Like Television, But Worse

Here’s an odd thing thing that keeps happening. It seems like people are starting to ask more from the influencers on their feeds. Two recent examples:

Last week, Jake Shane, the little guy that sometimes asks stupid questions on red carpets, asked Kacey Musgraves an impossibly stupid question during a recent episode of his podcast Therapuss With Jake Shane. The question was so stupid that Musgraves was visibly taken aback during the “interview.” Shane asked her to explain a line from her song “Slow Burn.” The line is, “In Tennessee, the sun's goin' down, But in Beijing, they're headin' out to work.” And Musgraves had to, uh, walk him through how timezones work. Back in March, Shane caught a bunch of heat online after he asked a bunch of celebrities if they thought that the child actor in film If I Had Legs I’d Kick You was “annoying.”

People are also having a meltdown over a food influencer that goes by @newt on TikTok who has close to 10 million followers. He decided to post a recipe for the Korean dish bossam that was also a gossipy recap of the d4vd murder case. It is honestly worse than you could even imagine. Not directly related, but a comedian named Nic Zicari posted a video that went viral on a few different platforms over the weekend titled, “You watch a food influencer with no personality,” which eviscerates, well, food influencers with no personality lol.

Oh, actually, here’s another for you. Writer Emma Camp made a video for The Wall Street Journal, asking the question, “Why does everyone sound like a teenager?” The one-minute video was meant to be some weird scoldy takedown of a recent interview with Hasan Piker and Jia Tolentino, where they joked about how shoplifting is based (waow). Except, people quickly pointed out that Camp spends her whole video talking — and mugging for the camera — exactly like a teenager. “There is already a broader name for this. It's called engagement farming and this video is also doing it,” writer Matt Bruenig wrote in the replies on X. You believe we should stop engagement farming, yet you participate in the attention economy. Curious!

All of this is pointing to a general malaise with digital video. One that certainly started with the clipping mania last month, but feels larger than that. And to explain what’s happening here I’m going to make a couple assumptions that I think are broadly true.

The first assumption is that the majority of users on the internet do not understand the economics of digital video. And, specifically, they do not understand that most of what they see on their feeds is being made by people who are not making much money from it. Here’s a data point to back that up. In an episode of The New York Times’ Popcast (who do get paid real salaries to make content), the comedian Druski said that he recently spent $100,000 on his Instagram skit about church pastors and didn’t make that money back from the video’s performance on social. Druski made the point that spending a few million dollars on a production isn’t that big of a deal for Hollywood studios, but big-time creators like him are spending their own money to make these videos.

Another assumption I’m going to make is that the average user on a platform like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram can no longer discern the difference between a legacy media podcast like Popcast, Druski’s one-man Comedy Central on Instagram, Jake Shane sitting on a couch with Kacey Musgraves, and a guy recapping murder trials in his kitchen. Which means all four kinds of videos are held to the same standard, though not how you might think. Instead of users expecting everything on their feeds to be professional, audiences have kind of settled into a weird middle ground where they want videos to feel like a friend with perfect media training casually FaceTiming them from a professional newsroom. A tough balancing act to keep up, for sure.

And my last assumption is that all of this has reached a point where the average user has begun treating their feeds like television, but a version of television that feels worse in ways they can’t totally explain. I see posts like this all the time, but there was another one over the weekend, where a user racked up 40,000 reposts on X for writing, “Has anyone else realized there's nothing to fucking watch on YouTube anymore.”

What’s happened to digital video is, honestly, just the most visible microcosm of what’s happened to everything over the last decade. Tech companies promised us their apps would free us from the gatekeepers and institutions that lorded over the 20th century only to replace them with basically the exact same thing those institutions offered us, but worse. Oh look at that, YouTube is literally doing a TV upfronts presentation this week.

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A Good Geese Song

Thanks For Coming Out To Garbage Day Live, Everybody!

Our residency at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn wrapped up last week. I want to thank all of you that came out and I want to thank our amazing guests that stopped by. I also want to thank my amazing team who helped me put together a really unique live show. If you’ve been wondering what Garbage Day Live is like, I’m excited to announce we finally have some nice professional footage to put online. Here’s the show about that time I accidentally mogged Clavicular.

And stay tuned for some news very soon about what we’re doing with Garbage Day Live next! (We’ll also have some more clips for you soon.)

New Labubu Dropped

Alright, just the down and dirty facts for this one in case you encounter this stuff in the wild. The new viral meme toys are called mystery dumplings and they’re like big dumplings you open. They’re like big squishy balls you open up from a plastic dumpling steamer. They’re made by a toy company called RMS USA.

I can’t uh totally understand what makes a mystery dumpling good or bad, but people seem to be really excited about getting the glitter ones? Or, perhaps more accurately, child influencers are paid to be more excited on camera about glittery ones versus non-glittery ones? Is that too cynical?

The Mormon TikTok Conspiracy

A video of wives dressed like “goths” surprising their husbands at dinner went real viral last week. I will refrain from making any comments about whether or not any of the wives were actually dressed as “goths.” The video was filmed at an Olive Garden, we can just let that slide, I think. Anyways, a user on X shared the video, writing, “I’m not sure how to explain this, but 90% of influencer content online is spiritually Mormon.” Which got me curious. Was the original user Mormon? I did some digging.

The video was posted by Elizabeth Stroyan, a kindergarten teacher from Arizona. Her original upload of the video did 14 million views on TikTok. Her content definitely has like a super wholesome vibe, but I couldn’t find anything that was overwhelmingly religious and definitely nothing connected to Mormonism. I think she’s just a white lady lol.

While this video doesn’t appear to connected to the Church of Latter Day Saints, they do have a pretty huge presence on TV and social media right now. The Mormon-led #WaterTok trend of 2023 became so popular it led to the subsequent Stanley Cup craze and the current explosion of “dirty soda” at fast food restaurants right now.

Before you go say that there is some kind of massive Mormon social media psyop happening right now, I’d like to offer a different theory. I think “spiritually Mormon” content is doing so well right now for the same reason super horny and offensive transgressive content is doing well right now. Algorithms are just pushing everything to the extreme.

A Lot Of Right-Wing Websites Are In Free Fall Right Now

I want to keep saying, “sorry, one more video thing,” but I think it’s best to assume that we are at a real inflection point with digital video and there’s just going to be a lot of activity in this space for the foreseeable future. Case in point: X is cracking down on freebooting and clipping.

Also, as The Righting reported yesterday, it’s not just Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire that is seeing a total collapse of traffic right now. The Blaze, The Federalist, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, all of those freaks are seeing massive drops in website traffic right now. And interestingly enough, that’s reflected in what’s happening on YouTube, as well, according to Chaotic Era.

Fox News is far and away the biggest political YouTube channel, with around 500 million views in April, but every other political YouTube channel getting over 100 million views are left or liberal.

If we assume that all right-wing digital media publishers were running elaborate ad fraud schemes to inflate their traffic and viewer metrics than this means that the money has dried up somewhere in the equation.

Only Four Days Left Until “The Event”

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s an Australian town everyone on Reddit agrees is haunted.

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