Petty, powerful, and pathologically online

Friendship Ended With First Amendment, Now Authoritarianism Is My Best Friend

Late night host Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air this week, following pressure from both the Federal Communications Commission and Nexstar Media Group. CNN has a good ticking clock of the conversations behind the scenes that led to Kimmel’s “indefinite preemption.” A source told CNN the decision was ultimately made after FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened to pull ABC’s broadcasting license during an appearance on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast.

The New York Times has a good piece on the administration cracking down on entertainers that refuse to tow the party line. A spokesperson for the administration told The Times that, contrary to what the media has reported, they actually have a good sense humor about themselves, but they no longer have “the time nor the patience to apply that method to the ‘miserable literati.’” Oh, sorry, that article was actually published in 1939 and written about a totally different government. Disregard.

Carr, via an animated GIF of Jack Nicholson nodding, seemed to confirm that the pressure the FCC is currently putting on Trump’s enemies was laid out in Project 2025. In fact, it was laid out in a chapter he, himself, wrote! The bulk of the chapter is about scrapping Section 230 and reigning in Chinese tech, but there’s also a lengthy section about how much power an FCC chair has, which includes a very relevant passage that reads, “Any merger that involves a wireless company, broadcaster, or similar entity that holds an FCC license must obtain FCC approval (assuming that the merger will involve the transfer of the FCC license).” And that’s what this is all about.

As Business Insider wrote, there’s a $6 billion deal at the heart of the Kimmel affair. Nexstar is currently trying to merge with another TV station conglomerate, Tegna, and are currently waiting for FCC approval. Adding to the pressure to take Kimmel off the air is Sinclair Broadcast Group, who are replacing Kimmel’s Friday episode with a special about Charlie Kirk and want Kimmel to donate to Turning Point USA. Sinclair’s massively conservative slant was best documented by Deadspin in 2018, who made a supercut of their local news affiliates all reading the same pro-Trump script.

Just to be clear, to appease any lawyers reading this, Carr, Nexstar, and Sinclair are all claiming there was no coordination here. But, also, Carr was quick to thank Nexstar on X for preempting Kimmel, writing, “It is important for broadcasters to push back on Disney programming that they determine falls short of community values.”

Kimmel’s suspension has given us the clearest picture yet of how the Trump administration intends to deal with the pesky First Amendment. Put pressure on the massive companies that uphold the American media landscape and assume they’ll fall in line. And install political allies at the companies they can’t directly pressure. Like Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who is currently in position to take over the American version of TikTok. Which is why esports journalist Rod Breslau speculated on X this week, “Trump is about to put 10% tariffs on all Amazon products if Twitch doesn't ban Hasan and Destiny (again) by next week.”

There are very few American media institutions that President Donald Trump can’t put his thumb on currently. And he knows it! While queening out with reporters on Air Force One on Thursday, Trump floated the idea of revoking the license of any broadcaster that gives him “bad publicity.” And other Republicans are quickly falling in line, seemingly relieved they no longer have to care about free speech. Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis told Semafor this week, “I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right. And that there should be almost no checks and balances on it. I don’t feel that way anymore.”

If you’re feeling hopeless, don’t worry, all the historians I follow are crashing out too. But if you are looking for something proactive, The Onion’s Ben Collins wrote on Bluesky, “Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.”

The wave of indie media orgs that have emerged since the pandemic is a good start, but they are still no match for the gargantuan Trump-aligned corporate media machine. A journalist, pundit, or, as we’ve seen this week, even an entertainer that gets too loud will be targeted by this administration. They will investigate you, go after your livelihood, and pressure the platform you’re broadcasting from. These people are petty, powerful, and pathologically online. One Trump appointee recently told Semafor that they were “radicalized” by “being booted out of the Gawker comments section, way back in the day.” No one is off limits now and there is no limit to how dumb this will all get. We need to figure out how to get news and information to people without YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, broadcast TV, cable, or corporate streamers. Our government is being run by aggrieved elites who were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else in the 2010s, where they could finally read what we all think about them. And it caused them so much psychic damage that they have decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it will ever happen again.

On October 9th, we’re taking over TV Eye for a big party in Ridgewood. It’s going to be a bit different from the live events we’ve done before, but it should feel substantially garbage-y. Special musical guests include Kill Alters, Reagen Holiday, and RGEM. Click the big green button below to grab your tickets while you still can!

Some Hot Takes

A Guy Named Roko’s Basilisk Is Building AI Products For Meta

In case you didn’t already think we live in a simulation, Meta’s Chief Wearables Officer is named Rocco Basilico. If you don’t immediately get why that is completely unbelievable, allow me to explain.

“Roko’s Basilisk” is the name of a very infamous forum post among AI evangelists. A user named Roko posted it to the LessWrong message board back in 2010 and it was considered so dangerous — or, perhaps more accurately, annoying — that any mention of it was banned from the site for years. LessWrong’s founder Eliezer Yudkowsky once called it an “information hazard.” So what’s so special about this forum post?

