Panic World - Here's why everyone's fighting about delivery apps (with Allegra Rosenberg)

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Perhaps you’ve seen someone pop off online about a delivery order going wrong, or it being too expensive. Maybe you’ve been one of those people. Some call them “Treatlerites” — “treat” + “Hitler,” of course — and it’s when general panic ensues after someone acts selfishly dictatorial about their delivery app output, and foolishly decides to rant about it online. Allegra Rosenberg joins us to discuss how much we should be reacting to this. Our guest Allegra Rosenberg is a writer, producer, and Garbage Day contributor. You can find her work at https://www.allegrarosenberg.com/. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Audio Maverick, a new nine-part documentary about one of the most visionary figures in radio, Himan Brown. Out now wherever you listen to podcasts. Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I agree. I have a question for you that has no moral judgments attached to it whatsoever. Okay. Do you use any kind of delivery app, Uber Eats, delivery, delivery, delivery, grubhub, whatever, any of it? Yeah, on occasion, I do. If you were to sort of ballpark it, like, how many times a month we're talking? Two to three to four? I would say never more than once per week. Do you feel like you are an enemy of the working class every time you use one? Yes, I absolutely have.

have a sense of crushing guilt, but not, I would say, a class-based one. This is a very personal guilt that I am not as good or an effortless as a home cook as my mother. Interesting. Okay. So you don't feel like a class traitor. No, I feel like a domestic trader. I see. Okay. Or a traitor to my gender even. That is very complex to unpack. Yeah, I won't make you do that. It's funny. No, I actually feel the same way in a lot of ways. And in fact, about four or five months ago, I was like, I'm going to not order any delivery food during the week anymore and slowly learn how to cook the things that I would order. And how's that going for you? A lot of the food I eat is ugly and misshapen, but it's getting tastier the more I do it. Are you just adding more butter? I use a lot of olive oil and a lot of spices.

I ask that question is because we are looking at a very hot, controversial part of internet discourse this week. The two areas of the internet, the one would think would be allies time and time again end up at war with each other when someone posts about their delivery orders getting messed up or if someone wants to pop off about them being too expensive. And so today we want to look at the recurring event that seems to send online communities and news media into a panic and try to see if there's anything we can do to stop this vicious cycle. My name is Ryan Broderick. Joining me today is writer, researcher, Garbage Day contributor, Allegra Rosenberg. Allegra, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. Are you familiar with the term treatlerite?

I absolutely am as of a couple months ago. Okay, can you define the term for us? It's a combination of the words treat and Hitler. And I think it is someone who is selfishly dictatorial about their delivery app food. Like they are mad when it goes wrong and they are and they make a fool of themselves online by opening themselves up to criticism for being so, I guess, needy about the way that food is delivered to their door. Okay. So as I understand it, and I want you to tell me if I'm wrong here, it seems like the

discourse around sort of the treatlerite phenomenon is. Some people say that gig worker apps, delivery apps are exploitative and that they should be outlawed or heavily regulated and that it's okay that they're expensive because delivery food and delivery services shouldn't be inexpensive. And the other side of the argument are people who say that these services are extremely important for the disabled community, for people who have limited mobility or access or, you know, might live in a food desert or something and that they need. these services to be cheap and easy to use. Is that sort of the breakdown here? I think that there's a third level to it, which is the old-style American puritanical sort of Protestant attitude towards treats. And then the contemporary 21st century techno-easy, everything convenient attitude that has sort of been forcibly inculcated in this country's youth by business. And those, you know, that sort of inherent morality is at war with what we've sort of been

taught or been offered to us on a plate in the last 10 to 15 years. On a plate. Very good. Very good. Can you tell me a little bit about your memories of the pre-delivery app world? I, well, when it was pizza night, it was so exciting because my mom would call up the pizza place and we'd say what we wanted. And then she'd hand us the $20 bills so that when the doorbell rang, we'd have to go and give the money to the pizza guy. And this taught us something about commerce, I think.

And also made me not be scared of answering the door, which was a problem at the time. So there was a function, a social function to delivery. It gave my mom a night off. And it also gave the kids the opportunity to feel like they were making dinner happen in the household. Yes, it felt much more participatory. I was using delivery apps in the early 2010s.

I remember, like, I had moved to New York and I had finally gotten enough money to, like, actually afford delivery. And I downloaded, I think it was seamless. And I was using it, like, fairly regularly because I wasn't able to cook because I was living with, like, four roommates or whatever. And it was a mess and whatever. And then I was using them a lot when I was living in London in my late 20s. and I feel like my relationship with them changed drastically during COVID. Does that sort of gel with you as well? Yeah.

I mean, I would have begun using them when I was in college in L.A. And L.A. was a very Postmates heavy town. And that was when Uber was cheap. That was when Postmates was cheap when it was all subsidized. The millennial subsidy life. Yeah. Yeah. So I got the millennial subsidy in college.

and it was a really good time to have it because it meant that I could afford to go from USC to a club at Hollywood Boulevard for five bucks in an Uber pool. Or I could afford to get delivery food to my dirty college house and not have to worry about cleaning up the dishes. So I definitely wasn't thinking. I was like, wow, this is great. No other thoughts beside that at the time. You know why Gen Z is radicalizing? because they can't go to a $5 wings and $1 beer happy hour get so intoxicated. They throw up in their Uber and end the night still spending under $50.

