Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - What defined the internet in 2024?

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

2024 was wild! "Brain rot" was the Oxford word of the year. TikTok's days away from being banned. The CostCo Guys and the Hawk Tuah girl were everywhere. Taylor is joined by Sam Sanders, host of the Sam Sanders Show on KCRW to break down the biggest online moments of 2024. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Taylor Lorenz. Welcome to Power User. The internet moves fast, so fast that it's hard to remember what captured our collective attention, even a couple weeks ago. The lifespan of a meme is getting shorter and shorter. There are new influencers being minted on the daily, and suddenly it feels like there's an entire new suite of apps that we all have to learn and keep up with. But 2024 was an unforgettable year, and today we're going to be breaking down the biggest viral moments, unpacking who's up and who's down, and what 2024's biggest memes and online phenomena can tell us about where 2025 is headed.

To do this, I've got Sam Sanders, pop culture expert and host of the Sam Sanders show on KCRW. Sam, welcome to Power User. So good to be here. Thank you for having me. This is great. You were on my show just a few weeks ago. We're still talking about that episode.

It was so delightful. So let's just make this a thing. Let's just bop to each other's podcasts in perpetuity. I love it. So this year started with a meme that was kind of a remnant of 2023. And I'm talking about the Mark Zucker versus Elon Musk cage fight that was supposed to happen. Oh, were they going to fight? Were they going to an M.MA or something?

Exactly. Oh, Lord. Yeah. Girl, I forgot that even happened. But remind me. Yeah, Elon Musk sort of, I think, tacitly challenged Zuck. I'll fight him. I'll fight Zuckerberg any place, any time, any room.

Zuck started training for it. Remember, he was fighting with all the MMA fighters. And then Elon sort of quietly backed out. I think he sort of claimed some injury maybe. It never happened. I think that would have been the biggest moment on the internet had it happened. But it did kick off what has now been called the Zuckassons, which is after that sort of rumors of those fights started,

you saw Mark Zuckerberg really start to evolve his look. He got very into MMA. He grew out the hair. He's got a new style, a new swag. He got some Riz. He got some Riz. He really did. Maybe he is the new Rizzler, the new Rizler.

I'd love to do a competition, whether it's UFC or something else. I think I can speak for the world where we would love to see that. Now, I do want to say, though, when it comes to Riz for these tech dudes, the bar is on the floor, the bar is beneath the parking garage, the bar is in hell.

So, like, doing the least feels like the most when you're comparing yourself to these other tech CEOs. I also found it quite remarkable that as many of the actual images I saw of Zucks glow up, I saw just as many like AI fake images of folks like imagining a Zuck glow up, giving him an ass, giving him a beard, giving him body-a-di. It was very strange to see the ways in which the internet glommed onto the idea of a Zuck glow up and like ran with it.

I didn't expect that. I didn't expect that. Another big story this year I think in tech is just the niche of of platforms. We saw an explosion of competitors to Twitter. Obviously, threads and platforms like Blue Sky launched previously, but this is the year a lot of them gained traction. We also saw things like the TikTok ban. And it seems like the whole social media world has kind of been tossed up and jumbled around. So I'm curious, Sam, what do you think of these text-based competitors to Twitter? Do you think that we saw a Twitter competitor emerge in 2024 or not?

I think Blue Sky is the fetch of social media. Stop trying to make fetch happen. It's not going to happen. Blue Sky will never get to even half the size of Twitter at its peak because I think the internet has moved very quickly from a text and still image-based experience to a video-based experience. The internet that I came up on, that you came up on, It was kind of text first.

And Twitter came into that space when we all were still wanting to write about our experiences. You know, we moved from Facebook status updates to Twitter. We were still reading websites with, like, long articles. We had a text-based experience of Internet and smartphone. And I think from the pandemic on, with the rise of TikTok, a lot of people's experience, especially people under 35, the experience has gone from text-based to video-based. And so you're never going to recapture that Twitter at its peak energy because people aren't doing internet like that in as high numbers as they were years ago.

