What Comes After Cancel Culture?

I’ve been following Graham Platner’s Senate campaign closely ever since his first big viral video at the end of the summer earned him the nickname of “the Zohran of Maine.” As a rule, I try not to ever “like” politicians. Not just because it’s an occupational hazard for me, but, also, I have a pathological anti-authority streak. A trait I, funnily enough, blame on my childhood growing up in New England. But I’ll admit that that New England upbringing is what made Platner exciting to me.

Here was a man that looked and sounded like the men I grew up with, but instead of paraphrasing Joe Rogan episodes he had just heard, he was talking openly and seemingly earnestly not just about socialism, but also his path to progressive politics through the fog of the toxic masculinity. Of course, we now know that Platner almost certainly had a bit more work to do on that front.

Over the weekend, CNN and The Washington Post published deep dives into Platner’s regrettable Reddit history. I want to reshare what I wrote following that news cycle, on Monday, both to keep myself accountable and, also, to make a few things clear. “I think working with candidates with Reddit histories like Platner’s,” I wrote, “or whatever else gets unearthed about the messy digital lives of young millennial Democratic candidates would help answer the single biggest question that loomed over the gargantuan No King’s Day rallies this week.” lol ok, so, a Nazi tattoo is not something I would file under “whatever else,” there. I forgot the golden rule of doing this sort of work: Always expect things to get worse.

And, on Tuesday, things got worse. Platner’s own team shared a video of his Totenkopf tattoo with Pod Save America, seemingly trying to get ahead of a rumored Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee press blitz meant to pave the way for 77-year-old establishment Democrat Janet Mills. The fact he still hadn’t covered it up before he debuted it on Pod Save is, frankly, idiotic. And on Wednesday, I wrote that the tattoo could be the scandal that surely ends his campaign. Which also seems in question now.

As it stands, Platner appears to be more popular than he was last Friday. But I say “appears,” because measuring popularity has never been more complicated in the US. The poll circulating that shows Platner ahead of both Mills and Republican incumbent Susan Collins, was conducted between October 16 and October 21. So it’s safe to say it doesn’t totally capture Mainer sentiment about the tattoo. A second poll published today, conducted after the tattoo news broke, shows him he still in the lead.

Also, an aside, I just don’t think it’s a good sign for American democracy that a candidate is taking his shirt off this much in interviews.

Murky polling notwithstanding, Platner isn’t backing down. And local media — who I tend to trust more than national media at the moment — is reporting that Platner’s town hall on Wednesday night was standing room only, with 100 more in an overflow room. His team seems to believe that they can trudge forward into the midterms with their $3.2 million war chest and populist support. And while it is a very long road to the election, I think it’s worth gaming out what a Platner win, or even close loss, would mean.

To pull back the curtain a bit more here, a handful of episodes of Panic World we’ve recorded this year have, without us intending to, continued to circle back to the question of, “what comes after cancel culture?” We’ve looked into post-#MeToo celebrity smear campaigns, the crashouts of Kanye West and JK Rowling, and have a couple episodes coming soon with young prominent Democrats, talking about how they navigate the Trump harassment machine And these conversations have led me to towards a unified theory (I love those) of 2010s politics.

Almost every liberal political movement of the last 15 years or so — and even some conservative ones — could be classified as “cancel culture.” As in, internet users were harnessing the populist power of social media to put pressure on the media to both change public perception and impact how institutions behave. Whether we’re talking about Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, or even the recent string of right-wing moral panics, like the Crack Barrel redesign, the mechanics of these movements are, effectively, the same. Dig up old posts, collect and verify unreported accounts of abuse, hijack trending topics. And thanks to the nonstop of barrage of bad faith right-wing flare ups this summer, a seemingly uncancellable president, and the deep stagnation and fragmentation of social platforms, we have suddenly been dropped into a world where that doesn’t really seem to work anymore. The drama is too confusing, the audiences are too establishment, the gatekeepers too anemic. In the attention economy, as long as you have access to attention and know to keep generating it, you can keep making money and, thus, likely weather the storm. Though, it still seems like the old rules still apply within more marginalized spaces, which is the dark irony here. A method of activism used primarily by the vulnerable and powerless has lost its impact among the already powerful, but continues to police the original communities that created it. You can cancel someone on Bluesky, but the guys on X only get more powerful with every offensive post.

