skibidi 🥀 67 💀 sybau 😭 sigma 😂 41 💔 chunc 🧍 clanker 🫨 bussy 🍆 JOHN PORK IS CALLING!!!!!! 🔚🔚🔚
Drawing connections between a culture of digital meaninglessness to nihilism while investigating the lawyerly state.
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🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 this week goes quite deep with Mel Zog, as she, Ben Dietz, and I psychoanalyze the nihilistic politics of Gen Z, debate metrosexuals, and why everyone (Not just Millennials!!) became a “pet parent.” Listen on Spotify and or YouTube!
Russia says no choice but war
Denmark links drone sorties to state actor
EU countries meet to discuss a ‘drone wall’
I’ve been watching these “things” for a few weeks now and, given the EU’s very fragmentary feeling right now, a certain eastern war machine seems to be licking its chops, figuring out the right time and place to pull the trigger, be it in tandem with mass rioting for Gaza or constant government collapsing. The Cheetos-and-pony show at the UN didn’t help, even if the technical pranks were a nice touch.
About the Dallas ICE facility shooting
The ICE Shooter’s Motive
Immigrants at “Alligator Alcatraz” Have Disappeared
This week in political violence, which is being spun as another anti-left thing even as the very institution that was attacked is disappearing people. Cue Stephen Miller playacting Joseph Goebbels, all done in his petit lil Valley accent!
US will control TikTok’s algorithm
Fox In Talks To Join Investors
Abu Dhabi royal family to take stake
TikTok Is About to Go Full MAGA
A nightmare, one that I will unfortunately have to continue to keep tabs on — along with international TikTok — just to keep you all abreast of what’s happening. This pairs pee-pee-poopily with just five companies controlling all of US media, three of which are now tied up in a decidedly right politic.
France’s richest man slams proposed billionaire tax
Bernard, if you are reading this: I hope you have really awful diarrhea for the rest of your life. I will buy a witch’s curse to ensure this: I’ve done it once, I’ll do it again! This also seems to get at and collide with the grumbling in Italy and France about adjusting retirement ages. (Which…the US is watching and salivating.)
Trump cancels annual hunger report
Something else to file under the war on the poor and homeless, which has been an ongoing refrain of the past few months.
Earth’s ozone layer is healing
Pacific Cold Water Did Not Occur
Good news, bad news, although I thought the ozone thing was…old?
MacKenzie Scott gives $70m to HBCUs
MY QUEEN REMAINS UNDEFEATED 😤 If you’re reading this MacKenzie, I want to interview you!!!!!
SDIYBT and ABHCTCAQ and SYBAU. 67 and 41. Skibidi? Send it. Sendy? Send it to me Rachel. 🥀🥀🥀🥀🥀 but 💀💀💀💀💀, which is 😭😭😭😭😭 which was 😂😂😂😂😂 Chop, unc, chunc. Fanum tax my sigma Ohio ick — but actually? Let him cook so he can hawk tuah that gyatt. Coffee spelled backwards is eeffoc. Wait: John Pork is calling!!! “I’m going to crash out,” the teen says in the coffee shop. “Or I might be” — the teen motions to their neck — “unalived.” Clanker bussy aura vibe mogging RIZZZZZZZ *that one laugh you already know without even hearing it* Tralalero tralala: yup, yup. U Din Din Din Din Dun: yes, yes. Trippi troppi, troppa trippa. “Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh,” I mumble to myself, swallowing a fist full of pills before wrapping my lips around the tip of a shotgun as I stick my head in an oven, pockets full of rocks, descending deeper and deeper into the sea.
