What was 'woke'?

I’ve spent the last few months trying to explain to my girlfriend what “quirk chungus” means. Per Know Your Meme, it’s a “slang term for a female archetype depicting a quirky Millennial woman alongside a ‘man-child’ counterpart.” It was immortalized in a genuinely hateful comic by iFunny user Big_Ed and has grown into a general catch-all among Gen Z for a certain kind of millennial.

I’ve shown my girlfriend the comic, along with dozens of posts about “quirk chungus millennials” and she still can’t totally wrap her head around it. I’ve terrorized her with videos of millennials doing weird dances. I’ve even spent some time showing her videos of a very specific kind of dance that was popular among nerds and cosplayers in the late 2010s where people would like sorta mug the camera with a Dreamworks smirk and move like they’re stop motion. (I should point out a lot of those videos were actually made by teenagers at the time.) I even showed her the Disney swingers app comedy sketch and Cedar The Barefoot, a self-described “they-them goblin,” who spent the pandemic making cooking videos. As one X user wrote, “An interesting quirk I've noticed with a lot of millennials is how much of their humor is inspired by Jim Carrey's Grinch.”

The consensus my girlfriend and I have settled on is that even though she was on Tumblr (and Reddit and Twitter and YouTube) just like I was throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the fandom moms and hobby drama and Reddit elf wives and shipping wars and, most important for today’s issue, the internecine “woke” drama that I saw — and apparently, much of Gen Z grew up with — just never reached her. Which makes sense. The internet’s a big place. But it speaks to a very real problem we all have when it comes to reckoning with whatever the heck happened in the 2010s. It was the decade where the internet finally overtook television as the way culture was curated. And the internet cannot be condensed into simple narratives the way TV can. You could try and make a Forrest Gump about the 21st century, sure, but it would have to contend with millions of posts and videos depicting very different lived experiences. Instead, most of what we remember now about the 2010s really just comes down to vibes. And those vibes are most often decided by people who are chronically online enough to remember and/or care. History is written by the posters now.

And so, vibes dictate that millennials were all polyamorous quirk chungus Disney adults drinking tea out of mustache mugs and wearing Doctor Who scarves and reading Supernatural fanfic and doing TikTok dances at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Even though the richest and most powerful millennials in the world include Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, Rihanna, Stephen Miller, Kalshi co-founder Luana Lopes Lara, and Jared Kushner. Swift might be dead to rights quirk chungus. But the others? Not really!

This same internet discourse-powered rewriting of history, a history decided by the posters, is currently happening within American liberal politics, as well. The Democratic Party has spent the summer squaring off against a new, edgy socialist insurgency that wants to make sure they don’t get mistaken for, well, whatever the heck was going on in the 2010s — the cancel culture, the rainbow capitalism, the demands to defund or abolish the police. And, perhaps troublingly, they really want to distance themselves from the summer of 2020, specifically.

Yesterday Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC News to discuss Wisconsin Assemblywoman Francesca Hong’s old “woke” tweets, which include a call in 2020 to cancel Thanksgiving, labeling it the original “superspreader event.” (I love Thanksgiving, but she kinda cooked with that ngl.) Ocasio-Cortez simply said of Hong’s posts, along with other “woke” positions like abolishing prisons and abolishing police, “Woke 1 was crazy.” Ocasio-Cortez was quoting New York City council member Chi Ossé, who posted that take back in May. And Ossé originally wrote it after being asked about one of his own “woke” tweets from 2021, which read, “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the council.”

The concept of “woke 1” and, thus, “woke 2” is a meme that evolved out of the concept of “dark woke,” which cropped up in the final years of the Biden administration. It is an admission that the wokeness of the 2010s is over, that it didn’t work, and that there is a new path forward. Though, I have yet to really see a coherent definition of what “woke 2” is, aside from leftists on X calling people slurs. (Is it woke 1 if I don’t think any self-respecting person should call someone a retard?)

To say that Ocasio-Cortez’s “woke 1 was crazy” line has gone down like a lead balloon is an understatement. And, most interesting of all, it’s basically pissed off everyone. Leftists and progressives are mad about it because it basically hand-waves away any meaningful work they did in the 2010s and early-2020s. Right-wingers are mad because it hand-waves away what they think was genuine oppression because they were forced to watch body-positive soap commercials and see pronoun buttons in coffee shops. And, hell, even radical centrists hate it, like Matt Yglesias, who wrote on X, “I don’t love this idea that nothing anyone said or did in 2019-2020 counts. Like it’s fine as a sociological observation, but I want political leaders who keep their heads even in the face of dumb fads.”