And this line of thinking — that “cancellations,” to be purposefully simplistic here, no longer move the needle for the bulk of the country, what the chronically online would call normies — has led me to one conclusion. The future of liberal politics in the US, if it is to survive, has to involve more material forms of protest. Actions like strikes, boycotts, and occupations that, of course, will involve the internet, but would, by definition, disturb the status quo. A status quo that the Democratic leaders in the DSCC are still terrified to challenge. Because even if Platner had been unmasked this week as an active member of Patriot Front, the DSCC’s best idea was follow their media onslaught by launching the campaign of a 77-year-old candidate to run against him.

The Future Of Entertainment

Let’s Check In On Some Of The AI Lawsuits

—by Adam Bumas

One of the reasons the conversation on AI has shifted to “crashing the economy is good, actually” is that all the lawsuits launched against the companies over the past few years are starting to pile up. Reddit, which has cut multiple massive data deals and is still the preferred source for most AI chatbots, is now suing a bunch of companies for scraping data without permission. Meanwhile, major media conglomerates are now suing Google for lost traffic thanks to AI search overviews.

As for the biggest player, OpenAI is reeling from the lawsuit by the family of a teen who was encouraged by ChatGPT to kill himself. They hired a “Council on Wellness” and announced new age verification for using the chatbot, neither of which deals with the alleged changes that specifically trained it to talk about suicide and self-harm. They’ve also subpoenaed a list of all the guests that attended the teenager’s memorial service.

Even enthusiastic generative AI users understand it needs a lot of safeguards to work effectively. That’s why military contractor and teen pregnancy enthusiast Palmer Luckey made waves earlier this week, when he said he tells ChatGPT to answer every question as if it’s a professor accused of sexual misconduct.

Steve Bannon Is Still Talking About A Third Trump Term

Steve Bannon is still on his “Trump 2028” press tour, telling anyone who will listen that President Donald Trump will run — and win — a third term in 2028. I agree with the folks who are saying to take Bannon seriously here. I think Trump is definitely flirting with the idea and if he can, he probably will try it. Or find some other loophole to nevertheless wiggle through. But I do want to caution against taking Bannon too seriously.

He has been effectively excommunicated from Trump’s inner circle for almost a decade. And it’s very likely that he’s using these press hits to communicate with Trump. And, most interesting of all, Trump continues to refuse to publicly take the bait.

The Counter-Strike Economy Crashed

—by Adam Bumas

Most new video games feature virtual items that can be bought for real money, but only a few of them have enough sustained interest for a full-blown virtual economy. Valve’s Counter-Strike 2, the perennial most-played game on Steam, has such a serious system of trades and values that one of its designers left the team to become Greece’s Finance Minister. Which means it’s serious news that a tweak to this system has crashed the market.

On Wednesday, Valve updated Counter-Strike 2, allowing players to exchange five common-quality weapons for one rare weapon. The problem is, rare items are worth dozens of times more than common, and these values have been tied to real-world money for over a decade. Nuking the exchange rate has wiped over $2.4 billion from the market, leading to widespread panic from people who have invested thousands of dollars into the flashy guns. It’s also led to all the same fears of suicides as a real-life market crash — ironic for a system where almost anything you can buy can be used to kill opponents.

An Incredibly Sick Morning Show Musical Guest

If you would like to listen to the absolutely incredible musician who performed on the local Rochester morning show, his noise project is called Industry Standard — hell yeah. And if you’d like to learn more about this style of music, you should absolutely email Panic World producer Grant Irving, grant@garbageday.email, because he is very involved in the noise scene and would love to tell you all about it.

An Evil Breakfast To Maximize Fart Production

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a very annoying way to play Dark Souls.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***