Day 17 of America’s Timothée Chalamet crisis

Hey everybody, I am back up and running after my computer was totally destroyed at Garbage Day Live on Tuesday. Shout out to the folks at Brooklyn Micro Center, you’re all amazing. Anyways, let’s talk about Timothée Chalamet.

We are currently two weeks into our national conversation about Chalamet’s thoughts on opera and ballet. Which has apparently become a Miley-Cyrus-twerking level cultural event. If you have somehow missed this, Chalamet, during a CNN Town Hall (lol) with Matthew McConaughey (lol), said he wouldn’t want to work in ballet or opera.

"I don't want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it's like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore,'“ he said, seemingly unaware that getting paid to make any video content, let alone videos over 90 seconds long, is absolutely a dying art form. “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

For what it’s worth, this is not the first time Chalamet has expressed fears that movies were becoming an outdated art form similar to opera. The difference this time being, of course, that he’s nominated for an Oscar and just completed a profoundly unhinged viral marketing campaign for Marty Supreme. Stare into the void, void stares back, etc.

As podcaster Juniper wrote on X, “This discourse is one of the biggest mass psychosis events I think I’ve witnessed outside of politics in a long time I genuinely cannot believe how mad people are about his correct comments.”

Which is why it’s worth asking: Exactly how real is this outrage cycle? Based on everything we’ve learned about the insidious culture-jamming that Hollywood PR firms have been up to lately, it’s safe to assume any story like this was seeded by someone for some reason, but can we prove it? Well, actually, sorta!

My assumption was that some teenager running a Chalamet anti-stan account watched the town hall, clipped it, and shared it to X, where it went viral and made everyone go insane. That’s basically how everything else works now. But that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

The first place to clip the video was Variety, who, based on the phrasing of their post, likely didn’t clock that Chalamet’s quote would be all that divisive. Their angle was that Chalamet wanted to keep movie theaters alive. Stranger, though, was that the initial Variety post only has 50 reposts on X and none of the quote posts went viral either. Which is pretty weird! In fact, I can’t find really any evidence of a single big viral post on X genuinely engaging with this. A clip from last week’s Saturday Night Live talking about the controversy is the closest I could find, with only around 2,000 shares. Which already presupposes “major ballet and opera organizations” were angry about it. Which is all to say that, even in a world of never-ending stupid and fake discourse, this is stupider and faker than the usual stuff everyone’s screaming about online.

Over on TikTok, Chalamet’s quote from the town hall became a meme, with different ballet and opera companies sharing videos responding to it. However, most of that happened after the SNL segment. Also, apparently, the teams behind those accounts don’t understand how to use TikTok, because none of them are using the same audio, instead just uploading their own version, meaning it can’t actually trend.

The only people taking this seriously are other celebrities. Also, Polymarket, who posted what appears to be an AI-generated video of ballet dancers to promote their Oscar betting pools. Excellent work. No notes.

As of this morning, Andrea Bocelli, Nathan Lane, ballet dancer Misty Copeland, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Doja Cat have all weighed in. Though Doja Cat has since recanted and ultimately given up the game a bit. She said she was “virtue signaling,” going on to say in a TikTok video, “It’s easy. It’s a modern way to garner clicks, likes, approval, and all kinds of things like that from people. And so I did that yesterday, and I didn’t really think about why I was doing it.”

Which is really the story here. An internet — and, increasingly, a mass media landscape — populated by video content does not have any room for context. It’s a school cafeteria. There’s no sense as to why anyone is talking about anything and, honestly, even trying to find out why, as I’ve just done here, is probably a buzzkill. I should have probably spent my time crafting a clapback. Oh well. I’ll catch the next one of these in 2.5 weeks.

Will any of this actually hurt Chalamet’s chances at an Oscar, though? Probably not, as I said, none of this actually matters. Plus, most Oscar voters are senile Hollywood weirdos that usually just vote for whoever was nicest to them in line at a buffet.

The Harris Poll released some fascinating survey that definitely confirms the vibes we’ve been noticing in our monthly GDMI reports. TikTok is losing steam.

According to The Harris Poll, nearly 75% of Gen Z users on TikTok are losing interest in the platform and more than half believe that it’s being censored. For what it’s worth, we haven’t been able to prove that second data point, but the appearance of censorship can be just as deadly for a user-generated content platform.

If TikTok is really on its way out, that would certainly make for some interesting timing. There really isn’t a replacement for it. It’s not dissimilar from when Vine died. Some Vine stars went to Instagram, others YouTube, and a few Musical.ly (which would eventually be rolled into TikTok). It basically took two years for TikTok to take its place. Seeing how desolate the social media space is right now, it might be a longer wait this time around.

Though, who knows, Disney+ is launching its own TikTok-like called “Verts,” which is, uh, a feed of short ads for Disney titles??? Maybe that’ll be the next hot app.

Several members of former Second President Elon Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were subpoenaed as part of a lawsuit led by the several huge US cultural associations. If you want an in-depth dive into what’s been revealed, head over to 404 Media, who watched all six hours of the testimony.

But if you don’t want to watch all of that, let me point you to three exchanges that I think are extremely important for understanding how DOGE ransacking the country last summer and why they did it. These were all clipped by the fine folks at 404 Media, who have really done the lord’s work here.

Former DOGE staffer Justin Fox was completely incapable of defining what “DEI” is and couldn’t really answer any specific questions about how he determined if a grant he flagged for cancelation was connected to DEI. Former DOGE staffer Nathan Cavanaugh admitted they didn’t reduce the deficit meaningfully in any way and also, apparently, has never read a book before.

Oh, also, Cavanaugh admitted that he emailed government documents to a personal device so that he could then Signal them to Steve Davis, the former president of Musk’s Boring Company. Uh oh!

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, an anonymous internet user completed a project they’ve worked on since 2009: A rap album that’s also a detailed walkthrough of Cave Story, the pioneering indie game. It’s impressive work, and the most impressive thing about it is how well it works as an album: The writing and production are as meticulous as the instructions. 

It’s the kind of specific, unvarnished nerdiness that used to fill the internet. It feels impossible that it came out in 2026 — and in some ways, it is. The album’s creator wanted it to be free for everyone, but had to remove it from Bandcamp after the site started automatically charging for downloads. 

The creator said the album should be free as a tribute to Cave Story itself. (I’ve reached out for comment.) The game was so influential because its solo developer put it online for free in 2004, when making money off your weird internet creations was the exception, not the rule. Now, the rule is so ironclad that you have to self-deplatform to opt out.

Rumors have been circulating online this week that a famous actor is going around Hollywood introducing people to his new girlfriend, who is an AI chatbot. Redditors claimed that it was Zach Braff, which, sorry, does sorta sound like something I could imagine him doing.

But, according to The Cut, Braff is not the actor in question. Braff wrote on Instagram, “I’m not dating a chatbot.” He also explained that the rumor may have started because there’s a storyline about that in the new Scrubs reboot.

OK, but, we can all agree, this is going to happen at some point, right?

P.S. here’s some Flash games.

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