The uncanny valley between meme and law

Garbage Day Is Going On A Little Vacation!

Here at Garbage Media we do our best to maintain a European work schedule. So starting tomorrow we’re going on a little break. We’ll be back to our regular publishing schedule on September 3rd. But keep an eye on your inboxes and podcast feeds, we’ll have some fun stuff for you over the break.

In The Age Of LOLgislation

—by Adam Bumas

On Monday, President Trump announced he was deploying the National Guard to Washington, DC, in an (unlawful) attempt to take federal control of the city. The president first floated the idea in February, but like most things he says — invading Canada, pardoning Diddy — it was hard to know how serious he was about it. Even now, as hundreds of troops are set to patrol the city until late September, there’s something fundamentally silly about the entire affair. Especially since it’s all happening thanks to a guy named Big Balls.

Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old DOGE recruit who called himself “Big Balls” on LinkedIn, is currently working for the Social Security Administration. Last week, he was reportedly attacked by two 15-year-olds. The next day, Trump posted a photo of Coristine to Truth Social, saying, “If this continues, I am going to exert my powers and FEDERALIZE this city.” At the press conference on Monday, Trump used what appeared to be a chart by the X account @EndWokeness to justify declaring a state of emergency in a city with historically low crime rates.

Any attempt to try to frame all this in more serious, traditional terms has been instantly punctured and forgotten. After Trump’s announcement on Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt bragged on X about the “wall to wall” coverage. PR rep Sam Biederman replied on X, “Everyone covered my press conference announcing the dictatorship 🥰🥰🥰🥰.” And yesterday, journalistic paragon Benny Johnson joked to Leavitt about “giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Big Balls” — at least, Leavitt decided it was a joke, which is part of the problem here.

This is the latest in a long series of what I’ll call LOLgislation. There was no specific bill or political movement to take federal control of Washington, but Trump posted about it and all of a sudden it was happening. The agenda has been dictated entirely via public comments on social media, pretty much the easiest possible thing to dismiss as not being serious. But when you’re the President, everything you say has to be taken seriously, even — no, especially — if you’re using social media as frivolously as it’s designed for.

This didn’t start in Trump’s second term. Just a few months into his first, the White House took the position that Trump’s tweets were “official statements.” Neither Twitter nor the press were equipped for this at all, which is a problem everyone did their best to ignore until January 6th, which wouldn’t have happened without Trump tweeting about it a month earlier.

But to me, the defining tweet of Trump’s first term wasn’t anything inflammatory, it was, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” Yes, you’re cringing, and that’s the point. This was something we intuitively understood wasn’t serious — a typo in the age before you could edit tweets — but also something we had to take seriously. An official communication by what people were still calling “the leader of the free world.” The brain-poisoned cultural reaction from all corners was an attempt to reconcile this, but we still haven’t really come to terms with it, even eight years later.

You can see that when you look at the effect of comments like the previously mentioned “Canada should be the 51st state” thing, which has completely destroyed US-Canada relations and pretty much swung their last election to the left, all because of what at least began as a joke. During the 2024 election, we covered how Vice President JD Vance admitted Trump’s stories about immigrants eating pets in Ohio were made up. Now the immigrants are being deported anyway.

But LOLgislation doesn’t just have to come from Trump himself. Back in February, DOGE was cutting federal funding in direct response to posts from right-wing activist Chris Rufo. Sometimes, it can be traced back to completely anonymous accounts, like the chart from @EndWokeness, an account which has been linked to Jack Posobiec. Even the name, “Department of Government Efficiency,” came from an Elon Musk reply guy going by “Sir Doge Of The Coin.”

Modern social media, which is now saturated by AI-generated propaganda from government accounts, wasn’t designed for this. I’ve written before about how there used to be clear differences between the presentation and function of accounts for politicians, official entities, and normal users. Smartphone apps like Twitter and Instagram completely leveled the playing field, leading to what internet scholar danah boyd calls “context collapse.” Not to mention, it’s not exactly a new strategy for authoritarian regimes to intentionally blur the line between jokes and real policy. The Nazis, for instance, were extremely comfortable operating within the uncanny valley between a meme and official decree, knowing both mob and state violence flowed downstream of both equally.

What makes the second Trump administration different, however, is that the pandemic shifted the cultural center of gravity online. So we all have to deal with LOLgislation to some degree. If any random shitpost can suddenly become US political doctrine, and tech giants have largely given up on content moderation, we have to take every random shitpost that seriously. This is why Bluesky is such an infamously tough crowd. It’s also a major reason why anyone who goes viral now is scrutinized in a specifically political context. Hawk Tuah Girl was “the national hero we need,” and Vance threatened to deport the Menswear Guy after getting owned by him on X. In other words, social media has turned us all into Trump.

