We can finally call them weird

Conservatives Are Struggling To Get Ahead Of The Whole “Weird” Thing

As of yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign has raised over $200 million. And her TikTok channel is also still incredibly viral, even if the initial burst of “Kamala is Brat” is dying down a bit. Which was always going to happen.

Semafor’s Ben Smith asked an interesting question amid the Kamalamania last week, though, writing, “Who, beyond the candidate, gets credit for the Kamala rollout? Has just been incredibly well executed.”

And, funny enough, aside from Charli XCX canonizing Harris as Brat, I don’t think there really is a clear answer here. Like all good memes, Harris’ campaign just sort of emerged as a piece of culture, fully formed, like it had always been there. In fact, according to a post shared over the weekend by Sen. John Fetterman’s former social producer Annie Wu, many staffers on the Harris campaign were already working for President Joe Biden’s campaign before it shifted over. Which is evident. It’s mostly the same kind of cheeky, brand-safe libposting that it was with Biden. But with Harris at the center of it, it just works a whole lot better. And the stars continue to align for her.

The Swiftie bloc has come out in support, even if Taylor Swift, herself, has yet to endorse. And in a turn of events that will hopefully give Reddit wives something they can use to deradicalize their Star Wars husbands, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, at a panel at San Diego Comic Con this week, unearthed an old clip of Harris quoting the show’s iconic “twirling, twirling, twirling” line from an old Treehouse Of Horror episode. I watched it this morning and, as a long-suffering Simpsons fan, myself, I can’t deny that it made me smile. It’s good shit.

Republicans are having a less good time, however. They clearly assumed Trump’s assassination attempt would win the election for him, even though, once again, that hasn’t really been true historically for American politics. And the introduction of Sen. JD Vance as Trump’s running mate has, literally, if Google Search data is accurate, erased almost any good will it did garner. Depending on what feeds you’re looking at right now, he’s either bickering like an incel with “cat ladies,” a couch-fucker, or the guy searching for videos of women being sexually assaulted by dolphins. And the larger universe of right-wing and far-right influencers is having an even worse time than Vance.

The Republican digital ecosystem is much more decentralized than its liberal counterpart. During the 2010s, spearheaded by publishers like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro, conservatives learned that if they threw enough racist 4chan posts at the wall, and then aggregated them for platforms like Facebook, some of it would eventually bubble up onto cable news and break through. This strategy does not work now, though. First, the age of algorithmic video is a very different beast than the Facebook era. Most Americans’ timelines are not full of content being shared by friends and family, but, instead, content delivered via algorithms made by strangers and professional posters. And, two, after a decade of exclusively reading the most insane internet content to ever exist, most conservatives have become impossibly weird.

And this weirdness is exactly what the Democrats are now attacking directly. I mean this literally. The official X account for the Democrats posted over the weekend that Trump is “old and weird.” That was it, that was the whole post lol.

And being weird is a hard thing for Trump and his supporters to refute because, yeah, they are. Libs Of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik spent the weekend proving no one in her life cares about her enough to do a wellness check, feverishly sharing out-of-context queer fetish content, stolen TikToks from trans teenagers, and innocuous videos of drag queens and black women, claiming that no, it is, actually, the libs who are weird, not her. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Jr., a bunch of evangelical Christians, and various QAnon landlords thought the best way to prove they aren’t huge fucking weirdos was to admit they got scared by the Olympics opening ceremony. Vivek Ramaswamy got ratio’d by the Menswear Guy after he tried to prove he wasn’t weird in a post that, also, accidentally revealed he doesn’t know how to wear shoes. And Robert F. Kennedy hung out with Hawk Tuah girl at a karate match at Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville. Great stuff. Not weird at all. You’re all doing great.

Look, I am not going to say that Democrats have the election in the bag. It’s possible Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz is correct in questioning if Harris is something of a political meme stock. We are still very early. But I can say that something, at least for me, personally, has shifted.

I don’t know if it was the horror of the Trump assassination attempt, Harris launching her campaign, or just the the subtle shifts of history, but something has broken in me. A threshold crossed. I’m not scared of these people, I’m not even interested in them. At one point in the last few weeks, I woke up and just felt, in my bones, that I was done. We have spent the last 10 years living in fear of some of the worst, most annoying people on the planet. And they are, and have been from the start, hateful, lonely weirdos who don’t even know how to wear their own clothes properly. And, sure, there will assuredly be new political threats to come, but whatever this all was is ending. And no matter what comes next, it does honestly feel extremely freeing to finally say it. Republicans are deeply unpopular weirdos.