That's why they're all little Hitler youth right now is because they don't have cheap access to these services anymore. That's my hot take. They don't have cheap access to anything. And even the stuff that is financially cheap is incredibly emotionally or psychologically costly. Yes, that is true. The way I sort of see it is like if you were living in major cities around the world, pre-COVID, you knew about these services. You were using them. I think the most like ethically grotesque of all of them is TaskRabbit, which is literally just like an app slave. That one I have never used and I like will not use it. I think Post Malone was like using them all the time at one point. He was saying he was spending like tens of thousands of dollars a month on TaskRabbit. Anyways, I don't use that one. TaskRabbit is good if you were a short girl with not a lot of upper. body strength and you need help with home decoration tasks. I will say that. Okay. All right. I'll give you that one. Yeah, I'm tall. I'm a long man. You have never felt the way that I have felt about trying to hang something up or mount something on a tall, tall piece of hair. No, I've never needed a tall man to come to my house to do things for me. Yeah.

How about I just, I'll call you next time instead of the task rabbit. Okay. Yeah, no, that's fine. I don't do a lot these days. It's pretty boring. So I feel like if you were like in college or if you're living in a city, you're around young people in the You knew about these services. You were using them. And I remember the kind of an inverse of the thing you talked about with like your family and pizza night. I was staying with my parents during COVID for a couple of months and like sort of like hiding out in the suburbs. And I remember ordering delivery food in the suburbs. And like my dad like came to the door to like see how it would work.

And it was like a very kind of I think mind bending moment. And I remember like talking to my mom the next day and like, yeah, like I order. order food. She's like, how did you do it? And I was like, with the app on my phone, she said, what do you mean? They just like came to the door. Like, how do they know where, you know, it was like, it was like ordering an Uber in the suburbs was like kind of a weird thing. Yeah. And I feel like this discourse about sort of the morality of it and the ethics of it, at least according to the timeline that we're about to go through here, seems to start like right around that moment where the whole country is now using these services, even if they're not in major cities. Yeah. And I actually think to a certain degree in major cities, these services make more sense. Absolutely. I imagine working as a food delivery driver for an app in a suburb or rural area must be one of the worst jobs you could possibly have. Yes. My parents live north of Boston.

I take an Uber usually from the train station to go see them. And like whenever I can, I talk to the Uber driver the whole time because it just seems like that's really boring. And it's a long drive to nowhere. So according to our timeline, we sent our researcher Adam down the rabbit hole to figure, out when this discourse started. And as best as we can tell, it all began with a disability activist named Amani Barbaran, who in January of 2020, weirdly enough, January 6th, 2020, started posting about, quote, ableist bullshit that you have to put up with when you use DoorDash.

And the screenshot, do you want to sort of, I'll drop it in the chat here. It's on the right-hand side. Click on that and just sort of describe the screenshot and the tweet. for the audience. Okay, so this is a screenshot of a conversation, an SMS conversation between OP and a DoorDash driver, and the DoorDash driver says, can you meet me in the lobby? And OP says, I'm disabled and I need you to come up to my apartment. And the driver says, I cannot leave my car in a fire lane. And OP says, well, okay, drop it off at the front desk. And the guy says, okay. And then the O.P. sort of piles on. It says, maybe if you were unable to accommodate

disabled people, you should get another gig. I will be reporting this interaction to DoorDash. And then the last thing you see in the screenshot is the guy saying, I can't park illegally. I just had a $300 ticket, which extrapolating narratively, the guy might have gotten the ticket from the last time that he was asked to park illegally and bring something up. I think that this is a really interesting example of this because, like, I actually think that Like, neither of these people are particularly wrong. Yeah, absolutely. They're just finding, they're sort of encountering each other at, like, a very specific

kind of breakdown in American society where, like, a person made vulnerable by lack of, like, health care accommodation and a person made vulnerable by lack of, like, a living wage working for, like, a fucking gotcha game that, like, connects them with clients are, like, having to navigate, like, this horrible gray area that I feel like most of these apps make money by primarily existing it. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, not to bring out the bug bear, but this is a prime example of intersectionality and the difficulties that it presents in American discourse because you immediately feel the need without even really being queued by the O.P.

You're like, oh, I think I have to take a side here because you've been conditioned in these kinds of, presented with these kinds of like, am I the asshole situation? You're like, okay, who's the asshole in this situation? Whereas that isn't, you know, nuance does exist. Maybe. I've heard that it does. Like you, who can be sure? Well, it doesn't exist in this instance very long because DoorDash's help account

jumps in the replies and says, we can help with that. Send us a direct message with your email address and phone number associated with your DoorDash account and we'll see what we can do. So like they've, they've immediately been like, Yeah, we're going to help you, like, punish this guy, which then, I think, escalates this into proper Twitter discourse. This was still the age of Twitter. Culture war in territory. Yeah.

So you get, you get one username Clipart Bear writing, if I was in the situation having to choose between risking a $300 ticket to appease someone for my $3 delivery fee and no tip, I would bash my head into the concrete outside or drive my car into a creek. And then another username, Transgender, writes, there were free. parking spots. He just didn't want to bring her the food, you know, part of his job. Barbara later posted that there was free parking available, but that's almost besides the point, you know, once hundreds of people are screaming at you online. And the whole unfortunate situation becomes so heated because we've created this world where every step of doing this is now so depressingly common. It's like the mustard tweet. What's the mustard tweet? Do you know the must? These are my different mustards.

No, I don't wait. I don't know the mustard tweet. Yeah, wait, dipping mustards? This is like one, I feel like this is one of the best tweets of the last like 10 years. Hey, this is Grant the producer. I need to jump in. Yeah. Congratulations. This, you are the second guest to stump Ryan.

