So based 🦾

Step 1 Trigger You, Step 2 Wear You Down, Step 3 ???, Step 4 Profit

It can be hard right now to know what exactly you should be outraged about. Which is by design. In various speeches over the last few years, chief Project 2025 architect and current director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought laid out a strategy that the Trump administration has been following closely across its first few months in power.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought told a crowd at an event for the right-wing think tank Center for Renewing America. “We want to put them in trauma.”

And the main way they’re traumatizing our country’s federal workers and, of course, the rest of us, as well, is by seizing budgetary and personnel offices and by slamming us over and over again with executive orders. Steve Bannon’s “flood the zone with shit” concept taken to its inevitable conclusion. Which is why, last night, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that would route any federal “regulatory actions” through the executive branch for approval. Will it get challenged in the courts? Yeah, sure, but they’re clearly trying to eliminate any checks and balances on Trump and they’re going to keep trying. Also, if you’re trying to follow how much of Project 2025 has been enacted, there’s a tracker. They’re about a third of the way through it.

Meanwhile, the rest of the administration has settled on a way to dominate the attention economy, advertising their wins to their supporters and tormenting their opponents, with an endless stream of viral content. Which is how we ended up with this: An ASMR video of deportation flights put out by the official White House X account this week.

The video currently has 64 million views, if you still believe/care about X metrics, and 22,000 shares. Though, surprisingly, the users in the replies — even the Verified ones — are almost universally disgusted by it. As one user wrote, “Nah man this ain’t it.” Though Elon Musk also replied, writing, “So based 🦾”

Similarly, Musk shared an AI image earlier this week that claimed that a “migrant mob” stormed a hospital in the UK with axes. At first, users thought it was a screenshot from a movie before noticing many of the subjects in the image had six fingers, meaning it was most likely generated by an AI. Also, UK law enforcement confirmed that no such incident occurred. Though the top reply to their post is from a user that wrote, “Shame nobody believes you, whatever the truth.”

And that is really the end goal of all of this. As journalist Felipe De La Hoz wrote on Bluesky this morning, “The official White House account posting an ‘ASMR’ video of shackled immigrants is not just cruel for its own sake, it’s intentional envelope-pushing to ramp up to desensitization over inhumane detention, camps, and deaths.”

The brain-breaking feeling you get watching something like the ASMR video or the time you waste trying to determine whether the image Musk shared is real or not is, like with Project 2025 and the executive orders, by design. It’s meant to initially trigger you and ultimately wear you down.

And I’m not surprised that Trump and his allies are being as brazen as they are online right now. At some point between 2019-2021, the internet conquered mainstream media, viral content replaced traditional corporate entertainment, and Republicans have first mover’s advantage. This is their victory lap after all the shameless years they spent posting Pepe the Frog memes and setting up YouTube channels to brainwash children. But I am surprised by how thoroughly the Democrats and, more generally, leftists and liberals have ceded internet culture, as a whole, to the right. Every meme, every format, every platform is fertile ground for an adversarial regime that knows how to spin them into cheap and easy propaganda and there is no line they aren’t willing to cross. You can quibble, and say that conservatives are better funded or less squeamish about being cringe or care less about telling the truth. But none of that really changes the fact that social media, the machine that now decides what pop culture looks like, is now an inherently right-wing space. And regardless of what explanation you subscribe to as to how we got to this point, that is a huge cultural loss for the left. And one without a clear solution in sight. And, no, sorry, telling people to log off is not an effective response when we’re talking about democratic action. Even if you, personally, don’t like using the internet anymore, it is more popular and more influential than ever before. We’re not going back.

But it’s not all doom and gloom here. We’re seeing the beginnings of our first internet-led protest movement of the second Trump administration. Which is heartening. It was responsible for organizing many of the marches earlier this week in cities across America. It’s calling itself 50501 and it’s primarily organizing on Reddit. It’s the first real sign that maybe the opposition can let go of their millennial luddism and embrace technology to push back. Though, they are currently arguing over what their actual message is. So, I guess we’ll have to wait and see how things play out.

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Why is it so difficult to get a new article on Wikipedia?

The online encyclopedia has grown to more than 6.7 million articles and continues to expand — even as the number of active editors overseeing that content continues to decline. It seems hard to believe, but there is only one Wikipedia editor for every 166 Wikipedia articles. For comparison, Encyclopedia Britannica has one editor for every 29 articles, along with 100+ staffers who continually update articles. 