The shift online I mentioned above also means we get situations like Signalgate, where drone strikes are planned in groupchats and celebrated with emoji. Meme stocks have taken over the global economy enough that a post from an account named “Walter Bloomberg” caused a spike amid Trump’s tariff rollout. And AI is being pushed so hard that those tariffs look like they were first calculated by asking ChatGPT how to do it. All this is why the Trump administration isn’t hiding that Big Balls is the pretext for calling the troops into Washington. Not Edward Coristine, Big Balls — a stupid joke name for a man hired by a stupid-joke-named government agency, who helped shut down programs saving thousands of lives, became an apparatchik in the State Department, and is now getting his big balls all over Social Security. And you can laugh at it all you want. You can dismiss it as ridiculous. You can spend your days online dunking on it, trying to stay ahead of the meme. But none of that changes that this is statecraft now. Which is why some days following the chaos of our current political moment feels like you’re just Having Fun Online, rather than the slow motion implosion of American democracy. That’s the whole point.

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A Good TikTok

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The UK’s Internexit Keeps Getting Dumber

Let’s check in on the UK’s completely idiotic Online Safety Bill, shall we? As it stands, British regulators have somehow landed on both threatening social platforms with fines if they don’t comply with the new 18+ guidelines and also… apparently threatening them if they “curb free speech.” The Telegraph reported this week, “Ministers have told platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok they must not restrict access to posts that express lawfully held views.” Well, that seems fine. If there’s one thing both internet platforms and the users of those platforms love doing it’s, uh, having lawfully held views.

Meanwhile, the UK is experiencing a drought right now and an official press release this week from the UK government suggests people “delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.” Which was literally a joke made about Texas last week.

Does Anthropic Know Their New Logo Look Like Goatse?

Anthropic, the company behind the AI assistant Claude, announced a new update this week. Claude’s logo is a little squiggle that most people agree looks like a butthole. Anthropic, for some reason, decided to put to hands next to the squiggle for the release of Claude Sonnet 4. So now it looks like Goatse, the viral image from the 2000s of a man pulling his butt checks apart. With AI companies, there is no way to tell if this was intentional or not.

Elsewhere in AI world, Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are fighting about which one’s company has the most predatory, monopolistic practices. If you don’t want to view all the back and forth happening between the two on X, here is a Bluesky post with all the relevant screenshots.

And, lastly, before we leave AI world, this week, a user on X complained that ChatGPT gave her out-of-date information about nail salons in her area. After some googling around, the user discovered that ChatGPT was pulling from a 2016 article, not something more current. This would, normally, not be notable. Except, other users on X quickly realized the user complaining about ChatGPT was Xiao Ma, who just so happens to work on Google Gemini.

Apparently, even Google employees would rather use ChatGPT!

“Product Mommies” Vs. Sorority Girls

A user on X going by @thefemiurge posed a fascinating question this week about our country’s ongoing Sydney Sweeney jeans crisis. Why are Republicans so happy about videos of dancing sorority girls, but still, years later, having a meltdown over those women in an office doing the “Gen Z boss and mini” TikTok dance?

On the off chance that you, dear reader, are also confused about this, I wanted to offer a theory. As the center of cultural and political power shifted towards Silicon Valley in the early 2010s, right-wing movements like Gamergate sprang up to radicalize the young be-hoodied millennial men who now found themselves working at tech companies. These men had far different interests — and social mobility — than the traditional Republican voter. Goodbye quarterback who dates the cheerleader, hello lonely guy screaming slurs in the Halo voice chat. And these men were valuable enough for right-wing influencers to abandon traditional masculine signifiers and spend a decade pretending Star Wars and Marvel movies were the most important thing in the whole world.

This also means that as conservatives have become increasingly focused on dismantling things like trans rights and gay marriage, and increasingly fixated on defining traditional gender roles for both men and women, they have to stay focused on their core demographic of men who work in STEM.

So it’s not that right-wingers are violently enraged at the idea of women dancing. They want young — blonde, white — women dancing in sororities. They don’t want women dancing — or even existing — in the workplace. Which is why they’ve come up with the derogatory term “product mommy” for a woman manager a coder might be working for at a tech company. None of this is super coherent, mind you. But understanding that conservatives are desperate for radicalized young men in tech makes a lot of their rhetoric make a bit more sense.

How A Fandom Turned Into A Weird Religion

New Panic World!! If you haven’t checked out the new video uploads of Panic World on YouTube, this week’s episode, with guest PJ Vogt, is a great one to dive into. There is a lot to see lol. It’s all about the strange cult in Russia that sprang up in the 2000s that worshiped Gadget Hackwrench from Rescue Rangers.

Speaking of furries…

A Good Furry Video

@astra.the.kitty

✨🤔How About You - Would You Tell Your Boss? 🤔✨ Happy Tuesday, Fluffs! Have my first compilation style interview, straight from Furry Weeke... See more

Some Stray Links

• “This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men And she’s never been happier.”

• “Former Texas Governor Rick Perry has a very illegal new obsession”

• “What Is a Far-Right Ideologue Going to Do With the U.S. Institute of Peace?”

• “Hasan Piker Thinks America Might Be Cooked”

P.S. here’s some poor phrasing from an ophthalmologist. (X post)

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