One component of the Zynternet I feel compelled to mention is the evolution of the Rogan-sphere to an assortment of comedy, sports, and 'lifestyle' podcasts on YouTube that have taken off since the pandemic. These podcasts are usually one degree of separation from Dana White. While the politics in these circles has always been implicit, actual politicians have started coming on these podcasts. Trump went on Full Send last year and got 8M views on YouTube, while he went on Logan Paul's podcast two weeks ago with 5M views so far. RFK has also done the rounds here - going on Theo Von's podcast (1.1M views), Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast (555K views), Lex Fridman's podcast (3.5M views) and Andrew Schulz's podcast (1.5M views) in the past year. Full Send interviewed the mayor of Miami last year (1.1M views). I don't think there's a 'left-wing' equivalent of this universe.
Maybe none of this matters and this is an audience that would have voted this way anyway, but it's at least interesting to me to have politicians being able to speak to millions of young people directly, for an hour or more, completely unfettered. I don't think the effect is negligible!
Great comment—one thing that's interesting is the porousness between all these different masculinist online cultures and the way one podcast with a largely male audience with algorithmically send its largely male audience to other podcasts with largely male audiences... I worry a bit that the "left-wing" equivalent is basically, like, the Kelce brothers' podcast.
I refused to watch the debate on the grounds it could only raise empty questions while cranking up the volume of the blend of analog TV static and calliope music that starts to buzz any time I watch anything resembling broadcast news. In the best case, Biden is an old dude with a lifelong speech impediment being forced to play 18th Century Town Square Simulator for the increasingly creaky tradition of it and should be cut a break- but he won't get one because even his own team regards politics as a vulnerability-hunting Screen Rants video. In the worst, he's an old dude losing a step (it didn't seem to bother Reagan- but if I'm trying to draw cover from Ronald fucking Reagan I should walk into the sea). In either case, a sitting president that declined to run hasn't been followed by one of the same party since Coolidge, and somehow I don't feel great about breaking that particular historical pattern this particular day (how I would love to be wrong).
I struggle, though, to imagine a good-faith voter looking at Biden saying million, meaning billion, and correcting himself, and to somehow find that intellectually concerning compared to anything Trump has said in the last 40 years. The Cheeto is a golem animated by the onboarding pamphlets of a dozen multi-level marketing schemes, and hunting for signs of cognitive decline is going to inherently be stymied by the fundamental disorder of anything he said in halcyon days- the plane cannot crash because it never took off.
I mean, I personally don't feel inclined to cut him a break—he's the president! He suggested he wouldn't run again! I just think "he's too old" is baked in to the polls at this point and somehow the only people in the world whose minds have been changed about that following the debate are pundits and Democrats who closely follow politics.
Oh, don't misunderstand me- just thinking that he doesn't have it anymore on the evidence is perfectly reasonable, as is frustration that no one decided that it might be prudent to use this four years to do some kingmaking, just in case. I was more generally lamenting the self-perpetuating centrality of The Debate and its inevitable product, The Gaffe, in our understanding of American elections. Even if Biden had made a deal with a wizard and still had his 30-year-old brain, he'd still be doing one thing he's always been bad at- extemporaneous public speaking- in opposition to an obviously unfit individual doing the one thing people seem to think he's good at- playing at being powerful on television- and the American electorate might think what happened was important, either because they genuinely cared, or didn't themselves but were certain other people did. It's one ceremonial round of a literal high school sport, and the more elections I live through the more I sour on debates as anything but a symptom of the horse-race mentality.
“Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person…eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the uh with with with the COVID. Excuse me, with um, dealing with everything we have to do with… (long pause) …look, if…we finally beat Medicare”
This is not doctored or exaggerated at all it is my best transcription of his exact words. This was not “replacing millions with billions” gaffes.