True. So now I need to cue the Price is Right music. Yep. Well done. I got stumped. Okay. Read me the mustard tweet. This is from July 15th, 2020.

So deep in psychosis territory. at anime Serbia tweeted How couples argue today Wife Cool how there's four mustards in the fridge in 2018 And none go with my sandwich Normal World Husband

Wow, it's almost like those are my dipping Mustards and aren't meant to go on sandwiches But okay, go off That is how couple is like this was a repost So I don't know where the original one went I might have been from before 2020 Sorry, that was on me Okay, but the point stands

That is how people talk, yes, I agree And congratulations. Back to our timeline here. This sort of example of basically a disabled person being like, here's my problem with these services. And then a bunch of people dogpiling them and calling them lazy, it becomes a massive, massive sort of meme on Twitter. And I think what's really interesting is that this is all happening two months before

the world really knows about COVID. And it's like interesting that we've already sort of reached that point. but obviously the user base for these delivery apps grows tremendously. So according to some numbers we'd been able to pull, there was a 123% increase in the U.S. of people using these services. And that obviously leads directly to people getting mad about how they're using them. As you've sort of been tracking this stuff, do you think that there are bad actors involved in these fights,

like making them worse? Or do you think it is literally just like a total breakdown in communication? Like do you feel like there's like a cultural angle to this stuff? I feel like insofar as COVID made everything worse, it obviously made this problem worse. But I think that there is something inherent in people's like wish to defend their own pleasure. And that is something that's visible across fandoms and across all sorts of online cultural spaces where they're like, well, this feels good to me. So then it's like a retroactive justification for. why, you know, they in particular should be allowed to do it even when there's some sort of

socioeconomic harm in play. And I think the worst thing, I think for a lot of, you know, the sort of post-Tumbler post-SJW people, like the worst thing that you can do is be accused of not understanding your own actions, right? The cultural element that I think that you're picking up on here is like the idea of a straw man, the idea that there is a great, of militant disability activists who are like supporting the entire business model of these apps when really I and this is completely unfounded but I feel like most people probably fall somewhere more towards like my use of the apps which is like yes sometimes and then there's like the you know millionaire addicts who order delivery multiple times a day every day which I've

also seen sort of proof of but there has to be a sort of bell curve here right of the people who are like, I wouldn't ever use an app, you know, for this reason. And then the people who are like psychologically and physiologically dependent on it. I feel like most people are fairly normal about these apps the same way they're fairly normal about Uber. Yes, there are like downtown club kids who refuse to step foot on the subway because their rich parents know that they're going to get shanked. But most people take an Uber like, I take an Uber if I have to go to Astoria because

I'm not going to sit on the train for an hour and a half. I did it the other day. It took me two hours to get up there. It was brutal. Yeah. And I did Uber back because it was late. And I was like, I can't do this. I did the train and took way too. Anyways, different podcast topic. This is, you know, this is a podcast about, you know, people being not normal online. And I think delivery apps and ride sharing apps at this point are, you know, as close to a utility as a privately provided service can get. And most people use them normally. I think that's right.

I think it's very silly to assume that huge swaths of the country are spending $40 plus every meal to be delivered to their door. I just, I don't really believe that. I also think that COVID, I mean, we've attacked this in a couple of different ways in different episodes now. But like, internet discourse became more aggressive during and after COVID. Like there's just a million ways to prove that that is true. And it is still more aggressive than it used to be. One user in 2021 kind of summed up actually a point that you just made named Iper Marine who wrote, Hi, disabled people exist and many services that abled see as lazy or luxury are necessary for us to live.

Think before you shame people for using food delivery or online shopping, Uber or pre-prepared food for fuck's sake. And then they wrote again, also considered that all these things, costs extra and most disabled people barely make any money, but our disabilities cost us tons. And I think that is like a very important piece of this, which is that like there was this post sort of 2018 Bernie Bro online left this movement, dirt back left, whatever we want to call it, that was like trying to find easy wins, you know? And it was like very Luddite. And they're like, oh, let's attack stuff that's that we think is popular.

So they're like, okay, delivery apps are going to be like the next big late stage capitalist thing that we go after. and they don't really like nuance. And then this is another community being like, yeah, we know they're bad. They're expensive, but we don't have any other option in America. Something I'm interested in, maybe we don't know enough about to speak on in any detail. We might think that, you know, food delivery apps are like huge here and people are super dependent on it.

But we've got nothing on China and the food delivery situation there. I mean, you've spent time there, right? Like, or you know more about that. I just imagine that there's such a. Well, also because it's a more urbanized or the cities are bigger and there's more of them. But I would imagine that there's such a delivery culture there that surpasses sort of anything that we have going on here. Yeah, I heard a crazy thing when I was there that this was before COVID because I was there in 2019. A big thing in the winter was hot pot delivery.

So like if you ever, if people are saying that don't know Chinese hot pot is it's a big pot full boiling water and you put stuff in and you eat it. And I was like hearing about this and I was like, so like do you like return the hot pot? And they're like, no, no. Like, they send you an electric stove and a pot all in a kit to like make hot pot at home. And like a delivery guy pulls up with that and you can just throw it away when you're done. See, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, I went to a Chinese mall where I think in about 90% of the stores you couldn't buy anything physically. You could look at it and then ordered on an app to be delivered to your house by the time you get home.

