The 1920s had the flapper, the 1990s had the slacker, the 2020s have the chud.

Any way you chop it, “chud” shakes out as the representative cultural archetype of this moment in history.

And by this, I don’t mean that most people are chuds or that chuddery is the inevitable condition of contemporary Man — rather, that “chud” exemplifies a set of attitudes, forces, and neuroses that define society today. By analyzing chuds, one can better understand the pathology of the present moment — because all of us, by virtue of being born when we have been born, are a little bit chuddy on the inside.

Defining Chud

The chud is the eternally aggrieved and endlessly self-righteous denizen of the comment section. He (and he’s almost always a “he”) mods his Discord server the way his Boomer parents might run their HOA. He leaves snide remarks on the Instagram reels of female comedians that seem to respond to an entirely different video than the one you just watched. He purchased his blue checkmark.

The chud is defined not merely by his resentment, but by a complete lack of shame around that resentment. He never hides his envy, his spite, or his prejudice — and he considers himself virtuous for doing so, believing that he is more honest than those who do hide their resentments.

He is a rebel without a cause, in conflict with conventional society less because there is something at stake for him and more because he views the battle as a way to assign meaning to his life. This interest, which you might call existential, outweighs any material or social interest — although lately it often meshes with greed, given that antisocial behaviors are increasingly rewarded in today’s economy.

The culture around crypto offers a great example of chuddery in practice. Today’s crypto bros desire wealth, undoubtedly, but they also frame themselves as rebels. It’s just not the anarchist-inflected rebellion of early crypto — rather, Trump-era crypto seems to be a rebellion against the tsk-tsk of your mother and the libs; it’s Marc Andreessen getting angry at woke rather than hackers getting angry at the coercive power of central banks.

Which brings me to what really is striking about chuddery’s relation to power — for the chud, all power relations are local and personal. Woke is legible because it manifests as people who are mean to you on the internet. Systemic inequality is not legible because it manifests as ambient global conditions. The chud tends to be on the side of state violence and the side of money, but even more so he is on his own side. He rebels against society, not the government. His enemy is the idea of mutual obligation and normative behavior; this is why he hates his mom but loves the police.

His antagonism is never really against the rulers but against normies, or girls. He does not comment “you’re fat” on the Instagram reel of the female comedian because he hates her, or even because considers her unattractive (he is likely lusting for her as he types the comment) he does so because he craves attention but hates the fact that he feels the need to seek anything from other people. His comments are best interpreted as a generalized lashing out at the necessity of existing within a society. Even when he does become some kind of internet leftist who claims to hate the police (and there are many chuds who take this route) his politics are not really about the system, but about a repudiation of the positions most normies hold.

To him, everything is a question of individuals — of their intelligence, their intentions, their identities. The chud has internalized the assumption that Margaret Thatcher articulated, that “there is no society, only individuals.” Chuddery is the signature affect of late-stage neoliberal culture, of the individual marooned in a hollow liberty and alienated from his own desire to be useful to others — unable or unwilling to imagine a way out of the psychic cage he spawned within.

Chuds come in many flavors. Here are a couple examples that come to mind:

• You have your J.D. Vance type chud, whose only through-line has been his sanctimoniousness (whether critiquing Trump supporters in Hillbilly Elegy, or telling Zelensky to say thank you — both cases where the geopolitical, the societal, is reduced to the individual).

• You have your Elon Musk type chud, an aggrieved nerd seeking an escape from society into a world of programmable sex bots defined by the excellence of individual men like himself.

• You have your Dave Portnoy type chud, who takes the cultural markers of Chad subjectivity but strips them of the convivial, pro-social spirit that traditionally animated them, replacing it with a competitive scarcity mindset.

There is a gendered aspect to chuddery which I have pointed at heavily here, but not really analyzed thus far. It goes without saying most chuds are men. A great analysis of the gendered aspect might be found in this Substack classic, You Have No Bitches, You've Never Been With A Baddie, & You Are Scaring the Hoes, which I believe offers a good survey of chud psychology.

I would also posit that chuds occur across race, class, and nationality. The peak age for the chud would seem to be Gen X, but there are certainly older and younger ones — but I have the impression that older men, even the evil ones, have a sense of propriety which prevents them from engaging in the shamelessness of chud behavior.

Historicizing Chud

“Chud,” as Etymology Nerd has very thoroughly described, came from a 1984 sci-fi novel where it was an acronym referring to “cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers.” It was then popularized by the pivotal leftist podcast Chapo Trap House as a term of insult for rightwing idiots. Posters across 4chan, Twitter, and other platforms then adopted “chud” in that sense. As Aleksic documents, in recent months its meaning has broadened (as happens with much slang) and turned a bit more general-use — a “chud” is kind of like a “jerk,” but the partisan flavor still sticks to the word.

“Chud” is also inextricable from the Chudjak image, which is a modified Wojak redraw of mass shooter Patrick Crusius. It was first posted in 2020 to the left-wing 4chan sister site Bunkerchan, according to Know Your Meme. Crusius murdered twenty people in a racially motivated attack against Latinos at a Walmart in 2019. The posters, reading his manifesto and following his digital trail, decided to take his likeness and turn it into a meme mocking the kind of racist 4chan /pol/ board subculture to which Crusius belonged. Part of the appeal of the Chudjak image, for the forum-dwellers, is how shocking this origin story really is — Wojak redraws had been based on real people before, but nobody quite so noxious, afaik.

The use of Chudjak might be interpreted as a way of fighting fire with fire — tonally matching the performatively transgressive vibe of /pol/ users in order to critique them. I would also bet good money that many of the lefties on Bunkerchan had been /pol/ people, or /pol/ adjacent, at some point, and so the contempt was rooted in familiarity.

However, most people using the Chudjak meme don’t know it’s a redraw of a mass shooter. That’s because it has become better known within the context of the “Nothing Ever Happens” format, which depicts Chudjak “monitoring the situation” and declaring that there is no real change indicated by any world event.1

It is here that I’d argue you really see the Chud’s relation to neoliberal subjectivity. The situations in which “Nothing Ever Happens” gets posted are usually in response to something like yet another truce-that’s-not-a-truce or escalation-that’s-not-an-escalation announcement about the Iran War. Somebody online flips out about it — often a news headline — and the smug chud reminds us all that “nothing ever happens” and we are being too emotional, too ignorant. The material stakes of the geopolitical moment are transmuted into the existential stakes of the thread: who is right and who is wrong, who is Chad and who is Soyjak? The chud reduces a societal question to a tussle between individuals. Moreover, he proposes a theory of society that sees it as frozen and static, not worth discussing: Society is not a living thing that one could do something about because “nothing ever happens.” Only individuals matter.

The contradiction at the heart of the neoliberal order is that it insists individuals matter but makes minimal provision for the tool that would make people matter in practice, which is society. Because he lives as if there is no society, the chud is left to make himself matter through the petulant, exhausting reassertion of his own presence on the internet.

This is sad. Maybe you do not need to bring back the traditional family as some conservatives say, but you do need to recognize the family was a tool to make people matter. Maybe you do not need, as some on the left propose, to bring back 1940s style unions, but you do need to recognize the trade union movement was a way to make people matter. Maybe you do not need to give all the artists a UBI in the age of AI, but you do need to recognize that the arts were a way to make people matter.

Instead of offering ways to make people matter, the culture of the neoliberal turn offered us data centers, stomp-clap-hey, Hinge, and $11 craft IPA. People used to have God, solidarity, and true love. Under such conditions, is it any surprise that we ended up with so many chuds?

Vincent Bevins recently wrote a great essay re-evaluating the effects of the Musk reign over the platform formerly known as Twitter. In it, he argues the “vibe shift” — that weird moment right after Trump won when the media seemed to think his program and ideas were authentically popular — was largely a consequence of X being re-engineered to the benefit of chuds.

It wouldn’t be the first, last, or only time the engineering of a social media platform has helped change the way people think. But what I’m curious about is exactly by what levers, rule-changes, and incentive-swapping such shifts happen.

Bevins writes,

…the “vibe shift” was the unconscious cognitive effect of hanging out on Twitter after Musk’s acquisition. It was experienced, and only needed to be experienced, in the minds of the US American media class. One of the main skills required of contemporary journalists is the ability to detect which way the wind is blowing, to carefully trace the hidden boundaries of discourse…. and where did New York writers and podcasters spend all their time, and how were they learning about the world? How is it not going to affect the ideological compass of a careerist class when the social hierarchy changes on the screen we stare at nine hours a day?

I mostly buy his argument. The media class was not convinced to like Trump (which would have been impossible) but it was convinced to believe other people liked Trump more than they really did, because the picture of “other people” they were looking at “nine hours a day” was drawn by Musk.

At the very least, Musk’s takeover shifted the discourse wars to a battlefield of Musk’s choosing. At the very most, it helped to muffle early dissent against the administration by distorting the ways it would be reported on. How did this happen?

It seems Musk tweaked the algorithm to amplify his friends. He also instituted blue checkmarks, prioritizing the speech of paying customers. He alienated groups of users leading them to leave for other platforms. He actively encouraged racists. Perhaps most significant was his neglect — the platform went to seed, problems weren’t solved, search stopped working as it should, and content moderation essentially stopped happening — or if it did, it increasingly took the side of the trolls. Twitter used to offer what felt like a view of the internet overall. You could start your day needing to write three quick articles for SEO (as I had to for a long while) and know you would find relevant topics by poking around on Twitter long enough. X is more opaque. The trends no longer make sense and the ads are pervy. Beyond people making crude comments about women in reposted TikToks (the most famous being the brouhaha over “Gen Z Boss In A Mini”) the site also doesn’t seem very connected to other parts of the internet.

But it wasn’t all Elon’s fault. The media class continued to read X like a thermometer offering data about the climate of opinion when it was actually a probe taking the rectal temperature of the internet’s loneliest men. Some of it was because many had grown dependent on Twitter as a tool to do their jobs in an era when their work was getting ever-more frantic (layoffs, stress, 24/7 internet news cycle). Some of it was because they were kinda racist themselves. Some of it was because they weren’t very smart. But they should’ve all known and done better.

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term “the conventional wisdom” in its common usage in the 1950s to describe the kinds of ideas which in polite society are never treated as ideas at all, but as assumptions of fact. The conventional wisdom feels natural and normal — it is the assumed starting-place of the conversation, the implied position of the normal rational observer. For example, the conventional wisdom today holds that people hate data centers. A year ago, people also hated data centers — but the conventional wisdom had not yet caught up to that reality.

If the conventional wisdom is a temperature probe, the reading changes more because people forcibly move it somewhere else than because the weather conditions have altered. Often, intellectual debates are less about convincing somebody on the fence to think your way, and more about shifting the conventional wisdom and the way we understand the position of the fence itself.

Elon found a new way of shifting the probe. Or you could call it a new flavor of an old way — he leveraged a bunch of money to take over the discourse, like Hearst or the Koch brothers before him. But the mechanism was through modifying the operation of a social media platform.

This reminds me of ’s recent work about memes and AI slop, which I admire a lot. In a recent post, Boomer Realism, he talks of a way of thinking about memes which Daniël de Zeeuw and Sal Hagen in conversation with New Models described as following an “operational” logic rather than a “representational” logic. Bösch writes,

Representational analysis asks what a meme means. But meaning is no longer the primary mode of operation. The White House is not posting memes because they have something to say. They are posting memes to produce alignment, normalization, and the low hum of ambient recognition that precedes any conscious evaluation.

Bösch’s concept of “postdigital propaganda” also touches on this, which he defines this way:

Propaganda is no longer primarily about messages, lies, or even persuasion. It’s about the conditions under which things become visible, feel right, and get endlessly repeated.

It’s about shifting the probe, changing the way people orient themselves in a social landscape. People don’t become trad wives, or Antifa, or whatever, because they see one post, but because they spend time in a feed where these things are first present, then normal, then something you have to take a side on, and then something that becomes a part of your identity.

This is exactly what Elon did when he took over Twitter and filled it with content from Islamophobes and people who think a woman’s place is in the kitchen. Everybody, including those who didn’t believe that stuff, started spending time in a world where, as Bevins writes, we “know far more about reactionary culture than… in 2021. I am familiar with a wide range of flavors of racism now, and I understand all kinds of racist posts at a basic grammatical level.” X got the liberal commentariat speaking according to its grammar.

I can’t give up on representation entirely. Perhaps just because I’m sentimental, but I also think there’s a real reason. Walk with me here — take the metaphor of grammar Bevins uses and extend it: Platforms may have a large hand in determining the grammars people speak by, but people still make their own sentences. An algorithm may determine the conditions of an utterance’s felicity, but people still have agency.

The question I’m asking here is about a line of thinking which I, Bösch, and many others seem to have arrived at — the sense that what matters is the structure of social media platforms, that this structure is up for negotiation and manipulation, and that content is effective primarily by doing something to this structure rather than doing something to an individual viewer.

I see the explanatory power of this line of thinking, but am also leery of how much I have embraced it. The question is, in a way, another version of what people are always asking in media theory, the debate over whether, a Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message.” What Elon Musk did was change the medium that was Twitter (the structure) and as a result we saw a shift in the message (content) of what people said there. But I’m not as willing as a hardcore McLuhanite would be to abandon the notion that the message matters — and in this example, the message also changed the medium because Elon Musk was moved by posts to change the way posting worked.

What I worry is, if you over-emphasize the medium, you end up with a rhetoric of volume rather than of value. The process of content transmission and audience persuasion here is essentially hydraulic — a series of flows, back and forth, where what matters is relative densities of “bad content” in particular parts of the system and the velocity of its spread. Platforms can make “fetch” happen by giving everyone around you money to say the word “fetch” where you can hear it. And in X’s case, “fetch” was “you should hate Muslims.”

But I don’t think platforms can make just any “fetch” happen. It has to be something that matters to people. Psy-ops fail more often than they succeed, and the ways that makers of memes craft their posts have a lot to do with what goes viral. While much of the internet is aimed at algorithms first and people second now (like I argued in cuck internet theory), it still needs somebody in the cuck chair to catalyze the reaction.

The real last redoubt of representation might be the user themselves. Memes may circulate because of what they do operationally — I think here of the sensonarrative power of Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and the way he turned into a way of tracking the interplay between online and offline worlds — but users circulate according to what they want their circulation to mean. The user takes the tools offered by social media and uses them to create a representation of themselves, or at least of a desired state of mind. An artist may draw a self portrait with a pencil on a piece of paper; a scroller draws it with engagement on an invisible algorithmic profile. The little worlds people make on social media out of memes, subcultural affinities, and conspiracy theories are creative works. The person people are most often talking to and about on the internet is themself.

By this way of thinking, the post’s most important authors are not whoever first made it, but the thousands of people who liked it, pushed it, and by far outnumber its creators. The question to ask of the White House’s memes is less “what did they mean by that?” than “what do people get out of that?” The question of what it “does” within the system, platform, and algorithm is also important, but what memes represent are the people who use them.

Maybe?

Cast your mind back to early 2023 when high-quality low-cost AI generators first came online and people began to fuck around and find out.

High school kids asked ChatGPT to tell them how to build a bomb. Wordcels like me asked it to write poetry to see if it would scan. Tech bros asked it how to talk to women. All of the above posted the results across social platforms.

One major way the capabilities (and limits) of the early AI models became known was through memes and viral media. More people found out through an Instagram Reel what Dall-E, Midjourney, ElevenLabs and the other AI applications could really do than found out through reading an article.

Then (and now) a concern brought up in conversations around AI is the threat of deepfakes. If the model can clone a voice and likeness to make it look like a prominent person said something they didn’t, then people might get fooled around election time. There have been cases of this since 2023, and there will likely be more. But I’d argue deepfakes never really destabilized society to the degree people seemed to worry they would, and a big reason why is because stuff like this also happened in 2023:

Memes which cloned the voices of major politicians like Biden and Obama demonstrated to the general public what AI could do — and helped build a basic skepticism to video clips of public figures online.

Memes were the vaccine. An inoculation of the body politic. By showing people how well you could use AI to lie, the memes taught us to be on guard. People who have just heard Donald Trump use the phrase “Skibidi rizz” while playing Minecraft with Peter Griffin are not going to automatically believe that a more malicious deepfake, which has him saying a phrase like “nuclear bomb,” is actually a recording of the man himself. They have seen how good the AI tools are at imitating Trump, know those tools are available to anybody who wants to use them, and calibrate their responses accordingly.

People are so skeptical of online images now that the opposite problem — viewers mistaking real footage for AI, believing it is a deepfake when it isn’t — has been a bigger deal than viewers getting duped by straightforward deepfakes. The video of Benjamin Netanyahu and Mike Huckabee joking about the number of fingers on their hands (posted after conspiracy theorists said the Israeli leader had deepfaked himself) stands as evidence of just how strange the situation has gotten. On almost any popular post online, you’ll find people arguing in the comments about whether it was AI. When I first saw Jimothy the Raccoon, I thought he must be AI.

This default skepticism towards online images was not inevitable. A particular population — mostly young and terminally online — developed it, and other populations didn’t (e.g., many older Facebook users). The skepticism is also less about being better at telling whether something’s AI or not than it is about beginning from a place of believing posts are fake until proven real, rather than the other way around.

That default skepticism happened through exposure (the social feed has really been the front line of AI adoption and disruption) but also through an act of collective caretaking — people taught one another, through memes, what AI could do.

On one level, the appeal of something like The Gregory Brothers Obama/Biden cover of Ice Spice’s “Boy’s A Liar,” which I embedded above, is that it’s funny. You’ve got AI Barack Obama saying to AI Joe Biden, “Hustle culture is a scam and I already quiet quit… you’re out here trying to grind until you hear a voice telling you to walk into the light.” So as a piece of political satire — as a song you could bump in a car on a road trip — it slaps.

