The Opinions - Dead Squirrels, TikTok Bops and Raw Milk: The Internet Slop of 2024

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

In a time when the internet is teeming with content and hyperfragmented, how do you determine which memes, viral videos and ideas actually matter? The Times Opinion writer Jessica Grose sits down with Ryan Broderick, the creator of the Garbage Day newsletter, to understand the trends that made a splash both on- and offline in 2024.This conversation was recorded in December 2024.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Jessica Gross, and I am an opinion writer for The New York Times. When I started working on the internet in 2004, I felt like you could really read the entire internet every day. And now I don't feel like that at all. There's way too much information. It is fragmented among niche communities. And as a mom and also a journalist who writes about the internet a lot,

it feels like it's impossible to know what to focus on. Is this an idea that one person believes, or is this an idea that a million people believe? Trends go viral really quickly, but that doesn't necessarily make them important. There was something about the election happening that really highlighted how much people are struggling to understand what is happening on the internet and whether or not it's important. What is just internet rage baiting and what is actually a cultural trend that we need to pay attention to? How do we figure out what really matters? And that is why I'm very excited to talk to Ryan Bradrick today. He is the host of the Panic World podcast and writes a newsletter called Garbage Day.

It is about the intersection of pop culture and the internet. He has covered topics such as peanuts. nut the squirrel and whether there can be a Joe Rogan of the left. He's been such a helpful guide in sorting out what's a significant cultural trend from what is just slop. I love that word. Everything is slop. Dude, slop is so good. I love, I love you calling self slop. It feels so good. Welcome, Ryan. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thank you for having me. So I feel like what I am getting on the internet in my bespoke TikTok that I spend with too much time on for a 42-year-old woman. What I am seeing may not be reflective of any larger

trends. So what am I missing? What is the mainstream media missing that we should be paying more attention to? Well, I think ironically, you are having the normal experience right now, which is the internet, let's say, five, ten years ago was a couple central feeds that everyone could kind of stare at and understand what's going on, the era of Gingham style, for instance. The internet post-pandemic is one now of fragments. So your TikTok is delivering exactly what you want to see. Your YouTube is doing the same. Your Instagram now is also doing the same.

X is showing you what Elon Musk wants you to see. All of these different platforms have shifted to a very personalized delivery mechanism. Rather than everyone looks at Peanut the Squirrel, only a few people know about Peanut the Squirrel until it becomes a national news story. So it's a very different landscape than it used to be. So this is a good way to transition to the how we got here question and then also talk about the peanut the squirrel meme. And so let's start with how we got here. And then we can talk about how all of this plays into the election and its outcomes and the vibes. How did we get here?

Let's see. I would timestamp it 2014 with the rise of online movements like Gamergate, which started as a pretty contained controversy about video game journalism that ballooned out into this wider, misogynistic, right-wing moral panic that would go on to influence the way conservative politics essentially have functioned ever since. And this is the same time where people like Steve Bannon, he did interviews where he said that I hired Miley Yonopoulos to go onto sites like Reddit and 4chan to learn what men who like video games are angry about so that we could write content for them. They're very upfront about it. And up until that point, I mean, there was even like a meme, which you would say the internet is serious business and the joke was that it wasn't.

And then around 2014, he becomes very serious. And it stays very serious leading into Donald Trump's first presidential campaign and all of the political strife online that we've seen since. The other sort of important moment, I think, would be 2020, which I would say is the last moment where the people who weren't online became online because they were in COVID lockdown. So my family started a group chat. We didn't have one before. This is where everyone starts to use the internet at once. And so digital media literacy kind of goes out the window really fast. Right.

And that's also the moment where a lot of major platforms that we were using started having a lot of trouble moderating those spaces, which they'd always had trouble moderating. But it became really apparent at that point. And that's, to me, the last turn off the highway would be 2020. And now we're sort of barreling down this road where no one's exactly happy with their time online, even the people running. the websites that we're using, but we're still all on them and they're still important. And it does seem a little bit like the companies have given up on moderation for the most part. Yeah, I do wonder if it was something to do with the insurrection and sort of companies like Meta and Google looking at this and going, we're out. We're going to bring in AI and it'll

moderate itself because we don't want to deal with this. But I don't know. The vibe is that, yeah, I don't get the sense that they want to keep these people. places running smoothly anymore. That brings us to this year, another election year, where there was a lot, just so much content. So much content. Just so much content. And some of it, good.

I actually, there was a brief moment in August where I was like, I'm having fun online again for the first time in a while. I mean, some of the songs, I'm a never, I'm a never Trump guy. I'm a never Trump guy. I'm a never Trump guy. I never liked him. I'm a never Trump guy. I'm a never Trump guy.

Like brain worms. That was a good song. I hate to admit this. I hate to say it. But the, they're eating the cats. They're eating the dogs. TikTok remix.

Pretty funny. They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. Eat the cat. Eat the cat. They're eating the cats. Yeah, those were bangers. So all of this was happening.

Right. And I think a lot of people, myself included, were trying to grasp at whether it was meaningful at all. Did it reflect the voting preferences or interests of anybody? Right. Can you talk to me about what you saw and whether any of it actually meant anything in retrospect? I mean, I will be up front. I called it wrong.

