President Yoon's massive L

This week on Panic World we have the two fabulous hosts of Endless Thread, Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. They were nice enough to come on the show and learn all about the various horrors of MrBeast. You can find the episode on any platform you use to gorge yourself on audio content. You can also just click here!

Bluesky’s First Big Story

I tend to timestamp the moment Twitter truly started to matter as happening at some point between February 2011 and October 2012. Which covers the bulk of the Arab Spring, the London riots, the start and end of Occupy Wall Street, and the week that Hurricane Sandy rolled into New York City. None of these events were caused by Twitter, but our understanding of them was wholly shaped by the tweets we viewed them through.

And the question many are asking right now is whether or not this week’s failed coup attempt in South Korea was similarly defining for Bluesky. I don’t think so, but it was definitely the platform’s first real test at handling something like this and I do think it passed.

On Tuesday night, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. The military swarmed the country’s parliament and clashed with protesters and even lawmakers, who had to effectively break into the building to vote down the resolution. If you’re looking for a greatest hits from the protests that followed Yoon’s attempted coup, here’s a video of Lee Jae-myung, the leader of the Korean Democratic Party, livestreaming himself scaling a wall of a military barricade, another video of a riot cop getting spun around by a protester lol, and a video of Democratic Party spokesperson Ahn Gwi-ryeong seizing a cop’s gun and scolding him like a big dumb baby.

A brief aside here, I spent about six weeks following anti-Olympic protesters around South Korea during the 2018 Winter Olympics and I think it’s important for Americans to understand that protest dynamics are a bit different in Korea. Korean men can serve as police officers instead of being conscripted into the military at 18, so it’s not uncommon to see, basically, teenage boys in riot gear getting absolutely walloped by middle-aged protesters.

Anyways, the coup failed, thankfully, and Yoon is facing impeachment for "insurrectionary behavior.” And while I hesitate to hold up this whole episode as some kind of omen of what’s to come for America — because Korean politics could not be more different than ours and, technically, we already had our insurrection and, in my opinion, it succeeded — it is worth noting that Yoon came to power two years ago amid a huge wave of misogyny and backlash against Korea’s feminist 4b movement.

Over on Bluesky, as Yoon was taking a massive L, the star of the moment was Verge reporter Sarah Jeong, who happened to be drinking in Seoul nearby and proceeded to drunkenly live-skeet the insurrection. What an incredible sequence of words. You can spin through Jeong’s Bluesky posts here, they’re great. She was also nice enough to blog the evening over on The Verge the website.

But aside from Jeong’s serendipitous reporting, how did Bluesky do with its first big news story? Well, Yonhap, Korea’s biggest news agency, is not on the platform. So that definitely affected things a bit. There also still aren’t a lot of Koreans on Bluesky. By share of users, Bluesky is overwhelmingly Brazilian, with the US, Singapore, and Japan coming in second, third, and fourth, respectively. There was some local activity going viral on the platform yesterday, but it was nowhere close to the kind of open source investigation, or OSINT, that we used to expect from Twitter.

The bigger issue, though, when it comes to relying on Bluesky during a news event like this, is the platform’s video player. Unfortunately, we have come a long way from the still images and GIFs that defined the news stories that made Twitter, Twitter. Video is now a fundamental part of the grammar of breaking news online and Bluesky’s video player is currently limited to 60 seconds, capped at a low resolution, and limits users to only 25 video uploads a day. In other words, it’s got a ways to go still.

But the very last issue with the overall experience of using Bluesky for breaking news is that it’s still not a place where people are making and sharing cultural commentary that can turn Bluesky into a destination. And this is an issue I have noticed about Bluesky, in general, actually. My assumption is that this is a side effect of how old Bluesky users tend to be. Which may be related to the limits of the platform’s video support. (The only thing zoomers seem to read are memes.) But it might also be connected to Bluesky’s anti-Twitter beginnings. The power users still don’t want that kind of culture. Regardless of why, all of the Good Posts I’ve seen about the Korean coup attempt — memes, viral takes, popular clips from the protests — were actually over on X. And even if you scroll through this handy custom feed for viral Bluesky posts, you’re not going to see much. And what you do find there is a bunch of #Resistance cringe.

