Pop Crave stuns

New Garbage Day Live guest just dropped. Excited to announce that Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith will be joining me on stage later this month at the Bell House! Very, very excited about this. Two more guest announcements to go! Get your tickets while you still can. October 23rd! Brooklyn! Live show! See you there! I love you!

You can buy tickets here!!!

The Pop Crave Election

On Monday, I wrote that we had officially entered the influencer stage of the election. At a rally over the weekend, former President Donald Trump brought out the last right-wing influencer that has any real juice left, Elon Musk. While Harris, this week, lined up a full swarm of media appearances across TV, radio, and, most notably, the Call Her Daddy podcast.

Both decisions here were correct, strategically speaking. Trump, as he’s gotten older, has leaned more heavily into using his rallies as a way to generate content. Which Musk’s weird little spasm definitely accomplished. And, Harris, like all Democrats, is more comfortable in a room with a producer. Though, I’d say if the most viral moment from that aforementioned media swarm was Harris on The View saying she’d add a Republican to her cabinet, maybe it’s time to rethink some things.

Victor Shi, a Gen Z Democratic activist, went viral on X yesterday after he wrote a fairly bone-headed account of Harris’ big week. Shi listed the average ratings of the programs Harris went on — of which three were TV shows — and concluded, “That’s a total of 25 million+ viewers mainstream media would never allow us to reach.” I’m not going to spend too much time dunking on a 20-something for not understanding what “mainstream media” means because I don’t think zoomers understand what TV is, on a conceptual level, but, instead, I want to focus on the impulse to view something like the Call Her Daddy podcast as being equal to, say, 60 Minutes. Because Shi is correct, they are. Everything is now just a content delivery service for the internet’s army of update accounts. Who are the real arbiters of this election.

The biggest update account is, of course, Pop Crave. It has 1.8 million followers on X and, well, that’s it. It doesn’t have a real Instagram account. And its last Facebook post, on a page that only has around 60,000 followers, was in 2023. And, yet, Pop Crave has successfully reconfigured how news functions in the US. There are hundreds of these update accounts, for every niche you can imagine. There’s a Pop Crave for right-wing propaganda, for movies, for video games, for basketball, for Brazil. And even Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign has one.

Most of these accounts got big during the initial wave of the COVID pandemic, the moment Twitter, when it was still called that, replaced cable news in the US as the country’s last real artery of monoculture. And they all largely function the same way. Quick updates, every few minutes, packaged neatly in the corpse of what we used to call a tweet. And those posts then trickle down to the rest of the web. They’re screenshot and posted to Instagram and regularly drive conversation on sites like Reddit and TikTok. Which means, even if you’ve left X after Musk turned it into an internet backwater, you are still living in the site’s shadow.

I assume I don’t have to over-explain to Garbage Day readers how important Pop Crave and its ilk have become, but in case you need some evidence: Chappell Roan stans are currently yelling at Pop Crave and Pop Base for under-covering the size of Roan’s recent festival crowd. Every generation picks their New York Times and scolds them accordingly, it seems.

Harris’ team has been able to interface with these accounts more seamlessly than Trump’s. There’s a whole universe of right-wing social-only update accounts like Libs Of TikTok, but they can’t really reach the mainstream the same way (because most of them are violently racist). Which is why, smartly, phase one of Harris’ campaign strategy was all about aligning herself with Charli XCX’s Brat album release and releasing a Chappell Roan-themed hat. Perfect Pop Crave bait.

In fact, this week, Paulina Mangubat, the digital content and creative director for the Democratic National Convention, actually confirmed that the branding for Kamala HQ, the Harris campaign’s Pop Crave-ian updates account, was styled off of Pop Crave and Deux Moi (another social-only celeb update account specializing in blind items). And if you click the link in the previous sentence, you’ll discover it’s a three-layer-deep quote-post and the initial post that Mangubat is responding to is from… Pop Crave. It’s Pop Crave all the way down.

