Brooklynites posted their way to a new bus, kinda

Note: Ryan’s taking a well-deserved holiday break today. This is Adam’s issue.

This week brings us a new milestone in the internet bleeding into real life. For two weeks, starting tomorrow, there will be a free public bus route in New York City that wouldn’t exist without a round of discourse on X from earlier this month.

This isn’t an official part of the city’s public transit, it’s a pop-up by the skincare brand The Ordinary. But the website for “The Ordinary Bus” treats it like serious municipal infrastructure. Which means that today I get to talk about New York’s MTA, which I’ve probably spent more time and energy studying than anything to do with the internet.

The inspiration for the bus seems to have been a post on X written on May 2nd, by @nazzobetweeting, who wrote “i love having to go through manhattan to go from brooklyn to brooklyn”. They added an image of Google Maps’ recommended public transit route between Williamsburg and Prospect Park, where the quickest option really is to go all the way into Manhattan and back.

nazzobetweeting is nowhere near the first New Yorker to complain about this — as the only NYC-based member of the Garbage Day team who doesn’t live in Brooklyn, this is part of my job. And I’d think about it even if it wasn’t, since I’ve been keeping up with online chatter about the trains and buses since my earliest days online. I was a member of the NUMTOTs while I was still in my teens, Before that, I was an avid follower of Andrew Lynch, who got so much attention with his “future maps” of the subway system that he started an activist group for one of the most popular options — maybe calling it “the retinol of Queens” would work better.

Because this one post seems to have made its own waves. The “brooklyn to brooklyn” post has received over 2 million views and 14,000 likes on X, and kicked off noticeable discourse about getting around in Brooklyn. This one bit of impulsive frustration seems to have been enough to shape the route the Ordinary Bus will take, if not inspire its creation outright. The free bus goes from one corner of Prospect Park to the west side of Williamsburg — without the post, I would have expected its northern end to be somewhere in Bushwick, which has inspired its own share of viral discourse.

Doing all this because of one X conversation cycle isn’t crazy in terms of the actual resources being committed. All The Ordinary had to do was rent a bus for a couple weeks, hire a driver, spin up a website and announce it. It was probably simpler and cheaper than their previous vaguely populist-looking pop-ups, like the indictment of celebrity endorsements they did last year, which didn’t stop them partnering with influencers to show it off.

Here, they’re treating the bus as something similarly noble. Their announcement starts “Brooklyn has a transit gap that shouldn’t exist”. The website gets even more high-minded, saying the company’s philosophy “doesn’t stop at skincare”, and they’re applying it to “the city itself”. Which is a little out of pocket if it’s really happening because of one person’s annoyed post. But one post isn’t the only factor here.

Free buses were a signature policy of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign — there were some pretty idiotic complaints when he took office the same day as a fare increase. The bus wouldn’t be the first pop-up directly inspired by one of his campaign promises. That honor goes to the free grocery store that the prediction market Kalshi briefly opened in February (Polymarket opened their own not long after). It seems to barely matter to these companies that Mamdani is a politician — he’s a popular online figure, and whatever attention they get from these promos will primarily be downstream from him, like they’re guests on his show.

Even so, mass transit is a lot more serious of a space to play in. The Ordinary’s ad copy shows they understand that, and they’re cosplaying urbanism for the audience of a single X post anyway. In some ways, it’s the same thing I’ve called “LOLgislation”, treating random posts, ads, and serious government policy as one and the same.

But this is one of the few times I’ve seen the process work on a policy I don’t just support but personally yearn for. And it’s definitely given me perspective on how intoxicating it can be. In my very earliest days of browsing the web, going through the archives of NYCSubway.org on my parents’ iBook G3, the whole thing felt impossibly magical. The idea that if enough people complain about the buses online they’ll just start a new one is similarly magical.

It’s not real infrastructure, but everything has to start somewhere. And if it really does make Brooklyn travel a little easier for a brief time, then I’ll take all the cleanser samples they give me in the bargain.