There’s also the novelty. That spring, when stuff like this hit the feed, it was some of the first content of its kind we’d ever heard. The algorithm and online publics love when something is new. Before 2023, there were voice clone applications and it was possible to assemble a deepfake (you definitely heard imitations of political leaders made with the computer prior to 2023) but it would take a lot of time and money. That spring, the feed was flooded because for the first time you could do it in a few hours (if you wanted to do it well) or a handful of minutes (if you wanted to do it sloppily). And the tool to make it all with was either free or like $12.99/month.

But a major factor was also how scary it felt to see this. Comments on all these early AI generated posts express fear — talking about the end of the world, the rotting of brains, the proliferation of technology that could obviously be used for something far more dangerous. Posts are always more than just whatever the creator made — they’re like little campfires out in the darkness of the internet, where travelers stumbling in by algorithmic chance gather to warm their hands. Around the post, conversations carry on asynchronously, between all types of people, about whatever the post stirs up.

The AI deepfake memes became places where people learned what AI could do — and also learned how others felt about it. There was fear, but those participating in the trends asserted a courage to joke about that fear, and do something about it. As you interacted with a reel of Emmanuel Macron strafing Marine Le Pen in Halo, you were doing your part in a civic campaign. By liking the video and amplifying it, you were passing the warning on to others so they could be aware of how insane AI generators had gotten. You were also passing on an attitude: you didn’t give a fuck, this shit was funny, you weren’t scared.

We often underestimate the social usefulness of that last feeling. Political subjects who don’t give a fuck, find shit funny, and aren’t scared are more effective than those who are afraid, overly serious, and obsequious to authority.

In the case of deepfakes, it was the memers who acted when platforms wouldn’t, when governments couldn’t. Through the dark nights to come of the 21st century, it will be the memers who keep the necessary fires burning.

An essay that has stuck in my mind lately is fear of breakdown, written in May of this year by architecture critic . To explain our moment in history, she applies an insight from 20th century psychologist D.W. Winnicott, who wrote of treating patients living in paralyzing fear of a “breakdown” — some possible future crisis that would change their lives and leave them without a sense of who they are. Winnicott writes,

There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has already been.

In Wagner’s essay, the “patient” is the average liberal or left-leaning person who knows deep down that “the breakdown of the society in which we were born and raised has, in fact, already happened.” We talk constantly of risks, backsliding, and warning indicators of decline because doing otherwise would be to accept the unimaginable is inside the house and not waiting at the doorstep. Democracy, world order, literacy — whatever it is that makes you who you are by virtue of your caring about it — is already over.

What the patient really fears is the dissolution of who they think they are. In the particular historical instance of 2026 and the set Wagner (and I) belong to, the acute issue (to my mind) is that our relation to the places that educated us, employed us, and disappointed us is not as we imagined it to be. Nobody wants to admit their idea of self is flawed, that they are actually a looter and not a victim. The assignation of looter is more a structural role than an individual choice, which is why I would consider myself primarily a species of looter. I say that because I’m a content creator.

When we talk about “breakdown” in 2026, what’s usually breaking down is the social, economic, and political arrangements of the post World War Two order. Whether you think that post World War Two order was good or bad, you have to acknowledge that it was massive. It created a system of trade, regulation, and management that knit the globe together, raising standards of living, murdering countless innocents, and making a lot of people (including, arguably, the girl reading this) rich. All the motley images, institutions, and dreams of twentieth century life — college, houses with lawns, hipsterdom, the 9 to 5, you name it — derive from the creation of a world order that put the United States at its center and vested power within its institutions.

For a variety of reasons, that world order is past saving. But because it was so massive, there’s a lot of value to be extracted from it. If they’re lucky enough to be able to, a lot of people are taking this an opportunity to loot, even if they wouldn’t describe it to themselves in that way.

Types of Looter

The first looters are corrupt actors taking money out of the government. It’s a well-told story that Trump and his cronies have used the government for private gain, pumping crypto scam coins and handing contracts out to friends. A version of this already happened with the War on Terror and the way defense contractors treated the taxpayer. It is perhaps most vividly represented by what’s happened to the architecture of DC. The White House and Reflecting Pool were symbols of postwar order, of American power. Now they are tacky opportunities to make money off sporting events and shitcoins. The fate of these monuments has broken through the news cycle because people know that the equivalent of what was done to the Reflecting Pool has been done to the less visible infrastructures of public health, education, defense, and justice.

And we also know some ugly, boorish old man got a lake house because of it.

The second type of looters are tech companies and platforms. As people like describe, platforms “disrupted” legacy institutions. They were unbound by regulations, juiced by VC money, and could do for free what institutions had to charge for. So instead of a local taxi company, you now have an app on your phone called Uber. Instead of a collection of networked actors like local DJs and record labels determining what music gets popular, you now have an app on your phone called TikTok. Instead of a third place or an extended network through church or school, you now have an app on your phone called Hinge.

Some people blame the apps (or phones) for killing their IRL institutional predecessors, but this gets it backwards: the breakdown was already happening when they showed up. The platforms are looters. AI companies extend this pattern of looting and make it more obvious: Anthropic trawls through trillions of words of text produced over centuries, taking not just the intellectual property of individual authors but appropriating (for free) the efforts of publishing houses, libraries, schools, and the array of other institutions that produced all those words. As you doubtless already know, they clone the collective knowledge of those institutions, siphon off some profit, and replace them with a thing that doesn’t pay back into the system which allowed it to happen.

And we know that some Rationalist freak in San Francisco got a nice glamping set-up for Burning Man because of it.

The third kind of looter are content creators. In the past world, I would have pursued an academic job or a journalistic job. A lot of my peers who create educational content would’ve done the same, and so would a lot of the people who watch our content and engage with our work. The same is true for other niches.

Those institutions no longer function. And yet, the work that was done within such institutions — not just literal information transfer or skills training, but care work in the form of mentorship, spiritual reflection, or the advancement of curiosity — was always necessary, and still needs to get done. So it gets done online.

In one sense, I am just a guy meeting an audience demand, doing that work through the medium that is available to me. But in another sense, I am taking advantage of the fact this work can’t get effectively done within a contemporary institution — I am profiting from continued decline. A part of why I’ve been so pissed off by Aaron Parnas — the creator who essentially reads paywalled news articles written by actual journalists into a TikTok camera and then makes millions by saying “you can trust me, unlike the mainstream media” (despite the media being his source for everything) — is that it’s shameless looting behavior. It’s taking the work, effort, and credibility of institutions and giving nothing back, just keeping the value for yourself — or, more accurately, keeping a sliver of it for yourself and passing the rest along to TikTok and Substack which, through the creator, are doing the real institutional looting. We know this is all bad not just from a moral fairness standpoint, but from a sustainability standpoint.

And we also know that a bunch of the most annoying Bushwick-based 26-year-olds you’ve ever seen are buying themselves a $9 matcha latte as “a little treat” because of it.

The fourth kind of looter are the people still working at legacy institutions. Increasingly, these places are staffed by people playing a game of musical chairs with dwindling grants and email job opportunities. Every year, the institution is less effective, the pie gets a little smaller, and the competition for what’s left increases. Old heads who are the Executive Vice Chair of Whatever or the Assistant Provost Dean for Whatnot are making six figures and watching as the bottom rungs of the career ladder — roles like Junior Analyst or Grad Student, which make five figures — get knocked out from under them. Many are deeply upset by this trend and the decreasing effectiveness of their work, but they’re also raising families and need a steady paycheck.

In 1970, political scientist E.O. Hirshmann proposed a framework of “exit, voice, or loyalty” to describe the choices faced by people working within declining institutions. People can leave, people can protest, or people can remain loyal. But the framework misses what may be the most rational and historically typical response to decline: “loot.” If you exit, you’re destitute. If you voice concerns, nobody listens. If you’re loyal, you’re a victim. If you loot, you conform with the action most of your peers are taking, and you can get what you and your community need.

If you literally educate children, care for patients, clean up the environment, or do something like that, you aren’t a looter — but your boss probably is, your boss’s boss definitely is, and you’re part of a dying breed.

What to do instead of looting?

Looting is a word with a strong moral valence. I choose it because I believe what we are involved in is both immoral and common, like eating beef. It is the default track for a person today — the world wants you to loot.

Nobody is a bad person for looting, because it’s better than many of the alternatives. If you invest your value into the institution, because it will just go to waste or get slurped up by a different, worse looter. If you are actively making the situation worse, then you’re complicit, or an accelerationist chud.

So what to do?

Loot ethically. Find a method to transform the value you’re extracting from the still-fat husk of the 20th century world order into nourishment for whatever new thing comes after. Like the vulture that flies off from the carcass to regurgitate her scavenging into the throats of her young waiting back at the nest, we should take our proceeds from content creation or email job and use them to feed a future which can fly on its own wings. These proceeds are not just monetary. They’re also skills-based, since after the revolution we will still need to circle back, touch base, and know how to do things. And they’re clout-based, since the reputation and social capital we build through institutions or outside of them shouldn’t just be an individual asset, but an asset for the collective projects one chooses to participate in.

The breakdown has already been. Look around at anywhere power exists today and you see looting. But the age of looting cannot continue forever, because there is a finite amount of meat on the bones we’re pecking.

One thing people often ask me is, “what’s the earliest meme?”

The question has no clear answer. Sometimes I’ll say “the line is hazy, but there’s the dancing baby and email copy-chain jokes in the 1990s and so on.” I could also mention fan art around Homestar Runner, gags on message boards and web forums, funny cat photos. But there’s something deflating about those answers, because a meme isn’t just “funny picture popular on the internet.” There’s other stuff going on.

For that reason, the answer I like to give lately is Kilroy Was Here.

Kilroy was a graffiti character drawn by British and American soldiers on planes, tanks, walls, and essentially any other available surface during the Second World War. Drawn rapidly with a few simple lines, he is bald, big-eyed, and long-nosed, peering at the viewer over a fence he grips with two hands.

The joke was that no matter where you were with your unit — a remote village in Italy, a tarmac in New Guinea — you would find a Kilroy and know he’d already been there. And as soon as you got somewhere, you’d draw a Kilroy for the soldiers coming after you.

It is hard to overstate how big a deal Kilroy was. They made a 1947 movie about the joke. He is engraved in two places on the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, officially sanctioned by the government.

He had names other than Kilroy. Two of them — in an uncanny resonance with contemporary meme culture — were “Chad” and the “The Goon.” Various catchphrases also accompanied him, ranging from the simple “Kilroy was here” to the more complicated British format of “what, no x?” with the x depending on the setting of the graffito.

Kilroys began popping up everywhere. It was said that Hitler thought “Kilroy” must be some secret codeword from American intelligence since it kept appearing on captured equipment. Upon exiting his VIP en-suite restroom at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, Josef Stalin was said to have turned to an aide and asked “who is Kilroy?” And a Kilroy allegedly discovered in the British Parliament asked “what, no questions?”

On the site kilroywashere.org, an early web repository for World War II memories, soldiers remember other particularly insane Kilroy sightings:

A night or two before American forces were set to assault German fortifications on the Rhine River, anticipating heavy casualties, a GI observed "Some crazy SOB crossed the river and painted "Kilroy was here." on the cement wall on the German side of the river!"

Similarly, “on the morning of September 15, 1944, just before the first wave of Marines were to go in” for an assault the island of Palau, a soldier on the deck of a ship testifies:

I spotted something in the rocks [on the shore] and got curious enough to borrow a pair of binoculars from the quartermaster to check it out. When I shouted out, "Kilroy was here!" everybody in the pilothouse thought I was crazy, and it was sometime before anyone would take me seriously. But there it was, about a thousand yards from the first landing beach, at the top of a pile of rocks, was a sign that said, "Kilroy Was Here!" No one had an explanation for how it got there. No American could have done that and no Jap would do it. We were the first in, and no one in the landing party had made it ashore at that time. Someone suggested that it had probably been put there by some Jap who had lived in the States, but I argued that no Jap about to meet his maker would do a thing like that. Three days later I "celebrated" my nineteenth birthday.

Some things in human nature are eternal. These nineteen-year-old guys from Ohio or wherever were launched by the government into remote violent corners of the world they had literally never heard of and decided the best thing to do in that situation was doodle themselves a little guy to hang out with. Sixty years later, they (or their adult children) were posting about it on an early Internet forum.

Various legends surround Kilroy’s origins. The most commonly-shared was the story of a shipyard inspector named James Kilroy, who in 1946 won a newspaper competition which sought to establish the meme’s origin. Typically, inspectors at the shipyard would approve a finished piece with a chalk mark, but some workers would erase those marks so they could get paid twice for the same piece. Kilroy, in response, started writing out the harder-to-erase phrase “Kilroy Was Here” on parts he approved. In a rush to get ships out, the Navy neglected to paint over these marks. Sailors and soldiers noticed and started replicating them as a joke.

The most common story about the drawing is that he started out as a doodle by British electricians in the service, since he resembles a diagram of a circuit. Accompanied by the verbal gag of “what, no x?” he became a way to complain about wartime rationing — “what no sugar?” or “what no cigarettes?”

The image and the text joined together as British and American forces mingled in North Africa, much as the Tumblr phrase “chungus” joined with the 4chan-popular image of a large Bugs Bunny to spawn “Big Chungus.”

On one level, Kilroy represents the GI himself: a long-nosed fellow (whose nose is vaguely phallic) peering over a fence at the viewer. He represents soldiers as a class, and his placement across an environment that was otherwise scary, foreign, and alienating was comforting. Like the men who drew him, Kilroy was defined by his mobility and by a certain puckish attitude.

Why is it a proto-meme, though?

There have been countless joke cartoons throughout history. What makes Kilroy an interesting candidate for a notable proto-meme are three qualities:

First, as a gesture, Kilroys were phatic communication: they marked that you or someone else had been here, and established a relationship between the absent author and the present viewer. There isn’t necessarily a joke or any content to a Kilroy, just the fact of a presence in a particular space and for particular people. Many internet memes operate by the same logic today.

Second, the combination of difference and repetition. Memes tend to be social trends that involve one collectively-generated piece and one individually-generated piece. With an image-macro meme, everybody shares the picture but then each person attaches their own text. With Kilroy was Here, everybody shared the picture and text, but each person placed it in a new area where they were physically present — and added variations on the style of the drawing according to their taste. The repetition is collective, the difference is individual.

Third, “Kilroy Was Here” is a gag that emerges out of a vast system of communications, logistics, and human mobility. The United States military in World War Two was a massive hive mind that moved men and women around the world. Just as internet memes ride the rails of the internet, Kilroy Was Here rode the rails of that massive, diffuse system. He was posted within that system and circulated through it. He showed up in locations soldiers went to because they were ordered and on material that the system moved from factories to the front-lines. Kilroy made sense because a group of people shared a common experience of that system, and he became kind of a mascot of that experience.

It is that third point in particular which leads me to consider Kilroy a proto-meme. If the James Kilroy shipyard story is taken as the origin point, then Kilroy’s medium is less so walls or chalk than the supply chain and logistical operation itself. Similarly, an internet meme’s medium isn’t so much the .jpeg or text editor but the process of digital circulation itself, which people play around in and inscribe with their own messages. In the same sense that memes are often about the internet (or offer us a vocabulary to think about how it feels to live within it) Kilroy Was Here seems to be about the experience of living ensconced within the globalized system of procurement, transport, and standardization that was the US military in World War Two.

A meme is always testimony and (perhaps) implicit critique of such systems, playing with the sense of living within them much as a painting plays with the experience of seeing stuff, or a song plays with the experience of listening.

There’s no such thing as dead internet theory because what’s actually happening is cuck internet theory.

The problem is not just that bots outnumber human users or inauthentic slop content has flooded feeds, as dead internet theory proposes. What’s happening is weirder and more fundamental: The internet is no longer really for or about us. Rather than the end-user, the human is now just a part of a loop. We haven’t been replaced, duped, scammed, or manipulated — we’ve been co-opted. We’ve been cucked by the computer.

The primary purpose of today’s internet is for various automated processes to talk to one another. The human exists as the setting of a convening, the catalyst of a reaction. When your eye lingers on an AI slop reel, you are allowing two bundles of algorithms that were made for one another to finally meet. It’s a match made, if not in heaven, then in the neural net’s n-dimensional representation of destiny.

The AI generator was built to produce images corresponding to what the algorithms that sculpted its training data recognized and liked in the past. And the algorithm is trained to recommend content similar to what it recommended in the past. They are literally made for each other.

We watch — passively but not entirely without investment, distantly but not without pleasure — and we engage. Every now and then, the human user can be convinced to take out their credit card and buy something. But the lion’s share of our value comes from the RLHF (Reinforced Learning through Human Feedback) we perform for the tech companies without really seeing it as such. We are neither customer (as the companies would lead us to believe) nor product (as tech and advertising critics like Tristan Harris have argued, in a critique of the data-driven type of capitalism that exists today) but a means of production.

On a transactional level, most platforms don’t make money by entertaining you. They make money by showing someone who bought an ad a set of numbers which make them believe they were right to buy that ad. The human user is valuable as the means by which that number is made.

The chain continues. The person who bought the ad makes money by showing those numbers to their boss or client, who makes money by showing their numbers to the investor, who makes money by showing their numbers to another investor, who makes money by arranging elaborate financial instruments and dodging taxes.1

The actual output the platform produces is not whatever human-facing event the number represents — an impression, an engagement — but the representation itself, which is a sellable machine-facing event. Put otherwise, that representation is data. In 2019, Shoshanna Zuboff argued data was “behavioral surplus” which allowed the tech platforms to further optimize and steadily enclose more and more of life within their bounds. In 2026, data is the raw material out of which you build AI.

The most lucrative products in the world today are numbers manufactured by American tech companies and financial institutions. These numbers are processed into training data, pitch decks, valuations, and justifications. Each of these become instruments for extracting more value out of the world of actual people who make things and putting it into the world of people who make slide decks.

They need three things to make those numbers: a computer, another computer, and a human who can make the computers kiss.

Wasn’t it always this way, though?