But these accounts are also clearly changing how the election feels on a day-to-day basis. Instead of reading (or skimming) an article or watching a news segment, the average voter is now encountering dozens, if not hundreds, of “updates” a day, across multiple feeds, that they then have to stitch together to create a general vibe of what’s going on. Which is why, if the election’s four main characters (five if you include Musk) aren’t doing something at any given moment, they don’t feel like they actually exist. But these updates also stop matterinf the minute a new one hits your feed. Which has resulted in an election where everything is content, but none of it matters.

Well, it will matter once polls close next month. Until, of course, something else happens.

Want To Hear More About The Pop Crave Election?

You’re in luck! That’s the topic of this week’s Panic World. Our guest this week is podcaster and commentator Akilah Hughes and it was a fantastic conversation all about Pop Crave, Chappell Roan, and the Democrats. You can find it anywhere you consume podcasts, but in case you need a link, click here!

A Good Post

A Hurricane Cannot Be An Inside Job

Spirit Halloween costume of “racist incident at Starbucks” brought to life by a witch's curse, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has been posting through the hurricane double whammy hitting southern states this week, claiming again and again that the hurricanes were somehow orchestrated by the, uh, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I guess. Most users thought when she wrote, “they can control the weather,” she was using the anti-Semitic “they,” but it turns out that what she actually believes is much stranger. Although, probably, if you dig deep enough, also anti-Semitic.

But Greene is not the only conservative convinced that Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton are, at least, tangentially connected to some kind of nefarious government plot. Another X account, called @RealRawNews, is claiming that Marines are fighting FEMA workers in North Carolina. And another account went viral after posting a video they claimed showed a FEMA helicopter trying to confiscate emergency supplies. It doesn’t show that. It was a Black Hawk operated by the North Carolina National Guard. Not that it matters.

Two years ago, X user @PerthshireMags wrote what I regard as the most incisive and haunting bit of writing about climate change to date: “Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it.” Which I still think is true, but it doesn’t account for a large portion of people who will be filming these disasters, convinced they are anything and everything other than climate change.

Bem Vindos De Volta Ao X Meus Amigos Brasileiros

Brazilians are officially allowed to access to X again this week. Which, I suppose, means Musk has banned the seven users the country’s supreme court wanted removed, paid the original fines they imposed on the site, and paid the additional fines they racked up by not complying.

As I’ve written previously, the real thing to watch here is both whether or not Brazilians come back to the platform and whether or not they stay on Bluesky and Threads. Brazilians were blocked from using X for over a month. And we don’t really have a historical case to go on here to give us a sense of whether they’ll return. Brazil is one of the largest democracies to lose access to a platform like this and then get it back. TikTok is still banned in India and Russian users are still, mostly, banned from every platform. The closest case study we could point to here is Nepal’s TikTok ban, which lasted about a year and it seems to have bounced back to roughly its pre-ban level of use in the country.

Relatedly, Bluesky is over on Threads now trying to grab some folks who are getting fed up. Speaking of which…

Threads Is Trying To Fix Its Gas Leak

Threads head Adam Mosseri confirmed earlier this week that, yes, the platform is filling up with low-effort engagement bait. Though, most of it seems to be coming from Business Insider reporter Katie Notopoulos, who is doing everything in her power to break the site.

I’m sure Mosseri and his team have all kinds of maddening algorithmic tweaks they plan to deploy to fix the problem caused by, uh, their previous algorithmic tweaks. And I’m excited to see what kind of shameless engagement bait is accidentally invented by this next round of fixes.

Gordon Ramsay Tried Dua Lipa’s Gross Drink Recipe

@gordonramsayofficial

Replying to @Gordon Ramsay Had to try what @Dua Lipa was cooking up…..

Some Stray Links

• “The Fight That Nearly Destroyed the Letterboxd Community” (Adam wrote this!!!)

• Caroline Calloway has a pretty good reason for riding out Hurricane Milton actually

• “Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information”

P.S. here’s a good post about fried chicken.

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