Congrats, Silicon Valley, you built an infinite Jerry Springer machine and no one wants to use it anymore because it makes them look like Jerry Springer. Me on the inevitable death of "clipping" and, probably, the entire short-form video industry.
www.garbageday.email/p/what-happe...
The idea that Geese is only popular because of a psyop is a psyop
Is it creepy that there are companies like Chaotic Good Projects out there promising to "simulate trends" with sock puppet accounts. Yes, sure. But, in my experience, they're almost always completely full of shit.
www.garbageday.email/p/the-wild-g...
Eliza Mclamb's original piece is worth reading, it's more focused on vibes engineering, which is harder to measure, but worth scrutinizing.
www.wordsfromeliza.com/p/fake-fans
But again, the only metric she mentions is that Chaotic Good got a TikTok audio to be shared 40,000 times at one point.
NO!!!
lol I know. You always say that. But quanitifying the ad fraud is interesting!!
This is the kind of thing @bumas.bsky.social and I try really hard to quantify and it's not easy. Without follower counts, video view totals, and Spotify streams, this basically means nothing. It's, frankly, a much more interesting story if bands are paying for this and it doesn't actually work.
I was also looking into the Chaotic Good accusations and ended up passing. This piece is interesting, but I also don't really believe companies that claim they can "make things go viral." And this piece doesn't really question if it's just a big scam. How do we know their clippers even mattered?
I thought Justin Bieber's Coachella set pretty was cool!
www.garbageday.email/p/was-justin...
For anyone using Surf. We've got a feed up there now!
garbageday.surf.social
In the early 2020s, bimbofication and its definition of the bimbo spread, like so many other things from the older internet, to TikTok. And it was hard to reconcile the fantasy image of the transformed bimbo with the real world where she now had to exist. We got a round of thinkpieces on bimbos, plus a second volley about himbos. We got a Bimbo Manifesto. The “bimbology” wasn’t uncritical, but since it was centered on the “seggs” app, it couldn’t deal with the reality that this was a niche online sex thing before it was a serious social phenomenon. Which was a problem that’s gotten worse. Because in 2026, most of culture can be directly traced back to niche online sex things. Our slang is incel doggerel, our media diet is a collective goon cave, and our government is insecure memelords.
Today I'm talking bimbo politics. See more behind the paywall, if you dare.
www.garbageday.email/p/bimbos-in-...
I enjoyed this conversation and bit of idea jousting with Ryan on Section 230. The law is only becoming more relevant with the recent verdicts against Meta and YouTube. Check it out.
Our podcast episode about section 230 with @brihreed.bsky.social is out today. I think we cover every argument for and against repealing it. Worth a listen if you're trying to wrap your head around this stuff.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgRg...
I agree with this is broad strokes, but I think the reason the concepts “podcast” and “celebrity chat show” merged is because execs wanted an always-on show that had a built in audience
Celebs became standard because YouTubers and other web-native creators didn’t need help doing very mid talk shows
The video pivot that started in 2020 has clearly reached the zenith of its stupidity and while old media tries to steer their beleaguered newsrooms towards the last next big thing, the next next big thing is clearly just over the horizon.
www.garbageday.email/p/oh-look-we...
Everyone suddenly wants to regulate tech platforms in the US, but no one wants to say the word "monopoly."
www.garbageday.email/p/meta-bad-b...
I keep calling this the “nothing is anything” argument that the tech companies keep making
I agree! There are plenty of ways to go about this and lots of countries have had some success. But the US is about to do something catastrophically stupid because it can't imagine standing up to these companies in a meaningful way.
Abolishing section 230 to regulate tech monopolies would be like if instead of trust-busting train monopolies in the early 1900s we instead legally classified everyone as a train company for some reason
Two things that are, unfortunately, true:
-Massive algorithmic tech platforms need to be regulated
-There is no proposed regulation in the US that legally defines a site like Facebook as being different from like the comment section on someone's cooking blog
Without that we destroy the internet.
The bit in Panic World where @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social shouts out Perplex City (amongst other ARGs) *and* wrecks my shit:
"Adrian will absolutely be messaging me about our inaccurate discussion of ARGs, he is the leader of the section of our audience that gets mad at us every single time." (true!)
it's called ska
The Epic layoffs today are another sign of the same reason we're all talking about DLSS 5. The video game industry is showing signs of a mass extinction - a death stranding, so to speak.
I wrote about it last week:
www.garbageday.email/p/the-death-...
We've been freed from content jail.
Well, maybe try not making light of the possible death of a very close friend of one of the owners and then try again, huh
First they claimed it was for misinformation and now they're saying our video, which features non-AI footage of Netanyahu (which is the point of the video) is AI content 🤔🤔🤔
TikTok banned a video we made making fun of Benjamin Netanyahu and continues to change the official reason why.
www.garbageday.email/p/our-conten...
I don't totally know the reason for this, but during the Epstein files news cycle, X just completely and totally blew Bluesky out of the water, even with all the fake shit circulating. It was invaluable for me. Bluesky still doesn't have a strong cohort of curators that can make sense of the noise.
I also just don't think Bluesky users want this place to be "useful" during breaking news. It's a way more emotional platform than Twitter ever was. Closer to Tumblr, honestly.
