Dead Squirrels, Tiktok Bops, and Raw Milk: The Internet Slope of 2024

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This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times” Opinion. You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

I am Jessica Grose and I am an opinion for “The New York Times. “

[Reproducing music]

When I started running on the web in 2004, I felt like I could read the entire web every day. And now, I don’t feel that at all. There is too much information. It is fragmented among niche communities.

And as a mother and also a journalist who writes a lot on the Internet, she feels that it is knowing what to focus on. Is it a concept that a user believes, or is it a concept that a million people believe?Trends go viral very quickly, but that doesn’t necessarily make them important.

There was something about the election happening this year that really highlighted related how much people are struggling to understand what is happening on the internet and whether or not it’s important. What is just internet rage baiting, and what is actually a cultural trend that we need to pay attention to? How do we figure out what really matters?

And that is why I’m very excited to talk to Ryan Broderick today. He is the host of the “Panic World” podcast and writes a newsletter called “Garbage Day.” It is about the intersection of pop culture and the internet. He has covered topics such as Peanut the Squirrel, and whether there can be a Joe Rogan of the left. He’s been such a helpful guide in sorting out what’s a significant cultural trend from what is just slop.

I love this word.

Everything is slop.

Dude, slop is so good.

[Laughs]:

I love you calling flats. It’s so good.

Welcome, Ryan. I am very excited to communicate today.

Thank you for making me.

So I get the impression of what I have on the internet in my tailor Tiktok where I spend too much time for a 42-year-old woman, what I see would not possibly reflect bigger trends. So, what am I missing? What are the customer media that we pay attention to?

Well, I think, ironically, you have that the general revels in right now, which is the internet, let’s say, 5, 10 years ago, a couple of core streams that everybody can see and perceive what’s going on, the “Gangnam Style” era, for example.

The post-pandemic internet is now a component of fragments. Then her tiktok gives precisely what she needs to see. Your YouTube does the same. Your Instagram is now doing the same thing. X shows you what elon musk to see.

All those other platforms were moved to a very personalized delivery mechanism. Instead of everyone looking at the squirrel peanut, only a few other people know about the peanut in the squirrel until it becomes a new national. It is another landscape of what it was.

So this is a good way to transition to the “how we got here” question, and then also talk about this year in particular. And I talked about the Peanut the Squirrel meme. And so let’s start with how we got here. And then we can talk about how all of this plays into the election and its outcomes and the vibes.

How do we get here? Let’s see. It would do so in 2014 with the increase in online movements such as Gamergate, which began as a great controversy about the journalism of video games that has prolonged this broader, misogynist and correct ethical panic that would continue to influence the way in which Conservative policy has worked.

And that is almost at the same time as other people like Steve Bannon, he did interviews where he said: “I hired Milo Yiannopoulos to transmit sites such as Reddit and 4Chan to inform what men like video games are so that we can write content for them. ” They were very frank about it.

And until that moment, I mean, even a meme, that you are, the website is a serious business. And the joke that it is not so. And then, around 2014, it becomes very serious, and remains very serious, before the first presidential crusade of Donald Trump and all the online political conflicts that we have noticed since then.

The other important moment, I think, would be 2020, which I would say is the last moment where the people who weren’t online became online because they were in COVID lockdown. So my family started a group chat. We didn’t have one before. This is where everyone starts to use the internet at once. And so digital media literacy kind of goes out the window really fast.

And this is also the moment when many main platforms that we used began to have many discomfort by moderating those spaces, which they had to moderate. But it has become really evident at that time. And it is, for me, the last circular of the road would be in 2020. And now we are fucking on this path where no one is precisely counted on their online, even the other people who run the Internet sites that we let. But we are all about them, and they are important.

And it turns out a bit like corporations have deserted moderation, for the maximum part.

Ouais. I asked me if it had something to do with the insurgency and corporations as a goal and Google in this and leaving, we left. We are going to bring, and that will take place because we do not need to deal with him. But I don’t know. The atmosphere is that, yes, I no longer feel that they need those positions to work without problems.

This takes us to this year, election year, where there were many, a lot of content.

So much content —

There are so content.

– And a little good. In fact, there is a brief moment in August when I told myself, I laughed online for the first time in a long time.

I mean, some of the songs —

Oh so well.

