Garbage Day

X Users Are Having A Meltdown Over Edward Sharpe And The Magnetic Zeros

There are a whole bunch of accounts on X that farm engagement by asking people basic questions about movies or music or whatever. The responses to these posts, as quote-posts, tend to go very viral because X’s algorithm loves quote-posts for some reason. Even though the site actively hides quote-posts now… Anyways, I digress, it’s a stupid app.

X users were asked this week what the worst song ever was and people landed on “Home,” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Likely because Gen Z has never seen what Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros look like and, yes, the 2009 video now going viral of the band playing the song on NPR’s Tiny Desk is, in 2025, violently millennial.

If you want to torture yourself by reading a lot of opinions from very dumb people about why this song is bad (I think it’s fine), you can click here to see all the quote-posts on X. But I, regrettably, have to push back on something that seems to have been lost to time.

Shocking news from the crypto world. A theoretically funny memecoin seems to have been a scam the whole time. The latest offender is a Solana-based coin called “360noscope420blazeit”, or just MLG for short. The token’s value zoomed up and back down again within 24 hours earlier this week, but it’s been around since last year. Before the spike, the most attention it got was in January after endorsements by offshore-casino-made-flesh Adin Ross and multiple members of FaZe Clan — once the world’s biggest esports team, now a cautionary tale about internet success, and the same kind of nostalgic punchline as saying, “MLG,” is.

An app called Tea was shooting up through the App Store this month and causing a huge meltdown among men on both Reddit and X. It asked users for photo or ID verification to prove that they were women and then allowed them to basically post reviews of guys in their area. The app was marketed as a way to protect women from abusers, but, obviously, it spun out of control pretty quickly. As Kate Lindsay in Embedded wrote, “Tea was doomed from the start,” arguing that there was never going to be an app-based solution for this that didn’t devolve into cyberbullying. And Clare Haber-Harris over at Cartoons Hate Her went further, declaring, “No matter who the target is — men, women, or anyone else — apps and sites like this just shouldn’t exist.” And then, over the weekend, all of the users’ personal info leaked.

The Tea app and the future of online surveillance

By now you have, no doubt, heard all about the dangerous new TikTok trend sweeping the nation. China’s great and powerful cyber weapon has convinced the innocent teenagers of America that Osama bin Laden was actually a pretty cool guy and now they’re all sharing his 2002 “Letter To America”. Well, first, just to get it out of the way, Osama bin Laden was actually bad. Also, a nepo baby.

After spending most of yesterday digging into this, I’m pretty convinced that this was never a real thing on TikTok. Even though it has since snowballed into a full on moral panic that is beginning to feel dangerously unstable. The Biden administration released a statement about the supposed trend and alarmed big-name creators and actors also reportedly met with TikTok this week to discuss the rise of antisemitism on the app.

Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week.

The story has morphed from what should have been a weird curiosity — and perhaps even a moment to reflect on America’s post-9/11 legacy — into a full-blown national scandal with dumb-dumb headlines getting written about it, like CNN’s “Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden”. I mean, I haven’t even had time in this piece to point out that a lot of the people I saw sharing the letter were millennials! But, yeah, teens fucking love Bin Laden. They’re saying 9/11 just hits different now no cap fr. Gen Z wants Baby Gronk to lead Al-Qaeda in a victorious jihad against the western imperialist hegemony gyatt!!

We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does. And what’s worse here is that there are very real issues with how TikTok works. It is a major source of misinfo and disinfo. It still has a terrible bullying problem. And, ironically enough, it’s also one of the most oppressively censorious social platforms that has ever existed. To the point users had to create a puritanical version of leet speak to communicate on it. But we can’t even begin to address those issues unless we start to look clear-eyed at what is actually happening on the app. And it is most certainly not the digital hub of a large-scale Gen Z Bin Laden fandom. Be fucking serious.

The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.

Last month, after the release of DALL-E 3, there were a whole bunch of stories about how the AI was pretty good at creating pictures of Kirby doing 9/11. And soon after, there was another news cycle about 4chan users figuring out how to make racist Pixar movie posters. Except, all of those stories could have been written — and were actually — about Photoshop on Reddit 15 years ago. That’s because all of this, everything from Biden’s AI executive order to the new mealy-mouthed platform policies to the endless stories asking us to pretend to be scandalized over pictures of Kirby flying United 93 are based on the same incorrect assumption that generative AI is unique in any way.

