The internet is officially TV now

Last week, as the country celebrated the blue tsunami, Salon announced that after 31 years, they were shutting down. They didn’t offer up many details about why Salon was calling it quits, save for one short paragraph towards the bottom saying exactly what you’d expect:

“The business realities of independent digital journalism have changed profoundly over the years,” they wrote. “After careful consideration, we have reached the difficult decision that our publishing model is no longer sustainable. We know this news will be deeply disappointing to many of you, and we share that sadness.”

In other words, not enough people were reading words on their website, so they couldn’t make enough money with the ads on the website, so they couldn’t pay people to write words on their website. A common story right now, to be sure. But Texas is run by Democrats now, Salon, your watch is ended. RIP in peace.

I’m a little hesitant to say that the death of Salon is the death of the journalism or words or the web, but its shutdown is another data point from this year pointing to a truly massive cultural shift that most internet users seem to have just accepted without really thinking through. That this was the year — and that this month was possibly the exact month — that the internet truly did successfully pivot to video. Tack on to that the fact that ChatGPT is now responsible for about 20% of the search traffic that Google is, it seems undeniable that 2026 will be looked back at as the year the internet of libraries was replaced by the internet of televisions (and, soon to be, chatbots). And in the way all elections serve as cultural checkpoints for America, this month was moment most people seemed to notice.

Parker Butler, who’s worked across a myriad of Democrat digital comms teams, argued last week that the Democrats over-performed in the midterms precisely because they knew how to command attention in this new video-first landscape. Responding to another X post about how much money Elon Musk burned on this year’s election, Butler wrote, “Many of the candidates who outperformed the most this year were ones who knew how to effectively wield organic attention.” Or, put another way, the smart Democrats made viral videos, rather than pay racists to tweet. But there are more examples we can use to back up the vibe.

Druski turned Saturday Night Live into one big Instagram Reel this weekend. Hasan Piker and Steve Kornacki both pulled in hundreds of thousands of views with their election night livestreams. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz spent the summer building up a glorified hype house, which they’re calling “New Media,” which is now flooding X and Instagram with sycophantic short-form video and livestreams that no one is watching. Then there was the summer success of Backrooms and Obsession, the forthcoming 2029 Oscars on Youtube, the podcast and short-form video sweep at the Emmy’s this year, and this year’s earlier Clavicular-driven clipping epidemic. As The Verge’s Mia Sato wrote yesterday, “A ‘pivot’ feels inadequate to describe the current emphasis on social video, not just in newsrooms but in society writ large.”

I’ll be honest, it pains me to write all of this actually. And not just because I make my living writing words on the internet and don’t particularly want to make 90-second man-on-the-street videos. It’s actually because even if I did want to make 90-second man-on-the-street videos, there’s no way to do that and build a real business. Sure, you can make a lot of money with digital video, but there’s virtually no way to do that without digital-sharecropping on a platform like Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, or TikTok, which will never give you the actual power to be independent. The move from a text-based internet to a video-based internet is a move from an internet where you could feasibly control your own destiny to one where you will always be under thumb of a platform. An internet where no one’s famous, but everyone’s a celebrity. And that celebrity status is rented from the platform. And, yes, this is true for politicians, as well.

There’s a lot in flux right now — and I’ll admit I sort of spent the year assuming this big pivot to video wouldn’t actually work — but I’ll end on this link to Rachel Karten’s Link In Bio issue about Instagram’s new Features product. Per Karten, Instagram is clearly confident enough in the internet of televisions that they’re adding a Netflix-like binging algorithm on top of the TikTok-like endless scroll algorithm they added to the app back in 2020. Instagram has decided the future of their platform and, assumedly, social media writ large, is one platform housing the entire content pipeline, from clips to short-form to long-form. And if you don’t like it, you’re welcome to put your videos somewhere else. But I assume every other platform is working on the same thing.

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Answering the phone is bad enough, and it’s really not ideal when that call turns out to be with a weird little freak who makes off with your non-inflation-adjusted wages — and then brags about it to his weird little coworkers. In fact, the BBC caught a guy at a scam call center yukking it up about how he’d ripped $250,000 off his victims.

This totally normal industry full of well-adjusted people treats your personal information like a commodity. These brokers have a whole marketplace dedicated to collecting and selling your phone number, address, Social Security Number, and pretty much anything else that’s in a data center somewhere.

That’s where Incogni comes in. Incogni goes after data brokers for you, making sure they remove your personal information from their databases — even continuing to follow-up if and when they try to auction off your info again.