And it's been hard for me as a 40-year-old because I realized in this shift to video, I'm probably not making my own TikToks. I just watched them. whereas in a text space internet, I was tweeting all day. And I had a social life in these spaces that I haven't been able to recreate since the demise of Twitter. So for me, it's less about which platform's up and which platform is down. It's like, what are the big ways in which we're going to use our devices? And it's moving to video and no longer text.

I totally agree with you. I think the text internet is dead. Right? Like, I feel like it was on life support last year. Yes. And I think also Twitter's aggressive pivot toward video as well, because they've been pushing so much more video in the feed. Like, it's just, it's not going to happen. We've moved on.

Yeah. Well, and then it's like when I want to go back and try to type a blue sky or type a tweet, I'm so scared of having any opinion because someone's going to rip it apart. And that energy is worse now than it was five or six years ago. You can't say anything online without someone being like, fuck you. There's some sort of like toxicity that feels very like mainstreamed, especially in the second half of 2024. And I don't know if that's Trump election vibes or what, but there's like a dark energy, I feel like. And I, you know, I remember even when I was covering the 2016 election, tweeting everything, I still knew that in general, most of my tweets would be treated nicely.

whether I was having a hot take on Bernie Sanders or not. And now I'm literally afraid to say what music I'm listening to online. Because someone's going to be like, you're trash, you're awful, you are stupid, how dare you like this thing. I posted a cut of one of my recent episodes talking about like Billy Eilish albums in which one I liked better. And somebody was really furious about it. And I'm just like, are you serious? And so I think like we've had years now where people know the way to more engagement is to fight. So everyone knows that.

And we've seen a lot of these spaces become overrun with outright in-cell and bots. Yes. And that's there too. You know? Yes. Yeah. I think they're all manipulated. They're also all AI driven, right?

We have like the rise of algorithmic feeds that I think have just become completely normalized. and that is why you have a lot of context collapse on different platforms. Oh, yeah. I think that we're just going to see more, aside from Google and meta, which have a duopoly, now they've gotten TikTok banned, which I think is said to happen early next year. Do you think it's going to happen? I think there's a whole podcast episode on this. Yes, it's happening.

Yes. Unless, you know, there would have to be like an act of God from Trump. I don't think. Here's my thing, though. I think Trump likes to be liked. And if he can do something, we're at the 23rd hour, he comes. and quote unquote saves it and all the influencers are like,

thank you, Daddy Trump. He would get off on that shit. I want to believe that. I think he also does a lot of really crazy policies that people fucking hate. True. It's ultimately this was Biden's policy, so it's not his policy.

So I think he, you know, but I do think that the social media landscape is just fractured. It also seems like 2024 was this year where we saw the year of long-form media where it wasn't just short-form content that has sort of dominated our feeds since TikTok launch. But you saw people leaning into these hours-long podcasts or days-long streams.

You had Kaisen out, one of the biggest Twitch streamers, streaming for 30 days straight in what's called a sub-a-thon, which essentially when you're streaming back-to-back 24-7 so that you can get as many subscriptions as possible. I have cams on 24-7. They watch me eat, sleep, wake up, take shower. Okay, so how many days are you doing, though? I'm doing 30s. He literally just had programming where he was streaming consistently throughout the month of November hitting record after record. He's obviously not the first person to do this,

but I think he hit really big numbers, but also sort of like cultural. There was a lot of cultural moments. There were a lot of like clips from that stream that ended up going mega viral. You also saw the rise of other streamers like I Show Speed and these big Hassan Piker had a breakout year. He's a political commentator, right? But this is a guy that sits in front of his computer eight to 10 hours a day talking and you have a lot of people consuming media for hours and hours and hours. And I think that's a little different because I think three or four years ago, I don't know that all of us were consuming two to three to four hour long shows, whether in live stream or podcast form. Well, and it's also just hearing you say how these folks do it, it scares me to death.

