Spooky internet mystery alert!

Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you decide if today is a brunch Saturday or a laundry Saturday.

PLATFORMS

NPR affiliate KCRW is calling it quits on Twitter. I think we’re going to see more of this. I’ve tried to kind of forecast where this is all headed a few times now and I think the very simple answer is just that there won’t be a Twitter replacement. It’s too much trouble to deal with. The ship really is sinking.

Elon Musk is rolling out affiliate badges which are basically just a new way to manually verifying already-famous people. They’re the little squares that appear next to the checkmarks. And they, of course, cost more than the checkmark. And also a bunch of huge accounts are exempt from paying for them. You get how this all works, right? Devalue the old way of verifying people. Make people pay for it. Introduce a new way of verifying people that is prohibitively expensive. Give it out as gifts for big users. It’s country club bull shit.

Florida state universities won’t let you use TikTok or WeChat on campus Wi-Fi. Obviously, students can still access these sites with their data plans. I think the thing that’s wildest to me is that my college also blocked stuff from the Wi-Fi, but it was mainly torrent sites. So I’d have to go over to a friend’s house off-campus and torrent a bunch of music to load on my iPod. Now it’s just like… access to your favorite short-form video app. Or, worse, the main app Chinese international students use to communicate with their families back home.

OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS

I feel like we should be talking about the new Linkin Park music videos. If you haven’t been following this, the band’s rapper and main producer Mike Shinoda came across a bunch of demos from the recording of the band’s album Meteora, which had largely-finished vocals from late singer Chester Bennington. So they remastered them and released them to celebrate the album’s 20th anniversary this year. But here’s why I’m writing about this under the AI section. They’ve been using Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to animate music videos for the remastered unreleased demos. And it kind of fits the band’s aesthetic perfectly?

Someone got a version of GPT-3.5 to run on a TI-84 calculator. Here’s the thing, a lot of the “AI is the future” stuff is predicated on the idea that we can keep these tools running. More people using large language models means we need more computing power. So there’s now a movement to get versions of GPT to run on smaller and smaller devices. The idea that we could all have a personal AI running on very simple hardware is both exciting and, also, outrageously terrifying.

The Guardian announced an incoming generative-AI editorial strategy. They have not said what it is yet, only that they are developing one in response to the ability for an AI to hallucinate fake content attributed to the paper. I’m not sure if it’ll be The Guardian, but I’d say by the end of the year we’ll see the first big publishing company release some form of chatbot based on their content. My assumption is that 2024 will see a wave of publisher-chatbots very similar to the iPad-optimized-website craze back in 2011-2012.

FANDOMS

The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog was downloaded over a million times. A reminder that this was a fun April Fool’s goof and now it’s in the top 100 games of all time on Steam. What does this say? Well, I think the main takeaway is that there are a lot of people who wish Sonic games were good lol.

STREAMERS

I love love love this story about the reinvention of chess.com for the streaming age. And I think there’s a lot of takeaways here about how, well, basically the whole internet works now. Chess.com noticed that online chess was getting popular during the pandemic. They launched a series of internet celebrity tournaments featuring popular streamers and gamers (who weren’t particularly good at chess) and had them play against pros. And the whole thing worked. The streamers brought an audience, got walloped, kids learned how good really good chess players are, and now Chess.com is more popular than World Of Warcraft. I think this strategy basically works for anything nowadays. There are people who have audiences. Find a way to work with them and make it fun. The network effect does the rest.

Twitch is trying to get in on streamer sponsorships. People are not happy about this. Right now, Twitch takes about 50% of its users’ ad revenue. Which is about on par with YouTube. So a way Twitch streamers make money on top of that is by doing in-stream sponsorships, which seems fair. They’re getting the ads and doing the labor of endorsing them and fitting them into their streams. The idea that they would work with Twitch to do this and make less money seems like an absolute racket.

This has nothing to do with the internet, but you should watch Netflix’s Beef. It’s incredibly good. Like good in a way that I forgot a Netflix show could be.

MEMES AND TRENDS

Finally, someone answered the question: What does a consultant do? If you haven’t been paying attention to Morning Brew’s YouTube channel, you absolutely should. They’ve stumbled upon a format that I think is really entertaining, where they’re mixing some really interesting reporting about the business world with genuinely very funny sketches.