I think it's important to watch at least parts of the debate, so that one has a conception of what a lot of other Americans actually saw. You lose credibility if you try to argue that he's just losing a step or has a stutter. It was beyond awful, like jaw-droppingly incoherent and worrying. If you tell people not to believe what they saw and heard, then you aren't going to be very good at representing your point of view, especially when you haven't actually seen or heard the indefensible thing you're trying to defend. There's a good reason people are panicking.
i randomly listened to a 2018 episode of time crisis yesterday, wherein ezra koenig and jake longstreth discuss how "fratty" had contemporaneously replaced "dorky" as the thing everyone can and does deride. specifically, the "played out" impulse to rely on quotes from stuff like the big lebowski; when jake was in high school he quoted ghostbusters and was a dork, and at the time of recording he quoted the big lebowski and was a new kind of dork. i love time crisis because i have a crush on ezra koenig (sorry) but also because i love witnessing men learning truths in real time and being genuinely excited by them. this discussion about frattiness leads ezra to say: "i think something happens when something becomes like a really like iconic cult--it's like happening with rick and morty now--where people like are really into it and ride for it and then it becomes a stereotype, 'oh the type of person who's obsessed with that is so annoying,' and then suddenly it casts this weird shadow on the thing itself...which it shouldn't."
he's on the right track: quoting anything , or, as he goes on to say, smoking weed, are not substitutes for actually engaging with culture or having a sense of self, but being overly critical of people who are a little too into to the office, say, is also a little mean spirited. he never really lands, but the conclusion, which i agree with, seems to be that "letting people enjoy things" is a difficult but important line to walk, because our culture is far too alienated and mean to take everything out on people who derive so much unabated joy from dumb stuff, but sometimes the stuff is so dumb it is harmful (e.g. marvel).
from 2016-2019 this cycle was constant: fratty/dork mainstream culture takeover > "cool people" bully tinder profiles with the office quotes > frat guys double down > cool people (rightfully) re-negotiate how to more meaningfully walk the line. all of this is related, somehow, to the way people reacted to trump being funny between 2015-2019 ("is it ok that he is so funny??"). what i find curious about the rebirth of this kind of posting in 2024 (huak tuah, portnoy), is that it has pivoted from profoundly sexless (the office) to almost always explicitly fetishistic (viral video about oral sex, portnoy's whole thing is being hot, kind of, "call her daddy"). i also think its interesting that the exact same kind of lack-of-sense-of-self aesthetic is uncannily paralleled in leftist/"brat summer" spheres in, like, jack schlossberg.
maybe since everyone started shamelessly admitting that trump is the funniest guy of all time, internet subcultures have lost their edge and the dorkish venn diagram has started closing in on itself, and every kind of person has just resorted to manically saying "i'm horny" via regurgitating viral one-liners. in any case, thank you so much to putting a name to the call-her-daddy-ification of memes, a specifically post-tiktok and post-covid aesthetic mode that is so hard to describe, especially in conversation with its more simple post-2016 counterpart.
I like the term Zynternet. It seems like we've reached a new social paradigm. In the 2010s "nerd culture" became fully mainstream. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter, Marvel Movies, Star Wars memes, "science, fuck yeah" all became culturally hegemonic instead of lame stuff for nerds. Part of it was a self-proclaimed nerdiness, "yeah, I like superheros, I don't care if it's for nerds, nerds are cool now," was the ethos. This really coincided with the internet becoming cool, so the stuff early adopters (nerdy programmers) of the internet found cool became cool.
The internet is rejecting "nerd culture" now from both wings of cultural politics. The Zynternet culturally libertarian frat guys now control much of the online space with this kind of horny machismo low brow content that sees "nerd stuff" as "woke and lame." On the other side you have your progressive wing who are back to thinking nerds are a bunch of misogynistic trolls. According to this side, new Star Wars and Marvel content gets review bombed by "hateful nerds" who don't like diversity or change in in their franchises. Video game culture is supposedly dominated by "nerds" who aren't accepting of new diverse audiences. It doesn't matter who is right, what matters it that there is a narrative that video games and science fiction and fantasy media is made for a niche audience who isn't cool.
Point being that we are now back to an anti-nerd culture. Marvel is falling apart, Harry Potter is uncool now, Big Bang Theory turned into Young Sheldon, and science isn't really a cultural identity anymore.