I mean, you and I both came up in traditional quote unquote legacy newsrooms. And the foundational organizing principle of what you would do in those spaces is you don't take the pen and you don't take the mic until you've prepared and know what the hell you're going to say are right. And it seems like everything you're saying about what these men are doing and women, too, is entirely improvising off the cuff. That is amazing. I'd be so afraid to do that. Even this conversation we're having right now, we had a call yesterday and talked about

discussion topics, right? Every podcast episode I take, I prepare a script, I research, and a team of editors helps me go over it. And so to hear you talk about the ways that Kai or Hassan can just get out there and just go live for not hours but days at a time, it is a new way of thinking about being a public intellectual that I find intriguing and also scary. Yes, I do want to say that they do spend quite a bit of time preparing too. But you're right. There's no script. There's no script.

There's no script. Right. It's all about kind of like what's going to happen next. And someone like, they're very reactive, right, to the situation as well, because you want to keep people engaged and keep people guessing. And I mean, it's a testament to their skill. Like, they're obviously very talented. I don't know that I could do that. But it is, you know, as someone who turned 40 this year, it has me to say, I'm like, oh, we're into an new world.

And I don't know if I have the skill set to thrive in the way that I would have thrived in the media landscape of 10 years ago. This was a big year of reckoning for Mr. Beas. This is the biggest content creator on YouTube. makes children's content. He got a big $100 million deal with Amazon Prime Studios to produce a big reality competition show, basically game show. And this was the year that he really had his reckoning. For years, his former employees had been coming out talking about labor abuses, poor working conditions, how basically they were being subject to kind of like torture for these videos. And a YouTuber named Dogpack dropped a sort of tell-all video that really

open the floodgates for all of this reporting to come out. I want to show this segment from an internal document at Mr. Beast called How to Succeed in Mr. Beast Production. Specifically on page 19, there's a paragraph called, No, does not mean no. I don't want to know if we want to say the downfall of Mr. Beast, but we certainly saw the Mr. Beast reckoning in 2024. This reminds me a lot of what is happening in the world of reality TV.

Like a lot of folks coming forward and saying, you like these little shows, you like this and that and the dating shows. and the housewives, but behind the scenes, it's like psychological torture, sensory deprivation, manipulation, and the list goes on. And I think the through line with what's happening with Mr. Beast and with what's happening in reality TV, when you have media spaces in which there's no union protections for anybody, this stuff can happen. I think the larger issue for me with reality TV and with YouTube and YouTubers like Mr. Beast

is that these newish media spaces need unions and union protections. Well, we just saw, right? The Love is Blind contestants were just declared official employees that happened recently. As they should be. Yeah, the NLRB was like,

no, you are employees and you need to have protections. And that's, yeah, that, like, it's funny. We had this like summer or two summers of like protest and strikes across the country. Teachers were striking, postal workers were striking and there was this idea that like unions were back, I hope they are. And I want everyone working in these new spaces to be able to have the choice if they need to,

to like get some protections. Yeah. Well, I want to talk about sort of like Mr. Bees as a concept because this idea of this like mega YouTuber has been so big since YouTube started, right? We had this era of like these mega stars that were so big. More recently we've seen kind of the nicheification of the internet of YouTube. It's very hard to reach the level that he is at unless you started almost a decade ago. He surpassed PewDiePie.

He has become the biggest in the world. A lot of people thought he was sort of too big to fail. I think we have seen peak Mr. Beast. I'm going to put it in the ground. That doesn't mean that I don't think he's still going to be around and still sign major deals. I think there's too many people invested in the success of this business to really see it go away. But I think it's going to become one of these, like, zombie YouTube channels, where we have all... Zombie.

That's strong. Well, yeah, I mean, when you look at some of the biggest YouTubers and YouTube channels that were like huge in 2016, 2017, 2018, even 2014, right? Like, they sort of hit peak cultural relevance. And they don't necessarily lose all their subscribers. They might atrophy a little or grow at a slower rate. But they don't have that cultural impact. And I do feel like Mr. B's defined 2021 to 2022, 2020, Internet so much. And now I just think we're moving into a new phase.

