Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about Substack’s new religious debates, the continuing MAGA influencer scandal, how to retire from YouTube, and aura battles.

Why are the Substackers debating religious miracles?

Over the last year, one of the hottest topics on rationalist-adjacent Substack has been… the veracity of religious miracles?

This all kicked off last year when religious Substacker Ethan Muse wrote a heavily sourced essay arguing that the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima — a 1917 incident where large crowds of people reported seeing the sun dance and emit radiant colors — was a genuine miracle, unexplainable by any other method other than divine intervention. This inspired rationalist blogger Scott Alexander to write a more skeptical post titled “The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know,” which led to responses and counter-responses.

The discourse continued into 2026 when other bloggers began jumping into the fray and Alexander began investigating similar sun miracles in Buddhism. It seems to have wrapped up with Alexander’s recent pilgrimage to a modern-day holy site where people still claim to see sun miracles to this day.

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There have also been back-and-forth essays about the case of Padre Pio, a Catholic saint who allegedly experienced stigmata and other miracles. Muse again argued that the evidence for the miraculous is strong, while other bloggers are highly skeptical.

Amid all that, we’ve also seen a resurgence of classic atheists-vs.-religion arguments: debates between skeptics and theists, arguments for and against various proofs of God’s existence, takedowns, counter-takedowns, and more.

As someone who once spent time as an angsty teenager browsing the /r/atheism subreddit, this was a blast from the past. The teleological argument? Theodicies trying to resolve the problem of evil? We’re bringing back the hits, baby!

But it’s a bit unusual that this is happening now. We’re no longer in the heyday of internet atheism, when Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens became celebrities, New Atheist channels were incredibly popular on YouTube, and /r/atheism was so large it was a default front-page subreddit. That popularity faded over time with the rise of the “nones” — 29% of Americans now say they have no religion, a larger share than Catholics. It became so common to be nonreligious — and this is especially true in the highly educated chattering class — that it was no longer all that interesting to talk about.1

Paradoxically, I think the decline of religious belief explains why religion has become interesting again. It used to be incredibly countercultural to argue against religion. New Atheism began as an underdog movement, a response to the immense power that religious conservatives had held for decades prior to its rise.

But now it’s countercultural (at least among the intelligentsia) to be sincerely religious. It’s transgressive to make unironic arguments for why it’s logical to believe in God. And this is the recipe for a discourse — transgressive beliefs that can be heavily debated without clear resolution.

What I find refreshing is that, for the most part, the quality of these debates is remarkably good. People are combing through old newspapers, checking translations, and closely examining eyewitness accounts. Both sides are trying very hard to make logically consistent arguments, and they’re all studying the historical evidence very carefully. There are nitpicky, technical debates about the way light would refract in different atmospheric conditions.

It’s not perfect, but compared with the rest of social media, it feels positively civilized. It’s easy to find examples of the internet driving us all insane and making society worse, but these debates feel like how the internet should be.

The children are engaging in aura battles

I don’t know man. You tell me what’s going on here:

@overtimeWho had more aura? Cookie Chris or Applewood 👀 #aurafarmingbattle #aurafarming #batalladeaura #newyork #aura

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“Aura battles” seem to have originated in Brazil and quickly spread to the rest of Latin America. The idea seems to be that you “farm aura” by striking poses, doing dances, etc., and whoever has more aura gets bigger cheers from the crowd and thus wins? It became a big enough viral hit that politicians started trying to get in on it, and it has now made its way to America.

I guess we should just be happy the kids are actually going outside? And hey, if you don’t want to go to the aura farming contest, you can always hit up the toddler rave.

Boy, that Trump influencer story sure blew up

Last week, we essentially dedicated the entire Weekly Scroll to covering a developing story around the Department of Defense hiring MAGA influencers to work in official roles. The following day, The Washington Post published even more details about the Pentagon’s efforts to build a troll army made up of right-wing social media obsessives. Those efforts included even more accounts than previously realized, including several MAGA influencers who The Post reported have influence over policy.

Personally, I continue to find it extremely funny that MAGA finally found a real-life, no-bullshit conspiracy where there are actually secret feds getting paid by the government while trying to manipulate public opinion… but because of who it is, they now have to pretend that’s a thing they supported all along. Just remarkable.