It is, it is a totally different. Yeah, it's a totally different environment. This goes back to what I was saying about like the American Puritanism. I think that we would never let it get to that stage. I think that the criticism that the mildest sort of bell curve uses of delivery apps face on social media is a sign that, I mean, people like to go to the grocery store in America. People really like to go to the grocery store. People were so excited when the Wegman's open in New York. I love the grocery store.

I love going to grocery stores in new places. Yes. I love grocery stores. Yes. I wish I could buy eggs there. Maybe one day I'll be able to buy eggs again. Yeah, maybe. I mean, but that's what I mean.

I think that there is the sort of weight of our grocery, our collective grocery-going culture and also our collective dining-out culture, which weathered the storms of COVID-in-faring fairly well. Why did New York take away the dining sheds? Let the rats share them. It's fine. I know. I had a birthday in a dining shed a couple years ago,

and then two homeless people went viral for having sex in it like a couple hours after and you can still see pieces of my cake there. I'm not even kidding. No, but that is just something that's so something that would happen to you, Ryan, specifically. Yeah. My mom brought that cake. Like, she brought cake and we all went to a bar in the dining shed. It was like 2021 maybe.

Was that the one that I saw? Yeah, you were there. Yeah, so then two homeless. I was like, I remember that cake. This explains why Ryan's always like, you know, when I have a birthday party, it makes strange and it's very horny. And I was like, that's such a weird fucking thing to say, Ryan. But now I get it.

Cool. Two homeless people had sex on. the bench that we all ate cake on earlier that night. Yeah. Yeah, pretty cool. But I think, yeah, the point here is that like delivery apps, I think have been very successful because they have found a business model that operates at this very unique intersection of a lot of the ways that American society breaks down. It is, it is a country that is not easy to live in. It is very large. It is very dependent on like a culture. It's very defined by a culture of doing things yourself and none of us want to live that

way, but we all feel like we're forced to. And we also don't like to take care of our most vulnerable. So and we also don't get along online anymore. So like all of this discourse has kind of led to this situation where it is most often based on the research that we've seen, disabled people being like, I wish these apps were more accommodating for my needs. And then a bunch of like in like, like, leftist being like, you are lazy and a problem.

And then just a total breakdown in communication. The treatlerite thing is very much, I don't think aimed at disabled people. It's a, it's a pejorative for anybody who seems too dependent on these apps and too stringent about how well they are being served by these apps, which. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because we're going to talk about how this, evolved into the treat the right phenomenon right after the break. Okay. Our story in the evolution of this discourse comes back in around May 2022.

When a grubhub driver leaves an order in the driveway in retaliation for a too low tip, the customer is in a wheelchair and she tells TikTok about it. And this is an excerpt from what she says, I'm in a wheelchair so I couldn't go get my food in the middle of the driveway. I ended up having to wait an hour until my caregiver came home so I could eat. When I approached Grubhub about the issue, they decided it wasn't that big of a problem and didn't want to do a whole lot. So I'm hoping we can spread some awareness here as to how this discriminatory and hopefully

things like this can ever happen again. Grubhub ended up offering her, can you guess what Grubhub offered her in the end after all this TikTok controversy? $20 or something. 15% off, which I don't think would even be $20 based on Grubhubbub prices. Oh, God. Wait, no, she told BuzzFeed News, REP, I know that the vast majority of drivers for these companies are really decent people. The comments on my video show that, but it's important for drivers to understand that their services impact people in ways they probably aren't even aware, which I sympathize with.

But also, like, I come back to this idea that, like, this person making, like, essentially $2 on an order has suddenly become, like, a frontline worker for, like, disability care because, like, America is a nightmare. Like, like, that, in my opinion, like, just shouldn't be how this all plays out. And obviously Grubhub is like, have a coupon. Sorry for the trouble. Right. And something about her call to action rings true. It's like, well, it's not the driver's fault. Let's talk to the company about this.

Because they're essentially the one causing everything in this situation. Right. And this TikTok, the user's name is, it's Jamila. She inspires a whole trend where people, start like going through old tweets on TikTok. There's a whole trend where they're talking about kind of like bad deliveries from things like Instacart or whatever or like poorly packed groceries. And it kicks off again on X, which I think is still Twitter at this point, 2022.

So the site's transitioning into Musk ownership at this time. And that's when someone screenshots one of these TikToks and goes viral for writing, I hate one of my underpaid gig slave is a man. And that's because they're making fun of the latest evolution of this. where people complain that men are getting groceries on these on these apps and they don't know how to shop for you now we're getting into like proper treat the right territory so can you can you for the listeners describe a bit of how this the how gender fits into this discourse because it's it's it's almost like a snowball that's like becoming like a giant avalanche yeah just like various

discourses there's two ways that gender plays into this and one is specifically with like any delivery driver, so whether that's of groceries or of like prepared food, it's like, oh, someone, my app showed a picture of a woman, but then a man came up the stairs. And this was like a massive, massive discourse explosion, I think only a couple months ago, where people were like, but this man is probably an illegal immigrant. So like, how dare you not support his right to try and earn a living? And someone's like, but I should know who's coming up my stairs. Like, I'm traumatized. I don't feel safe when there's like a man I don't know near my door that I have to, it just, it just went on and on and on. And then the second half of this is slightly less sinister. And it's

mainly about a man's ability to grocery shop, which is under fire in terms of the fact that if some, if you have like an Instacart shop or someone who's picking out groceries from the shelves for you, and the stereotype would be a guy isn't going to know the difference between like parsley and Italian parsley or like, you know, all these like, you very, very specific and quite important cooking things or one of the ones I saw how to do with ice cream. So then that raised criticism because it's like, just eat the fucking ice cream or whatever. Right. I saw that one too. Yeah. You know the one I'm talking about. That is, I think, less of a specific gig worker thing and more of like a gender politics, gender essentialism thing where it's like a man in a grocery store with a literal

