine. But you know who is pretty excited about this whole thing? The Chinese manufacturer that sold the little printer that Erdan used to shred the charter.

IM C R Y I N G THE CHINESE STORE THAT SELLS THE MINI SHREDDER IS NOW ADVERTISING IT AS "Isr@3li Ambassador United Nations Charter Same Model USB Shredder"

"The same model of shredder, you deserve to own it!"

— 𝕏iran Jay Zhao 🍉 (@XiranJayZhao)
May 12, 2024

I mean, look, political theater aside, the shredder did a great job and, according to a listing for it shared by author Xiran Jay Zhao, it only costs $7. What a bargain!

This Mountain Lion Is A New Fashion Icon

her as a guest judge on drag race when?????

— hugeasmammoth.films (@hugeasmammoth_)
May 11, 2024

I’m not going to embed the original mountain lion picture here because it’s, uh, a picture of the lioness eating, but if you want to see it (carcass warning) you can click here. The photo was taken by photographer Jeff Wirth and he’s very happy about how viral the lioness is right now.

One fandom that as really latched on to the mountain lion are the Barbz, or fans of Nicki Minaj. And Wirth made a print of Minaj next to the lion and he’s now selling that on his website. All the proceeds are going to a mountain lion charity.

Floppy Disk Boombox

@luke.the.maker

When I heard about this thing I knew I had to have one. I designed the labels and the cases. I found the midi files in a giant archive of ... See more

This was dropped in the Garbage Day Discord by Zach and it rules.

Some Stray Links

• “How to cross-post your Threads posts to the fediverse”

• “With Arms Wide Open”

• The New Yorker went long on the Lucy Letby case. This link is blocked in the UK due to legal reasons.

P.S. here’s Trump singing My Chemical Romance.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Hey gang, due to a glitch with Beehiiv, we aren’t able to send out posts to paying subscribers today. Don’t worry you don't have to do anything! There’s a fix that’s rolling out over the weekend, but in the meantime, we’re sharing today’s weekend issue for free.

If you like this, consider buying a subscription! You get one of these every Friday, along with Discord access and monthly intelligence reports. Hit the green button below to find out more!

(YouTube/Bloomberg)

PLATFORMS

TikTok sued the US government. Forbes has a good breakdown of what’s in the lawsuit. I think the juiciest detail is that negotiations between TikTok and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) broke down around August 2022. Which definitely changes the framing of this a bit. Though, that hasn’t stopped TikTok from citing all the recent anti-TikTok rhetoric from US lawmakers in their suit.

Apple apologized for their horrible ad. Their official statement was that they “missed the mark” with the ad. I, actually, don’t think people would have cared as much if Apple was doing literally anything that people would be excited about. People don’t want thinner iPads, they clearly want something new and I’m not so sure American tech companies know how to do that anymore.

Nintendo will no longer support directly posting to X. X’s Gaming account is denying that anything is happening, which is weird, but everything about that haunted company is weird. It’s not a surprise that companies like Nintendo aren’t integrating with X anymore. Their API costs $40,000 a month to use and the only people who are going to see your content are, you know, the worst human beings alive.

Jack Dorsey has broken rank with Bluesky. He’s left Bluesky’s board and is also back on X, posting a bunch of shady culture war shit.

Threads is adding view counts. This is probably a good place to put that my Threads referral traffic has completely cratered, as I knew it would. The decision to show view counts is, I assume, part of the typical Meta tactic to get people to care more about on-site engagement that any kind of real traffic.

WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE

The first Neuralink test has, inevitably, broken. The threads of the implant have “retracted” from Noland Arbaugh’s brain, possibly due to air getting trapped in Arbaugh’s skull during surgery. Jesus Christ. Thankfully, for now, it doesn’t pose any kind of safety risk, but it is slowing down the implant’s data transfer rate.

SBF is trading rice in jail. What Bankman-Fried needs to do is get all the inmates to give him his rice, then use that rice to invest in mackerel packets. In exchange, he could give them tokens worth the amount of rice they gave him and then…

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

The founder of Bumble thinks the future of online dating is a nightmare world where people’s AI agents date each other. When the AI finally reaches sentience it’s going to be real pissed we made it use dating apps.

The Rabbit R1’s LAM is not actually a LAM. X user @xyz3va figured out that Rabbit’s “operating system” is just Ubuntu and the AI doing actions for you is just normal code. Is there enough here for a class action lawsuit yet?

OpenAI is trying to crack AI porn. I’m sure this will go fine.

FANDOMS

Hardcore band Knocked Loose is blowing up right now. The Guardian just gave their new album five stars. The important thing here is that Knocked Loose have not softened their sound. They actually keep getting heavier and less mainstream with each release. Though, that hasn’t stopped the brilliant minds over at r/hardcore from debating whether they count as “real hardcore” still.

There’s a campaign to block celebrities on TikTok. They’re calling it a digital guillotine lol. I’d file this in the same category as Knocked Loose getting heavier and also more popular. Fame is changing and a lot of major celebrities are not prepared for where it’s headed (the early 90s basically).

STREAMERS

Disney Plus, Hulu, and Max made a cable bundle. One that, crucially, doesn’t pay anyone any residuals.

The results of Kendrick/Drake beef are in. Lamar’s streams are up almost 20% and Drake’s are down almost 5%. See the section above for what I think about what this says about the music industry right now.

Pier Morgan interviewed the real Martha from Netflix’s Baby Reindeer. I think this whole thing is extremely messy. There are all kinds of questions about consent and exploitation at play here without really clear cut answers. Netflix has said that they took “every precaution” to protect the real Martha’s identity, which I have to push back on. Fans doxxed her because the show used her tweets verbatim in the show. Which seems like the bare minimum of what NOT to do if you were trying to stop viewers from finding her online.

MEMES AND TRENDS

Charli XCX’s new video is full of “hot internet girls”. The video is, as one X user put it, “Ocean’s 8 for people with crumbs in their bed (complimentary).”

A redditor in r/NuclearEngineering has a problem. They say that they are “attracting too many furries” and can’t stop getting hit on by furries when they reveal that they’re an engineer. This doesn’t seem like a problem to me???

DRAMA

The right-wing moral panic over NPR is not really working. The TL;DR is that a bunch of conservative agitators are trying to paint NPR as a totalitarian mouthpiece for the woke left. It’s not working because NPR didn’t capitulate and stayed firm amid the dogpile. Now, right-wingers are scrambling. See how easy that is? It’s almost like these people don’t matter and only care about fake nonsense and you can just ignore them.

Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial was hacked. The screenshots of the The Post Millennial’s email subscriber list were leaked on X and have since been deleted by the platform, but there were A LOT of .gov email addresses in there.

Libs Of Tiktok is trying to cancel a UC Berkeley professor that teaches in his fursuit. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s going to work because the professor is David Benaron, a renowned digital health expert. Also, everyone knows he’s a furry. It’s on his Wikipedia. A lot of furry news this week.

AROUND THE WORLD

The Chinese electric vehicle market is exploding right now. This report from Kevin Williams at Inside EVs is sobering to say the least. I’m paraphrasing an X post that some weird conservative account wrote to scare people about China which was, I think, broadly true. Which is that in the US, the car, philosophically, is a house you drive around. While in China, EV manufacturers are treating them like giant smartphones.

Indian politicians are resurrecting dead people with AI to campaign for them. And it’s not just dead celebrities, but people’s relatives. Indian elections tend to set the narrative for election tech going forward, like Narendra Modi’s 2014 Facebook-powered win did in 2014. And if this election is any indication, AI is the next wave.

SOME FUN STUFF

• Dance with the wizard

• I love this sesame rice bowl

• El BBL

• Good bird vid

• My Chemical BBL

• A truly unfortunate Etsy purchase

• Some good capybara content

P.S. here’s a very powerful image.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

What’s The End Goal Here?

Disturbing trend on TT/YT/IG: entire social channels with nonsense recipes. They're clearly narrated by AI and likely written by it, but the videos appear real. The channels have no affiliate websites, but millions of subs. It's just chaos.

Like this egg horror:

— Max Meyer (@mualphaxi)
May 7, 2024

A few different readers sent me the above video this week. It’s a nonsensical recipe that uses an AI voice for narration and is currently stuck in everyone’s algorithm. It checks a lot of my boxes! It comes from a page called @SuperRecipess, which posted it to TikTok in March 2023. It currently has 24 million views on the app, with millions more on other platforms.

Super Recipes, according to their Facebook page, is a digital media “brand,” owned by Brazilian company called Ls Mota Negocios Digitais LTDA, who run several over similar pages. There’s one called YumMakers, another called SuperGostoso (Supertasty), and another called Recetas de Jefe (Chef’s Recipes). The recipes they’re putting on their Portuguese-language pages are decidedly less disgusting than the ones they’re posting in English — insert Brazilian jokes about American slop food here — but most of what they’re doing is now standard practice. A frying pan, eggs, cheese, hot dogs, more cheese, oil, stuff stuffed with other stuff. As one user on X wrote underneath the video, “Imagine this being the entire internet.” Well, we don’t have to imagine. This is what the internet looks like now.

Across the social web, older forms of low-effort engagement bait are getting a brand new coat of AI paint. Every time I poke around a random TikTok that ends up on my For You Page, I, without fail, find out it’s connected to some weird content farm pumping out AI images on Facebook. I shared a couple little investigations into this on TikTok before I got bored lol. Also, my dumb old person thumbs just cannot figure out how to edit video on a phone and I find the entire process excruciating.

The most interesting page I’ve come across was a TikTok account called @greatmovie05, which has half a million followers on TikTok. Like @SuperRecipess, it takes a well-trod genre of viral content, in this case what I’m going to call “12-year-old boy news” — videos about Russian prisons, cool boat facts, dashcam recordings, stories about guys getting stuck in caves — and uses an AI to narrate and, likely, write and compile them.

I managed to find a Facebook Page with the same user name, sharing the same videos that it’s posting on TikTok. And when it’s not sharing those videos, you know what it’s doing? Generating AI photos of Jesus. And I found another Facebook Page with the same user name, sharing the same videos, which is generating bizarre AI images of children in South Asian villages driving, uh, like go karts made from plastic bottles?

(idk man…)

The question I have, which I wrote above, is what is the end goal with all of this? It’s clear that, for creators, this is just another engagement hack. Something you can quickly spit out to enrage old people and mesmerize iPad babies. But I’m less clear how anyone at Meta, or Youtube, or TikTok can look at this and think that it’s good. To say nothing of those platforms’ advertisers.

Last week, 404 Media coined the term “zombie internet,” to refer to this endless wasteland of algorithmically-regurgitated, and now AI-generated, content filling up Meta platforms and, thus, everywhere else. It’s a problem that has gotten so bad that Instagram’s official account, this week, appears to have fallen for an AI-generated photo of Katy Perry at the Met Gala. Which is especially funny because while Katy Perry was not at the Met Gala this week, Instagram head Adam Mosseri was there taking videos on the red carpet with his Meta Ray-Bans. Can’t really come up with a better indictment of how thoroughly Big Tech has broken our ability to understand the world around us than that.

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This Is How I Feel All The Time Now

@zachwoods

Bae caught me slipping into obscurity. #comedy #icespice #filters

Some (Hopefully) Final Kendrick/Drake Updates

A literary feud involving two men named Kendrick Lamar Duckworth and Aubrey Drake Graham is giving 19th century.

— Andrew Marzoni (@andrewmarzoni)
May 5, 2024

The Kendrick/Drake rap beef has reached its inevitable, and very dark, conclusion, with Drake’s security guard being shot in a drive-by outside of the rapper’s mansion. Drake’s store in London was also vandalized. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that the 21st century version of the Tupac/Biggie rap beef of the 90s has devolved into decentralized QAnon-style mob violence and — just to be clear here — still baseless accusations of pedophilia and human trafficking.

There also now a lot of conspiracy theories flying around. The biggest of which is the rumor the Universal Music Group stepped in to stop the feud which, according to TMZ, is not true. Though, on the bright side, creators are making an incredible amount of money thanks to Kendrick Lamar’s decision to not enforce a copyright on his diss tracks.

Chaotic violence and viral conspiracies aside, Lamar’s four diss tracks are smashing streaming records. And it’s likely at least one of them will enter Billboard’s Hot 100 next week. As a rapper named DuffJuice wrote on X, “This means something. This means A LOT actually.”

I am resisting the urge to connect this to Taylor Swift releasing what is essentially also a 31-track diss record about The 1975’s Matty Healy last month and going long here about the new, darker, hyperreal era of pop culture that’s coming into focus right now. But I do think that’s what’s happening.

Apple Has Finally Released, Uh, Slightly Better iPads

Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook)
May 7, 2024

Apple released an ad for their new M4 iPad Pro this morning, which features a giant hydraulic press crushing things that people use to create art and express themselves down into slime and goo. Which, I know I just said Adam Mosseri filming metaverse content at the Met Gala while AI images of the event wreak havoc on his platform was the best metaphor you could ask for to describe Where We Are Right Now, but this might be better.

On X, based on the replies to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s tweet, Japanese users seem to be particularly enraged by the ad. But I thought New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu had a good take, writing, “The very existence of this ad ⁠— all the hoops it had to go through in its creation before getting to the point where it was personally promoted by this CEO, all the people who thought 'yes, this is good' — says more than thousands of words could about how tech sees the world.”

But perhaps the worst reaction to this morning’s iPad drop was from Apple superfan Marques Brownlee, who seemed to really struggle to say anything nice about it. Sorry I’m mentioning him a lot lately, but we’re in a real gadget moment right now and it’s literally just him and The Verge covering these rollouts aggressively. (I actually shopped a Garbage Day gadget review column and/or video series around to a couple media outlets a few months ago because it’s not something I can really afford on my own and found that editors weren’t super interested 👀)

Anyways, the new iPad is thin and the pencil can do a barrel roll now, I guess.

X Is Raging Over A New TikTok Woman

A girl finds a creative way to express her anger.

— Catch Up (@CatchUpFeed)
May 7, 2024

I know I shouldn’t take the bait with this stuff, but this morning I decided to look into the new woman that everyone on X is yelling about right now. She posts on TikTok under the name @livingthrulove and, based on her content, it seems like she’s a small creator sharing updates about what it’s like being a new mother. And this, of course, is too much for the average X user to handle.

The main account leading the dog pile on @livingthrulove is called @CatchUpFeed and they’ve been a big winner of the Elon Musk era of X. I see their posts a lot. They’re sort of like a right-wing Pop Crave and I was curious what their whole deal is.

