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Hello Deeists,
Welcome to this week’s thought digest — this one’s a little lighter than usual.
I had a longer piece about ChatGPT and advertising ready to go and then OpenAI dropped Instant Checkout. Suddenly the whole “AI + ads” angle feels dated — within, what, 24 hours? Anyway, if you haven’t heard, now you can just buy shit you don’t need directly inside the chat.
Dirt’s Daisy Alioto has been circling this idea for a while, and once again she’s been vindicated. If AI agents can move a person seamlessly from query → product → purchase, it undercuts the ad-driven model of search and marketplaces. Instead of optimizing for visibility through Google or Amazon ads, merchants will need to start thinking about how to appeal to AI agents. Tyler Cowen’s another person who’s been proven right here — you need to be writing (creating, designing, etc) with AI in mind. I’ve seen quite a few riffs on “We were promised AGI. Instead, we got AIO (AI optimization, as opposed to Search Engine Optimization).”
In a way, maybe this is good news?1
THE CALL-IN SHOW
This week’s call-in show is at 7:30 p.m. Central on Thursday, October 2nd. If you’re new, every Thursday I host a call-in show with
as an homage to Art Bell. Each week we pick a theme that ordinarily can be read two ways — either about the paranormal or internet culture. This week’s theme could, theoretically, be Internet-related… if you’re creative.That’s right. We’re hitting a classic. ALIEN ABDUCTIONS.
SHE’S NO JENNIFER TILLY
Over the weekend I learned about “Tilly Norwood,” an AI actress supposedly being courted2 by Hollywood agents. She was clearly not designed with Midjourney, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down.
Anyway, I think we’re all pretty burnt out on predictions about this kind of thing. Things move so quickly now that it’s hard to tell what actually matters and what’s just the product of a publicist whose email finally got answered. This feels like the latter.
And to that end, I see two possibilities for what this means:
First, mass-market movies could start looking more like video games, with AI actresses functioning more like avatars than performers. Instead of casting flesh-and-blood stars, studios might design “wire-born” actors who can be endlessly tweaked, never age, never strike, and — most importantly — exist across franchises without breaking continuity.
Audiences could even get used to interacting with them in real time, blurring the line between watching and playing. Over time, this would create a new cultural form. Maybe hyper-personalized, maybe in the tradition of Choose Your Own Adventure — closer to roleplaying or gaming than to watching a movie. It would be a world truly ruled by fandom.
Indie films would still survive, but as the artisan option, like handmade furniture in a Wayfair-forward world. They’d occupy the same space that stage plays, operas, and orchestral music occupy today: no longer dominant, but still respected, still practiced, still vital to particular people. In other words, the mainstream might shift, but the human desire for live, embodied performance would keep some form of traditional cinema alive.
Second, it could just be a publicity stunt — the next Lil’ Miquela. People talk for a while, nothing changes. At most, a cult following.
I can easily imagine both outcomes. If I drop my techno-optimism for a moment, I hope it’s the second. I hope the film industry comes back closer to the form we’re familiar with. But whatever happens, it’ll take time. Hollywood is already in decay. A shift this big won’t happen overnight, if it happens at all.
ON POLITICS & FANDOM
Politics is fandom — indeed, everything is fandom — because everything is mediated. Most of what we know, feel, and act on is almost exclusively delivered to us through screens, images, text. In practice, there is no clear break between “real life” and “media.” We experience reality the way we experience fiction. Fandom is the organizing principle of a life lived online.
Once politics is experienced as media, feelings outweigh facts. The unglamorous machinery of laws, budgets, and institutions slips from view — even more than it might have in the past. Fan Studies scholars like Nicolle Lamerichs and Paul Booth point out that fans define themselves through making things and feeling intensely. They produce fan works and they invest deep emotion into their objects of devotion. Politics works the same way.
Fans rewrite stories — they create “transformative works” like fan art and fan fiction. They invent new endings, spin off alternate arcs, and fill in the gaps the official version leaves blank. Political subcultures do the same thing. But just as media companies are experts at folding fan energy back into official franchises, political institutions are becoming experts at metabolizing subversion. Energy that looks rebellious is redirected into established channels.
Still, fan energy does reshape political parties. Just look at the Trump administration — I’m hardly the first to point this out. Subcultures can tilt the storyline and change the costumes, but they can’t rewrite the genre itself. Eccentric political subcultures — catboy monarchists, neo-reactionary Persian nationalists, eco-fascist crypto bros, whatever — rarely truly escape the system. They appear radical, but they’re only supplying new aesthetics for the spectacle. However strange the imagery, their energy is reabsorbed into Republican or Democrat. The logic of fandom might reshape parties’ look and feel, but they don’t destabilize power. They reinforce it, in the same way that fan cultures ultimately sustain the media industries they feed on.
NICKSTORY: PART I by LLAMIHGYN Y DWYR
The “Nickstorians”3 are a bit of a puzzle to explain.
Despite the community being about Nick Fuentes, a political commentator, most involved members do not ideologically align with him. I have not gone through and asked everyone the exact minutiae of their ideological identities, but I would say we are broadly some amount to the left of where he says he is. (I know that some of Nick’s right-leaning critics have declared that he is actually a leftist, something I do not personally agree with).
Even before I was involved in a community, my fascination with Nick and his cast of fellow miscreants was one of amused curiosity. When I actually learned who he was, I never saw him as the threat some did; I saw him as this cartoon character whose persona was defined more by whacky shenanigans than politics. He wasn’t Nick Fuentes the White Nationalist Catholic Autocrat; he was Nick Fuentes lover of Spongebob and catboys who sings Miley Cyrus songs to his friends and hunts for cum (yes, groypers, I know that was technically just a joke).
Still, I understood that most people would not be quite as understanding, so I should probably keep it to the Internet. Funnily enough, my first Internet fandom was true crime. As oblivious as I could be to how I was perceived at times during my teenage years, I had the awareness to keep my fascination with literal murderers somewhere people who actually knew me in the real world would not see it, so that was how I was introduced to Internet fandom culture.
That was pre-Tumblr and confined to YouTube back when YouTube’s setup was more akin to MySpace, if anyone remembers that. I ended up abandoning that particular fandom because of the abundance of white supremacists, making the fact that my next Internet fandom over a decade later would surround actual, self-declared white supremacists a bit ironic. While I had been following and had even previously posted about Nick and friends online in the past, though those accounts were unceremoniously deleted due to other extenuating circumstances, the Tumblr community as it exists now did not start until about November 2024.
Fuentes was in the public consciousness thanks to the “your body, my choice” thing and then the supposed sex tape4, so I had the inkling to check up on him and, for whatever reason, see if people on Tumblr specifically had anything to say about that. The next thing I knew, I was making another Nick-themed side-blog, except this time around, I found others, starting with about two or three, all people who had the same thought:
“I don’t really align with this guy, but his lore is so bizarre and fascinating.”
Something noteworthy is that the different eras of his life were defined to most of us by these friendships he has had, be it with Keith Woods, Jaden McNeil, Patrick Casey, etc. Everyone seems to have their favorite. In that sense, this ended up lending itself pretty well to shipping5, partly because he has actually been accused, whether reasonably or not, of being attracted to a lot of these people and, even if he hadn’t been, people love making that out of friendships and obsessive rivalries.
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