list of the things he has to get in front of him doesn't understand how to find those things or how to substitute appropriately. We're going to get to like how this becomes more politically weaponized in a second. But the reason why I think this sort of next step here is important is because this is the moment, and I think this happens in a lot of sort of viral trends, viral conversations, is that the core groups at the center of it start to lose control of the narrative. I mean, this happened a lot with like, when we were doing research about like how the bin Laden stuff started to spread on TikTok, this is exactly the same thing, which was like, effectively it was like people of color and smaller communities sharing this thing internally. people start to like jump onto the trend because TikTok obviously like promotes things as trends. It spins out of control and then like weird freaks on Twitter screenshot it and like turn it into a culture war thing. Which is exactly what's happening here with the treat the right thing where once again we started with two groups essentially like let's call them like disability advocates on one side and like workers rights advocates on the other kind of arguing about like this weird pressure point. And they're getting more aggressive with each other as this thing becomes more popular to talk about.

And as it becomes more popular to talk about really dumb people engage with it and start being like, I don't think my dash, my door dash person should be a man because like they're going to kill me. Or someone being like you're engaging in slavery. It's like it's like bad faith on both sides. Yeah. I mean, this is also the sort of the normalization of Kvetch culture when it comes to convenience. What are we allowed to complain publicly about? I mean, my mom would always say that things were declarese. You know, you shouldn't do that.

Why? Well, not because it's wrong or because it's bad. It's not classy. And I see, I use gauche. I love the word gauche. I'm like, that's extremely gush. Same thing. And so to me, complaining about anything related to a service that you are voluntarily

signed up for and isn't like, you know, something serious. Like, there's a difference between like, okay, tweeting at the airline is the only way I'm going to get my problem fixed and tweeting about my DoorDash order being like, and that's like a you. That's a thing you got to figure out with yourself and text in the group chat about. I think that there is a spectrum of acceptable to day class A as far as kvetching online about something that's going on in your life goes, you know, like, and this stuff, well, I wouldn't say it's wrong of someone to say, you know, this person picks. the wrong thing and maybe like try and at DoorDash about it. It's like really man, a little dick to say.

That said, I would yell at an airline, the company on the internet. Yeah. And I will go scorched earth on a rental car company. I was going to say that's the other one. I could spend the next couple hours talking about how like technology has not caught up with renting a car and there's no reason in 2025 that it should take an hour to rent a car. Anyway, okay. The reason why it's important to kind of track these discourses as they become sillier is because as they become sillier and as they become larger, bad actors start to notice and they start to figure out ways to weaponize them. And this has been particularly successful for the right wing after COVID as they sort of all came online and got smarter about it.

So can you guess what direction this story goes in next in terms of politics? Something to do with delivery apps and wokeism? You're not wrong. So in October of 2022, a Fox News contributor named Scott Martin ordered Taco Bell. And it costs $28. And he posts about the order the next day. He reveals inadvertently that like he didn't use any of the combo meals. So he's just like ordering individual Taco Bell items without saving any money,

which would be like one problem why that's not working. He then blames Biden inflation for the reason his Taco Bell delivery order was so expensive. and there's a Fox News sort of clip about this. Let's listen. You want to how bad inflation is? Yesterday, yes, I had a nice lunch at Taco Bell. Costs me about $28 at Taco Bell for lunch. People need to pay for those things, and they do that by getting jobs and getting in the economy and getting active and getting involved. Wait a minute. You spent $28 a Taco Bell for just yourself?

For lunch, yeah. It's true. Okay. That's a lot of Chalupa. Then Taco Bell gets involved, and they're like 14 times $2. burritos equals $28. What's your $28 order? Then AOC gets involved. And she's like, if someone is talking politics and eating $28 of Taco Bell in one sitting, then my immediate follow-up question is, what are their thoughts on Biden's executive order on cannabis rescheduling?

That's pretty funny. And then the New York Times gets involved. And they write, you could order $28 of Taco Bell or you could do the right thing and make this yourself in 30 minutes your choice. And then right as it's sort of like cresting about, uh, Jesus. This went on for five days. God damn. Just as that was sort of dying down, this is when it kicks back up again because a user named Enhood publicist or the neighborhood publicist writes a big long thread about using a grocery delivery app and getting a man who can't order things for her. And then we start all over again. Uh-oh.

Yes. But it's like, first of all, this is a question I have for you. I don't know if this is made clear, but how was it figured out that the $28 was spent in an app versus he seems to be fronting like he spent $28 in person at a Taco Bell, but was it determined that he had done it through a delivery app? Okay. It's a screenshot of a digital order system.

Oh, my God. This is so fucking stupid. He's in a fight with the Taco Bell Twitter account. Jesus. Posting his. receipt. Okay, I will read his receipt for you. So his receipt was one burrito supreme for $6.6.9, I should say. One nachos Belgronde for $7.14. One large Baja blast freeze for $3.79. Nice. A nacho cheese, Doritos, Locos, Taco Supreme for $3.19. And a Doritos cheesey gordita crunch for $5.19. I should say,

That's pretty close to my regular talk about order, actually. And it comes out to $28. Oh, okay, wait. Okay, wait. I got the smoking gun. In the screenshot, it says $25.40. He claims that he spent $28. I'm guessing it was $28 plus a delivery fee, and he didn't tip.