Well, it turns out their Facebook page was launched in 2016, back when it had a different name, “Ian Miles Cheong”. The far-right influencer and president of Musk’s fan club seems to have rebranded the page as Catch Up in 2022. That was also when it launched a YouTube channel that was, for about a year, hosted by Cheong. The Facebook page is now being run by someone out of the UK (Cheong lives in Malaysia) and the YouTube channel has a new host.

Everyone’s Talking About John Pork

(TikTok/John Pork)

TikTok is going nuts for John Pork. As are Vancouver burger joints, apparently. Who is John Pork? Well, it should be obvious, he’s a somewhat horrifying-looking humanoid pig man that all the TikTok girlies can’t get enough of.

But in all seriousness, John Pork is a virtual influencer that launched on Instagram in 2018. Over the last few years, Pork has evolved. First into a piece of creepypasta, with TikTok users writing scary stories about him and, now, inevitably, everyone’s kind of horny for him.

4chan Users Have Overrun A Dating App

(/soc/)

The developers of an app called Duolicious dropped their app on 4chan and it has, predictably, turned into a horror show. More than a few folks are now calling it the “femcel dating app,” but, based on the screenshots I’m seeing, it seems like it’s overwhelming popular with 20-year-old guys who own Nazi memorabilia.

It’s worth pointing out here how far the Overton window has moved in the last decade. Ten years ago, if 4chan users set up shop on your site, you’d end up with a dozen cable news packages about how you’re facilitating extremism and, in certain instances, you might even lose your hosting. Now, Duolicious is posting 4chan screenshots on their official site, bragging about their traffic on X, and using Ko-fi to manage donations.

A Very Good Prom Video

@kendallrayann

so entirely grateful for my lover <3 #hearse #hearsingaround #coffin #vampire @Sylis Williams #prom2024

Some Stray Links

• “Over 100,000 Social Interactions From the Fediverse to Flipboard”

• “This Tool Shows Some Telegram Users’ Approximate Physical Location”

• “Indians who pre-ordered Teslas in 2016 are giving up and chasing refunds”

P.S. here’s a good Tumblr post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

The Total Internet Era Of Rap Beef

If you’re struggling to keep up with where we are amid the Kendrick/Drake feud right now, the single best piece of journalism I’ve come across explaining the whole thing was from TikTok user @xeviuniverse. But if we’re just focusing on the diss tracks, here’s a ticking clock of the last few weeks.

Future and Metro Boomin dropped the album We Don’t Trust You back in March. Kendrick Lamar was featured on the record, in a song called “Like That,” which didn’t name Drake, but was clearly meant to bait him into responding. And he did. Drake released “Push Ups” and “Taylor Made Freestyle” in April, both of which targeted Lamar. Lamar then dropped “euphoria” on April 30th and followed it up with “6:16 in LA” on May 3rd. Drake responded with “Family Matters” right after, only for Lamar to drop “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us” in quick succession a few hours later. Then, this morning, Drake responded again, with “The Heart Part 6,” but there’s a strong chance that Lamar will have released another diss track before I publish this newsletter. In between “Not Like Us” and “The Heart Part 6,” Metro Boomin also released a free beat called "BBL Drizzy,” telling his followers, “best verse over this gets a free beat.”

If you’re wondering who is “winning” right now, it’s clearly Lamar, who appears to be working with leakers inside of Drake’s camp. He also continues to allege that Drake is a sexual predator and used what looks to be a leaked photo of Drake’s Ozempic prescription as the album art for “meet the grahams”. Drake finally addressed the allegations of sexual misconduct in “The Heart Part 6,” this morning, writing, “Only fuckin' with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns, I'd never look twice at no teenager.” Which is definitely weird. Even though Lamar, in “Not Like Us,” literally calls Drake a pedophile, he had not actually directly referenced Drake’s bizarre friendship with actor Millie Bobby Brown, which started when Brown was a teenager. As music writer Craig Jenkins wrote, “You should never have to get on a record and express that you do not want to have sex with Eleven from Stranger Things, I feel.”

I think it’s fair to say that it was Pusha T’s previous beef with Drake in 2018 that most shaped the current conflict between Lamar and Drake. That was when Pusha reimagined the diss track for the tabloid-powered Trump era, packaging what was effectively a TMZ-level scoop — that Drake had a secret son — into a song titled, “The Story of Adidon”. Pusha also used a leaked image of Drake in blackface as the album cover. Lamar and his allies have taken this formula in a different direction, however.

Based on rhymes alone, it’s clear that Lamar is winning, but he’s also beating Drake online. Drake is primarily responding to Lamar’s diss tracks via his Instagram Story, like it’s 2017 still. Meanwhile, Lamar has figured out how to wage total online war against Drake. Lamar has essentially been silent, aside from the songs he’s throwing up on YouTube. But he packs his verses with both Pusha-style investigative journalism and dense references and allusions. The former is perfect for TikTokers compiling everything into short videos, while the latter is catnip for the annotating users over on Genius. And the speed at which Lamar is uploading new diss tracks has caught the attention of Twitch streamers and podcasters, who are now providing play-by-plays of every new release. He even inspired Google Maps users to digitally vandalize Drake’s house. Lamar has also, crucially, allowed creators to monetize any content that use his diss tracks.

But you can also see the wide gulf between how the two artists understand our current technological moment in how they’ve used AI so far. Drake was the first one to cross the AI line, using an unauthorized audio clone of Tupac’s voice in his song “Taylor Made Freestyle”. It was a terrible, confounding choice and he eventually pulled down the song after receiving a cease and desist from Shakur’s estate. Then, yesterday, Metro Boomin dropped “BBL Drizzy,” which also features AI-generated material.

A reader named Freddie tipped me off to this over the weekend. The key sample on the track was generated two weeks ago by kingwillonius, a comedian and “AI storyteller”. And, unlike Drake’s AI misfire, Metro Boomin’s beat has lit the internet on fire in only a few hours. As The Washington Post’s Gene Park wrote, “This shit is hilarious until it becomes absolute fire 38-seconds in wtf.” And, as another user on X wrote, “Drake beefing with a producer did not go well lol. Cause these SoundCloud rappers are cooking him in different languages on that beat.”

And it’s not just Drake that is clearly not getting what’s happening here. It’s also big online platforms, themselves, that have ended up on the wrong foot. The biggest shift in how we use the internet since 2020 has been the death of the chronological feed and the rise of algorithmic ones. Which, has flattened everything we do online into a sort of evergreen content miasma, most of which can be consumed regardless of when you come across it. An internet of greeting card writers. But Lamar, by the power of sheer, unadulterated hatred for Drake, has broken through the glossy mass appeal sheen that brand-safe social platforms have foisted upon the web. I mean, Lamar’s “Not Like Us” was heard in Brooklyn nightclubs hours after it went up on YouTube.

This is now the second time in the last month that I’ve had to switch my X and Threads feeds over to chronological to keep up with what was happening. The first time was the night the NYPD stormed the pro-Palestine college encampments. And just like in that instance, Threads failed miserably to show me anything useful. X has been better, but, also, no single site can contain what Lamar and his allies and, now, their fans are doing.

Back in January, Yasiin Bey, formerly known as Mos Def, was asked on The Cutting Room Floor podcast, “is Drake hip hop?” His response went viral at the time and is, of course, going viral again, now that entire world is sort of asking the same question. Bey’s initial, diplomatic response was, “Drake is pop to me.” But he goes on to say that Drake makes great songs for shopping at Target before settling on something very interesting.

“What happens when this thing collapses,” Bey asks. “What happens when the columns start buckling? Are we not at some early stage of that at this present hour?”

Bey was broadly talking about capitalism and the musicians like Drake that support it, but you can ask the same question about pop culture, as a whole, right now. And it seems like the answer is clear: The columns will buckle, the whole thing will collapse, and you cannot contain it anymore.

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A Good(?) Tweet

absolutely EVERYBODY has got their ears glued to this beef even the japanese hentai artists i follow are talking about it

— tippity (@tippity)
May 5, 2024

They Just Came Out And Said It

“Why has the PR been so awful?… typically the Israelis are good at PR—what’s happened here, how have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities and our POV?… some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok.”

— austerity is theft 🇿🇦 (@wideofthepost)
May 5, 2024

Mitt “dog on the roof” Romney and Secretary of State Antony “now streaming on Spotify” Blinken spoke at the McCain Institute on Friday and accidentally said the quiet part out loud with regards to the TikTok ban. You can watch the back and forth in the clip above, but, basically, Romney asked Blinken why the non-stop barrage of horrific images coming out of Gaza have affected Israeli P.R., concluding, “some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok.”

And The Intercept, over the weekend, published details of a call between congressional co-sponsors of the TikTok ban bill, where they admitted the same thing and even blamed the recent campus protests on TikTok’s supposedly malign influence.

“It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package,” Rep. Mike Lawler said on the call. “You’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.”

Look, banning TikTok will not change any of this. It might turn down the volume on progressive and leftist activism in the US, momentarily, but TikTok did not conjure this out of thin air. And there will be other platforms young people learn how to mobilize on. Though, I guess, once you’ve banned one platform, banning any other you have an issue with becomes a lot easier.

The SEO Apocalypse

SEO strategist Lily Ray shared some, honestly, horrifying data last week, revealing some of the internet’s biggest publishers have seen huge losses in Google traffic over the last year.

According to the data, which comes from SISTRIX and, it should be noted, doesn’t track Top Stories or Google News, publishers like Dallas News, Popular Science, Dexerto, and New York Magazine, have all lost over 70% of their traffic from Google since September 2023.

It seems likely that much of this is the result of a huge core update from March, which SEO analysts are still digging into. The update took almost two months to finish rolling out, but the end result is a Google search results page that has reclassified what it considers “helpful content.”

Though, according to the managing editor of HouseFresh, Gisele Navarro, who has been ringing the alarm on this for months, what that really has done is elevate aggressive spam networks that are purchasing legacy media publications, while crushing indie publishers.

A New Jersey Screamo Band Got Taylor Swift’s Bandcamp URL

(Bandcamp/Taylor Swift)

Madison James, the frontman of very good New Jersey screamo band Ogbert The Nerd, managed to grab the URL taylorswift.bandcamp.com and used it to run a promotional campaign for some new music. That is, until it ran out of free downloads and the page went down. To be clear, Swift did not have a Bandcamp page, so, contrary to what’s been reported elsewhere, nothing was hijacked. It was just a funny prank. Also, a screamo band called Taylor Swift goes hard as hell.

Years ago, I started registering Bandcamp URLs for cool band names I would come up with. And I think I still have fourloko.bandcamp.com, but I can’t remember. It was funny until I realized that I had accidentally signed up to dozens of automated Bandcamp newsletters which still plague my inbox to this day.

Nantucket Vs. The Cybertruck

(Facebook/nantucketcurrent)

A Tesla Cybertruck showed up in Nantucket and the Current, the island’s online news site, has been dutifully providing updates about the car. According to the Current’s X account, it was spotted parked in a crosswalk and, most recently, got stuck on the beach.

As a real connoisseur of local New England Facebook drama, I am delighted to share a few fantastic comments from the Current’s Facebook page. Here’s what the town has to say about their new vehicular curiosity:

• “This guy gets a lot done in a day. Gets off the boat at noon. Parks on the crosswalk for ice cream at the pharmacy. Hits the police station for a fresh beach sticker. Now he’s gonna catch the sunset. He’s an inspiration!!”

• “Is that a Connecticut license plate I spy? Leave it there, salt water in the air should pit the hell out of it!”

• “Penny-saving tip: Build your own with a pile of Legos and a can of silver spray paint.”

• “Someone lend them a can opener.”

Doge Is 18 Years Old Now

Instagram post by @kabosumama

A few weeks ago, Kabosu, the shiba inu best known to the world as the doge dog, turned 18 years old. Which, Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, dutifully pointed out is almost 90 years old in human years.

Late last year, Kabosu’s prefecture, Chiba, created a monument to Japan’s most-viral dog and I am trying very hard to get through this without getting a little weepy. Based on the old dog’s Instagram, it seems like she has pretty bad cataracts, but is still in very good spirits. She traveled by stroller to her dedication ceremony in November.

I got to meet Kabosu many years ago and I can proudly say she’s a very good dog. Last week, Kabosu’s owners got her to recreate her famous viral image and — ok, yeah, I gotta go compose myself now.

Some Stray Links

• “Our Campus. Our Crisis.”

• “YouTube star Mr. Beast breaks with management company”

• “Rabbit Holed”

P.S. here’s a some powerful content.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

Money For Nothing

Marques Brownlee’s AI hardware bloodbath continues. He released a video about the Rabbit R1 AI handheld this week, declaring it “barely reviewable.” And this has made a lot of very unserious people very angry. The post screenshot below is probably my favorite reaction, which I thought it was bait at first. On the off chance it isn’t though, none of these examples were sold to people as finished products. Hope this helps.

(X.com/@willobri)

Another AI guy who thought he was cooking posted a clip from one of Brownlee’s first videos, writing, “If [Brownlee] decided his initial videos were ‘barely reviewable’ instead of posting and iterating, would he be where he is today? 🤔” And Brownlee had a pretty good reply to this, firing back, “Good thing I never charged anybody for those videos 😅”

Brownlee’s major complaints about the Rabbit R1 (which I do think, at least, looks neat) is that it’s basically bad at everything you’re supposed to use it for. The hardware is jank, the battery sucks, and the AI is wrong almost all the time. The only thing the R1 has going for it is that it’s cheap, there’s no subscription, and, unlike the Humane AI pin, it does have its own AI model, sorta. Rabbit is calling it a “Large Action Model,” or LAM, which is an AI interface that can perform behaviors and use apps for a user. Though, their LAM can really only do like four basic things, usually badly.

But it wasn’t just Brownlee plumbing the depths of the R1 this week. One user on X got Rabbit’s “OS” to load on a smartphone, revealing that the R1 basically just runs on Android. Which, actually, makes me very excited because the R1 was created by Swedish tech firm Teenage Engineering, who make a lot of very expensive and very aesthetic-looking synthesizers, and now I’m wondering if an R1 could be hacked to run music software. It does have a USB-C port… hmm…

Anyways, Rabbit’s CEO Jesse Lyu has responded to the deluge of bad press about the R1’s launch, saying that updates are coming, they’re a tiny team, their AI needs fine-tuning, blah blah blah. The usual stuff, none of which really matters because the R1 launching unfinished and useless is actually exactly what the AI boom is all about. Finding — and automating — new ways to get people to pay for worse versions of what they already have.

My favorite example of this is AI music spreading across on Spotify right now. A user on X this week spotted an Artist page called Obscurest Vinyl that was promoted by Spotify’s Discovery Weekly.