– “I’m a Trump guy. I’m a Trump boy -“

(Singing) I’m a Trump boy

I never liked him

I’m a never Trump guy

I’m a Trump boy

— like brain worms. That was a good song. [LAUGHS]

I hate to admit this. I hate to say it, but the “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs” TikTok remix, pretty funny.

(Song) They dogs

They cats

Eating the Cat

Eat, the cat

They cats

Yes, they were Bangers. So all of this is happening.

Okay.

And I think a lot of people — myself included — were trying to grasp at whether it was meaningful at all. Did it reflect the voting preferences or interests of anybody?

GOOD.

Can you tell me what you saw and if all this meant something retrospectively?

I mean, I will be upfront — I called it wrong. I was feeling good about the Harris campaign almost up until the very last moment. And I was particularly impressed with a lot of their digital strategy. And I think I was making the same mistake that they did, which was that I was overindexing the same way they were overindexing the importance of TikTok.

And you said before, Tiktok gives you this very personalized portal. And I think that is the danger of something like what the Harris Crusade did with Tiktok as its number one vehicle to spread, because it is not a transmission platform. No simply.

That said, I think they were able to capture the spiritualist very well. The “Republicans is weird” line, I’m a big fan. I’m also a Sega fanboy, so Tim Walz likes an absolute catnip for me.

So there was a game similar to it, “Crazy Taxi.” And —

Oh, my gosh.

– You drive. I don’t know if I ever noticed it.

Yeah!

But I’m coming in a minute. Here we go. I will play this.

I love the way they played with culture. And then the day of the elections, and it is located that it did not matter. And I traveled through the remains, I read other interviews and listened to other post-muts, looking to perceive what was wrong there and why they did it to me. And I will have to think that it is because I was hitting the nostalgia of the millennium so perfectly that I think I was swept. And when you look at how other people voted, generation Z voted massively for Trump.

No women, men.

But the men, yeah. And so then the question becomes, why? And I’ve seen a lot of things about Joe Rogan and different sort of manosphere podcasts, Andrew Tate, all this stuff. I’m not convinced. I’m not convinced. But there was definitely a disconnect, and no one on the left liberal progressive side seemed to catch it.

So part of what I love about your newsletter is the name, that it’s called “Garbage Day,” because that’s what I feel like I’m doing most days on the internet, is just picking through the garbage and collecting things that might be interesting. I know I keep bringing up Peanut the Squirrel because that was one of my favorites that you did. I laughed out loud. I was like, this is so stupid that I can’t imagine sitting down and trying to understand what is going on. So tell me how you got on that story and how you explained that story.

Of course. So I’m still in X because other rich people are still there. It is like taking the American conservative elite and putting them on the worst Jank message and letting others fight. And they obsess with really strangers. stuff.

And I saw that they had just founded on a dead squirrel. And I thought, ok, let’s put it together, who started that? Why has this squirrel become vital?How did he become a conservative martyr?And then check in to locate some sort of more vital explanation for why Elon Musk spent the weekend talking about a dead squirrel.

Alone, and only to summarize the other people who lost this error on the Internet, Peanut was a squirrel suspected of having anger.

Mm, no, ok, I had it.

No, OK. [LAUGHS]

So there is a guy in the state of New York. He followed the peanut, a squirrel and resurrected the squirrel, returned it to health and then an Instagram account for the squirrel.

I call it an “ardorfuelfue”.

Squirrelfluencer is good. It’s super good. Yes, so the ardlefluencer was making so much money on peanut and peanut content that they followed a raccoon. And then they were able to start an animal sanctuary. A neighbor turns out to have informed the ardorfluencer for not having the right to have peanut licenses.

So, fauna control, I suppose, makes a descent to space and captures the mapache and squirrel. And the raid, the peanut is scared and bites one of the officers. And because of this, they had to quote Uncot, “destroy the squirrel and the mapache. ” And that, according to the influencers on the right, was a better example of a liberal communist, if you wish, the government exaggerated. And then the peanut has become this wonderful martyr to the right.

Peanut died from our sins.

Yes, Peanut did.

So I’m going to argue that Peanut The Squirrel has long -standing implications and issues.

Tell me. Tell me.

Because it reminds me of the whole Maha movement, right? So RFK, Jr. and the idea that —

Make America in health.

– Making Americans feel healthy and the concept that there is a total organization of other people who place regulations on health-related behaviors, whether for animals or humans, to be burdensome and a violation of their freedom. So I feel like being disappointed by the peanut That the squirrel is also disappointed by the fact that you can’t drink raw tap milk every day.

