Finding a Chalamesque boyfriend

The Highs And Lows Of The Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest

—by Adam Bumas

There are still a few days left to make your plans for the Taylor Russell lookalike contest in New York. And if you can’t make it, chances are you can get to one of the many other lookalike contests that have been popping up across the country over the last few weeks. In fact, they’re so popular the newest ones have run into a problem. Omar Apollo, Miles Teller, Rachel Sennott, Mark Lee… chances are there’s at least one person on that list you don’t recognize on sight, making the finding of a lookalike a lot less exciting. But how’d we even get here?

Like many other weirdly popular memes, this one started in New York’s Washington Square Park — Gen Z’s open air viral laboratory. The Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest was held there on October 27th, and attracted a crowd of hundreds, including the man himself. It was organized by YouTuber Anthony Po, who admitted to The Hollywood Reporter he initially planned to rig it so he would win, but had to step back when the crowd got so rowdy that several Timothées were arrested.

Po is your bog standard viral stunt influencer, so when something he does gets big, it’s worth investigating why. And, well, Heather Wei-Xi Chen and Kirsten Merrilees reported for Defector that most people attended the contest for one of two reasons: To make content, or to find a Chalamesque boyfriend. Fair play on the second, but it’s the first that’s worth focusing on here.

Viewed in a vacuum, the lookalike contests are definitely a little strange. But they’re actually totally in line with a bunch of other offbeat cultural moments lately. Barbenheimer, brat summer, Kendrick vs. Drake, they all bubbled up out of niche corners of fandom first, propelled by young people making content as a form of entertainment themselves. Which is fairly a novel idea. These trends may have eventually ended up looking like any other meme — with brands and politicians jumping in at the end — but they each started as something that felt decidedly too strange to co-opt.

And, yes, The Brands are beginning to try and find an angle on the lookalike contests — the various frantic Slack rooms that uphold America’s marketing industry, thankfully, move quite slow. Actor and humanoid capybara Glen Powell took charge of his own lookalike contest last week, appointing his mom as a judge and awarding a cameo in his next movie as the grand prize.

Which brings us to the central tension here. It’s one that continues to pop up every time Gen Z launches a new meme. Much has been written about how weird their humor is, sure, but their tastes, at least as a group, are unabashedly mainstream and almost always collectivist. Compare the lookalike contests to one of the first big Gen Z memes, the Gentleminions. Dressing up with your boys to watch a Minions movie is surreal, but it also requires you going to the premiere of a billion-dollar children’s movie franchise. Barbenheimer, same deal. Gen Z were quick to grumble that brands were going to force a Barbenheimer down our throats every six months going forward, but it’s hard to complain about brands cashing in on a trend if that trend is you dressing up to watch the two highest grossing movies of the year.

This mix of normie and hyper-specific culture is even more pronounced on TikTok, where the barrier between an inside joke and a common reference, between liking something and participating in it, is nonexistent. That’s how you get lookalike contests for these less famous figures (who are still undeniably in the mainstream).

Which is the underlying appeal of these contests. Over the past 20 years, so much of what fandom means has been corporatized and financialized as the internet has made it easier to track. PopCrave has turned fan accounts into press teams, Funko Pops are a billion-dollar business, Comic-Con has become a shareholder meeting (and vice versa). But it’s a lot harder to co-opt a semi-spontaneous irl party, whether the theming is Hegelian e-girl or TikTok Rizz. It’s not impossible, but you can tell tastes are shifting.

And this is what makes the lookalike contests different from the flashmobs that were embarrassingly popular a generation earlier. Flashmobs usually had some kind of meaning to them, an activist pretext or vague notion of social awareness. But these contests don’t really have any other meaning to them besides getting together, having fun, and, of course, making content.

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A Good Post About Microwaves

What The Heck Is Going On With Jack Schlossberg?

Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s weird grandson and the true victor of the 2024 election cycle, had a big Thanksgiving week. He posted videos at Vivek Ramaswamy of himself lip-syncing to Toby Keith songs, generated a bunch of AI images of Elon Musk sucking on eggs, and posted that he wants Robert Kennedy Jr. to submit a stool sample to, uh, someone? Schlossberg also seems to be going through a breakup right now, as evidenced by his recent TikTok output.

Amid all of the posting mania, Schlossberg also seems to be using Trump’s big win to stretch his brand a bit and actually try his hand at being a semi-serious political pundit. He was posting over the weekend about Musk undermining US military interests.

