An endless feed of celebrities eating chicken wings

Last week, I wrote about a theory I had been cooking up for a while. That “pre-deplatforming” might be the new shortcut to coolness. Social media is the establishment now and not being on it — or using it in extremely inappropriate ways — will be increasingly attractive to the fickle 20-somethings that decide what culture looks like.

It was one of the few issues I’ve published here that resulted in literal phone calls from people after it was published. Which makes me think I was on to something. The Onion’s CEO Ben Collins called it “a post so smart I'm almost afraid to share it.” Which was very nice. I also forgot that The Onion pre-deplatformed late last year with their guerrilla screening of their movie Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile. And well-known tech blogger Cory Doctorow connected my post to William Gibson’s predictions of a “recommodification machine” from the late 90s.

The question at the heart of my piece, though — what does the future of cool look like? — was on my mind while reading Vanity Fair’s “The New Late Night” feature over the weekend. It focuses on podcasters and video creators like Brittany Broski (the kombucha girl), Kareem Rahma from Subway Takes, Chicken Shop Date’s Amelia Dimoldenberg, comedian Ziwe, and Sean Evans from Hot Ones. To follow my argument on pre-deplatforming — the new social media establishment.

Vanity Fair’s piece arrives about 10 years after Vanity Fair’s last mass-canonization event of “late night,” when they declared people (men) like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, and Bill Maher the “new late light.” Of the 10 hosts they wrote about back in 2015, only five of them are kinda-sorta still hosting traditional late night shows and Kimmel is the only one without some kind of podcast. Which makes me think that the cultural moment that Vanity Fair correctly wrote about last week — that late night shows were replaced by celebrities eating chicken wings — is either currently peaking or, possibly, already over. The next version of Chicken Shop Dates or Subway Takes will probably not arrive neatly packaged on a YouTube channel or an Instagram account. And I can use Vanity Fair’s 2015 “new late night” piece to prove it.

American late night shows work pretty well as a yardstick for the larger culture industry, actually. The format — a host, maybe a co-host, a band, a monologue, some celebrity interviews, and maybe a musical guest — started unraveling when Jay Leno stole The Tonight Show back from O’Brien, retired in 2014, and gave it to Jimmy Fallon. An aside here, but I sort of think that Hot Ones’ cultural relevancy peaked with O’Brien’s 2024 episode, which effectively broke the show, and Hot Ones is sort of dying a long death now. In this way, I’ve come to see O’Brien as the grim reaper of media lol.

Fallon’s big innovation was turning The Tonight Show into something that could work, primarily, on YouTube. This largely meant replacing traditional interview segments with “games.” These games required very little context, which platforms hate, and, once clipped, looked indistinguishable from videos you’d see from popular YouTubers or digital media outlets. And the majority of late night hosts that Vanity Fair profiled back in 2015 were unraveling late night in similar ways. John Oliver quickly ditched the interview segment (I attended a taping of one of his first episodes, which featured an unaired interview with a journalist and it was not great). Now Oliver’s Last Week Tonight is effectively a very expensive weekly YouTube essay. Trevor Noah, after hitting a wall with The Daily Show, started experimenting with unscripted crowd work. O’Brien eventually ditched his band and cut his TBS show down to 30 minutes, before throwing himself entirely into podcasting. And James Corden unleashed the evil that is Carpool Karaoke upon the world before we exiled him back to England to make more episodes of Gavin & Stacey. We have Josh Gad at home! We don’t need you!!!

Vanity Fair’s new crop of late night hosts have taken what was already unraveled by those hosts and unraveled it further. Decoupled from TV entirely, these “shows” now exist everywhere and, somehow, nowhere. Most of them are filmed in simple studios — or sometimes just out on the sidewalk or on a subway. And they’ve been condensed into basically just repeatable single segments that celebrities can be easily slotted into. Almost every creator profiled by Vanity Fair last week told them the same story about how their show took off. They experimented with formats until they found one the algorithm liked.

And so, if you’re trying to imagine what comes next for media, you merely have to ask, what can be cut out of the equation? Or you can ask, at what point does this continued unraveling of entertainment result in something that no longer functions as either entertainment or a viable business? How long can you keep whittling down whatever you’re making before you cross the threshold into slop? And what happens when platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram squeeze so much blood from the stone that young people are simply forced to go elsewhere? You can see the answers to these questions being worked out as we speak. Because it’s very obvious that we have reached a point where there isn’t much left to cut.

