Trying to scold the entire internet

America’s Hall Monitors Bravely Assemble

Last week, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by an unknown suspect outside of a Manhattan hotel as he was headed to an investor’s meeting. The New York Police Department is now carrying out a manhunt to find the gunman, who is still at large. Authorities released four, unfortunately, dazzling photos of Thompson’s seemingly very handsome masked killer, revealed that his shell casings had the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” carved on them, and, also, found a backpack full of Monopoly money believed to belong to the suspect. Oh, also, the hospital Thompson was sent to after the shooting wasn’t in UnitedHealthcare’s network. All of this has only added to the social media frenzy around the murder.

In fact, the overwhelming response to Thompson’s death online could be summed up as “lol, lmao even.” But it, should be noted, that it’s not just chronically online shitposters celebrating Thompson’s death. It’s possible this is the most aligned America — well, aside from the folks in its highest tax brackets — has been about a news story since the invention of the internet.

An announcement on Facebook from UnitedHealthcare had to have reaction counts turned off because of the amount of laughing emojis users were adding to it. Right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro’s viewers were breaking rank in the comments underneath a video of his about the killing. Reddit moderators couldn’t contain a thread about it on r/medicine. There was a lookalike contest for Thompson’s killer in Washington Square Park over the weekend. There’s a ton of merch with “deny,” “defend,” and “depose” popping up. And there are even some fun conspiracy theories.

My personal favorite piece of deranged content about the killing, however, was this TikTok from The Daily Mail. Which isn’t a shitpost, but certainly feels like one!

@dailymail

A balloon reading ‘CEO DOWN’ and depicting a smiling star and party poppers was spotted outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan where United... See more

Reporter Taylor Lorenz went long over in User Mag about about how, no, this does not mean that an overwhelming amount of the country is pro-murder, or whatever. “Thousands of Americans (myself included) are fed up with our barbaric healthcare system and the people at the top who rake in millions while inflicting pain, suffering, and death on millions of innocent people,” she wrote. And Today In Tabs’ Rusty Foster put it another way, writing, “A nation full of people absolutely parched for consequences and with nothing to look forward to but rising fascism.”

The only recent story like this that you can really point to is the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. His killer revealed that he carried out the attack because of Abe’s support of the Unification Church, a cult-like religious order that wields a tremendous amount of political influence in Japan. And the overwhelming response from both the Japanese public and lawmakers, alike, was, yeah, actually, he had a point. I don’t think Thompson’s murder is suddenly going to lead to the dismantling of America’s cruel and inhumane healthcare industry, but it’s certainly been a cathartic few days online.

It has also quickly unraveled a decade-plus of right-wing programming in online spaces for young men. Many of whom are suddenly realizing maybe there are meatier subjects to take their anger out on than the racial makeup of Star Wars casting announcements. The best example being a thread yesterday on the subreddit for the edgelord streamer Asmongold, where users were enthusiastically talking about giving up the culture war to focus on a “class war”. The thread was deleted eventually for being “political,” but the same conversations are happening all over the manosphere right now. Which, you know, I don’t think anyone had an anonymous assassin on their list of possible “Leftist Joe Rogan’s,” but it seems like he’s moved to the head of the pack.

As Bluesky user hayao.lol wrote, “However this ends up the guy won, flat out. This has done more damage to the image of the surveillance state, public complacency around healthcare, and 'cops' as a concept than any other single act.” Which I suspect is what’s actually making US elites so uncomfortable about all of this.

Thompson’s death been a real shock to the system for America’s ruling class, who seem to be realizing for the first time that the majority of the country will not mourn their deaths. As podcaster and reporter Michael Hobbes wrote a few years ago, “I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds.” Which is why a whole bunch of tedious hall monitors are suddenly tut-tutting about all the memes in every major newspaper. I, personally, am not going super hard on the pro-assassination memes — as funny as they are — because we just don’t know what the motive was. We live in a time of mass accelerationist violence and I don’t feel like publicly cheerleading a guy who might have a compound full of deranged far-right ramblings. But I’m also not stupid enough to think that scolding the entire internet for how they’re acting is a meaningful use of my time on planet Earth. Maybe if I had a paid column somewhere — or proper health insurance — I’d feel different.

