An edgelord out of time

—by Adam Bumas

The buzzy new video game Mewgenics has caused a lot of controversy since its release last week — mainly for its voice cast. Across the game’s long public development, over 100 people, most of them only known to the very online, have recorded meowing noises for the game. (It’s a turn-based roguelike featuring randomly-generated cats who you breed and raise to become party members.) The final list of voice actors includes mortal enemies, convicted felons, empty provocateurs, and Rivers Cuomo.

In other words, the game has arrived with a lot of baggage. Which is, likely, what the game’s creator was hoping for.

Edmund McMillen, lead developer of Mewgenics, has always been fairly subversive. He's been making games about mutant, pooping, emotionally abused babies since the 2000s. They were just the right mix of juvenile and adult — with well-designed gameplay supporting all the attention-grabbing edgelord stuff — to appeal to the Dr. McNinja era of the internet. But we are not in the Dr. McNinja era of the internet anymore and it’s made McMillen’s press tour for Mewgenics a little confusing.

Speaking to The Verge, he said he wants the game’s use of mental disorders as stat modifiers to be a serious statement about neurodivergence. But when he was asked about the “problematic” figures in the game’s cast, like Ethan Klein and his wife, or both the notorious Christine Chan and one of her serial harassers, he said he was “exploring” clashing ideologies. How bold! Should we throw a party? Should we invite Francis Ford Coppola?

The important missing piece of information here is that Mewgenics has been in development since 2012. Long before Gamergate and the online right changed what it meant to be provocative. Making McMillen both an edgelord out of time and, also, a fairly useful yardstick for how much things have changed over the last decade. McMillen sat down to make Mewgenics right at the start of the woke era and is now releasing it at what is, very possibly, the end of it.

It’s not just right-wingers declaring that “woke is dead” right now. There is an entire contingent of mostly liberals and leftists who are currently searching for a new form of progressive-coded behavior that can match the blunt aggression they’re seeing from Trump World. (The fact this is happening amid a larger nostalgic yearning for a “2016 reset” over on TikTok really just confirms my theory that we all want a mulligan on the last decade.)

Over the past month, the term “Dark Woke,” or “Woke 2.0,” as it’s sometimes called, has started to appear in serious publications like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, describing recent political rhetoric getting coarser and more inflammatory. The problem is, none of them can agree on any clear definition. Are Gaza protestors Dark Woke? Is Ryan Geddie’s “Evelyn Normielib” Dark Woke? Vanity Fair is using “Woke 2.0” to describe the entire continuum of the year’s anti-Trump efforts, from organizing in Minnesota to angry posts on Bluesky — very helpful, thanks. 

Luke Winkie in Slate has the most concrete view I’ve seen, describing Dark Woke as an abandonment of “circumspect language temperance” by prominent voices in the Democratic party. And it’s true there’s been a lot of vulgarity from Democrat officials recently. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to get the fuck out last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called her opponent “full of shit” a month before that. Even beyond the profanity, Rep. Jasmine Crockett is comparing ICE to slave patrols. And Winkie, like many others, lumps in the continued campaign of former Redditor Graham Platner. And so, we must ask, is Mewgenics dark woke? Or is it, as many users claim, just problematic? And is that distinction even worth engaging with?

When looking at culture as a whole since the early 2010s, the center of gravity everywhere has moved further and further towards the right, politically. It’s something no one seems to want to acknowledge amid all the 2016 nostalgia for Pokémon Go and Snapchat you might be seeing on TikTok right now. What we’re calling Millennial optimism largely just means, “stuff that wasn’t ruined by online Neo-Nazis.” The fact that everyone is trying to define some new, edgier form of wokeness they’re calling “Dark Woke” is part of all of this. A desire to literally try and redo wokeness. “Dark Woke” could be a needed update for American progressives, a necessary evolution to survive in a more politically combative era. But one could also argue that not even wokeness itself was immune to the larger shift rightward. It’s Nick Fuentes’ world, we’re all just, unfortunately, living in it.