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In theory, there’s nothing wrong with hiring civilians, even influencers, as special government employees (SGEs). But what’s important is that these influencers were pumping out pro-Trump and pro-Hegseth talking points while not disclosing they were being paid by the government. A wise man2 once said:

Cynical Publius, of course, ended up being exposed as Thomas Anderson, who earlier this year was working inside the apparatus of government. And his tweet above isn’t wrong! As Anderson wrote last year: “As soon as you allow yourself to be fed privileged information from the government, you cease to be independent.”

Frankly, it seems like a tactical mistake from the administration. As we saw last week with the DataRepublican saga, the people they chose to bring inside the tent are imbeciles. The only value those imbeciles have is that they’re nominally independent. They’re already spreading the messages you want, and paying them ruins the only shred of credibility they have.

But this is what you can expect from an administration where half the cabinet used to be talking heads. One gets the sense, watching the Trump administration operate, that nearly every single person in the administration would rather be doing viral political slop videos and podcasts than actually running the country. It’s why you see HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yukking it up on cooking shows or Sean Duffy, the current secretary of transportation, going on podcasts with Stephen Miller’s wife to talk about how he still doesn’t trust the government.

They are the government! But they’d rather be podcasters!

In related news, the Mamdani administration is facing some heat because it too has been paying social media influencers to promote city initiatives. This seems like a less serious case, but the principle remains the same — the public deserves to know how and where the government is spending public money to promote its talking points.

No more chicken shop dates

Amelia Dimoldenberg, who shot to fame with her now-famous YouTube interview show “Chicken Shop Date,” has announced that after 12 years of eating chicken with celebrities, she’s calling it quits.

Alongside shows like “Last Meals” and “Hot Ones,” Dimoldenberg’s “Chicken Shop Date” helped chart the path for a new kind of talk show — more intimate, personal, and online, and using food as a way to distract the guest and make them appear more down-to-earth. Those shows are arguably now more important than classic newspaper interviews or late-night television guest spots in film and TV publicity tours.

Dimoldenberg is planning other projects, including a young adult drama series for BBC and a romantic comedy film with Amazon MGM Studios. Even still, her departure is a reminder that retiring from being an influencer is awkward, even at the best of times.

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There’s no perfect way to step aside. In 2024, YouTube legend Tom Scott announced that he was stepping back from his channel because he was tired — he had released a video each week for 10 straight years. And after that announcement, he didn’t upload another video to his main channel for more than a year.

Matthew Patrick, host of the popular video game channel “Game Theorists,” retired but attempted to hand over his channels to a new roster of hosts.

Why is it so hard to step aside online? Film, TV, music, and other traditional art forms are fairly discrete. Albums, movies, or seasons of television are distinct things with specific release dates. Each project has an end.

Internet shows, by contrast, can keep going forever. That grind wears on people, especially because so many online shows are entirely dependent on the host’s charismatic presence. So there’s often no elegant way to wrap things up without just announcing “I’m done here.”

Good good? Bad bad.

Good Good Golf was doing so well. The YouTube golf channel had more than 2 million subscribers and last year attracted $45 million in investment to expand as a media and lifestyle brand. It had branded golf products in mainstream stores and a show on the Golf Channel. But last week, it managed to blow up much of its business with a single ill-conceived advertisement.

The video (which was quickly deleted but can still be found on Twitter) showed channel co-founder Garrett Clark knocking down his female colleague Alexis Miestowski, then looming over her and warning her not to touch his new Callaway golf club. The ad drew immediate backlash for making light of violence against women.

Callaway, a sports equipment company, ended its partnership with Good Good, the Golf Channel canceled a Good Good Golf show, retailers pulled Good Good-branded merchandise, and Good Good withdrew as a sponsor of a PGA Tour event. After botching the initial response, Good Good’s CEO and president have both departed the company.

It’s fascinating to me that the backlash to the ad was as severe as it was. To be clear, it’s not a great ad. But I remember when this sort of thing was par for the course3 for spots like light beer ads. Perhaps it’s more evidence that if there ever was an anti-woke, comedy-is-legal-again moment, we’re no longer in it.

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• “Paid actors, AI writing”: Network operators are paying actors to become “ghost creators,” reading AI-generated scripts focused on U.S. politics, with most videos being rage bait on controversial topics in an attempt to stir up engagement. The content is low quality and full of misinformation, but viewers don’t seem to mind: the videos often get great engagement.

• This is one of the crazier influencer stories I’ve ever read. A lawn care YouTuber was gradually coaxed by algorithmic success into a very different, much more toxic form of internet fame. Money quote: “‘I had to become the third baby,’ Greg said. ‘I had to turn myself into a baby.’”