This does seem to slightly gloss over the fact that "narrative" ignores that "nerd culture" is still driving billions of dollars of spending on entertainment every year. But YMMV
Yes, but I think it is the point of the cultural cycle where it has gone from being a niche culture, to the hegemonic dominate culture, and is now leaving zeitgeist. In many cases, things like Marvel; Harry Potter, and Star Wars are beginning to struggle to find consistent success and are trying to appeal more to new audiences rather than pleasing core fans.
In simpler terms, that media was popular among the nerd subculture, nerd subculture became cool, that media became mainstream, homogenized and stopped serving a specific subculture, and now that subculture is no longer cool.
It’s the same cycle you see other subcultures going through as well. Hot topic selling goth clothes doesn’t mean goth is significant today culturally.
Sure, but Hot Topic has never been the arbitor of "cool." They pretty much always did genre stuff, just at "mall scale," right?
Back to your point - you saying it's cyclical is fine, but you could also argue it's that Marvel, Star Wars, etc lost quality over quantity and we'll potentially see a return in the billions for Deadpool & Wolverine. So then us the cycle that quick, isn't ignoring the cycle (breaking free), or is it just that the last few/several things put out have sucked. Whereas the new House of Dragons doesn't, which is why people are talking about it and not The Acolyte?
That’s the point, Hot Topic commodified 80s/90s subcultures, making them no longer hip.
I think we’re talking about two different things. I’m talking about the cultural idea of “nerdiness” no longer having cultural capital among individuals while the zynternet is on the rise. Mainstreaming of nerd culture is what led to the rise of media like Marvel, but that media is less associated with nerdiness now. Zynternet people still watch Marvel movies, but the discourse around it has changed. It’s not cool to be a nerd anymore, even if the echos of that influence remains. But that’s also why this media seems to be floundering a bit because they trying to find a new core audience- The acolyte very much tries to cater to a diversity forward “Star Wars needs to change” crowd, while Deadpool is appealing to the edgelord zynternet types. Neither is trying to appeal to old school convention going comic book/sci-fi nerds, who used to act as cultural influencers who could make or break the success of the media by arguing it was a faithful adaptation or not, etc.
Question, where do the fashion bros fit within the Zynternet? Throwing Fits, Nolitadertbag, etc. Sort of niche, but feels like they're anti-frat in that they're making fun of frat and Wall Street bros who are late and buying their way into "cool" while at the same time reproducing and buying into some of the same ideas and stereotypes the Zynternet is built on. Sort of related to the woke question was the response to a mildly political guest (Mia Khalifia on Throwing Fits) that left the comment section in shambles. Feels like those pages are catering to genuine fashion bros, the Zynternet, while wearing some sort of vaguely leftist outfit that signals that they aren't like those other dudes.
Another interesting moment irt Zynternet politics was the frat bros of Ole Miss response to the Palestinian demonstration. Ofc they were throwing racial slurs, but the crowd was a bunch of 100% zynternet bros who largely just stood there, singing, dancing, probably checking their parlays and listening to Rap Caviar. Not really committed to the bit. Their great-grandfathers were probably rolling in their graves lol. Online, the twitter account RedCupOleMiss goes from mindless posts about Ole Miss sports and their athletes (majority of them Black, heh) to this bizarre moment on campus treating their "counter protest" like a tailgate.
Really interesting question--I tend to think of HLG, Throwing Fits, etc., as fairly distant from the Zynternet but there's a lot of porousness to boundaries between these different internets, the unifying quality basically being that they're "male-coded" ... I mean who doesn't like a good meme about downing some Miller Lites with the boys regardless of whether they're wearing straight-leg Dickies or Lululemon slacks or polo shirts or whatever (coincidentally, or not, lacrosse shorts seem to be really back in among fashionable people these days)?? But maybe the core thing here is a bunch of different attempts to create and perform a new (?) masculinity in "the post-Trump era"... ? I don't know, worth thinking about
I didn’t see the debate; thank God. But I kind of agree with you and have my own double contrarian stance: debates are useless and rarely move the needle (remember Trump gets sentenced in two weeks) AND negligible doesn’t mean absent; in a tight election that’s likely to be decided by 10-20k people in three states, negligible still makes a difference!