I see. There you go. I see. Yeah. I have even talked about like three times in my life. That just seems like so much food. I didn't want to admit this in the opening, but that is pretty much the only thing

that I'm ordering delivered it anymore and it's usually after one in the morning. Mm-hmm. I'm down to once a month. Yeah, I'll order delivery when I'm sick, which because I have the immune system of a flea is about once a month. Yeah. Okay.

I think that's fair too. Going back to sort of like accessibility conversation, I think that's totally fine. What I think is like very important here to sort of like point out is that by 2022, post-COVID, the sort of dumb internet discourse that isn't culture-war-related or is like vaguely cultural-related will eventually become cultural-related because the people that work for Fox News now are all on the same platforms we are looking at what we're fighting about. So they're very, very quick to sort of jump into an argument between, you know, disabled activists

and leftists and be like, we're going to get into this too. And there's like no off switch. And a lot of larger accounts sort of see that culture war thing and think it started there. And they don't really do like what we've been doing is like dig to the very beginning, which is why in October, on October 18th, after the sort of Instacart mail shopper thing kicks back up again, Jorts the cat gets involved. Are you familiar with Jorts the cat? Of course I'm familiar with Jorz the Cat. Yeah. So Jorts the cat, I guess you can say like what?

He's like a, like a union guy. Yeah, like a pro-labor cat novelty account, I guess. Yeah. Okay, so Jorts writes, all the love for Jorts, but this is why labor-based analyses by themselves can't get us to disability justice. The left has to do better. Thank you, Jorz, the cat. And then, of course, there's a million people in their replies fighting about this. One user writes, under capitalism, disabled people are often forced to be.

complicit in harm for labor practices, whereas the left has a choice about being complicit in abelism. Ostensibly, it's the sort of pro-labor position, right? But it really is more or less like it's sort of anti-pleasure, anti-convenience position where it's like if you ever, if you display a, if you display a use of these services that is over what this sort of general public has deemed to be too much, we'll jump you for it. And it's like, well, like, where, where does the line? Where is the line? And it actually seems like your mom kind of to find this pretty well, which is like you probably shouldn't complain about most of this stuff because, you know, the next stage will just be another kind of leftist on leftist war and it'll just get dumber and more absurd.

And we're going to talk about all of that after the break. In July 2024, this kind of like weird Twitter, leftist Twitter adjacent account, written by this guy, Jules Sudolzv, based on the research we've seen, this is the moment, you know, when he enters that the policing of other people's pleasure, as you've described it, becomes the defining narrative of this discourse cycle. It is sort of left the realm of, like, internecine political fights. So he goes on a tear, and he has, like, multiple tweets about this. So one is, I'm so genuinely confused by whatever the opposite of woke mind virus has a bunch of leftist defendant. Chipotle because I think it's unconscionable to charge $25 for a small lunch, which goes up to $40, if you want it delivered.

The CEOs of both Chipotle and DoorDash are billionaires, and they both dramatically underpay their workers. Another one, fuck, I didn't realize you guys were so inflation-pilled. How did you find a way to blame yourself for corporate price gouging? I'm sorry, you are all sick. And then another one, when did Chipotle start charging $15 pre-taxed or burrito? There's a lot of it. So I'm not even understanding. Is he pro-treatler or anti-treatler, right?

Okay. I can do this. I swear I can do this. He's arguing that the delivery apps are price gouging, and he wants other leftists to be mad about how much restaurant food costs when you use the app. Once again, this is all like very serious emotions based on the price of a Chipotle burrito, which I think is like really important to hold on in the deep depths of your heart as we talk about this stuff. It's like, at the end of the day, food prices cause the French revolution. Food prices, as we are seeing now right now, is kind of what it's all about.

This is just sort of this internety microcosm of the larger human conversation about food prices that has been going on since the days of INAS here in fricking Sumeria. Yes. Underneath this whole thing is something very valid. Food does cost too much, and we have zero safety net, and we spend our time arguing, you know, amongst each other because there's no real good way to impact change. And I think, you know, Jules will probably agree with that. And we need to now change entirely how we are thinking about the stuff because there is

another layer to this that we haven't discussed yet, which is that amid all of this, people online discover that Mr. Jules here has been ordering bottles of water. Water? As in like distilled water, bottled water? Like a bottle of water. Like he's ordering bottled water, which I think is genuinely, unless it's spark like I think it is genuinely insane to order bottles of water if you live in like a city where like that if you live in New York City or something like it's insane to drink bottled water I would agree I would agree but like I don't want to get yelled that by people who are like I've also lived in places without potable tap water. I am aware of how this works but another user stepped in during this whole episode and was like today I learned people order water for delivery I'm not poor I am not working class I am not lower middle class at worst I am middle class at worst I am middle class. I am middle class. and probably upper middle class,

I can't imagine ordering water, in part because my dad would climb out of his casket to beat me up. And then somebody else shared a DoorDash receipt that showed them spending $154 to order 12 packs of Skittles, little bites, and 39 cans of steel reserve, which I think is a joke. Did you read the Katie Weaver piece about sugar?