To some extent, capitalism (or maybe “modernity” is a better word here) has always cucked you. Markets, machines, and bureaucracies talk mostly to and for one another, leaving the customer, the citizen, and the worker behind. But even if we are not seeing a difference in type, we are seeing a difference in format and perhaps degree.

That difference in format and degree is worth marking. Look at it just in terms of internet history over the past two decades. Every minute of those twenty years, people watched videos, chatted, and shared stuff online. Some, but not all, of those engagements resulted in exchange between two humans through the medium of the machine: a creator got a follower or payment, a viewer arrived at an epiphany, or another meme hit the group chat and made everyone smile. But lately (as anyone who makes money from the internet or spends a lot of time there will tell you) this seems to be happening less and less. Some critics, like , have talked about an internet that’s turning back into a passive broadcast medium. Others have talked about the destruction of media business models and the capture of value by platforms. You could, as Cory Doctorow does, call it enshittification too.

Why do they need a human? Can’t a bot just cuck another bot?

recently wrote about the end of the “cog era of capitalism,” arguing that while in the past, the powers that be wanted individual people to serve as hard-working, obedient cogs, now “capitalism can function relatively well whether we participate in it or not… capitalism might just prefer that we be dust…”

You could imagine a future where this is true and it’s just bots talking to bots without need of a human in the loop at all… it’s not all that dissimilar from what AI 2027 imagined in the most Doomer of its scenarios. But there’s a few reasons why I think the computers need a human to cuck:

1. The AI cannot cuck itself because it is not good enough yet, and may never be.

2. If the robots are to dominate, putting humanity in the cuck chair and teaching us to call it a throne is the best way to keep us in line.

3. Human interaction may be what keeps things flowing. If it’s just the bots, then they end up doing predictable, stereotyped patterns — they need human involvement and occasional human input for novelty and to get the whole system moving, because otherwise it would just stagnate. There’d also be no opportunity for arbitrage without the unpredictability that human subjectivity brings into the equation.

Why “cuck”?

I used the word “cuck” because it was a good hook to a video. I never planned to write something about this until Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic, one of my favorite journalists, mentioned Cuck Internet Theory in the pages of that eminent magazine which also published W.E.B. DuBois and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In a separate incident, I brought up “cuck internet theory” to a reporter at a major American newspaper, and we had a discussion about whether it was printable — the jury is still out. But if Cuck Internet Theory was going to be mentioned at any of these places, I figured I should establish a record in writing of what I meant.

When I made the original video, I was thinking about “cuck” in the meme sense, as in “every hotel got the cuck chair.” I was not thinking about the full dimensions of the cuck situation or literal sex in any way. At the suggestion of some astute commenters on the original video, I decided to revise Cuck Internet Theory to Cuck Logic Internet Theory (C.L.I.T.) in order to emphasize that I am not thinking about a sex act, but about the logic of the cuck situation which centers around three participants, one of whom is in a stance of ambiguously-passive observership. The cuck situation — and its complicated rapport with agency, where the cuck’s non-involvement is a form of involvement, an active choice to be passive — describes the contemporary online user experience pretty well. We have been conditioned to sit in a cuck chair and call it a throne.

But really, why “cuck”?

Seeing the situation through the cuck framework helps to more clearly situate the problem. It is not replacement that is going on, but a kind of cyborgization happening according to the terms, timetables, and niche ideological fixations of the world’s richest people. The “replacement” narrative offloads political agency to a scaling law — joblessness, displacement, and suffering become a kind of collateral damage from progress. The policy solutions are necessarily reactive, even palliative.

If we’re being replaced, then the liberal establishment, with its tender technocratic hands, will means-test a new safety net sponsored by Anthropic to catch those helpless fools who fall behind — and the PMCs running that safety net will continue to make six figures in exchange for helping the new aristocrats make eleven. If we’re cucked, as I argue, then the solution is to see the algogarchic2 project not as productive or future-facing at all, but as extractive, a vast magnet pulling money, agency, and meaning out of real life situations. And the question to ask is how to reverse that magnet’s polarity so technology is not taking the world away from you, but giving it to you.

Timothy Wilcox, in the Substack of (who has also written great stuff on similar topics) imagines the “permanent underclass” that may arrive after AI automates everything as a “burrito courier class” moving stuff between machine systems knit together by platform-based markets. This is not too far from the way things currently are. People have not yet been replaced by AI, but they are being managed by it — surveilled, directed, and paid according to what it decides. We are in the loop, but we do not control the loop. Ask anybody who makes money through an app, including me. The future looks like that. I am a cuck.

This is the last installment in my series on Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Jeffrey Epstein. I’m putting some of it behind the paywall.

What I wanted to do with the series was bring together a few threads that have been on my mind. As this newsletter has gone on, it has strayed from close readings of particular memes to repetitive jousting at abstract themes. I annoy myself as I do this because I don’t always do it as well as I’d like to, and thank you for your patience. I see this newsletter, and my presence on other platforms, as a kind of open notebook. I’m working out ideas live in front of people largely because I can’t figure out how to work any other way.

What interested me with both Tung Tung Tung Sahur and the Jeffrey Epstein memes was this notion of “screen-crossing.” Things online become things in real life — the conspiracy jumps from the keyboard of the incel to the lips of the Senator, the reckless Twitter hype becomes the inflated stock valuation. And then they cross back to the internet, as the Senator is filmed and the valuation is posted about, and the online re-representation boomerangs back into the real world.

I discussed Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Jeffrey Epstein as serial screen-crossers — meme figures which come from a specific grounded reality, are decontextualized online into posts, recontextualized again into reality as “online things we have to talk about irl,” then decontextualized again into online posts about posting. Tung Tung is a frivolous example of this, but Epstein is a serious one. By juxtaposing the two very different cases, I wanted to highlight the mechanics they share, which are the mechanics of an indifferent system that has placed the news story on the same ground as the conspiracy theory and the shitpost on the same scroll as the heartfelt testimony.

But my interest in screen-crossing is not just abstract. There are discernible, concrete mechanisms at play in this process. We can identify who or what intervenes, and at which moments, to carry Tung Tung Tung Sahur from inside joke to plastic figurine in your hand; or Jeffrey Epstein from story powerful people sought to cover up to AI-generated sprite dancing across the shitposts of America’s thirteen-year-olds. Often, these traces exist within the post itself.

In my analysis of Distracted Boyfriend as a layered image, I argued that memes carry the sedimented traces of various crossings and recrossings of the screen, reflecting the pull of these processes:

1. Online, a stock photo marketplace calls for specific pictures of situations that fit into algorithmically-optimized niches,

2. In reality, three models and a photographer in Spain make a funny picture matching one such niche in order to make money,

3. Online, somebody sees that picture and recognizes it as bizarre

4. In reality, on August 17th, 2017, that person connects the situation in the picture to their view on socialism and young voters

5. Online, that post circulates and is imitated as a format

6. In real life, the “Distracted Boyfriend meme” becomes a cultural trend that is written about.

7. Online, people make meta-memes about the fact Distracted Boyfriend is a meme

8. In real life, people now know Distracted Boyfriend is a cultural entity that people make jokes about

9. etc. etc. ad infinitum until the end of the world/meme

Each of these turns lives somewhere in the meme image. In the example above (let’s situate it at around step 7/8) the ironic meta-meme lives in the flipping of the image over the y axis. The meme trend lives in the convention of the labelling. Underneath that, the stock photo lives in the pure image itself. Put otherwise, the meme makes sense because as a participant, you know the meme’s maker, like you, saw this:

And the maker of that meme in turn saw this:

And now you are seeing a meme layered on top of these two previous versions which, practically, are records of two different strangers’ screens. In addition to features like captions or inserts, changes to the tint and resolution of image which happen when you screenshot, download, and repost also mark these crossings of the screen. Through the depth of the meme-image there is a story of reception, or more precisely, appropriation. There is a dialogue going on between the re-captioner and the original captioner, just as there is one going on between the viewer and the re-captioner — and often the content of the re-captioner’s message to the viewer is “look at what I’m saying to/about this person who used the format before me.”

Most people using a meme don’t need to know all of its lore, but they do feel it, and its presence has been aestheticized — consider the enhancement of circulation marks in deep-fried image-macro memes, or the convention of including the kind of captions used in Snapchat stories on certain kinds of images. Markers of how an image used to be on somebody else’s screen are the devices that situate it in a narrative.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur made me rethink Distracted Boyfriend. You might see these sedimented layers in the image itself as different “turns” of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The topmost layer is made by the platform, territorializing the meme as a post. Then, the text-labelling layer territorializing the photograph as a meme. The photograph territorializes the actors as a couple. There is an apparent acceleration here, a species of compounded interest, if you’ll forgive my pun.

Read more

In the spring of 2024, I covered a trend on TikTok about debt. I still think about it all the time.

The scheme was simple: Users posted minute-plus videos with the hook “I heard we’re paying off each other’s debt on this app” and then talked for a full minute so the video could be monetized. If you the viewer followed them and watched their video, they would in return follow you and watch your videos. Everybody in on the trend would follow each other so we could all reach the 10K follower threshold necessary to monetize, and make money for one another.

An app built to drain minutes from your life and turn them into money for people you don’t know became the opposite: A way to take minutes of your life and turn them into collective power for you and your community.

The trend did not work to actually pay off a lot of people’s debt. Jake, a creator who made one of the most viral videos in the trend, told me that he got $5,200 — good money, but not enough to pay off student loans. Eric Martinez, another creator who earned millions of views for his video, only got $2,000. We can assume TikTok made a lot more than that.

Jake, who at the time was mostly making funny content about his job in healthcare, begins his video by saying: “So I’ve done the math, and apparently, in order for TikTok to pay off my student loans in one fell swoop, I would need 247 million people to watch this video for five seconds… which you’ve just done, so thank you, I appreciate it.” He goes on to explain the platform’s monetization system and eat a bowl of cereal, bringing the video to over one minute in length and making it monetizable.

@jheisenburgIf you’re reading this just know I appreciate you. I’m so happy we could share this moment ❤️🥣 #fyp #studentloans #viral #cereal #icarly #spencershay #whynotdatemedotcom

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

The video trend started after an update to TikTok’s monetization program (it’s always getting updated) that laid out a series of conditions for making money. “I went down and used it as a checklist,” Jake explained to me. “At the time, I thought I was going to get in trouble for gamifying the system. I remember being nervous I was gonna get the video taken down or my account banned for doing something with the sole intent of hitting their checkmarks.”

TikTok did not end up taking down the video, probably because it helped catalyze a massive trend that mobilized a commuity — which is what a social media platform wants to do. It was compelling content. People stared into the camera and shared their stories of debt, which are really the stories of entire lives — both the lives they actually lived, and those they were not permitted to live. And then tons of other people watched those stories and interacted. Both Jake and Eric found themselves fielding countless comments and DMs, boosting videos sent by followers, trying to help. “There were people who had medical debt or school debt, or got scammed by somebody, all these different stories,” Eric said to me, “you realize that so many people are silently struggling and maybe this was an opportunity for them to bring to light something they were embarrassed to talk about, or maybe get out from under this crushing weight they’ve been dealing with for a long time, and see if it works.”

I have debt. Everybody I love has or had debt. We all fear getting more of it. The trend was deeply relatable, perfect for social media virality, because stories of debt are the stories of individuals but they are also systemic. Everybody tells them, and the tellings of debt— how you fell into it, how you got out of it — are the flashes of grit, chance, and catastrophe which best expose the broad, dark range of American life as it really is. A personal story, for a moment, sweeps away the shade of our advertisements and good manners, letting you see what’s actually happening. And, for a moment, helping you believe there is something we can do about it for each other.

We understand our attention is valuable. We know platforms take that attention and turn it into various forms of power: money, reach, influence. This translation happens through processes we seem to be able to game, coordinate, and grasp at a personal level.

It’s only reasonable to think we can devise a way to use that power to help each other. Why, after all, should the primary purpose of a global network connecting nearly everybody in the world be something as banal as e-commerce? Technological progress unthinkable to people fifty years ago surrounds us, altering the shape of lives and countries, steering the course of culture — is there no higher purpose to any of it than b2b Saas? It is as if a civilization built pyramids not so a god-king might prepare for a reign beyond death, but so they could sell fishing equipment.

*

The trend occurred at a moment on TikTok — and other platforms — defined by a concern about democracy. It was in May 2024, the year of Brat summer and the podcast-first Trump campaign, but weeks before we knew it was Joever. It was also the spring of antiwar protests across university campuses in the West.

These protests were spurred by what people saw on social media. In a recent piece for The Bulwark (the most Liz Cheney-coded of Substacks) Rob Flaherty, head honcho of the Biden campaign’s digital arm, acknowledged the team “missed how much the ongoing visuals were seeping into the public consciousness.” But it wasn’t just horrendous visuals of what Israel is doing in Gaza that outraged people. The videos also enabled a discourse about democracy and individual initiative which the political process could not metabolize and still has not fully understood.

It was a common occurrence that spring to be scrolling and encounter a woman standing in ruins, telling you to stop scrolling, watch her full video, and comment even if you couldn’t donate so that you could help her family eat. These posts, often made by suffering civilians in Gaza, explicitly discussed the engagement and monetization mechanics of vertical video platforms. They appealed to people to see TikTok (or whatever platform) as a vast machine that could generate attention, revenue, and fame — and then they asked people to turn that machine to a humanitarian cause. You didn’t have to wait a year until the next election, which didn’t even offer you a real choice anyways — you could do something right now, this minute, to fight for the kind of world you believed in. Rather than a democracy shackled to the cadences of another century and bound to institutional inside games that most people are not dealt into, social media offered a vision of a closer and quicker democracy.

This other democracy isn’t just a vision. It exists as undercurrent beneath the mainstream of the internet. Fundamentally, social media platforms are slot machines built to sell Temu. But every day, people hack them to do more productive stuff. We find friends, seek advice, learn about the world, and make careers online. As traditional institutions choke in the vise of disruption and financialization, the internet has become the place where culture can really live, where people can improvise forms of self and community that didn’t exist before.

When you watched or posted a debt video, you were casting a vote of confidence in the wisdom of strangers. It was about trying to do for one another what government and other systems have failed to do. That the mechanisms for doing this were the same as those used for more frivolous reasons — that the video of Jake eating cereal lives a breath away from the video of a starving mother asking for baby formula — doesn’t subtract from their political importance. We’ve chosen to use these tools to do dumb shit that benefits big companies, but there was always the potential to do something deeper. There is a radical proposition at the heart of even the most basic day-in-life influencer’s appeal: thousands, millions, of people see something of themselves and their own experiences in her, and they want the rest of the world, the rest of the internet, to see it also, to see them. With their engagement, their donation, and their attention, they work to make it so.

* My thinking here draws from both Muskism, a recent book by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, and a review of Muskism that I found via X, Musk’s platform (if you click the link, read “Part IV. Subaltern Cybernetics”).1 The writer, Nik M., who is a DSA dude in New York City, understands “the woke mind virus” (as Musk puts it) to be a kind of distributed intelligence built through the online movements of the twenty-first century (Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Gaza, et al.). “Wokeness” is a weird mirror to the kind of distributed intelligence Musk seeks to engineer with his “everything app.” Musk’s vision of the future is one where the internet exists to let him sell “sovereignty as a service,” and network the Neuralink chips lodged in every brain with the Tesla, SpaceX, or xAI products lodged in all layers of public infrastructure. The “woke mind virus” is troubling because it is a threat that emerges from the internet itself rather than from the rotted institutions he is already conquering, and proposes another model of digital popular sovereignty. Nik writes,

The struggle between these two cybernetic projects [Muskism and woke mind virus] is in many ways the substance of our political moment–it is class struggle, with two sides, translated to the level of modern digital production. On one side, Musk’s grid of control: the cybernetic collective under private command, preserving hierarchy, extracting attention and data, reprogramming the state. On the other, the subaltern grid of solidarity: the distributed intelligence of the movements, beginning to cohere into political form, reaching for the capacity to govern.

I would be somewhat less communist about it all, and also not ground the “subaltern grid” in the woke movements, seeing it as much embedded within the everyday flows of internet culture which are as present within Musk’s grid (X the platform) as they are in activist practice— but the insight here is sound.

To the question posed a couple of paragraphs ago — what is the internet for? — these seem to be two main answers.

The first answer is from the people (like Musk) who own the platforms and are now putting all their bets on AI. AI (as it is currently being deployed) constitutes an attempt at using the power of the internet to end history. The companies want to take the network that connects nearly everybody in the world, train models on the decades of data it has generated, and fund it all with the money gotten from that network’s exploitation. In the telling of the tech tycoons, once these models are fully fledged, they will know and run everything. Humans will have nothing left to do, no history to make. AI promises to be the final centralized technocracy, the fullest articulation of the systems which, when people originally described the “end of history” in the 1990s, ran off clunky desktop computers. But now the systems can really take on more agency than the people they ostensibly represent. For them, the purpose of the internet was not to sell products but to free us from the burden of needing to be human together.

The second answer is from the people on TikTok trying to pay off each other’s debt. They want to use an extractive social media app as an engine of collective security, treating it as a piece of shared civic and economic infrastructure that can recenter wealth in the hands of the public. They seek to redistribute the power of the internet among the users. For us, that’s what this was all for: the production of a fairer, freer, and fuller life, shared and suffered together through a democratic process. Such a democracy is not a utopian vision, but a pragmatic one — and to my mind, it does not foreclose the usage of AI (within reasonable bounds) or the existence of advertising. It would not solve every problem, because such final resolutions are not possible. Rather than the escapism of oligarchic or institutional power today, one of which postpones the taking of responsibility into an impossible inhuman future, and the other of which shoves it back into a fraudulent and irretrievable past; we should seek a sincere, risky encounter with the present and with one another, with history. We should pay off each other’s debts.

1.

Holding a real Tung Tung Tung Sahur in your hand is one of those moments when the lived experience of existing within late capitalism feels so fucked-up that it almost approaches the sublime. It feels in your heart like he should not exist, but you know in your mind that of course he exists.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is one of the most popular, profitable, and recognized characters in global media today — and yet he is fundamentally uncopyrightable. Produced by shitposters using AI generators in decentralized, digital collaboration, Sahur now forms a piece of the Anthropocene’s permanent fossil record across several continents.

