Why is Charlie Kirk's Face on the Michael Jordan No No No Meme?

Plus AI, the busted algo, Your Name Here, and Armand Hammer's Mercy

Points of order:

• Late November: the best time of the year. A chill creeps through the year, nighttime introduces itself increasingly earlier, people start making lists. Just saw my first gift guide of the season. The Giants, Saints, Nets, and Pelicans have combined for eight wins and thirty nine losses. What’s better than this?

• Went back on Nothing But Respect to talk about body counts, things of that nature. Characteristically fun time. I like that their show keeps getting better, both in terms of their conversations and the profile of their guests, but they somehow remain contractually obligated to let me come on the mic every so often to throw out some asinine analogies and talk about all the Israeli guys on my favorite basketball team.

• For those who missed it, made my debut in The Ringer writing about why Conner O’Malley and Tim Robinson work. Taking a six month hiatus from masculinity discourse, but I’m grateful that the good folks over there let me put this on their website:

  

  If you enjoyed the piece, you should let Bill Simmons know. DM him, tag him, if you live in Los Angeles stop him on the street; let him know the people want more Ock. If you’re joining us from The Ringer, welcome to the club.

• Congratulations to Zohran Mamdani—ran into him while running through Brooklyn a few months ago, but sort of soyfaced in the picture so I couldn’t share it on the internet. There’s at least one confirmed Never Hungover reader on his team—a sign of things to come?

• Proof positive that One Battle After Another is a masterpiece: everyone’s being annoying and sharing every single scene from it on Twitter right now, but I’m still not sick of it.

• Danny Brown digicore album isn’t bad, 2slimey hurt my ears in a good way…favorite new listen is probably Loidis’ bonkers set at Waking Life. Portugal…insanely swag. My friends and I got robbed there once, but it was our fault and the thieves were quite honest in their own right.

• Fucked with Bugonia…sorry…

• Does anybody own a SMALL BUSINESS? Have had a recent manic obsession with opening a book store…don’t be a stranger.

Today’s blog is a grab-bag. Below, some thoughts on Charlie Kirk faceswaps as the meme du jour, the humiliating Twitter ‘certified bangers’ thing, the excellent new Armand Hammer record, Helen DeWitt’s Your Name Here, and some links on AI psychosis.

Why is Charlie Kirk’s face everywhere now?

For the last two weeks, my algorithmic preferences on both Twitter and Instagram have favored a legitimate barrage of images, videos, and gifs of Charlie Kirk’s face transposed onto memes with currency among people younger than me (turning thirty in a week, after which point I’m not allowed to write, think about, or see this stuff). On Instagram, flyers promoting the “Kirk Twerk” in Salt Lake City contend with body dysmorphia-bait and gray cats on my scroll; Twitter’s For You page is, at this point, an even split between people talking about their favorite football teams like Sephiroth, people referencing their pinned tweets or bios, and Charlie Kirk as IShowSpeed, Destroy Lonely, a bullet-ridden Drake, fakemink, Michael Jordan, whiteface Young Thug, Anthony Mackie, and what appears to be a porn actress. I get how an algorithm as boorishly underdeveloped as Musk’s works: you linker for a moment or make the mistake of clicking through a post, and before long your timeline will be nothing but variations on that very post. It’s my fault, in other words. And yet still, the scale at which Kirk’s likeness has been rendered as both meme-replacement and meme in its own right is legitimately staggering.

