Garbage forever

Just a reminder: I’m on the road this week, so there won’t be a Friday issue. We’ll be back to our regular schedule next week!

Happy Birthday, Garbage Day (Part 1)

Garbage Day turns six years old today. Something I did not realize until Garbage Day researcher Adam asked me about it the other day. The formatting for that first issue is all screwed up now so I won’t bother linking to it, but I believe it did include a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog’s feet. How far we’ve come.

I started Garbage Day after I had landed back in New York after four years working in the UK. I was feeling alienated from my own country and more than little lost, professionally. I decided to launch it on Substack after a round of layoffs had liquidated most of my friends at work and I realized that I, one, didn’t have a backup plan for such an event were it to happen to me and, two, I didn’t really have folks in my office that I could send funny internet junk to anymore. At least not in the same way. Alone in my new, old country, alone in a job I no longer recognized, hoping to find some connection online. Can’t get more old school internet than that.

As of August 2020, the newsletter had become my full time job, but wouldn’t start making enough money that I could properly pay rent in 2022. This year it started making enough that I could hire a full-time employee, Adam. None of that would have been possible without you, dear reader. So thank you, truly.

The early years of Garbage Day were a bit of a blur. I was priced out of my apartment in New York and wasn’t sure this newsletter would ever be able to pay the bills. I moved my stuff into my dad’s basement and was living on a shoestring budget, sleeping on couches and cheapy hotels. I was what you could call a “digital nomad” or “functuonally homeless,” depending on how you’d like to define it. I ended up writing Garbage Day issues in all kinds of weird places — a hotel pool in Miami the same weekend a guy dressed like The Joker shut down the highway, on a train across Italy, a beach in northern Brazil, over the phone, dictated to Adam, from a tent at a British music festival, on a toilet after some very ill-advised street food decisions in Mexico City. And I’ve come to see that frantic worldliness as the secret sauce of Garbage Day: A thrice-weekly dispatch from the end of the world. A world that has, much to my deep, profound horror, become the internet-fueled nightmare I always feared it might become and used Garbage Day to warn against. A world where, as I write this, an AI-generated economic plan promoted by a fascist cabal of Bitcoin libertarians and 4chan posters has grounded international trade to a halt and sent prices for basic goods soaring. The damage of which, so far, consumers are only noticing via the skyrocketing prices of their Temu and Amazon orders. The world is just content now and makes more sense through a screen than through your own eyes.

To spend years writing about one topic as extensively as I have written about the internet or “internet culture” means you eventually find yourself writing about everything, worried you’re not really writing about anything anymore. But to write about the internet in a post-COVID world, specifically, means that you will have to write about everything because everything is now finally online. It’s not uncommon that I start questioning what the internet even is anymore. Is it the memes we share? Is it the platforms we share them on? Is it the infrastructure that underpins those platforms? Or is it simply the people behind the screens we view it all through?

The closest I’ve come to answering that question is a, perhaps unsatisfying, “yes.” We flattened the world and everything is something now but, also, nothing. We, in theory, know everything and also don’t know anything at all. We can communicate with anyone and are also deeply isolated and more alone than ever. We’ve created a near-infinite library of human creativity and are now opting to consume AI generations instead. I’m not sure how you make sense of all that, though I have stopped thinking about the internet in terms of good or bad or as a project that was successful or unsuccessful. Instead, I think of it as a force of nature, amoral and unstoppable. There was a first domino knocked down at some point, but the chain reaction has started and there is no getting off the ride anymore. Sorry, millennials. This is forever now.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. This stuff is interesting and, more often than not, funny. The stupidity of the modern world is, above all else, even when you account for all the technology it relies on, extremely human. AI may be idiotic, but it can never be as idiotic as the human being that doesn’t realize it’s powering the sex bot they’re flirting with on X. And as long as the end of the world remains this stupid Garbage Day will never run out of stuff to write about.

I hope you don’t mind the navel-gazing today. Six years is a long time! And this year is shaping up to be a big one for us. We promised you in December that 2025 was going to be the year Garbage Day grew up a little bit and we’ve been putting the pieces in place over the last few months to do just that. We’ve got some big news coming and some exciting news we’re almost ready to debut. So stay tuned. And keep reading below for one more birthday reflection from Adam and a couple good posts.

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A Good Post

Happy Birthday, Garbage Day (Part 2)

—by Adam Bumas

As of today, Garbage Day has officially lasted longer than the Confederacy and exactly as long as World War II. And I wanted to celebrate that longevity with an intensely Garbage Day story I only heard about yesterday even though it’s from a month ago.

In mid-March, a user on Weibo, a Chinese social app similar to X, was doxxed after getting into a fight over K-Pop star Jang Wonyoung. In retaliation, other Weibo users tracked down the pro-Wonyoung stan who revealed the information. They determined it was actually the 13-year old daughter of Xie Guangjun, a high-ranking executive at Baidu, China's largest search engine. Since then, Xie and Baidu have released multiple public apologies and run an entire internal investigation, all to deny that a teenager was able to use her dad's panopticon-level corporate access as the atom bomb in a K-pop stan war.

There are so many angles we could take with this story, but I think the common element between anything Ryan or Allegra or I could say is that a quarter of the way into the 21st century, its most important question — is the internet real life? — appears to have an answer. Real life is the internet. In every respect, our lives are gradually becoming more subject to the tendencies and limitations of internet-based services and communities.

We live under a geopolitical order that you could argue would look completely different without a mean article in Gawker about a tech CEO and a very factual and logical Harry Potter fanfic. The biggest beneficiary of this order, the richest man in the world and loser of a feud with Asmongold, may step back soon from using the misspelled meme of a dog as his official seal of taking control of the United States government. If he does leave to spend more time DMing women to have his babies, he'll cede control of the world’s third-largest military to a series of groupchats, where bombings are met with thumbs-up reacts. Maybe they'll have an advantage in a global conflict where the biggest ongoing risk to military infosec is the forums for an MMO.

The common elements between all this become easier to see if you’re used to internet spaces and real life ones following different rules, and still think it’s weird when the latter starts working like the former. This covers everything from censorship that has kids writing “unalive” in their homework, to the reason for today’s celebration: Acknowledging the passage of time. 

Because the internet doesn’t really work like that. Physical spaces change with the seasons and years, but text and user interfaces stay the same. Sites like TikTok and Tumblr hide posting dates, so the same trend can recur identically after months or years. Others, like the recently-departed 4chan, are designed to be so ephemeral you can get away with anything. Either way, if a website's database and design hasn't changed, there's no way of telling how old a post is without a date stamp.

One of the most infamous blessings and curses of the internet is the idea that it lasts forever, that nothing you say there will ever go away. But that's just an idea, one that absolutely isn't true in practice. A Pew study from last year found almost 40% of webpages from 2013 are now offline. My own most formative internet community — a semi-official forum for people waiting for Half-Life 3 — was unceremoniously shut down nearly a decade ago. The internet doesn’t live up to its own standards of timelessness, especially because it’s entirely created by, for, and about us fickle mortals. Without active efforts to preserve, disseminate, and curate, the internet has the same fate as everything not designed to change with time: It becomes garbage.

And for all the gloom both Ryan and I have expressed about what’s become of the internet, there’s so much worth saving from that garbage. The internet still delivers me things every day that are beautiful, fascinating, astounding, and touching. And as the world changes around us, I think there’s going to be even more. We’ll be here to show you the best of what we find.

One More Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “The Bureaucratic Nightmares of Being Trans Under Trump”

• “How Pope Crave is preparing for the real-life papal conclave”

P.S. here’s updog drinks sky.

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