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Mouse Cinema

The Girls Are Fighting, AI Edition

My dear friend Casey Newton, over at Platformer, kicked off a nice big drama cycle on Friday, after he published a piece in his newsletter titled, “The phony comforts of AI skepticism”. Newton took aim at what he described as the “AI is fake and sucks” school of thought, warning that it is downplays the possibility that the emergence of an AI superintelligence is both possible and dangerous.

Newton singled out New York University professor Gary Marcus, writing that his arguments are “extremely useful to those who believe that AI is fake and sucks, because they give it academic credentials and a sheen of empirical rigor.”

Marcus then responded to Newton’s piece in his own newsletter, calling it a “distorted portrait of Gary Marcus” (he used the third person) and “AI skepticism.”

Now, I like and read both of these guys. I am also the child of divorce and perfectly comfortable playing both sides of a conflict. But I, also, do think that both of them are shades of correct here. Newton is right, there are millions of people using AI products right now and those AI products are lightyears better than they were two years ago and it’s not impossible that they will just keep getting better. And Marcus is also right, AI can continue to suck and also continue becoming increasingly dangerous. As an overwhelming amount of women can tell you, for instance, it’s already dangerous.

In fact, in a piece on Sunday, writer Edward Ongweso Jr summed this up quite nicely, writing in his newsletter, “AI can be real and fake and suck and dangerous all at the same time or in different configurations.” Which is about as coherent a summary of my own feelings as I’m probably going to find.

But the real story here is that indie publishing is back, baby.

The Bluesky Junk Invasion

My favorite psuedononymous open source investigator and data scientist Conspirador Norteño is finally on Bluesky and already using the platform’s tools to surface some really cool stuff.

They’ve been monitoring Bluesky’s firehose — a live feed of every public post on the app — to identify botnets registering accounts en masse. According to their reporting, in a five day span, over 2,000 accounts were registered, using similar bios. And over half of those accounts seemed to come from the same network. You can read more of their Bluesky research here.

It’s Time To Talk Tuah A Lawyer

Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah girl, has found herself at the center of a royal crypto fuck up. She decided to launch a memecoin called $HAWK and it immediately shot up to over almost $500 million in valuation before dropping more than 90% in a few hours.

It’s hard to separate out who is joking about investing all of their money in the memecoin and who actually did, but based on the on-chain data, there were real investors. If you’re wondering why someone would put real money behind this it’s because, one, people are stupid, and, two, memecoins can make a lot of money and, well, see point one.

The smoking gun here, as to whether or not anything illegal happened, is the fact that almost 90% of the coins upon launch where owned by accounts that either were holding pre-launch or knew within seconds when to buy. Which has led to allegations of insider trading. Financial scams investigator Coffeezilla has more.

As for whether Welch is facing an SEC investigation, that’s also a little complicated. Memecoins aren’t clearly defined as a security in the US. And it’s also unclear exactly what Welch actually knew. The coin was launched by a group called overHere, which, like most crypto organizations, has almost no publicly available info listed. A press release for the coin lists a “Clinton So” as the founder of overHere, but, once again, not much else is out there.

Why Spotify Wrapped Sucked So Bad This Year

You were not imagining things, Spotify Wrapped was extremely bad this year. Not only was it weirdly hideous looking, it also lacked a lot of the usual fun insights it normally includes. And it seems like there’s a reason for that!

Spotify did a massive round of layoffs last year. And among those layoffs was Genn McDonald, the data scientist that managed Spotify’s massive treasure trove of genre data. He spoke to Billboard back in April about what he was able to do with all those insights, saying, “I worked on fraud detection and on the artist similarity algorithms, and on tons of editorial tools and internal metrics.” It’s likely McDonald’s departure is also why smart playlists like Discover Weekly have gone seriously down hill over the last year.

And he was appropriately snarky on Bluesky about how bad Wrapped was this year.

Historical Minions

Some Stray Links

• “How Raw Milk Went From Hippie to MAGA”

• “Elon Musk Was Sole Funder of Shady Pro-Trump PAC That Claimed RBG Was Also Anti-Abortion”

• “The publisher is always right”

P.S. here’s a video that made me feel a certain kind of way.

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