I think you’re dead-on.

ALRIGHT. [Laughs]

And I also believe that Peanut The Squirrel is a better example of the way in which the American conservative movement deals with things now, of which I think in a way, OK, basically they handle a tabloid. Therefore, they look for those little stories of human interest that can remodel in great controversies. And Peanuts The Squirrel is a better example.

So going forward, what does this mean for our politics, not just in this instance with Peanut the Squirrel, but about other things. Is it just the way we’re going to process politics going forward, and we need to adapt to it?

The two big brands I have are Trump, which enters the White House, which created so many chaos and calamity the last time I established all the plans I have for next year,

Just, just.

– Because it is a board for 4 years. The other consultation brand here is Bluesky’s rise and this greater fascination with open source social networks platforms. Obviously, there is an interest in online choice spaces away from Elon Musk, far from the finish line, far from overcoming companies. And we don’t know how those two things will interact.

If the liberal and progressive activists of the country and on the left are on a platform that does not seem to that belonging to Elon Musk, which is now in Mar-A-Lago every week, how will those online forces interact online? ? But I think you are right that we definitely touch a type of wall with this kind of thing. I don’t think the average user has time to be, well, I will read five things about peanuts in the squirrel to perceive what is happening.

I mean, I heard that Biden left the race when I in a park with many other parents and our children. And there is a mother who is a hairdresser. It is very out of line. And she likes it, why do other people communicate about coconut?

And I had to explain to her, and it sounded like I was a crazy person. And I was just like, none of this matters. I mean, there’s just a way in which you sound absolutely unhinged when you try to explain an entirely internet phenomenon to an offline person.

It’s like describing a dream.

[Laughs]:

Actually. And I think well. I only believe that at a safe point, enough other people will be like, I look ridiculous. And I don’t care.

Correct, correct. Well, I think it’s an intelligent position to finish here.

That’s how it is. Everything I write will import very soon. So I think you’re right.

Thank you so much for talking with me today. It has been so much fun.

Thank you for making me. It’s an explosion.

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If you like this screen, in Spotify, Apple or anywhere you get your podcasts. The screen is produced through Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vishakha Dharba, Phoebe Lett, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. Bruzek and Annie-Rose Strasser.

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[MUSIC PLAYING]

It is called “The opinions”, a screen that brings you an opinion of the opinion of the “New York Times. ” You have heard the news. This is what you should do with that.

I’m Jessica Grose and I’m an opinion for “The New York Times”.

[Reproducing music]

When I started working on the internet in 2004, I felt like you could really read the entire internet every day. And now, I don’t feel like that at all. There’s way too much information. It is fragmented among niche communities.

And as a mother and also a journalist who writes a lot on the Internet, feels that it is to know what to concentrate on. Is it a concept that a user believes, or is it a concept that one million people believe? Viral pass very fast, but that does not necessarily make them important.

I love this word.

Everything is sorry.

Dude, slop is so good.

[Laughs]:

You like things sun. It feels so good.

Welcome, Ryan. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Thanks for making me.

So I feel what I get on the web in my Tiktok tradition where I spend too much time for a 42-year-old woman, what I see would not possibly reflect the bigger trends. What is missing from the mainstream media that we pay the most attention to?

Well, I think ironically, you have the general reveling in right now, which is the internet, let’s say, 5, 10 years ago, a couple of core streams that everyone can look at and perceive what’s going on: the “Gangnam Style” era, for example.

The internet post-pandemic is one now of fragments. So your TikTok is delivering exactly what you want to see. Your YouTube is doing the same. Your Instagram now is also doing the same. X is showing you what Elon Musk wants you to see.

All these other platforms moved to a very personalized delivery mechanism. Instead that everyone looks at the squirrel, only a few people know the peanut in the squirrel until it becomes a new national. It is another landscape of what it was.

It’s a smart way to move on to the “how did we get here” query, then communicate about this specific year. And I communicated about the same peanut from the same squirrel. And then let’s start with how we got here. And then we can communicate about how all of this plays out in the elections and their effects and vibrations.

How did we get here? Let’s see. It would do so in 2014 with the rise of online movements like Gamergate, which began as a major controversy over video game journalism that has spilled over into this broader, misogynistic, and correct ethical panic that would continue to influence the way conservative politics has worked.