If you don’t know what any of that means, it’s okay. If you only know what some of that means? It’s okay. If you know what they all mean, that’s okay too. But the point of many of these neologisms is to have no meaning. Most of them — SDIYBT, 67, eefoc, U Din Din Din Din Dun — are nonsense words, in-jokes based on media items that spin out from comments section to eventually become an exclamation: it is language divorced of definition. “What’s the meaning behind it?” the older sister asks. “No meaning,” the younger sister replies. “You just say [it].” Half of the aforementioned phrases emerged in the past year, language memefied and solidifying our “idk” era, as older people don’t understand younger people but younger people don’t understand each other. “At the old age of 15 I gotta be watching these videos now,” one commented on a video explaining the phrase “sendy.” “i’m 13 and consistently watch tiktok and i still don’t know,” another comment on another video goes. “Bruh I’m 18 I feel unc,” says another more. The concept of the saying “the concept of” sets the scene, a phrase that attempts to parse meaning from the meaningless. All this is as my friend amanda brennan always said when we worked together: everyone has their own internet — which means every internet has its own meanings, as every internet space yields its own languages, where the occasional spillover creates confusions, much of which is based in the goings on of adults which are stolen and assigned new values by pre-teens who repeat them constantly to and with their teachers. This breeds a culture of everyone on the internet stimming, repeating their chosen cultural comfort words over and over again because they feel good to say, as “new vocal stim” itself becomes an expression.
But this is just pawing at the top of the pile of internet slush: increasingly our culture is based in nothing — literally. “Slop” — creations made by and for no one with no specific intention — are the definition of meaninglessness. Meta launching an AI-video app called Vibes reflects this economy, which pairs with YouTube AI channels dedicated to femicide: creations made with unclear intentions and unclear audiences, which can be read as “something real” even if they’re not (which, in the case of Google, proves that their words are meaningless too given their reassurances that such content couldn’t be made). Everything has become brain rot which also means means everything is a trojan horse for economies and ideologies to twirl away in the background. The enshittification of life, where meaninglessness masquerades as meaning as AI-created applications meet AI-gatekept HR teams, as dating becomes labor within a pot of AI, as AI songs by AI artists court AI streams but real money.
This is why the shooting of Charlie Kirk keeps spiralling because it is an action in search of meaning, born of a blurry world akin to muttering 6-7 over and over and over again until someone agrees to cut your balls off as you await the goonerific 8. The surface is the “Debate me, bro.” politic, which masquerades as civil discourse but is performance as discourse: a game of civility that employs rage bait to leverage someone to move beyond political edging, to see who will enact violence first. The bullets on the scene said so many things — “NoTices Bulge OWO What’s This?,” “Hey fascist! Catch!,” “You’re gay LMAO” — which tie to Luigi Mangione's performance and this week’s ICE shooter, acts as memes that do-and-don’t mean anything as online jokes enter real life to be performed by Fox News anchors: they mean nothing to those in-the-know but, when taken out of context, are loaded with significance, all misdirects of a messy a moment, years of social posts created and consumed in seconds that have gone IRL, where politics and civility are flattened by the antiquated and one-dimensional “traditional media.” As Cy Canterel explained (which was why I wanted to talk to her), “If you take it literally, they were just joking. If you miss the reference, you reveal you’re out of the club. The ambiguity is the shibboleth and desensitization.” Concepts like “transmaxxing” represent this well as it is and isn’t transitioning, which does and doesn’t bring in transgender people, which is and isn’t the point. This is all a side effect of the sickness of isolation from community and from oneself — and is why “nihilism” has become a word of the moment, not because it’s a negative glass-half-empty approach but because it’s a bone dry world view where one doesn’t even see a glass at all but nothing. Pour the fucking water on the table! Who gives a shit as there is no meaning in such a view. Cy once again explains this: “If the actor is steeped in blackpill culture, the motive vector points as much toward in-group status and mimetic spectacle as it does toward any policy aim…You’re reading an attempt to turn reality into a toxic in-joke.”
