The oligarchs got high on their own supply

Since Tuesday’s landslide Democratic victory in the midterm elections, there’s been a lot of analysis that rightfully clowns on prominent right-wing figures for posting bizarre, erotic memes as if that was a real political strategy. Take your pick, we’ve got AI Star Wars breeding kink from Elon Musk or Rule 63 Harry Potter cosplay from Palmer Luckey. Neither swung any votes. But even separated from political strategy, it is pretty strange that America’s most powerful capitalists spend their days hornyposting, right?

I’ve been saying for more than a year that the Trump 2.0 project has involved submitting completely to the algorithm — engagement baiting and growth hacking as replacement for government messaging, organization, and policy. But I haven’t seen a lot of discussion about the sexual side of that, and I think it’s important, because this isn’t just happening on X.

The data we pulled this week about the top performing posts from October across every major platform suggest that every algorithm has gotten more sexualized. It’s affecting engagement numbers, influencer payouts, and even Patreon returns. The question is why? And the best answer I have for you is it’s all actually downstream of the rise of generative AI.

Every social platform we use has let in so much erotic AI content it’s starting to visibly shift American culture writ large. The sex robots have brainrotted their cum-brained oligarch owners, and, as this week’s election proved, that disproportionately impacts all the conservatives on X. But the great goonerfication is absolutely affecting what we all see online every day.

Generative AI has changed significantly in the past few years, but the ways people use it recreationally haven’t. Last month, Character.AI, one of the first successful independent AI startups, declared bankruptcy. It made its name in 2022 by going all in on roleplaying chatbots who you could talk to. This very funny list of its most popular characters, which looks like an AO3 tag search (more on that further down), shows any platonic talk was drowned out. 

Like a lot of tech pioneers, Character.AI went out of business mostly because the bigger companies were able to copy its best ideas — i.e. sexy chatbots — relatively easily. From OnlyFans allowing its models to set up automated responders to Musk’s aggressively horny Grok anime girl, artificial ERP (erotic roleplay) is so in demand that we’re having trouble keeping it out of children’s toys. And that’s just text. 

Images and video, which the algorithms have prioritized for more than a decade, are where the constant flood of AI content has really changed everything we see. This isn’t just sexual content, though it’s worth noting that months after the Grok CSAM debacle ended with virtually zero consequences, major platforms still refuse to censor AI videos that are sexual in ways that would get humans instantly banned. No, the same laissez-faire attitude extends to content you can watch in public.

Back in September, we were one of the first to report on the growing practice of replacing the real person in a popular video with a hypersexualized AI woman mimicking them, and getting way more views with their knockoff than the original. In October, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri offered aggrieved users a boilerplate reply on Threads saying, “We are actively working out what to do, it’s just a tricky problem.” He didn’t say why, exactly, but the AI videos doing better than the real ones provide an obvious reason. It takes a lot of effort to shift the algorithm away from content users have engaged with, even if it was artificially promoted.

This is the problem for everything. From fake news to ragebait, even if people disapprove of a trend, they’ve been trained by years of the infinite scroll to respond passively in a way that perpetuates it, if it stimulates the right lizard-brain reaction. And this month, we’ve seen the problem is getting worse.

I’ve previously written about TikTok artificially boosting microdramas, but this is the first time I’ve seen signs of a fandom for them — on Patreon, of all places. Are thousands of people really making the active choice to pay money for early access and exclusive bonuses for AI slop? It sure looks like it. In October, over 3,200 patrons gave money to a Patreon page for “Charlize Remi”, the pen name of the person behind an AI-generated microdrama called The Impossible Plant.

Based on my experience with Patreon, these numbers are a little fishy. The show has never topped 600,000 views on any individual platform, and you tend to need millions of views to get thousands of patrons. But a point in favor of these fans being genuine is what they’re paying for: The Impossible Plant is a lesbian romantic drama, and patrons get “Uncut” and “fantasy” (i.e. sexier) versions of all the spiciest parts. Porn games are one of the most reliable and highest-earning accounts on Patreon, since most game platforms don’t allow anything explicit, and they don’t need a mainstream audience to generate interest. Now, it looks like porn microdramas are joining them. Which is enough for me to call it. Algorithmic promotion is having an actual effect on taste.

Another data point we can look to is the biggest stream of last month. It wasn’t anything to do with the elections. It was the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, which has lost a lot of its mainstream appeal, but lives on as something horny you can stare at on safe-for-work social platforms. The annual event was held on October 18th, and was 2026’s second most popular YouTube stream in the US, with 3.1 million peak viewers. 

The brand’s official accounts got boosted off the show too, with 2.8 million new followers on Instagram and 1.8 million on TikTok — in the top 10 on both platforms for October. According to StreamsCharts, the show did better in the aggregate than this year’s Apple Keynote, with viewership up 30% from last year. Just like fake news and ragebait, this effect is shaping everything we see, even if it isn’t a sexy robot. Everyone’s become a little more comfortable being horny on main.

Now, let me just be clear. The last thing we are here at Garbage Day are prudes. In fact, I tend to put explicit and sexual content as more important to online trends than most people would like to admit. My pet theory is that the “why I need to stay on X” movement exists largely because the Everything App still has an enormous community of sex workers and content creators there, since it’s the largest iOS app that still allows you to see porn without age verification. But it’s clear that AI making algorithmic platforms hornier is causing some strange communication breakdowns on and off X, as we saw this week.

Silicon Valley’s reactionary right spent the lead up to and early years of the second Trump administration unleashing a wave of AI-generated erotica, convinced it was the first step to summoning their machine god. At the same time, the White House’s relationship with Big Tech got so cozy that Musk bought Twitter and invited every prominent MAGA tastemaker to set up shop. The self-appointed “Technoking” and his mindlessly scrolling court got high on their own supply and became stuck looking at reality through a kaleidoscope of AI anime girls, thinking the rest of the country was drooling over Malfoid as much as they were. And according to all the data I’ve seen, no amount of historic electoral losses can break through their fortified spank bank as long as their algorithms don’t meaningfully change. And now, anyone using the same platforms as them is at risk of the same fate.

Since Trump began his first run at the presidency in 2015, “the resistance” has had its ups and downs, and mostly the latter. So how did the Democrats manage to whip up a “blue tsunami” this time? Or more importantly, how did the Republicans mess this up so badly? Ryan & Grant discuss their theory on a bonus episode of Panic World — namely, the GOP became really, really bad at the internet. Check out a preview on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, or get the whole episode by subscribing to our Patreon.