Well, it’s a little dense, but the simplest summary I can come up with is that Roko posited that a super-intelligent AI would come online sometime in the near future and retroactively punish anyone who didn’t help it come online. Roko argued that knowledge of the AI’s eventual awakening — which all LessWrong users would now have from reading Roko’s post — would mean that it would punish anyone who didn’t basically spend all of their income supporting the AI industry. There’s a few other dimensions to Roko’s post, but I assume Garbage Day readers are normal and well-adjusted enough to not need to care about any of that.

But you can imagine the reactions from the AI crowd this week when they all learned that a guy named Rocco Basilico was working for one of the top AI companies in the world. “My name is Rokos Basilisk and I’m making artificial intelligence that you put on your body,” one user wrote.

The age of Scorpius

—by Adam Bumas

A couple months ago, we finally found a community of people who actually use Threads: Booktok authors and readers. More or less the entire time since then, the community there has been absorbed in the extensive personal and professional drama of a single first-time author. We’ve been waiting until there was some kind of resolution to write about it, but it’s now been going on for so long we should just bring everyone up to speed.

Audra Winter is the pen name of an author who’s been working for years to create a young adult fantasy series about a world with a Hunger Games-style caste system determined by zodiac signs. The first book in the series, The Age of Scorpius, received thousands of preorders thanks to Winter’s promotion on TikTok. Winter sold the book to BookTokers as a self-published culmination of a childhood dream, realized with high-quality professional artwork, made by “a team of 15 artists.”

Unfortunately, like many things you can buy on TikTok Shop, the book didn’t measure up to the hype when it came out in August. It was riddled with basic mistakes that traditional publishers would have fixed, and the novel’s Goodreads rating nosedived, with readers finding it bland and unspectacular at best. But, as The Daily Dot noted, it was harder to change Age of Scorpius’ TikTok Shop rating, where the positive reviews — written before the customers actually got what they ordered — were locked in.

So why is this still going? Mainly because Winter has tried to turn damage control into another arm of her content creator strategy. Following the backlash, she announced she would be rewriting the book in collaboration with her team of artists, and releasing regular updates. When readers reacted negatively to the idea of being given a webcomic when they paid for a novel, Winter and her team responded by deleting any negative comments, and creating a new Patreon tier for the updates they said would be free. Trying to keep the haters separated by a paywall hasn’t worked, though, and now leaked updates on Threads suggest that Winter is moving to Finland to work more closely with one of her many artists… on the novel she already wrote and people didn’t like.

Palworld Is Finally “Launching”

Palworld, the video game that was marketed as Pokémon with guns that isn’t actually Pokémon with guns, is finally getting an official launch version. If you haven’t been following this, it’s been in early access since January 2024.

Pocketpair, the studio behind the game, put out a video this week announcing that it would be spending the remainder of the year eliminating jank for an official launch version early next year. Nintendo’s lawsuit against Pocketpair, however, is still making its way through the courts.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair for patent infringement, but the case hasn’t been easygoing for Nintendo. Pocketpair recently tried to argue in a Japanese court that Pokémon mods count as “prior art” and would block Nintendo’s patent claims. Nintendo has pushed back, claiming that video game mods do not count as art. Which has some very far-reaching ramifications if accepted by a judge! In the words of Florian Mueller, a great journalist you should follow if you want to stay updated on this: “GROSS.”

A Try Guy Tries Marriage Counseling

—by Adam Bumas

It’s been exactly three years since the Try Guys fell. Back in September 2022, members of the popular YouTube channel’s subreddit discovered that founding member Ned Fulmer had cheated on his wife Ariel with a producer and host who worked for the channel. In case you don’t remember, the story made it all the way to Saturday Night Live — which, in a great 2020s parable, just ratcheted up the discourse meatgrinder.

Three years later, the Try Guys channel seems to be doing as well as any YouTube channel in 2025 (uh-oh). Meanwhile, Fulmer had stayed largely silent until this Wednesday, when he released a new podcast called Rock Bottom, where the first episode’s guest was Ariel, his now ex-wife. Panic World’s production coordinator Josh subjected himself to the whole podcast episode and described it as, “the most uncomfortable hour I've ever watched of two people interacting.”

This is obviously an enormous publicity stunt — the podcast dropped alongside a glowing People interview — and, hey, we’re talking about it. But there’s more to go through here. For a start, Rock Bottom apparently uses the same RSS feed as the podcast Ned and Ariel once made together, meaning it has thousands of subscribers and hundreds of positive reviews about their wedded life.

Because that was the flywheel, the thing that made this tabloid fodder in the first place. Ned Fulmer was a prototypical wife guy, and years of the Try Guys’ content strategy was aimed at people’s parasocial enjoyment of Ned and Ariel as a couple. Now, even though Ariel is saying on Ned’s podcast that she hasn’t forgiven him, very little has changed about that strategy in principle. It’s just gotten exponentially more exploitative and shameless.

A Moment Of Zen

@wiliervittoria

Feed zone 🧀🍗 #mtblife #mtbedits #mtbtiktok #ucimtbworldseries #mtb

Some Stray Links

• “No One Knows What ‘Terminally Online’ Means Anymore” (Adam wrote this!)

• “FBI Readies New War on Trans People”

• “Millions are turning to chatbots for guidance from on high.”

P.S. here’s an academic paper on puppygirls.

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