Coconutpilled and contextmaxxing

Kamala Summer Has Officially Arrived

President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the election and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris via a notes apology yesterday. Republicans are very upset that Biden didn’t do it in a video or official address, likely because they wanted one more shot at dunking on his mental fortitude. And they’re so desperate to keep talking about Biden that they’re now sharing a slur-filled deepfake of him instead. It uses PBS footage and PBS is, obviously, not happy about it. Meanwhile, Trump hasn’t posted about Harris at all. In fact, he was still ranting about Biden on TruthSocial as of this morning.

Which actually encapsulates the entire Republican position on the matter. They seem bizarrely unprepared for this. (You know who did see this coming, though? The @Starheal astrology account, apparently.)

Prominent Republican influencer James Lindsay, better known as @ConceptualJames, has been having an absolute meltdown on X for the last 24 hours. He seems particularly upset about Harris’ hypnotically bizarre “what can be, unburdened by what has been” tagline, which Lindsay described as “a Marxist and Luciferian incantation,” which is definitely something a normal person would understand and/or care about. I guess, Harris is just too conceptual for James.

Meanwhile, Coconutposting is in full swing and the memes are very good. Also, before you ask, yes, there are already “Not Like Us” Kamala edits. Kamala summer has officially arrived. And before we get in deeper here, if you’re looking for some good starting points on Kamala memes, here are the Know Your Meme pages for the coconut tree meme and the unburdened meme.

Even if you took the most digitally-skeptical view of the 2016 Trump campaign and ensuing presidency, you would still have to concede that he weaponized cheap digital advertising, leaned into memes as a way to connect with and radicalize young people, generated viral moments to stay in the news, ran the country via Twitter decree, and organized an insurrection with Facebook Events and livestreams. And he did all of this fairly organically because Trump has a deep, yearning void inside of him that can only be filled by attention (relatable tbh).

The 2020 Biden campaign team seemed stuck between wanting to copy Trump’s 2016 playbook and also copy Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaign strategies. Which just didn’t work. RIP Biden water. You can’t be a violently-insane brain-rotted superposter and also be a glossy Instagram infographic girlie. Those are two different people and they usually date each other in their mid-20s up until one of them decides they don’t want to live in Bushwick anymore. Harris’ campaign, though, has already slid much more organically into the zeitgeist, at least online. And, yes, part of this is absolutely because Harris is not a 81-year-old white guy. This is something that both Trump’s campaign and, also, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign figured out to some degree. If you’re going to turn your old man candidate into a meme, he must never, ever acknowledge it or the game is over. Harris doesn’t have to deal with the malarkey problem because she does seems like someone who would send you a Deuxmoi post or a weird Instagram Reel about harmonic frequencies at one in the morning. But like in a fun way.

And you can already see how this works by looking at how easily the Biden-Harris HQ X account rebranded itself as “Kamala HQ,” and started pumping out memes. Her team has also started using the Brat font which, at least to me, doesn’t feel like a Pokémon Go to the polls moment, and has already made quite an impact on Fire Island.

“Dark Brandon memes: forced, cringe, literally something skull mask neo-Nazis were already making for fun during the election, cynical attempt to wield Posting Energy,” QAnon Anonymous collaborator and extremism researcher Sarah Hightower put it. “Coconutpilled Memes: organic, understated, genuinely subversive, taps into the collective Posting Consciousness.”

But the question is whether or not all this coconutposting means anything. It’s been the central tension of every election since 2016 and something we still can’t really answer because of how the internet has continued to evolve — or devolve — ever since. Do memes matter? And it’s likely that the answer is an unsatisfying, “kinda?”

Harris is very viral right now. She is also polling about the same as Trump. Which is better than Biden and, honestly, good for literally day one of her campaign. She has already raised $50 million in what The New York Times is calling a “cash wave,” with more on the way. So right now, the Harris campaign is surging both online and off. But if the internet in the 2010s was the semi-reliable tip of America’s cultural iceberg, the internet in the 2020s is a totally separate reality. One you cannot ignore, but one that is also dangerous to depend on. So the key is to feed the online world with content from the offline world. To create — and continue to create — enough cultural impact that you stay in people’s feeds. At least until November.

