*Jesse Plemons in “Civil War” voice* “What kind of Democrat are you?” www.garbageday.email/p/we-did-it-zo

It's not the point of Garbage Day, but @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social's writing double as group therapy for recovering culture/games/"trends" reporters of the Viral and SEO Eras

This year, Halloween collided with a right-wing digital machine that has spent the last year trying to co-opt, drown out, and weaponize social platforms. www.garbageday.email/p/cancel-cul...

We are so annoying. 🧛 @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social

There's a phenomenon where when you jump from Substack to Ghost, for example, you get a bunch of unsubscribes because people start to actually receive your newsletter instead of it getting tracked to spam from Substack.

Getting off Substack is the right move. I would compare it to moving from an app like Garageband to Ableton or Logic. Or switching from clip art to creative stock images. My business has grown. My readership has grown. Substack fills your list with junk signups, takes your money, and holds you back.

Wow this is rough. Gov Kathy Hochul is speaking the Zohran rally. She's listing examples of Trump admin overreach in NY and the crowd is heckling her loudly, chanting, "do something, you're the governor." Taking forever for her to get through her speech.

At the Zohran, AOC, Bernie Sanders rally in NYC. Cops just threw this guy out. Onlookers in the section said he was with another man who was also thrown out for screaming about communism in Cuba (being bad). Rally doesn't start for like another hour. Weird decision to start heckling so early.

A second favorable Graham Platner poll has hit the timeline. Here's some more thoughts from me on the end of "cancel culture" and how we navigate a world of feeds jammed up with impenetrable outrage. www.garbageday.email/p/the-nation...

Generational image for this app.

This was possibly the best concert I have ever been to. Still thinking about it months later.

I've spent the last year interviewing prominent Dems, pundits, and internet culture researchers, who have all sort of been saying the same thing: It's possible we're living in a post-"cancel culture" world. Platner's favorable polling and huge IRL crowds seem to point to that being the case.

Today we're sharing a piece from @bumas.bsky.social we sent out to our paying readers yesterday. It's, as best we can tell, the most definitive list of who is running Trump's digital operation. Meet the far-right hype house flooding our of our feeds with shit. www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-who...

I assume people aren't questioning it because no one knows what local news looks like in New England, but the Palantir story in the screenshots I posted doesn't have any kind of source and apears to be totally made up bull shit.

Fascinating platform story happening around the Graham Platner stuff. The number one source for almost all of the discourse about Platner on X right now is from an account that only had 70 followers at the start of the week, isn't a real Maine news outlet of any kind, and was created in August.

Can the Manhattan Project avoid building the nuclear bomb?

The twin scandals of Graham Platner's Reddit history and the Young Republican nazi texts, though vastly different in scope and seriousness, reveal the defining political question of the 2020s: How do you manage an entire country of angry, online men? www.garbageday.email/p/young-repu...

"A universe of dumbasses talking to other dumbasses, measured by numbers that don’t make sense and don’t reflect anything other than passive screen time." — @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social @garbageday.email

"If you want access to it, you better get comfortable making lowest-common-denominator bullshit in front of a camera. And, of course, it’s a lot easier to feel good about doing that if you’re an idiot." www.garbageday.email/p/the-great-... @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social

The Trump admin is fully powered by the attention economy. A universe of dumbasess talking to other dumbasess, built on the assumption our tastes have grown so rotten and atrophied that we can't even remember a world where we weren't inundated by worthless slop. www.garbageday.email/p/the-great-...

Trump's stupid antifa roundtable didn't need to make sense to be effective www.garbageday.email/p/the-war-ag...

idk if this makes sense, but whenever I see good resistance art like this, or Kimmel's first monologue after his suspension, and it makes feel some sliver of relief, I immediately get hit with this creepy feeling like I'm watching a memory. Like passing the faded movie posters months after COVID.

The thing that no AI company has officially communicated to anyone is that the minute there's decent enough agentic AI — an AI using apps for you — you will never be able to buy anything of any value online ever again. Unless, of course, you use their agentic AI...

The key innovation of Trump's second term is figuring out how to both scale the localized MAGA frenzy beyond just him and his rallies and, also, most importantly, figure out a way to force it on blue states. www.garbageday.email/p/a-slow-mov...

