Yeah, it's probably time to panic

The Zone, Fully Flooded

At the eleventh hour yesterday, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from freezing federal funding. In the lead up to the planned freeze, the online Medicaid portal was shut down and chaos broke out as federal programs like Meals On Wheels struggled to operate, not knowing exactly what would happen next. As of today, it seems like the entire plan has thankfully been rescinded.

But as evil and stupid as our government acted this week, yesterday was an abject failure for America’s corporate media, which is repeating the mistakes it made during the first Trump administration, but in a very different and much more dangerous world.

But before we go further here, I want to be clear: I don’t like complaining about “the media,” for the same reason I don’t like blaming everything on “capitalism”. It’s, frankly, not helpful when there are plenty of specific organizations and actors to actually criticize. I’ve also worked in newsrooms most of my adult life. I understand how the sausage is made. Which is why, in 2016, I wasn’t totally surprised by the American media’s very retro approach to covering Trump’s early years in office. It was palace intrigue and tabloid scoops mixed together with business-as-usual White House pool reporting, with the assumption being that this was an aberration. A temporary bout of governmental insanity that would eventually pass.

But that was a decade ago, when people still shared links on Facebook, watched cable news, and Google still worked. It was easy for America’s mainstream media to gawk at Trump and let a few of their young internet culture reporters put on tactical armor and traumatize themselves at riots organized by white nationalist militias in the effort of balancing things out. It was easy to believe that The System, the network of institutions and broadcasters America had relied on since the end of World War II, would survive Trump simply because The System, though weakened by the internet, still existed.

But, as I said, that was a decade ago. And The System is breaking in front of our very eyes. And like many Americans, I spent yesterday trying to process the new reality we’ve suddenly found ourselves in. One where I am aware that something is happening, but largely unable to actually figure out the specifics. And throughout the day a loop emerged. I would see a claim on a social platform like X or Bluesky, like SNAP benefits being affected by the freeze (it seems like they wouldn’t have been), try to verify it, and only get days-old Newsweek stories and a bunch of aggregation from Indian newspapers that have figured out how to game American search traffic like The Hindustan Times and The Times Of India.

Things didn’t really improve as news organizations finally caught up yesterday. The Associated Press claimed the Musk-compromised United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is offering employees a “buyout” — they aren’t, it’s eight months of remote work before termination. A federal employee provided Garbage Day with a copy of the email, titled “A Fork In The Road,” which is incidentally the same subject line used in an email sent to Twitter employees during the X transition. Similarly, The Washington Post’s coverage of the termination agreement called it “an easy way to quit” for some reason. NBC News changed a headline on a piece about the Medicaid portal being shut down from something actually useful to a worthless quote from the White House. And, perhaps most confounding of all, Wired’s investigation into the “Elon Musk lackeys” who have been installed in OPM refused to name several of them because "of their ages.” Their ages, apparently, being 21??? I actually think we should know the name of the 21-year-old former Palantir employee who just became an advisor to the director of a government agency. The New York Times, thankfully, set up a live page with all 2,600 federal programs that would have been affected by the freeze, which was better than the liveblog they had running yesterday, which had gems such as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt telling reporters she would “check back on that,” when asked about Medicaid being turned off. You all understand you’re not going to have jobs anymore if this administration gets what they want, right?

There are bright spots, of course. Independent journalists like Marisa Kabas and Ken Klippenstein have both been breaking genuine news amid the chaos this week. And, even better, they seem to actually be writing those stories for the average Americans who would actually be impacted by a federal funding freeze. But the bulk of America’s media seems to be as incapable of grasping the severity of the situation as the Democrats are. So I'll end here by laying things very simply.

Welcome to 2025. No one reads your website or watches your TV show. Subscription revenue will never truly replace ad revenue and ad revenue is never coming back. All of your influence is now determined by algorithms owned by tech oligarchs that stole your ad revenue and they not only hate you, personally, but have aligned themselves with a president that also hates you, personally. The information vacuum you created by selling yourself out for likes and shares and Facebook-funded pivot-to-video initiatives in the 2010s has been filled in by random “news influencers,” some of which are literally using ChatGPT to write their posts. While many others are just making shit up to go viral. And the people taking over the country currently have spent the last decade, in public, I might add, crafting a playbook — one you dismissed — that, if successful, means the end of everything that resembles America. And that includes our free and open and lazy mainstream media. And they’re pretty confident it’ll succeed because, unlike you, they know how broken the internet is now and are happy to take advantage of it. While I’m sure it feels very professional to continue playing stenographer in your little folding chair at the White House, they’re literally replacing you with podcasters as we speak. So this is it. Adapt or die. Or at the very least, die with some dignity.