I think people are starting to look a little bit askew at some of his challenges. It came out that he had actually not paid a bunch of doctors who had done eye surgery. And this video, we're hearing a thousand people's blindness. It's going to be crazy. Turns out he didn't pay some of the doctors involved. Are you serious? Yes. This is part of what led to this cancellation.

Exactly. So I think we're just, we're seeing, you know, the backlash to him where I think it's going to be hard for him to continue on the path that he was. previously. And I don't think that he's going to go away, Mr. Beast fans, because I know they're going to come debate me about this. But I do think that his cultural relevance is fading. And unless he reinvents himself, which he might, his star is, his movie. Also, I'm not going to worry about him, either way, because either way, he's rich. That man got paid. He'll be fine. He'll be fine. February was actually when we started to really see the proliferation of a lot of this AI

slop that I think also has come to dominate the 2020. internet. We saw the Taylor Swift deep fakes, remember, when those sort of vaguely pornographic deep fakes went viral of Taylor Swift on Twitter. I didn't click on those. I was like, let me not curse myself. Yeah. Yeah. They came across my feed because Elon was initially refusing to censor them or, you know, remove them in any way. But I feel like AI had a real big moment this year. Like if we're talking breakout technologies of the year, AI sort of warping everything around us seems to be like a defining tech story. I don't think it's as big as we thought it was going to be. At the end of 2023, I remember everyone's saying, 2024 is going to be the year that AI ruins everything,

specifically the music industry. You remember, in late 20203, there was this AI song of Drake and the weekend that sounded surprisingly. surprisingly like a real Drake weekend song. It was sued to oblivion within a day or two, but it got really vile really quickly to the extent that the daily, I want to say, had a whole episode about it. When an anonymous music producer used artificial intelligence to impersonate Drake earlier this month,

it jolted the music industry. It was everywhere. And I follow music obsessively, and my thinking was like, oh, this is a sign. 2024 is going to be the year in which AI ruins pop music. But in actuality, in the world of music, it didn't because everyone in their mom is just suing everything AI and music into oblivion. And then when I do see AI pop up in other spaces, it's still very bad. So I'm not worried about it.

It's so bad. Wait, no, but you're, okay, I would say, okay, it hasn't ruined pop music yet, but it's ruined everything else around us. Like, I mean, AI Slop, I feel like, has destroyed so much of the internet. Look at what happened to Google, right? Another big story this year was the AI recipes and the AI generated food on food delivery apps, the glue on the pizza. I'm Canaanotoplas and I'm eating the glue pizza. It's good.

Earlier this year, recipes were going viral because people were Googling recipes and Google was auto-filling different recipes and it was suggested putting glue in your pizza to ensure that the cheese was sticky. I would argue, though, like what actually has ruined Google, at least in my experience, is not AI. It's all the sponsored results whenever I search for anything. That's the bigger ruining of me. And so, like, the inshittification of these apps and these platforms is happening and can happen with or without AI. I totally disagree because I think it is AI that is insidifying these apps.

I mean, look at something like Facebook with Shrimp Jesus, an AI-generated image of Jesus made of shrimp that went mega-vigree. viral on Facebook. I also think that we started to see AI affecting the real world. Remember the AI Wonka experience that happened this past spring where basically an AI generated flyer of a Willy Wonka experience went viral. A bunch of people showed up and then it was a disaster. It was nothing like the AI generated images. I think a lot of these things loom bigger on the internet than they actually are in real life. It was a funny online moment and I do think it started to show the problems and we saw this happen again, right, with that parade later in the year. I think it was also in Ireland. Thousands gathered in Dublin, excited for a Halloween parade that never came. The event was a hoax,

spread by an AI-generated website based in Pakistan. Again, you see this AI-generated flyer, AI-generated content. It's become so easy to produce creative work that I feel like there's, I just think like the gap between marketing and reality has just completely diverged. Yeah. I am not as worried as you are yet. I'm not a full dumer. Yeah. Because I think that in general, I am still able to have a pretty good experience online.

