The fringes of online gutter culture

Hawk Tuah Girl Feels Like The End Of Something

One of the most fascinating issues right now with the current state of the web and, by extension, popular culture, is that we simply don’t know what audiences mean anymore. Sure, we understand them relatively. Someone with millions of views or followers or subscribers is more popular than someone with 10. But once you get into the upper echelons of popularity things become much fuzzier.

For instance, I’ve spent the summer writing about the pop girlie showdown between Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Chappell Roan. But it wasn’t until I spent some time back home in the Boston area this summer that I encountered what is, clearly, the biggest song of the season: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”. Which I heard no less than 100 times in the span of a week. Bostonians have a weird love pop country, stomp clap hey ho indie, and radio-friendly hip hop, so it makes sense that that song has taken over the region.

And Anthony Fantano, in a recent video titled, “Why Is The Shaboozey Song So Popular,” nails this conflict, between intense fanbases favored by online platforms and the background radiation of culture. He argues that Spotify and other streamers (and COVID) effectively killed the party song because most of the music trending on those platforms is listened to alone and Shaboozey showed up with the perfect crossover hit to remind people that you can still listen to music outside.

But the distinction between the popular and the truly popular is harder to gauge when we’re talking about purely online celebrities. We know MrBeast is a big deal. Though, it’s still a little hard to actually feel it irl. But what about Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah girl? Is she actually popular? Or do we just know her name and see her on our screens?

Well, Jake Paul, another internet celeb who has been living out in the fringes of online gutter culture for over a decade now, seems to think she is. He signed Welch to his media company, Betr Media, and is helping her launch a podcast called Talk Tuah. Which is, honestly, excellent branding. But I’m less clear on why anyone would listen to it. Welch has also spent the summer at various cryptocurrency events. Another vector for the “is this really a thing?” phenomenon. This week she’s in South Korea at a conference called Korea Blockchain Week. And, yes, there’s a $HawkTuah crypto coin. There’s apparently a bull run on it right now. But, once again, is there?

Journalist Taylor Lorenz ran up against this question in a recent piece on her Substack about the Brazilian X ban. Lorenz reported that, “some staffers at music labels and entertainment PR agencies said they were scrambling on Friday night to assess the impact the ban might have on their talents’ fandoms.” Which is a strange admission considering the reason Brazilian fans are so vocal about American pop culture on platforms like X is because American celebrities do not typically… come to Brazil. It’s a difficult place to tour and it’s even more difficult for fans to import any kind of merch. So these labels are now effectively saying that they’re worried about losing free promotion for their artists that has been long organized by fans who don’t get much in return. So, once again, after the Brazil X ban, are these artists actually losing their audiences or are they just finally seeing the true size of the fandoms they bother engaging with? Also, it’s not like these fans are vanishing. They still exist somewhere. We just can’t see them as easily. Which is the point.

(To be clear, this is not a knock on Brazilian fans. More artists should come to Brazil!!! And if these fans are so important for promotion, they should be compensated in some way probably!!!!!)

The Hawk Tuah Conundrum becomes even more headache-inducing when you take into account that it’s also unclear if X still actually matters. As of March of this year, X’s user base was down about 30% from where it was the year prior. And the estimates I’ve seen recently say about 40 million Brazilian users were booted off over the weekend. Twitter was small, but X is microscopic. So, like Welch, is X important or is it simply the last social network that lets users — and, more crucially, people who work in the media — still search it?

The conclusion I’ve come to this summer — one I’m still not totally sure I fully believe yet — is that what’s really happening here is that virality is decoupling from popularity. And I think you could even argue that the very idea that mass appeal had to be accurately reflected back at us online and vice versa was an entirely millennial idea. A neurotic need to know, and quantify, exactly what everyone else was seeing and doing. A panopticon for the overachieving generation. But I also don’t think we’re returning to the 2000s decentralized content badlands either. Instead, there will be silos of popularity, online and off, global and regional, real and fake, and none of them will quite add up correctly, but all seem vaguely huge. It’ll be confusing, but, ultimately, I don’t think anyone will really care. Well, unless you’re trying to run for president or something.

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Wait, does simple actually win?

A month ago on Garbage Day, I just put a link to meh.com to see how it'd do and 1,859 of you checked it out, more than just about every other thing I've tried here. So…let's try again:

meh.com

I have my doubts, but also my hopes and dreams that just putting a link to a site without hype somehow is actually the best way to get you all to see what Meh is about. The science experiment continues!

An Important Reminder From The United States Postal Service

Podcasts Are An Important Part Of Audio

So here’s the first of a few surprises I’ve been working on all summer: Garbage Day is officially launching a podcast. It was going to be called Talk Tuah, but that name was already taken. So we’re going with Panic World. And you can follow it on all major apps right now. And if you were already following the Garbage Day audio edition, then congrats! You’re following it (more on that in a sec). Our first episode is out next Wednesday.

