Ryan Broderick

@ryanhatesthis.bsky.social

81158 Followers 1507 Following

Chilling online. I write a newsletter called Garbage Day.

I could throw a million examples at you — and will happily duke it out with you if you email me lol — but it seems to clear to me that pre-deplatforming is, to use Gen Z slang, the new meta. The Clavicular’s and Andrew Tate’s of the world sort of understand this. But it’s extremely surface level. As platforms police speech less and less, edgelords lose their sheen. While Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is much closer to the blueprint for a post-TV and, soon, post-social media world. The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something. Which, of course, will be filmed and put back online. You can’t escape the matrix entirely.
It is clear that something has shifted. Abolish ICE is not just the mainstream position, it is also the only moral one. I have seen up close what their occupation has done to Minneapolis. They are an affront to human dignity. A rogue paramilitary force that will execute you in the street like an animal and count the bullet holes when they’re done and smear your name online to cover their tracks. A kaleidoscopic nightmare of state violence and Silicon Valley-sponsored surveillance run by internet-brainrotted fascists and hapless podcasters that forces normal people, like Pretti or Renee Good or Keith Porter, to respond the only rational way one can to such a thing. You must oppose it with whatever you have. Hide your neighbors and arm yourself with whistles, barricades, Signal groups, geolocation tools, cellphone videos, and, if need be, you go on strike. Which is why, tomorrow, instead of our usual Friday issue, Garbage Day is joining the general strike in solidarity with Minneapolis.
Every time I’ve tried to involve AI in one of my creative pursuits it has spit out the exact same level of meh. No matter the model, no matter the project, it simply cannot match what I have in my head. Which would be fine, but it absolutely cannot match the fun of making the imperfect version of that idea that I may have made on my own either. Instead, it simulates the act of brainstorming or creative exploration, turning it into predatory pay-for-play process that, every single time, spits out deeply mediocre garbage. It charges you for the thrill of feeling like you’re building or making something and, just like a casino — or online dating, or pornography, or TikTok — cares more about that monetizable loop of engagement, of progress, than it does the finished product. What I’m saying is generative AI is a deeply expensive edging machine, but for your life.