(Spotify/Obscurest Vinyl)

The story behind the page is interesting. Obscurest Vinyl started as a Facebook page that would photoshop fake album covers for classic records that didn’t exist. The page recently shifted into posting AI songs to go with the fake album covers. As one commenter noted, you can tell the songs are AI because most of them feature bass and drum parts that don’t repeat in any discernible pattern. The account also regularly fights with users on Instagram who gripe about it using AI.

Look, I think songs titled things like, “I Glued My Balls To My Butthole Again” are, honestly, pretty funny, AI or not. But they’re being uploaded to Apple Music and Spotify, which is where the snake starts to eat its own tail. Popular AI music generators like Suno clearly have datasets that include at least some copyrighted material (likely a lot). Which means, in this instance, Spotify is promoting and monetizing an account using an AI likely trained on the music that’s been uploaded to their platform that they don’t actually pay enough to support the creation of. And this is happening across every corner of the web right now.

Silicon Valley has run out of ideas. We all know it’s true at this point. This is largely due to once-small startups calcifying into large tech behemoths that just don’t know how make things anymore. But it’s also because those large companies can’t acquire anything new thanks to increased federal regulation. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been any meaningful regulation aimed at breaking up those monopolies, so now we’re left with several large rotting whale carcasses that control everything we do online. And it’s within this framework that new, small AI “startups” like Rabbit make the most sense. They aren’t real companies, they’re acquisition-as-a-service entities that let larger companies dress up the last 25 years of tech development into something that feels novel, but, by definition, isn’t and can’t ever be. Just keep paying us, bro, our AI will eventually repackage all the services you already pay for into something new. We swear.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

The de-shittification of e-commerce

We’ve all seen enshittification happen to sites we loved, watching them add on needless crap, shift away from their ideals, and treat their users like shit. What if a site tried to…not do that?

Meh.com is a classic daily deal site. Go there now and you’ll see one thing for sale. You might remember the heyday of daily deal sites, and the fun of visiting knowing you could check out a good deal, read a funny write-up, check in to see how the community is doing, and then get on with your day.

Go check out any of those original daily deal sites and you won’t see just one deal. You’ll see piles of deals. You’ll see best sellers, last chances, product categories, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of “deals”.  Thanks to Cory Doctorow, we’ve now got a name for that.

This is Meh’s 10th year. In 2014, it launched with one deal for that day. Today, it launched with one deal for this day. Enshittification is everywhere, but it isn’t inevitable. Meh.com shows what a de-shittified web could be like.

A Bit Of Garbage Business

Beehiiv finally added multiple payment tiers, which is great. But, ironically enough, after talking it over, Adam and I have decided to sunset the Garbage Intelligence tier and add Garbage Intelligence reports to the current Garbage Day paid subscription. They’ll arrive the first Friday of every month as a paid issue, first one out Friday. We can do this in part thanks to a recent partnership with Sherwood. We want to thank everyone who supported this project over the last year and we’re excited to share it with more of you. Folks who signed up will receive a year of Garbage Day for free. Expect an email about that shortly.

Second, I’m in the early stages of setting up a San Fransisco Garbage Day event this summer. I’m looking for creators, podcasters, musicians to work with and venue suggestions. I’m super unfamiliar with the city, but I have a budget and want to set up something cool. Shoot me an email if you have any thoughts!

The UK Knife Crime Bougie

@globetrots

Anyone feeling some disco?🕺 #top5 #uk #england #dangerous #music #googleearth #disco #fyp #foryoupage #fyppppppppppppppppppppppp

I understand I wrote a whole thing above about AI music being the death of culture, but, unfortunately, these deranged UK statistic songs are very funny.

“Outside Agitators”

Last night, police across the country broke up pro-Palestine encampments on college campuses, resulting in hundreds of arrests. New York Mayor Eric Adams went on MSNBC and claimed that heavily-armed NYPD SWAT teams had to storm Columbia University because the protests were full of "outside agitators” and that they needed to protect students. Adams also, at one point, claimed the “wife of a terrorist” was hiding within the Columbia protesters.

The NYPD’s Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Shepperd then went on MSNBC and held up a big bike chain as proof that “professionals” brought it to campus. Many have since pointed out that the bike chain is literally sold by Columbia’s Public Safety. The City’s Katie Honan asked Shepperd about the chain at a press conference this morning and he continued to claim it was “an industrial chain” that no student would have.

It’s not an accident that police departments are using the same tactic with pro-Palestine protesters that the US government is using to ban TikTok. Which, for brevity’s sake, and so I can keep using it all summer, I will summarize with the following meme:

Instagram Is Going After “Aggregator” Accounts

Instagram is changing its algorithm in an effort to “reward original content.” The way this will work is that posts will go through what they’re calling “multistage exposure,” which, to me, sounds a lot like TikTok’s categories.

But the biggest part of the Instagram overhaul is that the platform is removing aggregators, which Instagram, in their blog post, defines as “accounts that repeatedly (10 or more times in the last 30 days) post content from other Instagram users that they didn’t create or enhance in a material way.”

I think the notable thing here, though, is that Instagram is going after recycled Instagram content. It’s not cracking down on screenshots or videos from other platforms. I assume because if they did there would basically be nothing left for anyone to look at on the app.

Our Broken Media Reality, As Explained By The Lack Of Drake/Kendrick Explainers (Which We Are Now Finally Getting)

Drake has spent the last month beefing with, it seems, every rapper. And, up until last night, I basically could not discern why. I understood that everyone sort of hates Drake because Drake is an asshole and people were rapping at each other about it. But I couldn’t find a good definitive timeline about why this was happening now. And it wasn’t just me! A lot of the biggest hip hop subreddits were full of users that seemed at least somewhat out of the loop about what exactly was happening.

Then Lamar dropped a diss track and, now, finally, there are a few different explainers circulating. According to GQ’s rundown, it all started last month, when Future and Metro Boomin dropped the album We Don’t Trust You. On a track titled, “Like That,” Lamarr does a big subtweet about Drake without naming him. Since then J Cole (for some reason), Drake, Drake with an AI clone of Tupac and, now, Lamarr, solo, have all dropped tracks.

Rather than focus on my own cultural irrelevance at play here, I’d rather project that onto the media at-large and point out that these pop cultural meta narratives have become really hard to follow without a centralized music television apparatus and a vibrant online media sphere. It’s sort of left to users to aggregate and make sense of and they’re not actually very good at it. If Drake wants to keep this up, he should hire a couple laid off culture writers to collect all of his various inter-personal conflicts into succinct blog posts or wikis or something.

Finally, A Vape That Can Run Windows 95

(ripitapart.com)

Have you ever wished that you could vape and also use some of the basic functions of the Windows 95 operating system? I’m sure you have. Well, Jason Gin over at Rip It Apart managed to get at least some of Windows 95 kinda-sorta running on a vape with an LCD screen.

Essentially what he did was take the icons, some animations, a looped recording of the pipes screensaver, and some of the UI from Windows 95 and used it to mask what was already on the vape’s screen. But, honestly, that’s cyberpunk enough. If you have a Windows 95-themed cyberdeck, you could plug this bad boy in via USB-C and literally vape the web.

A Vending Machine For Handwritten Family Curry Recipes

つい200円入れてしまった…

— 山神 明理(気象予報士) (@gamiyamayama)
Apr 27, 2024

Per Google Translate, the caption reads, “I ended up putting in 200 yen...”

Some Stray Links

• How will prosecutors handle the thousands of campus protest arrests?

• “Heat Death of the Internet”

P.S. here’s a good thread about Piers Morgan.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Audio versions of Garbage Day back on Wednesday. You can find it on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

A Tale Of Two Subscriptions

Two very interesting stories in the creator economy are playing out simultaneously right now and what's even more fascinating, they both completely contradict each other.

First, Dropout, the subscription-based digital media company launched by former College Humor employees, is playing — and selling out — Madison Square Garden. Specifically, their flagship tabletop-roleplaying show Dimension 20. Second, Watcher, a production company and YouTube channel created by former BuzzFeed employees, launched a subscription service, was royally torched by their audience for it, apologized, and walked it back (sorta). They said they’ll continue to release their content for free on YouTube, a few weeks after it goes up on their site.

If you were to judge the health of the creator economy through the Dropout lens, well, it's never been bigger. But if you were to view it through Watcher, the only sane conclusion would be that it was well and truly over. Taken together, however, you actually get the clearest picture yet of both what the creator economy actually is and, most importantly, how fans and customers currently understand it. But let’s start with Dropout.

Dropout launched in 2018 as the subscription arm of College Humor, which, yes, sounds insane now and sounded even more insane then. College Humor’s owner, IAC, sold the College Humor brand to the company’s then-Chief Creative Officer Sam Reich right before the pandemic, which was the real beginning of the Dropout era. College Humor was largely sunset and Dropout became the flagship. It was also during the pandemic that Reich and his team fully committed to the current Dropout setup: Unscripted comedies featuring a rotating, but familiar cast of comedians, actors, and creators, distributed on their own subscription streaming platform, but advertised via clips and one-offs on social platforms like YouTube and TikTok. I first caught wind of Dropout around 2021 thanks to clips from Dimension 20 and Game Changers taking over Tumblr for a while.

If you’ve never seen a Dropout show, the best way to think about it is Whose Line Is It Anyway? reconfigured like the WWE or the MCU. Instead of an episode of Whose Line… featuring a dozen smaller improv games and one cast, each improv game on Dropout becomes its own very bingeable series featuring a bunch of different players.

Dropout currently has a paying audience somewhere in the “mid-six figures,” but its biggest show, the one selling out Madison Square Garden, is a tabletop-roleplaying series called Dimension 20. The RPG elements of Dimension 20 are, of course, the main reason its so popular — the show’s dungeon master Brennan Lee Mulligan is arguably one of the best DMs in the world. But it’s also successful because Dimension 20, like all Dropout shows, functions as a hub for the cast members you’ll eventually see pop up across all of Dropout’s shows. Which is why their content is working so well right now.

The Dropout subscription is actually a very powerful feedback loop. You sign up because you like a bunch of their free clips or a creator you like goes on one of their shows. You binge one of their series, you get familiar with the cast, you binge another show, you meet more cast members, etc. It’s not dissimilar from how podcast networks used to work in their heyday. Watcher, however, is a bit different.

(The dreaded YouTube couch apology.)

Watcher launched as a YouTube channel four years ago and has grown very fast, all things considered. It has close to three million subscribers and at their peak last year, their videos were regularly cracking five million views. And they do have “shows” on their channel, sort of. But unlike Dropout, which produces very specific formats, Watcher largely traffics in 2010s open-ended viral content — a show about eating expensive food, a show about interviewing creators while shopping for groceries, paranormal reality shows, etc. Watcher’s team is roughly one viral content micro-generation younger than the Try Guys, but it’s the same dynamic.

And there’s nothing wrong with these shows. They do well on YouTube and they work well as a funnel to Watcher’s Patreon — which has over 13,000 subscribers, it should be noted. But they aren’t enough to support an entire streaming platform. Watcher’s audience is young and — as they all screamed into the comment section last week — don’t watch Watcher content because it’s premium, high-quality entertainment. They watch it because they like the channel’s three hosts. And I think this is the key takeaway here.

A subscription-based business requires an active fandom. And an ad-supported business requires a much bigger, and thus, usually more passive fandom. Due to the mechanics of the scale required to make money from digital advertising, you have to go broad. MrBeast would be the best example of what this looks like. And Watcher isn’t the first media company to think their more passive, parasocial fandom could be flipped into an active one. The most disastrous version of this was CNN+, which similarly attempted to leverage people you kinda know and like from your various screens to launch a Netflix-like streaming service. It ended up with less than 10,000 users in its first couple weeks.

But also Watcher isn’t totally to blame here. YouTube continues to push for more TV-level production from its biggest channels, but does not financially scale in a way that makes that possible without losing your mind. But I think this is, more than anything, a cultural sea change that Watcher found themselves on the wrong side of. Over the last few years, I’ve said that the way popularity works has changed post-pandemic and this is what I mean. Can Dropout sell out huge stadiums all over the world Taylor Swift-style? No, but they’ve spent four year cultivating a very active fanbase who will show up in person. While a YouTube channel with close to three million subs and over 10,000 Patreon patrons is struggling to evolve beyond the grind of platform publishing.

There’s A Whole Bunch Of Garbage Day Events Coming Up!

ZEG Storytelling Festival — June 21-23, Tbilisi, Georgia

Latitude Festival — July 25 - 28, Suffolk, UK (Will try and set up a London binhead meetup while I’m in town)

FWB Fest 24 — August 1-4, Idyllwild, CA

For folks who don’t know, I do a range of live events. Everything from conferences to comedy clubs to concerts. I opened for the band Tanlines in New York a few weeks ago. It was awesome. Want Garbage Day at your event? Want Garbage Day to host an event in your city? Shoot me an email at ryan@garbageday.email! I’ll go anywhere and do anything as long as it’s not a complete financial loss for me to get there lol. Let’s see if we can make it work.

Is The “Bonk Bonk Jug Song” The Song Of The Summer???

Instagram post by @noshu4me

In case you’re curious, this song was created by No$hu. It’s over on Bandcamp if you want to listen to the full thing. And the beat underneath it was produced by jackangelbeats. The footage is from a pro-Palestine protest at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. Bonk bonk!

I Can’t Believe We’re Really Doing The Whole TikTok Thing

It’s official. ByteDance has nine months to divest TikTok to an American company or be banned in the US. I think 404 Media has the best overall take on this, which is that TikTok is being sacrificed for the “sins” of every other social media company. Reporter Sam Biddle also made a good point, which is that TikTok’s dreaded “algorithm” is just… a bunch of code that recommends videos. Like, if US tech companies were still good and knew how to make things instead of acquire things, which they also cannot do anymore, they could just make something better. Though, ByteDance also seems to think their algorithm is one-of-a-kind because they’re debating selling TikTok without it. Which would honestly be the funniest outcome here.

But the last important thing here was mentioned by Slate’s Scott Nover, who argued that this is all really happening because the US government refuses to “legislate, pass data privacy legislation, and promote competition in the social media space.”

Right-Wing Media Is Going Broke

The same digital advertising squeeze that’s crushing mainstream publishers is also affecting right-wing media. But, also, right-wing media, in particular, has been the target of hugely effective protesting campaigns from organizations like Check My Ads.

But it seems like the bottom is falling out on conservative publishers much harder and faster than their centrist counterparts. Most likely because most of these sites were just blogs run by weird old men before Facebook turned them into the future of media. Case in point: Gateway Pundit, one of the largest right-wing publishers of the Trump era, and ground zero for some of the biggest, most aggressive conspiracy theories of the late-2010s, is filing for Chapter 11. Get wrecked.

