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 Internet culture features, interviews and investigative reporting on online communities and folklore, internet aesthetics, old web nostalgia, digital true crime. 
As seen in WIRED, Vice & more.

WIRED •

‘Cheapfake’ AI Celeb Videos Are Rage-Baiting People on YouTube

Mark Wahlberg straightens his tie and beams at the audience as he takes his seat on daytime talk show The View, ahead of his hotly anticipated interview. Immediately, he’s unsettled by the host, Joy Behar. Something isn’t quite right about her mannerisms. Her eyes seem shifty, suspicious, even predatory. There’s a sense, almost, of the uncanny valley—her presence feels oddly inhuman. His instincts are right, of course, and he’s soon forced to defend himself against a barrage of cruel insults pla...
WIRED •

Dozens of YouTube Channels Are Showing AI-Generated Cartoon Gore and Fetish Content

Somewhere in an animated New York, a minion slips and tumbles down a sewer. As a wave of radioactive green slime envelops him, his body begins to transform—limbs mutating, rows of bloody fangs emerging—his globular, wormlike form, slithering menacingly across the screen.“Beware the minion in the night, a shadow soul no end in sight,” an AI-sounding narrator sings, as the monstrous creature, now lurking in a swimming pool, sneaks up behind a screaming child before crunching them, mercilessly, bet...
Medium •

What is older brother core?

For something to be classed as older brother core, it must feature several key components. Gaming is one of the most important. Older brother core almost always involves video games—whether these are played at home in the bedroom (where most photos depicting the trend are set), or occasionally in video game stores or arcades. Games are usually played on mid-2000s consoles, particularly the Xbox or Xbox 360—with their characteristic green cases serving as the dominant colorway (alongside black) f...
Medium •

What happened when internet sleuths discovered a viral lost song in a 1980s porn movie?

In April 2024, internet sleuths finally located the lost song previously known as EKT in a 1980s porno. I interviewed the person who made the discovery (south_pole_ball), but the article never made it to publication. Here’s an updated version with some extra bits added in. Questionable moustaches. Full bush. Tenuous supernatural storylines. There are many things you might expect to encounter when watching a vintage eighties porno, but the answer to one of the internet’s biggest mysteries is prob...
Dazed Digital •

Lostwave: how the internet became obsessed with lost songs

On Reddit, internet sleuths are desperately searching for the artist behind a mysterious 80s-sounding track, ‘Everyone Knows That’ – the latest in a long line of

It’s late at night and you’re searching. For what exactly, you’re not sure, but perhaps something ASMR-infused – a video equal parts soothing and strange that’ll lull you gently to sleep, while reminding you of the vast expanse of the internet. As you navigate YouTube’s complex warrens of ‘dark’ and ‘unsettling’ video essays, you see a
The Daily Beast •

YouTube’s Comments Are an Internet Treasure We Must Protect

At first glance, the video ‘BRODYQUEST’ looks like nothing more than standard YouTube fodder from 2010. The jaunty, electronic track—which features an image of actor Adrien Brody journeying through oceans, famous landmarks, and into space—has all the trimmings of the epic bacon internet it was uploaded onto. It was a viral sensation—even the actor himself has seen it. But it’s not the sort of video you’d imagine, 13 years later, would be hosting anything other than a partially animated graveyard
Dazed •

What is frutiger aero, the aesthetic taking over from Y2K?

Shiny globules, green fields, tropical fish – memories of an era dominated by glossy, naturalistic design are taking over

It’s 2008 and the sweet smell of plastic fills the air, as you unwrap your first-ever touchscreen phone. You boot it up, and are greeted with a melodic chime, before being lulled into stock images of sunflower-filled fields and oversaturated blue skies. In the next room, your parents are taking their first intrepid steps towards becoming technologically literate by trading t

Ethical Porn: What It Is and Sites to Check Out

“The term ethical porn, unfortunately, brings up the same connotations as corporate social responsibility,” says Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a user-generated adult video platform that runs on a paid subscription model. (She prefers to use the term “social sex” to describe her platform.) But while the name might sound pretty drab, ethical porn in reality is far more exciting – and all-encompassing – than it sounds, covering everything from BDSM to blockchain-enabled porn. Here’s wha
LADbible •

Salad Fingers creator never meant for the seriously creepy character to be scary

If you’ve spent any time online during the last decade, you’ll surely have come across Salad Fingers – the quintessentially creepy cartoon character with a love for rusty spoons who first took the internet by storm back in the 2000s.Now creator David Firth has opened up about the cartoon’s origin story and some of the inspiration behind it.“[It was] a comment that my friend made and then I just sort of made a cartoon based on that comment,” the Doncaster-born artist tells LADbible, referencing a...

Gay Garden Gnomes: Pandemic Protest Grows Thanks to TikTok

While some of us were baking banana bread or growing sourdough starters during the first quarantine, Maura Bennet-Martins was laying the groundwork for a different kind of hobby: turning straight garden gnomes into queer icons. Two years later, Super Gay Gnomes is a thriving small business selling hand-painted, glitter-coated garden gnomes in a rainbow of colors.

Bennet-Martins, who lives in Boston with her wife, explains that the business started out as a silent protest against a bigoted neigh...
Dazed •

Why you so obsessed? The online safe space for the infatuated

On r/limerence, members gather to share advice on how to manage their overwhelming feelings of obsessive longing – but is it

“It’s a longing. It’s like a pining. The dopamine hit is insane. Nothing else, no substance can give me that same euphoric feeling.” Ashley* isn’t addicted to alcohol, drugs or gambling, though she’s seen people compare her own affliction to these things in the past. Instead, she’s been working hard to overcome a lifelong reliance on something – or rather someone – else.
Medium •

How memes helped Friday Night Dinner become a cult show

This article was originally published in April 2021 on sulk, a short-lived magazine/blog aiming to publish new writers that I worked on with friends.It’s a Friday night. The Goodman family are sitting down for dinner, as they do once a week, every week. Dad Martin’s got his shirt off (he’s bloody boiling as usual), adult sons Adam and Jonny are pranking each other, and Mum Jackie just wants everyone to calm down. Suddenly the doorbell goes, and of course, it’s weird neighbour Jim, here to tell J...

A Teenager Has Remade Myspace and Everyone Is Loving It

Your best friend had one. Your older sister had one. Most of the bands clogging up your iTunes library had one. Even enduring teen icon Effy Stonem had a Myspace page — her Top 8 placements hinting at a preference for Cook over Freddie (we knew it!). By the end of the 00s, just about everyone you ever met was on Myspace, backcombing and spraying the shit out of their hair for that all-important upside-down profile pic.

Myspace was most closely associated with the alt scene, functioning as a hea

FarmVille Is Closing Forever and Hardcore Fans Are Devasted

In case you’ve forgotten, FarmVille was a browser-based game accessible via Facebook that was hot shit from around 2009 – when it launched – to around 2011. The game had a simple premise: you’d create a farm, plant crops and raise animals. The more products you harvested, the more “Farm Coins” you would earn to once again repeat the dopamine-inducing cycle, this time with an extra cow. Everything happened in real-time, earning FarmVille a reputation for being mindless and repetitive, but also we
WIRED UK •

Bloody crime scene cleanups are going viral on TikTok

Grace*, a 17 year old from Arkansas, has also recently made the jump to TikTok, after following a crime scene cleanup account on Instagram for three years. For her, the appeal of the videos is a mixture of fascination with the macabre, and a genuine desire to learn about the practicalities of the job.

“It’s something I’m drawn to because of the morbidity of it, I guess,” she says. “I’ve always been really obsessed with death and understanding what happens to us physically when we do pass, so it