But the problem with taking Schlossberg seriously is he has a very specific kind of rich Massachusetts guy vibe, where everything he says sounds like he’s being sarcastic, but also appears to be totally genuine. It’s likely this is part of the reason he initially went viral, but is definitely making his, once again, seemingly earnest, pivot to leader of the new #Resistance, a bit confusing.

All that said, he cooked with this one:

ChatGPT Can’t Talk About A Certain Guy

Here’s a weird thing. If you type “David Mayer” into ChatGPT right now, the AI stops working. It won’t even tell you it can’t answer, it just bricks the chat. And as Mashable reports, it can’t read screenshots or images that feature the name either. Some other users have experimented with this and discovered more names that ChatGPT can’t acknowledge aside from Mayer’s.

The weird “David Mayer” bug, though, caught the attention of users over on Reddit’s r/conspiracy because there is a David Mayer de Rothschild, who is a billionaire and member of the Rothschild dynasty. Interestingly enough, it seems like ChatGPT could accept “David Mayer de Rothschild” before all of this blew up, but, as of this morning, when I checked it, “David Mayer de Rothschild” now also breaks ChatGPT, as well. “David Rothschild” and “David de Rothschild” both still work. Also, the block does n’t seem to be happening on the API level.

The leading theory here is that it’s related to the European Union’s right to be forgotten GDPR provision, but it’s curious that it’s only being applied to ChatGPT. I put both “David Mayer” and “David Mayer de Rothschild” into Midjourney and not only did it accept both prompts, it actually generated images of Mayer. But it’s also possible it’s related to a completely different David Mayer.

The Slop Aesthetic Of The 2020s

Kanye West released the music video for “Bomb,” a song off his album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2. It’s, of course, horrible, which should be expected at this point. But the video also features AI-generated footage. I think it may feature some real shots of West’s children, North and Chicago, who are also sampled on the track, but it could possibly all be AI-generated.

“I’ve been warning people to prepare themselves for the worst aesthetic era of our lifetimes,” The Information reporter Julia Black wrote on X. “But I fear nothing can prepare us for what’s to come…,” comparing the 2020s slop aesthetic to previous garbage style eras like the 2000s.

With Trump entering the White House again next month, and folks like Elon Musk scurrying in along with him, it seems likely that, yes, this is just how this decade is going to look. AI-generated images, cybertrucks, NFT art, Shein clothes — things are going to get very very ugly.

*Sigh* Let’s Talk About The Destiny/Nick Fuentes Thing

Look, I am only including this on the off chance you come across references or memes about it. So you don’t have to do the research yourself.

Steven Kenneth Bonnell II is a streamer that goes by Destiny. He is sorta-kinda aligned with the online left, but he’s also a notorious troll and, famously, extremely stupid. We could run through Bonnell’s greatest (worst) hits, but, honestly, you don’t really need to know them.

Nick Fuentes is a Gen Z fascist and is also considered the de facto leader of the “Groypers,” a far-right splinter group of the alt-right that use a fatter version of Pepe The Frog as their mascot, have less qualms with trad Christianity, and are even more nativist and racist than Trumpers.

A video leaked on X over the weekend, purportedly showing both engaged in various sex acts. It’s unconfirmed, but Bonnell did address the video in a recent stream, sort of laughing about it, claiming a friend of his was hacked recently, concluding, “sometimes it happens.” Fuentes has also sort of addressed the video’s existence, writing, “My haters spent their entire Thanksgiving watching gay porn to verify a rumor published by a Pakistani newspaper just to hurt my reputation.”

The Enron Thing Is Most Likely A Viral Stunt

Enron, yes, that Enron, launched a website and promotional video this morning. They’re claiming they plan to solve the “global energy crisis” using decentralization.

This is almost certainly some kind of a stunt. The Enron trademark has been owned by The College Company since 2020. And The College Company is the parent company of the Birds Aren’t Real project. Other tells that this is a joke are the obvious stock photos on the new Enron website and a section where they claim that Enron is an acronym, with the R and the N standing for “repentant” and “nice,” respectively.

Some Stray Links

• “The Great Grocery Squeeze”

• “Man who found smooth Mars bar gets £2 compensation”

• “The Grinch has knee surgery tomorrow”

P.S. here’s a post that transcends language.

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