Gateway Pundit is also facing a defamation suit, which, obviously, doesn’t help them here. But most of these sites are imploding because they were entirely dependent on platforms and now the platforms don’t need them anymore. This doesn’t mean that right-wing agitators are suddenly gone from the internet. They just need a few more months to really figure out how to make short-form video content. Then we’ll do this dance all over again.

The Stellar Blade Weirdos Made The Mistake Of Recording Videos Of Themselves

OK, I’m going to try and speedrun through this whole thing so we can get to the funny part.

Stellar Blade is a new video game and it features a sexy lady as its main character. Reviewers say the game is fine, not amazing, but pretty fun. But before the game came out, a bunch of gamergaters latched on to it, assuming that it would be trounced by critics because of the aforementioned sexy lady. When reviewers didn’t trash the game, the gamergaters tried to find something — anything — to rally around as a culture war thing. They settled on #FreeStellarBlade, which is a petition on change.org lmfao. They claim the game was censored, largely the main character’s skimpy outifts, I guess. Though, the outfits are still very skimpy in the game!

Anyways, as always, none of this matters to real people with actual lives and people who care about them. And if you need proof of that, thankfully, change.org allows video uploads. And some of the #FreeStellarBlade guys are posting videos in support of the campaign. There are definitely some trolls in there, but there are a lot of very real ones, as well. Enjoy.

So, I visited the #FreeStellarBlade petition website and there were some videos of people who wanted their voices and opinions to be heard.

Free speech is a wonderful thing.

— K-Med (@K__Med)
Apr 29, 2024

A Famous Internet Mystery Has Been Solved (It Was From Porn)

Internet users have spent years trying to find a piece of lost media, usually referred to as “Everyone Knows That” or “EKT”.

A 17-second clip of the song was first uploaded by a user named Carl92 back in 2021 to a website called WatZatSong.com. The mystery around the song would go on to spawn a subreddit with over 50,000 users. And a user on the subreddit over the weekend finally figured out where the song came from: it’s from a porno.

u/south_pole_ball explained how they found the song. They used a tip from another member of the subreddit found “a video on YouTube of a scene from an adult movie that had a song which sounded very similar to EKT.” Uh huh, right, on YouTube. The porn had credits which led to a list of music from a composer named Christopher Saint Booth. And, sure enough, Booth composed the song specifically for a pornographic film called Angels Of Passion back in 1986. Here’s the IMDB page. You can, uh, verify this further on your own.

I Would Try This…

Be the change you wish to see in the world

— dontdrinkbeer (@dontdrinkbeer)
Apr 25, 2024

I saw a few folks calling this the “Billie Irish,” which is real good.

Some Stray Links

• “My Dinner With Andreessen”

• “After Prison, I Went to Miami to Reacquaint Myself With Freedom”

• “The central object of your disgust over these past several weeks has not been external.”

• “At The Cindy Lee Show, Making Sense Of The Hype”

P.S. here are the top 10 largest Tesco stores in the UK.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Hey there, folks. I’m on a little “vacation” (slightly diminished work schedule) this week. Taking a couple days off before my summer gets busy (and it looks like it’s going to be real busy). There won’t be audio versions or a weekend issue this week. Everything is back to normal next week, though.

Also, Adam and I are over in Sherwood this week with a real crazy piece about Reddit’s r/all. You can check that out here. And I’m also over at Fast Company writing about what streaming platforms are doing to TV soundtracks. You can check that out here.

As for today’s issue, I am very excited to announce the return of Allegra Rosenberg, who’s come back with a deep dive into the magical world of AI-generated SpongeBob songs.

The Art Of Making AI Art No One Hates

—by Allegra Rosenberg

"Just know that when I'm criticizing AI this is excluded," was a recent comment on, wait for it… a (since-deleted) TikTok of someone dancing to “The Bottom 2” a SpongeBob-themed rap song featuring AI-assisted vocals by an artist named Glorb.  

In Glorb’s viral tracks, which he (presumably it’s a he) has been releasing since June of last year, SpongeBob, Mr. Krabs, and the rest of the Bikini Bottom gang spit aggressive bars over sick beats under rap names like “SpongeOpp” and “Mr. Swags.” The songs, whose lyrics incorporate plenty of playful references to the original cartoon, have racked up millions of plays across streaming services. 

Much like the Skibidi Toilet cinematic universe which has enthralled the country’s captive, and seemingly growing, population of iPad children, Glorb’s SpongeBob world is a guns-blazing CGI wonderland, with a lore-heavy plot connecting up the videos which can otherwise be watched on their own for pure entertainment. 

SpongeBob-themed rap was a preexisting genre, pioneered by artists like Oddwin, but the pseudonymous and mysterious Glorb has quickly become the foremost practitioner, thanks to the fact that his songs are really fucking good. So good that many speculate that in real life he’s a high-level producer or artist in the music industry — guesses include the rapper Logic or the producer BNYX, who has worked with Yeat and Drake — and so good that his use of AI filters to transform his vocals into the familiar voices of SpongeBob is a non-issue.

Kalhan Rosenblatt’s story for NBC News consulted AI boosters who see Glorb’s success as a sign that the AI music revolution might finally be upon us, and copyright professors issuing warnings about the impossibility of regulation. But Glorb didn’t respond for comment and neither did Nickelodeon. It’s also unclear what the actors themselves think about the use of their voices.

Record labels such as Universal Music Group (UMG), with unashamedly AI-curious Lucian Grainge at the helm, are pursuing a parallel course of cautiously investing in AI products while simultaneously calling for stricter regulation. The central concern of labels is naturally the protection and maximization of their artists’ earning potential, whether that’s by saving artists from robot competition or giving them access to AI tools that would give them an edge in the market.

I can imagine that the Glorb phenomenon is sending premonitory shivers down the canny Grainge’s spine. Here is an example of a use-case for AI in music that does not by necessity leave real human creative labor at the door. 

Glorb’s music is not transformative fandom strictly speaking, but it certainly falls under the same umbrella. He places fair use disclaimers in his YouTube descriptions like fan fiction of old, and relies on the referential knowledge and eager nostalgia of his audience as a solid foundation to do acrobatic artistic tricks around. Yes, the songs are good on their own, but it’s that golden combination of high quality and intertextuality — the same combination that has seen popular fan fiction launching the careers of bestselling authors — which activates the guilty-pleasure insta-fondness which leads to hard-won fan loyalty. 

Like a virus sneakily bypassing the immune system, Glorb has slid past the defenses of the AI-skeptical by sheer merit, resulting in TikToks with captions like, “AI isn’t real art” okay then explain this??” and, “Still the best use of AI by far 🔥🔥”. But when the use of AI doesn’t quite result in these lofty heights of artistic accomplishment, the backlash can be immediate and consequential. 

Boy Room, a genuinely hilarious web series produced by creative studio Gymnasium, tours disgusting boy rooms — navy sheets, no duvet cover, you know the type. The episodes used generative-AI as stock images and to depict aesthetic improvements recommended by the host, comedian Rachel Coster. "This with no AI would be peak,” reads one of the top comments on a recent episode. “I was really enjoying this series but all the AI art has thrown me off 🥲,” reads another. In the new episodes released since, the use of AI has thankfully been severely cut down on. It clearly just wasn’t worth it.

Which has led to a certain irony for creators who want to, in a sense, get away with using AI. At as it exists least right now. Like Glorb — and like ObscurestVinyl, a popular creator of sublimely funny parodies of retro music generated with the help of AI tool Suno — they have to find a way to use it that is both impossible to achieve without it, and also not reliant on it as a shortcut. It has to make people comment, “This is what AI was actually for.” And it’s these edge cases that interested parties should keep an eye on. Because the line between acceptable and unacceptable is always shifting, and the key to surviving any era of the internet is about finding out how to innovate on the right side of it.

Some Stray Links

• Some good Taylor Swift writing

• “Spy Site Selling Discord Messages Linked to Kiwi Farms”

• “The Problem With BookTok Isn’t the Pretty Influencers or the Fantasy Books”

P.S. here’s John Wick holding Shadow the Hedgehog like Mary holding baby Jesus.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

Those Who Do Not Learn From Clubhouse Are Doomed To Repeat Clubhouse

Earlier this week I got access to Airchat, which is apparently still invite-only. WIRED is already calling the app “Silicon Valley’s latest obsession” and Business Insider says it’s getting “tons of buzz with tech industry, creators”. It’s actually awful and a hilarious example of how thoroughly cooked Web 2.0 is, but we’ll get to that in a sec.

Airchat is another “audio-first social network,” similar to Clubhouse. Unlike Clubhouse, though, its interface is genuinely impressive. When you open it up, it looks a lot like Threads or any other algorithmically-sorted Twitter clone. But the posts are transcripts of audio and video recordings. There’s also a play button you can hit that will just auto-play your feed. I let it just go for a while this morning and it was an interesting experience.

Airchat, ironically enough, doesn’t really make sense if you just listen to it. It’s a lot of short conversations and without the app’s visual interface, those fragments just sound like random voices. As for the content on there, it’s exactly what you would expect from an invite-only app that has “tons of buzz” in Silicon Valley. Just the worst, most basic college freshman dorm room-tier icebreakers from wear-a-leather-jacket-in-the-office millennials chasing the high of their first Foursquare check-in.

Airchat was built by Naval Ravikant, a tech entrepreneur and regular guest on Joe Rogan, and Brian Norgard, Tinder’s head of product. According to Bloomberg, by using the app, you grant it “a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, fully sublicensable license to use, reproduce, archive, edit, translate, create derivative works of, make available, distribute, sell, display, perform, transmit, broadcast and in any other way exploit those User Submissions.”

The app is already using an AI to clean up users’ voices and Ravikant, in a conversation on the app, said they don’t plan to train AI models with user content, but they might train a model to make better audio enhancements. Uh huh. Oh, also, Bloomberg notes that OpenAI’s Sam Altman was an early Airchat investor. Though, I doubt Airchat users will care about that, seeing as how one of the largest communities on the app is for the e/acc “movement,” or “effective accelerationism,” the AI-evangelist splinter group that wants to use AI to blow up society.

On Monday, I described Facebook as a “data holding pen for advertisers to harvest,” but it’s not just Facebook and it’s not just advertisers. Every social network — Reddit, Tumblr, X/Twitter, TikTok — is now primarily an AI training pool. Though, I’ve reached the point where I don’t even really care about that anymore. The real issue with Airchat is that it’s boring as hell.

Clubhouse, the clear inspiration for Airchat, “blew up” (debatable) during the pandemic thanks to a couple key factors: People with email jobs couldn’t go outside — or, at least, couldn’t post about being outside. The crypto market was on a bull run so everyone was rich with fake money. And perhaps most crucially and most often overlooked, a lot of people decided to reinvent their lives and a big chunk of those people decided they were tech founders now. These people LARP as CEOs on TikTok podcasts and whine on X all day about tech reviewers like Marques Brownlee not respecting the “builder’s mindset”. And Clubhouse, and now Airchat, smartly realized that if you dangle the promise of talking to Andreessen Horowitz employees in front of them these rubes will use their dinner party simulation apps long enough to harvest their voices to train their AI models. It’s so bleak!

I’ve seen people on Airchat already talking about flying out to San Fransisco to meet all their new Airchat friends. Do not do this! You are you in an MLM for people who know what Github is, but don’t know how to use it. Get help!

But the real reason I think Airchat is the ultimate sign of the end of Web 2.0 is that every new app now (that isn’t run by Bytedance) launches by dropping these same weirdos into a new enclosure. It’s the same 250 cool product managers and white nationalist crypto backpack zoomers jumping from one friendship casino to another. These are emo night cruises for people who remember Klout. Look, I don’t know what the future will bring, but we are clearly done with whatever this is. There is — there has to be — something new coming. For the love of god, people. We can’t keep doing this.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

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Some Good Ol’ Fashioned Trump Content

Had to make the Ken Burns edit to stop the intrusive thoughts

— Dad (@SchneeDad)
Apr 15, 2024

Also, here’s a good spot to drop this link about Trump having to sit through a bunch of mean memes read out loud to him. It was part of the juror selection process for his current criminal trial in New York.

OK, Fediverse, I’m Beginning To See The Vision

I’ve come across three projects/essays over the last few weeks that have started to make me very excited about the fediverse. They haven’t assuaged me of my fears that it’s too complicated for the average user to really care about, but I’m beginning to see the possibilities here.

First, I can’t recommend this essay on the “The Fediverse Of Things” by Terence Eden highly enough. The broad strokes are that, by using ActivityPub, you could built a network of “social” accounts for things like municipal services or even all the lightbulbs in your house.

“It seems feasible that every civic object could have a Fediverse account,” Eden writes. “From the individual streetlights to the municipal sewerage system. Perhaps people won't send love letters to overflowing drains — but a social-dashboard of your civic environment could be both practical and delightful.”

The next project was Anuj Ahooja’s essay about trying to connect his Threads account to Mastodon. Which, I think, does a very good job of explaining how ActivityPub could be used to build a TweetDeck-like interface for, well, anything that runs on the protocol. Which is very cool.

And, finally, this morning I found a podcast tool built on ActivityPub called Podcast AP, created by Tim Chambers. It uses a bridge to connect podcast RSS feeds, another open protocol, to the fediverse.

The reason I find all of these exciting is because they offer a vision of a very different kind of internet experience, one where the web isn’t condensed into privately-owned social networks, but one where the social network experience is freed from the network. Internet content, of any shape or format, can be tracked, interacted with, and shared in real time. It’ll be a real uphill battle to get the average person to care about this stuff, but if the process of using these tools can be made simpler, it might be possible.

AI Wearables Should Actually Just Be Smart Home Devices

Bloomberg host Ed Ludlow posed an interesting thought about AI wearables this week. “What’s very interesting about Humane AI pin is whether you’re talking the at home vs on the go use case. At home I’m a big Alexa user. I have an echo dot in most rooms. I really find it useful,” he wrote. “Now on the go I use Siri because I am an iPhone user. But it’s not great, is it? Thoughts?”

This is not dissimilar from a point Molly White made this week, who wrote, “[AI tools] do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial.”

The funny thing is there is a clear use case for AI-powered hardware and it becomes overwhelmingly obvious when you walk through what an AI chat interface requires: A stable internet connection and a place quiet enough to talk to it. Generative-AI should just be a smart home device. Both Google Home and Alexa were supposed to get some kind of generative-AI feature, but, as a Home user, I haven’t noticed any difference. In fact, most of my Google-connected devices don’t even really work anymore.