And at the same time when other people like Steve Bannon, he did interviews where he said, “I hired Milo Yiannopoulos to go on sites like Reddit and 4chan to report which men who love video games are angry so we can write content for them.

And until that point, I mean, even a meme, which is you, the web is serious business. And the joke that it is not like that. And then, around 2014, it gets very serious, and it’s still very serious, before Donald Trump’s first presidential crusade and all the online political conflicts that we’ve noticed since then.

And that’s also the moment where a lot of major platforms that we were using started having a lot of trouble moderating those spaces, which they’d always had trouble moderating. But it became really apparent at that point. And that’s, to me, the last turn off the highway would be 2020. And now we’re barreling down this road where no one’s exactly happy with their time online, even the people running the websites that we’re using. But we’re still all on them, and they’re still important.

And it turns out that a little like the corporations have deserted moderation, maximum of them.

Sí. Me wonder if it had anything to do with the insurrection and corporations like Meta and Google through this and coming out, we came out here. We’re going to bring in AI, and modes because we don’t need to face it. But I don’t know. The environment is that yes, I don’t have the impression anymore that they need them to stand up gently.

That brings us to this year, another election year, where there was a lot — just so much content.

Then content –

There is so much content.

— and some of it good. I actually — there was a brief moment in August where I was like, I’m having fun online again for the first time in a while.

I mean, some of the songs —

Oh so well.

– “I’m a Trump guy. I’m a Trump boy -“

(SINGING) I’m a never Trump guy

I never liked him

I’m a never Trump guy

I’m a Trump boy

— like brain worms. That was a good song. [LAUGHS]

I hate to admit this. I hate to say it, but the “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the dogs” TikTok remix, pretty funny.

(SINGING) They’re eating the dogs

They cats

Eating the Cat

Eat, the cat

They’re eating the cats

Yes, they were Bangers. So all of this is happening.

GOOD.

And I think a lot of other people, myself included, were looking to find out if it’s significant. Did it reflect someone’s personal voting tastes or interests?

Okay.

Can you tell me what you saw and if everything meant something in retrospect?

And you said before, Tiktok gives you this very personalized portal. And I think it is the danger of something like what the Harris crusade has done with Tiktok so hard that its main diffusion vehicle, because it is a diffusion platform. It is justarray

That said, I think they were able to capture the zeitgeist quite well. The “Republicans are weird” line, I was a huge fan of. I am also a Sega fanboy, so Tim Walz was like absolute catnip for me.

So there’s a game similar to it, “Crazy Taxi. “And-

Oh my God.

— you drive around. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it.

Yes!

But I’m coming in a minute. Let’s play this.

I love the way they were playing with culture. And then come election day, and you discover it didn’t really matter. And I’ve been looking through the wreckage, reading different interviews and listening to different postmortems, trying to figure out what I got wrong there and why I was so taken by it. And I have to think it’s because it was hitting millennial nostalgia so perfectly that I think I was swept up in it. And when you look at how people voted, Gen Z overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

No women, men.

So the component of what I love about your newsletter is the name, which is called “Coil Day”, because that’s what I feel like I do on peak days on the internet, is pick the junk and gather things that might be interesting. I know I still make the peanuts by picking up the squirrel because it was one of my favorites you made. I laughed out loud. I thought, it’s so stupid I can’t believe sitting and looking to figure out what’s going on. So tell me how you put this story in combination and how you explained this story.

Of course. So I’m still in X because other rich people are still there. It is a bit like taking the American conservative elite and has placed them in the worst Babillard of Jank Máximo and letting them fight with the other. And they are obsessed with really strange things.

And I saw that they had just founded on a dead squirrel. And I thought, ok, we put together, who started that? Why has this squirrel become vital? How has it become a conservative martyr? And then see to locate a more vital kind of explanation for why Elon Musk spent the weekend talking about a dead squirrel.

Alone, and only to summarize the other people who lost this error on the Internet, Peanut was a squirrel suspected of having anger.

Mm, no, OK, I got this.

No, ok. [Laughs]

So there is a guy in the state of New York. He followed the peanut, a squirrel and resurrected the squirrel, returned it to health and then an Instagram account for the squirrel.

