People don't care that "The Odyssey" is woke or whatever

The American right wing spent last summer having a massive meltdown over, first, Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle commercial and, then, a proposed new logo from Cracker Barrel. They shrieked at liberals and progressives who were mad about the optics of Sweeney bragging about her “genes” in a jeans commercial and whined when American Eagle eventually apologized for it. They ended up getting their big cultural victory a month later, though, when they bullied Cracker Barrel into abandoning their new logo.

As profoundly silly as it sounds, the Cracker Barrel victory was basically the height of the online right’s cultural project. This isn’t to downplay how aggressive the second Trump administration has been about dismantling our institutions and personal freedoms. They have also had some larger institutional media wins, like the installation of Bari Weiss at CBS News, the sale of TikTok US to Trump-aligned oligarchs, or the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger (if it happens). But when it comes to the online right, specifically, Cracker Barrel was the last time they successfully bullied something into — or out of — existence.

The online right couldn’t stop Charlie Kirk from becoming a giant punchline after he was murdered. And the people who lost their jobs for social posts about Kirk are all getting big payouts now. They couldn’t run proper defense for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the occupation of the Twin Cities in January. They couldn’t get people to stop watching The Olympics, the NBA Finals, or the World Cup. They couldn’t make people care about Trump’s UFC birthday party. They couldn’t make Armie Hammer’s racist action movie number one at the box office, as we reported on Friday. And they certainly could not influence the box office of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. And that last one seems like it might be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

But before we lift up the rock and look at out how the right wing is scrambling this morning amid The Odyssey’s massive opening weekend box office, let’s do a little refresher on how we got here. Because I think it will explain some of the issues they’re having currently.

Elon Musk was convinced by a bunch of reactionary tech CEOs during COVID to purchase Twitter, believing the site was basically the only platform that mattered. A mistake every rich guy in tech and media made at some point in the 2010s. Musk has since converted Twitter into X and pushed through a bunch of changes — paid verification, Community Notes, the Grok AI, an algorithmic For You page, and the hard pivot to video — that actually have made the site feel like a fundamentally different app. Sure, there are Twitter-like things that happen on X, but it’s simply not the same place anymore.

Musk did not seem to understand, however, that what made Twitter valuable couldn’t actually be bought: The uncanny combination of extremely important people, anonymous maniacs, and shitposting teenagers that felt like it might self-destruct at any moment (and often did). The secret sauce of Twitter was that an editor or producer or studio head or a politician or a CEO might see something insane on their feed and be influenced by it. It’s been nearly four years since Musk bought Twitter and there’s very little of that secret sauce left. The important people either stayed on X and had their brains — and cultural influence — melted by it, or decamped for Bluesky (or nowhere). Same with the anonymous maniacs and shitposting teenagers, most of which are over on Instagram these days. It didn’t happen all at once, but X is basically just a newsreader service for stuff happening elsewhere on the web, used primarily by the world’s worst people. Which is really only useful for people with jobs like mine, sadly. Very little of what happens there matters to normal people because all the normal people left. This has throttled the Trump administration’s public messaging and I also suspect it’s why right-wing influencers like Tim Pool and Ben Shapiro are feeling a financial crunch right now. No one ever cared what happened on 4chan until it broke containment, but Twitter was where it would usually spread and now there are the same users on both sites and everyone’s lost interest. And that is extremely obvious with The Odyssey this week.

The Odyssey made an estimated $260 million worldwide this weekend. And its “woke” casting and its modern-ish dialogue and historical inaccuracies and all the other garbage Musk and his reply guys have been screeching about for a month clearly did not matter to normal theatergoers. It’s apparently so good that even Shapiro is hailing it as a masterpiece. And this has put the right-wingers who assumed it would flop in a very funny position. Right-wing YouTuber Joey Salads has shifted to a narrative that movie might be making money, but it would have made even more money if it wasn’t woke. Daily Wire contributor Harry Khachatrian went a simpler route, arguing that the movie is actually not woke. Musk unfollowed the (often very horny) film account @TheCinesthetic and spent the weekend retweeting posts about Roman history. But the most important reaction from Odysseygate was from right-wing talk show host Erick Erickson who wrote on X, “The succubus right is exhausting, sucking all the joy out of life. Don't go see Nolan, ‘it's woke.’ Don't watch sports. ‘It's woke.’ Don't do this. Don't shop there. It's like the Left — draining the joy from life in the name of some weird purity.”