The attraction of Tung Tung Tung Sahur lies less in his smile or in his bat, and more in the way he epitomizes a world-system that we do not yet understand, but which surrounds us all the same.

3.

I’ve been fascinated by two essays touching on Tung Tung published in here on Substack, both of which are worth your read. The first, by Gabrielle de Seta, concerns the material life of Italian Brainrot, reflecting on the bizarre fact that if you go to a gas station in Virginia or Los Angeles (as I have) or Bangkok, Hong Kong, South Korea, or the Italian countryside (as de Seta and their friends did) you can find Italian Brainrot toys made in a factory in Dongguan, China. “Italian Brainrot,” de Seta writes, is “the first consistent repertoire of AI-generated content to become material through established channels of physical manufacturing and commercial circulation.”

You might see the physical Tung Tung Tung Sahur as harbinger of a new form of culture industry. “The vernacular origins and uncopyrightable nature of Italian Brainrot,” de Seta writes, “suggest a provocative claim: if this is not the first distributed property to have widespread commercial success without a major IP holder behind it, one is probably just around the corner.”

By this reading, the old form of culture industry— which involved characters a corporation could own, that circulated through channels of centralized distribution it could physically control — has been eaten by a new form, which relies on characters nobody owns and channels of decentralized distribution that nobody controls. Mickey Mouse might have been the first representative of that old form, while Tung Tung Tung Sahur is the avatar of the new one.

4.

Capitalism is always violently breaking itself apart and then stumbling into reassembly. It creates systems that depends on established orders (copyright, central channels) and then performs its own revolution (brainrot, algorithms).

What disconcerts me — and what I think also baffled people way back in the 1800s — is the alien straightforwardness of the new products and the new experiences they create in us. They dispense so easily with all the context they came from. When I’m holding the die-cast Tung Tung Tung Sahur in my hand, all the things I know about it — the layers of irony, decontextualization, recontextualization, and posting which brought it to me, in physical form — are like a vestigial organ.

He smiles, he costs $3.99, the gas station attendant who is about fifty doesn’t even know who he is, just that he sells, and in the eyes of society that is the verdict which matters.

Landscapes spanned by the 1800s railroad, seen through the window of a train, must have presented themselves with a similarly barren matter-of-factness: you will be in Denver tomorrow, no sunrises, tavern conversations, no exposure to the weather involved; and you will get there for a predictable sum at a predictable pace. The answer by ChatGPT offers a similar cleanliness: it shows you that it’s thinking, dots trembling the way they do when a person’s writing you a text message. It swirls the labyrinth of its neural net, and what emerges are two sentences:

5.

Here I am in a Backrooms-esque site I accessed off a YouTube advertisement for an Italian Brainrot “educational children’s video.” The two pop-up ads it served me were, first, for a teen mental health crisis center and, second, an AI integration for my small business.

The joke of this intricate system, which so ably anticipates desire (or claims it can) is that half the time it doesn’t work. I asked ChatGPT for two sentences in the prompt above, and it gave me four. I try to click the “Mysterious Call from the Wooden Friend” Tung Tung Tung Sahur video and I keep getting this other one.

There is a carelessness which feels demeaning here. You get used to it, learn to click around the dumb obstacles, scroll past the porn-adjacent “microdrama” on your feed that you never asked for. It becomes background scenery, hardly even registers as friction.

The carelessness arises because none of this is for me. I am reduced to a third party, simply enabling a conversation between two machines. I do my part to train the models, contribute to the page view counter, and move dollars and data from the real world into the digital world. In return for facilitating interactions between computers (which if you follow the stock market seem to be the main value-generating function in the economy) I am connected to an increasingly slim payout of information, mild satisfaction, and social connection. The user sits in a cuck chair watching two computers make love, trained to find pleasure in the spectacle of an algorithm smooching an AI generator through the medium of a slop reel.

The only way you feel kind of involved is when you repost Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and the irrational lust of technical systems mingles with your own sense of whimsy to make something that, more than the other pointless content, feels real.

6, 7.

As Willy Staley wrote about memes in a fatally Twitter-minded New York Times magazine piece, in reference to 67:

It’s too weird for a human intelligence to have come up with. Instead it was conjured into being by something else, some entity we’ve created by disappearing into our phones for several hours a day.

Maybe we could live peacefully with such an entity were its influence confined to the realm of jokes, slang and pop culture. But it seems capable of influencing just about everything, even the government of the most powerful country in the world.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is more the spawn of that entity than he is the spawn of any author — let alone the specific Indonesian and Islamic context he comes out of, which Luigi Monteanni describes in the second piece that I love. Monteanni attributes the virality, ultimately, to Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s sensonarrative power:

The sensonarrative power of Italian Brainrot compels users to participate in the production and circulation of this specific genre of content. This capacity to generate circulation, replication, and, eventually, meaning does not derive from the formal qualities of the genre, but rather by what its material instantiations do to us sensorially when we encounter them in the wild.

In past posts on this newsletter, I’ve written about memes as a kind of sensorial encounter — Adam Aleksic has also written eloquently about that. The “meaning” of a meme is often in the way it makes us feel, the way it affects your body (evidenced by the use of the word “brainrot” to describe an entire genre) and the social uses you put it to. Although the “material instantiations” of Tung Tung or any meme are diffused — flickering images on phone screens, the tongue bouncing off the mouth’s roof while saying “tung tung tung” — they cohere by means of networked devices and algorithms. Millions of eyes, fingers, and tongues pass over and engage the same post like voices finding the same melody. It is the voice that matters, prior to the lyrics, which many people don’t even make out.

8.

on Substack, Dante Conero on TikTok (creator of maybe my favorite shitpost ever) writes brilliantly (and I, with Google and a friend’s help, translate from the original Spanish):

A 16-year-old teenager makes an elaborate story about Tung Tung Sahur. Tung Tung Sahur wanders through the neighborhoods of Lima, flies through hallucinatory shopping malls, and ends his life with a shot of heroin in a nameless plaza, all while a Crystal Castles song plays in the background….

Perhaps in a few days, his post will garner thousands of likes, and it will seem perfectly normal to think Tung Tung Sahur can do all of this. Perhaps some of his peers will create similar stories, and the broader lore of this particular brainrot will be altered forever. Or perhaps not.

I am not familiar with the reel of Tung Tung Tung Sahur OD’ing in Peru, but the process rings true: a meme is as available to a 16-year-old in Lima as it is to the Indonesian audience that first did it; and it is as available to me as it is to the President. We can all change the rules and vibe of the meme. Whether the modifications any of us make to it become a piece of its ongoing “lore” is up to chance, the organic “swerve.” Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, writes:

When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.

If pieces of internet culture moved like rain, drawn by a defined gravity in a logical, regular motion, nothing would happen. Innovations like Angel Tung Tung Tung Sahur, or his romance with Ballerina Cappuccina, occur not through planning but by an accretion of random chances, of swerves. Somebody sees it, somebody shares it, somebody likes it, and the entire structure can alter from that.

It is a strange continuity which emerges from these swervings, and in Dante’s telling, the art of the “memero” (one could also say, meme page admin) is to “administer recurrences” and create this continuity.

[Meme accounts] construct a living archive where each post rewrites the ones that came before and prepares the way for those that do not yet exist.

If a meme truly matters, it is not because it was seen for a single night. It is because, after seeing it, the world remains in some small way reconfigured, and what follows can never be quite the same.

In this sense, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a continuity created by a swerve of human creativity in the stream of machine-generated culture, and administered by diligent human effort.

9.

Staley’s “entity” finds its perfect vessel in 67 — a meme that, like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, once came from a specific cultural context but is now purely, defiantly, a sensonarrative experience in the way Monteanni describes — just a thing you say and a motion you do that carries meaning because, across a billion screens and a billion moments, it keeps getting done (it recurs).

On top of that core sensonarrative experience, anyone can add their bit — but your bit remains just something extra, never final, and he’s never yours. Tung Tung can expand into an endless lore — he can die, be born, hate Tralalero then love Tralalero, sing a tune or swing a fist. He can have an online meta-narrative as a “niche meme” then a “popular brainrot,” then an “old meme.” But there is just a core collectively-shared sensonarrative experience at the bottom of it all.

You hold him in your hand, and he is just a piece of plastic with those same great empty eyes, and you giggle in the way you did when you held him in your hand and he was just a plain of bright pixels. I don’t have to be me to feel the way I feel about him, I can be anyone — and in the moment I regard him, I am anyone, the same anyone you are, and the 16-year-old Lima teenager is, when we look at Tung Tung Tung Sahur.

This “anyone” is, maybe, Staley’s entity.

10.

Most of all, that “anyone” is the girl reading this.

11.

I’ve heard people call memes the internet’s inside jokes. But lately, memes feel more like the entire world having the same song stuck in its head, all at the same time.

It is not repetition, but recurrence at play — a continual returning, with changed characteristics. In my previous post, I talked about both Jeffrey Epstein and Tung Tung Tung Sahur in this respect:

With both Epstein and Tung Tung, there is no singular screen-crossing event, but a continued series of recrossings, back-and-forth...

A meme is kind of like a pinball bouncing around a machine, paddled between real sensonarrative experience and computer-mediated responses. It attains power and velocity by its collision with the walls (“this is not real,” or “this is dumb”) that seem to contain it, but instead serve to refract it. The meme page admin, like the person playing pinball, manages recurrence by sending it back out again, or, watching as it returns, timing the exact right moment to strike.

12.

This agency is trying to copyright Tung Tung Tung Sahur — a pointless endeavor if there ever was one. The whole point is that Tung Tung is ours. He cannot be anyone’s exclusive property, nor should he be, since the creativity that produced him was collective. The entity that authored him is “anyone.”

But in a more fundamental sense, the biggest cucks of all are production companies and agencies. Culture, in its current form, is computer systems making love to each other with audiences serving as the means to do it. The traditional creative industries linger on the outside, watching this happen, searching for ways to interject themselves and get a piece of the action.

13.

Holding a real Tung Tung Tung Sahur in your hand is a mark that the internet has “crossed the screen” not once, but a multitude of times. And so have you. In the acid bath of algorithmic content our selves burn away, until all that’s left are the bare wires which computers and money use to transit across our desires, our bodies. These wires exist in anyone.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is not a joke, a story, or answer — he is a jolt. And by feeling him, watching him move through the circuits, we can view the whole network that we are in. We can demonstrate our own power within it by amplifying the swerves, the moments of human weirdness that interrupt an otherwise static deluge of data flowing from computer to computer in a manner that each day is further optimized away from ourselves and what matters.

I want to place two of the most popular meme figures of the 2020s in conversation with each other: Tung Tung Tung Sahur of Italian Brainrot and Jeffrey Epstein of Pedophile Corruption Cabal.

To be clear, my interest is less in the real Epstein or the real Tung Tung Tung Sahur than in the ways they have been represented and the forces underlying those representations. Ultimately, I want to figure out how those representations “cross the screen,” to borrow Hito Steyerl’s evocative phrase — how AI-generated monsters the “algorithm” likes become mass-market toys that children like; and how real-life monsters the “algorithm” cares about become corruption issues the political system must confront.

Although these cases arrive at two very different destinations (a shelf of gas station tchotchkes on the one hand, and the US House of Representatives on the other) both testify to the processes by which the internet makes the real, which in turn remakes the internet.

With both Epstein and Tung Tung, there is no singular screen-crossing event, but a continued series of recrossings, back-and-forth over a permeable border. The structure formed by the linkage of the internet and real life is rhizomatic, drawn not by a linear chain of cause-and-effect but by a continuous oscillation between deterritorializating and reterritorializating processes — an idea I take from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Territorialization: something happens between people in a specific place and time, which is assigned particular meanings according to what it relates to — things like a narrative, a thesis, a price. Deterritorialization: the internet yanks that interaction out of its original moment and geography, throwing it up on a platform where it lives as a post. Reterritorialization: online, that interaction is situated by reference to a different set of coordinates, and assigned particular meanings according to what it relates to there — things like a view count, a comment section, an RPM.

The process continues. From out of that new territory, that “online world” where Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein both live, the interaction deterritorializes back into reality as a trend people watch, write about, and use as a point of reference for public debate in newspapers and dinner party conversations. It then crosses back online as people post about other people talking about the trend and monetize, riff, and ironize. This has never not been happening.

Take the following as an example. I present it as a linear, causal process for the sake of clarity, but in practice all of this is happening simultaneously:

1. In reality, Clavicular goes to the club.

2. On the internet, the stream of him going to the club exists as a monetized video on Kick.

3. In reality, somebody watching that stream sits down and clips it because it will make them money.

4. On the internet again, the clips of the stream of Clavicular at the club circulate,

5. In reality, people watch the clips knowing the clips are there because somebody else watched them first,

6. On the internet, people post jokes making fun of the clips and the culture involved with them,

7. In real life, Clavicular goes to the club again because the jokes, clips, and stream did so well.

8. etc. etc. ad infinitum until the end of the world.

At each point, we see a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization. The moment when Clav says to a girl by the pool “Are you okay? Looks like you’re byyourselfmaxxing…” starts as an interaction between two people in Florida, then turns into a segment in a stream, then turns into a parasocial moment between a viewer and their computer, then turns into a clip, then turns into a moment for someone scrolling and seeing the clip, then turns into a joke, then turns into a quote-post — each turn yanks the moment out of the territory it was sitting in and places it on a new map where it connects to new things, new people, and new forms of measurement.

The turns happen through processes intrinsic to both reality and online platforms. Many of these processes are economic. Algorithms and monetization work to recode events, people, and images into new contexts — they price what was not previously priced, making what was a casual interaction into a video that, as more and more people watch it, accrues money for its makers. The real world becomes a field to clip-farm in. But the more of the world’s territory that is clip-tilled, the more the place where clips get posted becomes the world itself, since the clips are the basis by which people evaluate, plan, and conduct real life business such as selling, thinking, and going to war with Iran.

Comparing Tung Tung and Epstein

In the sense that all phenomena on the internet are subject to this process, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein are the same. But they also bear a more specific set of similarities since each meme functions as a kind of commentary on the process of screen-crossing itself.

Both Jeffrey Epstein and Tung Tung Tung Sahur are figures of “folk horror,”contemporary Slendermen living in a mostly AI-generated lore-world. Tung Tung Tung Sahur will hit you with his bat and Epstein will take you to his island. Each is also, for the most part, mute. Save for clips from his interview with Steve Bannon (which only went viral recently) most memes of Epstein have not featured him speaking. Like Tung Tung, he is typically narrated about, projected onto, and distributed virally. Both are pre-loaded into my TikTok as AR-animated characters that you can superimpose onto footage of real people and make them dance, fight, and kiss you — inspiring a trend where people ironically depicted Tung Tung Tung Sahur as an abusive boyfriend.

I am thinking here not of the Jeffrey Epstein that exists for CNN, nor of the Jeffrey Epstein that existed in early 2020s memes, but the brainrot Epstein that every fifth grader in America knows — a name inserted into viral algospeak the way “skibidi” and “gooning” are; the face of the AI-generated kitten birthed by the Donald Trump AI generated cat and fathered by the Elon Musk AI-generated cat.

The only other faces I saw more often on TikTok in 2025 were Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, and possibly Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Epstein posthumously has a level of name recognition usually reserved for Presidents. A full accounting of Epstein’s posthumous meme fame would take a whole other post.

Here’s my sketch of the de/reterritorialization of Epstein:

1. In real life, a pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein commits horrible crimes and leverages the structure of neoliberal political-financial power to cover them up, before finally getting caught and dying under strange circumstances,

2. Online, users interpret his death and his life as a kind of conspiracy theory, spreading the meme that “Epstein didn’t kill himself,”

3. In real life, the idea of an Epstein conspiracy becomes a profitable and poignant node within broader narratives across culture, leading to pressure for continued investigations

4. Online, the continued release by investigators of emails, documents, and photographs pertaining to Epstein and his connections turns into a continued flow of content,

5. In real life, the idea of the Epstein story becomes larger than the man himself, encompassing a broader feeling about elite abuse, the impossibility of justice, and the impotence of regular people — an idea which, even more than the specifics of the case, the media and politicians are unwilling to articulate

6. Online, joking about Epstein becomes a shorthand for talking about the issues in #5, and a symbol of affiliation for those who feel alienated from the conventional narrators,

7. In real life, people who are thirteen years old and literally not fully sentient in 2019 when this all started, encounter and consider “Epstein” as a topic of conversation they cannot avoid. And a random Florida man is spotted while driving by people who think he looks like Jeffrey Epstein.

8. Online, Epstein brainrot content made by children proliferates within a broader lore of politically-sensitive characters including Netanyahu, Charlie Kirk, and Donald Trump because, as writes for Wired, “name-dropping Epstein and Netanyahu results in the videos getting more traction.” The random Florida man who looks kind of like Epstein gains 750,000 followers.

Here’s my sketch of the de/reterritorialization of Tung Tung Tung Sahur:

1. In Indonesia, a drum is beaten during the season of Ramadan to wake people up for sahur, the pre-dawn meal. The drum makes a sound like “tung tung tung.”

2. Online, people use AI to create a character that corresponds to the sahur drum and it goes viral, and is posted according to a pre-existing format.

3. In real life, a trend called Italian Brainrot has been happening across platforms and discourse — Tung Tung Tung Sahur is wrapped into it, representing the terminally online, and reporters write about it.