There’s an old journalism joke that reporters cover every new election according to the rules of the previous one. But I think the tech press does the same thing. Which explains why most of the stories you read about AI right now use the same whack-a-mole content cop strategy most news outlets and research groups spent the 2010s using to cover platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Now they’re breathlessly writing up every instance of an AI producing A Forbidden Image. And what’s worse is this attitude helps tech companies continue to undermine labor and consolidate lobbying power, allows politicians to keep dragging their feet on writing real legislation for the internet, and provides fantastic cover for online platforms that still don’t know how to moderate themselves. I have yet to see anything produced by generative AI you couldn’t do with Photoshop or After Effects or, like, Wikipedia. And if everyone stopped being ridiculous for five minutes, we’d all realize that this tech hasn’t introduced a single new problem. We still just have same old ones we refuse to deal with!

And so, my big hot AI take here is that there’s actually nothing new to moderate. I mean, my god, OpenAI is literally using the same Africa-based third-party moderation contractors that Meta and Google use. It’s all just the same stuff with a new Sci-Fi coat of paint.

Please, I'm begging just even one politician, open up TikTok. Use it for like two minutes and realize that it's not a mass media platform. Please, I'm begging you... I'm so tired...

MrBeast released a series of new videos over the weekend filmed in “Africa”. He put one on his main page titled, “I Built 100 Wells In Africa,” and another titled, “We Powered a Village in Africa,” on his Beast Philanthropy page. And, of course, almost immediately people were posting about how weird the videos are. And, of course, MrBeast had a temper tantrum about it.

“I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care,” MrBeast posted on X, clearly caring quite a bit. “I’m always going to use my channel to help people and try to inspire my audience to do the same.”

But what MrBeast doesn't understand is that being unnaturally viral is all he really is at this point and it tarnishes everything he does. And it’s most noticeable with his charity work. Mostly likely because at this point we all know that making purely viral content and chasing audience-agnostic mass appeal, as MrBeast does, requires, in some sense, being a complete sociopath with no concept of what it means to artistically or creatively express something. Which is why most creators that go viral eventually settle into a baseline. They find an audience and start figuring out what their niche is beyond traffic. But MrBeast never did that. Because traffic is all he seems to want or care about. If he truly cared about philanthropy, for instance, why not just do it and never film it? Well, that’s because philanthropy is just another type of viral content for him.

On October 29th, a Twitter user named @luvcalxb posted a video of a woman in the back of a van saying that she doesn’t cook, she just likes to have sex. @luvcalxb captioned it, “This generation is cooked 😂,” which is basically the same caption all these videos have. That video was then shared by a user named @scubaryan_, who captioned it, “no way she just casually said this… our generation might actually be finished 😭”. That version of the video was shared 4,000 times and “viewed” close to nine million times.

The video briefly had a Community Note on it that read, “the girl getting interviewed is an OnlyFans model and this is an undisclosed ad which is illegal,” which then, hilariously, linked to the model’s X account, giving her more promo. Great work, guys. Also, after digging through the replies a bit, I found a user asking, “where do fanbus find these women?” So I had a name and a page. The model goes by the name punannieannie and the clip comes from an Instagram Reel posted by an account called The Fan Bus.

There are a few big takeaways here for me. The first, and funniest, is that X users have become so right-wing and reactionary that they’re spending their time raging over literal ads for porn. The second takeaway is how savvy new porn operations have become. They’ve built these labyrinthian networks of SFW viral content on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that guide users to their OnlyFans pages. And the final takeaway for me is that at our current late stage of Web 2.0 everyone is having such a Bad Time Online at such a consistent level that you can build an entire media company off of short videos of young women saying random stuff that makes weird men angry. Inspiring, really.

This post from a verified X account recently received 17 million “views,” about 14,000 retweets and around 500 replies. But the replies aren’t what you’d normally see on Twitter pre-Elon Musk’s takeover. Instead, they’re almost exclusively from other verified accounts, who aren’t even attempting to actually reply to the post. Even weirder, some of the accounts replying underneath this post appear to be trying to start a completely different reply thread.

It's bizarre new trend on X that I’ve noticed becoming more popular recently. And I’m going to call it a Verified Meme Dump. And it’s sort of a perfect example of how paid verification and user monetization has broken a platform that was primarily powered by conversations.

On Twitter, back when it was Twitter, the incentive to be funny or interesting or informative was retweets and likes, which if you gained enough of you might get a media job, or a book deal, or get laid. On X, Musk’s pay-to-play model of virality has turned the site into an environment of pure capitalism where conversation simply gets in the way. And after scrolling through enough of these Verified Meme Dumps, I slowly realized what they actually reminded me of. These replies are just galleries of refried edgy memes with no coherent theme, posted by scammers and weirdos, surrounded by ads for brands I’ve never heard of and products that probably don’t exist, with poorly-aggregated headlines sitting next to them on the sidebar. It’s 9gag. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to make 9gag. And his big plan to improve it, according to Fortune this week, is to start charging new users $1 a year to use it.