Because of this limited oversight capacity, new submissions are overwhelmingly declined as the site's eligibility standards have become increasingly rigid. Existing brand articles, meanwhile, are often ghost towns of outdated information and limited editor engagement. 

Lumino's new white paper explains how Wikipedia stumbled into this predicament and why it has pivoted toward a "deletionist mode" to address it. You can also subscribe to our newsletter, Wikify, to stay updated on the latest Wikipedia developments.

Rainbolt Guesses Where The Blue Spot Is

That Weird Anti-Trans Bachelorette Contestant That Fakes Being Trans May Or May Not Be Dead

Josh Seiter is a former Bachelorette contestant who has pivoted into being a vocal anti-trans weirdo on X. He regularly dresses up in women’s clothes and puts on makeup and claims he’s trans to, like, make some kind of hateful point about trans people not being real, I guess. I’m not entirely clear how one of his recent posts claiming he was pregnant with Elon Musk’s child fits in here, but whatever.

His X account yesterday claimed that he was pronounced dead in Mexico, news which a lot of people really hoped was true. But it’s actually unclear if he’s dead or not.

There are no official third-party reports of Seiter’s death. And his social accounts were hacked in 2023 and shared a similar death hoax. Or, at least, that’s what he claimed happened. No specific hacker or group was ever mentioned. But it’s all very similar to the posts on Seiter’s X and Instagram accounts this week.

Mastodon Is Adding Quote Posts

The open source social network Mastodon, which runs on ActivityPub, announced this week that it’s adding quote-post functionality to the site. Even more interesting, it’s adding quote posts that will function like Tumblr reblogs. If you’re having trouble envisioning this, on Bluesky and X, the quote post is displayed above the original post. On Tumblr, a reblog is displayed below, in a chain similar to email replies. And this decision isn’t a random design choice.

Tumblr is currently migrating to Wordpress. Both platforms are owned by the same company, so they’re centralizing everyone on one backend. Individual users will, most likely, never notice. But according to TechCrunch, after that migration is done, Tumblr will then federate with Mastodon.

There’s no set deadline for this, but it’s a cool idea, in theory. Though, at the moment, it’s hard to tell if adding Tumblr to ActivityPub will elevate the ecosystem or just drag it down further. It’s also unclear if this is actually something users will even appreciate after so many years of using individual platforms for individual experiences.

According To Posts On X, The Everything App, Which Elon Musk Has Previously Called The “Best Source Of Truth,” He Has A “Botched Penis Implant”

Look, Elon Musk says we can trust everything on X that doesn’t have a Community Note and this post from Azealia Banks claiming Musk has a “botched penis implant” doesn’t have a note. Nor has Musk refuted it. So I guess it must be true.

This all emerged as part of a longer conversation Banks was having on X about how Musk is bad in bed because he allegedly takes too much ketamine. Which, again, sounds like a malicious bit of misinformation, but, it also does not have a Community Note. So who’s to say, really.

Everything Has An Explanation

I don’t love picking on random users because I do think that people should be allowed to post whatever random nonsense they want on the internet. I think platforms and institutions should be better about managing said nonsense, but, in a perfect world, I think it’s relatively harmless.

That said, I wanted to include this X post because I think it’s a very good example of how difficult it’s going to be to communicate the actual impact of Trump’s policies. Every bit of bad news will have a convenient explanation. And as we get further into this administration it will become harder and harder for people to let go of those explanations the more they commit to them. There will always be a “they” and “they” will always be the ones actually responsible.

Boy Blood Enthusiast Bryan Johnson Went Dancing

Like many, I had a lot of questions about, well, every single insane detail in this video. And luckily for us, Johnson answered most of them. He did not compromise his very important sleep schedule to go dancing because this party was at 4 PM (lol). And he was wearing ankle braces “because of how easy it is to accidentally step on someone’s foot on a crowded floor and roll the ankle.” It is still unclear, however, why he wasn’t wearing a shirt.

A Fun New Computer Feature

Some Stray Links

• A truly moving piece about “I had to do it em”

• “What Older Adults Should Know About Bluesky”

P.S. here’s a truly thrilling pizza recipe.

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