If this is all starting to feel fuzzy in your head, don’t worry, that’s my point. And something like Mewgenics proves how confusing this has gotten. Standards and cultural norms matter, both for those who want to uphold them and even for those who want to challenge them. You can’t subvert something if you can’t identify it!

A year ago, writing in GQ, Kieran Press-Reynolds dismissed Dark Woke as “a flimsy patchwork of amorphous vibes, a la cottagecore.” The idea has gained a lot of attention since then, and we surely haven’t seen the last of it. But when even a video game about mutant cats has to deal with how online culture evolves, it’s worth trying to understand that evolution. To use an outdated phrase, Dark Woke ain’t it, chief.

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As I wrote earlier this month, China opened the floodgates on AI filmmaking last year. And ByteDance’s newest video model Seedance 2.0 is the first one I’ve seen that can reliably generate scenes that look and feel like scenes. Rather than the glorified trailer clips or surreal brainrot that western models like OpenAI’s Sora creates.

Because China has leaned so fully into AI moviemaking we’re actually getting some answers to questions that, well, I was wondering about. Like what would happen if someone who was actually creative and not a sub-human CHUD used an AI model to make something?

Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke released a short film this week made entirely with Seedance 2.0 and it was done well enough that I assumed at least parts of it were shot with human beings. The narrative of the short film added to the confusion, it’s largely a conversation between Zhangke and an AI version of Zhangke — who were both, it turns out, AI generated. If you watch it, it all makes sense.

Visually, it’s a little rough. Some movements and bits of dialogue are a little jank. And there’s certainly some unrealness to a lot of it. But it’s an interesting exercise, nonetheless.

Zhangke’s script, which is pretty tight, and so I assume it wasn’t written by AI, includes a really interesting moment towards the end. His AI version tells him that in the future it’ll be the one doing all of the work and the human version of him will simply be the brain. “You want me to be your client,” human Zhangke asks. “I’ve spent my whole life hating my clients.”

The entire world is now run on clips of longer videos that no one is watching the entirety of, which is causing plenty of unforeseen consequences. Making matters worse, most of these longer videos are made by content creators that don’t really have the same reward structures as traditional journalists. Journalism, especially the political kind, has always been a bit of an access game, but in an attention economy that’s even more pronounced. You’re really leveraging a high-profile guest’s network effect to grow your own. So the content of what people are making in these long videos that become short clips doesn’t really matter for anyone involved. All that matters is that they show up to the taping. Anyways, this is all background for how former President Barack Obama ended up claiming that aliens were real over the weekend.

It was in a clip from recent interview/podcast thingy from very popular lib YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen. During a “speed round” Obama said that, yes, he thinks aliens are real. Cohen did not ask any followups to this!!! Because, like I said above, he has no reason to. And someone like Obama wouldn’t go on his show if he did. But, luckily, Obama was nice enough to do a little journalism on himself once people, understandably, went fucking mental over a president saying aliens exist. He wrote on Instagram, “I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Thanks Obama!

So we all kind of know that the right wing whips up culture war garbage to distract people from whatever deeply unpopular evil thing they’re working, but Argentine X users — and some genuine news outlets — have recently taken things to a fairly whacky extreme.

There are massive protests in Argentina currently, as the far-right government led by Libertarian wolfman redditor President Javier Milei tries to dismantle workers’ rights. Which times up perfectly with a current moral panic in the country over furries, but, more specifically, therians.

For those of you who don’t remember the mid-2000s, therians were a small subculture adjacent to furries. Furries dress up in big animal costumes, while therians believe, on some level, they are that animal.

So if you see Spanish-language X posts about furries this week, remember what I always say: The extremely online culture wars of the 2010s and 2020s were dreamed up by a cabal of pedophiles and are meant to distract you from oligarchs ransacking the social safety net.

An orphaned baby monkey at the Ichikawa Zoo in Japan named パンチ, or Punch, is currently trying to integrate with the larger monkey population. He’s very nervous and he carries around a stuffed animal of a monkey and sleeps on it. I love him very much and I will have a complete breakdown if he’s not accepted by the other monkeys at the zoo.

P.S. here’s a real bop.

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