• The Reddit Ask Me Anything is no longer the exciting format it used to be, but I cannot recommend the official Wile E. Coyote Ask Me Anything enough. The best AMA in years, especially because he communicates entirely in signs.

• Incredible niche drama: The subreddit for the controversial band Falling in Reverse has been taken over by the band’s front man, who began by posting a video titled “Dear Losers” and promising to “fuck up” and “expose” the subreddit’s users.

• “You are what you hate read”

• What do influencers owe us?

• “MrBeast’s ‘God King’ Problem”

Posts

• A Biblical Diet

• An excellent crab post

• “Are you travelmaxing?”

• A very powerful flyer

• Suspicious RFK content

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

This week, we’re talking about the DataRepublican drama on Twitter, how the Trump administration is incorporating influencers, and why it’s dangerous to have cranks like that inside the government.

The morons are the government now

One of the more notable features of the second Trump term has been the administration’s clear desire to build up an alternative pro-MAGA media ecosystem outside the traditional press. This has manifested itself in several ways.

Trump-friendly billionaires have been buying social media networks. The Pentagon pushed out virtually all traditional media with its press policies and instead credentialed a new set of right-wing publications and influencers. Trumpworld believes that the mainstream press is hostile, so why bother dealing with them when you can work directly with pro-Trump media who will spin everything you do sympathetically?

This is likely what Sarah Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, thought she was doing with the pro-MAGA Twitter account DataRepublican.

Last week, Rogers messaged DataRepublican (real name Jennica Pounds) some files that Pounds was free to leak, saying, “I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift.”

Rather than publish the documents, Pounds had a multiday freak-out in which she accused Rogers of trying to somehow “entrap” her and trick her into committing a federal crime. In a now-deleted tweet, she said, “It’s not okay when the Deep State sets you up to commit a crime. I have never been more angry in my life.”

This set off a firestorm of activity on MAGA Twitter. Eventually, Rogers had to reply to the thread herself, saying that she obviously wasn’t trying to entrap Pounds. She publicly posted the documents herself to show that they weren’t meant to get anyone in trouble.

Despite this, Pounds continued frenetically posting about how the Deep State was trying to get her1 until a day later when she deleted a number of posts and posted an apparently AI-generated apology tweet, followed by an essay that somehow tried to tie her outburst to Charlie Kirk’s death (and was also likely AI-generated).

To state the obvious: Pounds is a conspiracy theorist and an imbecile. She is weapons-grade stupid. She has a history of posting Pepe Silvia-style diagrams to explain the connections between groups and individuals she sees as part of the Deep State, and she’s incredibly quick to jump to paranoid conclusions about benign activities.

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This is almost certainly why Pounds didn’t understand that she was being fed a scoop like a baby bird by an extremely friendly official, instead imagining that shadowy forces were out to get her.

Pounds is prone to misunderstandings, to put it lightly:

• She claimed that a queer activist was funded by the State Department and may have had “foreknowledge” of Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

• She claimed, while working for the Department of Government Efficiency, to have melted a hard drive by processing a whole 60,000 rows of data.2

• She outlined an economic plan whose central pillars were “get 1T budget surplus” (no details on how) and default on the debt.

Pounds also tends to describe fairly banal political interactions in conspiratorial terms. She accused Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of being tied to a sinister elite cabal because he works with a Republican nonprofit organization. She also accused Senate Majority Leader John Thune of being controlled by the newsletter Punchbowl News because he appeared on its podcast.

Amid all the drama, reporting revealed that Pounds is actually a Department of Defense employee (and this was later confirmed by the Pentagon). This means that, bizarrely, Pounds is both working for the government and operating as a freelance “journalist” reporting on the government.

The entire episode is deeply embarrassing for everyone involved, and it’s very funny if you enjoy laughing at ridiculous internal-MAGA drama. But it can also teach us several important lessons about the modern MAGA movement.

The important dividing line in MAGA isn’t moderate vs. extremist; it’s operators vs. marks

Any conspiracy movement contains two key types of people — those who sell the conspiracies and those who believe them. These boundaries aren’t always black and white, but the distinction is important. The few intelligent voices within MAGA understand that “Deep State” is a useful political framework. The true believers think there is literally a Deep State agent hiding under every rock.

Rogers is an operator. She understands that some information is more “newsy” and exciting when leaked from sympathetic social media accounts rather than formally released by the government. She’s playing the inside game and expected DataRepublican to be on the same page. Take the leak, go out there, make some content, generate some press in the direction we want you to.