And I'm still at least at this point able to sniff out the AI pretty easily. I will be worried when it becomes harder and harder to do so. And so far for me in my world, hasn't become that yet. That's all I'm saying. The problem is, Sam, many people do not realize it's fake. This is the problem. I really don't want to downplay it, Sam, because I have to tell you, as somebody that covers technology and media literacy and all of this stuff, you as a journalist might be able to tell what is AI and what is not. Most people cannot. And the thing is that something doesn't have to necessarily be believable to so doubt, right? Like, I think just the fact that we're

questioning whether or not things are AI or not has made it so that there's just a lot more distrust in the things that we're seeing and consuming. Yeah. Brain rot was Oxford Dictionary's word of the year for 2024, and I think it was perfect. I never know how seriously to take the word brain rot because it feels like three quarters of the time when I hear it, it's delivered with a wink and a nod. So it's like, are you saying your brains actually rotted? Or are you saying L-O-O-O-B? Brain rot, I'm actually smarter than all of this, and I'm thinking on a higher level about all of these things.

BrainRot speaks to a specific type of content that is kind of so overly optimized for the internet that it just becomes, like, comically dumb? Yes, but the fact that you can see it and see the dumbness and how the dumbness worked means that you're smart. Again, not rotted, right? I think those of us that can recognize BrainRot, I think the average six-year-old, Does not have that media literacy. I think they love brainwit. They just like skibbitty toilet. They just are like, oh, skibbitty toilet.

Skibbitty toilet all day long. I also broke the news earlier this year that a skibbitty toilet movie is perhaps in development. Michael Bay is exploring that. Of course Michael Bay is doing the skibety toilet movie. I cannot wait for the 15-minute final disaster scene of Michael Bay's skibity toilet movie where, like, a toilet the size of Arkansas explodes. Oh, absolutely. You know he's going to do it. Absolutely.

And I'll be there. I'll be there. Up next, Sam and I will debate who's the most influential content creator of 2024. We had some breakout creators as well this year. Earlier in the year, we started out with Risa Tisa with her viral series, Who the F, did I marry? I'm going to tell the story of how I met, dated, married, and divorced, a real pathological liar. I watched two of the TikToks and was like, I'll watch.

wait for the movie because I think it was like altogether like over 40 hours of content she posted about this bad relationship. Bless her. Bless it. But I will wait for the 90 minute movie. Well, a TV series, I believe, was in the worst. Oh, a TV series. It doesn't need a whole series. Just make it a TV. Just make it a movie. I agree. I think it goes back to this long form content thing though. I think like the fact I sat through it for all 40 hours or whatever it was. You did. Give it a grade. Give it a review. I loved it. I would say B-plus. Okay. Okay. She seems great.

Like her energy seems so welcoming, you know? I think her story was wild. I think it kicked off this trend on TikTok of long-form storytelling, where you even are seeing this with like that little Muppet meme recently where people are using it to tell this like sort of humorous stories in multiple acts. Like I think people love storytelling. We're seeing a lot more storytelling on social media. You know, a few years ago, the pinnacle of. of long-form storytelling on a social platform was the story of Zola on Twitter,

which became a movie. You want to hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out? It's kind of long, but it's full of suspense. No one's doing Zola on Twitter anymore. They're doing Zola on TikTok. It's moved.

It's shifted. I'm going to mention some other big content creators who broke out in 2024. Just do it. Okay, well, we have to say Moodang. I don't know if she counts as a content creator, but I think, you know... No, she's...

She doesn't. She's a viral animal. I think she was the viral animal. When we look at the viral animal of 2024, she was the viral animal. It was a year of hippo. But she is not the cut. Yeah.

She's not. Yeah. I think the New Yorker recently wrote about the year of the creator and tried to argue that her handlers were the content creators. I think that's a stretch. I think she's just a viral animal.