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No we know, it can be really bad. Burning hellscape, that community GIF of the room on fire, the “5 to 9 after the 9 to 5” TikToks and it’s people going to the gym and eating ground beef in the dark, bad.

Do you ever wonder why… work sucks SO MUCH for SO MANY people? Or why meetings make you want to scream, why your manager’s acting weird, or how to say “no thank you” to replacing yourself with chatgpt?

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You know how Garbage Day makes you feel smarter and less alone? Imagine that, but for work. Subscribe and be the smartest person in the group chat.

The Wall Street Journal published a pretty incredible story this weekend about the internal debate within OpenAI about whether or not they should alert Canadian law enforcement about what mass shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar was posting inside of ChatGPT. Jesse Van Rootselaar’s account was banned last summer and OpenAI never notified authorities about what she was telling the chatbot.

According to the WSJ article, Van Rootselaar’s account didn’t just trigger automated flags, but nearly a dozen OpenAI employees manually reviewed it and discussed reporting to law enforcement. Van Rootselaar killed eight people in a mass shooting earlier this month.

404 Media reported last week that Van Rootselaar created a mall shooting simulator in Roblox. A spokesperson for Roblox told CNN that the game had only been viewed seven times (as if that’s the point here).

The actual point is that both ChatGPT and Roblox are not traditional social platforms. We are very used to the social media wild goose chases that happen after mass shootings, where users scour public platforms for content that might provide some kind of insight into why the attack happened. The unspoken hope being that if we had just caught it in time, things may have been different. To say nothing of all the would-be attackers that are reported to law enforcement in time because of their Facebook or X posts. But apps like ChatGPT and Roblox are not simple feed-based platforms. They are far more reactive and personalized and we are quickly discovering how hard they will be to moderate.

A redditor going by u/ostaylor posted, and then deleted, a complaint to the subreddit for Marriott hotels yesterday about late checkout in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Just for context, the city is under siege right now after Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, the drug lord better known as El Mencho, was killed by Mexican armed forces yesterday. His cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), is now ransacking cities across western Mexico.

I found a couple copies of u/ostaylor’s post. They said they were mad that, as a platinum elite member of Marriott Bonvoy, the hotel wouldn’t allow them to extend late checkout until 4 PM. “Worst Bonvoy property, I have ever experienced,” they wrote.

You can read a thread with all the other r/Marriott users making fun of them here.

—by Adam Bumas

In the week before its first season finale, The Dunk and Egg Show (or Game of Thrones: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, if we must) was popular in such a specifically 2010s way that we have to say it broke the internet. The season’s penultimate episode, “In The Name of the Mother”, was so well-received that the night it aired, it was only the second TV episode in history to average a perfect 10/10 from IMDB’s user reviews. The first, of course, was Breaking Bad’s climactic “Ozymandias”, which has kept its perfect rating on the site for over a decade. 

We’re sure everyone who considers it a personal duty to maintain IMDB high scores is very popular and emotionally healthy. Hypothetically, though, if they were a bunch of aging millennials too sigma to move on to Peaky Blinders, they’d be affronted by some jousting show coming for their crown. Which would explain why the past week has seen some of IMDB’s most sustained and furious downvoting wars not involving superheroes.

Internet Archive snapshots show the Breaking Bad fans got their way fast, with the “...Mother” average rating dropping to 9.8/10 less than 24 hours after the show aired. But the war had begun, and for days both episodes saw thousands of angry 1/10 reviews. Enough to get around the systems set up to discourage review-bombing, and leave the rating for “Ozymandias” shattered and half-sunk within a few days, exactly how this happened last time with The Dark Knight. Really makes you wonder why Letterboxd is so slow to keep their promise of adding TV shows, right?

Parents in Belfast, Northern Ireland, reportedly walked out of a K-Pop arena show over the weekend. They took to TikTok to complain that the show, a variety show of cover acts, was not solely about KPop Demon Hunters, which I guess is what they assumed.

At first, I thought this was another AI rugpull, like the Scottish Willy Wonka event, which happened in 2024. But no, K-Pop Forever! was billed as, “smash-hits including songs inspired by K-Pop Demon Hunters.” So I guess a lot of these angry parents didn’t know K-Pop is a massive industry of different artists (and genres) and not just, like, a cartoon, I guess.

Finding the original TikToks from angry parents has become kind of tricky, however, because K-Pop fans were quick to turn the whole into a meme. So there’s hundreds of videos now of actual K-Pop groups, captioned by users that they aren’t real K-Pop. You can click here to see what I mean.

P.S. here’s a good walking video.

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