No use litigating the finer points here—the conversations in the days after Kirk’s assassination were neither prescient nor thoughtful, and I’m not interested in relitigating or revisiting any of them. In the wake of Kirk’s shooting, Trump and his cronies leapt at the pretext for a left-wing crackdown that, as of yet, seems to have failed to materialize; psychotic right wing LARPers on Twitter promised a civil war that thus far seems to consist of trying to get people fired from their jobs. It feels noteworthy, the most meaningful sociopolitical effect of the biggest domestic political assassination of my lifetime at the two-month mark is that teenagers are derisively using Kirk’s face on memes everywhere.

kirk edits I saw in the last 10 minutes

The why here is pretty easy—these edits pop on socials, the sharers likely hold either politics or identities diametrically opposed to Kirk’s reactionary conservatism, they’re transgressive, and a lot of people find them very funny. People will hand-wring; not my job. The part that’s actually interesting, for my money, is the how. Kirk’s death coinciding with the rise of techno-slop as the dominant cultural form—a lot of these edits feel directly in keeping with the OpenAI Sora bullshit similarly clogging up my phone—set the groundwork for this total degradation campaign. It’s the sort of ridiculous (value-neutral) and shocking (id.) meme campaign that literally would not have been possible, like, six months ago. For all the moral panic around AI—it makes us dumber, heats the planet, corrodes public trust, makes bad people rich, might learn how to launch nukes, you know the deal—there’s almost always a baked-in assumption that AI is something we, the masses, interact with, and that its people-side effects will hinge in large part on we, the masses, maintaining some level of AI-literacy. The Kirk memes are, in this context, markedly different: not deepfakes meant to convince you that, like, Barron Trump has a beautiful singing voice or Zohran is a bad trick-or-treater, but self-evidently fake clips that retain comedic value because they are fake. Their flagrant artificiality, in other words, is the point, or at least point 1b. It genuinely feels like the introduction of a new memetic paradigm, one in which artificiality is both a functional tool for producing at scale and itself the main thrust of the joke.

AI/Twitter Lagniappe

Don’t want to linger too much on AI or Twitter—I love the way that grass bends between my fingers and the soft light of a setting sun—but would be remiss if I didn’t flag two more side attractions.

Over the last week or so, the brilliant minds at Elon Musk’s X dot com (no house rules at Never Hungover, this stuff isn’t important enough to merit them) launched the “Certified Bangers” account, both a part of the organized effort to add as many badges as possible to accounts on the site and a mark of Musk’s total victory in his quest to transform his everything app into Reddit. I can’t think about this stuff for more than two seconds before my shoulders start to fold over my chest in visceral embarrassment, so the less said the better. Quickly, then: the “Bangers” (Jesus Christ…) function seeks to “recognize the very best posts that move the timeline, ranked by authentic interactions.” That someone at Twitter thought this was a good idea is perhaps the most humiliating thing I’ve ever considered in my life, and I once shat my pants in the outfield of a little league game. The only interesting component of this disaster is that it is an unwittingly lucid articulation of what has rendered the site unusable since Musk took over in earnest. Each of the five inaugural “Bangers” is an overt engagement-farming post from accounts that make money on the basis of their impressions. At the end of the summer, I wrote about how the reorientation of Twitter toward quote-tweet slop and image dissemination had radically transformed and broken the site; this soy gambit indicates that this destruction is by design.

To heal your brain, consider two excellent recent pieces on AI from Max Read and Tom Krell of How To Dress Well fame (his new blog, false world, is a treat). Both pieces treat the techlash—and specifically AI backlash—in their own rights. Max and Tom have different sensibilities, prose styles, and ways of thinking through these things, but the two pieces are among my favorite pieces of writing about AI yet—skeptical without being reflexive, goal-oriented without being prescriptive, thoughtful. Both, ultimately, linger on the notion of attention as perhaps the vital form of modern currency. If ten years ago our collective panic was one of data, there’s reason to suspect that the next will form around attention scarcity. Developing, sustaining, and wisely delegating one’s attention may become the most invaluable practice for those not keen on having their entire sense of self effaced by modern technological culture. Here I am talking about “Bangers” and Charlie Kirk faceswaps—you guys go on without me.