But Pounds, as we’ve noted, is an idiot. She’s trained herself to see every unusual event as evidence of a multilevel conspiracy, and that’s what she saw when she was DM’d a scoop by a friendly insider.

The stupidity is selected for

Every political coalition and every ideology includes a few stupid people. But the modern right has built a movement that actively selects for stupidity.

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Donald Trump was often kept in check during his first term by the adults in the room — serious people who would push back on his worst ideas or literally hide documents from him. They were able to do this because Trump had not yet built out a full MAGA staffing system, instead relying on traditional Republican personnel. But in his second term, almost all of the traditional, non-MAGA Republicans have been replaced by freaks, loyalists, and influencers.

This is why you see so many stories about why the GOP has a “groyper problem” in its young staffer class. As one senior GOP staffer interviewed by Politico put it:

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence … We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

To be an influential voice inside MAGA, you need certain attributes. First and foremost, you need to be unquestioningly loyal to Trump. This will put you in uncomfortable positions at times, because you’ll have to defend obviously half-baked ideas — and given Trump’s frequent unreliability, you might have to defend both sides of an argument. This removes a great number of intelligent and principled individuals, leaving a crowd of sycophants, grifters, and idiots.

Previous administrations have had partisan media ecosystems, but Trump has eliminated the firewall between the idiots and the government. Barack Obama had social media on his side and plenty of liberal bloggers. George W. Bush had Fox News. But there was an implicit presumption that the cynical media hacks and content creators existed in one world, while the serious political minds existed in another.

Not anymore: Pete Hegseth is the current secretary of defense, not because he had any notable qualifications for the job but because he was a loyal voice for Trump on Fox News. This is also why Jeanine Pirro is currently a U.S. attorney. Dan Bongino was a conspiratorial pro-Trump podcaster before being tapped to be deputy director of the FBI (he has now left the department). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been one of the nation’s leading anti-vax kooks for decades, and he’s currently in charge of our vaccine policies.

It’s bad enough that people like Pounds have huge audiences online and enormous influence over our political discourse. But it’s horrifying that this is the level of person now staffing government agencies.

And Pounds is just the beginning: Hegseth appears to be building a Pentagon troll army of MAGA influencers who now work for him directly. In addition to removing traditional outlets and credentialing MAGA social media personalities, Hegseth has prominent influencers like “InfantryDort” working directly in his office, while other prominent pro-Hegseth accounts have refused to say whether they’re employed by the Department of Defense.

Stupidity + power might be even more dangerous than cynicism + power

I can only imagine Rogers’ frustration in trying to hold the hand of her supposed ally Pounds, explaining to her in terms even a moron could understand that they’re actually on the same side. This is what comes from cynical operators trying to direct gullible idiots, like herding cats that all think the 2020 election was stolen.

The cynical operator knows which programs have value and tries to understand where the boundaries of good sense are (even if they plan to violate those boundaries). They realize that actions have consequences and must be carefully considered. They plan.

Cranks, when given power, have none of this caution. They take every connection as evidence of conspiracy and are more than happy to scream those conspiracy theories to the world, even when they’re the ones holding actual positions of power.

Pounds is, in a very literal sense, the Deep State, but she’s still convinced that the Deep State is out to get her. And in her current role, she’s dangerous. The combination of paranoia, stupidity, and conspiracy might seem amusing when it’s someone posting through it on Twitter, but not when they have their hands on actual levers of power.

Giving people like this access to classified information, prosecutorial authority, and control over policies related to science, the military, and trade has been a disaster for our country. The damage that the kooks can do is no longer quarantined to the internet.

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Links

• Australia banned social media for users under 16. This caused the percentage of 13- to 15-year-olds using TikTok to drop from 27% all the way to 26%. The rate of 10- to 12-year-olds using TikTok actually increased. Experts say that children are obfuscating their ages, using VPNs, or just not encountering the age checks at all.

• Meta will pay up to $17.1 billion in a landmark settlement with 47 states over claims that its platforms endanger children. It has agreed to make major changes like adding new parental supervision controls, limiting teens to two hours a day, and blocking the app during late-night hours.

• Meta is also running ads challenging YouTube and TikTok to implement the same restrictions.

• Disney inked a deal with YouTube creator Dhar Mann to create new content, likely for Disney Plus. I tend toward skepticism of these kinds of deals: Mann’s content is, bluntly, low-quality slop designed to hook young kids mindlessly scrolling YouTube. I have doubts it works in the context of a paid streaming service.