Chicago, Portland, and everywhere else. This is how it's going to work now: ICE raids, National Guard occupation, far-right militias, spree shooters, and constant digital static. It's not a question of if the Trump meat grinder will come to town, it's when. www.garbageday.email/p/the-pressu...

Every month, we write about the most popular content around the internet. For the first time, I'm proud to say that we're on our own list! @panicworld.com was Patreon's fastest-growing podcast last month.

Not feeling too great about how things are going!!! www.garbageday.email/p/a-slightly...

"starting nofap in 1/2 months"

Little Reichstag Fires Everywhere

A perpetual Reichstag Fire for the 24-hour news cycle www.garbageday.email/p/the-pressu...

I've had to take very strong allergy medication before bed lately, which has resulted in weird dreams. I also started my yearly fall horror movie binge. So last night I had a vivid dream that I worked at a "Babadook reserve." People kept bringing me their Babadooks and I had to manage them in a zoo.

One Battle After Another basically feels like if Martin Scorsese directed Southland Tales (complimentary)

This new wave of edgelord shooters is a beast of Trump administration's own making. www.garbageday.email/p/the-rise-o...

Basically, we have a lot of young people that have only ever known a world flattened by viral content, where everything is constantly getting noticeably worse all the time, and understand that mass violence gets the same reaction that a meme or shitpost does and view them as basically the same thing

The idiotic Tylenol/Autism annoumcement this week has made the playbook very clear: Wait for Trump to spew bull shit, use TikTok as way to make liberals look ridiculous for not believing it and dox as many random people as you can to shut up dissent. www.garbageday.email/p/taking-tyl...

As someone who’s already a professional podcaster, this is humiliating to type, but today I became a streamer. @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social and I discuss Kirk fall out and if the admin pushed too far. www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9ay...

Real honour to make my debut in @garbageday.email today. I wrote about London’s Speakers Corner, Charlie Kirk and how Debate Slop took over all forms of online discourse www.garbageday.email/p/everything...

Kirk was a nobody to normal people, but it's now clear how important he was to the right. The dream of post-Steve Bannon conservativism: An influencer presidential candidate. A homegrown Trump. The panic we're seeing is a movement realizing they have nothing to replace Trump's cult of personality.

For @onthemedia.bsky.social I spoke with @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social (whose Garbage Day newsletter is absolutely essential these days) about radicalization and what mainstream outlets get wrong about internet culture and memes. Really enjoyed this one: www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm...

Every journalist, pundit, and entertainer in the country that doesn't want to bend the knee to Trump needs to figure out a way off corporate platforms ASAP www.garbageday.email/p/petty-powe...

More for your consideration: Welcome to Hell World @lukeoneil47.bsky.social The Handbasket @marisakabas.bsky.social How Things Work @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social @garbageday.email @ryanhatesthis.bsky.social Expedite @kristenhawley.bsky.social The Food Section @hannaraskin.bsky.social

The media company that can figure out how to produce news or news adjacent video content without relying on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, broadcast TV, cable, or corporate streamers will make a billion dollars and probably help save American democracy — or exist long enough to document its end

In the 2010s, this country's elites were thrown onto social platforms with everyone else and could finally read what we all think about them and it caused them so much psychic damage that they decided to destroy both the internet and democracy to make sure nothing like it ever happened again.

Went on PBS NewsHour last night to talk about Gen Z accelerationist violence

The meme aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death (1/2)

And if you wanted an audio version… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

Thank everyone who read @garbageday.email this week. Our Friday issue was read 500,000 times. www.garbageday.email/p/charlie-ki... Our coverage wouldn't be possible without @bumas.bsky.social, @cates.bsky.social, @ellievhall.bsky.social, @grantirving.bsky.social, and @joshfjelstad.bsky.social.

Here's what comes next www.garbageday.email/p/utah-gov-c...

Anyone wanting actually-gets-this-shit type analysis of the internet-side of this situation, I recommend this and his new podcast episode ... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Not really sure where this guy is getting this. The BBC, as of 14 minutes ago, has family friends saying that Robinson "stated Kirk 'was full of hate and spreading hate'." Not really how Groypers would describe things... www.bbc.com/news/article...