The tyranny of relatable content

A Government Of The Posters, By The Posters

—by Adam Bumas

Former President Barack Obama joined Bluesky on Sunday, and has gained over 300,000 followers since then. Obama hasn’t left X, where he still has roughly a thousand times as many followers (he’s posting to both platforms simultaneously), but like everything he does, it’s clearly a capital-G Gesture. And, if you look at his history with social media, it’s a pretty important one for Bluesky — for a lot more reasons than just because he’s the former president.

Betting big on social media was a genuinely risky and largely untested idea when Obama did it at the start of his first presidential campaign in 2007. It would be laughable by today’s standards to say his first campaign was particularly online, but when he was early to embrace MySpace and Facebook and then won, it was a wake-up call for everyone, not just politicians. Obama wasn’t the first celebrity to balance being serious and relatable online, but his winning campaign cemented the playbook that politicians are still using, like sending mass texts asking for money. (Yup, those are his fault!) And that playbook has reverberated far outside the political sphere in the two decades since.

In fact, one could argue — and I plan to — that Obama’s biggest legacy is not political. He’s patient zero for one of the uniquely annoying scourges of our time: the Relatable Brand Account. 

He wasn’t the first example — Radiohead had an AIM chatbot in 2001 and you could add Ron Burgundy on Friendster before you saw Anchorman — but as late as 2007, when Facebook introduced brand pages, there was a general sense that social networks should treat individual accounts as a separate species from businesses, lawmakers, and other organizations. 

Then, a few months into Obama’s first term, we got the most important shift in that paradigm. Twitter introduced verified checkmarks in June 2009, thanks to his fellow Chicagoan and early supporter, Oprah Winfrey, joining the platform. (Not Tony La Russa!) They were another way to straddle the official and the personal in the same way Obama did during his campaign. Checkmarks were for everyone and everything — not just a star athlete, say, but their team, their agency, and the brands that sponsored them. Even before they became available to anyone with the money, they were a wrecking ball to any meaningful difference between a person and the mouthpiece of an organization online.

Would all this have happened with or without Obama? Possible. But he’s still reaped the rewards for being such a trailblazer — like the massive deal with Netflix he signed in 2018. He’s a media mogul, and a metaphorical elder statesman of social media as well as a literal one for the US. And those are both crucial for Bluesky, which is currently at a crossroads as a platform — and Obama’s presence should be viewed as an effort to tip the balance.

Bluesky made a big splash at South By Southwest earlier this month, with CEO Jay Graber delivering the keynote in a sweatshirt making fun of Mark Zuckerberg. When they made the shirt available for sale, it sold out instantly — in large part because it’s the first time ever that regular people have been able to give Bluesky money. The platform started as a decentralized, not-for-profit research effort, specifically trying to avoid the mistakes of Twitter, and before the shirt, it was still funded entirely by investors. Though, as of last year, they’re working on paid subscriptions. The Bluesky team has been swearing up and down that they’re working to avoid the mistakes Twitter/X has made, but if they eventually offer a subscription to Obama that treats his account identically to yours or mine, they’ve already made the most fundamental mistake here. Because the social media landscape Obama helped create, by blending the casual and the official, is the exact same one Bluesky was founded to work against. If a brand is a person, then a person has to be a brand, especially in an algorithmically-controlled attention economy that’s increasingly shifting literally everything about social media towards getting your money. And more importantly, if a government official or group has a social media presence, it has to be both a person and a brand.

And eight years after Obama walked this tightrope all the way to the White House, Donald Trump ran it up the gut. Trump, unfortunately, understands the delirious unreality of the person/brand hybrid better than maybe anyone else on the planet. Well, he might be tied with WWE’s Vince McMahon. But Trump's first administration established a precedent of treating his tweets as official statements. And more directly than anything I’m blaming Obama for here, Trump sent us on the rollercoaster that just loop-de-looped past “a shitty website is all the transparency the US government needs” a few weeks ago.  Now, there’s no difference between a post that’s an executive order, a commercial, or someone saying whatever bullshit is on their mind. In fact, it must serve as all of the above. On one end of this, you get our current level of discourse, where random jokes are treated like they’re chiseled into stone by a divine hand. On the other, you get stuff like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul getting in on the morning routine meme. Very funny, Kathy, exactly what everyone voted for.

Muira McCammon, a professor at Tulane who’s an expert on government use of social media, doesn’t blame the users here. “It's worth remembering that a lot of institutions (in business and government) are truly still just winging it,” she told Garbage Day. Instead, she sees the problem as systemic for the platforms. “These forums create context collapse — where everyone online merges into a single audience.” Any social network that’s serious about being a way forward has to start at this point, with clear differences in the presentation and function of accounts for people, governments, and brands.

Because otherwise, we get what we got on Monday. When The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed he was added to a Signal group chat for Executive Branch officials, where they coordinated military strikes in Yemen via texts and emoji. It’s a full tasting menu of horrible news, but the overpowering flavor seems to be the idea that, as USA Today tried to argue, “we’ve all done this”. No, we fucking haven’t! I haven’t bombed a single Houthi in my entire life, and adding someone to a group chat about that isn’t the same thing as a faux pas among friends! But if a post is simultaneously a random person’s unfiltered thoughts, and the military action of a global superpower, then of course a catastrophic and unforced OpSec breach is just another form of Sharing Relatable Content. 