Yes, but could you summarize it for our listening? So, I mean, this is a piece that came out in the New York Times, a week or two ago and it's a funny essay about her addiction to sugar and she goes to the spa and she tries to rid herself of her addiction and then at the

no spoilers but at the end she decides that she won't bother ridding herself of her addiction and the comments where some of them are like, this is great personal writing, she's such a funny writer, love Katie Weaver and other comments were like how dare this skinny white woman write this article about how she can eat all the sugar she wants

and not get fat? She's evil and I'm like it's so morally fraught our relationship with food, with treats, with pleasure through eating. And I think that the reaction to that piece is very much a sort of reflected facet that illuminates this conversation that we're having right now, which is like, what food should the average American be allowed to enjoy and how and at what cost and in what order of convenience. It is so great you brought that up actually because about a god these these these flame wars go on for so long so. I love that you said flame wars. Let's start calling them flame wars again instead of discord. Yeah, I'm tired of saying the word discourse in this episode. So like this flame war against this jewels account goes on for like two days, three days, finally culminating in a post where he writes, the only reason food delivery is luxury is because corporate greed folks raised

the price to make them unaffordable to the average person. We've been doing cheap food delivery at reasonable prices and decent wages for decades, but all of a sudden, y'all, very important when they drop the y'all online. That means that they're really crashing out. Y'all pretend ordering pizza or Chinese our entire lives is somehow different. Refusing to give up this argument, though led to an incredible bunch of replies here. So let me read a few. So my politics are whatever this isn't.

This has gotten really embarrassing, man. Just take a break for a day or two. To which Jules replied, I will never log off. That's how you'll know I'm dead. This is the exact moment this summer when we get the term burrito taxi. Are you familiar with burrito taxi? It's just like you're ordering a taxi just to bring a burrito to you. Yes.

That is what it is. I would say this is the moment that like this conversation online about delivery apps, about accessibility, about the politics of them and the ethics of them, completely collapses. And now everyone's just screaming at each other. And I think you're totally right, which is that they're now completely focused on, do we deserve them? Should we have them? Are they a luxury?

It is like, it's impossible to make sense of what anyone's saying at this point. Like, there's certain users that are tying this into, like, illegal immigration stuff and, like, wanting to, like, call ice on these people. There's another person who writes, don't order a burrito text. see if the fact your servant can't speak perfect English bothers you and you want him deported. Like it's like it's like it's become, I think I've used this term in an episode before, like a wicker man. Yeah. This nexus point of all of this bullshit and now we've just dumped everything onto it.

I think the term servant as used in this discourse is particularly telling because that ties it into so many other discourses about domestic labor globally and in America. that we don't have time to go into here. But when they erupt... Let's do it. Well, I mean, when there is something that is incredibly explosive about anybody revealing their own personal relationship to domestic labor in their childhood or in their present day,

that can then be weaponized in any discussion that they're currently having or that they will ever have. I think the classic example of this is a Tumblr drama from 10 years ago about this famous, this Tumblr famous blogger named Sixpens, who revealed that she had essentially a child-playing. The Sixth, the Sixthens Child Slave Tumblr drama. I remember this.

Yeah, yeah. Explain this to the audience. I don't know if I can remember this perfectly, but there was a popular blogger who was popular for Tumblr reasons. Like, you know, they were funny. They posted a lot, whatever. A lot of creepy pasta. It was like a creepy pasta blogger.

Yeah, they were from the Global South, I believe. Southeast Asia, I believe. Yeah. And they revealed something. I don't know if you remember that article from ages ago, like my family's slave like that. Oh, it's what's her face? It's Gia Tolentino.

Right. So it's that. And everyone was like, oh, Gia and Tolentino is having a sixpence slave drama thing. Exactly. So it's that kind of this person who's essentially an indentured servant and their family, which, yes, was probably common in the class that they are in the place where they come from,

but to a global audience, especially with this must have been 2016, like peak Tumblr, SJW, was, yeah, hugely explosive and caused an immense amounts of catastrophic discourse and, you know, whether it's okay for anybody in the entire world anywhere to have a servant and whether six-pence should be canceled. I think the problem with six-pence is that they were just completely unapologetic. Yeah. I mean, I think we're also talking about, like, children fighting with each other to some degree. But I agree. Like, yeah, there was a, there was a real breakdown in communication there.

And I think, I think you touched on something really important that I want to hit one last time before we get to the end. end of our story so far, which is that these are just not the arenas for serious political conversation. Like, fighting about the cost of a Chipotle burrito on the internet is insane way to spend your time, no matter what you're trying to do. I would also argue that at this point, a viral campaign to, like, get better wages or to scare a corporation with, like, your social media activity, like, probably isn't going to work. There was a brief moment, you know, where it was possible back in, like, 2014, you can do

like a flash mob to like scare target into being woke or something. Yeah. But we don't live in that world anymore. You know, obviously there are all kinds of ways to be an activist online and to use the internet for activism. We're seeing this right now with the 50-51 movement on Reddit. Like the stuff is happening and the internet plays a part. Right.

But the days of like scaring a corporation into doing rainbow capitalism because you got mad about it on Twitter are over. You're not doing activism by fighting with people about whether or not it's ethical to order bottled water. which is crazy and you shouldn't do it. It's crazy. You can just say something is crazy. And or de cost a, rather than getting into the culture war about it.

But, I mean, that's inevitable. That's always going to happen. It's the default state at this point of the internet conversation between any groups that differ by opinion from each other even slightly will inevitably devolve. So the reason we're talking about this is that exact devolution that you're talking about and how it continues to sort of come back up and get worse somehow every time. So for instance, about three weeks before we recorded this, a Twitter user wrote, a common

boomer trope is that millennials are broke because we eat out all the time. The reality is that if you have a remote job or you're a freelancer, eating out is often more economical than cooking due to lost productivity. And then they write like an insane thread about how like they're ordering all their meals on DoorDash. It goes viral again. Someone writes, I want 2025 to be the year that people admit to themselves that they actually just prefer to spend their money

on burrito taxis and that this is an objectively luxury good. If you own a refrigerator and a stove, it is the first approximation, never more economical to order delivery. And they have a whole thread about how like you're a class trader if you order food online.