Yes, the Chive is definitely an antecedent, but I think the Chive was like 10 degrees nerdier/geekier than the Zynternet... it's a bit like the Chive if you removed all the Reddit and added a dash of MAGA
God I was JUST going to say the Chive and Chubbies birthed this internet in 2013. The bros were more harmless and hapless back then, though, bless them.
I am super on board with your debate take that Biden did badly and is not the strongest candidate, but also that it mostly confirmed a thing people knew and were supporting him in spite of!
Certainly a weird paradigm now. On the one hand, a dearth of deeply thoughtful longform podcasts and also hours of neanderthals who only seem interested in the sound of their voices. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs
> Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings--mostly but by no means entirely male--has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents--college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches--and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.
You sound a tad more informed about it than a well adjusted person would be :)
In fact, I wouldn't expect anybody not belonging to that "scene" (or whatever it is) to even know about its existence except very peripherally, much less have it mapped out like that!
This take on that debate is less contrarian than the one I have in mind, so don't feel too bad. Yours is more defensible on the merits (to the extent that even matters nowadays).
Woke up this morning feeling like the debate was a bad dream- probably because it was the first debate in 20 years during which I didn’t drink heavily- and more or less came to the same conclusion. If the people with the worst political instincts on the planet are in lockstep, Biden can surely outperform the polls
One component of the Zynternet I feel compelled to mention is the evolution of the Rogan-sphere to an assortment of comedy, sports, and 'lifestyle' podcasts on YouTube that have taken off since the pandemic. These podcasts are usually one degree of separation from Dana White. While the politics in these circles has always been implicit, actual politicians have started coming on these podcasts. Trump went on Full Send last year and got 8M views on YouTube, while he went on Logan Paul's podcast two weeks ago with 5M views so far. RFK has also done the rounds here - going on Theo Von's podcast (1.1M views), Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast (555K views), Lex Fridman's podcast (3.5M views) and Andrew Schulz's podcast (1.5M views) in the past year. Full Send interviewed the mayor of Miami last year (1.1M views). I don't think there's a 'left-wing' equivalent of this universe.
Maybe none of this matters and this is an audience that would have voted this way anyway, but it's at least interesting to me to have politicians being able to speak to millions of young people directly, for an hour or more, completely unfettered. I don't think the effect is negligible!
Great comment—one thing that's interesting is the porousness between all these different masculinist online cultures and the way one podcast with a largely male audience with algorithmically send its largely male audience to other podcasts with largely male audiences... I worry a bit that the "left-wing" equivalent is basically, like, the Kelce brothers' podcast.
I refused to watch the debate on the grounds it could only raise empty questions while cranking up the volume of the blend of analog TV static and calliope music that starts to buzz any time I watch anything resembling broadcast news. In the best case, Biden is an old dude with a lifelong speech impediment being forced to play 18th Century Town Square Simulator for the increasingly creaky tradition of it and should be cut a break- but he won't get one because even his own team regards politics as a vulnerability-hunting Screen Rants video. In the worst, he's an old dude losing a step (it didn't seem to bother Reagan- but if I'm trying to draw cover from Ronald fucking Reagan I should walk into the sea). In either case, a sitting president that declined to run hasn't been followed by one of the same party since Coolidge, and somehow I don't feel great about breaking that particular historical pattern this particular day (how I would love to be wrong).
I struggle, though, to imagine a good-faith voter looking at Biden saying million, meaning billion, and correcting himself, and to somehow find that intellectually concerning compared to anything Trump has said in the last 40 years. The Cheeto is a golem animated by the onboarding pamphlets of a dozen multi-level marketing schemes, and hunting for signs of cognitive decline is going to inherently be stymied by the fundamental disorder of anything he said in halcyon days- the plane cannot crash because it never took off.