It's whoever held the camera. Whoever's posting the content. They're the ones. Yeah. We also had Jules LeBron. You see how I do my makeup for work? Very demure. very mindful. I don't come to work with a green cut crease. I don't look like a clown when I go to

work. Love her. And you know what I love? She came in. She got her bag. She's like, I'm using this money to pay for my transition, and then she wandered off. I don't think about her anymore. I just know she got her bag and it's helping her. Don't stick around long enough to be a milkshake duck. I agree. And then I would say the two major content creators that define 2024. And you tell me who really encapsulates 2024 better. The Costco guys, including the Rizzler, or the Hock Tua girl. You gotta give him that Hock Tua and spit on that thing.

Oh, Huck to a girl, because hers is the perennial cautionary tale. Like, she is caught up now in a crypto scheme. That was so quick. I don't even know if this is a cautionary tale. I think she just speed ran the entire cycle of virality. This goal went viral immediately, signed brand deals immediately. She knew. She got a podcast immediately.

Got the podcast. We're selling crypto and Bitcoin immediately. And now it's all falling apart. All within a few months. But the cycle was so quick. I mean, normally that would take like a couple years to like live out that life cycle. As someone who podcasts for a living watching that happen, I was just like, oh my God, what am I doing wrong?

How do I hocktoa myself? My goodness. Well, her podcast was backed by a sports betting company. Okay, I don't want that. I don't want that. Damn. Damn. Okay. I got to go Costco guys, though. Really? Yeah. I mean, I just think that they have become this sort of like interesting phenomenon

where they've really created this world, this like extended universe of people. The Rizzler is, I mean, he's an eight-year-old. So he has not been canceled yet. But he's just such an online phenomenon. I mean, he just appeared in a big Christmas ad for a toy company. I want a B-ball hoop and a brats dog. I want a T-ball set in a pixel pet and a little types ride in the backyard. Has Costco said anything about the Costco guys?

They are supportive. They're quietly supportive. They don't, I don't think that they have partnered directly, but they allow them to film in the stories as long as they're bothered. That, for me, is the most interesting part of the Costco guys. Costco navigating it. Like, I find Costco to be an incredibly impressive brand with incredible longevity. I think that, like, them navigating Costco guys without getting too close is smart because

who knows who's going to milkshake duck. If they milkshake duck, Costco can still be like, you know, that was them. I don't think people overly associate with them with Costco. I think they're known as the Costco guys, but I do think that they've sort of superseded the brand. They've done more. know AJ and Big Justice and all of them. Are you a Costco girly?

I'm not. I don't have the membership, but I support. It's kind of miraculous. I have friend dates at Costco. Like when it's time to catch up with a good friend that I haven't seen for a while, a lot of times, I'm like, meet me at Costco. It's so fun. Yeah. Anywho, sorry. This old man here, waxing poetic on Costco. It's a great place. This summer, there was also obviously tons of big viral political moments from Trump's multiple assassination attempts to the brat-pilled coconut memes this summer, Brat summer generally. It was interesting kind of like how seasonal that meme is.

I feel like we had Brat Summer and I don't know what we're having this fall. People have been saying it's sort of Trad Wife fall. That just doesn't... I sure hope not. That feels dark. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I go so back and forth on Bratts,

Brat. Because on the one hand, I love Charlie X-E-X. I loved that album. I loved the remix album. And I thought everything she did about the presentation of her in that moment was incredible. Because she took this music that is niche. It's like intensely niche dance music. And she made a lot of folks care about it who wouldn't through the smartness of that branding. But then as soon as I saw the ways in which Democrats and Team Kamala tried to co-opt Brat, In hindsight, it clearly didn't work. It did not work at all. Yeah. And so I'm of two minds on Brat. I think when I think of Brat as just an expression of Charlie X, X, X and her music in this year for her, great. As soon as it became political, I think for a second and two, I was like, oh, that's fun. And now I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