And this is likely why many pro-Trump strategists are freaking out right now. This dual-sphere campaigning takes a lot of energy and they’ve been banking on a candidate that couldn’t even coherently talk to one reality, let alone two. But now they’ve found themselves in a race with someone who’s just sort of being doing that by accident for the last five years without even really trying.

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Put an End to Those Pesky Spam Calls

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A Good Post

While we’re on the subject of Silicon Valley reactionaries btw, folks like Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, and Gab CEO Andrew Torba have all changed their profile pictures to some cringe laser eyes thing. A bunch of crypto media outlets are reporting this might have something to do with the Bitcoin 2024 Conference, which is happening in Nashville this week. But it’s also possible that it’s connected to Biden dropping out. But I’m beginning to think that both are true and that Mark Cuban has been right from the start: Silicon Valley’s endorsement of Trump is a Bitcoin play and all of this is just to pump the crypto markets.

The Dead Internet Theory In Action

There’s an account on X called @goksuuuuul that seems to almost exclusively post AI-generated recipes with basic stock photos. And last week, they posted a recipe for “Buffalo Chicken Burgers,” that really caught the attention of the site’s vast network of bots. The replies underneath it are all some variation of this:

There are also now a bunch of humans in the replies pretending to be bots, as well. As one user wrote, “Wanna see some real dead internet? Check out the replies.”

This is not an X-specific problem, though. This kind of content is happening across every major social platform right now. And it’s safe to say that the companies that own these platforms are trying to find out exactly how much slop the average user is willing to tolerate. The only option we have for getting away from low-effort AI content is probably (maybe) the fediverse, though, I have some concerns with that, as well. Speaking of which…

There’s A New App That Connects Mastodon, Bluesky, And Threads

Openvibe, which is not a sex toy manufacturer, is a new fediverse-enabled social app. It already works with Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Nostr (if anyone’s using that).

It seems pretty simple. Log in with your accounts and everyone you’re following appears in the same feed. You can also cross-post across platforms and, most exciting, to me anyways, there is an aggregated trending section. It currently only works on mobile.

I am deeply torn by projects like this. I am in my mid-30s, so obviously, I long for the days of combo-messaging platforms like Adium, but I also know that they never totally work in the long run. There are always important pieces missing when you aggregate services. And this is also why I’ve had so many conflicting feelings about the fediverse. I have serious doubts about its core thesis, which is that you can even have a decentralized public square. It’s possible that to have any kind of conversation online you do need a bit of platform lock in.

Anthony Fantano Is Hiring Breaking News Writers

Anthony Fantano, YouTube’s biggest music critic, is hiring writers for his website The Needle Drop. Even more interesting, Fantano is not doing a traditional salary or even freelance model for journalists. Instead, he’s paying writers a “percentage of revenue generated from their articles.” Writers have to write two articles a month to qualify.

This is clearly an idea imagined by a guy who has made his money off YouTube for the past decade. But there are a few other bits here worth highlighting. Writers will get 25% of programmatic ad revenue “for each article written on any of the network's platforms.” Which seems to imply this isn’t just a website. And writers will get bonuses from “direct advertising and subscription revenue.” Fantano’s site has also joined Lambgoat’s media network.

Look, any money to writers is better than none. Especially for music writing. And, at least, on the surface, this doesn’t seem like he’s building a content farm. But I’ll be curious if this project works, both from a quality standpoint and, also, an audience standpoint.

The Onion Weigher Strikes Again

The @onionweigher account on X is an account that will tell you how much an onion weighs if you send them a pic. Seems pretty self-explanatory.

Last week, a user named @ColsonYoung sent them a picture of an onion that was slightly bigger than a 12-ounce can of soda. And the Onion Weigher guessed it weighed about 700 grams.

Well, @ColsonYoung weighed the onion and guess what? It weighed approximately 700 grams. Incredible stuff, as always.

One More Good Kamala Post

Some Stray Links

• “Facebook turned off the news in Canada. What happened next?”

• “I pushed for press freedom in Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal fired me.”

P.S. here’s a good MF Doom post.

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