Waging war for the lulz

—by Adam Bumas

After US forces abducted Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January, we said it was the act of “rogue troll states, fueled by internet clout, where nothing matters unless it becomes content.” And in the ten days since the US and Israel began attacking Iran, the Trump administration has posted some truly horrendous memes about it, once again. Drew Harwell has a very good rundown of them in The Washington Post, but we’ll just stick to saying how crazy it is to celebrate American imperialism in the Middle East with Yami Yugi from Yu-Gi-Oh!

The troll state has gone to war and you don’t have to be on X to see it. Though analysts and pundits still seem to be a little confused about why official US government channels are talking like epic bacon redditors. So before we dive in, let’s do a quick refresher on what trolling actually is, since it’s all but died out.

Trolling may be deeply baked into the foundations of internet culture, but it also doesn’t actually have a lot of currency online in 2026. On the old web, the reason a troll was cool is because they were being ironic. U mad bro and so on. 

Now that basically all social spaces online have been financialized the same kind of social performance can’t stay cool and detached. In an attention economy everyone understands the value of clout. Trolling is a way to get attention, attention equals money, you can’t earn money ironically, QED.

The only way trolling can still exist on the modern internet — i.e. anywhere in culture — is someone with so much power people need to expect serious behavior. Which isn’t common, since the age of the relatable brand account eroded almost all expectation for disciplined, responsible online behavior from basically anyone with money or power. There are exceptions to the rule, though. When Elon Musk took over Twitter in 2023, one of his first moves was to change the company’s press email to auto-reply with “💩” It was deeply irresponsible, which is why it was, at least arguably, a successful act of trolling.

The second Trump Administration, which Musk spent almost $300 million to install, is still inundated with his influence from his time semi-officially running DOGE. And the most obvious sign of that influence is how hard government accounts are trying to troll everyone. They were expecting, and welcoming, the outcry from The Pokémon Company and Ben Stiller for using their work in the pro-war posts. They want the vulgarity to be a show of force, and have explicitly tied memes and arrests together in their agenda. They understand that the US government is a troll it’s structurally impossible to stop feeding.

Most analysis of how government leaders are talking about the war(s?) in the Middle East calls it “mixed messaging.” All the statements look a lot more coherent, though, through the lens that they’re all trolling. That’s why there’s so much contradiction in general about the goals, scope, and methods of the war. They’re how you enforce the dynamic that you’re just trolling, not being serious, and that your target is owned by taking it seriously.

That’s why some members of Congress are still avoiding the word “war,” or why Secretary of Murder-Death-Kill Pete Hegseth has to say, “this is not a regime change war, but the regime sure did change.” These are some of the few words left with actual consequences, and any forum moderator will tell you that banning words is a deeply imperfect way to keep the ideas behind those words out — that’s what gave us “weeaboo,” after all.

And that’s why Hegseth and Trump are so dismissive of US casualties, and why Fox News had to air old footage of Trump saluting fallen soldiers so they wouldn’t have to show the salute landing on his stupid hat. Once you start trolling, you can’t take anything seriously, even yourself. Otherwise, you’ll be the one who’s owned — or Kirkified, which is what happened the last time the Trump regime tried to take anything seriously.

The aesthetics may be ever so slightly different from the propaganda we expect from an authoritarian regime, but it achieves the same outcome. Question everything, believe nothing, and eventually give up paying any kind of attention to what the regime is doing. Though, trying to shitpost through an actual war, with an adversary that will not back down, amid the very real economic consequences of that war, is only going to get more complicated. Can you ironically use Halo fancams to inspire a draft? Can you entertain your CHUD followers with fashwave Agartha edits when gas is $10 a gallon? Or when Americans start dying in large numbers overseas in a war that the administration is still wink-wink not calling a war? We’ll soon find out, I guess!

They’ve kept it up for a week and a half, but trolling can’t last very long (even the X poop emoji stopped after a few months), and a foreign war can’t be ended very quickly. When asked “What’s next?” in an interview last week, Trump said “forget about next.” But it’s hard not to ask the question of a war that’s being waged for the lulz.

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I am quite certain that you have seen videos from Professor Jiang Xueqin on your timeline recently. His video from last year, titled, “Geo-Strategy #8: The Iran Trap,” has been viewed close to four million times and clips of his “lectures” are all over short-form video apps right now. Which isn’t totally surprising he checks a lot of boxes.

He’s Chinese, which gives him a certain air of objectivity, especially for folks who having a very Chinese time in their lives right now. He’s aggressively anti-Israel. And, well, it does seem like he correctly predicted a few things about the current conflict in Iran. But short-form video platforms don’t really give you a lot of context and there are a few pretty important thing you should know about Xueqin before you start binging his videos.

First, he is not a professor of geopolitics or any adjacent field. He has a BA in English from Yale. He currently teaches at the Moonshot Academy, a high school in Beijing. And his YouTube channel, Predictive History, which is growing very quickly right now, is not your typical history channel. Per the channel’s description, Xueqin is trying to apply “psycho-history” to current events. Isaac Asimov readers will recognize that term. It was coined in the Asimov novel Foundation, and it’s the belief that you could use mathematics and statistics to predict the future.

Also, while I have not seen anything super outwardly antisemitic in Xueqin’s videos (though I haven’t watched them all), I can say that, anecdotally, after watching a few, YouTube started bombarding me with some absolutely INSANE antisemitic content. He also will, fairly often, go off on tangents about the Illuminati. Weirdly enough, though, far-right streamer Nick Fuentes says he’s not a fan.

Oh cool, here are some new man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. Though, technically, actually, not beyond our comprehension.

Corticol Labs, an Australian biomedical and AI startup, created a “biological computer,” made from a bunch of human brain cells. 800,000 living brain cells, to be exact, which are connected to electrode arrays, allowing them to interface with different programming languages.

And then, of course, they taught those brain cells to play DOOM. It, reportedly, took about a week to get the biocomputer to figure out the game.

Roy Lee, the CEO of Cluely, the AI startup that’s supposed to help you “cheat on everything,” is feuding with TechCrunch right now. He was apparently contacted by TechCrunch reporter Julie Bort and gave them, “some BS,” according to him, because he was not expecting them to write about it. Well, they did and the numbers aren’t great. One estimate circulating on X right now estimates they have about six months of runway left.

Lee released a video responding to TechCrunch’s video, ranting about how actually Cluely is fine and arguing that TechCrunch should be reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, not him. (TechCrunch is a business and tech site that primarily focuses on startup news.)

The most interesting part of this whole cycle, for me, however, is angel investor Jason Calacanis’ response to Lee’s video. “Possible comments I considered: 1. this video will get more views than techcrunch this month 2. don’t care what Roy builds, just make him crash out monthly and I’m good,” he wrote on X this morning. “5. Wen Livestream Roy?”

That last part is what stood out to me. It seems incredibly clear to me that Silicon Valley elites are pushing reaction Gen Z hustlebros and looksmaxxers to livestream (i.e. Clavicular) and this is just more proof.

Here are two fun standalone websites to mess around with this week. First up, there’s Mew Clicker, a cookie clicker-like game that lets you from subhuman to Chad based on how often you click.

And, next up, is your ai slop bores me, which lets you take on the role of a user or an AI chatbot. You can ask questions or request drawings or answer questions or draw something for other users.

Remember, the internet is not inherently worse than it was in the before times, it’s just that a cabal of ultra-wealthy oligarchs convinced that us we can’t do stuff like this anymore and have financially strangled any incentives to try.

P.S. here’s Zooey Deschanel’s Crumbl Cookie review.

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