What do you think about it? I think, like, a lot of interesting stuff has happened in sort of like music pop culture this year. We had the Ares tour concluding, which is obviously one of the biggest tours of all time, spawns tons of content. She'll bring you back. She'll bring you back. That thing will never end. She's taking it to the grave. But then we also saw the rise of this new generation of pop girlies of Sabrina Carpenter with espresso this summer and taking things on in her video with Barry Kogan, Chapel Rhone, Charlie X, X, X.X. I know that Sabrina and Charlie have been around for a while, all three of them. It's like none of these people are an overnight success, but you cannot deny that this was, for. all three of them a breakout year. Well, and what I love about the three of them, and I would

add Olivia to that mix, and maybe even Gracie Abrams, they're not fighting. They're not doing the thing that the celebrity women were kind of forced to do when I was like coming up in the 2000s where it's like, who hates who, who's pitted against who. All of these women have covered each other's songs or performed together, and they all share and show love for each other. And I like that. Nothing but love for my pop queens. I love them all. I feel like they had an interesting year in fashion also. Oh, this girl, I dress like an uncle taking his nephew to soccer practice. I'm so out of touch on fashion. I think we finally maxed out on the niche TikTok aesthetics. I think no more strawberry girl, milk girl. We did see in 2024 the rise of the mob wife aesthetic.

coastal cowgirls. I think everyone's a little bit sick of them. I think we have had enough... They come too quickly. They come too quickly. It kind of reminds me of also the way that we think about men. We saw over the summer it was the rat boys were in. Yeah, the rat boys thing.

That was just like, yeah, that was for the white boys. It wasn't for all the boys. But now they're being called noodle boys. This is, okay, the larger thing here is that like every few months we find a new word to describe people getting their rocks off on the very idea of Timothy Shalabay. Yeah, it's true. That's what it is. That's what it is. Y'all are obsessed with Timothy Shalameh.

And every few months, you find a new word for that. I would like to drumroll, please. Introduce the Timothy Shalemay look-alike competition. Five minutes before the event, there was already like a thousand people there. People crave community and connection. I think that's what these cele look like contests that have gone viral really in the later part of this year really speak to. As somebody tweeted, and I'm going to butcher exactly how the tweet was. worded, but it was basically like these are free offline events that anyone can go to. And it's really

rare that we have like spaces to meet up and meet people. Oh yeah. I get that. And I'm not mad at it. I don't think it's for me. I'm not going unless they have like a Tyrese lookalike contest because I would like to try to win that one. But I think it's really earnest and pure. You know, when they started, I was like, oh my God, are the cops going to F this up? Is it going to become violent? Is it going to become weird and like a problem for these kids out there? But, but, but. But, I was like, oh, my God, are the cops going to F this up? Is it. It's going to become violent. Is it. It's going to become weird and like a problem for these kids out there. But it seems to just be a good time. Yeah. So far they've been good. There hasn't really been drama. Obviously, sometimes, you know, Timothy showed up to his. Glenn Powell zoomed in, I believe, to his. I will say, I think we've reached peak lookalike contest. There was a Jason Kelsey one

last week. I don't think they're going to continue that much into 2020. Do they only do the white guys? Have there been any ones that aren't white guys? There's a Zendaya one. But yeah, we need a little more diversity, I would say, in that world. But Partifle, which is the main engine behind all of them, which is the sort of Gen Z's favorite event playing out. I've used it. Yeah. I like Partifle. Well, Partifle has said they are shutting them all down. They said at the end of 2024, no more. But they've been working. Yeah. So I think they're just joking around, but I do think in January, look, it's cold. I don't know if people want to go out for these as much as they did, you know, maybe in October and November. What do you think are some overlooked trends or

or memes this year? What were some sort of like underrated online moments that really ended up being? Maybe we didn't think they were as influential in the moment. What sort of stands out to you? I think it's not so much a thing we missed, but a thing we were just talking about in the wrong way. When Beyonce released Cowboy Carter, her first country album, the stage was set for this like race war in Nashville. And I don't have to tell you all the racialized history of country music in America. Before it was labeled country music, that kind of American music was made in integrated southern spaces. And that music became racialized to sell records. Back in the day, you could only sell music to white audiences if it was made by white people.