I was feeling good about the Harris campaign almost up until the very last moment. And I was particularly impressed with a lot of their digital strategy. And I think I was making the same mistake that they did. which was that I was over-indexing the same way they were over-indexing the importance of TikTok. And you had said earlier, you know, TikTok is giving you

this very personalized portal. And I think that is the danger of something like what the Harris campaign did with leaning so hard into TikTok as their main broadcast vehicle because it's not a broadcast platform. It just isn't. That said, I think they were able

to capture the zeitgeist quite well. The Republicans are a weird line. I was a huge fan of. I am also a Sega fan boy, so Tim Walls was like absolute catnip for me. So there was a game similar to it, a crazy taxi. Oh my gosh. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Yeah.

I'm going to come on here in a minute. Here we go. I love the way they were sort of playing with culture. And then come Election Day and you discover it didn't really matter. And I've been looking through the wreckage, reading different interviews and listening to different post-mortems, trying to figure out what I got wrong there and why I was so taken by it. And I have to think it's because it was hitting millennial nostalgia so perfectly that I think I was swept up in it. And when you look at how people voted, Gen Z overwhelmingly voted for Trump.

Not the women, but the men. But the men. And so then the question becomes like, you know, why? And I've seen a lot of things about Joe Rogan and different sort of Manosphere podcasts, Antri Tate all this stuff. I'm not convinced. I'm not not convinced, but there was definitely a disconnect. And no one's like no one on the left liberal progressive side seemed to catch it.

So part of what I love about your newsletter is the name that it's called Garbage Day because that's what I feel like I'm doing most days on the internet is just picking through the garbage and collecting things that might be interesting. I know I keep bringing up Peanut the Squirrel because that was one of my favorites that you did. I laughed out loud. I was like, this is so stupid that I can't imagine sitting down and trying to understand what is going on. So tell me how you got on that story and how you explained that story. Sure. So I'm still on X because some very important rich people are still on it. It's sort of like if you took the American conservative elite and put them in the worst, jankiest message board and just let them fight with each other.

And sometimes they get fixated on really weird stuff. And I noticed that they were just melting down about a squirrel that had died. And I was like, okay, let's piece together. Who started this? Why did this squirrel become important? How did it become a conservative martyr? And then try to come up with some sort of larger explanation for why Il-Mas spent the weekend talking about a dead squirrel. Right.

And so just to recap for people who miss this blip in the internet, peanut was a squirrel that was suspected of having rabies. Okay, I got this. No, okay. So there's a guy in upstate New York. He adopted peanut, a squirrel, and resuscitated the squirrel, brought back to health, and then started an Instagram account for the squirrel. I started calling him a squirrel fluencer.

Squirrel fluencer is really good. That's super good. Yeah, so the squirrel fluencer was making so much money off of peanut and peanut's content that they adopted a raccoon. and then they were able to start a animal sanctuary. A neighbor appears to have reported the squirrel fluencer for not having the proper licenses to have peanut. So wildlife control, I guess, raids the house

and seizes the raccoon and the squirrel. And during the raid, peanut freaks out and bites one of the officers. And because of that, they had to, quote unquote, destroy the squirrel and the raccoon. And this, according to right-wing influencers, was a perfect example of liberal, communist, if you will, government overreach.

And then Peanut became sort of this great, this great martyr for the right. Peanut died for our sins. Yes. So I am going to make the argument that Peanut, the squirrel actually does have long-lasting implications. Talk me through it. Talk me through it. Because it reminds me of the whole Maha movement, right? So RFK Jr. and the idea that... Make America healthy again. Make America healthy again. And the idea that there's a whole group of people who find regulations on any health-related behaviors, whether it's for animals or humans, to be onerous and a violation of their liberty. So I feel like getting upset about Peanut the Squirrel is also getting upset.

about the fact that you can't drink raw milk from the spigot every day. I think you're dead on. Okay. And I also think that Peanut the Squirrel is a perfect example of the way America's conservative movement processes things now, which I've sort of been thinking of as like, okay, they're essentially running a tabloid. So they're always looking for these little human interest stories that they can spin up into massive controversies. And Peanut the Squirrel is a perfect example of that. So going forward, what does this mean? for our politics. Not just in this instance with Peanut the Squirrel, but about other things.

Is it just the way we're going to process politics going forward and we need to adapt to it? The two big question marks I have are Trump entering the White House, which created so much chaos and calamity last time that I've sort of just thrown out any plans I have for next year. Fair, fair. Because it was a sprint for four years. The other question mark here is the ascendancy of blue sky. and this larger fascination with sort of open source social media platforms. There is clearly an interest in alternative online spaces away from Elon Musk, away from meta, away from sort of corporate overreach.

And we don't know how those two things are going to interact. If the country's liberal and progressive and leftist activists are all on a platform that is not on the one owned by Elon Musk, who's now hanging out at Mar-a-Lago every week, how will those forces interact online? But I do think you're right that we are definitely hitting some kind of of wall with this sort of stuff. I usually don't think the average person has the time to be like, okay, I'm going to read five things about peanut the squirrel to understand what's going on.

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

And I was just like, none of this matters. I mean, there's just a way in which you sound absolutely unhinged when you try to explain an entirely internet phenomenon to an offline person. It's like describing a dream. Truly. And I think you're right. I just think that at a certain point, enough people are going to be like, I sound ridiculous and I don't care about this anymore.

Right, right, right. Well, I think that's a good place to end here. That's right. Everything I write about will not matter pretty soon. So I think you're right. Thank you so much for talking with me today. It has been so much fun. Thank you for having me.

This is a blast. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Vesachad, Fisca Durba, Phoebe, Feebillette, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

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