The following is not an ad, it’s some good old fashioned promo for promo. If you’re interested in advertising, email Ryan at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

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Earlier this month, the literary magazine Granta published “The Serpent in the Grove”, a prize-winning short story. Last week, people who actually read the story began accusing it of being completely AI-generated (people almost universally agree it was). The magazine released a statement, saying they tested the claims by…uh, asking Claude and shrugging. Others are questioning whether the story’s author exists at all.

The most interesting take on this shitshow came from Tuhin Chakrabarty, who ran searches on each string of text in the story, and found that many of the weirdest turns of phrase came directly from stories on AO3 or Wattpad, which were then awkwardly shoved into new contexts.

 It’s all a massive example of “genre glitching,” where AI-generated text briefly uses completely inappropriate registers of language. It’s most noticeable when the chatbot starts talking like a commercial — or, as I found, vice versa. I did my own searches for the weirdest phrases Chakrabarty isolated, and found verbiage directly from the story in places like a Wisconsin construction company or a German tourism site. In a bigger smoking gun, I also found it in the AI-generated response to this Quora question about using more descriptive language in creative writing.

May is graduation season, and recently that’s meant a lot of commencement speakers getting booed by graduates for bringing up AI. There’s been so much discourse that even AI people who haven’t made speeches are being asked to join the trend. Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to roleplay the scenario by the New York Times’ Borg Cube bureau chief Kevin Roose.

There’s one point that hasn’t been brought up much in the debate. AI programs are speaking during graduation, too. More and more schools are leaning on AI-generated voices for announcements during ceremonies, and a lot of them are completely mispronouncing the students’ names. 

It’s a great example of what all this booing is expressing. It’s not as if this never happened before AI. The difference is now there’s no specific human who can be blamed for the mistake, or who can *puts on mortarboard* learn from the experience.

Last month, the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender movie was leaked to the public. Last week, it happened again, to an animated series it’s even harder to be normal about. The upcoming finale of The Amazing Digital Circus, set to release in theaters June 4th, was uploaded online by someone who had access to the Brazilian Portuguese dub. Everyone saw this coming so far out that the distributors cancelled its Korean release over fear of this exact thing happening.

I’ll have a lot more to say about the show and its fandom when the movie is properly released, so for now I’ll just say the fandom is deranged even by the impressive standards of kids’ cartoons about fucked-up adult themes. That’s been great for business, since the finale’s theatrical release has already broken presale records with weeks to go. But it’s been tough to handle for a lot of the audience, who have started debates over whether or not a web show in theaters is gatekeeping, paywalling, or losing its indie cred.

The leak has just turned up the temperature of all of these arguments — not to mention, all of the other arguments over what will/should happen in the actual show. It’s also made things worse for the show’s creator, a trans woman who goes by Gooseworx. Months before all this, she was getting so much backlash on anything she posted she deleted her Reddit account. After the leak, she posted on Bluesky that she “shouldn’t be the figurehead” of the show at all.

Valnet is one of the few digital media conglomerates that seems to be doing well for itself in 2026. We recently learned it paid $20 million to acquire Polygon from Vox last year, to run it like a ”digital media sweatshop,” just like all their other niche news sites. Now, it’s trying to figure out ways to stiff its writers entirely.

Kotaku reports that contractors for their site TheGamer were presented with new contracts that would pay on a sliding scale based on the performance of the articles they wrote for the site. The scale pays out better for high performing articles, but it bottoms out at zero. If the piece doesn’t get enough clicks (meaning less than 1,000) the writer isn’t paid at all.

The site’s staff — or their contractors, who make up almost the entirety of the site, meaning they’d all be subject to these new contracts — are reportedly in “open revolt”. One speculated this is really a “soft-layoff” to shut the site down entirely.

P.S. here’s succulent Chinese wheels. (This was shared in the Discord by Omnishambles!)

***Any typos in this email are Adam’s fault today***