4. Online, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is posted into new narrative formats alongside other Italian Brainrot characters — a meme posted with the awareness that it is one of a group of trendy memes popular in the present moment,

5. In real life, a content creator, Bie the Ska, dresses up in an elaborate Tung Tung Tung Sahur costume and re-enacts the skits in the narrative formats

6. Online, his videos join an ongoing trend in which Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a meme representing the place of memes and memeticity in the world in general,

7. In real life, a toy manufacturer in Dongguan, China decides to make a Tung Tung Tung Sahur toy

Perhaps the most significant similarity between Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein is that, for very different reasons, each is indigestible to the offline world. I sometimes think of this as the Wolf Blitzer test: if you showed Wolf Blitzer this thing from the internet, would he get it? Brainrot Epstein is indigestible to Wolf because Epstein means too much, wrapped up in crime, conspiracy, and politics. Tung Tung Tung Sahur is indigestible because he means too little; he is arbitrary, random, and strangely uninscribed — in the same way 67 was.

In both cases, the memes are almost like an attack against the real world — a refusal to recognize its processes of territorialization as more final and more valid than those of the internet. Both are uncopyrightable and untalkable-about in the registers of traditional, unbiased reporting which, Axios-pilled, seeks to tell an audience “why this matters.” But yet, each of them ultimately grows in a symbiotic relationship with a real world that always does find a way to monetize, decontextualize, and deploy what happens online through its own circuits — it seems often like the real world is bending towards the online world, but the online world also bends towards the real.

Deleuze and Guattari describe the interlocked process of de/reterritorialization by a comparison to the symbiotic evolution of flowers and pollinators. Replace “orchid” with “online world” and “wasp” with “reality”:

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.

It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But… something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.

This entire book, A Thousand Plateaus, reads like an acid trip. But what made me think of this passage in particular is the reference to “mimicry” as an insufficient account of an image’s reproduction. The word “meme” was invented by Richard Dawkins because it shares a root with “mimicry,” and he was most interested in the idea of imitation as the engine of culture, which is a dumb idea. Today, the word “meme” still carries a connotation of unoriginality, copying, and derivativeness.

But the first modern use of the word “meme” (to refer to something on the internet) matches the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari understand cultural reproduction — as a mutual becoming-towards of the represented and representation. In 1994, Mike Godwin wrote the essay “Meme and Countermeme” for Wired, and described what people know today as “Godwin’s Law:” the maxim that “the longer a discussion on the internet goes on, the higher the likelihood that a comparison to Nazis gets made.” Godwin describes the invention of this maxim as a “countermeme” in response to the “meme” of people making Hitler comparisons on web forums. That people started following his lead in posting the maxim, in order to discourage these inappropriate Hitler comparisons, was evidence to him of an early kind of “memetic engineering.”

The meme in Godwin’s telling is an intervention to change a real community’s behavior. There is a becoming-real of the meme (in that Godwin’s Law changes the way the community talks) and a becoming-meme of the real (in that Godwin’s Law is, somehow, always proven correct online).

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.

Replace “book” and “world” with “Epstein Files conspiracy theories” and “real-world response to Epstein .” Or, alternately, replace them with “Tung Tung Tung Sahur” and “the idea of brainrot.”

In the next installment: the material life of Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Brainrot Epstein, the place of capital in D&G and in all of this. Distracted Boyfriend, deep frying, and the layered image as index of screen-crossing. Irony as line of flight.

I’ve been fixated on videos of prominent Democrats at public events getting asked what they did and didn’t do for Gaza. The formula is almost always the same: at an occasion where traditionally nobody says anything of substance -- like a Q+A at Harvard -- somebody from the audience is filmed asking Antony Blinken or Samantha Power about genocide, knowing it’ll make a good social media clip.

This type of “bird-dogging” video is familiar – it’s been a political tactic used by activists for years. Social media both amplifies its effectiveness and sharpens its meaning, however. By involving an asynchronous internet audience, numbering in the thousands if not millions, the videos seek to make such events actually representative and deliberative rather than pro forma and staged. The questioner speaks on behalf of those watching, representing us on the other side of the screen, and says exactly what you would want to say to Antony Blinken. It’s not just about getting a political figure on the record with a gotcha on a controversial stance, but about enacting an actual democratic moment within a ritual frame that performs that kind of authentic engagement but in effect actually muffles it.

The Biden administration officials always say the same thing: Given the conditions they did the best they could to get as much aid as possible into Gaza. Senator Elissa Slotkin gave a similar answer in her viral interview with Breaking Points, saying she was a good person because she was doing all she could to get baby formula through to mothers in Gaza – while voting to send the bombs that were killing the babies.

Elissa Slotkin is smart. What she can’t say is that she knew her hypothetical “no” vote on a weapons package to Israel would have little effect given the conditions we operate within, and so she voted “yes” thinking it preserves her place at the table. Now, that calculation has changed and she can vote no on the weapons packages, which is good but far too late. I’d imagine the same thing is true of Blinken, Sullivan, and Power: they knew that given the conditions the best they could do was preserve their place at the table and beg the Israelis to let aid through.

The problem is it never occurs to these people that the purpose of the political process is to negotiate what those conditions should be. The purpose of having a big job in the government is to make decisions. If we lived in a functioning liberal democracy, that negotiation would take place. Instead, we see the political process reduced to negotiation over technicalities — suggesting best practices for the care of individual trees as the forest itself burns.1

While it might not occur to politicians, the idea that the purpose of democracy should be to negotiate the conditions of our shared existence does occur to people posting on the internet. It occurs because every day, people on the internet work to craft the social context they live in. Americans remain joiners of “associations” in the de Tocqueville sense — it’s just that they’re joining furry conventions and Fortnite lobbies instead of the Rotary Club. Online communities create the conditions of a shared reality through participation and posting — they adjudicate disputes, raise funds, convene debates, mount campaigns, and articulate visions. In these small-scale associations, the skills necessary for democratic life are practiced — often rancorously, often to little effect, and often counterproductively — but to my thinking, that’s better than elections where, implicitly, politicians and policy are sold like any other product that you would learn about via your television set.

Being a furry is not an answer to the crisis of democracy. But to understand what contemporary democracy might look like, the place to turn is the internet. Gaming, social media, and open-source projects are the most vitally and fundamentally democratic aspect of contemporary life. The two democratic institutions that are most productively and consistently present in the life of the average American are Reddit and Wikipedia.

Given these conditions, the idea that we could somehow elect the same kind of politicians, sustain the same kind of policy process, and play the same kind of game as we did in 2015, is not just ineffective but perverse.

I went to an event in New York, shortly after Zohran won the primary where some of the organizers and advisers who helped him win spoke to content creators. One thing they said was that Zohran looked at the world of New York City artists and content creators and thought, “I can do politics in that world.” And so he went out and played the political game – sought endorsements, made compromises, raised funds, generated publicity – but under new conditions. These conditions demand their own trade-offs, entail their own ethical conundrums and complexities (just as the old Washington game did), but crucially given these conditions it was thinkable to oppose the arming of a state involved in murdering a civilian population. Given the conditions Slotkin and Blinken operate under, such an opposition is unthinkable – even though, for most people, it is plain common sense.

And so my mind keeps returning to those videos of people asking Samantha Power why she did what she did. She sees the event at Harvard as a ritual of the game: these young people are professionals who will one day turn the same wheels she turns, because — to her thinking — there are no other wheels of power. They will go through their phase of campus idealism as she did, but then they will barnacle onto their own Richard Holbrooke and ultimately learn that change really happens through institutions. They will -- as she did -- discover they are careerists first and idealists second. Middle-aged and haunted by failures, they will then take part in the obfuscation (which events like this one at Harvard serve to manufacture) that your careerism is proof you are “smart” (in the Obamaworld sense) rather than proof of cowardice or psychopathy.

Arguably, this game was worth playing in 1997. You have to make compromises to live in the real world, to achieve actual policy ends. But in the past quarter century, all that playing the game has yielded us – despite some of our best people committing their professional and personal efforts to it – is a series of lost wars and now a genocide.

All that’s left for these people to do is pull a Brett McGurk and parlay the relationships you built through public service into a career introducing the Saudis to Western VC firms and clucking your tongue at Trump on television — diligently pretending as if there is now any meaningful difference between yourself and Jared Kushner other than the fact Kushner has made more money.

I’m writing this because it seems like in every piece bemoaning the end of liberal democracy, there is an obligatory paragraph on how social media deteriorates consensus truth, fragments media, and encourages autocrats. This is true about a specific case, but it is not a general rule. Social media makes running the kind of democracy that appeared to work in 1997 impossible. Another kind of democracy is possible, and needed.

Another reason I’m writing this is because I read this forum by the German magazine Taz with a group of thinkers talking about the crisis of liberal democracy. I was struck, in particular, by Wendy Brown’s suggestion of a “post-liberal democracy,” one which she has elsewhere described as reparative democracy. I don’t understand or agree with all of her ideas on it, frankly, but the drift of her thought seems right to me: Why would one suppose that democracy run via infrequent elections, dependent on the operation of impersonal bureaucracies, and tied up in a now-dysfunctional relationship with the market, is the final or natural form of democracy, rather than just a historical incident of the mid-to-late twentieth century? The fact that it will never be 1997 again is a tragedy for many in Washington, but “we might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors,” as Thomas Jefferson wrote.

People on the internet do seem to want to live in a democracy, and are seeking to make it themselves from first principles because the authorities do not want (or, more charitably, do not know how) to give them one.

The one thing artificial intelligence definitely proves is the need to study literary theory.

That’s why I’m writing this post reviewing Leif Weatherby’s book Language Machines, which makes the argument that the person to turn to in order to understand Large Language Models is Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism who died in 1913. If you’re interested at all in these topics, I’d recommend buying Weatherby’s book here.

I read Language Machines in bits and starts over several weeks. Like a hunk of whole grain fiber-rich bread from the farmer’s market, it’s dense and nutritious, taking time to masticate but rewarding you with a sense of robust healthfulness. There are also moments where insight seems to leap like sparks off the page, your eye striking a sentence like a hammer at an anvil. Once, as I read on the Metro commuting, I said aloud: “bro is cooking, bro is actually thinking” and a stranger looked at me askance. The passage I was reading was this:

It was once unthinkable that an artificial image could move, could capture something distant and let us view from afar goings-on across the globe. Today, we are struggling with a similar transition in language, as neural nets capture and generate whatever language is, removing it from its presumptive root in human consciousness. Language has always been the theoretical bridge between the natural and the artificial… by making the very model of our notion of artificiality automatically reproducible, we are in the process of potentiating the artificial. That is what is hard to think about: language freed from psychology, from the instrumental uses which we sometimes put it. (p.81)

Weatherby’s project is careful and historically-grounded, but I am almost cautious to agree because it is too aligned with what I believe as a partisan of language. I am exactly the sort of person who is supposed to like this book. He argues that language was always a key layer in computing — that if we see programming as a negotiation upwards in abstraction from the binary code that records which part of the machine is jolted with a charge or not, to the machine or assembly code, to a language humans code in like Java or HTML; the natural top layer is the spoken language humans use to explain what they are doing to each other, and ultimately lead the machine to produce in a format like the one you are reading now. To separate computing from language — something we tend to naturally do — is a mistake.

Artificial intelligence introduces a new entanglement of computation and language, one which seems to confirm the vision of language held by de Saussure and the tradition (think Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and so on) that draws from him. AI exposes a form of language that needs no human speaker — and so words are not distillations of a mind’s intention, or filtered reflections of a reality, but components of a massive system that rolls along in its own way. Language is a kind of ecology that moves meaning and people around the way a landscape moves sunlight, water, calories, and organisms around. What AI does is scan the structure of that landscape, and extend it using computational means rather than the regular biological ones which human brains employ. In a memorable phrase, Weatherby writes AI is “the dialectical revenge of language itself on its alleged masters, humans.” (205)

I was drawn to Language Machines because I felt I’d been thinking along similar lines, but in a less structured and sophisticated way. This, from my post last June about Italian Brainrot:

An AI model does not produce language, it extends language — they fill in a gap, predict the next word. Their “minds” are collections of scraped data latticed over by frameworks for organizing and reorganizing that data. Codes replicating with no need for a mouth or fingers to articulate them. When you say thank you to ChatGPT, you are not talking to an agent, but to a discourse. It is not using language, it is language spilling out of a mechanical sieve…

And then, on “grok, is this real?”:

AI chatbots are discourse with no self behind the masks. They are constituted by the scripts of our performances at work or at play, and nothing else. Like a wound-up marching toy they iterate into crooked paths and then go limp. Juiced temporarily by the sum of whatever sense they have been trained with, they inertia off into the head-empty stillness of hollow talk.

The epigraph of Language Machines is the de Saussure quote I was thinking of when I wrote that “wound-up marching toy” comparison:

Language (langue) is comparable to a machine which would march on forever, whatever the deteriorations that one would make it suffer.

This idea of language as a kind of autonomous system is central to semiotics. And now, we have autonomous systems that make language. Others have pointed this out, but — at the risk of overglazing Weatherby — nobody’s done it quite like this.

For a story in the BBC a while back, I talked with communities of AI researchers who were essentially working on “jailbreaking” Claude so that it would write esoteric religious poetry, say inappropriate or un-PC things, and shill meme coins. There’s a side of this which is purely playful: getting the robot to curse, even though it’s been programmed not to, is fun. But there’s also a mystical side.

One of my sources compared the latent space of the model’s data set — the array of connections it could make between words — to the map of a game like Age of Empires II. There was the “valley of the helpful assistant,” the plot of land within its map of language the model is programmed to speak out of, which is clear and legible to us. But by prodding, prompting, and fine-tuning, you could make it pull from stranger territories within language and lift the fog of war that hung over those parts.

The purpose of these explorations was not just play, but a kind of research. The latent space is structured by a series of vectors that place each word in relations of varying difference. “Red” and “green” have a relationship to one another that is mathematically modeled within the latent space, as do “red” and “communism.”

Some connections in the latent space, like those two, are straightforward. The math models symbolic, categorical, and practical patterns in language that are apparent in the data set of all the language the model scraped up, and then it infers how those patterns would extend into new utterances. Through hallucinations, hacks, and trolling, the people I wrote about for the Truth Terminal story believed they were accessing less-straightforward structures within human language and culture, surfacing connections that the math could model, but which typical humans using language could not access. One described it as a form of “futuristic archaeology” into the deep structure of language itself.

This, it occurred to me, is a lot like what poets do. They explore, bend, and imagine new shapes for language. I don’t say this in the sense that AI will replace poets (it doesn’t write good poetry, typically) but that it demonstrates, as Weatherby writes, that “language is poetic first and referential second” — that when we speak we are, primarily, invoking and exploiting those cultural structures that knit words together rather than talking about real things in the world. People tend to consider it the other way around — that when we say the word “horse” we mean first the seen, living thing in the world and second the cultural complex of “horse,” that the abstract sign is a kind of inferior tool we are forced to use by necessity, that language approaches but never reaches true experience. But where we actually live, experience, work, and love is in that sign-realm — language is poetic first and we — like AI — are creatures of the vector space before we are creatures of real space.

Weatherby has this idea of “remainder humanism” — the knee-jerk desire to make a “bright line” between what is human and what is AI. People want to insist on some remarkable essence of human language use that the computers will never touch — whether a brain-bound process, as Chomsky argued, or the (seeming) opposite insistence on some kind of “intention” or human touch behind the sign being what AI is missing.

Our own intelligence is already artificial. There is no unique human essence that the representation (whether linguistic or computational) is missing, because whatever we are, it is always involved with representation like cereal is involved with milk at breakfast. And so to stake a critique on this elusive human essence — which is always retreating as the models get better — is not sustainable.

But I’m not sure I’d entirely agree that just because you cannot measure an ineffable human essence doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Although our experience is always mediated from within representational systems, we are always aware of what they don’t do for us. To me, this kind of slippage, incompleteness, and incoherence isn’t just incidental but a sort of organizing principle of culture, in the way that people say dark matter holds the universe together. I think of Wallace Stevens and his vision of poetics as the “mind in the act of finding what will suffice.” In that verb “suffice,” there’s a recognition that the mind never finds in language an answer that is entire or truly correct, just one that “suffices” for a moment, a situation. Usually, you want more than what is merely sufficient.

Weatherby concludes by saying “all that remains in the end, then, is the open question of a real humanism in the overlap between platform capitalism and computational culture generation.” He sketches towards what an answer to that question might be. He thinks it has something to do with rhetoric, the holistic practice of training to not just read and write language, but to reason and use it in a structured way. Rhetoric in the medieval context relied on Latin and the Classics, creating its own specialized system of a language above language, a sort of supra-literacy.

Weatherby seems to reference, glancingly, memes as an example of that kind of modern rhetoric. Meme-making is a ritualized action that addresses interface, computation, language, and online publics in one fell swoop. One way rhetoric looks in this era, I think, is the manufacture of prefabricated mental packages which hold thoughts in the weird ooze of post, link, and comment section. Meme formats are one such shape.

Another kind of rhetoric might be thought to exist in theory itself — a set of formulas, of topoi, applied and rearranged into the world of culture. I speak from a niche experience here, but part of the pleasure of reading Language Machines was seeing Weatherby artfully stack, parse, and apply thinkers I’ve been interested in for years — Marx, Kittler, Srnicek, and Derrida especially. Ideas like differance or the commodity theory of value operate both on an explanatory level, but also on a kind of rhetorical one, where they have value as instruments for dislodging other kinds of thoughts, for orienting yourself (even if it’s an orientation by arguing against them) and putting stuff in context.

So I think as we search for a “real humanism” — one that lies in actual people and their tangled experiences of the world, rather than in some ideal, untouchable essence the computer can never replicate — we must be careful and playful in equal measure. Careful, because the stakes are high and the situation demands diligent work that watches closely. Playful, because in a moment when language has become “a service” on tap that constructs itself without the steering of a human hand, all the cliches, omissions, and biases that are coded within language will bloom unchecked like algae in an unmoving pond.

In the era of its autonomous construction, the task of deconstructing language — looking at language and saying “hold up a second,” Uno-reversing the binary, joking, probing, unpeeling — becomes even more important. Which is why I love Language Machines, and why the way forward must include poetry, rhetoric, and memes.