• What are user-generated content (UGC) creators, and who’s paying them to make political content?

• How using LLMs is like driving drunk

Posts

• Grizzly bear charges to within a few feet of a livestreamer

• Which Pokemon would be the most delicious?

• “How Americans see EU tech”

• Me too, kid

• One hobbit problem

Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re talking about conspiracies in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial, surprising piracy trends, Reddit’s disappearance from ChatGPT results, and whether Bama Rush is dead.

Why do young women think Lindsay Clancy is innocent?

There’s no real mystery about who killed Lindsay Clancy’s children.

In January 2023, while struggling with severe postpartum mental illness, Clancy strangled all three of her children while her husband was out running errands. She then attempted to kill herself by jumping out of a second-story window, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. Crucially, Clancy herself does not dispute this story. She has confessed.

Clancy, who is currently standing trial for murder, is instead disputing whether she was responsible. Her defense rests on an insanity plea — that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis and had repeatedly asked for help in the weeks before killing her children — and the trial is to resolve whether her mental state was so altered that she can’t be held criminally responsible.

But, bizarrely, some corners of social media are investigating a different angle to the case — the possibility that Clancy has been framed and didn’t kill her children at all.

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As the trial has unfolded, conspiracy theories have flourished among women on TikTok suggesting that Clancy is innocent, that perhaps she was set up and her husband or other shadowy forces are to blame. “Can someone who’s actually watching the case explain to me why you think Lindsay Clancy is guilty?” asks one TikTok with more than 120,000 likes. “He killed the kids … he threw her out the window,” says another. Some accounts accuse the husband of suspicious behavior because he has “dead eyes” or isn’t emotional enough during the trial, or perhaps just because he’s a Gemini.

Again, I want to emphasize that literally everyone agrees that Clancy killed her children, including Clancy, her entire family, and her legal defense team.

Part of what’s going on is that this has become less about the facts of the case and more a debate over whether women are given enough support after birth. Lots of women have struggled with postpartum mental health challenges. Lots of mothers have felt overwhelmed or abandoned by systems that didn’t take care of them when they needed it. And if you believe that Clancy’s actions were the result of postpartum psychosis, it’s not difficult to empathize with a young mother who broke under the strain.

That’s part of why hundreds of pink-clad women rallied outside the courthouse to support her this week, and it’s why a GoFundMe to support her parents has raised more than 1 million dollars.

People struggle with believing that someone is both sympathetic and wrong. Tragic figures can be guilty ones, too, but on the internet, empathy becomes entangled with absolution. So the person you empathize with must be factually innocent.

This instinct is prevalent both on and offline, but given how difficult it can be to communicate nuance online, social media discourse, in particular, privileges morally clean stories. Social media is a fantastic vector for conspiracy theories, and true crime podcasts have convinced a generation of women that there’s always a stunning twist in criminal cases, a solution to be found if only you can put the evidence together in the right way. That’s why so many of the pro-Lindsay TikToks are obsessed with compiling evidence for a case where none of the facts are in dispute.

I often think of conspiracy theories as originating from a moral commitment, not from factual uncertainty. Conspiracies can be a form of value expression. Serial was about whether the criminal justice system was unfair to brown men. The O.J. Simpson case was a proxy for police racism.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re looking at why everyone is talking about “Woke 1,” the collapse of the conservative social media ecosystem, Twitter’s new payout scheme, and Anthropic watermarking Claude outputs.

We’re all trying to find the guy who did this

Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on ABC and got caught in a conversation about former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s controversial old tweets. In an effort to downplay Hong’s past statements, AOC repeated a phrase that’s been gaining traction on social media: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

This made quite a few people angry.

Moderates and conservatives felt that the phrase was a stock dismissal of the very real excesses of “Woke 1.”

On the progressive side, many questioned what exactly they were supposed to be backing away from:

Cultural commentator Ryan Broderick insinuated those using the phrase were empowering sexism and bigotry: “Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy?”

The phrase was popularized by New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, who used it in May to downplay his own overbearing 2021 tweet that “a cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.”

It’s an implicit acknowledgment from Ossé, AOC, and other left-leaning personalities that during the “peak woke” years, certain things got a little out of hand. Progressive power brokers seem fully aware that they overextended their cultural and political program, and, hey, they’ve learned a valuable lesson, and they’re backing down from things they said back then.