Yes, those are all extremists who are of-a-kind of right wing bro whose politics are being defined now. But it’s not just them but a wider Gen Z way of looking: see the “We are all Jimmy Kimmel.” joke as proof of the dissolution of left-versus-right axiom, as we move more into belief systems of meaning versus non-meaning. “The fringes tell you a lot about what’s happening in the mainstream with Gen Z, which is like this unserious approach to things,” as Mel Zog said on this week’s Hip Replacement. “We are lacking proper vocabulary to describe these extreme political epistemic bubbles that happen exclusively online,” Mockjaw explained on TikTok. After nearly two and half decades of creating and scrolling “content” designed to be disposable — a time period that contains the majority of Gen Z — it’s unsurprising that aspects of life itself (Politics, for example.) is becoming disposable too, that a growing group of people are moving through the world and deeming certain things real and other things not-real: it’s all NPC shit until it isn’t. Life as a cut-scene until it isn’t: when your world is viewed through the lens of Twitter or TikTok, Tumblr or Instagram, Fortnite or Roblox, everything is content which means everything is made to be understood and or disposed of in seconds. Meaning doesn’t matter if everything is bound for the garbage heap of “internet trends,” of hyper-capitalism’s take-make-waste pedagogy.
It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, which is happening as sticks and stones are breaking bones exactly because words aren’t hurting anyone anymore. The internet hasn’t just flattened truth but it has rendered anything you see and hear inherently doubtful, confusing. “6-7” are two numbers in sequence but also a statement of a people who see nothing, who assign signals to detonate giggle bombs in corners of the room as you spin off to muse on numerological meanings: it is just a slim example of this emerging world view. What becomes of a people who see everything as an app you can crash when you’re tired of it?
Demna’s Gucci Is Here
Gucci wants everyone to think like a shopper
“THE TIGER”
This healed my fashion depression, especially as Demna got Catherine Opie to do the pictures. His mind, particularly as it’s shaping up to be a parody of Italian fashion. He remains undefeated and I’m glad Rachel Seville Tashjian sees it too!! Who knew Milan Fashion Week would be this year’s breakout?
Arc’teryx Fireworks Trigger Backlash,
“biggest marketing fails of the year”
This is a bit overblown on both ends, as the brand didn’t need to be doing all that as worse shit is happening because of fashion in vulnerable environments — but who am I to draw that line? Shocked though that Cai Guo-Qiang was doing such collabs, then again 2025 is a year of surprises.
The Disappointment of Downtown Brooklyn
A very stinging indictment of what will become a marker of the Millennial’s fingerprint on larger city “style.” Embarrassing! (That said: I know that’s “untrue” and would argue that Millennials as a generation are more about ideas versus design, a la “walkable cities.” But walk with me: what arts and architecture items will be remembered as classic, defining Millennial expressions? I’d toss Female Figure and Continental Breakfast into the ring, along with Can’t Help Myself, even if the artists are Gen X.)
“reverse engineered parking ticket system”
Viral parking ticket app lasts just 4 hours
Subway Builder allows design of own system
“this game is going to change lives”
Funny week for urban planning, as the narking-on-the-parking-narcs app got a lot of attention. It was killed, but highlights a few things people pointed out: tickets are bad, yes, but pay for social services (and the guy who made the app helped bust Luigi). Compare this with Subway Builder’s breakout, which proves the point of how cities kill logical mass transit paths.
“picking up rose petals”
Sasha Velour Breaks Down RuPaul’s Drag Race
This video is two years old but was circulating on TikTok and…I think we need to have a serious conversation about 1.) how Sasha Velour’s “So Emotional” lipsync is one of the defining television moments of this century and 2.) that it also ruined the rest of Drag Race as her creative limitlessness placed a ceiling on all younger queens, who have yet to rethink and deconstruct the lipsync in the way Sasha did. (Which leads us to a theory: is Drag Race going to get cancelled because woke?)
“these restrictions rankled Rockwell”
My mother was a deep Norman Rockwell fan and, after being exposed to so much of his work for so much of my life, I forgot how “radical” his images were for the time. And they’re so beautiful too! Too bad most people are completely defanged, when it comes to using very public media positions to speak to power now. Just look at this piece from 1963!
Dan Wang’s book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future is a must-read, posing a fascinating thesis: America and China want to be each other — but what separates them is the profession they view the world from. In China, engineers are in charge, which is how you end up with enviable mass rail systems but policies that regulate family sizes and few soft power flexes. America may lack a strong sense of building or the urgency to better lives on a base level of infrastructure — but individual rights, soft power, and lifestyle? We have an abundance, all because the United States is a nation of lawyers.
