Staring Into The Gen Z Abyss

There are two “controversies” traveling around X.com right now that are, on their face, not related, but do seem to be coming from the same place. What I’m going to call offline shock. Something I’ve seen pop up among younger internet users more and more often this year.

First, there was the snow day post from user @stuff1eee, which has caused more psychic anguish than anything I’ve seen online in years. If you haven’t come across it, here’s a screenshot:

Seems pretty anodyne, right? Wrong. There are hundreds of replies and quote-posts on this thing, most of them some variation of, “how do I get this?” Or, “I wish I had friends.” The completely unhinged reactions to this post are probably best summarized by the user who wrote, “We just keep glossing over the owning a home part to make your point seem reasonable?????” To which the original poster, @stuff1eee, replied, “I rent this apartment!” To which the angry replier wrote, “You also scream privilege.”

And, of course, the post inspired a full-on generational war, with millennials saying some variation of “just buy some shit at IKEA and invite your friends over” and Gen Z users saying they can’t do that. One Gen Z user argued, “Today’s 20-somethings are bitter about this is because they (we) can’t afford rent, have shitty bitter roommates, can’t afford to furnish anything, also can barely afford to have friends. Just to contextualize lol.”

Fair enough! Being in your 20s is agony, regardless of when you grew up. But I will say that I graduated into the recession, made literal minimum wage, and filled my living room with furniture I found in the actual garbage and had a party very much like the one above during Hurricane Sandy. It, of course, didn’t look nearly as nice though. And I think offline shock has a strong connection to aesthetic disappointment: “Why doesn’t my life look as good as this image I found online?”

In the end, @stuff1eee had to “clear the air,” writing, “We aren’t in Chicago. 3/5 drove here. We’re not toxic, we’ve been friends for 6+ years. The only people sleeping with each other are my husband and I. We don’t abuse substances. We are all employed full time and are ages 23-26.” Just to give you an even better sense of what users were writing about this very innocuous post!

Meanwhile, over on a different part of X, pop music stans have been having a meltdown over Pitchfork’s top songs and best albums of 2025. Top song was “Love Takes Miles” by Cameron Winter and top album was Los Thuthanaka by Los Thuthanaka. If you haven’t heard of them, that’s ok! I haven’t either. Excited to look them up. That’s the point. Though, I will say, I have tried mightily to get the band Geese this year, who show up on both lists, and I just can’t. I don’t know how else to say it, but, to me, they sound like cosplay. Which might actually be thematically relevant here, but let’s circle back to that in a sec.

Anyways, pop stans are having a meltdown about the list. “Every time Pitchfork drops a list those [Twitter Stans] got mad [as fuck] like when will these people realize that music is way more than some certain mainstream slops they made their entire personality,” one user wrote. It’s a notable development of the post-COVID age. Pitchfork has been putting out dense, indecipherable criticism since it started, even during its more poptimist era. The people it wasn’t for basically ignored it or laughed about it and moved on. But now there are a whole lot of young people that seem very mad their favorite, usually already very famous, pop act isn’t covered or covered negatively. I suppose this happens to all legacy publications in a way. No one reads TIME anymore, but everyone has an opinion on the Person of the Year cover. Incidentally, Addison Rae is on Pitchfork’s top songs list, but stans are mad about the song Pitchfork chose.

What ties these two online meltdowns together is the breakdown of the online life and the offline one. In the case of the cozy living room, it’s the extremely uncomfortable revelation that their less online peers have friends (lol sorry). Or housing, I guess? And in case of the Pitchfork lists, it’s the idea that all the metrics X stans use to define their favorite artists — views, sales, streams — can’t make them actually cool. Not “popular,” but cool. Both of these little online misadventures are about the crushing realization that it’s very hard to be authentic online right now. And this is why I think when Gen Z makes traditional art — film, music, etc. — it can come off as cosplay. The feeling like all of the options they could possibly make have been mapped out for them already. Like Lego blocks they can piece together as they please. And it’s why I’d argue the defining art form of Gen Z is incomprehensible brainrot. Which I do consider art and, incidentally, is the most authentic thing I’ve seen young people make.

As much as I might sound like an old guy grouching about the kids here, I don’t mean to be. I genuinely feel bad for young people who grew up in a world defined not just by the internet, but, specifically, by what is popular on huge corporate social platforms. And I don’t think older people really understand how confusing it must be to only know a world where every behavior, interest, life choice, political viewpoint, and opinion on art and culture has a numerical value attached to it. A world where liking the most basic stuff imaginable has just as much of an optimized path towards maximum engagement as being a misanthropic asshole does. It’s that meme about the illusion of free choice, whatever path you take there are metrics to guide your way.