Man, do I hate all of it right now.
I mean, I personally don't feel inclined to cut him a break—he's the president! He suggested he wouldn't run again! I just think "he's too old" is baked in to the polls at this point and somehow the only people in the world whose minds have been changed about that following the debate are pundits and Democrats who closely follow politics.
Oh, don't misunderstand me- just thinking that he doesn't have it anymore on the evidence is perfectly reasonable, as is frustration that no one decided that it might be prudent to use this four years to do some kingmaking, just in case. I was more generally lamenting the self-perpetuating centrality of The Debate and its inevitable product, The Gaffe, in our understanding of American elections. Even if Biden had made a deal with a wizard and still had his 30-year-old brain, he'd still be doing one thing he's always been bad at- extemporaneous public speaking- in opposition to an obviously unfit individual doing the one thing people seem to think he's good at- playing at being powerful on television- and the American electorate might think what happened was important, either because they genuinely cared, or didn't themselves but were certain other people did. It's one ceremonial round of a literal high school sport, and the more elections I live through the more I sour on debates as anything but a symptom of the horse-race mentality.
“Making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person…eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the uh with with with the COVID. Excuse me, with um, dealing with everything we have to do with… (long pause) …look, if…we finally beat Medicare”
This is not doctored or exaggerated at all it is my best transcription of his exact words. This was not “replacing millions with billions” gaffes.
I think it's important to watch at least parts of the debate, so that one has a conception of what a lot of other Americans actually saw. You lose credibility if you try to argue that he's just losing a step or has a stutter. It was beyond awful, like jaw-droppingly incoherent and worrying. If you tell people not to believe what they saw and heard, then you aren't going to be very good at representing your point of view, especially when you haven't actually seen or heard the indefensible thing you're trying to defend. There's a good reason people are panicking.
Your analogy for Trump needs a little bit more racism, but otherwise, spot on!
The Cheeto is a golem animated by the onboarding pamphlets of a dozen multi-level marketing schemes – wow, I spit-cackled at this.
Happy to help.
thank you for the explainer, I'd seen the phrase and had been assuming it was a Star Wars character or something
i randomly listened to a 2018 episode of time crisis yesterday, wherein ezra koenig and jake longstreth discuss how "fratty" had contemporaneously replaced "dorky" as the thing everyone can and does deride. specifically, the "played out" impulse to rely on quotes from stuff like the big lebowski; when jake was in high school he quoted ghostbusters and was a dork, and at the time of recording he quoted the big lebowski and was a new kind of dork. i love time crisis because i have a crush on ezra koenig (sorry) but also because i love witnessing men learning truths in real time and being genuinely excited by them. this discussion about frattiness leads ezra to say: "i think something happens when something becomes like a really like iconic cult--it's like happening with rick and morty now--where people like are really into it and ride for it and then it becomes a stereotype, 'oh the type of person who's obsessed with that is so annoying,' and then suddenly it casts this weird shadow on the thing itself...which it shouldn't."
he's on the right track: quoting anything , or, as he goes on to say, smoking weed, are not substitutes for actually engaging with culture or having a sense of self, but being overly critical of people who are a little too into to the office, say, is also a little mean spirited. he never really lands, but the conclusion, which i agree with, seems to be that "letting people enjoy things" is a difficult but important line to walk, because our culture is far too alienated and mean to take everything out on people who derive so much unabated joy from dumb stuff, but sometimes the stuff is so dumb it is harmful (e.g. marvel).
from 2016-2019 this cycle was constant: fratty/dork mainstream culture takeover > "cool people" bully tinder profiles with the office quotes > frat guys double down > cool people (rightfully) re-negotiate how to more meaningfully walk the line. all of this is related, somehow, to the way people reacted to trump being funny between 2015-2019 ("is it ok that he is so funny??"). what i find curious about the rebirth of this kind of posting in 2024 (huak tuah, portnoy), is that it has pivoted from profoundly sexless (the office) to almost always explicitly fetishistic (viral video about oral sex, portnoy's whole thing is being hot, kind of, "call her daddy"). i also think its interesting that the exact same kind of lack-of-sense-of-self aesthetic is uncannily paralleled in leftist/"brat summer" spheres in, like, jack schlossberg.