YouTube creator Tom Scott rode a fast train. A fast Japanese train. That uses electromagnets.

A TikTok guy tried to make a tandoor oven in a trash can. He made a followup video where he used it to make some naan, which did not turn out very good and seemingly took hours to make. These videos caused a whole wave of discourse on Twitter that I’ll spare you the particulars of, but I did notice something interesting amid that discourse. Which is the idea, once again, that virality is deserved. As in, if something goes viral the person who went viral must deserve it and if they don’t they’re to blame. I get the impulse. And I don’t think it’s completely wrong, per se. But I also think sometimes stuff just goes viral and that’s the nature of the internet and you’ve got to throw your hands up and say, “oh well!” Does that virality oftentimes reenforce systemic inequality, yes, undoubtably. Is that the fault of a random non-famous person who uploads a video of a harmless DIY project? I’m not so sure.

Clothing brand Reformation is paying people to reshoot their TikToks wearing Reformation clothes. This was spotted by social media analyst Rachel Karten. This is diabolic and, also, I assume, the peak of micro-influencer marketing. It’s hard to imagine that space becoming weirder and more granular than this.

DRAMA

Spooky internet mystery alert! So this one is a real rats nest. But there’s a weird YouTube channel called “Rex Todd” that posts seconds-long clips of the same picture with weird number codes connected to a hashtag called #PrayForDave. A YouTube creator named Internet Mystery Machine started digging around the channel and stumbled across what looks to be an art collective based in Kentucky and Louisiana that posts a bunch of weird nonsense and play hardcore show. Except, get this. In Internet Mystery Machine’s video they mention that the #PrayForDave hashtag seems to have some overlap with a noise band called the KFC Murder Chicks. Well, I’ve never revealed this before, but I was pranked by one of the members of the KFC Murder Chicks back in 2021. One of them claimed they had invented the “chad meme” and I interviewed them and they spent like an hour lying to me about it on the phone. From what I can tell, they’re all part of a schizoposting collective that makes noise music and just pulls elaborate pranks on the internet.

So maybe the #watertok stuff is actually at least slightly malicious? I’ve seen some fairly compelling arguments that its popularity is at least in part because of users with eating disorders. Yesterday, I said this stuff is harmless. So I guess, here’s my more nuanced take: TikTok tends to surface trends that involve addicting sensory information and rabbit hole capitalism. For the most part that stuff is fine and fun and weird. But it can also work as a very effective cover for more dangerous content. And the speed and intensity of TikTok makes the line between those two things very blurry.

The woman who keeps singing at people trapped in various places is staging her videos. VICE got to the bottom of this TikTok mystery. I am relieved that she’s not just doing this people.

AROUND THE WORLD

There was a big international raid of the dark web and it was called “Operation Cookie Monster”. The main target of the raid was the Genesis Market, which sells stolen digital credentials, which are often pulled from user cookies (hence the name).

Massive Chinese e-commerce app Pinduoduo is basically malware. You know, it’s fine and good that we’re talking about how dangerous and invasive different consumer platforms are. But it really sucks that we’re limiting it to Chinese ones. Because I have yet to see a Chinese app doing anything worse and more unethical than what American-made tech companies are doing to us, as well. In perfect world we’d be having a global referendum on data privacy, but, at least in the US, it seems like all we’re going to get are big investigations into shadowy Chinese apps.

Twitter censored a post according to the orders of the Indian government. But censored globally. Which is unprecedented. According to Indian news site The Hindu, a local activist had their tweets censored and the explanation box said they were being “withheld in Worldwide”. To me, this reads like a glitch. Instead of saying “withheld in X country,” they just set it to global geofencing. It’s still bad though and, more importantly, very embarrassing for Twitter.

Twitter is facing a ton of fines for hate speech in Germany. If the German government decides to fine Twitter for all of the hate speech cases, it would add up to around $32 billion.

SOME FUN STUFF

• Possibly the most important question of our time

• CREATE MACHINES CREATE 

• A terrifying two-sentence horror story

• Blank Page With A Machine

• Casey Neistat vlogged from Trump’s arrest

• Philly chicken man Etsy shirt

P.S. here’s an extremely funny art brush.

***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***