On December 13, Saturday Night Live  ran a fake ad for “Uber Eats Wrapped.” It started like the familiar end-of-year dopamine hit, then swerved into humiliation: chicken nuggets “more than 99% of users,” an “Uber Eats age” that was “Dead,” and the real gut-punch, a character discovering he’d spent $24,000  on delivery. The joke wasn’t that the numbers were wrong. The joke was that the numbers were true —and that truth feels different when a company reads it back to you in neo

A few decades ago, a joke could ruin your life. In some places, it could even get you killed. Today, a joke can become a financial product. It can raise millions for charity. It can mint a cryptocurrency. It can turn a cartoon cat into a half-million-dollar sale. The big change is not that people suddenly became funnier. The change is that the internet learned how to turn humor into coordination, and coordination into money. When humor was treated like a weapon Power has alwa

The first time you see “Italian brainrot,” it looks like the internet broke: an AI-smeared creature, a fake-Italian name, a voiceover that sounds like it was generated by a microwave. The second time, you start recognizing the “characters.” The third time, you realize this isn’t random at all. It’s a format. And formats are how the internet prints money. Oxford picked “brain rot”  as its Word of the Year in 2024, describing it as both the content  and the effect : the suppose