Can’t wait to see the memes Obama reskeets about it — at least he can actually relate.

A Good Post

Elon Musk Had A Very Embarrassing Gamer Moment

Hasan Piker, Elon Musk, and the official X account for Assassin’s Creed got into it on X this week. It all started when Mark Kern, better known as Grummz, screenshot a post that Piker had made about playing the new Assassin’s Creed game. Kern is, at this point, the sort of de facto head of the weird and confusing second act of Gamergate. You do not need to know anything about him or what he is wasting his life ranting about online every day.

Musk interacts with Kern often and, yesterday, he jumped into Kern’s replies to call Piker a “fraud,” and accuse him of promoting “a terrible game for the money.” Like I said, you do not need to know anything about what these very sad men care about, but the very quick context here is that gamergaters think Assassin's Creed Shadows is woke and are trying to convince each other that it didn’t sell well because it’s woke, even though it’s one of the franchise’s biggest launches ever.

Anyways, Piker jumped in, accused Musk of being a fake gamer and paying someone to level up his character in the game Path of Exile 2 and then challenged Musk to a duel in Elden Ring. Then Musk, without directly responding to Piker, called him a “chickenshit retard.”

The entire back and forth ended when the official Assassin’s Creed X account got involved. Looking at the shares of the posts below, I would say it’s safe to say that this is a pretty brutal ratio. Maybe Musk should start paying someone to fight online for him, as well.

ChatGPT Can Do “Ghibli” Now Unfortunately

OpenAI’s newest generative-AI model, GPT‑4o, has added a new image generator directly inside of ChatGPT. Previously, ChatGPT could do something sort of similar, but had a lot of problems with text. For instance, a few months ago, I dusted off my ChatGPT account and tested it on a few basic things — which I do every time there’s an update. I asked it to generate diagrams for some recipes, a workout plan, a map, etc., just a few things to see how the tool is improving or changing. The native image generator was extremely bad. I went back to those threads this morning and the new images it was generating are lightyears ahead of where they were in a few weeks ago.

Users have also quickly realized that it can do “Ghibli” style.

X is now being flooded with “Ghibli” style memes — also photos of 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination, obviously. Now, there is of course, no such thing as “Ghibli” style. The AI has ingested millions of stills from Studio Ghibli produced movies, illegally, and is warping existing images to look sorta-kinda like one of their films. And, also, just for the record, Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki has previously called AI art, “an insult to life itself.” Which is fair.

But the AI Ghibli trend is notable if only because it’s one of the first real AI memes or trends to takeoff in a long, long time. Probably since the AI 9/11 trend in 2023. (Why is it always 9/11?) So it’ll be interesting to see how long this one actually lasts as a genuine trend. Usually, these burn out pretty quickly, which is a fascinating downstream effect of AI content in and of itself actually. Not only does it cheapen the act of making something, apparently, but it seems to also cheapen the act of sharing it. It’s almost as if those two things are linked.

Trump Media Is Going All In On Crypto

Trump Media, which owns Truth Social, put out a press release on Monday announcing that they’re partnering with Crypto.com to launch exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. The announcement gave Trump Media a much-needed boost in the stock market.

Trump Media has been building out a pretty extensive crypto portfolio over the last few months. It has NFTs, memecoins, and its own protocol, called World Liberty Financial (lol).

The easiest way to think of a crypto ETF is a bag of different crypto coins that you can invest in the performance of, rather than buying the coins yourself. There are a lot of issues with them, but the most interesting criticism from crypto diehards is that they aren’t actually cryptocurrency. Which sort of defeats the whole point.

The Morning Routine Meme Was Fun While It Lasted

@duolingo

Rise and Grind. These Scores aren’t gonna raise themselves. IB: @Worthy Supps #duolingo #score #ashtonhall

Well, it was fun while it lasted, folks. The Saratoga water muscleman, Ashton Hall, was the internet’s main character for about, uh, 48 hours before the brands showed up. Obviously, the Duolingo owl did a parody, embedded above. And we mentioned New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s up top. Because politicians are the lowest form of brand. Though, if you still have the bandwidth for one more good morning routine parody, this pirate one is pretty great.

One observation from all of this that I think is important, though, is that the time between a meme and brand co-option has shrunk to the point where a lot of the brands doing morning routine content right now are getting A LOT of confused messages from users who aren’t in on the joke. I think this is also probably related to the cultural footprint of memes in 2025 — they just don’t travel as far as they used to. Which makes the increasingly intense race among brands to jump on them first even more confusing.

Gov. Tim Walz Has A Good Radish Recipe

Here’s a link to the recipe.

Some Stray Links

• “As top Trump aides sent texts on Signal, flight data show a member of the group chat was in Russia”

• I did a little interview about Panic World!

• “The media platforms that just won't die”

P.S. here’s The Curse!

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