Does X matter?

A little housekeeping before today’s issue. First, I’m going on vacation next week. The newsletter will be off all week. I’m going to go sit in the woods. I need it so badly lol.

Second, I’ve gotten some emails about premium subscriptions. Seems like some folks are getting unsubscribed from their yearly plans without realizing it. If you see a green button below, it means you DON’T have a paid subscription anymore. Just hit it and resubscribe.

Exactly How Politically Dangerous Is X?

Over the weekend, riots broke out across the UK and both the British media and lawmakers quickly pointed the finger at X for inciting the violence. It speaks to one of the central anxieties of our current moment: Exactly how important is X, the website once known as Twitter? Which is really another question asked a different way: Exactly how much influence does Elon Musk have over us?

It seems clear that X has played a role in the anti-immigrant riots in England and Northern Ireland this weekend, but discerning exactly how much of a role is the tricky part.

Tensions in the UK started last week after a 17-year-old from Wales, born to Rwandan parents, attacked a Taylor Swift-themed yoga class in Southport, England, with a knife, killing three children. Because the alleged attacker is under 18, his name wasn’t released initially, though it was later revealed to be Axel Rudakubana. And because of strict UK reporting laws around crime, no other details about the suspected attacker or his motives have been made known to the public. And this information bottleneck created a vacuum that quickly filled up with racist conspiracy theories online, particularly on X.

On July 29th, @Artemisfornow, an anti-COVID lockdown truther and verified X user, posted that the Southport attacker’s name was Ali-Al-Shakati, an asylum seeker on an MI-6 watch list. None of this was true. And @Artemisfornow was credited as the originator of the conspiracy theory by outlets like The Times Of London, but she has since said that she actually got this information from a Facebook page called Kossyderrickent, a Nigerian gossip blogger with 100,000 followers on the platform, who, in turn, wrote that he got the name from a witness at the scene. The fake name was then picked up by a viral chum site named Channel3, which is run, partially, by a team of Facebook marketers in Pakistan. And from there it was shared on X by a right-wing journalist named David Atherton and far-right soccer hooligan Tommy Robinson. Finally ending in a mob storming a local mosque in Southport.

Then, on Saturday, as riots mobilized across the country, Tristan Tate, the brother of alleged sex trafficker and men’s rights influencer Andrew Tate, shared a photo on X of a man that he claimed was Rudakubana, but was actually just a different guy named Axel that someone found on Facebook. And digital researcher Marc Owen Jones has done a lot of good analysis into who are sharing pro-rioter hashtags and the conclusion is that they’re actually coming from a small handful of far-right influencers in the UK, and are primarily being shared by bots with AI-generated profile pictures. Of course, Musk is sharing a lot of this stuff too. But is X inciting the violence or just documenting and mirroring it? And do we continue to focus on X simply because it’s still the easiest platform to search?

Interestingly enough, these are questions that were asked 13 years ago, during the 2011 London riots, which were driven by vastly different circumstances, but still inspired the same desire to blame it all on Twitter. As The Guardian reported at the time, “While politicians, journalists, and police were constantly tweeting about the disorder, rioters were not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those taking part in the looting and violence were mostly avoiding communicating on public forums.”

And this time around, blaming everything on Twitter, now X, also means giving a lot of power to a global reactionary movement that Musk and other Silicon Valley CEOs have a vested interest in propping up. One they’re hoping they can spin up in time for November’s US election. If X matters, then the media covers X, and if the media covers X, the right wing control the discourse. Exactly like they did in 2016, both with Brexit in the UK and Trump in the US. But X is less influential than it was as Twitter. And we can prove it.

X has lost 18% of its user base since last year, 23% since Musk bought the site, and it’s not growing anymore. According to data that Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas and I are tracking, if you ignore various scams that spike up from time to time, the biggest accounts on the platform are basically passing the same 8-10 million users around every month. The site is totally stagnant.

And while, yes, X has a uniquely important role in British life that it doesn’t have in the US (basically as a public WhatsApp for the ruling class), it’s also just as likely that these riots would have happened without it. The initial report that led to the attack on the mosque was from Facebook — and it’s still up on Facebook, mind you. And the most dangerous riot content that I’ve seen is actually happening on Telegram, where users are organizing a hit list with the addresses of various immigration charities. Oh, also, Facebook users appear to be literally tagging themselves at various locations where they’re throwing bricks at police cars.

Instead, we need to adjust how we think of X. There does seem to be some cultural juice still left in it. Kamala Harris’ Brat Summer and Hawk Tuah girl both may have been driven by TikTok, but the moment they popped on X was the moment they really entered the zeitgeist. But it’s not that Musk and his website are creating new culture, they’re simply recording it. In this sense, X is now to TikTok what TV used to be to Twitter. A slower, older media environment capable of aggregating and canonizing what’s happening in a more chaotic, but relevant space. And just like with cable news, it’s not actually driving culture. If you ignore it, it will go away.

Anyways, I didn’t have room to put this anywhere, but I wanted you to all to know that one rioter is now, according to the Metro, much less gobby after a police dog bit his arse.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

❌ Delete your personal data

Spam starts with your personal data being sold. Data brokers are profiting from your home address, SSN, phone number, and other personal information that doesn’t belong to them. Incogni scrubs your personal info from the web. Simple as. It takes 3 minutes to set up, tackles 180+ data brokers and people-search sites, and there’s a 30-day money back guarantee. Protect your data, your time, and your sanity. Get Incogni today and never look back.