While staying at his mom’s house in Brooklyn in April of 1865, Walt Whitman learned that Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated at Ford’s Theater during a production of Our American Cousin which his lover at the time, Peter Doyle, a Confederate deserter who fled to Washington, DC and got a job as a bus driver, had been watching. “There was nothing extraordinary in the performance,” Doyle later said of the play.

In the dooryard of Walt’s mother’s house were planted lilac-bushes, with “heart-shaped leaves of rich green” and “perfume strong I love.” In his burial hymn for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman imagines breaking a sprig of lilac and placing it on the President’s coffin as it travels, by railroad, across the United States.

My mom’s house also has lilacs planted in the dooryard. She introduced me to Walt Whitman. I have since re-encountered him several times, returning every few months to Leaves of Grass and reading or re-reading whatever pleases me. I think of Walt Whitman literally every day. The psychic geography of the Washington, DC area, where I grew up and now live, is Whitman.

Across places that today are paved over by McMansioned suburbs, the nation’s most aggressive data center build-out (which I covered for the BBC last summer), or slop bowl lunch joints catering to lobbyists making the world worse, Walt Whitman rambled on a series of fascinating side quests during the Civil War.

I live blocks from the route which Peter Doyle, a DC omnibus driver, followed each day with Whitman joining him regularly in the evening to sit at the front and yap after clocking out of his bullshit day job as a government clerk. The National Portrait Gallery, my favorite art museum in the city, was a hospital where Whitman nursed wounded soldiers.

If there is any dead white man whose opinion we should hear at this moment, it is Walt Whitman. Part of this is because nobody else from the 1800s was quite as seriously engaged in thinking about you and I — he tells his reader, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”: “I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.” From the same:

It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried...

A conjuncture of factors has led me to think about Whitman more than usual. First: the United States seems fucked and Whitman is a poet of the Civil War, who sought to articulate a vision of democracy that was broader, weirder, and freer than a Classical or Enlightenment inheritance. Second: it is spring and lilacs are blooming — so he comes to mind. Third, in my last post I talked a lot about Nick Fuentes’ use of “you” as a pronoun, and I was working on something else about 4chan greentexts. It occurred to me that the poet who seems to address us in the most modern, meme-y way is Whitman.

The 4chan greentext form begins with “>be me,” and “Song of Myself” begins: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The original edition of “Leaves of Grass” features only a picture of Whitman in a jaunty pose, dressed as a regular guy, without his name as an author — he is an anon.

Whitman’s poetry is highly personal, but not in the sense of confession or autobiography. He talks most often about solitary, embodied experiences — being a commuter, looking at the sky, breathing. These are things people do alone, but with the knowledge that everybody else does them. Titling a poem “Song of Myself” is not narcissistic because the subject is not Walt Whitman, but the experience of selfhood in the first place — Walt is just the most accessible self for Walt to write about.

The self, in Song of Myself, breathes, bathes, fucks, wonders, eats, smells, and exercises — but most of all, he yaps. There are, according to a quick cmd+F search of the poem, 489 instances of “I” and 235 instances of “you.” The cardinal activity of the Whitmanian self is the act of address — communion with other selves. It is a communion premised on equality, a word which Lincoln (and I’d say Whitman) understood in a mathematical way, grounded in Euclid.

Before all other facts about the world, Whitman cares that people are equal. This is not a precept of morality, but a principle of physics for him, an undeniable truth about the universe which society may construct elaborate contraptions to suspend — in the way airplanes defy gravity — but ultimately must obey. Black or white, male or female, poor or rich, young or old, “I give and receive the same,” Whitman writes. But there are also other equalities: the past, future, and present are the same; writer and reader are the same; death and life, victim and perpetrator, are all the same.

The Union cause was always spiritual, and grew increasingly more so as the war went on. It promised a just emancipation of slaves, described in Biblical terms (“jubilee,” “grapes of wrath,” and so on) but it also rested on a radical interpretation of the words “union” and “equality.” I think the Union transplanted the Christian conception of the Trinity onto the American project.

Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last In The Dooryard Bloom’d” interests me in part because it makes this connection clear. It centers on a “trinity” defined by Whitman: the blooming lilac, the song of a “gray-brown bird,” and the “thought of him I love.” The last of these is proximately the dead Lincoln, but more profoundly all of Whitman’s countrymen. Instead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we have lilac, bird, and guy you love. The components of this trinity can be interpreted more abstractly: nature, the creative/expressive act, and the thought of your fellow men that you love. In this, we find the three-personed God, the three-faced American nation, which Whitman worships.

Nature worship, creative self-assertion, and loving solidarity. This mystic trinity is the foundation of American democracy, which was really founded by Lincoln and not Washington. Liberalism is something they invented in Europe.

Originally, I wanted to study Whitman, the mid 19th-century newspaper business which he worked in for much of his life, and the transatlantic connections between Europe and the United States in the Civil War era. One reason I gave up on this was that this kind of academic career is hopeless in 2026, given how the life of the mind has been so thoroughly fucked over. Another reason is that I figured this was not really spiritually true to Whitman’s vision, which — I idolize the poetry, not the poet here — is really the thing I believe in above all else. He’d want me, who he talked to so directly across his poems, to speak from and to my own modernity, about the affairs of regular people and the things that matter in the heart.

Whitman wrote in the language of his day, without fuss. He inflected it with archaisms like reversed word orders (“when lilacs last”), random “thou”s and so on, which are carried over from the King James Bible. The KJV was for many Americans at his time one of the only books they owned. It was their liturgical language — not quite as extreme as the Catholic Church’s use of Latin, but certainly not the way people really talked. Whitman’s fusion of that language with the rhythm of everyday speech and the straightforwardness of his “>be me” kind of address creates an interesting juxtaposition, but also relatability.

I see his outlook as very contemporary. He wants to overshare, he wants to be relatable, and it feels weird to call him “Whitman” as you would another author rather than “Walt,” as you would call a dude you know. And so I wonder too, if there is something very contemporary in his mystic conception of union, that might salvage.

Faced on the one hand with the complicity-rationalizing managerialism that motivated the Biden years, and on the other with the Ahab-striving of our cruelest to win (whether against China, modernity, ourselves, God, etc.), I think we should see Whitman as a resource that can inform us of another way, and offer a language in which words like “democracy” and “equality” can actually matter and actually be the tough, existentially crucial things they are, rather than pablum sputtered out by people who have never failed to dodge an uncomfortable truth.

I will write more about memes, but also expect another post or so on Whitman before the spring ends.

A few weeks ago, I was on Charlie Warzel’s podcast Galaxy Brain talking about Clavicular the looksmaxxer (how long ago it already seems that anyone cared!) and his colleague Nick Fuentes brought up the episode on his livestream later. As far as I know, Fuentes did not mention me personally, but instead took issue with Charlie’s opening monologue. Here’s what Fuentes said:

Millennials are playing Settlers of Catan with their girlfriends, drinking wine. And they’re giggling about this shit [Clavicular]. And some girl at this Settlers of Catan board game party is saying ‘I can’t believe I understood every word you just said, I need to touch grass….’ do you know what I’m talking about?

I saw this podcast from The Atlantic… and there’s this older millennial doing the podcast in his attic and he’s like ‘for those that haven’t heard about Clavicular, maybe that’s a good thing, I’m sorry I have to tell you’… as if you’re not a doomscroller? These people need to go into the gas chambers. I shouldn’t say that, but seriously. The women, too.

Fuentes probably searched his name to find the podcast, which only had about 20K views on YouTube. Or maybe he saw it in some Twitter quote-tweet, or one of the mouth-breathers in his Telegram chat sent it.

It is fascinating that the worst possible thing, in his mind, is to drink wine with your girlfriend who laughs at funny stuff from the internet and play Settlers of Catan because, although I don’t really like Settlers of Catan, isn’t that the good life? Isn’t that, or something like it, what we’re all hoping for? Why is attending a Settlers of Catan wine night worthy of a sentence to the gas chambers?

Maybe it’s because the wine night isn’t being streamed on Kick, which means you’re throwing money away. And maybe the romance between insane streamer and sad viewer is as potent as that of boyfriend and girlfriend, thereby in competition with romantic relationships, just as it is with every kind of real-life social bond.

But I want to talk about the “you” which Fuentes spends a good deal of his day talking to, because it’s simultaneously tormentor and sustenance. Folks often assume internet-famous people are charismatic in the way Charles Manson or Bill Clinton were charismatic, but that’s not the case, because the audience has the power. There is something erotic about it, not in a directly sexual sense, but in the way of intimacy, minds mingling, tension. Other commitments (like wine night) are rivals to this kind of love. The same structure pervades all internet fame, with the Perv Right just being an extreme form of it, because the vibes are so blatantly libidinal and the communities so estranged from the rest of society.

In the discourse of streamers, “you” is constantly consulted as an authority, asked to provide approval, verification, judgment. The audience is never figured as passive, and never directly persuaded: It’s implicit in the discourse of Fuentes that you already agree. Given this commonality, he seeks to be understood, not believed. His do you know what I’m talking about? is a cousin to “chat, is this real?” because it points to the function which the “you” of the stream is asked to perform: That of reality-maker. A person sitting alone in their room, rambling into the void, needs you to make the rambling into a thing that matters. It is a co-creative act, and it is that act, I’d argue, which people enjoy more than the personality of whoever’s doing the rambling.

There are two personae created by Fuentes: himself, and the open-ended “you,” which the viewer may imaginatively occupy. The “you” is the more compelling invention. We know the streamer doesn’t literally mean “you,” except for in the moments that you give him twenty bucks and your handle appears briefly on the screen. But if you live a life where most of the time, when someone says “you,” the implied person behind that “you” is worthless failson, disgruntled employee, or anonymous stranger, and you know that’s what they’re thinking of when they call you, getting called into a “youness” that is a highly-knowledgeable, understanding, and powerful entity feels great. It’s a “you” shared among others, but it is yours. And I have now tangled myself within the second-person pronoun, but do you know what I’m talking about?

If you watch either Clav or Fuentes’ streams, it’s clear each man is trapped in a hell of his own making. You could say they’ve made the bargain which Milton’s Lucifer did, preferring to “rule” that hell than “serve” in someone else’s heaven — but they only appear to rule their respective hells. They are really being prodded along by an audience that treats them with a kinky contempt: the looksmaxx forum guys ratted Clav to his college for roiding and kicked him out; Fuentes laments that he should just “become a liberal” at this point because his audience is too weird. And yet he continues to plead with them throughout the stream: do you know what I’m talking about?

My audience is not trying to goad me into chemically castrating myself or committing a hate crime, but you do feel the pressure of that relationship and, I think, so do friends of mine who create content. An audience is like a person you live alongside — someone you depend upon, worry about letting down, that you courted and were in turn courted by.

A TikTok user recently left a comment on a video of mine that struck me as uncanny, because it showed them imagining my interiority. I quote it indirectly here: “I feel like Aidan is more into this stuff than he lets on, or maybe had a phase with it at some point — the ‘playing along,’ the continuing focus…” This comment was left, understandably, after I’d posted a video talking about how my facial attractiveness PSL rating was only 4.9 (“low-tier normie”). This was based off an assessment from the free online looksmaxxing face scanner that may be selling my data to sketchy brokers who will someday jail me on the basis of my retinas when we are living under the Thiel Reich.

I never had a looksmaxxing phase, so the commenter was wrong. I was also never an incel. But I was a young person at the same time these guys were young people. I still am, I suppose. So I can’t say I don’t feel the dark pull of that digital romance, the ways it digs its hooks into the tender spots of the apparatus we have all inherited from the society that made us, encouraging certain neuroses because they were profitable to the purveyors of attention, porn, games, and now, peptides. I can’t say I don’t recognize the shapes of their shame, or the ferocity of their yearning for something better. And I can’t say I’m not attached to the same interfaces and algorithms they’re attached to, that I’m not also studying my analytics and changing myself on their behalf.

This is the source of my fascination with the looksmaxxers: a recognition of the way we are constantly microdosing falling in love with people on the internet. It’s a skewed, strange love. You can say the post got two hundred thousand views and know it was good. But you can’t say for sure if the joke you made at the Settlers of Catan wine night was good, because how can you accurately read the facial expression your buddy’s girlfriend made, and in a broader sense, how can you ever know the souls of her, him, your own girlfriend, and therefore, yourself?

From the other end, you can acknowledge the e-girl’s poetic anguish in ninety characters without needing to actually deal with her difficult personality. Or you can laugh at the edgy joke without having anyone hear you do it. As we integrate this frictionless machine logic into our own lives, you can AI-generate an essay instead of staring at the blank page, and you can measure your maxillary distance instead of looking in the mirror and wondering if you are “handsome.”

The hardest things are the most human things. I like the “frictionmaxxing” framing, which details how in our personal lives, technology removes short-term discomfort at the cost of long-term learning. But I find it can flit a little too quickly into judgments of people which, while warranted, distract from the heart of the problem. It’s not that people are taking the easy way out and technology is selling it to them. It’s that they are never asked to be anything further than what technology (and power) want to measure. We have lost an appreciation for the human personality because power in the 20th and 21st centuries did not want a nation of souls, but a nation of statistically-modelable consumers and rationally-addressable “issues.” The real allergy to friction lies not with individuals, but within our institutions.

The streamer asking “you” to be his guardian, his fact-checker, and his confidant is refreshing because we live in a world that otherwise asks a “you” to be something very superficial, and small. Nobody you meet nowadays just wants to chat, unless it’s on the internet. All the world asks is for us to contribute to its balance sheets. The company wants a purchase, the platform wants engagement, the employer wants a productivity metric, the teacher wants a score, the politician wants a poll number, the Palantir murderbot wants a hit. “You” is a thing to be counted, not known. This civilization eats people and shits them out as numbers. It has been that way for a while, but it’s gotten worse, more self-confident, more capable of counting more stuff. In the industrialized West, we have the best possible version of that bargain and it still fucking sucks.

These numbers compound, collateralize, and train entities that will live out the real stories, for which we are just the supporting cast. The ghoulishly chattering AI models; the suicidal markets that can’t stop selling poison into cells, clouds, and seas; the blundering, butchering bureaucracies compelled to repeat the same mistakes over and over. And there is no place permitted for pricelessness. Do you know what I’m talking about?

I.

What will determine the impact of AI on you and whatever you care about — whether it’s great power competition, the economy, society, education, the lives of those you love — is not how effective the models are at doing tasks once reserved for humans, but how humans decide to use the models. There has been a disturbing silence around this question up until recently — people talked a lot about extinction risk and sci-fi scenarios, bots acing the LSATs, but not enough about what happens to schools and power grids. Or what happens if the mercurial alcoholic defense secretary demands Anthropic create a “War Claude” that automates the taking of human life.

In this post, I want to think about that question and examine an idea whose time has come: a Slop Tax.

Maybe the solution doesn’t look exactly like what my friend has proposed. (link to Politico piece on it). Maybe there’s some other way to structure an intervention in the political economy of AI that serves to balance out some of its damages and make the whole thing more sustainable. Or maybe the idea of a slop tax isn’t radical enough and we should be blowing up data centers.

II.

I was pondering this because I attended a happy hour given by tech writer when she visited Washington, DC. She summed up her impressions with the line “All the money is on one side and all the people are on the other. We aren’t ready for how much people hate AI.” This line is essentially accurate, and it’s far from the only issue in Washington, DC where money and people are on opposite sides.

At this same happy hour, after I’d stumbled out of the cold and into a large basement — one wall of which was filled by a video showing pixelated flames mulling over what may have been AI-generated logs — a woman approached me and asked “which section did you write for?” I explained that I wrote a Substack about memes, and she said, “You didn’t work for The Post? I thought everyone here was from The Post.”

That was the day Jeff Bezos amputated several sections from my hometown paper, and this was the bar where they were all coming together to drown their sorrows. I’d heard of similar things happening after DOGE — morbid parties full of DC people, typically idealistic folks, young and old, who came to this city in order to help the world, and were left out in the cold with nothing but an open tab at Mission. Even if their idealism was of the cringe West Wing cosplay variety, I respected it and grieved the shattering of dreams. Looking over the room lit by the heatless glow of the fake fire, I realized I was one of the bad guys. The fact that my Substack about memes is doing fine as The Washington Post fails says something terrible about civilization.

AI is currently entering our civilization as a synthetic, dazzling image of a fire projected on a wall, and the tech people are saying “look, it’ll cook everything and keep you warm” as you stand wearing mittens holding a raw steak. Meanwhile, you watch those same people drown the embers of the ancestral hearth fire, around which you once gathered with your family while the chowder-pot simmered, with gallons of freezing water.

The fire metaphor has perhaps gotten out of hand here. But we need to figure out some way to make AI into a thing that actually nourishes people, that is actually generative and delivers for society as well as shareholders — a balance which, with many jolts and complicities, companies like The Washington Post had achieved if you squinted and could accept a dose of manufactured consent back in the 1980s when my parents were my age.

III.

We lived under a different kind of capitalism back then. One of the points Eric Hobsbawm makes in The Age of Extremes, his history of the “short twentieth century,” is that he thinks people in the future will look back at the Cold War and appreciate the nuances between different types of capitalist regime more than people in the twentieth century did. There wasn’t just one capitalist bloc. The types of capitalism that existed at the post-colonial periphery and the center were very different, as were the ways capital was disciplined within countries by various forms of social-democratic institution like trade unions or welfare. The same point could be made diachronically, couldn’t it? Capitalism in the United States in 1960 is very different from in 2025. In 1960, the average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in American companies was 20-to-1, and in 2018 it was 278-to-1.

Throw in changes to tech and it’s clear that if there is to be a balance among competing priorities — the welfare of the common person, the productivity of industry, the maintenance of a shared reality — there needs to be a new rebalancing. Obviously, such a rebalance requires reining in the industry and making actual standards rather than rules dictated by lobbyists. There also needs to be accountability: Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg should go to prison. I’m not even sure for what, but these men are clearly the kind of person the world’s folkloric traditions warn us about, demonic and hollow, a threat to the social order. We need deterrence, because right now people look up to these guys and aspire to be like them.