Incogni is offering 58% off right now with code DAYDEAL. Subscribe today, so you have more time to look at that sweet, sweet online content — instead of dealing with a scammer on a phone lin

I’ve gotten a few questions from readers and other journalists about the state of the manosphere post-midterms. First, yes, it is extremely bad vibes over there at the moment. That whole world — from Clavicular, to Joe Rogan, to the reactionary CEOs of Silicon Valley — are dyspeptic at the moment. If you want a nice dose of schadenfreude, here are the hosts of the All In podcast realizing the party is over.

And Clavicular, in between court dates, wanted to make it clear that he’s not on the Trump train anymore. “I told you guys last year, JD Vance is subhuman. The Republican party is a joke. Should have listened to me, good riddance,” he wrote on X last week.

And, yes, even Rogan has realized it’s the end of an era. As CNN’s Reliable Sources wrote this week, Rogan continues releasing episodes with former Trumpers, giving them a platform to break rank with the MAGA movement.

Here’s where I’ll caution you from celebrating just yet. Though the media stumbled across the internet bad man movement around 2015, I can tell you these creeps have been finding one another online long before that. I was hate-reading Roosh V’s Return Of Kings and 4chan /fit/ posts back in college. I am convinced that what we now call the manosphere is as innate to the networking effects of the internet as mass shooters, eating disorders, and cyberbullying. So I don’t think we’ll ever see a true end to it, but I can confidently say that the wind has been taken out of these guys’ sails and it’s going to be very funny to watch them stumble around for the next year or so.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is yet another Big Tech CEO to dump cold water on the great and mighty AI revolution. Chesky, during an earnings call last week, said that a “non-material” amount of users are having their AI agents book Airbnb listings for them.

This is more or less the same observation Bloomberg opinion columnist Parmy Olson made in a piece today, writing that AI agents are a “solution looking for a problem.” But I think Chesky actually put a finer point on it in the earnings call, arguing that online shopping, whether it’s for products or services, is actually fun and not something normal people would outsource to a bot. Chesky pointed out that bulk of web traffic to Airbnb happens during work hours. It’s the fun thing people do instead of working!

This is actually, in my opinion, the core problem with almost everything coming out of Silicon Valley right now. The thoughts and feelings of our new ruling class are not relatable!!

Not to do a dreaded both-sides take, but I think the current death spiral of right-wing digital media while liberal and leftist digital media finds its footing is interesting. I don’t think its conspiratorial to say that the deck is stacked against the left on all the major platforms. And I also think right-wing creators are much more comfortable taking all kinds of funny money. So what happened? Well, here are two interesting stories that might color in some of the missing details.

Per The Washington Post last week, actively melting candle Laura Loomer was charging thousands of dollars per X post. It seems like the bulk of Loomer’s clients were people wanting to get their interests in front of President Donald Trump. Alex Bruesewitz, Trump’s 2024 campaign advisor, admitted to paying Loomer for a post. Which is strange because you’d think, uh, Bruesewitz could just talk to the president? I assume they’ve met before lol. Even stranger, I thought it was common knowledge that Trump doesn’t really look at the internet much anymore? I was under the impression most of his engagement with posts come via aide Natalie Harp’s print-outs. Anyways, the TL;DR here is the only thing the right wing loves more than flooding the media with propaganda is scamming each other.

On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic National Committee is now talking about their decision to create the consistently viral, though not super buzzy, I’d argue, @FactPostNews account. Per Semafor, the DNC created it as a way to get away from the “DNC’s toxic brand.” Which is funny because it’s not wholly dissimilar from how the MAGA movement (and the Tea Party before it) turbo-boosted the Republicans back in the mid-2010s.

All of which is to say, a few years ago a British friend, after cycling through the umpteenth prime minister in as many years, told me they were beginning to suspect that there was only one consistent trick to winning any election in any country in the world post-2008. You just have to clearly and simply tell people you are not the current party in charge. And, if you are, technically, the party in charge, you have emphatically deny you are in charge and use a fun new name until people vote you back into power.

I’ve been keeping tabs on how different countries are culturally responding to AI. And there is a bit of an East/West divide. Or, at the very least, the mainstream media in countries like China and Japan — and the western outlets that regularly translate that media — are convinced that all the “netizens” (hate that term) of East Asia are A-ok with AI.

Which, assuming that’s all true, makes the current AI-fueled flame war between Chinese trolls and Japanese nationalists all the more interesting to watch from the side lines. Basically, a whole bunch of Chinese users are jumping on to X via VPNs to post AI-generated videos of Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dancing and flirting with his assassin, Tetsuya Yamagami.

Curious to see if this starts to change the popular attitude towards generative AI in Japan!

Rolling Stone’s got some real fun photos from the guerrilla show.

P.S. here’s an important Tumblr post.

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