Every episode tackles a different online witch hunt or moral panic, old and new. And our first season will be dropping weekly up until around Christmas. We’ve already got some great guests including Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, podcaster Michael Hobbes, and Caroline Calloway.

Panic World also has a Patreon, where we’ll be hosting bonus content. It won’t be part of the normal Garbage Day subscription because Beehiiv can’t do private podcast RSS feeds yet and there really isn’t an easy way to link the two. But we’ll be working on ways to integrate them and make things simpler as we go. And both subscriptions will get you access to the Garbage Day Discord. Garbage Day’s current monthly subscription is pretty low and if you were to subscribe to both it’d come out to around the same price as Defector’s podcast bundle, so I feel like this is not a totally crazy proposition lol.

We have an incredible team working on this, including our producer Grant Irving, our business manager Josh Fjelstad, and it features research from the indefatigable Adam Bumas. And I think you’re all really going to like it!

As for the Garbage Day audio editions. The simple answer is: They were really fun and ultimately informed a lot of what we’re doing with Panic World, but were extremely labor intensive to do by myself for every issue. I’ve looked into accessibly options that could accomplish the same thing and they aren’t great, but let me know if there’s anything you guys are using to listen to articles that you like and I’ll see how much it costs. (If you want the old eps of the Garbage Day audio edition for some reason I can email them around lol.)

Some More Notes On The Brazilian X Ban

I still don’t think this X ban in Brazil will stick. I assume both parties will back down to the point where everyone gets to come back. But weirder things have happened. In the meantime, I thought I’d add some context to this new Alexandre Files drop because it’s, intentionally, a little misleading.

The post refers to Monark as “the Brazilian Joe Rogan,” which is accurate, to a point. Monark is Brazil’s most infamous podcaster, real name Bruno Aiub. In 2021, Aiub defended former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro after he claimed that COVID-19 caused AIDS. iFood, a Brazilian food delivery app and one of the main sponsors of Aiub’s podcast, pulled their ads from the show and one of Aiub’s fans, who was working at iFood at the time, started vandalizing restaurant listings and replacing food names with pro-Bolosnaro memes.

Then in 2022, Aiub was fired from his own show after he got “very drunk” and argued that Brazil should have a Nazi party. Which is illegal to have and advocate for in Brazil. And in 2023, the year that X’s team is mentioning in their Alexandre Files, Aiub was threatened with a fine of the equivalent of around $60,000 for using platforms like X and Spotify to publish fake news about the Brazilian election. Also, illegal in Brazil.

I’m sure all of this was omitted for reasons that are purely coincidental and not tied to Musk’s desire to, one, do whatever he wants on a global scale, and, two, use X to wage a right-wing culture war.

Comedian Crowd Work TikToks Have Become Unsustainable

@blaucomedy

STAND UP COMEDY TOUR: Louisville 9/6-7 | Glasgow 9/18 | Dublin 9/19 | London 9/20 | Belfast 9/21 | Manchester 9/22 | Miami 9/27-29 | Irvin... See more

Look, I would not recommend you watch this video. It’s awful. But it’s a useful example of how out of control crowd work videos on TikTok have become. I see this guy’s videos on Reddit a lot. His name is Michael Blaustein and he’s now not only filming his audiences with dedicated cameras, but, I believe, also planting audience members and even giving them microphones. In the second half of the video above a very obvious audience plant pops up and I think she is wearing a lav mic.

The reason you might be seeing more and more complex crowd work videos is that a lot of comedians are trying to compete with Matt Rife, who turned the format into TikTok catnip. As for why I think the format does so well, just on a philosophical level, it’s that these videos are built around the same kind of curiosity gap as recipes or man-on-the-street interviews. It promises something unexpected and you’ll wait the 60 seconds or whatever to find out what happens. Once again, though, don’t watch the video. It sucks ass.

No, Disliking Generative AI Is Not Ableist

NaNoWriMo, the weird nonprofit behind National Novel Writing Month, is in hot water this week after they published a blog post defending the use of generative AI to complete the challenge. This is the same rhetorical pretzel that a lot of organizations are in right now because there’s a lot of buzz around AI and everyone everywhere is an idiot. But the real interesting nugget in NaNoWriMo’s AI post was the argument that banning the use of AI would be “classist” and “ableist”. As fucking if lmao. It’s a contest to see if a human can write a novel in a month.

Writers are now leaving NaNoWriMo’s board in protest. And the organization has since updated their post to be a little more nuanced, adding, “it is simply too big to categorically endorse or not endorse.” Which is true. But the idea that banning generative AI is an accessibility issue is ridiculous. I could go on and on here about how using generative AI in a novel writing competition is patently absurd, but I think this X post says everything I would say fairly succinctly:

There’s A Cajun Guy Cosplaying X-Men’s Gambit On TikTok

@drz400dan2

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Some Stray Links

• Here’s the Pitch Deck for ‘Active Listening’ Ad Targeting

• Every Single Company’s Website Right Now

• OpenAI’s “Google killer” is apparently… not great

P.S. here’s a good Tumblr post.

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