So literally, when labels began to sell it, they differentiated. And the white stuff became country music. and the black stuff became literally on the Billboard charts race music, but it was all the same thing. So our very idea of country music in America is racialized, right? That said, Beyonce releases Cowboy Carter, and everyone's like, this is the mean racist Nashville elites and black people in black country, and it's going to be a fight.

And we didn't get a fight. What we got was Shibuzzi's Bar Song-Tipsy topping the Billboard Hot 100 for 18 weeks. So it wasn't just the biggest country song in the country this year. It was the biggest song, period, in the country this year. And it was a country song written and performed by a black guy with dreadlocks, sampling a hip-hop classic, Jayquan's tipsy. The only other song that has been number one longer was Little Nas X's Old Town Road, another country song performed by a black man.

And so for me, the biggest undercover story of 2024, was the great country race battle that wasn't. There's no battle. Hip hop is part of every genre. Black people are part of every genre. And most of America is just enjoying all the songs. You know, like Morgan Wallen's songs have trap beats under them. Like it's like there's no battle.

Like most of the music consuming public wants to hear pop and country and Charlie and dance and all of it. And like this idea of genre means a lot less to real people than we think it does. Yeah. Sorry to soapbox. No, that is so interesting and I think so true. Last thing before we go, what are your predictions for what we will see on the internet in 2025? I think we'll continue to see the slow downfall of TV streaming. Just before we hopped on the line, I saw the new trailer for the next season of The White Lotus.

And I'm like, oh, finally, I can take my streaming app seriously again. But for the last year or so, Netflix, Peacock, Hulu, all the others, they systemically kind of let me down. I don't like the interfaces. I can't find good stuff to watch. They don't seem to be part of the zeitgeist or having their finger on the pulse anymore. But dare I say, my energies in terms of like just viewing might be shifting. to a place like YouTube, you know? Yeah.

That's what I see coming in my world. I'm probably years behind the kids anyway. They're all on YouTube already. But this 40-year-old who still believes in, like, the heyday of HBO, I might be making my way to YouTube more in the new year. I get it. I think YouTube is going to have another huge 2025, especially if slash when this TikTok band goes through.

YouTube is a huge beneficiary along with meta. I think Twitter will really. remain relevant but become sort of increasingly miserable. Like I think that the way that people remained on it throughout the election in 2024, it was sort of like the last grasp. I think now that especially under Trump and Elon's, you know, close relationship with Trump, it's just going to be full truth social. And we're just going to see that fraction, as you mentioned, as well.

The move away from text, I think Twitter's down for 2024. Yeah. And I think that we're going to see also, I mean, it just goes back to streaming. I think we're going to see the birth of a new generation of live streamers and long-form content creators that are really going to take advantage of this more long-form ecosystem to build a name for themselves. And I think streaming is becoming more and more part of that. Can we live stream together in the new year in one of our backyards? You want to launch your Twitch show?

I want to walk into a newest territory for me with a friend who I trust, Taylor Lorenz. 2025, the year Sam Sanders goes full Twitch Star. With Taylor's help, I'm not going alone. I got to hold a hand. Sam Sanders' Sub-Athon coming fall 2025. There you go. Get ready, get ready, get ready. I'll put my dogs in there to be fun.

Well, Sam, thank you so much for joining me. And happy end of the year. Happy end of the year. Thank you for just like what you do. Like even in this conversation, you taught me some things. So I appreciate the education you're given to myself and your audience every day. Thank you. That's all for the show.

You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Lorenz. Power User is produced by Travis Larcich and Jelani Carter. Our executive producer is Zach Mack. Our video editor is Sam Essex. Power User is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you like this show, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And in the meantime, subscribe to my newsletter, UserMag.com, where you can get all the latest online culture news straight to your inbox.