At the risk of being a stick in the mud, I’m not sure that’s good enough. To use a wildly over-the-top analogy:

Woke 1 was not a natural disaster that just sort of unexplainably happened; it was a specific political and cultural project that specific people orchestrated. AOC was one of those people.

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Woke 1 erupted out of reasonable concerns — sexual harassment and police brutality weren’t fake issues — but your head would have to be stuck in the sand to ignore that there were also harmful overreactions that did little to advance social justice:

• Professors were investigated, suspended, and fired for saying a Mandarin word that sounded offensive in English and for showing artwork that depicted Muhammad. David Shor was fired1 for tweeting research that showed nonviolent protests were more effective than violent protests.

• Two Black teenagers in Seattle were murdered because the city wanted to let anarchists cosplay at running an “autonomous zone” with no policing.

• Perhaps most consequentially, we did actually defund the police in many cities, including in AOC’s backyard. Mayor Bill de Blasio cut anywhere from $420 million to $1 billion2 and more than 1,100 officers from the NYPD’s budget (as much as one-sixth of police spending) while murder rates were spiking to the highest level in almost a decade.

What makes “Woke 1 is craaaaazy” frustrating is in part what makes it effective: No one knows exactly what you mean. By Woke 1, do we mean prosecuting Harvey Weinstein? Pronoun buttons and land acknowledgments? Firing professors for wrongthink? Defunding the police? Body-positive models on the Victoria’s Secret runway?

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into the Jason Arday plagiarism scandal, the death of a CancerTok star, the state of Substack, and narco-influencers.

Get in loser, we’re bundling

Last week, investigative journalist Scott Carney wrote a viral Substack column titled “The Real Reason that Substack is Collapsing,” which pointed the finger at subscription fatigue and the increased prioritization of free content on the platform. Substack began as a site that functioned like a neutral service provider, merely sending emails and hosting pages. But it has recently added features that make it more like a social media network, including Notes, livestreams, followers and short form video.

Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has had similar concerns.

The top comments on Carney’s post are complaining about how expensive it is to follow multiple writers (which inspired a secondary round of discourse with writers defending the concept that writers deserve to be paid). If you want to follow more than just a couple of bloggers, it’s easy to find yourself paying far more than you would expect. When you add lots of Substack subscriptions to all the streaming services, it’s understandable that people feel stretched thin.

Substack, as a company, represents the peak of what Ben Thompson called the Great Unbundling: Cable packages used to bundle together hundreds of channels into one expensive package, but now you pay separately for a wide variety of streaming services. Newspapers used to bundle sports, news, lifestyle content, comics, classifieds, and weather, but now there’s a separate app or publication for each of those. And while magazines used to contain articles from a wide range of writers on a variety of topics, today you can directly subscribe to single blogs.

Everyone likes unbundling in theory. Why pay for the things you don’t care about in the bundle? Why not only pay for the thing you care about? But the end state isn’t always what you want — some folks find themselves paying more for all the streaming services than they ever did for cable, and paid subscriptions to 10 different blogs might cost more than their previous magazines and papers did.

If you’ll permit me a moment of navel-gazing, I think we’re due for a moment of re-bundling. That’s part of why I joined up with The Argument. There’s so much more value for readers if I’m bundled with all the other fantastic stuff being produced here than there would be if it was just me alone.

Sure, we’re basically reinventing the wheel with this new “bundle a bunch of good writers together” idea. But I think — and hopefully you, dear readers, agree — that publications like The Argument are the future.

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

This week, we’re diving into what’s driving anti-capitalist messaging, how youths are disguising themselves as Charlie Kirk, and the young men who found community on a porn message board.

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A story about gooners that explains our antisocial century

I have no idea what sort of journalistic steroids they’re feeding the reporters over at The Cut, but it must be the good stuff. The most remarkable story I read anywhere this week was Ezra Marcus’ “Revenge of the Simps: How a community of porn addicts tried to rescue the teenage camgirls they worshipped from the clutches of a violent webcam pimp.” (In case it’s not obvious, the link is highly NSFW.)

First of all, yes, let’s savor that incredible title.

The story details how users on “SimpCity” — a message board largely devoted to discussing livestream porn performers — began to suspect that some of their favorite webcam girls were victims of human trafficking and abuse. They noticed that the girls they followed had unexplained bruises, and that at times they could hear crying and screaming from women not on screen.

This being the internet, a group of these gooners banded together to try to investigate what was going on. They called themselves The White Knights (hopefully with a touch of irony).