I call it a “ardorfluenceur. “

Squirrelfluencer is really good. That’s super good. Yeah, so the squirrelfluencer was making so much money off of Peanut and Peanut’s content that they adopted a raccoon. And then they were able to start an animal sanctuary. A neighbor appears to have reported the squirrelfluencer for not having the proper licenses to have Peanut.

So Wildlife Control, I guess, raids the house and seizes the raccoon and the squirrel. And during the raid, Peanut freaks out and bites one of the officers. And because of that, they had to, quote unquote, “destroy the squirrel and the raccoon.” And this, according to right-wing influencers, was a perfect example of liberal communist, if you will, government overreach. And then Peanut became this great martyr for the right.

Peanut died from our sins.

Yes, Peanut did.

So I’m going to argue that peanut squirrel has lasting implications and problems.

Tell me. Tell me.

Because it reminds me of the whole Maha movement, right? So RFK, Jr. and the idea that —

Make the United States greet.

– Make Americans in shape and the concept that there is a total organization of other people who located regulations on behaviors related to physical condition, whether for animals or humans, be loved and a violation of their freedom. So I need to disappoint me about the peanut that the squirrel is also disappointed by the fact that you cannot drink raw milk from the tap every day.

You are right.

OK. [LAUGHS]

And I also think that Peanut the Squirrel is a perfect example of the way America’s conservative movement processes things now, which I’ve sort of been thinking of as like, OK, they’re essentially running a tabloid. So they’re always looking for these little human interest stories that they can spin up into massive controversies. And Peanut the Squirrel is a perfect example of that.

So, in the future, what does this mean for our policy, only in this case with Peanut L’Equureuil, but in other things? Is this how we will deal with the future in the future and we have to adapt to it?

The two big question marks I have are Trump entering the White House, which created so much chaos and calamity last time that I’ve sort of just thrown out any plans I have for next year —

Alone, alone.

– Because it is a board for 4 years. The other mark of consultation here is the rise of Bluesky and this increased fascination with open-source social media platforms. Obviously, there’s an interest in online spaces of choice away from Elon Musk, away from Meta, away from the overtaking of companies. And we don’t know how those two things will interact.

If the country’s liberal, progressive, and left-wing activists are on a platform than on an Elon Musk estate, who now hangs out at Mar-a-Lago and every week, how will those forces interact online?’To be right that we are definitely reaching some kind of wall with this kind of thing. I don’t think the average user has time to be, okay, I’m going to read five things about the squirrel peanut to perceive what’s going on.

I mean, I heard about Biden dropping out of the race when I was at a park with a bunch of other parents and our kids. And there was a mom who is a hairdresser. She’s like very offline. And she was like, why are people talking about coconuts?

And I had to him, and he seemed to be a looping person. And I was like, nothing about this thing. I mean, there’s only one way you seem private when you consider a completely web phenomenon with an offline person.

It’s like describing a dream.

[Laughs]:

Truly. And I think you’re right. I just think that at a certain point, enough people are going to be like, I sound ridiculous. And I don’t care about this anymore.

Correct, correct. Well, I think it’s an intelligent position to finish here.

That’s right. Everything I write about will not matter pretty soon. So I think you’re right.

Thank you so much for talking to me today. It’s been a lot of fun.

Thanks for making me. It is an explosion.

[Playing music]

If you like this screen, in Spotify, Apple or anywhere you get your podcasts. This exhibition is produced through Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vishakha Dharba, Phoebe Lett, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. His edited through Kaari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek and Annie-Rose Stasser.

[Reproducing music]

By Jessica Grose

Produced by Derek Arthur

At a time when the Internet is complete of content and hyperfragmentation, how do you solve what memes, viral videos and concepts tell? Times Jessica Grose’s opinion editorial sits with Ryan Broderick, author of the Bobbin Day Bulletin, to perceive the trends that splashes in 2024.

This verbal exchange recorded in December 2024.

(There will be a complete transcription of this audio verification within 24 hours of publication in the previous audio player).

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].

This episode of “The Opinions” produced through Derek Arthur. Published through Jordana Hochman. Mix through Pat McCusker. Additional aggregate through Efim Shapiro. Original music through Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Verification of the facts through Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta’s public strategy. The executive manufacturer of Audio Opinion is Annie-Rose Strasser.

The Times undertakes to publish a diversity of letters to the editor. We would like to listen to what you or one of our articles. There are some tips here. And here is our email: let@nytimes. com.

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Jessica Grose is an opinion for times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.

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