maybe since everyone started shamelessly admitting that trump is the funniest guy of all time, internet subcultures have lost their edge and the dorkish venn diagram has started closing in on itself, and every kind of person has just resorted to manically saying "i'm horny" via regurgitating viral one-liners. in any case, thank you so much to putting a name to the call-her-daddy-ification of memes, a specifically post-tiktok and post-covid aesthetic mode that is so hard to describe, especially in conversation with its more simple post-2016 counterpart.
thank you clare, absolutely booming post
I like the term Zynternet. It seems like we've reached a new social paradigm. In the 2010s "nerd culture" became fully mainstream. Big Bang Theory, Harry Potter, Marvel Movies, Star Wars memes, "science, fuck yeah" all became culturally hegemonic instead of lame stuff for nerds. Part of it was a self-proclaimed nerdiness, "yeah, I like superheros, I don't care if it's for nerds, nerds are cool now," was the ethos. This really coincided with the internet becoming cool, so the stuff early adopters (nerdy programmers) of the internet found cool became cool.
The internet is rejecting "nerd culture" now from both wings of cultural politics. The Zynternet culturally libertarian frat guys now control much of the online space with this kind of horny machismo low brow content that sees "nerd stuff" as "woke and lame." On the other side you have your progressive wing who are back to thinking nerds are a bunch of misogynistic trolls. According to this side, new Star Wars and Marvel content gets review bombed by "hateful nerds" who don't like diversity or change in in their franchises. Video game culture is supposedly dominated by "nerds" who aren't accepting of new diverse audiences. It doesn't matter who is right, what matters it that there is a narrative that video games and science fiction and fantasy media is made for a niche audience who isn't cool.
Point being that we are now back to an anti-nerd culture. Marvel is falling apart, Harry Potter is uncool now, Big Bang Theory turned into Young Sheldon, and science isn't really a cultural identity anymore.
This does seem to slightly gloss over the fact that "narrative" ignores that "nerd culture" is still driving billions of dollars of spending on entertainment every year. But YMMV
Yes, but I think it is the point of the cultural cycle where it has gone from being a niche culture, to the hegemonic dominate culture, and is now leaving zeitgeist. In many cases, things like Marvel; Harry Potter, and Star Wars are beginning to struggle to find consistent success and are trying to appeal more to new audiences rather than pleasing core fans.
In simpler terms, that media was popular among the nerd subculture, nerd subculture became cool, that media became mainstream, homogenized and stopped serving a specific subculture, and now that subculture is no longer cool.
It’s the same cycle you see other subcultures going through as well. Hot topic selling goth clothes doesn’t mean goth is significant today culturally.
Sure, but Hot Topic has never been the arbitor of "cool." They pretty much always did genre stuff, just at "mall scale," right?
Back to your point - you saying it's cyclical is fine, but you could also argue it's that Marvel, Star Wars, etc lost quality over quantity and we'll potentially see a return in the billions for Deadpool & Wolverine. So then us the cycle that quick, isn't ignoring the cycle (breaking free), or is it just that the last few/several things put out have sucked. Whereas the new House of Dragons doesn't, which is why people are talking about it and not The Acolyte?
That’s the point, Hot Topic commodified 80s/90s subcultures, making them no longer hip.