And then that spreads, of course, to our new little leftist honeypull Blue Sky. It gets a screenshot on Blue Sky, and someone writes, as someone on the Zoomer of Millennial Boundary, I feel there's a legit problem with people not knowing how to purchase groceries. Then there's a whole fight there about it.

And then, of course, our man Jules, who is now on Blue Sky, gets involved one last time writing, sorry not to restart the burrito taxi discourse, but it's genuinely funny that we're openly being fucked side. by the worst price gouging and wealth inequality ever. And some of you are like, well, if you didn't want to get fucked sideways, why didn't you make a burrito at home and drink tap water? And then someone replied, motherfucker, you have a sink.

There you go. To historicize this discourse a little bit, it's important to remember that we live, despite everything, we live in a time where food is more abundant and available than anybody, our ancestors. Except for eggs. Except for eggs. That's a different problem. No more eggs.

But we live in a time. time where food is the most abundant and affordable it's ever been. And now if we go back approximately 120, 150 years, the thing that's costing you the most is food and clothing and rent is costing you the least. So we have we have entered the sort of reverse zone where now things like rent are sky high, but food and clothing are almost, you know, unlimited compared to the resources that were available to people a century or more ago. So you're saying that if you're order sheen you're a class trader yeah exactly and you're ablest if you say it's bad to order sheen is that where you're headed with this it's just ugly that's even worse it is ugly it's really

ugly garbage i mean that's look what you need to do is go on ebay search for h and m clothing made before 2016 by as much of as possible that shit will never break and it's pretty cheap that's what you got to do you got to get them you're gonna get these brands before the forced obsolescence yeah urban outfitors pre 2015 i'm still wearing that stuff yeah it was right before they shifted into like doing their own thrifting so you're buying like really upmarked thrifted clothes. Okay. To bring it all on home, do you think that there's an end in sight to this kind of debate

online or do you think it is just baked into the machinery of the platforms we use? People are always going to argue about food and pleasure and money. And this is the sort of perfect nexus of all of those highly contentious topics, specifically in American society. And I feel like it's that one of these things that, you know, once this discourse has sort of arrived and the grooves have been worn in, it's not something that people are likely to get away from. I can only hope that people learn from the prevalence of the discourse

that complaining about your delivery order, unless there's something, I mean, egregiously wrong with it from the restaurant point of view or the driver point of view. But there's a day class A sort of gradient there. If you surpass it, you are likely to be set upon by the treatlerite calling, you know, wolves. I ordered Taco Bell about a month ago. you know, coming back from the bar and I got the wrong order.

And you know why I didn't go on Blue Sky or X and complain about it? Because it was way more food. It was someone had ordered way more food than I did. And I ate that shit cold all weekend. You were, you were blessed by not having complained about your orders online before. It was a carmic debt repaid. If you keep that in your mind, it doesn't work for airlines or rent a carers. As we discussed, you can, you can yell at them all you want.

But everything else, I would just say, oh, my meal came out wrong. Hey, universe, get me next time. Practice resilience with your relationship with delivery and ride chair apps, and you will be comically rewarded. And I think in all seriousness, like, remember that like the people that are delivering your food are just as screwed by this stuff as you are. In America, things are always getting slightly worse. So like, be kind to each other. And don't order bottle water.

I think we can all agree that that one, like, you just don't even do that. I mean, I think the problem with this guy is that he's probably got. microplastic in his brain from all the bottled water. I, okay, look, when I lived in Sao Paulo, you cannot drink the tap water, you will get ill.

And people have a filter or they order jugs of water. And in fact, in fact, I once like ordered a bottle of water, like a normal still bottle of water at a restaurant. And all the Brazilians were like, that is insane. Why would you do that?

Like, they're like, that is a ridiculous thing to do to order a bottle of water. So, you know, you can't even make that argument. In countries where you can't drink the water, that is still crazy to order a bottle of water.

Allegra, thank you for coming on so much. Thank you so much for having me, Ryan. This was great. If people want to follow you online, where can I do that? They can follow me at Chotchky on Blue Sky. That's T-C-H-O-T-C-H-K-E on Blue Sky.

That's also my substack. I am on Instagram as Chachky, although there's an underscore in there, and I don't know where it is. I didn't know you were that. Blue Sky. I just followed you. I didn't. I thought you were under your name. I'm still finding everyone post Twitter migration. Yeah. And that's mostly where I am. And I also have a cool website that I just redesigned. That's Allegro Rosenberg.com. That's where you can find out about my

writing and upcoming book and all that good stuff. Thank you again. This was great. Thank you. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at Garbageday. Email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Youmus. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our derange logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com slash panic world. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude. production slash ads. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer,

our wonderful bad man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at Panicworldpod at gmail.com. And one piece of advice for me to you. Chill out. Touch grass while you still can. It breaks my brain a little that like when I read Jules's tweets forgetting that he ordered bottled water, I'm like, this guy's making some good points. But then I feel completely under.

Then I'm like, no, I can't agree with anything that somebody says who orders a four-dollar bottle of water. Champagne Socialist, more like bottled water Bolshevik. Am I right? Am I right, guys? It was worth it. Don't worry. I'm still recording.

so we've got that on the tape. Find a way to fit that in.