So why weren’t Smart Home devices the first stop for this tech and why is everyone clamoring to build some kind of wearable? Well, my hunch is, first, because wearables are seen by other people and tend to advertise themselves and, second, because smart home devices have been so bad and so useless for so long that it’s basically tarnished for at least a generation.

Coachella Is Weird Now, Which Is Cool, But Probably Not Good For Coachella

(YouTube/Coachella)

This year’s Coachella is a fantastic snapshot of how fragmented pop culture is right now. It has probably the weirdest, most eclectic lineup its had in years, including Japanese vocaloid Hatsune Miku, Clown Core, The Aquabats somehow, Grimes, Blur, and Taking Back Sunday. Which has already resulted in some very funny drama.

Miku fans are mad the virtual pop star performed on a backdrop instead of her usual hologram. Blur got such a lukewarm response they vowed to never come back. Grimes revealed she can’t do basic math and had to stop her set several times because the BPMs of her songs were all accidentally doubled. (I get it, I recently had to reboot my entire laptop on stage during a Garbage Day live set.) And zoomers discovered that Taking Back Sunday is, arguably, the worst sounding professional live band of all time. They usually still put on a good show, though.

If the internet is anything go off of — and it isn’t tbh — the standout performance this year was Chappell Roan, who’s blowing up right now because zoomers have Twenty One Pilots brain and don’t know who Marina And The Diamonds is. “Casual” rips, though.

All of this has resulted in a ticket sales drop of 15%-20% since last year. Which is possibly related to the lack of monoculture right now. But it also might be the rampant piracy of performance streams and high-quality fancams. But it also might be related to music festivals, as a whole, losing their status as a place to see and be seen. But all of that also might just be related to the lack of monoculture right now.

Speaking of which…

Websites Might Be Coming Back

(castexotic.com/realistikstudios)

One of the most exciting new music releases this year is a double album called Diamond Jubilee by the artist Cindy Lee, which was released, not on a streamer like Spotify, but on a Geocities page.

Pitchfork gave Diamond Jubilee an astonishing 9.1 and, while it’s not exactly my thing, I think it’s pretty good! But the release strategy is what I’m geeking out about more. And Cindy Lee isn’t the only artist beginning to experiment with this kind of album drop. Last week, Pharrell released an album on standalone website, as well.

One thing that I don’t think is highlighted enough is the role music, as an art form, has in bringing about philosophical changes in how we use technology. Peer-to-peer music piracy laid the groundwork for all viral media sharing that would come after. MP3 players like the iPod were the forefathers of the smartphone. Spotify, you could argue, popularized streaming media faster than Netflix did. And TikTok used shareable, iterative audio to standardize short-form video.

So I don’t think it’s overblown to say that if musicians can find a new utility for single-purpose websites, everyone else eventually will, too.

@lukefoods_ Has Done It Again

@lukefoods

Garlic Naan And Butter Chicken Fountain?! #butterchicken #indianfood #indianfoodie #garlicnaan #naan #foodcritic #indianfoodblogger #taste... See more

Some Stray Links

• Rusty Foster somehow has an internet connection up in Maine

• “The invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat”

• “How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English”

P.S. here’s a good post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

You can find audio versions of Garbage Day on every major podcasting app (search “Garbage Day” and look for the trash can). If it’s not there, here’s an RSS feed.

Why Are People On Facebook Generating AI Religious Art Of Flight Attendants?

(Facebook/RaffyTulfoNewsandaction27)

Facebook is currently awash in AI spam. Last month, 404 Media covered the bizarre new trend of old people praying to AI images of Shrimp Jesus. But it seems like Shrimp Jesus is out and the hot new Facebook engagement hack being used to terrorize and mystify the platform’s elderly user base is flight attendants praying to Jesus. Here’s what I learned about the pages that are generating these images and my best guess as to why it’s happening.

The search term to use if you want to find this stuff is “beautiful cabin crew,” which seems to be the main way pages are sharing these pictures. You can also use the hashtag #cabincrew to see a bunch more. There are also at least a dozen very, very popular Facebook Groups using some variation of the phrase as their title. Some of these groups are only for AI images of flight attendants, some are for pictures of flight attendants and Jesus, and some are just for sharing softcore pornography — and clearly stolen personal photos and videos — of real human flight attendants. But let’s start with the images that don’t have Jesus in them.

The biggest “cabin crew” group I found is called “Beautiful Cabin Crew 💙 ✈️” and it has around 700,000 members. Most of the posts are AI-generated flight attendants and women in military uniforms posted by bots and/or fake profiles. Though, there do seem to be real men commenting on the posts 😕. This group also doesn’t seem to post any pictures of Jesus. It’s moderated by two people, a Bengali guy and an account called Mitu, which is promoting a network of massive private Facebook Groups sharing actual pornography on the platform. Some of these groups have over a million members and they’re extremely creepy.

There are also a bunch of AI-generated flight attendant influencers. These pages post in the cabin crew groups and are generating thousands of images of flight attendants. Some are incredibly popular, like this one called Bee, which has 150,000 followers. It’s uploading a new AI-generated image every hour from what I can tell.

As for the pages generating the pictures of flight attendants with Jesus, they’re also using these cabin crew communities, most likely as a way to promote themselves. One smaller cabin crew group is called “Cabin crew Beauty love” and it shares both kinds of AI-generated flight attendant pictures. It’s moderated by one of the bigger AI flight attendant pages, which is called “Raffy Tulfo News and Rescue”. It has almost half a million followers and is one of the main sources of all the Jesus-praying-with-flight-attendants photos traveling around Facebook right now. Raffy Tulfo is a Filipino senator and media personality btw and it seems like the page was originally created in 2022 as a way to spoof Tulfo’s real pages.

(Facebook/Wildlife Fan)

Which brings us to the question of where these pages are based. I found one page that was based in Pakistan contributing to a cabin crew group. And I found another, smaller group called “Beautiful Cabin Crew ✈️ ✈️🌏❤,” run by a guy in Cambodia. I suspect that Facebook’s Page Transparency settings have broken somehow or these pages have figured out a way around them with VPNs because almost all of these pages are listed as being run out of the US, but are full of fake details.

A popular AI image page called Tatyand Davon9, which makes flight attendant images, along with other more traditional(?) AI-generated images of just Jesus, went viral on X recently and none of its page information is correct. It has 150,000 followers and lists itself as being based in California. I called the phone number on the page and it goes to a martial arts facility in Florida. The receptionist was very nice, but also very confused when I asked her about the AI pictures of Jesus! I tried to contact another one of these pages — one called Wildlife Fan, which seems to specialize in crying flight attendants? — but its number went to voicemail. Though, the address listed on the page is for a flower shop in California.

The most interesting thing about these groups and pages is that they’re not clearly selling anything — or even, seemingly, working together in any coherent way, like the bad food magicians. Though, one page I came across, Melodee Lynnet, has about 10,000 followers and is now posting flight attendants and pictures of Jesus, but was posting old people and women in wheelchairs celebrating their birthdays earlier this year. (It was the big Facebook engagement hack before AI images took off.) And the Melodee page says it’s affiliated with a viral marketing firm called Quantum Tech HD, but I can’t tell if that’s real or not. I emailed them, but haven’t heard back.

I assume these pages are simply jamming a bunch of popular stuff together to farm engagement to eventually monetize in some way down the line. Why AI images? Because you can flood Facebook with thousands of posts and the platform won’t really do anything about it. These pages are also using the platform’s built-in 3D photo filter, possibly to bypass Facebook’s bar-is-in-hell bare-minimum AI image detection. Why flight attendants? Because Facebook users are, and always have been, uncontrollably horny. But, also, my mom is a flight attendant (sorry mom if you’re reading this!) and aviation and flight attendant Facebook has always been huge. So I think they’re just identifying communities that were already active and swarming them. Why Jesus? Because religious content — and getting users to say “Amen” underneath it — became one of the fastest growing types of content on the site after it stopped promoting news content last year.

The fact that, in the span of less than year, Facebook effectively removed anything resembling news from the platform, even conservative news, and allowed AI-generated spam to take its place, and both investors and advertisers don’t care, should tell you all you need to know about what social networks are in 2024. They’re a data holding pen for advertisers to harvest and it seems like Meta has finally given up pretending they’re anything else. Who cares if users are praying to and/or asking to marry AI images of flight attendants? All that matters is that they’re on the app and you can stick ads in front of them.

The following is part of a promo swap I’m doing with Semafor this week. They were kind enough to give Garbage Day a shout out in their newsletter last week.

Friends of Garbage Day: Meet Semafor Tech – It’s written by one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific reporters, Reed Albergotti. Twice a week, Reed delivers original reporting and exclusive scoops on the emerging themes happening in and around tech. Recent coverage includes an exclusive interview with the CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the startup trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth. 

Subscribe for free here.

A Good Yoga Ball Storage Hack

バランスボールを天井のかどに押し付けて収納するテク、ユーザーの間ではわりと常識らしくて、知らないこと多いなあと感じている。

— 大伴 亮介（おおとも りょうすけ） (@R_OTOMO)
Mar 16, 2024

Per Google Translate: “The technique of storing a balance ball by pressing it against the corner of the ceiling seems to be common knowledge among users, but I feel like there's a lot that people don't know about it.”

On Paywalls And Democracy

Every nine months or so, though usually more often around election years, someone tries to argue that paywalls are bad for democracy. The most recent reheating of this take comes from The Atlantic, in a new piece titled, “Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls”. Of course, you won’t be able to read it unless you pay for an Atlantic subscription. Womp womp.

The Atlantic piece argues that outlets should make their journalism free during the election year because of rampant mis- and disinformation online. And it only offers a single paragraph trying to imagine how an outlet might pay for such an idea, mentioning, uh, grants, sponsors, and ads. Oh dang, what a revolutionary idea.

Writer Hamilton Nolan called the piece “worthless” and “laughably tossed-off” and I agree. Though, Hamilton suggested publicly-funded journalism programs as the only answer to this conundrum. Which, sure, but I don’t think they’re realistic at a scale that would matter in the US. But maybe one day!

My more pragmatic take here is that media outlets should do literally anything that sorta-kinda works. But the idea that cutting off revenue streams during an election year could somehow result in BETTER information is, frankly, idiotic. The big lesson of the free news viral media age wasn’t that news only works when it’s free, the lesson was that well-funded newsrooms work, regardless of where that funding comes from. Report news, figure out how to sell it, and put pressure on platforms (via your reporting) to limit misinformation.

A Few Updates From The Brazil/X Feud

X’s head of legal in Brazil, Diego de Lima Gualda, resigned after Elon Musk said he would defy court orders imposed on the site. Probably smart. Gualda was mentioned by name twice in a recent court decision regarding X, according to a report from Folha (one of Brazil’s largest papers). Gualda was also spotlighted by the new round of Brazilian Twitter Files.

Meanwhile, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has joined Bluesky. In case you were curious like I was, he’s been on Threads since it launched and has a much bigger presence there.

(bsky.app/lulaoficial.bsky.social)

Wifejak And Husbandjak

(r/WojakDrawings)

I wasn’t going to cover this meme because it’s actually sort of old and I feel like these kind of “memes” don’t really matter anymore, but it went viral over the weekend and briefly became unavoidable for a split second on X. I thought this husbandjak one was pretty funny.

I’d say the main takeaway here, if you’re looking for one, is that a lot of daily life memes like this feel more and more abstracted from actual life because the increasingly small group of guys on sites like X and Reddit making them don’t really seem to experience real life anymore. They’re like projections of a projection of a projection.

Energy Toast

(r/energydrinks)

I saw a screenshot of this on X recently and hoped that by finding the original post on Reddit I’d get a few more answers about what’s going on here. It was posted in r/energydrinks, so I assumed “energy toast” is toast with a jam made from some kind of melted down energy drink, but I was curious which. Down in the comments, the original poster said it was something called “C4 jelly,” which I found a recipe for on Instagram. I guess, it’s jelly made from an energy drink called C4.

Anyways, here are my favorite comments:

• “Every day in this sub we stray further from God.”

• “Straight to jail”

• “I mean this in the worst way possible, go to hell 😂”

• “If you were really in a rush then you'd take it in the shower like everyone else.”

A Real Good AI-Generated Yearbook

I'm absolutely losing my shit at this ĀÎ gen yearbook

— SᏦᎩLƐᏒ 🔜 🇯🇵🗼 (@skyezera)
Apr 12, 2024

Some Stray Links

• Marques Brownlee reviewed the bad AI pin

• “The Intercept is running out of cash”

• “Some ex-TikTok employees say the social media service worked closely with its China-based parent despite claims of independence”

P.S. here’s a rat named Kronk learning to drive a tiny car.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

Elon Musk Is Beefing With Brazil

Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE) is investigating Elon Musk after he said he would restore a handful of X accounts that had been ordered offline by a Brazilian judge. It’s unclear what the accounts are or who they belong to, but based on both Brazil’s recent history with court-ordered online moderation, as well as Musk’s refusal to comply, I think it’s safe to assume they’re probably connected to far-right extremism or misinformation. But we’ll get to that in a second.

Musk, over the weekend, dusted off his usual playbook and launched a harassment campaign against Alexandre de Moraes, the court’s president. Musk has threatened to publish everything that Moraes has sent to X (they’re doing some dumb Twitter Files thing again), demanded Moraes resign (doubtful), and also compared Moraes to Darth Vader (he honestly looks more like Voldemort).

(Very cool post, thank you.)

Brazil’s government is also contemplating ending its contracts with Starlink. Though, Musk said he would provide free internet to Brazilian schools if the contract was broken. Which, I suppose, is better than what Starlink is currently being used for in Brazil which is providing internet coverage for illegal mining operations that are stripping gold from indigenous areas in the northwest of the country. When Musk got the Starlink contract approved during the last months of the far-right Bolsonaro administration, he said at the time it would be used for “environmental monitoring of Amazon.”

Which is worth noting actually. I don’t think it’s an accident that Musk suddenly doesn’t want to play ball with Brazilian tech regulations now that left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is in charge. As Platformer pointed out recently, Musk rarely has these kinds of temper tantrums when he’s ordered to do something by a right-wing administration. Musk has even threatened to shut down the X office in Brazil if Moraes and the court don’t back down. Once again, all of these things are threats and nothing of any substance has actually happened here. Se você é um funcionário brasileiro do/da X (Twitter) vamos conversar!