Life In Late Stage Capitalism

@contentmachine

Shaboinky Juice sounds legit #comedy #funnyvideos #snl #future #dayinmylife #sketchcomedy

Musk Is Violating His Own Terms Of Service (And Likely Election Law) If You Even Care

Over the weekend, Elon Musk shared a video featuring AI-generated audio of Vice President Kamala Harris, which has now been “viewed” 130 million times. The video originally came from an account called @MrReaganUSA, where it was “viewed” an additional 15 million times. That account belongs to a right-wing YouTuber named Christopher Kohls who, I guess, pretends to be Ronald Reagan online. Normal.

As New York Times reporter Ken Bensinger noted, when Musk shared the video from the weird Reagan cosplayer, he deleted the word “parody” from the caption, which is a violation of X’s very flimsy terms of service. And as journalist Jules Suzdaltsev pointed out, both making a video like this and, also, sharing or distributing it, is likely some shade of illegal, as well.

I don’t want to belabor a point I touched on above, but I do want to go a little longer here about why Musk pumping out right-wing propaganda on X is such a stupid waste of time. Even though I oscillate between skeptical and convinced about exactly how effective online radicalization actually was on a macro scale, if we do accept the common wisdom that Facebook pushed America’s Overton window right and that Twitter, at its peak, was able to manipulate the mass media in a similar way, then we have to acknowledge that this is simply not the case now. Facebook content used to come from people you know. There was a peer pressure to engage that is almost entirely absent on the app now. And I actually think that was the secret sauce. And it’s definitely not there on X, the everything app that has everything on it aside from real people. It’s also far less influential for journalists than it was even two years ago. So I do think it’s safe to say that Musk is literally pissing into the wind with this stuff.

OpenAI’s Search Engine Is Here And It Sucks

I have friends and a life, so I often forget that ChatGPT exists, but, apparently, OpenAI finally announced its long-awaited search product over the weekend. And, as The Atlantic reported, even its demo got a bunch of stuff wrong. SearchGPT is still, according to The Verge, just a prototype, but the plan is to eventually pull it into ChatGPT.

I am, admittedly, a little more openminded about generative AI — or at least easily dazzled by it — than AI doomer king Ed Zitron, but I think every day it becomes clearer that he has been correct from the jump that this stuff is a bubble and it’s bursting. His newest piece today argues that OpenAI might only have a runway of a year or two left to either raise an unfathomable amount of money, build computer God, or implode completely. I’ll tack another prediction on here.

I think the future of generative AI, post OpenAI is bloatware. Remember that weird period around 2014 when HTML5 was replacing Flash and there was still a bunch of old, janky Flash players scattered around the web? That’s what “ask the chat bot” and “summarize with AI” boxes are going to feel like. If they don’t already.

Congrats To Reddit User u/hai_world

Nine months ago, a redditor named u/hai_world, in a thread on r/boxoffice, predicted that Marvel would bring back Robert Downey, Jr., to play Doctor Doom. And this weekend, at San Diego Comic Con, Marvel announced just that (I don’t want to talk about it).

Now, one piece of context here is, for those who don’t lurk on Reddit’s various movie communities, r/boxoffice over the last few years has evolved to something closer to r/wallstreetbets. A lot of the users there spend their time trying to predict — and probably gamble on — weekly box office hauls.

Either way, u/hai_world has commented this week on how correctly they saw the way things were headed. “They called me a madman,” they wrote. Yeah, probably because it’s the dumbest idea in the entire worl— nvm I don’t want to talk about it.

Marques Brownlee Finally Shared His FBI Story

YouTube tech critic Marques Brownlee was visited by the FBI following his reporting on the Escobar folding phone back in 2020. Definitely worth a watch.

A Redditor Has A Gnome Problem

Alright one more Reddit item for you. I’m going to do my best to sum this up as concisely as I can, but here’s a good thread with screenshots of the important bits.

There is a user in r/Edinburgh that is trying to find a specific brand of vodka because they’re a “Russian Slavic pagan,” who recently moved to Scotland and forgot to offer their gnome, or “домовой,” which Google translates as “goblin,” for what it’s worth, an offering in their new home. Now the user says their Wi-Fi doesn’t work and their girlfriend broke up with them and they need a specific brand of Russian vodka to appease the gnome.

According to the commenters from r/Edinburgh, there’s a secret Polish arcade in the city that should be able to help them out.

GB & J

Some Stray Links

• MatPat’s lobbying on Capitol Hill

• “Saudi Arabia’s goin sicko mode on its sci-fi city-state”

• “Veep Creator Armando Iannucci Saw It Coming”

P.S. here’s a good rabbit post.

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