Wang explains —
The United States, by contrast, has a government of the lawyers, by the lawyers, and for the lawyers. Five out of the last ten presidents attended law school. In any given year, at least half the US Congress has law degrees, while at best a handful of members have studied science or engineering. From 1984 to 2020, every single Democratic presidential and vice-presidential nominee went to law school, but they make up many Republican Party elites as well as the top ranks of the civil service too. By contrast, only two American presidents worked as engineers: Herbert Hoover, who built a fortune in mining, and Jimmy Carter, who served as an engineering officer on a nuclear submarine. Hoover and Carter are remembered for many things, especially for their dismal political instincts that produced thumping electoral defeats. Lawyers have so many tools available to delay or prevent building. You don’t just feel the difference going from the lawyerly society to the engineering state: You saunter, tread, and amble upon its works. Americans no longer manufacture well or build public works on reasonable timelines.
This is a fascinating analysis of the state of the States, which Wang spends nearly three hundred pages untangling, comparing and contextualizing in relation to China. It offers much needed context for this moment while poking at state of culture: much of the West is ruled and therefore handcuffed by lawyers, to the point that the infrastructures of legality are getting fuzzy thanks to a secret police hired by the richest country’s richest people, who work tirelessly to uphold power systems that prevent greater equity.
This approach keeps the poor handcuffed, all reinforced by the bourgeois poisonings of little treat-based class dysmorphia and the general malaise associated with the constant anti-poor structuring of life. NIMBYism embodies this well, where legal systems bar communities and city structures from creating more equitable living, mass transit, and business development so that a privileged few can keep their literal backyards. Human resources (HR) has become the lapdog of legal advisors, enabling layoffs and firings in not-very-legal ways (during maternity, medical, and or general leave) as the bet by businesses is that little you won’t lawyer up and confront a company as they can and will lawyer you down (or agree to a quiet settlement that obfuscates truth, to prevent other workers and the general public from knowing what actually happened). (See also: Generation NDA.) This proves the success of the anti-union narrative as “more than half of non-union, privately employed Americans—some 60 million people—have signed away” the right to sue employers, according to Quartz. This won’t be getting better either as the dissolution of things like DEI embolden companies to treat workers like shit, even if workers still have a good legal case. All of this is ironic considering legal degrees and law schools have long been seen as a bastion of safety, from the outside looking in, hence the Millennial stereotype of everyone having a law degree since so many of us ran “back to school” during the recession in order to recession-proof our lives only to get boxed out due to surplus and legacies, all as AI creeps into the domain (which, ironically, is all being repeated by Gen Z now). The Millennial “legal ceiling” says so much about the lawyer state, which TikTok breakout Rachel Cohen embodies well: she gained a following by standing up to the legal system as it help reinforces current authoritarianism by using the law against itself. “The Trump administration is coming for the American legal system through large corporate law firms because he knows that people at large corporate law firms will not speak out about what’s happening for fear of lost profits,” she explained in March, which continues to be proven true.
Which brings us to Trump 2.0. The BBC and Reuters and The Guardian and The New York Times and The Conversation have been mumbling for months that his presidency has flipped the legal system on its head to break it. “Trump has long made a habit of publicly criticizing or mocking judges who have ruled against him,” The Washington Post explained a month ago. “Trump and his administration have been accused of flouting numerous court orders in the more than 160 cases that have been filed against them.” Yes, we can say this is “a 2025 thing” but the fact that the legal state has operated in a defanged way against Trump and other privileged persons for years, treating defendants as if mob bosses, is ultimately what delegitimized the system — and created a vulnerability for someone like Trump to exploit versus to honor, meaning all in power can follow the same playbook of flouting the law. From Theo Von on up, anyone below that demarcation is now squeezed out of power by the legal system. No wonder so many “illegals” are disappeared without due process: they simply cannot afford to be legally “real” to the law state. The legal system thusly loses its meaning, becoming clogged as Project 2025 dissolves it. Do laws and legal items matter if the people in power don’t follow them? Obviously not, which is why people like Chuck Schumer gloating about wanting to “work together” proves their irrelevance, that they aren’t bold enough to defy the law in the name of good.