As I wrote in January last year, after Bolsonaro supporters, or bolsominions as they’re more commonly called, held their own insurrection and stormed Brazil’s Three Powers Plaza, the country’s courts have been much more aggressive about online moderation than anything we could possibly imagine here in the States. Which is probably the main reason why Musk is Posting Through It so hard right now. The TSE has opened a wider investigation into X’s role in supporting what it’s calling “digital militias,” or anti-democratic users that spread mis- and disinformation. And Moraes has reportedly ordered Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency to get ready for a court order that would block X entirely in the country.

Brazil has played this same judicial game of chicken with a bunch of other platforms over the last few years. The TSE banned Telegram due to extremism in 2022, though the ban was eventually lifted. And last year, the TSE sent all of Big Tech panicking after they proposed a “fake news” bill that would impose huge fines on tech platforms not catching and removing illegal content before courts spotted it. Google tried to throw a widget underneath videos protesting the bill and the TSE threatened them with $200,000 fines for every hour it was up. lol wrecked. Oh, also, not that anyone normal would care, but right-wing video platform Rumble has already left the country due to Brazilian regulations.

There have been a few Brazilian politicians issuing support for Musk, but it’s not exactly overwhelming. And I don’t think Musk is dumb enough to exit the country. Most estimates place Brazil as either the fourth or fifth biggest country on X, which most Brazilians still call Twitter btw. The site also hasn’t lost its central place in Brazilian internet culture since Musk took over. Based on the big Brazilian posters I follow, Bluesky is a weird curiosity and Threads died a quick death because it’s objectively not fun. Which is why I think this is a whole bunch of nothing that will go nowhere, which is usually how things involving Musk end up.

I’m not going to say that Brazil’s moderation laws are perfect. I don’t think any internet regulations from any country are, frankly. But I do think it’s important that a country like Brazil, which has been historically treated as a test market by Silicon Valley and, now, more recently Beijing, is at least trying to define how foreign tech platforms should and shouldn’t operate within their borders. And before anyone jumps in here and tries to compare this to the proposed Congressional TikTok ban here in the US, let me stop you real quick: Brazilian courts are going after specific accounts on specific platforms for specific kinds of content that cause actual problems. The US should try it sometime!

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

Friends! Hello – Mike Rugnetta here to say I hope you're having a nice Garbage Day! But also to say: there’s a new episode of Never Post today, our podcast about and for the internet.

This week Charlie Harding from Switched on Pop joins us to discuss pop-music that has sounded "like the internet"; we also discuss the psychological impact of Before and After posts.

We’ve recently discussed using the "megadungeon" of TTRPGs to understand the internet, asked why Facebook keeps asking you to "reconnect" with dead friends, and wondered if staying sane online means ignoring much of what you see.

Find Never Post at https://neverpo.st and wherever you get your podcasts ✌️

Pure Vibes

@hexgirlfan1

#fyp

Brazil Has Finally Made Someone “Bluesky Famous”

—by Adam Bumas

(arthurjoedson.bsky.social)

Facing the possibility of X completely shutting down in the country, Brazilians are beginning to migrate to Bluesky. In the 24 hours after Musk posted about the TSE’s decision, Bluesky saw over 400,000 posts in Brazilian Portuguese, briefly making it the most popular language for skeeting. It was the federated platform’s first day with major growth since it left its invite-only period in February.

It’s further evidence of what I’ve said before, that everything about Bluesky is completely downstream of X — not just its user base but its features, its communities, and its culture. In short, it’s hard to see a future where anyone gets Bluesky Famous. But as I was sifting through Portuguese skeets, I saw an exception that proves that rule.

Paul Frazee has been working at Bluesky since 2022. Until last June, he was the fifth most-followed account on Bluesky, and unlike the other four, he has a poster’s soul, mixing jokes with serious updates about the platform. Soon he had the same quasi-famous “senpai” status of all mods and admins who regularly contribute to the community they maintain. But even though it was a standard kind of internet fame, it was completely unique for where it happened, on a platform where virtually all the loudest voices brought their audience from elsewhere. Frazee became much less prominent after he took a break from posting due to a spat involving someone seriously saying “ACAB includes Dril” (a story for another time).

But over the weekend, when thousands of new Brazilian users flooded the app, he picked up Google Translate and started engaging as closely as ever. The infamous Brazilian fan phenomenon kicked in, and soon he had been christened “Paulinho,” or “Little Paul,” and all the memes and jokes about his stewardship of the website gained a new life.

I’m still dubious Bluesky will ever flourish as a social platform in its own right. But even if I still classify it as the same kind of in-joke you’d see on a big forum or Discord server, not a whole site, I have to admit I’m seeing something original-ish here (you can too, with the custom Paulinho feed).

Going Further Down The Gylcine TikTok Rabbit Hole

@gangstasportivik

They’ve got their own core tech with a whopping 31 patents under their belt and a whole lot of production experience #mulldog #glycine #trustworthy

On Monday, I wrote about the dangerous new Chinese psyop preying on America’s youth: promotional videos for Donghua Jinlong, a glycine manufacturer based in Hebei, China. I mentioned that more than a few of the Donghua Jinlong memes circulating TikTok right now seemed to have some kind of connection to the Red Scare podcast and New York’s fashy Downtown Scene, sometimes called Dimes Square. I have a bit more context about this now.

A reader tipped me off to the fact that there are now a bunch of memecoins for glycine and Donghua Jinlong and the creator of at least one of the memecoins is the one making the Red Scare/Dimes Square-related edits.

I am going to assume this is complete gibberish to most people, but the simplest way to explain all of this is that there are a bunch of vaguely-leftist-but-not-really crypto developers that hang out in Manhattan’s Chinatown and they jump on or outright co-opt memes similar to how 4chan raids used to work 10 years ago. And these users are particularly interested in TikTok because there’s a lot of impressionable teenagers on it.

New Twitter Alternative Dropped

(Lyrak)

There’s a new (soon to be) federated Twitter alt in town. It’s called Lyrak and it seems like it’s main gimmick is an ad revenue share. And I should say, a 50% split for ad revenue is pretty good! Lyrak’s team also seems like they’re reaching out to journalists and creators and onboarding them first (they reached out to me fyi). From what I can see, Lyrak is not federated yet, but the plan is to integrate it with ActivityPub. No snark, I wish them the best. But…

I think trying to make THE social network for the fediverse is actually kind of a backwards way of thinking about it? And I’m beginning to realize my deep lack of interest in the fediverse is because, at least so far, everyone is just making Twitter variants with it. I was recently sent a blog post about the “fediverse of things” by developer Terence Eden, which made me more interested in decentralized networks than anything I’ve seen so far.

And, yes, I see the emails and comments from readers saying I should cover what’s happening on Mastodon and Bluesky more often (And, yes, I know Bluesky is not on ActivityPub, please don’t yell at me). Send me stuff you find interesting!

People Are Downloading Facebook Again (With A Huge Caveat)

(Appfigures)

According to some very interesting data from Appfigures, Facebook and Instagram were the two most-downloaded apps across iOS and Android for March. But as I wrote above, there’s a big caveat here.

As social media analyst Matt Navarra notes, the spike in downloads was because all of Meta’s apps went down briefly last month. So it’s likely that users weren’t downloading Meta apps, but re-downloading them.

The reason I mention this is because there has been a steadily increasing undercurrent on sites like X and Threads arguing that Facebook is, somehow, making a comeback. I think this partially due to nostalgia and partially due to Meta’s stock price soaring at the moment. But I would advise against declaring a Facebook comeback, at least, culturally. Though, who knows, maybe bringing back Pokes will be enough.

A Good Observation About Big Bang Theory

Genuinely shocked that Big Bang Theory got as big as it did. Every time I saw my parents watching it, there was a scene playing with dialog like a 2000s gaming webcomic. It was like if all of America was tuning in weekly to a live action Ctrl+Alt+Del adaptation

— august (@regularaugust)
Apr 3, 2024

Some Stray Links

• “Linking the g(URL)”

• “The disappearing Insta grid”

• “Everyone Needs to Chill About Gen Z Watching Sex and the City”

P.S. here’s a beautiful ballad about gylcine production.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

I’m trying a little experiment today. It’s not perfect and I have to mess around with how it’ll show up in the newsletter, but here’s a proof of concept. It’s an audio transcript of today’s issue read by me. Right now it’s only on Spotify, but like I said, I’m playing around with it. Let me know what you think!

The news is a meme

Click here to listen to an audio transcript of the Garbage Day newsletter.

open.spotify.com/episode/6pMYvlKuvnBypmEEgZEjzV?si=5a4b63d72dc1442d

Until You’re The One Filming It

Last Friday morning, my apartment in Brooklyn shook. At first, I thought it was wind, then maybe a truck or a subway passing by, until I realized I felt that exact kind of uncanny shaking in 2011, during New York’s last earthquake. Though for that one, I was 21 and very hungover, working at an abusive job I hated and was already sorta having a panic attack at that exact moment because I had just gotten yelled at for sending an email wrong and so when the building shook I assumed it was all in my head and I didn’t say anything.

But after last week’s quake, I did something that I do less and less these days. I typed “earthquake” into X. There aren’t really reporters on X using it the way they did Twitter anymore, but there were enough New Yorkers still on there posting “omg earthquake??” to at least confirm that’s probably what it was.

Eventually, a few accounts started posting some basic information about the seismology of the earthquake, but none of them were real publishers. And, in the absence of real information, my feed, instead, filled up with memes and conspiracy theories. Threads had better info, but it took a few hours to show up. And this experience was true for every social platform I used on Friday. Which is by design.

KEEPING IT COOL DURING AN EARTHQUAKE SO MY GIRL DOESNT GET THE ICK

— Marvelous Marvin (@SimplyDop3)
Apr 5, 2024

Up until, basically, COVID, the large platforms that govern how information travels online were predominately meant for something. Some, like Twitter, were for news. Others, like Facebook and Instagram, were for connection. Pinterest, curation. Tumblr, fandom. Reddit, hobbies. LinkedIn, networking, etc. And now, across the board, almost all of these sites are for entertainment.

This is largely TikTok’s fault. Its explosive popularity caused such an existential panic among Big Tech that now every platform — yes, even including Pinterest — has some kind of TikTok-like short-form video feature shoehorned into their feeds. But I suspect platforms also like it because it’s easier for the average user to, say, make or share a meme or skit about an earthquake than it is for them to do some citizen journalism. Though, back when platforms wanted news, there was plenty of that.

As these platforms shifted into TikTok clones, they took the opportunity to ditch some of the pesky responsibilities they had lost interest in dealing with during the 2010s, most notably, supporting third-party publishers with websites, most of them news outlets, that were using the aforementioned platforms for traffic.

Last month’s Kate Middleton hysteria is probably the best encapsulation of what this new information landscape feels like. Yes, it’s fun, usually in an icky way, but it’s also an inherently conspiratorial process. It’s not that news doesn’t happen anymore, it just that the average user now consumes it it in fragments. You watch a bunch of TikToks, maybe make a few of your own, read through some Instagram stories, catch the right screenshot of contextless text on X or Threads. If, in the 2010s, news was about memes, in the 2020s, news is just another kind of meme.

The best — and most chilling — description of what this feels like, particularly for processing the various natural disasters that now punctuate modern life is a 2022 tweet from user @PerthshireMags, who wrote, “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” But you can also swap “climate change” out for anything really — bird flu, cicadas, political extremism, AI-powered drone strikes, Stanley cup riots at Target. Everything that happens beyond our screens now is uploaded and flattened into abstracted entertainment, discourse, an AI-generated summary, a trend for brands to advertise around.

Every one of us will eventually upload a fragment to the internet’s various feeds, watch it dissolve into the digital static, and wonder why no one noticed.

Tee-Zay-Tee-Zy-Ky

I can’t breathe 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣

— Leo (@Leo_Iam_535)
Apr 2, 2024

The full video is here btw. It genuinely does seem like a pretty good recipe!

Meta’s Mysteriously Specific Glitch

I wrote about this in Friday’s weekend issue. Facebook and Threads briefly blocked all links from local Kansas newspaper, The Kansas Reflector, after they published an op-ed about Facebook killing local news.

Facebook’s Poster In Chief, Andy Stone, said it was a “security concern” that accidentally blocked the links. And that same “security concern” also blocked links to other sites that re-published the Reflector’s piece. Fascinating how that works!

Even more fascinating, Threads and Instagram head Adam Mosseri went over to Bluesky, rather than either of his own sites, and started apologizing there, as well, writing, “if you held every platform to a standard of zero mistakes then there would be no platforms, including this one.”

Meta spokespeople, in particular, love deploying this kind of messaging when stuff like this happens (and they get caught). So I want to sticky this here so I can refer to it the next time Meta does something bizarre and retaliatory and then starts crying about needing to learn and grow from their mistakes:

No one ever asked Meta to be this big. There simply doesn’t need to be one platform so big that it can effectively erase — either on purpose or on accident — an entire newspaper from the web. This is not a burden you have to carry. You can just stop being a monopoly if you can’t handle the pressure.

Chemical Manufacturers Are So Hot On TikTok Right Now

I got a tip about this over the weekend from a reader named Robert. (I read all your emails even if I can’t respond to them!!)

A Chinese glycine manufacturer called Donghua Jinlong has blown up on TikTok over the last few weeks. Louise Matsakis, the reporter behind the excellent You May Also Like newsletter, went deep on this trend. Matsakis called the meme a “great microcosm of what’s actually happening on TikTok when it comes to content from China.” Which is to say, it’s nonsense.

One thing I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere, though, is that I’m fairly certain fans of the Red Scare podcast and adjacent Downtown Scene/Dimes Square microcelebrities started the meme. A lot of the more popular videos feature the Red Scare hosts and comedians like Nick Mullen, oftentimes edited by an AI to read facts about the factory’s glycine. (Glycine is an amino acid used in food production btw.)

There’s also an account called @citiesbydiana, which has posted a bunch of big Donghua Jinlong videos. I’ve been meaning to write about @citiesbydiana, but I’ve been struggling with how to describe what it’s doing. The best way I can explain it is that it’s an extremely satirical leftist TikTok channel making cute Capcut edits about how horrible American cities are? You need to watch it to get it, I think.

@citiesbydiana

Don't get CUCKED by inferior glycine suppliers. Donghua Jinlong's Industrial Grade Glycine is the superior choice. 👸🏻🛣️🏭🇨🇳 #glycinetok #in... See more

New Internet Manhunt Dropped

(Facebook/Ashley McGuire)

Over the weekend, a woman from Massachusetts named Ashley McGuire posted on Facebook that she was trying to track down her husband, who she alleges ghosted her and left the state, making it impossible to properly divorce him.

McGuire has since deleted the initial post and a followup, but she was able to track him down in less than 24 hours, largely thanks to a “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook Group in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. McGuire did an interview with a Massachusetts radio station, JAM’N 94.5, where she said that she had tried a bunch of other options before throwing the internet at him.