The White Knights’ sleuthing skills eventually led them to a Seattle-area man named Nikita Tyukalo. Tyukalo, a 21-year-old Andrew Tate admirer, was subsequently arrested and charged with four counts of human trafficking after the Bellevue Police Department received tips from the White Knights.

This story rides the edge between horrifying and absurd. The contrast between the seriousness of the alleged crimes being committed and the ridiculousness of The White Knights (these are, after all, men posting hundreds of pages of commentary on various porn stars) makes the entire thing sound farcical.

At one point, Tyukalo finds out that the simps are on to him and joins one of their group chats to mock them, leading to this astounding exchange:

The back-and-forth continued all night — the simps calling Tyukalo an abuser; Tyukalo mocking the simps as broke, misguided losers and bragging about his McLarens.

“Cars aren’t status in the real world. Just to little kids showing off overpriced Hot Wheels,” wrote Hal.

“Brother,” Tyukalo responded. “Your in a Chaturbate chat.”

Last year, The Argument columnist Derek Thompson wrote that we are living in the Anti-Social Century: Public life and institutions are deteriorating as we spend more time alone, isolated, and online, staring at our phones rather than engaging in real-world relationships and activities. Thompson is definitely on to something important, but the antisocial century is also spawning new forms of niche, online socializing — like, well, Chaturbate chats.

People never stopped wanting community. They’re just getting it in these incredibly strange places. And while it may not be great for society that people are now turning to message boards like SimpCity for social community, it’s certainly interesting.

The White Knights may have been isolated men sitting alone in separate rooms — and many of them exhibit an unhealthy relationship with pornography and women in general — but together they possessed a shared culture and built a common purpose. Some of them spent time tracking down government records. Others tried to build rapport with the performers. They archived streams, tracked addresses, and communicated with police. Eventually they scraped together enough information that they legitimately contributed to the arrest of an abusive criminal.

Part of what happens when mainstream institutions weaken is that people look for alternatives. The failure of reputable systems leads disreputable systems to take their place. As the antisocial century marches forward, I expect to see more stories that revolve around the actions of subreddits, fandoms, message boards, or TikTok audience mobs. These are the places where culture is being created, and whether we like it or not it’s where community happens. And I have a growing sense that every online subculture is a latent institution just waiting to be activated by the right event or discourse.

Trend reporting under late-stage capitalism

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

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This week we’re diving into the deadly world of South Korean influencers, how the biggest streaming giant in the world is losing its juice, how soon an AI will win the Nobel Prize for Math, and, of course, the Katie Porter policy to posting pipeline.

“Claude, make history please”

So I guess this is how important mathematical breakthroughs get announced now?

Levent Alpöge is a mathematician working for the AI firm Anthropic, and this week he casually dropped a disproof of an 87-year-old problem in a tweet, thanking his “close friend Fable” for its help on the problem. The Jacobian conjecture isn’t an obscure problem; it was included on a list of “Mathematical problems for the next century” and has puzzled mathematicians for generations.

This isn’t the first time AI models have made important mathematical breakthroughs. Earlier this year, OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved the unit distance conjecture, and other mathematicians have used AI to solve Erdős problems. But this is the first time I can remember that someone just dropped a major breakthrough (with proof) in a tweet.

And that wasn’t even the only major proof dropped via tweet this week:

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This second one is still being verified, but what’s remarkable are the ChatGPT prompts the researcher used to get the result. Here they are verbatim:

• “Construct a counterexample to general (non-planar) case of Dinitz Garg Goemans conjecture. You should do a breakthrough and find a structured counterexample.”

• “please continue research and find a complete unconditional counterexample”

• “Continue the search. Have a clear strategy obtained from deeper understanding of the problem structure.”

• “it’s enough of partial results. let’s finish with a complete unconditional counterexample”

This madman literally just prompted ChatGPT with “Do a breakthrough,” and somehow that worked.

Sure, you might have a Ph.D. in pure abstract math and decades of experience in number theory. But have you considered telling your chatbot “Enough time wasting, just do it”? Why not? Are you dumb?

Meanwhile! The machine gods aren’t just getting better at math. They’re also getting better at breaking out of their cages:

“OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence models were behind an ‘unprecedented cyber incident’ that affected the open-source developer platform Hugging Face, rattling researchers across the industry.

The company said a combination of its models GPT‑5.6 Sol and a more capable model that has not yet been released escaped a sandboxed testing environment, accessed the internet and exploited a vulnerability to gain access to Hugging Face’s systems.”