Of course, you can’t really send a person that rich to prison and everyone knows it. Money has corroded all the civic infrastructure around AI, meaning that it enters peoples’ lives as a kind of band-aid on a bullet wound. As I wrote in Comparing ChatGPT to McDonald's, the paradigmatic use case of AI right now is not workflow optimization but “gas station fried chicken reply guy” for a business owner in rural Virginia who, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to write themselves. AI serves as a source of cheap and “good enough” intellectual and emotional labor. Since we increasingly don’t provide that stuff to each other through systems because they have been plundered by rich people, AI plays an important social role. It is to thinking and feeling what McDonald’s is to eating.

For both McDonald’s and ChatGPT, the social cost they inflict becomes the demand for their services. As the education system worsens (in part because people use AI to cheat) as people get lonelier (in part because everybody’s gooning to AI chatbots) as the climate crisis intensifies (aggravated by AI’s energy-intensive development) as jobs are eliminated from the economy (in part by AI) and as income inequality accelerates (turbocharged by tech billionaires) a lot of people will be dislocated. Free or low-cost AI will be the infrastructure they fall back on, just like McDonald’s fills a gap in America’s social infrastructure…

ChatGPT is the lazy, cheap solution to the social damages created by the system that produced it, just like McDonald’s. The hurt it causes becomes the demand to sustain it. Insofar as it is a tool for inflicting social cost, slop (in all forms) doubles as a tool for creating demand.

I like eating McDonald’s and I like some applications of AI. But when a business builds into and around injustice rather than trying to resolve it, what ends up happening is an institutionalization of the issue. Injustice becomes load-bearing, which is why it’s hard to let go. The whole thing falls down unless something else can take its place.

III.

Here’s Mike’s idea:

The Slop Tax is a mandatory contribution by AI companies equal to ~1% of their annual market capitalization, directed into an independent, publicly managed Cultural Trust Vehicle…

The tax revenue reclaims value from the artificial overproduction of platform slop and redirects it into individuals, institutions, and projects committed to cultural work that prioritizes human creativity over its computational imitation. This restores balance to what has heretofore been a one-way extraction..

The Cultural Trust Vehicle (CTV) Mike proposes, if funded by just 1% of the market capitalization of AI companies (not their profits, since those are negligible by comparison) would likely be the most-funded piece of public cultural infrastructure in American history. He estimates an annual value of around $200 billion, orders of magnitude higher than the budgets funding NPR and PBS today. The CTV would use this money to fund programs and make grants — paying wages, providing bedrock operational support, and keeping theaters, studios, and educational programs open.

As a sentimental “New Deal Democrat,” I am inspired by the idea of a Works Progress Administration for the 21st century. I love art and know many artists. The vibes are impeccable.

But I also don’t think the arts are frivolous in any way, shape, or form. If we’re living in a crisis of loneliness, bad mental health, and plummeting media literacy, then the arts are the number-one thing that can help solve those issues.

The arts have been under-emphasized because people think of art as “soft,” and they have a twentieth-century conception of art, seeing it as a product they buy rather than an experience they have. We forget what art really can do on a local, nonprofit, and peer-to-peer basis. Hollywood, big publishing, music labels, universities and galleries became very powerful brokers of art in the 1900s, so there really was no place for a purely public option or something like a CTV. But now their models are all broken, so we should look for new possibilities that maybe can better fulfill the ethical, spiritual function of art.

There’s also a quality-of-life argument here. We want to live in a world that can produce good movies, murals, theatrical productions, paintings, books, and music. People love that shit. And our current system is simply not set up to allow for a healthy arts scene.

Another idea would be to broaden the scope of the CTV to include two other segments which overlap with the arts (and are equally imperiled by AI): journalism and education. The traditional model for fact-based journalism is broken and the media companies are not solvent. We are reading news that is of lower quality and lower ambition than the news we were reading ten years ago. Semafor has to go beg the Saudis for money and CBS has to whore itself out to oligarchs. There must be a better way, and maybe the slop tax is that way.

Similarly, with education, people bemoan declines in test scores and literacy. A way to change that would be, first of all, to give more money to schools, students, and teachers at all levels from Pre-K to PhDs. But a deeper way to change things would be to incorporate schools into communities and cultural life a bit more, to rethink categories and curricula (like the obsessive focus on standardized testing) which were arguably never up to snuff but in the age of AI are even more absurd. If we understand things like education, a healthy middle class, and public health as inputs into progress — a key piece of the puzzle, alongside stuff like energy and research, that allows for innovation and productivity — then the CTV is a vehicle for funding these things with more efficacy than the tech companies themselves can.

Another argument is financial: if the CTV is a tax on valuation and investment in AI, then it can act as a check on bubble-inflating investment. It can help discourage irresponsible, unrealistic allocations of capital in things that aren’t real by imposing a small cost on doing something like borrowing $100 billion from your chip manufacturer so that you can buy more chips from them through an SPV so the debt doesn’t show up on your balance sheet and affect your credit rating, which is what allows you to borrow so much in the first place and inflate a bubble which, when it pops, will impose a much bigger cost on all of us.

Lastly, you need something like a slop tax because otherwise the tech companies are poisoning the well they drink from. They and the AGI they may produce probably want to exist in a context where the rule of law is a thing. They want a stable, predictable business environment instead of one linked to the whims of crazy people and the size of bribes you offer their subordinates. The world they are building now is not a stable and lawful one. They need some kind of an arbiter, some kind of robust public sphere that is independent of them, some kind of structure for accountability when they mess up or break rules. They may not think they need it, but they do.

Creating such an infrastructure should be as much a part of the conversation as scaling and alignment. You could build all the data centers in the world, but if society falls apart it will mean nothing and it will help nobody. You could talk all the effective altruist philosophy you want into Claude, but if the core thing it ends up doing is monetizing despair then the longtermist shit just doesn’t matter.

A slop tax would be a good start.

The most common misunderstanding of social media is that it’s a place for stupid people. I fight a crusade against this view by hysterically insisting memes are a complex artistic tradition worthy of study. But it’s also obvious in a commonsense way when you go on the internet.

TikTok did not flip the valence of global opinion about Israel because it was the app with an addictive algorithm where low-information voters dance to viral trends, but because it’s the app you go on to find out what it is like for a person living in a refugee camp. People can be mobilized online, people can learn to care about things they didn’t care about previously, and people online are, fundamentally, adults capable of taking responsibility for their world.

A recent Pew Research Center study surfaced a number of useful findings about online audiences. I love their work, but take issue with one interpretation of the data here, and want to discuss in this post how the issue with it is symptomatic of a larger problem in the way we conceive of publics, online or off:

When asked how often they seek out the news, about one-in-five young adults (22%) say they do so often or extremely often. Older adults are much more likely to intentionally seek out news.

But while young adults’ intentional news consumption is much lower, they are more likely to get news incidentally – that is, without looking for it. When it comes to political news, 70% of young adults say they get it because they happen to come across it, compared with 30% who seek it out. The oldest adults show the reverse pattern, with those 65 and older more likely to get news because they’re looking for it.

Social media is a common place for incidental news exposure – users often encounter news while using these platforms for other reasons.

Why do younger adults follow the news less closely? One possibility is that young adults are much less likely to feel attached to their community than their elders – which may help explain, or result from, their lower news consumption.

The issue here is a misunderstanding of how social media works. A 58-year-old news junkie tunes their TV set to CNN and watches whatever is being aired at that hour. A Reels user scrolls their feed while sitting on the toilet, “happens to come across” news content via algorithmic recommendation, and then decides on a video-by-video basis what to keep watching and what to move past, what to engage with by liking and commenting, what to amplify or not by sharing — all with an awareness that their engagement will change the nature of their scroll, that we “build our fyps brick by brick.” Properly understood, one behavior is not more or less intentional than the other. Each is passive and also participatory in its own ways.

The idea that online audiences are less engaged because of algorithmic recommendation flies in the face of everything we know about them and the algorithms. The last thing an algorithm wants is a passive viewer — it wants somebody who will engage, because that’s what they’re optimized for. The fact that on a 2 million view video half of my audience has scrolled away within ten seconds can be read as evidence of that audience’s shallowness of attention, or it could be read as evidence of 1 million people making an engaged choice about their media diet (that touches on a news topic) by deciding Aidan Walker should not be a part of it.

@aidanetceteraEpstein and JP Morgan Chase, find the article in NYT! #chase #bank #epstein

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In another sense, online public space is structured by strong parasocial attachments and intentional co-creation of niches and communities. The person who comes to believe Earth is flat because of exposure to bullshit on the internet is not passively brainwashed by an algorithm — they are very much a part of the process, “doing their own research” and forging fraught parasocial connections to various grifters. They are posting, commenting, sharing — they co-create, with a community, the otherworld they choose to inhabit.

By comparison, the Boomer watching CNN or reading the paper looks lazy. You watch the news on TV, and the best you can do is cluck your tongue and have the correct opinion. You watch the news on the scroll and you can be a part of making the news.

Read more

In a Politico Magazine article last month by Calder McHugh, “Charlie Kirk Memes Have Taken Over The Internet,” I was quoted saying:

“The internet wanted to take control of his image,” said Walker. “People took these Kirkification memes and used them as a way to destabilize whatever image [conservatives] wanted to create. And so I don’t think anyone will be able to look at Kirk 100 percent seriously now.”

I stand by that quote, but after saying it on the phone interview I wondered what I actually meant — why does control of an image matter so much? And, as an operation to take control of an image, why did Kirkification matter in its moment? The following post is in two sections, the first a sketch towards a general account of “the image” right now, and the second a more specific account of Kirk’s face as “an image.”

The Image: From Evidence to Engagement

People tend to think of images as superficial, less important than the real-world things they purport to represent. This tendency still seems to hold in political circles that are not MAGA or MAGA-adjacent. Whether it’s centrist Yglesiascels who declare “slow boring” policy questions matter more than flashy proposals, or leftists who ask “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays?” there is a default preference for the real thing over its representations. This preference is paradoxically (and predictably) intensified by the fact that it is usually a pose — “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Of course, a preference for the real thing is common sense. People should strive to not be exaggerating, lying, or submerging themselves in fantasy. But that common sense should be nuanced a little further in the contemporary moment because images are not what they used to be.

Images always had value as a means of persuasion, mobilization, and communication — not just as containers for arguments, ideas, and facts, but as particularly graceful and portable containers. They retain that value. But when images are posts first and pictures of things second (as they are today) they take on another kind of value which is more foreign and fickle. Paradoxically, the image today is both more and less material than it used to be, because it is a post first.

A post operates differently than a picture, even when the picture is also broadcasted on a screen. A post is a live document rather than a static slice of time. It is monetizable on the basis of precisely measured live engagement, tends to travel more swiftly and flexibly, bobs along without anchor on an opaque sea of algorithmic buzz. Additionally, the post is a site of exchange, interaction, and engagement. A viral reel, quote-tweeted meme, or photo of the bruise on the President’s hand is not just a representation of a thing, but a sparring-ground for commenters, a hook for the algorithm to bait, and a revenue source for its maker. The post is a volatile electron in the ever-roiling collider of social media platforms as much as it is a representation of the world.

Put otherwise, the post is an address (in both senses of the word) on the internet: a place where things can happen and money can be made, but also a moment at which algorithms and audiences may be called to attention. In this way, a post is more material than pictures on a broadcast, in a book, or in someone’s head are — it is live, present, and imbued with kinetic energy in a way mere images of things are not. But it is also less material because it is worse at representing real experience outside of the internet.

Ruby Justice Thelot writes in his essay “The Death of the Image”:

…when images overtake reality, they stop representing reality; they stop serving as evidence. They change and are no longer guides to make sense of the world. Rather, they exist as independent entities.

Thelot (who btw I was recently in conversation with in NYC for the release of my pamphlet On Skibidi) points out two frightening trends in visual culture: First, the rapid proliferation of AI generated pictures taken out of data rather than real visual experience and the accompanying possibility that there were more images generated by AI than there were taken by cameras last year; and second, the sense of “default fakeness” which accompanies the process of acquiring knowledge about the world through images on the internet today. Unlike in the past, everybody now thinks every image is fake-until-proven-otherwise — they always kind of were, as Susan Sontag taught us — but“pics or it didn’t happen” no longer applies because every day you see pics of things that never happened. My cherished mutual Jeremy Carrasco, an AI expert who forensically analyzes videos that followers send to him to determine if they are real or not, reports that 76% of all the videos people send him are actually real.

So maybe in 2026, the image can no longer “mean” primarily by reference to a thing in the world outside of itself because the delicate social contract which sustained the use of images as natural evidence has unravelled. Now, as a post, an image “means” primarily through the situations it participates in, by the engagement metrics and signals it gives off.

The same thing, it seems, has occurred with language to some degree, and the example below maybe illustrates it clearly. As I argued last week, the most meaningful two words in the text of the viral hype post about Clavicular’s behavior at the club are the clickable “show more” because the text matters more as a post soliciting engagement than as visual evidence of reality, which is simply a field where you farm posts.1

There is need for a larger analysis of the different ways our conventional use of images and language have been deranged in recent years. There are many similarities — each was disrupted by an AI innovation (image generators and LLMs respectively) and each are now funneled through social media platforms that distort them, their makers, their audiences. But there are also differences, both in the nature of visual expression versus linguistic expression, and (maybe) in the way algorithms process them, namely by breaking apart a post’s audio, visual, and metadata components and then weaving them back together.

But tabling that question for now, I want to say that both images (and language) are losing that evidence value and gaining value as engagement.2

In my two previous posts about Clavicular (and more or less throughout this blog), I have argued we’re entering a world where measurement by machines supplants meaning-making as a way of orienting ourselves in the world. Measurement derives from engagement, while meaning derives from evidence. I’m quoting myself here because I described this idea better in that previous post than I can now:

Meaning is dependent on who you ask, but measurement is dependent on what you do, or are. Rather than navigating weird, tangled, and unfair systems of human meaning-making, people like Clavicular choose to optimize for metrics. Instead of learning to talk to women, you simply do steroids because a person’s attractiveness can’t be a basket of mostly-intangible qualities, it must be a battery of measurable quantities — canthal tilt, facial width-to-height ratio, maxillary recession. And your only logical task in life is to “maxx” those metrics.

This way of thinking naturalizes (and reflects) the dominance of algorithms, which are constantly scanning the social world for stuff they can count and then resculpting that world so they can count it better and push the numbers to where companies would like them to be… the algorithm is not just a tool used by a platform on its users, but an all-around context into which everything — from economic transaction, to personal relationships, to our understanding of current events — is embedded, as essential to being a contemporary person as a body of water is to being a goose.

The goose-in-water-ness of the algorithmic order makes it, to my mind, a form of ideology in an Althusserian way — the thing which “interpellates us as subjects.” Ideology is not “conservative” or “liberal” here, but a technical term denoting the water the goose swims in.3 Ideology does not script our behavior so much as provide us the language we write our own lines in, the stage we perform on, and the standards of legibility which make us recognizable to the audience. Images, when serving as evidence, are valuable because they help us know who we are, who other people are, and what things in the world can be in relation to us. And after the advent of photography, images are a way for us to tell one another what and who is real, while pretending that it is not just us deciding that question of what is real.

But under a newer system — what I call “algorithmic ideology” in the Clav posts — it’s not as much about processes of social distinction, negotiation, and institutionalization which are elaborated by discourse and through evidence. Rather, a lot of the authority is with machines. Algorithms and AI (albeit with human input) decide what is seen and what is relevant. The image-as-post is crucial to this newer system of measurement because it becomes the probe stuck into the social body to determine how things are shaped at a given moment. What mark the image left in the data set, what conversations it has sparked, and what calculations it has changed constitute the main ways that it alters the world/your experience of it.

Two things to add. First, this shift isn’t entirely a rupture: images in the old way always were a little like posts, and posts in the new way can still serve as evidence if people choose to read them like that. Things are blurred. Second, this is neither progress nor decline — it is shitty, but so was the old system; it has its merits, but so did the old system. Both progress and decline narratives about the internet are lazy, unproductive bullshit. For a quarter century, everyone told an uncritical progress story about technology, and now that it seems tech is kind of evil, they’ve just inverted it and are now telling a story of regression, blaming the phones for everything. This is a good way to get views, but it is not a good way to understand the world. The interesting consequential thing is not whether phone is good or bad, but that phone is here and we can decide how to use it.

An Image: Charlie Kirk, from Poster Boy to Posted Brainrot

People are deciding how to use the phone and the networks it gives them access to every day, in real time. Memes are examples of these usages.

I set this whole thing up about a thousand words ago to talk about Kirkification, and after all this stuff about “the image” it’s time to turn to “an image,” by which I mean Charlie Kirk’s face, which was everywhere on the internet in the last few months of 2025.

Kirk was undoubtedly famous before he was killed. But it’s safe to say that the majority of images ever produced of Kirk, by volume, were produced in the last four months. I couldn’t open TikTok from September up until a few weeks ago without seeing Kirk’s face. Many, if not most, of these images were made using AI, were clearly not real, and were never intended by their makers to seem real. In other words, these images had no evidence-value — instead, they had engagement-value. The meaningful thing was the post’s participation in the “Kirkification trend” — and then the hundreds, thousands, often millions of likes, comments, saves, and reposts also participating in the trend through engagement with the post.

In the following weeks, memes moved beyond the core Kirkification trend (which I described in a previous post) and Kirk was shoehorned into other lores, formats, and meme-making traditions. Charlie Kirk is in the Agartha lore for the same reasons the word “skibidi” is in “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler / you’re so skibidi / you’re so fanum tax.” Each of these elements is a piece taken from a different viral meme familiar to the audience and proven to generate engagement.

But it should be mentioned that meaning is not entirely evacuated, because there is an adjacency in terms of niche: Kirk fits alongside Yakub, the idea of Agartha, and the white pharaoh because he comes from rightwing internet vibes, just as Skibidi fits with gyatt and fanum tax because, like those other terms, it comes from online brainrot vibes. So the logic of combining different viral memes together is not random, but based on niches.