It makes me wonder what I’d be like, with my deep-seeded oppositional defiance disorder, if I was born 10 years later. I’m genuinely paralyzed at the thought of it. What kind of snob would I have become? Would I even know how to be a snob?

Does It Creed?

Happy Birthday, 6-7 Meme

Hard to believe that the 6-7 meme has been with us for an entire year now. If you haven’t encountered it — or have encountered it without any context — it’s basically the Gen Alpha equivalent of 69 or 420, but without the baked in taboo of either. Though, going off what I wrote above, the fact 6-7 is effectively meaningless might be what makes it feels as dangerous to young people as the sex and weed numbers were for millennials. In a world where everything is cataloged and collated, gibberish feels like counterculture. Honestly, though, that’s probably giving it a little too much credit. Young people, tween boys, especially, love being fucking annoying.

The meme comes from the rapper Skrilla’s song “Doot Doot (6 7)” and you can watch an interview here with Skrilla about the meme if you’re curious about how he feels about it. The lyrics appear to have something to do with a minor car accident Skrilla was in on the way to the studio? I’m a little fuzzy there.

A lot of folks online are remarking that it’s surprising how long 6-7 has lasted, with one X user bringing up the often-cited point that memes used to die a pretty quick death during the Ellen Show era because “DeGeneres was an environmentally significant apex predator in the media ecosystem.” Well, Jimmy Fallon may have finally accepted his destined role as DeGeneres’ replacement as America’s cultural necromancer. This week he put out a video where Sydney Sweeney has to guess what’s happening behind her. It’s three Labubus doing 6-7 at a McDonald’s drive-thru. Time for a new meme!

Ethan Klein Pressured A Streamer Into Publicly Apologizing To Him

We don’t really cover the near-constant drama happening around streamer Ethan Klein, both because it’s, honestly, pretty confusing and, also, I just assume everyone involved is either deeply, profoundly mentally unwell or exploiting mentally unwell people for internet traffic. But this new development seemed newsworthy.

This week, the streamer Kaceytron, real name Kasey Caviness, released a public apology to both Klein and his wife Hila for violating their copyright (embedded above). This comes, of course, after Klein threatened to sue her.

The alleged copyright violation occurred when Caviness and several other popular streamers watched Klein’s nearly two-hour “content nuke” video about leftist streamer Hasan Piker, a former collaborator of Klein’s. And Klein’s lawsuit may end up building some legal precedent for what counts as a reaction video, seeing as how it counts the number of silent seconds in Caviness’ stream (70 minutes roughly).

AI Slop Is Pretty Lucrative!

Social Growth Engineers, a viral market research firm, uncovered a staggering AI content farm on TikTok that’s hawking Amazon dropshipping products. There’s about 40 accounts bringing in billion of views, selling things like hair products and probiotics. They’re also using the same format too, autoplaying slidehows with AI-generated images. Here’s what they look like in the wild:

You should go check out Social Growth Engineers’ full post here because it’s wild. Most of these accounts have been running since 2023.

Minority Report, But For The Southeastern Conference

—by Adam Bumas

On Sunday, college football coach Lane Kiffin announced he would be leaving his position at Ole Miss before the playoffs, to coach their divisional rivals at Louisiana State University. The internet was furious in a very old-fashioned way — getting mad at trades and contracts is one of the main things sports fans talk about. But the next day, Kiffin had to physically get from Mississippi to Louisiana, and his journey ripped all the online anger at him into real life, in an unmistakably 2025 way.

In a very dystopian sci-fi turn of events, Kiffin’s exit from the University of Mississippi campus was tracked, uploaded, and livestreamed by hundreds of different people across all the platforms you’d expect, from boarding the private jet in an X video to gossipping about him in TikTok comments. Thousands more followed along, giving every single element its own moment of sub-drama on Monday: The whereabouts of Kiffin’s dog (reportedly still at a Mississippi kennel), a claim that a fan tried to run him off the road (police have denied it) even his old clothes (left out on the street).

That last one gives the whole thing the air of a messy public breakup, which means what we saw Monday was a walk of shame. One that, it seems, is required to pass through the digital spaces where all fandoms are centered now. Even fandoms as old-school and regional as college football in the Southeast.

Tucker Carlson In Home Alone 2

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s the Graveyard Gliders.

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