I wrote about the “succubus right” last month, or as I called it, “the Bush era no fun police.” And they definitely are back and are a problem. For Republicans, not the rest of us. They’re very easy to ignore, especially now that they’re housed entirely on one website that sucks to use. There were a million factors that led to Trump’s first presidential win in 2016, but one of the big ones was conservatives figuring out how to replace their post-9/11 scoldism with 4chan troll “lol nothing matters” aesthetics. And they’ve spent the last year completely undoing that.

As journalist Zaid Jilani wrote, “The Odyssey feels like Stalingrad for conservative antiwoke culture warriors because they tried to go after one of the worlds most famous filmmakers and ordinary people are like shut up nerds.”

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Last week the folks at beehiiv hosted their Summer Release Event, where they announced a bunch of new features. The main thing we’re excited about is the new Community feature, live now in beta. It’s pretty neat. It operates as a standalone site and web app for individual newsletters. So we have our own Garbage Day app, complete with our icon, and you can download it right now! We called our Community “The Department of Sanitation” lol.

We’re excited to play around with our Community, which you can join right here! Ryan and I had the fantastic idea of launching the Garbage Day Community first to our paid subscribers in our Discord, and encouraged them to go wild testing it out over the weekend. Predictably, we got Bee Movie scripted within the first 20 minutes. Also, importantly, this was the first post made in the Community:

How many people are actually using AI? It’s one of the more pressing questions of our time. Unlike search and social media, AI usage leaves behind very little evidence, and I think it’s making everyone feel a little paranoid right now.

This year, the total amount of people using AI platforms worldwide crossed one billion. And that doesn’t include all the unavoidable AI widgets that now populate our screens. That’s people going to an AI chat interface such as Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But what’s really interesting is the majority of those users are not actually paying for these services.

For those of you reading this that have somehow been able to entirely avoid anything to do with AI, most of the major services operate the same way. There’s a throttled free plan and then increasingly expensive paid tiers above that. Per a Bank of America study from March, only 3% of American households are actually paying for one of those tiers. And I’ve recently seen AI evangelists point to that number as proof that they are, to use crypto parlance, “still early.” But I think that number is telling a very different story.

Even with all the AI glut, it is just not something people are willing to pay for. And I genuinely think if it turned off tomorrow nobody would really care lol. And as the anti-data center movement heats up, I think that distinction — between the people who are just using this tech because it’s there and the people who love it enough to pay for it — will become extremely important!

Speaking of passive AI consumption…

Netflix snuck a little bombshell disclosure into their second-quarter earnings report last week. It has apparently used generative AI in around 300 titles, largely deploying it in the post-production stage. The earnings report includes a couple examples, including Indian thriller Glory, Brazilian sports documentary Brasil 70: A Saga do Tri, and another docu-series called The American Experiment.

They don’t give a ton of details about how they used generative AI, but they said it was primarily used for “enhanced crowds, historical battle sequences, and worldbuilding establishing shots.” (If you’ve watched any of these shows and noticed anything felt off, let me know!)

Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami on Saturday. They were meant to cohost a boxing event before they were picked up by law enforcement. They were not arrested for crimes committed in the US, however.

Britain's Crown Prosecution Service announced a combined 59 charges between the two of them, including seven counts of rape, three counts of trafficking for sexual exploitation, and 19 charges for “offences relating to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.” Their attorney told the media that the charges were "filth and slander." He also said that their arrests this weekend were "greenlighted by a low-level functionary at the Justice Department.” Which carries with it some pretty loaded implications!

And it also points to the big question here: Will the US extradite the Tate’s to the UK? The brothers are both dual citizens of the UK and US.

P.S. here’s a good video about Boston.

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