Platform Temperance

i guess i'll weigh in on ai psychosis

“You’re doing okay, and you’re going to do better”

Struck out placing a review of the outstanding Armand Hammer & Alchemist record—feels like I listened to it in 4D, in a way—but would be remiss if I didn’t highlight one of my favorite albums of the year. What better way than to consider it alongside Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff’s Your Name Here, the best book of the year (define year, of course, how you’d like)? The cheap comparisons only take you so far—both are works of art created by duos tethered by two of the most singular writers working in billy woods and Helen DeWitt, but where Elucid flickers around Armand Hammer records with his galactic poet sensibilities, Ilya Gridneff is sort of just an insane guy.

Let’s rewind: Mercy, Armand Hammer’s second joint effort with the elder statesman Alchemist, is equal parts propulsive and digressive, in-your-face and introspective, bleak and hilarious. I find it difficult to write about woods and Elucid because they are manifestly better writers than I. By this point, their strengths are old hat. woods jump-cuts between registers without a misplaced word, contraposing fully-sketched vignettes against parables and truisms so effectively that one chastises theirself for ever having uttered the words “the personal is political,” while Elucid dutifully contorts his dreamy visions and revolutionary poetics around his counterpart’s wry, removed barbs. As far as pairings go, peanut butter and jelly are less instructive than bones and flesh. On “Laraaji,” the album opener, Elucid conjures “tender-headed Black boys sleeping under the Ginkgo tree, dreaming of becoming ungovernable; a few traded verses later, woods wakes his tree-sleeper up defeated and alone, taking time to pay homage to the late legend Ka before comparing the miserable drudgery of daily existence to what Cleveland Browns players must feel like lining up to take snaps in December.

By now, this highwire act is what you come to expect from an Armand Hammer record. Mercy is most delightful when it showcases woods and Elucid following experimental threads and loose ideas to their logical conclusions. On “Scandinavia,” woods trades his typically regimented delivery for a drawl that bleeds his speech from one bar to the next. “Might sell you a bridge,” he jokes in this opening verse, “but it’s no regrets when you examine the metalwork.” The two trade a handful of verses, alternating about every thirty seconds, before woods homes in on his next idea, punctuating each bar with a stammered “like” (including, for what it’s worth, my favorite line of the record: “I’m nice like just ask my ex-wife’s parents, like…).

Your Name Here, for its part, is a novel written by the genius Helen DeWitt and Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. A version of the book, which was published last month by Dalkey Archive, had been previously listed for sale on DeWitt’s website during the roughly 20 years that Your Name Here spent awaiting printing. It’s a novel as much about the difficulty of its own publication as it is about anything; though, in fairness, it is also a novel about, non-exhaustively, suicidal ideation, sex work, tabloid journalism, the war on terror, language acquisition, video games, transatlantic travel, a book-within-the-book about a society governed by lottery odds, the actual lottery, telephones, and Tom Cruise. In large part, it resists summary; Your Name Here is worthwhile as much for the form of its substance as it is for the fact of its substance. To call it a disintegrating novel would be to imply, unfairly, that it ever really starts. It succeeds more as a novel of permutations: false starts, abandoned riffs, second-person-narrators, hare-brained ideas about doing The Lord of the Rings for Arabic.

Insofar as much of the time that I’ve spent with Mercy has also been time that I’ve spent with Your Name Here, it’s been hard for me to consider them in isolation. The two works speak to me simultaneously, even if, as would tickle DeWitt, they do not speak in the exact same language. They represent, in their respective rights, the neuroses borne from experiencing mundanity and isolation in a world structured by horror; they poke around the corners of genocide, the flagging American empire’s GWOT, and the increasing technological mediation of our lives; their characters are lost innocents, cunning realpolitikers, merciless operators, and manic masterminds. Though their most overt stylistic traits resemble one another—like woods and Elucid, DeWitt and Gridneff alternate entries of their radically different prose—the function of their structural decisions is perhaps most telling. Armand Hammer work so well because woods and Elucid compliment, discipline, and challenge one another; Your Name Here works not because Gridneff’s proto-schizzed-out voice is a match for DeWitt’s, but because it is the perfect voice to demonstrate how susceptible a temporarily incapacitated artist is to mistaking the banal for the beautiful.

Buy Your Name Here here

Buy Mercy here