I think we’re talking about two different things. I’m talking about the cultural idea of “nerdiness” no longer having cultural capital among individuals while the zynternet is on the rise. Mainstreaming of nerd culture is what led to the rise of media like Marvel, but that media is less associated with nerdiness now. Zynternet people still watch Marvel movies, but the discourse around it has changed. It’s not cool to be a nerd anymore, even if the echos of that influence remains. But that’s also why this media seems to be floundering a bit because they trying to find a new core audience- The acolyte very much tries to cater to a diversity forward “Star Wars needs to change” crowd, while Deadpool is appealing to the edgelord zynternet types. Neither is trying to appeal to old school convention going comic book/sci-fi nerds, who used to act as cultural influencers who could make or break the success of the media by arguing it was a faithful adaptation or not, etc.
disgusting. should have a P in there, like "hwk - PTOO"
Question, where do the fashion bros fit within the Zynternet? Throwing Fits, Nolitadertbag, etc. Sort of niche, but feels like they're anti-frat in that they're making fun of frat and Wall Street bros who are late and buying their way into "cool" while at the same time reproducing and buying into some of the same ideas and stereotypes the Zynternet is built on. Sort of related to the woke question was the response to a mildly political guest (Mia Khalifia on Throwing Fits) that left the comment section in shambles. Feels like those pages are catering to genuine fashion bros, the Zynternet, while wearing some sort of vaguely leftist outfit that signals that they aren't like those other dudes.
Another interesting moment irt Zynternet politics was the frat bros of Ole Miss response to the Palestinian demonstration. Ofc they were throwing racial slurs, but the crowd was a bunch of 100% zynternet bros who largely just stood there, singing, dancing, probably checking their parlays and listening to Rap Caviar. Not really committed to the bit. Their great-grandfathers were probably rolling in their graves lol. Online, the twitter account RedCupOleMiss goes from mindless posts about Ole Miss sports and their athletes (majority of them Black, heh) to this bizarre moment on campus treating their "counter protest" like a tailgate.
Sorry for the long comment. First timer.
Really interesting question--I tend to think of HLG, Throwing Fits, etc., as fairly distant from the Zynternet but there's a lot of porousness to boundaries between these different internets, the unifying quality basically being that they're "male-coded" ... I mean who doesn't like a good meme about downing some Miller Lites with the boys regardless of whether they're wearing straight-leg Dickies or Lululemon slacks or polo shirts or whatever (coincidentally, or not, lacrosse shorts seem to be really back in among fashionable people these days)?? But maybe the core thing here is a bunch of different attempts to create and perform a new (?) masculinity in "the post-Trump era"... ? I don't know, worth thinking about
Let's go with progressive, not leftist
Applying one of Hailey's other answers to the presidential sphere....the best way to get over one is to get under another.
I didn’t see the debate; thank God. But I kind of agree with you and have my own double contrarian stance: debates are useless and rarely move the needle (remember Trump gets sentenced in two weeks) AND negligible doesn’t mean absent; in a tight election that’s likely to be decided by 10-20k people in three states, negligible still makes a difference!
Max, all this seems very Chive-adjacent.
Yes, the Chive is definitely an antecedent, but I think the Chive was like 10 degrees nerdier/geekier than the Zynternet... it's a bit like the Chive if you removed all the Reddit and added a dash of MAGA
Total Frat Move was doing this 10+ years ago
And Barstool has been around forever
God I was JUST going to say the Chive and Chubbies birthed this internet in 2013. The bros were more harmless and hapless back then, though, bless them.
I am super on board with your debate take that Biden did badly and is not the strongest candidate, but also that it mostly confirmed a thing people knew and were supporting him in spite of!
"Zynternet" is solid.
But I'm still waiting for someone to name a column "For Whom The Hawk Tuahs"
Certainly a weird paradigm now. On the one hand, a dearth of deeply thoughtful longform podcasts and also hours of neanderthals who only seem interested in the sound of their voices. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs
> Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings--mostly but by no means entirely male--has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents--college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches--and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.
You sound a tad more informed about it than a well adjusted person would be :)
In fact, I wouldn't expect anybody not belonging to that "scene" (or whatever it is) to even know about its existence except very peripherally, much less have it mapped out like that!
This take on that debate is less contrarian than the one I have in mind, so don't feel too bad. Yours is more defensible on the merits (to the extent that even matters nowadays).
Woke up this morning feeling like the debate was a bad dream- probably because it was the first debate in 20 years during which I didn’t drink heavily- and more or less came to the same conclusion. If the people with the worst political instincts on the planet are in lockstep, Biden can surely outperform the polls