Now, I need to acknowledge that I’m being hard on Bluesky. I realize how difficult of a job the platform has ahead of it. It’s trying to defeat the corpse of Twitter and also fend off Meta Snapchat-ing it for parts to feed to Threads. And I’m being hard on it because we need it to win that two-front war. It is the only good option we have here. And yesterday was an important proof of concept for breaking news on Bluesky. We know it can work there. Which makes me think we’re a lot closer to the platform’s big breakthrough moment than many expect.

Though, who knows, we still haven’t seen how Threads has reacted to the coup. When users over there learn about it in a day or two maybe they’ll have a good take on it.

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A song by They Might Be Giants you've never heard

Meh can be hard to explain. What if, instead of reading about it, you could instead hear They Might Be Giants sing about it?

Will it help you understand Meh better? Probably not. Will it get stuck in your head, leading you to wake up day after day, cursing that moment you innocently clicked on the link to hear a simple song about Meh? You tell us!

A Good Post About Oasis

We Called It

On Monday, Garbage Day researcher Adam wrote about how the celebrity lookalike trend was probably next for a big brand takeover. And, sure enough, Away bags posted an Instagram carousel of celebrity lookalkes posing with their luggage. This was spotted by writer Rachel Karten.

The head of Away’s social team told Karten that “cultural relevance is their North Star.” Alright then lol.

Is This As Far As AI Goes?

Amy Castor and David Gerard over at Pivot To AI put together a compelling argument that we have likely seen the limit of this generation of generative AI. Several big names in the AI industry have started admitting that they have reached a plateau with how smart and effective these models can be. Reuters has some more on this.

Now I will say, this isn’t exactly surprising. Most of the big AI companies have been pretty open from the start that building artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was their actual goal and that generative AI was a sort of fun jumping off point. But it’s still not even totally clear if it’s even possible. And if it is possible, no one knows how far away anyone is from creating it.

Which poses an interesting question. If this is as good as AI is going to be for a while, is it really worth anything? (The answer is no, obviously.)

X Users Found A New Woman To Scream At

Users on X have spent the last week writing the most unhinged, psychotic vitriol imaginable at a Cambridge PhD student who decided to share a photo of her thesis. The bulk of the anger is over the fact it was called “Olfactory Ethics: The Politics Of Smell In Modern And Contemporary Prose”. It’s interesting actually, you can read more about it here.

It’s not really worth analyzing why X users are so angry over something this obscure — it’s likely because there are just not as many normal people to rage at these days — but it is important to use this as an example of why X simply cannot be used as a regular social platform anymore.

And this refusal to accept the writing on the wall is not just a problem for random women minding their own business on the internet. Politico has a maddening piece this week about how the Democrats cannot shake their Twitter addiction and it’s beginning to seriously affect how they understand the world. It’s over. It’s 4chan with a billionaire owner. Don’t post anything on there you wouldn’t post on /b/.

It’s All Kicking Off In The Muppet Fandom

It’s always exciting when multiple readers race to alert me to some extremely niche internet drama. You know it’s going to be good. And this one is no exception. Let’s go through it step by step, shall we?

Muppet History is a fairly big X account about all things muppets. And the couple behind the account released a statement this week apologizing for “overstepping boundaries” and announcing that they’d be taking a step back because the “community deserves only the best.” The adult muppet fan community, I guess.

Details have emerged alleging that one of the owners of the account was sexually harassing his followers across multiple platforms. And the Frank Oz Facts X account has also condemned Muppet History for abusing his large platform by (according to screenshots) “belittling, talking down, telling someone they aren’t a real muppet page”.

Some people were just not meant to have so much power and influence.

The Swifties Have A DUI Problem, Apparently

I have seen multiple reports now that there is a lot of drama in various Facebook Groups for the Vancouver date of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour because, apparently, more than a few American fans who hoped to cross the border to attend are just now realizing they can’t if they have a DUI on their record. Whoops!

An Important Discussion About File Types

Some Stray Links

• “Why did Silicon Valley turn right?”

• “I Have Created A Turkey Fiend”

• "X Has Become a Hate Machine”

P.S. here’s a beautiful portrait.

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