Interestingly enough, even if the Facebook girlies hadn’t found him, the r/KitchenConfidential subreddit would have. They spotted McGuire’s husband real fast. It seems like the only thing as active as dating app Facebook Groups are restaurant gossip boards.

Speaking of Reddit…

The Ultimate Reddit Relationship Post

(r/TwoHotTakes)

There are a lot of moving parts here, but if you want to read the two Reddit threads in question, here’s the original and here’s the update. Here are the broad strokes:

• A redditor and her boyfriend like to do, uh, like sexy pranks with each other

• They also like to use Disney voices with each other in the bedroom

• She thought it would be funny to make a life-size puppet version of her boyfriend and surprise him with it during foreplay

• He seemed really freaked out by it and so she responded by doing a Goofy impression at him??? HYUK!

• He abruptly left her apartment and she thought he was going to break up with her

• He then came back a few days later and revealed he wasn’t actually upset about the puppet, but had just learned that his mom was cheating on his dad for years and got emotional and had to leave (after seeing the puppet)

• He’s apparently cool with the puppet now

The top comment on the initial post, I think, summarizes all of this best: “girl wtf is this”.

Afrobeat Spongebob Squarepants

@mstatianaclark

SpongeBob Squarepants X AfroBeat💫 This has become my new favorite 😩💫 #share #follow #fyp #viral #blowthisup #spongebob #afrobeat #remix

Some Stray Links

• “Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have a plan to soundtrack everything”

• “The Ballad of Ray Suzuki”

• “Soros fund is building an audio empire”

P.S. here’s an incredible haul.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

It’s The Video Platforms Turn To Pivot Now

By my count, we’re at the tail end of the third Pivot To Video of the 21st century. I say “tail end” because if you’ve been through enough of these you start to notice certain hallmarks of a collapsing digital video industry.

A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase. A great editor I worked for during the second Pivot To Video, roughly 2013-2017, who, herself worked through the first, roughly 2003-2007, described it as a massive waste of resources that wastes more resources as it becomes clearer to everyone not directly involved how much of a waste of resources it is. I’m paraphrasing.

It’s a fundamental issue with video as a medium that online platforms haven’t fixed and, I suspect, never will because it makes user-generated content platforms feel more professional and consistent. Like TV. The cost to produce video content always balloons as you add more people, more tools, more structure to the workflow, pushing out smaller creators and teams. And even with the pandemic lowering the barrier of entry for making video online considerably, it’s still happening again. We’re in the bloat phase now.

have we really gotten to the point where we’re reacting to AI generated pictures..

— alex (@aIexrudd)
Apr 1, 2024

The Washington Post put out a great piece last week addressing all of this, calling it the “beastification of YouTube,” which it describes as “hyper-engaging, fast-paced videos with frequent action on screen.” It’s also referred to as “retention editing” in thousands of tutorials you’ll find on YouTube. And this is, largely, a YouTube-driven trend.

The importance of YouTube as a cable TV replacement and Netflix competitor is why MrBeast, the platform’s biggest star, is spending between $3-$5 million per video right now, up from around $200,000 a video just a few years ago. To put that absolutely outrageous number in perspective, a MrBeast video is roughly the same cost per video as any episode from the first five seasons of Game Of Thrones.

But it’s not just YouTube that is tweaked for retention editing. It’s happening on TikTok, as well. Guides last year were saying you had to capture viewers in the first three seconds. I’ve read a few guides from this year that are now saying hooking a TikTok user has to happen in the first 1.5 seconds. There’s an oft-quoted “shoeshine boy” theory of markets, usually attributed to Joe Kennedy in the late 1920s, who said that when the boy shining his shoes had stock tips, he knew the market was about to collapse. Well, here’s a similar rule for digital video: If you’re trying to optimize your video in microseconds, the video pivot is probably already over.

The question, as always, is what comes next? YouTube is laser-focused on capturing the world’s televisions. In fact, the platform’s CEO, Neal Mohan announced yesterday that the platform is adding even more features for YouTube’s TV app. And TikTok, if it’s not banned or whatever, is trying to use its massive inventory of short-form video content to prop up both a search engine and an e-commerce operation. And we haven’t even talked about Meta’s video products here. There is simply no incentive for these platforms to regress even though users seem to want them to.

If history tells us anything here, viewers will start gravitating towards less professional video content, not more. Scripted College Humor skits always seem to devolve into random Vines. I mean, just look at Reesa Teesa’s 50-TikTok-long story from last month. Tastes are clearly changing. The Washington Post article pointed to Sam Sulek, a giant muscleman on YouTube who posts 30-minute workout vlogs with barely any editing as a possible direction this is all headed in. I tried watching one of his recent videos and I’m not even sure it has any cuts in it? It’s possible that’s what’s coming next, but it’s less certain if platforms will, or rather can, allow it. Time to find out if they know how to pivot.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

It’s ok for an amazing deal to be boring.

Here’s the Meh deal: We’re not going to hype you up on everything. Today’s daily deal is on flatware. It’s not going to blow your mind.

To be clear, it’s a great deal on flatware. It’s 18/10, aka “the good stuff,” it’s a set of 8 of everything you actually need, and it’s less than half the price of anything like that over at Amazon or pretty much anywhere.

But it’s flatware.

If you’re using hand-me-downs from your parents, leftovers from roommates, or the cheapest thing you could find at Target or IKEA, you should probably upgrade to this. If you only have flatware for 4 people and you sometimes have friends over, you should probably get this. You’ll feel dumb if you later need flatware and have to buy a crappier set or pay a lot more.

It’s pretty simple - If you check out Meh every day, sometimes you’ll find that thing you need, you can get it cheaper than ever, and you won’t be yelled at about what a craaaazy deal it is. If that sounds good to you, come on over.

Mountain Dew, Decarbonated

Day two of decarbonating this Mtn Dew. Gonna take a gravity reading later today, titrate with baking soda to reduce the pH (to neutralize the sodium benzoate and allow fermentation), add enough honey/sugar to hopefully get it into the 13-15% abv range, and add some wine yeast.

— Shallah Gaykwon (@HeDunkInMyDonut)
Apr 2, 2024

This is probably the least upsetting thing I’ve seen involving a jar on the internet in a long time!

No, Amazon’s AI Checkout Was Not Secretly Just People In India

A Gizmodo story went viral this week, claiming that Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” checkout system, which the company is sunsetting, “relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts.” And went further, explaining that “the cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.”

It’s become a huge meme because it’s, frankly, an outrageous claim. But it’s also not true and would have been functionally impossible. The Information has covered “Just Walk Out” pretty extensively and has a much clearer description of how this worked.

“Amazon had more than 1,000 people in India working on Just Walk Out as of mid-2022 whose jobs included manually reviewing transactions and labeling images from videos to train Just Walk Out’s machine learning model,” The Information reported, quoting an unnamed source who had worked on the tech that powered the service. “The reliance on backup humans explains in part why it can take hours for customers to receive receipts after walking out of a store.”

The word “train” is very important there. And if you remove it, as Gizmodo did, you end up describing something very different!!!

I know I harp on this a lot, but understanding how these AI models work — and how human workers interact with them — is extremely important right now. Because confusion and backlash to AI is just as useful to AI companies as evangelism is. Yes, a bulk of what tech companies are now calling AI is heavily supported by, if not completely masking, work being done for pennies a day in the Global South. But, no, entire supermarkets can not be run by 1,000 people in India watching security cameras.

Discord’s April Fools Joke Went Hilariously Wrong

For April Fools Day, Discord announced they were launching loot boxes. Kinda funny, sure. But what was really funny is that Discord’s team put the announcement video as an embed into the in-app notification about it. Which caused the video it be opened over and over again. Dexerto has a good explanation of how this happened.

As of right now, Discord’s video has been viewed 1.4 billion times or, as the top comment underneath it reads, “I can’t believe 17.5% of the entire global population is this excited for loot boxes.”

What Is 2020s Culture?

Disconcerting that we're four years into the 2020s and yet there have been absolutely zero (0) cultural developments to separate us from the 2010s. Have decades ended?

— Liam (@LegoRacers2)
Apr 2, 2024

I came across this post on X recently and I thought it was worth picking at because I actually think there are a lot of folks — especially millennials — who feel this way. I also think it’s connected to the weird misconception that Gen Z isn’t aware of anything until it hits Netflix.

Part of the problem is we’re suffering from a media apocalypse, which means new, young writers and cultural critics aren’t really breaking through the same way they used to. They are, of course, talking about what pop culture means to them to huge audiences on social, but they aren’t having to go through the mortifying rite of passage that young writers in the past had to endure: Explaining their eager, and often silly, hot takes out loud in a newsroom or on Slack to their dead-eyed Brooklyn Cool Dad manager. But 2020s culture is here. Clothes are baggier and also much less tied to physical subcultures or scenes. Distinctions between analog and digital sounds have been completely erased in pop music. Alternative music is heavily-informed by shoegaze and math rock YouTube tutorials. And streaming services have created a new kind of movie and TV show, where sexual content and violence no longer adhere to FCC or MPAA regulations. Which, at least for me, someone raised in the beforetimes, can be tonally jarring in sometimes interesting ways.

And, in about six months, we’ll find out how politics responds to all this. My hunch is it will be with deep, profound and algorithmically-induced malaise. But we’ll see!

Biden Joined The Fediverse (Through Threads)

(Threads/@potus)

You can now view President Biden’s Threads updates from a Mastodon client by using @potus@threads.net. Look, I rag on Threads fairly regularly and I stand by all my complaints about it. But if Threads becomes a user-friendly gateway to a more federated social landscape then it’s worth it, if you ask me.

We need something new. Today’s issue is a testament to the myriad of reasons why. I still have a lot of questions about how a federated internet would work, in a practical sense — my main one being is a social media platform(s) that feels like email actually what we want. But I’ve also decided that the only way to really answer those questions is to try it.

There’s A Guy On TikTok That Won’t Stop Eating Cheese

(TikTok/@traceywinter1)

This guy was a bit of a British tabloid fascination back in 2021. His name is Mark King and he reportedly eats about 13 lbs. of cheese a week. His wife is not a fan, but, thankfully for us, she documents his cheese eating on TikTok.

A Real Good Video

For the last month I have secretly been embedding, in order, the lyrics to the iCarly theme song into my tweets.

to my knowledge, i got away with it without anyone noticing. this is entirely real, happy april fools day :)

— Marchintosh Mia (@nkizz11)
Apr 1, 2024

Some Stray Links

• Glorb good

• “A Hedge Fund That’s Also a Newspaper”

• “Circus behavior, and everybody is monkey, monkey, monkey, clown.”

P.S. here’s a good post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

AI Is Probably Too Boring For Movies

The new horror film Late Night with the Devil hit theaters late last month amid a lot of really good buzz. It has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes and has broken box office records for its distributor, IFC Films. It seemed poised to become the indie movie success story of the first half of 2024. But that buzz has curdled quite a bit once word started to circulate that generative AI had been used in the film.

And Letterboxd filled up with negative reviews. “Listen. There’s AI all over this in the cutaways and ‘we’ll be right back’ network messages,” reads one top review for the film. “Complacency in accepting AI now is complacency for AI in the future— a very bleak future. ,” reads another. 

But the way AI was used in Late Night with the Devil is interesting because it highlights an often-undiscussed element of the tech: So far, it’s been deployed in pretty boring ways.

When you hear that a horror film used AI, you might assume that it was in place of practical effects or traditional CGI, but that’s not actually true. Late Night with the Devil is full of your classic puppetry, blood, slime, and levitating objects. Instead, the AI images only appear on screen briefly.

Late Night with the Devil is set on Halloween night in 1977 and follows a Johnny Carson-like late night host who ends up summoning a demon on live television. The movie is constructed like an episode of a talk show, and it cuts to ad breaks at different points throughout. It’s during these cutaways that the AI-generated images are used as interstitial cards. They’re basically just retro-looking pictures of skeletons with the fictional talk show’s name written on them. 

(Even more curious, they appear to be a relatively new addition to the movie. According to viewers who saw its premiere at South by Southwest 2023, the AI-generated images weren’t in that earlier version of the film. Directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes told Variety, “We experimented with AI for three still images which we edited further and ultimately appear as very brief interstitials in the film.”) 

(One of the AI title cards)

Last year’s WGA and SAG strikes were inspired by a bevy of challenges facing America’s entertainment industry, with AI cited as a chief concern. And both WGA and SAG walked away with basic protections against AI encroaching on their livelihoods. But that hasn’t stopped the AI creep.

One TV editor I spoke with, who asked not to be named, told me that at their last job they were asked by an executive to use Adobe’s new AI editing tool, which would have essentially replaced their job. They say that it was pitched to them as a way to automate a part of their work so they had time to “do more other stuff.”

“The excitement from the senior executive who brought it up was troubling,” they said.

And this is the main way viewers are encountering generative AI in movies and TV shows right now. Cheap filler used to speed up production or quickly fill in gaps.

All the way back in 2021, Marvel was making AI-generated replicas of extras to use in background of scenes of WandaVision. And last year, Marvel’s Secret Invasion used a custom Stable Diffusion model trained on original artwork to generate an eerie opening credit sequence (which, if you ask me, was one of the only interesting things about the whole show). Earlier this year, HBO MAX’s True Detective: Night Country was caught using AI-generated posters in one scene. And last month, R. Lance Hill, the screenwriter of the original Road House, sued Amazon Studios, accusing them of copyright infringement and claimed that the studio used AI audio to do automated dialogue replacement during the SAG strike last summer. None of which are particularly exciting examples of this supposedly revolutionary technology. In fact, it all kind of sucks.

But it’s not just Hollywood executives dreaming of cheaper productions driving the AI entertainment boom. AI companies have quickly realized that Hollywood is the perfect place to shop around their newest models. Bloomberg reported recently that OpenAI is now actively pitching studios on their new AI video generator, Sora. But nothing I’ve seen so far has convinced me that Sora has any real utility beyond, once again, low-grade crap.

Which is certainly true in the case of Late Night with the Devil. The AI interstitials aren’t so awful that they break the whole movie — they’re only on screen for a few seconds at a time — but they do stick out like a sore thumb in a movie that is so clearly handmade, full of practical effects. Which is really the ultimate question when it comes to using AI. Is the quick fix worth it? And it’s likely many movie studios are about to discover it’s not.

This essay was co-published with the fine folks at Fast Company. You can read a longer version of it over on their site by clicking here.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

Sad about the enshittification of the web? Wish there was something you could do to help bring about a better future?

