The internet's stinkiest guys

This week’s issues are going to be a little shorter than usual. I’m speaking in Norway for Future Week and the timezone is a little wonky. If you’re looking for more delicious content to consume, check out Panic World, the new podcast from Garbage Day. We’ve got two episodes up already, with a third one on the way!

Why Is A Company Called Stake Watermarking Memes?

I have come across several posts recently that all have the same watermark at the bottom. It’s for a company called Stake and in very, very tiny letters at the bottom it reads, “gamble responsibly | this is an #ad.” The weird thing is that these posts are not really ads. They’re just random viral ephemera, usually shared by verified X users. Though, I’ve also seen the logo pop up on YouTube and TikTok, as well.

I do not have the gambling brain shape, so I had never heard of this Stake app before. It was started in 2017 by Ed Craven, the Australian billionaire behind anti-woke Twitch competitor Kick. And Stake’s big gimmick is that the gambling doesn’t happen with real money, but cryptocurrency. Which makes Stake a casino built on top of a larger casino. But it’s their marketing strategy that I find the most interesting.

I’ve seen it on fight videos, random relatable posts, and some of the horniest stuff imaginable. Do you, reading this, work for Stake? Would you like to put your logo on my entire newsletter? Let’s talk. Although, maybe read this whole thing first. Either way, I’m curious what their rates are.

Stake is not the first company to brand essentially all of the internet’s lowest-common denominator garbage. WorldStarHipHop, iFunny, theCHIVE, and 9Gag have all walked this path before. The difference here is that Stake is not a user-generated content platform. It just, apparently, wants to advertise to the people that would consume that kind of content. Which means that unlike those previously ubiquitous watermarks, the Stake watermark is not just codifying the internet’s worst content, but also codifying — or at least targeting — a specific kind of person: The post-incel gooner. The mattress-on-the-floor-and-one-folding-chair guys that power the internet’s various casinos, both pay for and also loathe OnlyFans models, watch other online stinky guys play first-person shooters on Twitch, and spend all of their time fighting about — and gambling on — Premier League football.

Back in April, Garbage Day researcher Adam Bumas called this the Barstool Web. An internet increasingly devoured and co-opted by online gambling. When he wrote that, the word “devour” was largely a metaphor, but it reads a lot more literal now.

Garbage Day Is Doing An Election-Themed Live Show!!!!

October 23rd! The Bell House in Brooklyn! It’s a new Garbage Day live show all about the election. It’s called “America, The Final Season”. Memes! Music! Laughs! Niche internet references! I’ve also got some great guests lined up, which I’ll be announcing soon. It’s going to be a blast.

👉👉👉 You can buy tickets here!!!

When You Gotta Rock With Bro Even Though He’s Not Mysterious And Cool Around Women (He Talks To Them)

@sahibcantsingh

where is the mystique. where is the allure #mysterious #cool #nonchalant #aura

That Horrible X Show Is Doing Reaction Videos Now

New Norm, that terrible anti-woke animated “sitcom” that airs on X, has pivoted to short reaction videos recently. Essentially turning into a weird right-wing VTuber.

These reaction videos are advertising Mike Lindell’s anti-woke pillow company, MyPillow. Which just announced a discount price of $14.88, which is a very specific number. If you aren’t familiar, the fourteen words is a Nazi credo, and the number 14 is often paired with 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler,” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. I’m sure this is all just a coincidence!

Germany’s Far-Right Party Goes All In On Generative AI

Germany’s far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), were polling very well in the lead up to this weekend’s state elections. Early exit polls show that the Social Democrats were able to squeak out a victory, but that shouldn’t quell any concerns about the AfD gaining significant ground in Germany over the last decade.

The AfD’s Brandenburg branch last week posted an AI-generated video, captioned, “On September 22nd you have the choice. It's time for real change. It's time for AfD.” And in the video, AI-generated imagery shows a wholesome, “traditional” German past, juxtaposed against our scary, woke, pronoun-filled present.

As Joel Swanson, a professor at Sarah Lawrence wrote, “It's kind of telling how the far-right AfD's fantasized vision of the German past is all AI-generated, because they can't show actual photos of the German past to which they want to return.”

This is very true for German far-right parties, as the folks at MyPillow could maybe tell you, but I think it’s also a good way of thinking about all of the right-wing influencers embracing AI content right now. Something I wrote about last week. They can’t show you the real, supposedly perfect past they want to return us to, but now, thanks to AI, they can just generate it.

The Hawk Tuah Girl’s Podcast Is Pretty Popular

Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah girl, launched her new podcast, Talk Tuah (good branding). It’s currently the fourth-biggest podcast on Spotify, which is not a totally accurate snapshot of the entire podcast industry, but it’s not totally unreliable either. It’s safe to assume the show is pretty big.

She has two episodes out, the first being a totally incomprehensible interview with comedian Whitney Cummings and the second being an interview with her grandmother.

I think it’s easy to dunk on Welch — and many are — but I’m sort of rooting for her! Based on all the interviews I’ve done with formerly-viral celebrities over the years, it sounds like absolute hell. It basically strips you of any agency you previously had and, most often than not, ruins your life. So get your bag. Make a weird, boring podcast with your grandmother and advertise the hell out of mattresses or whatever.

Chappell Roan Has Become Stuck In The Algorithm

If it feels like your feeds are suddenly full of Chappell Roan quotes, it’s because she did a round of interviews recently where she was very candid about her mental health, her politics, and her uneasy feelings about fame. Because the internet is fundamentally broken now, these interviews have been repackaged as small posts on various platforms and stripped of any larger context, the most important being she’s in the middle of a press cycle that she doesn’t really seem to be enjoying. And these accounts sharing these “updates” — Pop Crave and its various imitators — don’t have traditional publishing schedules, so they just flood your feeds, making it seem as if Roan is somewhere screaming at reporters about her various grievances. Which is, of course, not what’s happening. I think she’s only done like three or four big feature interviews in the last couple months.

This is a relatively new issue for celebrities to navigate and a quirk of platforms like X, Threads, Reels, and TikTok. On those platforms every new piece of content you see feels as if it’s reflective of some kind of new development and that effect is compounded if, like many stan armies are, you’re using these apps in conjunction with each other. When really what’s actually happening is that accounts like Pop Crave are chopping up a larger interview or feature written by a publication that Google has made it impossible to ever track down. So you probably aren’t sick of Chappell Roan! You’re sick of the internet.

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “OpenAI Messed With the Wrong Mega-Popular Parenting Forum”

• “Western game studios should be very nervous about ‘Black Myth: Wukong’” (Adam and I wrote this one!)

• “American Idiot Turns 20”

P.S. here’s a masterlist of nu metal songs with “go” breakdowns.

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