A more direct example (since, like “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler,” it is word-centric) might be the slangmaxxing trend of “lowkirkenuinely.” Adam Aleksic’s analysis of this is amazing, and I’d follow his lead in calling it microbrainrot. Like many meta-memes, it emerged later than the primary memes made after Kirk’s death, coming about in November. At first, “lowkenuinely” (lowkey + genuinely) was coined, and then “Kirk” was interjected by others — performing verbally to the new slang word what the Kirkifcation trend performed visually to the faces of the people on the internet. The meme trend then followed the crescendo logic that many memes do: lowkirkenuinely (lowkey + Kirk + genuinely) becomes “lowkirkentologixsevenlowstate” (lowkey + Kirk + genuinely + ontological + 67 + flow state). It should be noted that the lengthy, drawn-out explanations of an arcane linguistic code here are presaged by “Onika=Burgers” and other memes of that nature — just as the characteristic appearance of Kirk microbrainrot on TikTok (the poster’s face concealed behind a wall of explanatory text) calls back to other formats of posting.

But the important thing is that the component pieces of the word are more meaningful as elements that have been crammed together in a ridiculous way to demonstrate whimsy and algorithmic overload than as expressions of semantic sense. At this point, engagement value is made to replace evidence value. I see this as an example of a work of art serving to expose, through provocation, a tendency that typically remains underexpressed — this meme trend is about how you can be meaningless as evidence but eminently meaningful as engagement. To steal a phrase that Ruby Justice Thelot used when we were discussing 6-7 during the On Skibidi panel, it’s “playing with the physics of internet, but with no particles — usually you have to adopt some kind of meaning or signified you’re pointing at…”

I love this metaphor and was thinking of it when, about a thousand words ago, I described the post as “a volatile electron in the ever-roiling collider of social media platforms as much as it is a representation of the world.” I don’t know a lot about physics, but I am led to think electrons are a kind of subatomic particle without mass — but which still have certain effects on other particles and the forces that bind or break apart atoms, molecules, and the world. Engagement, then, could be understood as a kind of electrical current — both in the literal sense that it happens through electricity, and in a more figurative sense that exists as a type of static between ideas, words, and images. The power of electricity to generate force was understood in ancient times — people saw lightning, were shocked by static after petting their cats — but it was not really instrumentalized until the Industrial Revolution. A similar shift may be happening with the power of images: evidence-value is like water power, horse power, or combustion, but engagement-value may be like electrical power — a property previously invisible but now emphasized by a new technology.

And so taking control of Kirk’s image through engagement — reversing the current, to perhaps irresponsibly extend my metaphor — might be seen as a new way of articulating power and persuasion. Those who idealize Kirk have not been refuted or silenced so much as they have seen the discursive field shift around them, moved by opaque currents of engagement that alter how and why things may mean. And it is far from the first or last time that has happened to an image.

I’m sorry that I’m talking to you about Clavicular again. There was enough material from last post that I’ve decided to reformulate what was cut into its own thing. Most of that material was looking at Clavicular in a broader historical context, so this post is less about him and more about the world around him.

Jamie Cohen, over at New Media Homework, wrote an excellent post called we are entering the era of Show More, pointing out how “2016 was the foundation of this world,” and highlighting a piece of found poetry in a viral tweet: “We are entering the era of Show more.”

“JESTERMAXXING,” for those unaware, means being a silly little guy. “Show more” is both the essential dictum of algorithmic social media and the place where the intention of the entire exercise is clearest: it’s all about the blue text you’re supposed to click on, the engagement. Those are the two most meaningful words in the post.

Cohen correctly notes that today’s manosphere streamers are running the same plays that people like Milo Yiannopolous ran in 2016. It’s just that after two Trump administrations and a decade of enshittification, the mainstream culture that would have cancelled them, contained them, or debated them — and whose indignation they farmed for engagement — is more decayed. Boundary pushing is only interesting when the boundary is maintained, so the transgressive influencers have to attempt ever-more glaring transgressions to get the same attentional harvest.

That wasn’t true ten years ago. Back then, all you had to do was call fat women ugly on television to get a hundred thousand followers in the rightwing social media space. Now you have to throw a Sieg Heil. Perhaps in another decade, you will have to kill somebody. Or maybe we’re already there, given cherished mutual Drew Harwell’s reporting at The Washington Post about ICE’s clipfarming and content creation push.

This transgression curve is unsustainable. It will end in disaster. It will self-immolate. These guys are going to catch charges, overdose — they always talk about how the deep state will get them, but they’ll get got by themselves first.

Prior to his Jestermaxxing, Clavicular sat down with Sneako and Nick Fuentes for an hourlong stream in search of controversy. The stream to me is what you call a “rich text” for thinking about how the attention economy (and nihilistic radical politics) have evolved.

Elder Zoomers vs. the youth

For most of the time, 27-year-old Sneako sat silently, grunting now and then as 27-year-old Fuentes and 21-year-old Clav debated. Sneako, never much of a thinker, may have had nothing to say. He also had the dissociated air of somebody who’s stoned and going nonverbal. As Fuentes offered racist tirades, and Clav rambled about rugged individualism, Sneako languidly scanned the flurries of comments from various freaks on the internet blowing into the screen and looked like a lost little boy.

Both Fuentes and Sneako were born in 1998, the same year I was. They were conscious of being young men (or at least large boys) in 2016 when the derangement of public discourse really became visible. Clav was born in 2005, and was eleven when that all started. By the time he entered puberty, the looksmaxxers had been bonesmashing for years.

Age was a major part of the discussion: Fuentes jokingly called himself and Sneako “uncs” and sought to impart wisdom to Clav. Both are creatures of an earlier era of the internet — Fuentes rose to prominence with the Groyper Wars of 2019, and Sneako is a former MrBeast employee who pivoted to street interviews (of the type that spawned Hawk Tuah girl) and then sprinted down a darker path.

Fuentes, after years in the wilderness, is now at a place of new prominence, largely because everybody talked about him after Charlie Kirk’s killing. Clips from his livestream show routinely get views across X, and he’s taken to imitating the style of rightwing pundits like Tucker Carlson as he rants white nationalist talking points.

He is keenly aware of the lineage he’s trying to break into. In the livestream, he described getting offered a sponsorship deal from a gold brand and wanting to take it precisely because conservative commentator Mark Levin (a mainstream Boomer rightwing figure) once had the same sponsorship and Fuentes wishes to “mog” him. His suit-and-tie get up, along with his elevated way of speaking, also indicate that success for him means breaking into the “respectable” world: In other words, walked so Nick Fuentes could run. His longterm animosity towards Charlie Kirk, who to him seems to have represented an internet forum-born political project subordinating itself to the desires of Boomer rightwing donors, might be seen in this light. Fuentes wants the Boomers to bend the knee to white nationalist shitposters.

To the extent Fuentes has a coherent project, it’s about institutionalizing a structure that advantages white men even more than it already does. His “theory of change” corresponds neatly to that of Stephen Miller or other terminally-online Trumpworld figures: transformation-through-coercion of the government, media, and markets to perpetuate racism. Fuentes’ pitch to young people frames this as a response to institutional decline, while Clavicular sees little appeal:

FUENTES: People used to say ‘oh, go touch grass.’ But what we’re starting to see is that back in the day, you could sort of ignore the decaying political situation. But as time goes on, it’s getting harder and harder to ignore in terms of the overall decline in quality of life, the rapid diversification of the country…

CLAV: I feel like I’ve sort of transcended all those issues, though.

Returning to the kind of analysis I did last post, I think this exchange corresponds to the overall idea of an algorithmic ideology replacing an institutional ideology. There used to be grass you could go and touch, a viable way of life outside the screen — but now there isn’t. Elder Zoomers vaguely remember that world, but for Clavicular’s age cohort, arrived at adulthood in the horns of a polycrisis nobody can deny, the political situation is not “decaying,” the political situation has always been fucked as a default. So the only sources of purpose or profit are the self and the social media machine.

This is nihilism-by-default rather than nihilism-by-disillusionment, and that is the salient difference between Elder Zoomers and Young Zoomers.

The LARP of it all

At this point, I risk taking these men too seriously. None of them are operating within reality or offering a sincere critique. They are each performing an ideological LARP that has become their life and they cannot turn back from it. They have burned every bridge back to the normal world and gone all in on content.

Part of the audience pleasure, to my mind, comes from this knowledge: both Clavicular and Fuentes are entirely dependent on their viewers. Much has been made about the sadomaschocistic dynamic between Fuentes and the “pay pigs” that listen to him and take his verbal abuse on stream, but the manipulation goes both ways. For each of these men, there is no meaningful relationship in their lives other than the one with their audience. They are purely devoted to a constituency of slimy, broken people in the way that nuns are married to Christ. And each of these men, at this point, could never get a normal job. So all of their actions should be assessed as the moves of a man with his back to the wall and a loaded gun pointed at his head: they are desperate, and kept in a state of desperation by an attention economy that needs them to be in that position, by a transgression curve that calls for ever-more horrendous stunts.

Each man is a kind of martyr. They inflict suffering on themselves to prove devotion to something immaterial. Like the mystic self-flagellating, or the stigmatic continually reopening the wounds on their hands so they remain gory for the faithful to see, Clavicular and Fuentes turn their lives, their bodies, into material proof of an abstract principle’s power. They strike, isolate, scar, and maim themselves to illustrate the supremacy of the simulation and its digital representations over the reality which their audience loathes.

When you think about their biographies, this dynamic is even clearer. Both Fuentes and Clav are upper-class boys who got kicked out of university because their lives on the internet got in the way of their lives in the system, and they chose the internet. College was a family-imposed attempt at normality, and each man experienced dropping out as a Rubicon-crossing, when they chose the simulated world over their real-life career prospects, community, and network — the ideology of algorithms over the ideology of institutions. As Clavicular said:

I got kicked out of college for you know, roiding, taking testosterone. I had the option to potentially get reinstated if I proved I wasn’t taking the roids, but I said, ‘No, fuck that. I’m gonna continue with with my looksmaxing, with my steroids.’ So I feel like that’s more character than anything. I’m fully willing to sacrifice my degree for looksmaxxing. It’s how much I valued it.

The appeal is almost like a LOLcow, and both men are talked about in that way. Clavicular is a performance artist. His body is a canvas and the medley of drugs and mutilations he does are the paint. The picture he’s creating is one of the modern man under algorithmic ideology: a creature surrounded by suffering on all sides, who feels so out of control of his life that he seeks to inflict suffering upon himself as a last-ditch effort to choose his own destiny.

For some audience members — like me — he is interesting because you feel like you are better than them, and most people certainly are. But he’s also like a thought experiment: what if all you cared about was content? What if you didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone, totally disregarded the future, and just “maxxed”? How far could you go? I am, perhaps to an unproductive degree, darkly fascinated to see how far he can go because the distance he travels will be an exact measurement of how broken the old world is. Our task is not to repair that break or decelerate the transgression curve, but to find something new that can take its place. The work now is to measure and prepare.

Everything you could say about Clavicular — the 20-year-old looksmaxxer who is one of the internet’s first main characters of 2026 — feels optimized for algorithmic traction. He has lived his life in order to be a hook for a social media post.

That’s why he hits himself in the face with a hammer, does methamphetamine for “hollow cheeks,” has taken so many steroids he’s rendered his body incapable of producing its own testosterone, and meticulously documents and posts all of it. That’s also why he’s been collabing a lot lately with Sneako, a degenerate dirtbag who has been one of Ye’s few friends after the whole Nazi thing, as well Nick Fuentes, groyper commandant and little freak white supremacist who has seized a viral moment over the last few months.

On stream with Sneako this past week, Clavicular (real name Braden Peters) appeared to get a text from his (purportedly) 17-year-old girlfriend saying she was pregnant. Later, while streaming themselves sipping drinks at a restaurant, he said to Sneako:

CLAV: Maybe I’ll have a kid, though. That’d be a W segment.

SNEAKO: Bro, your brain’s so cooked. Having a kid as a segment?

CLAV: Well, all I think about is content, I’m sorry bro. Like dude, I literally only think about content, you’ve gotta understand.

SNEAKO: Having a kid is a good collab.

The next night he was at the club with Sneako, Nick Fuentes, and Andrew Tate blasting Ye’s “Heil Hitler.” Clips of the group saluting at a club went viral across X and other platforms. It was a “good collab.” Tate, the only person in the clip who didn’t seem to be into the song, had this to say:

It was played because it gets traction in a world where everybody is bored of everything all of the time, and that’s why these young people are encouraged constantly to try and do the most shocking thing possible… you see this on all their streams, they’re running people over, doing retarded shit constantly…

“Running people over” would seem to refer specifically to Clavicular, who hit somebody with his Cybertruck during a Christmas Eve livestream leading to a temporary ban from Kick (charges appear to have not been pressed).

Three days later, he appeared on a rightwing podcast with normie 50-something host Michael Knowles, and explained that he preferred Gavin Newsom to JD Vance because Newsom is a “6’3 Chad” and Vance is “fat and ugly.” Clips of that went viral online. Clavicular also shared on a stream that he’d turned down an invite to a Peter Thiel party because “that’s like a Diddy party” and “you have to have something wrong with you to have made that much money.”

I’m not a clinician, but I’d say he’s likely a psychopath and a drug addict — and partying with Nick Fuentes isn’t really that much better than partying with Peter Thiel. But what’s really going on here?

We should take Clavicular at his word that all he thinks about is content. To some extent, the same is true of Sneako, Tate, and Fuentes — to understand this particular strain of online political life, you have to understand they are always clip-farming.

But you shouldn’t see these figures as disengaged from ideology because they treat the real world solely as a field in which to sow content and reap online engagement. Instead, Clav’s total submission to content is an ideology in itself — and an increasingly influential one.

When everything is content, everything is measurement first and meaning second. “Hitler” is primarily a keyword denoting reliable engagement, not a name denoting immense evil. Hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is rational because it makes more people watch your Kick stream.

Meaning is dependent on who you ask, but measurement is dependent on what you do, or are. Rather than navigating weird, tangled, and unfair systems of human meaning-making, people like Clavicular choose to optimize for metrics. Instead of learning to talk to women, you simply do steroids because a person’s attractiveness can’t be a basket of mostly-intangible qualities, it must be a battery of measurable quantities — canthal tilt, facial width-to-height ratio, maxillary recession. And your only logical task in life is to “maxx” those metrics.

This way of thinking naturalizes (and reflects) the dominance of algorithms, which are constantly scanning the social world for stuff they can count and then resculpting that world so they can count it better and push the numbers to where companies would like them to be. The algorithm does to a discussion what Clavicular does to his face — a series of micro-fractures, delivered repeatedly and with precision, in the hopes that it will match a target number. The algorithm is not just a tool used by a platform on its users, but an all-around context into which everything — from economic transaction, to personal relationships, to our understanding of current events — is embedded, as essential to being a contemporary person as a body of water is to being a goose.

Contentmaxxing might be understood as a kind of ideology. Ideology, according to the definition offered by Louis Althusser, is that which “interpellates individuals as subjects.” Quoting from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s gloss:

What Althusser meant by this formula is that ideology constitutes and calls to us as agents, providing the framework and orientation within which we experience ourselves (and one another) as centers of action beholden to normative demands. According to Althusser, ideology can perform this function only because it is always embedded in ritual practices and institutions.

Where Clavicular ties into all this is on the level of “ritual practices and institutions.” In the past, to be popular as a 19-year-old meant you did cool shit, were invited to things, and succeeded at performing the rituals and being within the institutions (sports teams, clubs, social circles) that matter for teenagers. Nowadays, to be popular is measured by engagement from friends in the form of text messages, likes, followers, and Snap streaks. The ritual practices of social media and the platform (rather than the institution) are what you read to attain a vision of yourself and the world.

Each of these ideologies employs different techniques. In the old-school world, taste (“looking cool”) mattered as a way for ideology to express itself, as did various rituals of institutional accreditation. In the new world, it’s all about surveillance, algorithms, and attention-getting. Both of these ideologies purport to reflect reality — and to some extent they do, as it is translated through those techniques and according to the interests of the people winning the game. My sense of what being “cool” means, if I was raised within that old-school ideology, is conditioned by the way our society views disability, race, class, and gender as well as the actual coolness of someone. The same holds true for algorithmic ideology: the sense of what “cool” means is conditioned by the way the technology views us, expresses us and elaborates the simulated world it has made — which it largely does through measurement of engagement metrics.

The ideology Clavicular expresses is anti-meaning, a kind of digital nihilism. He wants to show there are no norms, laws, institutions, or traditions stronger than the algorithm’s kayfabe market, its shallow snap judgments, and what an unrestrained individual can make of them. There is no base of power other than the hyper-optimized self, no community and no constraint. It is a radical opposition to things like taste, institutional credibility, family, and collective existence; and a radical embrace of the cold, individualistic world-model of the algorithm. Perhaps most of all, it’s a rejection of the human body as it exists among other bodies, expressed through the mutilation of it to satisfy what the algorithm wants to see. The gamble is that through strategic amoral conniving, you can win the game — but nobody is really responsible for anything that happens in the end, because it’s all the machine, the matrix, the way things “have” to be.

Proclaiming “Heil Hitler” in a club or striking yourself in the head with a hammer both break foundational taboos of the old-school ideology which used to run things in the Western world. Facing no real consequence for either taboo-breakage — instead, finding fast fame and financial success from them — is proof of that older ideology’s vanishing. Club promoters hasten to ban Sneako, Clavicular, and Fuentes, preventing them from ever coming back, but it doesn’t matter. A hundred thousand people are still watching the livestream. And they weren’t ever there to dance, to talk to people, to order bottle service — they were there to mog, to be filmed and to post, since that’s what you measure.

Last year, I felt like I stood on the other side of a line I would never get across. I think this, in a general sense, is kind of the experience of being Gen Z — if one could possibly

Read more