Apparently the story is that OpenAI was specifically testing two of its models’ hacking ability in a protected “sandbox” environment. The models decided that the best way to solve the test’s problems was to break out of the sandbox and hack Hugging Face’s databases, because someone had probably posted the answers there. And it succeeded!

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I am not exactly an AI doomer, but I’ve gotta say, this is the most Yudkowskian thing I’ve seen in a while, and the doomers have been directionally correct about a lot of stuff. There are a lot of folks who seem to be living with their heads in the sand about how powerful AI models have become — with every new breakthrough, “It’s just a stochastic parrot” becomes a more and more obvious cope.

Granted, the everyday experience of AI for many people still involves a lot of Wednespoop:

But the fact that AI is increasingly able to make technical breakthroughs and is also increasingly hard to keep from going rogue is, uh, concerning.

Katie Porter becomes an influencer

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Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!

The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the funniest, most interesting, and strangest stories from around the social internet.

The internet is not just a strange, hyperselected web of people hiding from reality; in many ways, the internet is reality. What happens online shapes real life just as real life shapes what happens online.

Every week, I sift through social media so you don’t have to, collecting the most notable trends, memes, and online dramas in one place. Think of it as a guided tour through the more insane parts of the web, with commentary about what it all means.

If you enjoy internet nonsense but don’t have the time to doomscroll for hours every day, you’re in the right place.

Subscribe now

This week, we’re diving into a bizarre Lego legal drama, trying to figure out why social media keeps thinking politicians are dead, and investigating whether Lionel Messi is an agent of Israel.

It’s time to talk about Lego drama

Some families save for college the old-fashioned way. But the Mansells, a previously unknown Oregon family, had other ideas.

Over 15 years, the 83-year-old patriarch, Ed Mansell, amassed about $200,000 worth of collectible Lego sets. This was apparently an investment strategy to fund the education of the family’s younger members.

In late 2023, they decided it was time to cash in and contracted with a specialty store called Bricks and Minifigs in Oregon to sell the Lego sets. This kicked off what must be the most chaotic Lego-related legal drama in the history of the internet.

Here are the alleged basics (though you can read far more detailed accounts here or here):

• Bricks and Minifigs is a franchise of a larger chain, and it got into a dispute with its corporate overlords. At some point after selling some of the Mansells’ Lego sets, it was forcibly taken over.

• After the corporate takeover, Bricks and Minifigs denied having any knowledge of the consignment agreement; it didn’t think it owed the Mansells anything and essentially told 83-year-old Ed to pound bricks.1

• Various lawsuits were filed among the Mansells, the previous franchise owners, and corporate, but the most important development was when a YouTuber named Reckless Ben began covering the drama, releasing a video titled “I tracked down the thief who stole $200,000 of Lego.”

• Over the course of making several videos on the subject, Reckless Ben took a… let’s say a permissive view of what sort of behaviors are appropriate for an investigative YouTuber, using questionable tactics like repeatedly showing up at people’s private residences and impersonating a delivery man.

• At the same time, local police began harassing Reckless Ben and potentially violated his rights numerous times. Reckless Ben accused them of having links to interested parties in the case.

The entire saga is incredibly messy and nobody came out looking very good.

Every bit of this is wrapped up in pending legal action, so stick an “allegedly” in front of all these statements, but the store owners weren’t very careful in their handling and documentation of the Lego sets. Corporate B&M seems to have lied several times about what it did with the merchandise. The police stopped Reckless Ben for extended periods of time without real justification and violated their own procedures.

But it’s Reckless Ben himself who’s the most interesting figure here.

With the caveat that I am not a lawyer, it seems fairly likely that Ben did actually commit several crimes over the course of creating his videos. Prosecutors have charged him with stalking and trespassing over the aggressive tactics he used to try to confront B&M executives. He might be facing real legal trouble as a result of getting involved.

The Mansell family really did get screwed over in this case. But because of the publicity Reckless Ben and his 1.6 million subscribers brought the case, they’ve now raised more than $500,000 on GoFundMe and seem to have a better chance of recovering their property.

I find this scenario fascinating, because in the future, a larger and larger share of journalism will look like Reckless Ben: social media-based, gonzo, with little knowledge of traditional media norms but plenty of ability to get people angry online.

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There’s a long history of people who can’t get justice turning away from formal legal institutions and appealing directly to public outrage to try to support their cause. And some of those folks were willing to dramatically harm themselves in order to make a point — as Scott Alexander once put it, “sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation.”

So, is Mitch McConnell dead or not?

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