The Clear Channel internet

New York City is having a good week. The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time in nearly 30 years and they’ve won their first two games against the San Antonio Spurs. The streets around Madison Square Garden have quickly turned into huge parties and, like all parties in 2026, they’re beginning to produce viral content.

The big clip of the moment is a Knicks fan yelling into a camera, “My mayor: Muslim. My bagel: Jewish. My Christian: Dior. Knicks in four.“ I’m not going to lie, it goes hard. Though, few have seemed to notice (or care) that the microphone the Knicks fan was yelling into has a Kalshi flag on it.

The account that shared the clip is called @itsbingbot, which, per its bio on TikTok, is an account for “Kalshi's robot.” There are more posts of the robot in action on its Instagram. It appears to be a Unitree G1, created by Unitree Robotics, and it’s shown up to a handful of NBA events recently. Unitree has been using the robot’s ability to play basketball as a performance benchmark and has tied that into their marketing, I guess. This robot, which I suppose is called Bing Bot, wears a Kalshi-sponsored Knicks jersey and has been interviewing and dancing with fans all week in Manhattan. But Bing Bot is only the most visible tip of the Kalshi Knicks psyop.

Kalshi-sponsored accounts are also staging viral moments at Knicks celebrations that are getting shared organically by fans and then boosted by affiliated clipper accounts. A TikTok user, who does not appear to be working with Kalshi, named @jpthejuggernaut, filmed a Knicks fan calling the Spurs pussies in a video that did nearly two million views on the platform. That video was then shared to X by an account called @LakeShowYo, a Verified clipper account affiliated with Kalshi Sports. @LakeShowYo also shared the Christian Dior video, which is what made it really go viral, racking up nearly 20,000 shares on X. And @LakeShowYo’s account is a fascinating glimpse into how vast of a content operation Kalshi is running in New York right now.

@LakeShowYo shared a video from a TikTok channel callled @offtheglasstv, which is a sports apparel brand that’s currently running Kalshi promo codes. And @offtheglasstv has been following Bing Bot around Knicks celebrations, as well. Best as I can tell, many of the “crazy Knicks fans” that are showing up their videos are plants (they appear across multiple videos). The Christian Dior guy seems legit, but we’re less sure about the person who brought all this into the field of play. The fan who ran onto the court near the end of Game 1 of the finals was reportedly doing it to promote his memecoin “$Attention”.

This is not totally new. Every tech bubble seems to recreate the flashmob from first principles. But what Kalshi is doing in Manhattan right now is easily the most insidious version of it. Not only are many of the fans planted by Kalshi-sponsored accounts, but the seemingly random accounts promoting the clips are, as well. It would be absurd to say that the Knicks fandom has been completely astroturfed by Kalshi, but they are clearly trying to co-opt it. Though, it’s unclear exactly how much of this being directed by Kalshi.

According to Semafor, a bunch of Kalshi influencers went renegade last week. The prediction market was sponsoring big right-wing accounts like @GuntherEagleman when they started posting conspiracy theories about the Los Angeles mayoral election. (Polymarket influencers were doing the same thing.) So it’s possible that Kalshi doesn’t even know that their funding some weird tweetdecking operation and these accounts are just trying to make as much money from various video rev share programs as they can. The end result, though, is effectively the same.

All of digital video — and by extension, all of social media — is poisoned. There’s been so much written about the Dead Internet theory lately, but that’s not what this is. It’s closer to the Clear Channel internet, where everything has been so thoroughly corporatized that nothing ends up in our feeds by accident anymore. At least, not when it comes to the truly viral content. It’s either being directly bankrolled by a company like Kalshi or downstream of some weird payola agreement a bunch of influencers made with random clippers on Discord. But unlike TV or the radio, our social media feeds continue to look like — and market themselves as if — they’re still powered by real people. And there are really on two outcomes here. One possibility is we just slowly accept that nothing we see online anymore is genuine and accept that social media is just a new worse version of TV now. The other, much more interesting possibility, is that people realize the internet is infinitely big and you can always just make a new version of it.

I’m not a huge sports guy, but I think that’s also true for basketball and every other cultural institution that feels totally and completely locked in amber by huge corporations right now.