The lawyer state isn’t just a Trump thing as much it’s a big business thing. Media empires like Paramount and tech companies like Google continue wandering down their paths to monopoly as the charade of law is more a song and dance of formalities that ultimately lets them spend their way to a win, which is likely why Comey will lose as Soros wins. Bob Iger choosing to pull Kimmel out of fear follows the path of CBS bending to Trump over 60 Minutes: these are expressions of a legal vacuum that chooses profit over workers, over country. This is similarly why the tech world acts the same: they’re gunning for more runway to do whatever they want. “My friend John Perry Barlow argued that the internet transcended earthbound laws and borders,” Steven Levy wrote for Wired this week of tech’s Trump loving. “‘Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.’” “They are demonstrating that when forced to choose between democratic principles and oligarchic access, between constitutional governance and regime favor…they will choose wealth every single time,” Mike Brock wrote this week (h/t Jimmy Roe). Tim Cook trembles as he hands Trump a golden key to the kingdom of Jobs, painting a portrait of capitulation in big and small ways, from moving manufacturing to pausing the release of The Savant. “We are not aligned on the decision to pause the release of The Savant,” the show’s star Jessica Chastain said in a sharp statement on the decision, reiterating that now is the time to question “the full range of violence witnessed in the United States.” All this even if we know Trump always caves: the strongman is an act, one that even the best paid industry actors are unsuitable scene partners for.
The lawyer state may not completely collapse any time soon but it most definitely, most obviously is being tested and transformed, likely for the worst. Perhaps an engineering state would be better (Well, not for women, among other vulnerable persons.) but the likely best case scenario is a more diverse governing system and governors representative of the diversity of lives and experiences. A key difference between the engineering state and the lawyer state are the embedded liberties, which are being tested now — and they’re all based in laws that, when not upheld, unravel the quilted state. Like words becoming nonsense as the internet bends language, a government loses meaning when it doesn’t follow the rules it laid out for itself. This doesn’t just start at the top but by all parties involved. Accountability is a two-way street, one that doesn’t require any advanced degrees to understand but certainly requires a lot of backbone (and or quite deep pockets).
“New vocal stim”
“My children are not”
“how to pronounce”
“popping more Tylenol”
“I am not the best at talking”
“most powerful Reddit mod”
“I took Tylenol”
“We actually don’t”
The best Tylenol-to-autism memes.
“The lion does not”
“The lion ignores”
“The lion ignores”
“The lion ignores”
Speaking of the body, every “The lion does not…” video cracked my shit up because, yes, I am the same lion too and I will pretend life-threatening happenings aren’t real. My toxic male trait 🥀
“puts his phone in the fridge”
An incredible bit, where a man tests and punishes AI through other objects. (To that: can someone verify if the LinkedIn AI-bio trick is true or not?)
“TRL is not on anymore.”
This video gave me a momentary existential crisis. (Speaking of nostalgia, I don’t think enough people are appreciating the new Bardia Zeinali directed Doja Cat video. It’s very good. The album also samples Pino Donaggio too!)
“I want to know what Linklater thinks”
Did you know Richard Linklater and Alex Jones “were friends” in the aughts?
“My little cousin Leo”
The best statement on intergenerational communication, much of which speaks to the point proven in the first essay.
“beatbox x yodel”
Get this woman on Broadway a decade ago.
“Baby bird sleep talking”
If you’re reading this and own a parrot, can you respond and tell me what that’s like? Every day I am influenced that I need to get a bird, even if they scare me.
“THE PISS SAGA”
An incredible documentary about a Pasadena-based artist whose chosen medium was urine, and the local filmmaker (Derek Milton) who tried to catch him.
And, finally, how this week and this decade and all these years has felt.
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RE: sticks and stones, also there's been what some refer to as a culture cold war, where neither side can effectively cancel the other anymore, so now it's come to bullets and outright state censorship. too depressed to press the shift button sorry