If you have a tip for Garbage Day, you can reach me on Signal at ryanbroderick.69420, happy to keep things anonymous or off the record.

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Let’s Check In On How AI Content Is Doing On YouTube

There’s so much of this stuff on YouTube and Facebook right now, actually. TV talent show clips were already very popular on those platforms, so I guess it’s not entirely surprising that users are making them with AI now.

The Era Of Chinese AI (And Everything Else) Is Officially Here

Chinese tech giant Alibaba announced they have an AI model dropping this week. It’s called Qwen 2.5 and they’re claiming it’s “superior” to both DeepSeek’s and Meta’s. Kind of funny that Chinese companies aren’t even bothering to compare themselves to OpenAI’s models anymore.

Speaking of OpenAI, they’re now accusing DeepSeek of violating their terms of service and possibly stealing intellectual property to build DeepSeek r1. Cry about it, bitch.

Lastly, if you’re thinking about running DeepSeek r1 on a laptop, an engineer for Hugging Face has a thread breaking down how to do it. He estimates it would cost around $6,000.

Mexico Hits Back At France

Trans filmmakers in Mexico, furious at the depiction of both Mexicans and trans people in the Oscar-nominated musical Emilia Pérez, decided to make their own film in response and it’s incredibly funny.

If you’ve missed this, Emilia Pérez is a Spanish-language film by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, who does not speak Spanish. There was also only one Mexican actor in the main cast. There have been protests in Mexico over the film.

So Mexican creator Camila Aurora made her own version called Johanne Sacreblu. There are no French people in it. There are Ratatouille rats in every scene (maybe a nod to Camille, the composer of Emilia Pérez, who also did the song from Ratatouille) and every character looks like a sad mime. The musical numbers go hard as hell honestly.

A Very Gross Feud

Apologies upfront, the next two items are a little NSFW-ish. If you’re reading this in an office, you’re probably fine, but this stuff is pretty icky.

Last year, I wrote about British OnlyFans model and adult film star Lily Phillips who was trying to break the record for most sexual partners in 24 hours. Her goal was 1,000 and she was getting a lot of buzz for the stunt after she participated in a genuinely upsetting YouTube documentary about her initial run of 100 men in one day. Another British OnlyFans model named Bonnie Blue ended up breaking the 1,000-person record first, though OnlyFans banned her video. It seems Blue didn’t use the platform’s age verification system for all thousand of the participants.

Horrible internet man and sometimes-adult film performer Adam22, on his podcast No Jumper this week, claimed that Blue didn’t steal the idea from Phillips, but, actually, the other way around. Now, if any of this matters to you, you need serious help. But there is an interesting creator economy story nestled in between all the grossness happening here.

OnlyFans models are dependent on the same network effects as every other creator and there is a serious need to constantly top yourself. The MrBeast effect as it were. But while Blue ended up breaking the record, Phillips easily generated the most conversation about it. Which is all that really matters online. And that’s why Phillips now has double the Instagram followers as Blue.

Alright, on to even more upsetting matters…

The “Gooneral”

Earlier this month, an Arizona man named Nautica Malone was filmed exposing himself in a coffee shop drive-thru. According to TMZ, he killed himself after realizing he had been filmed. The darker corners of the internet have been harassing members of Malone’s family, calling the incident a “goonicide,” a portmanteau of “goon” and “suicide” (not genocide).

ChickenAndy, a streamer from Arizona, went live from a “gooneral” (“goon” + “funeral”) in front of the coffee shop this week. According to Complex, police eventually broke up the event.

There are all kinds of troubling things about young internet users and sexuality that we could probably infer from this, but, honestly, it’s probably best to never think about any of this ever again.

A Classic Menswear Guy Heater

Some Stray Links

• “How Fanum Built an Empire Streaming Much More Than Video Games”

• “Headed for technofascism”

• “It’s Time to Quit DoorDash and Uber Eats”

P.S. here’s a baby potato.

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