Use code DAY55 today for a 55% annual plan discount →

FDR Franklin Delano Roosevelt Brat Summer Spring Breakers Charli XCX Edit

Market Bad

The stock market is not doing so hot today. CNBC is arguing this is all connected to a bad jobs report that dropped last week, but many of the stocks doing the worst right now are Big Tech stocks. At least tech writer Ed Zitron is having a good morning as his predictions of a tech bubble bursting come clearer into focus.

Bitcoin is doing the worst, though. This weekend essentially wiped out six months of gains. As Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote this morning, “Bitcoin doesn't look like The New Gold. It looks like three tech stocks in a trench coat.”

Why Is Gen Z Obsessed With Gatekeeping Pop Stars?

Here’s an interesting little anecdote from America’s ongoing pop girlie crisis. Over the weekend, a Chappell Roan fan account shared this TikTok video from an Oklahoma University sorority.

@oualphagam

Our chapter is ALL SET for you to run home, PC ‘24 💗🏡 #RUSHTHEREDDOORS #GOGAM #WORKWEEK #ALPHAGAMMADELTA #ALPHAGAM #RUSH #DANCE #RUSHTOK #SORORITY

“Love that Chappell is getting recognition but I fear half of them would probably call her a slur,” the fan account wrote. Then the president of the sorority chapter responded, writing, “I’m the president of this chapter and I’m also queer! LGBTQ+ people in sororities exist and we are just having fun 🩷 I saw Chappell in concert in February and had the absolute best time at her show.”

The whole interaction has gone very viral, with the general consensus being, “everyone should stop being so weird about Chappell Roan.” Which I agree with! Though, I also think there is something uncanny valley about the way sororities film these kinds of videos. But my main take on this is that Gen Z is having a tough time with gatekeeping and it seems to be causing them a lot of anguish. I sympathize, when I was 15 years old, my high school hockey team discovered Fall Out Boy.

As I see it, Gen Z wants to rebel or pushback against millennial culture and be “cool”. And to do so, they understand that they need to establish themselves as authorities or curators, and to make it harder for culture to be discovered. But they’ve also never lived in a world without social media. So everything they’ve ever consumed has had some kind of metric or number attached to it. Which is, I think, why they seem largely incapable of imagining anything beyond pop music. (They also love shoegaze, but that’s because Spotify happened to show them something that felt cool.) So the end result is a lot of young people fighting with each other about who gets to enjoy literally the most mainstream sounding music imaginable.

It Seems Like Kanye West Used Vocal AI On Vultures 2

Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign released a second collab album this week and, according to several hip hop subreddits, it’s being called “9/11 for Kanye dickriders.” I just report what I see, folks.

One user in the Playboi Carti subreddit, which isn’t really a Playboi Carti subreddit and now functions more like a general hip hop shitposting community, isolated a few moments on Vultures 2 that seem to point to West using an AI model of his own voice.

This would not surprise me for a few reasons. The first is that West has always been uncomfortable with the sound of his own voice and loves filtering it through different digital effects. The second is that West is extremely lazy. Since the Yeezus era, at least, he’s been mumbling gibberish into demos and having ghostwriters turn it in to real lyrics. And the third reason is that West has no one around him anymore that can tell him his ideas are awful.

But what I find the most interesting about this is how relatively quick this technology has spread inside the music industry. And I think it’s likely we’ve probably already heard AI-generated vocals in major releases.

It’s All Kicking Off In The Hegelian E-Girl Clique

Alright, let’s go step by step here because this is a thorny one. A bunch of women who identify online as “Hegelian e-girls” announced a party in Brooklyn over the weekend featuring a bunch of low-level Gen Z doomer influencers. I’m not going to spend a ton of time explaining Hegel, but this gives you a decent overview of the general vibes at play here. Also, one of the e-girls wrote a notes app manifesto that you can read here if you feel like it.

After the Hegelian e-girl party was announced, however, the e-girls started claiming that violent threats were made against the venue and the whole thing had to be postponed. Though, there are reports that this wasn’t true and there were no violent threats and in fact no reservations at all for the event.

Then the party did end up happening at a different venue. I think. According to posts from people who were there (I think), it sounds like it was full of a lot of really fashy weirdos. Maybe idk. None of these people say what they mean and it doesn’t actually matter because…

There’s now drama inside the Hegelian e-girl clique. One of the e-girls, named Sanje, claims that she left the group a week ago when she realized that “the ‘Hegelian e-girl council’ is quite literally subhegelian” and “relies on a very vulgar understanding of dialectics.”

So there you have it. The Hegelian e-girl council announced a party in Brooklyn, possibly faked a bomb threat, may or may not have actually ended up throwing the party, and, in the end, broke up because they were actually subhegelian all along. A story as old as time.

A Really Good TikTok

@official.homesweethome

This was a night I’ll never forget!! #engagement #proposal #couplegoals #boyfriend

Some Stray Links

• “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Admits He Left a Dead Bear in Central Park”

• “I was New York's Cheeseball Man”

• “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas”

P.S. here’s an important Joe Rogan observation.

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