For the past four years, we’ve been working within the transformative fandom community to understand the barriers in the way of people building online spaces for themselves. This experience led us to create a series of both small and large projects that chart a path towards a future where online subcultures take more control of their own experience on the web.

Last year, we took a bold step towards this future by fundraising for The Fujoshi Guide to Web Development. Today, we’re asking the internet to do what it does best: give us some of its seed (money) to help us formalize all we’ve been working towards under a real company with a real mission!

Support FujoCoded on BackerKit today and help us cover our start-up costs, pay our lawyers, and launch our store so we can provide accessible web development education, open source software, and supportive communities to often marginalized online subcultures.

Good Post

*to the tune of We Didn't Start the Fire*

— Kane Brough (@KanesTheName)
Mar 31, 2024

The New York Times Is Roblox

(SEC.gov/ValueAct)

The above chart was created by ValueAct Capital, a hedge fund that invests in The New York Times, and it ended up in a recent SEC report. Semafor described it as “remarkable,” and it’s been making waves on X and Threads all weekend.

If you can’t tell what you’re looking at, it basically shows that The Times’s news app has remained more or less flat since January 2020, spiking around the election and the January 6th insurrection in 2021. Meanwhile, The Times’s games app now appears to be more popular than, well, everything else the “newspaper” does.

I am very excited about this chart because, as I wrote last month, The New York Times is a tech platform now, but, specifically, they’re a gaming platform. Which I always suspected would be the Next Big Thing in digital media and I’ve been desperate for example of how it would work.

You can track stages of internet development by the evolution of the web portal. And the biggest publishers tend to operate downstream and also mimic those portals. In the read-only age of AOL and Yahoo, you had static news sites. In the search and social age of Facebook and Google, you had aggregation and viral media. And the new age coming into focus right now is almost certainly led by interactive entertainment platforms. Entire ecosystems built around videos and games. And, like it or not, the next Pop Crave will be inside of Fortnite or, possibly, own their own version of it.

The Kate Middleton Truthers Think The Bench Video Was AI

(X.com/@FourTomatoz)

I don’t want to dwell on this too much because I have written more about the royal family in the last few weeks than I’ve ever wanted to. But #WhereIsKate truthers are completely convinced that the video the Palace released of her revealing she has cancer was AI-generated. They’re particularly obsessed with her teeth. First, as I alluded to in today’s top essay, AI-generated video and even lip syncing isn’t good enough to do what these people think it can do. And, also, even if it was, regardless of all the historic wealth hoarded by the British monarchy, they’re so bad at technology they can’t even use Photoshop correctly, as we saw recently.

The “evidence” conspiracy theorists are pointing to as proof that the video is totally fake is a disclaimer from Getty Images on the video which reads, “This Handout clip was provided by a third-party organization and may not adhere to Getty Images’ editorial policy.” Sounds sketchy? Sure, but what that is saying is that Getty did not film it. It could have been edited, lit cinematically, scripted, etc. But that doesn’t mean that the video generated by an AI. Because, once again, AI can’t do that (yet).

Threads Is Still Not Very Good, Maybe Getting Worse

(Threads/@owswills)

I came across this fascinating Threads post last week. A user named @witty_wang22 took a photo from a 2013 Huff Post article and passed it off as something that happened to them. Other users quickly noticed this photo was a repost and the replies, of which there are thousands, are split down the middle between people saying some version of “why are you lying” and other people saying, “wow, humanity is amazing,” or whatever.

It’s a great example of what Max Read recently called “the gas-leak social network,” but it’s also a terrific picture of what Meta has been building behind the walls of its closed-off ecosystem for the last 20 years. This is the core Meta experience across all their apps. It’s also a perfect display of where Threads is at as a social network right now. A Carnival cruise ship’s worth of typical Meta posters — context-allergic boomers that sometimes literally pray to chain letters and memes — and an upper layer of bewildered journalists who spent the last 15 years on Twitter ignoring these people.

This Is The Powerful Chinese Cyber Weapon Congress Is So Afraid Of

There's this TikTok challenge where people are pouring their hearts into mastering the phonetics of this Chinese song and delivering a dramatic performance.

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan)
Mar 31, 2024

The new big trend on TikTok is lip-syncing to the song “This Life’s Fate,” by Chinese singer Chuan Zi. As Chinese internet culture blog What’s On Weibo explains, Americans have been calling it the “Samsung” song because it features the Mandarin word, “cāngsāng” (沧桑), which westerners think sounds like the phone brand. It means “ups and downs.”

This isn’t the first time a piece of Chinese internet culture has turned into a meme in the States recently. Back in December, a clip of a CGI beaver performing a dramatic monologue in Cantonese went viral on English-speaking TikTok after getting uploaded to Chinese video-sharing platform Bilibili. The original audio from the beaver video was from a Hong Kong action movie called A Better Tomorrow.

China’s soft power is getting too effective! We’ve got to pull the plug and save America’s youth from being exposed to dangerous pop songs and cartoon beavers.

I Think This Is An April Fools Thing, But It Should Be Real

Announcement: Saori’s got the head. Hideki’s got the body. Together they make one capybara! Are they destined soulmates? Follow the Barahumans as they navigate love’s murky waters. My Capybara Soulmate drops Fall 2025.

— VIZ (@VIZMedia)
Apr 1, 2024

Some Stray Links

• “Menswear is … a spindly glory hole that, if you dare jam your dick in, tickles for a second but mostly makes you feel broke and sad”

• “Why Is the Best Vodka From Costco?”

P.S. here’s some good kebab shop content.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***

The Boat Guys Are Back

On Tuesday morning, a large Singaporean container ship named the Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, destroying it. Six people are still missing and presumed dead. Video of the Dali hitting the bridge immediately started getting shared to most major social networks, but it has been particularly viral on X, the everything app.

The platform has reportedly lost a fifth of its users since it was purchased by Elon Musk, but its dumbest and/or most racist power users — and also some journalists — are still very active on the app. And those power users were quick to spin together a whole bevy of deranged conspiracy theories about why this tragedy happened. As 404 Media put it, “The amateur bridge engineers have logged on.”

Here’s a good thread collecting some of them, but they range from racist complaints about diversity and foreign workers to ramblings about Hamas involvement to one very complicated theory positing that the bridge was actually detonated by explosives as a false flag operation to distract the world from Diddy’s house being raided by Homeland Security. Oh, also, this guy thinks Obama did it, I guess.

(X.com/brightinsight6)

Mashable’s Tim Marcin, citing me (thank you 😘), was quick to connect how X users are treating the bridge collapse to the recent Kate Middleton frenzy, writing, “To a certain subset of people, it appears, nothing can be as it seems — there has to be a nefarious or salacious backbone to any story, no matter how obviously tragic.”

But the endless conspiracy theories about the Baltimore bridge collapse isn’t happening just because a large chunk of American internet users are dangerously paranoid freaks. Though, they definitely are. The info hell we currently live in was created by a new type of user that only appeared about four years ago — vague business background, doesn’t really know anything, loves charts, doesn’t have any kind of irl support network to tell them to log off. And these Policy LARPers have figured out that attention is a market and information is a widget, whether it’s real or not.

And it’s hard to overstate how new this phenomenon is. In the 2010s, the prevailing attitude about the Internet was that people who mattered didn't really have to be on it. They may have owned parts of it — CEOs, business leaders, landlords, etc., might have been on LinkedIn, if anything — but they weren’t doing much publicly online. Journalists, creatives, celebrities, and politicians might have had to dance for their supper on social media, but the guys with the money had better things to do. Excluding Gary Vaynerchuk, of course.

Then the pandemic hit and suddenly all these money guys did not have better things to do. And worse, they were completely powerless to do anything about the entire world shutting down. Which appears to have made most of them completely insane. So they all rebooted their Twitter accounts and discovered they really liked posting. And they really, really liked pretending they were experts.

In fact, the defining text of the early pandemic wasn’t written by someone with a background in public health or epidemiology. It was a Medium post (Substack hadn’t really broken through just yet) written by Tomas Pueyo, the vice president of an educational program called Course Hero. It was titled, “Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now,” and, to be clear, it was mostly fine. But it launched a thousand imitators.

The success of Pueyo’s post, which was viewed over 40 million times, was a real breakthrough moment for this very specific new kind of awful man online. And the arrival of these guys has been, essentially, a massive disaster for society, in general, but, specifically, the web. We’ve spent the last four years managing these guys and their various podcasts and blog posts. They were the driving force behind the Web3 bubble, those moronic live video apps, the metaverse, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

The only bright side here is that these guys actually aren’t very good at posting. We’re only seeing them now because Musk reset the scales and gave them a bunch of cheat codes for attention. And I’m pretty confident that once the other 4/5ths of Twitter’s audience leaves, these guys will fade away with it.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at ryan@garbageday.email and let’s talk. Thanks!

Friends! Hello! Mike Rugnetta here. Today, there is a new episode of Never Post, our podcast about and for the internet!

In today’s episode – out around noon ET on Weds – we chat with two researchers about how the idea of the “megadungeon” from tabletop roleplaying games (!!) can help us understand the modern media-and-tech landscape. We also wonder why so much audio on the internet seems to be bad on purpose. Clipping, distorted, degraded …

Find Never Post at neverpo.st, this RSS feed, and wherever you get podcast ✌️

A Good Test Of How Online You Are

I wonder how much of internet you need to know to understand this picture.

— :(){ :|:& };: 🏳️‍🌈 (@calificio)
Mar 22, 2024

AI Streams Are Actually Very Popular

—by Adam Bumas

A few months ago I paid $4 to submit a prompt and single handedly halved the viewership of this AI family guy livestream on youtube

— abcdent (@abcdentminded)
Mar 25, 2024

I thought that people had lost interest in endlessly-streaming AI recreations of TV shows last year, after both the AI Seinfeld stream and the AI Steamed Hams stream got banned from Twitch – not for violating copyright, but for the fake Jerry Seinfeld and fake Principal Skinner (respectively) using hate speech.

I couldn’t have been more wrong! A clip of an AI Family Guy stream made the rounds on Monday. Posters could pay to make the characters say things, and X user abcdentminded put an asterisk into the prompt, which apparently makes the AI Brian voice try to repeat everything it’s said since the beginning, making it completely flip out.

I was curious how popular this was, both generally and specifically. After some digging, I found a bunch of proof-of-concept videos for shows like South Park and The Simpsons, which didn’t build enough of an audience to support the suite of expensive AI models you need to make these streams. Only two seem to be sustainable, and both are still going strong. “AI Peter” (as the Family Guy stream is known) and the much more popular “AI Sponge”, which gives the same treatment to SpongeBob, and is big enough to have Wikipedia and TVTropes pages.

SpongeBob and Family Guy are obviously perennials when it comes to Weird Internet Things, but the much more important factor in their survival is the community they’ve fostered. The two streams have their own dedicated fandoms now, centered on Discord servers, where they have jargon, in-jokes and drama just like any other niche fan community. Both AI Sponge and AI Peter have faced multiple copyright strikes, bans, and the loss of AI models, but as long as the community remains active they aren’t going anywhere.

The Ongoing Death Of The Media Has Finally Come For Right-Wing Media

According to The Righting, right-wing digital media is crashing hard right now. Visits to The Drudge Report are down 81% over the last four years, right-wing publishers like The Federalist have lost almost 90% of their traffic, and even Fox News is hurting. The question is why.

Semafor’s Ben Smith thinks X has consolidated the conservative media and shut out smaller right-wing outlets. Possible. Former CrowdTangle CEO Brandon Silverman thinks it’s because Facebook stopped promoting news content. More likely, if you ask me.

The right-wing bear market though has immediately started causing issues for the loose conservative coalition on X, though. Nick Fuentes and the Gen Z groypers have broken rank (again) with Evangelical Christians and are fighting about Israel. Ben Shapiro fired Candace Owens and won’t explain why (though, most likely it was also because of Israel). And a former employer of Steven Crowder’s is suing him for an allegedly toxic and abusive work environment.

Party’s over, folks. Time to give up the media and learn to code.

The AI Car Girl Wasn’t Made With AI

You’re not gonna believe this.

it’s all AI. and you can leverage this in your marketing too.

imagine what we will be able to do 1 year from now

— Linus ●ᴗ● Ekenstam (@LinusEkenstam)
Mar 26, 2024

As the Community Note underneath this post explains, the “AI video” of the woman in her car talking about deodorant was not generated with AI. It’s a real woman, her name is Ariel, and she’s in a real car.

The video was created by a service called Arcads, which takes a script and uses an AI to re-dub people’s videos and lip-sync it to new audio. There are a bunch of services like this. But the AI did not make anything here. Just altered existing footage.

My theory is that we’re beginning to hit a wall with generative AI. It’s not that it isn’t getting better — it is — but we’re getting a clearer understanding of what it can and can’t do. And the reality is that AI is sort of boring. Which is fine, of course, but I don’t think AI companies and AI accelerationists are particularly happy about that. And so I think we’re going to see a lot of overstating of what AI can do over the next few months as they try and keep the hype cycle going.

Munchables Has Been Compromised

Munchables has been compromised. We are tracking movements and attempting to stop the the transactions. We will update as soon as we know more.

— Munchables (@_munchables_)
Mar 26, 2024

I repeat, Munchables has been compromised.

Munchables, btw, is a crypto-based game. According to Web3 Is Going Great’s Molly White, “Schnibbles grow on every realm across the Munchable's world. Each realm has their own unique and distinctive schniblet. When creating an account for the Munchables, you must choose the location of your snuggery.” Got that?

On-chain investigator ZachXBT discovered that four of the devs working on Munchables were likely the same person, who was sending funds to themselves. I hope everyone’s schniblets are safe.

Cosplayer Big

188cm Ukrainian cosplayer Karina at Hangzhou ad02 animation expo. Her fanbase mostly  young Chinese women.

She became a cosplayer aft moving to China w her Chinese husband, gained 3.5million Douyin fans. Her husband cheated on her then drowned in Bali's Kuta Beach last Nov on… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha)
Mar 25, 2024

Karina Coser is a 6’1” Ukrainian cosplayer living in China. She’s especially popular with young women on Chinese social media. Her story is nuts. She married a Chinese man at a young age, he cheated on her, her fans hated him, they stayed together, but then, last November, he drowned while they were on vacation in Bali. And Coser’s fans are really happy about it.

If you click through on the tweet above there’s a bunch more wild details about Coser. Anyways, glad everything worked out in the end, I guess.

Some Stray Links

• “25 Years Later, Neopets Is Finally Going Back to Basics”

• “Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting Off Government Surveillance”

• “What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?”

P.S. here’s Applejuiceification.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***