Ossé, though, seems both excited that Ocasio-Cortez referenced him and also oblivious that this whole episode has made him look, frankly, kind of silly. I’m actually his constituent, so I’d love to ask what woke 1 is and why it was crazy. Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy? Were the counter-protesters that were attacked and the one that was even murdered at Charlottesville crazy? Were all the women in politics, journalism, and entertainment that were SWATed and doxxed and chased off the internet — and out of their jobs — by gamergaters crazy? Was it crazy to spend a decade living in fear of incel spree shooters? Or are we just talking about stupid internet shit that you, personally, saw in 2021 and, therefore, it’s something no normal person needs to actually care about?

This feels sort of obvious to say, but I really can’t imagine a bigger victory for the right wing. A new generation of leftists who are have bought into an extremely online distortion of their own history, are pathologically ashamed of it, and now absolutely terrified of sounding woke. Feels like it might just be easier to acknowledge it’s inherently cringe to believe in something and move on.

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Podnews reported last week that Spotify is adding a new button called “Skip Ahead,” which will give Premium users the ability to skip chunks of podcasts they might not care about. Podnews mentioned things like ad breaks, sponsorship messages, and even calls to join a Patreon. And per Semafor, podcasters are freaking out. “The platform repeatedly insisted that the changes will buttress overall listenership by keeping users engaged with podcasters’ content, citing information showing that the skip button kept people listening to podcasts longer,” they reported.

There’s one line in the Semafor piece I want to highlight because I think it underscores what’s happening across the creator economy right now. Spotify is reportedly experimenting with a Skip Ahead button because they’re concerned about the amount of ads in podcasts and also worried that free Spotify users, the majority of their user base, is hearing both Spotify’s ads and the ads in podcasts.

There’s a simple solution here actually. One that is also true for YouTube, who has also been locked in a skip-ads arms race for the last few years. Hell, it’s basically true for every platform that pays people anything to put content on that platform. Though, they aren’t going to like it and they aren’t ever going to do it: Just pay creators, or in Spotify’s case, podcasters and musicians, more money. That’s it! That’s all you need to do. If you pay creators more — whether it’s through ad revenue or a cut of the overall premium subscriptions or whatever — they will make better stuff and people will like it more and you won’t have to keep making algorithmic tweaks to manage their slop. It’s very simple!

Or, I guess, you could go the other way…

Last week, X’s head of product, Nikita Bier left the company and the platform announced it was drastically overhauling its revenue sharing program. No word yet about where Bier will land, but his tenure should be thought of as X 2.0. The first phase of X was the chaotic — and psychotic — free-for-all that was Elon Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino running the day-to-day operations. Bier’s time as head of product marked a fairly noticeable shift in how the platform felt. More stable, less 4channy, perhaps, but it had other problems. Chief among them was the rev share program turning the app into ground zero for clipping and low-effort slop. So Bier is leaving and the site is changing course on the rev share program feel linked.

The rev share program is being replaced with the “Original Content Rewards Program,” according to a blog post on X’s website. It’s launching in September and it’s basically a payout system solely for Verified users posting “content you have personally created – written, filmed, designed, or produced – that reflects your own voice, perspective, or expertise.” In other words, no clipping. Womp womp.

Warner Bros. made the extremely confusing decision to release an AI-generated “podcast” featuring talking dogs to promote their new film The End of Oak Street. I guess there’s a dog in it. I am, honestly, kind of relieved at how angry people are about this. The comments on Instagram are brutal.

I’m cooking on a theory that I am now ready to debut, lol. I think we are going to see a increasingly large gap form between AI slop-enjoyers and AI slop-haters. And I think very shortly there will just be two totally different audiences when it comes to entertainment, people who don’t care or don’t notice it’s AI slop and people who absolutely do. And to back up that theory, Roku this month launched a channel that is nothing but AI slop 24/7. According to The Verge, it’s a genuinely awful experience. But I guarantee you that there are people out there who have already put it on and not even noticed.

Really what this is all going to boil down to is intentionality. Do you want an audience that will intentionally watch your shows and actually go see your movies in theaters? Or do you want to make audiovisual stimuli that people mindlessly stare at?

Roach lord Asmongold was banned from Twitch for two weeks. It’s not entirely clear why, but viewers think it may be connected to a recent stream where he advocated shooting immigrant children trying to cross the border in Spain earlier this month. You can read the quote here if you’re so inclined.

In other Bad Streamer news, Chud The Builder is out on bail. He’s spent the last two months in jail and is charged with attempted murder after he allegedly shot a man while he was on stream.

P.S. here’s Hereditary The Musical.

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