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Panic World producer Grant Irving and I will be in DC this weekend for the UFC White House fight. It is sure to be a nightmarish kaleidoscope of insanity and we’ll be covering it here in the newsletter next week and in the podcast, but if you want updates as we go, be sure to follow Garbage Day on Instagram. I’ll be dumping everything into a story over there all weekend.

—by Adam Bumas

Weekend box office reports say The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act made over $35 million around the world since it opened on Thursday. It’s not putting up the same numbers as other internet hits like Backrooms or Obsession, but the barrier for entry on this is a lot higher. Not only is The Amazing Digital Circus the last episode of a web series, it’s also intensely and forbiddingly online.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic. The series is easy to get into by the more all-encompassing standards of YouTube. The show follows ordinary humans who are trapped in a mysterious, kid-friendly digital world. They have to survive both by learning the secrets of the game and dealing with their mature, complex emotional dynamics. 

Any cartoon about adult themes is all but guaranteed attention online, but the internet appeal of Digital Circus goes deeper. The show combines too many niche web communities to list here. It has all the unfolding mystery of an ARG, the gaming-based drama of a Minecraft SMP, and takes inspiration everywhere from classic science fiction to the YouTube “object show” Battle for Dream Island (ask the most indoor kid you know). The show features both its own proprietary Backrooms and its own proprietary Obsession. And, unlike those other two, you can come to the theater in cosplay!

I took this picture of cosplayers Laila and Annie on Digital Circus’ opening night, where I asked a bunch of attendees about their relationship to the show, as well as the last thing they had seen in movie theaters. When I asked the same questions opening night of Iron Lung I found plenty of regular moviegoers, including some who barely knew who Markiplier was. Here, everyone was fully up to speed on the show, but many of them hadn’t been to a theater in a year or more. Which means this is probably a much better sign of the times than horror movies that anyone can sit down and watch.

Lizzo has been trying to restart her career after she was sued in 2023 by former dancers for allegedly sexually harassing them. She also stopped being vegan in 2024, which lost her the support of the vegan community at large. Part of her return to public life is posting pretty much nonstop on X. Amid her flurry of posting, she’s been surprisingly candid about how she, well, doesn’t have much of a career anymore. Last month, she was complaining that social media algorithms were scrambling her ability to communicate directly with her fans on platforms like Facebook (I actually buy it). And over the weekend, she answered a question about why her fanbase suddenly vanished.

“The industry changed so much in the last three years. Streaming replaced radio and I was a radio darling. That’s how my fans discovered my music,” she wrote. She also complained about the “public attack” on her career, which isn’t how I would describe what happened, but it did likely impact things, as well. I want to focus on the radio-to-streaming shift, though.

I’ve tended to think of Lizzo as an internet-first artist — largely because she was so tied to late 2010s social justice and got her start on TikTok — but I think she’s right that her music was primarily for radio listeners. There is clearly a sound or a vibe that does better on streaming than on the radio and we all recognize that radio is no longer where popular music is found these days, but I haven’t read anything particularly good about what the differences is between artists that did well on the radio versus artists that do well on streaming. Even more interesting, though, Lizzo framed it as an audience access problem. I’ve seen some other users on X making lists of other artists that are also likely locked behind the crumbling radio ecosystem, like Meghan Trainor, Lil Nas X, Katy Perry, and Kesha. Which feel broadly true?

A lot of concert discourse flying around right now. A whole bunch of Phoebe Bridgers’ stans are claiming its ablest or classist that she’s doing a phone-free tour. I will spare you the play-by-play there, but some of the arguments are pretty mind-bending. Elsewhere, though, there is a debate raging over whether it’s ok to be mad at a guy wearing a banana costume to a hardcore show. Allow me to explain.

A guy wore a banana costume to a Toronto show for the hardcore band End It. The band told the crowd to tear the costume off him, saying, “You wanted the attention and now you have it.” The crowd was very happy to oblige.

One user on X astutely connected the banana man to the trend of Death Grips fans dressing up in pinwheel hats, which is actually a trend we covered here in Garbage Day way back when!

To tie up both the Phoebe Bridgers and End It stories here, I’ll just say that establishing a new normal for concerts post-COVID is going to take a lot longer than I initially assumed. Waiting to see which prediction market figures out a way to monetize this first.

P.S. here’s an important update from the tunnel woman.

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