Move Fast and Break People Part 4: The Apotheosis of the Lolcow

How the internet metastasized into the real world and turned human life into an eternal forum flamewar

Move Fast and Break People Part 1: How The Internet Gave Us the World—And Took It All Away

Move Fast and Break People Part 2: Everyone’s Third Place

Move Fast and Break People Part 3: Asshole Monoculture

Welcome back to literally everything falling apart around us!

Hope you’re all having a great summer watching everyone be bizarrely chill with an ancient (guess that never mattered!) dementia-riddled President Pedo governing via ChatGPT and a half-drained Magic 6 Ball stuck on Tariff Again Later, roving masked gangs of money-choked secret police grabbing people off the street, the government fighting the weather, the government fighting the economy, the government fighting itself, the government fighting the planet, and the government fighting Superman, apparently. Turns out we were all just terribly silly biscuits because there isn’t and never was an Epstein list, and that, too, is miraculously super totally fine with the media and the exact same people who made sure we had nine thousand Congressional hearings to view Hunter Biden’s tool of the establishment. Looking out the right side of the flaming plane crash of all our lives, the word “deportation” has been redefined to mean all sorts of things it doesn’t, but mostly “alligator torture.” The Secretary of Defense openly slams whiskey at press conferences while abandoning Ukraine without texting the group chat and actively planning an invasion of Greenland at least, and the President’s personal advisor/Twi’lek dancer gleefully tweeted about feeding every Latino in the nation to alligators. The Temu Trujillo on his throne of skulls has decided to end satire forever and just hold a UFC cage match right on the White House lawn, shoved a bill through Congress that no one read except to get mildly concerned about the line items involving setting the entirety of rural America on fire, defunding trans hurricanes, and mailing every child an envelope full of neo-measles personally signed by President Mola Ram. Oh! Then he threatened to deport/alligator torture a Democrat for winning a primary and take personal control of New York City because we live in the shittiest straight-to-Betamax Bond movie. And again, no one’s really that upset. At least, not a tenth as upset as they were about ending a war in Afghanistan, the price of eggs, having a cold at a debate, or the existence of a new Superman movie!

Plus, while a brown person holding a job a white person imagines other white people (not them) should be doing is an affront so intense it must be answered by ripping each and every one of them apart until the Atlantic turns to a sea of blood, it’s very completely awesome for every single human profession and activity to be outsourced to a couple of billionaires’ poorly-socialized neopets that can’t pass their bite test, even though we can all see them being actively manipulated to spew hatred in real time right in front of us. Don’t worry, one of them is calling itself MECHAHITLER, and hundreds of thousands of people are actively using fucking MECHAHITLER as a goddamned therapist and/or life partner.

Am I caught up? Probably not. Hours to go before end of business, after all. I don’t know what to tell you, man. It’s weird living in whatever luxury living sub-development of hell managed to sprawl into reality. Every time I try to finish this series, something so fucking Jacobean happens, so dredged from the ultraviolent nethermind of Gargamel’s id, that I feel like my brain is being sawed in half with a broken spork. And all anyone does in response is get absolutely apoplectically furious with Democrats.

Any minute now, Carol

So I’ve been thinking about magic lately.

I’m not going full woo on you, relax. I’m fully vaccinated and this is still about the internet unintentionally ending human civilization. But I am a professional fantasy and science fiction writer, most of the time. I’ve invented a magic system or two. And it’s as good an explanation as any. Honestly, between you, me, and the ever-watchful eye of Mechahitler, if I didn’t know better, I’d say magic is the only explanation that makes any coherent sense.

Not crystals-and-potions magic. Not sparkly spells cast at the dark of the moon by elves of great power.

But maybe abracadabra magic. Maybe slight-of-hand. And, you know, maybe some light demon-summoning.

Because we all know none of this is coming from a place grounded in realism.

A totally normal political position that anyone would ever take with regards to any other President of either party!

And while we all make jokes about Trump having made a deal with some devil or other to be able to, without seeming to actually try at all—in fact, occasionally attempting to try not to—mind-flay millions of people and turn them into extensions of his fish-greasy will, and still be converting new ones right now, even with all the alligator torture and public brainmelts and unforced economy-impaling, to be able to turn every single conversation to the topic of himself, every piece of art to address him first…he kind of did. We just didn’t understand the technology had already sufficiently advanced to become indistinguishable from magic.

And the thing about magic is, there’s always a price. A trade. For power, for ease, for plenty, for the objects of divers desires. For every magical gain, there must be an equal and opposite sacrifice.

If you let something out, you have to let something in. If you let something in, something will escape.

I don’t make the rules.

So yes, we worshipped assholes, told two and a half generations to study STEM and nothing else (definitely not rhetoric or history or critical analysis because fuck the blue curtains am I right fellow cool kids ha ha teachers suck thinking about stuff is dumb!) or they were wasting the lifeblood of their ancestors, removed, first the necessity, then the possibility, of having to interact with other people on a daily basis, got a huge percentage of humanity to spend all their free time in the same intangible, easily-manipulable place, and wrapped the whole thing up in a pandemic-colored bow that forced everyone who wasn’t living like that yet into their homes, away from other people, and glued their eyeballs open while they observed the unfiltered vortex of the internet 24/7.

But it’s not just that we replaced human life and activity with the internet at approximately the same time that a living (mostly), walking (sort of), talking (I guess technically) low-res edgelord meme failed at failing to get his burnt-out hamburger heat-lamp of a frontal lobe elected President.

We did do that; slowly, without a plan, excitedly perusing points-of-interest on a technological roadmap-cum-skill-tree for an entirely other country, one we were gonna speed through at the speed of loneliness, following the siren-song, not of Pleasure Island, but Convenience Island—where we could see our troubles were all monetizable and everyone knew our names because they’d stolen our data before we were born. By the time anyone clocked the donkey ears, they were trending on TikTok, the hottest red carpet accessory, required to qualify under business-casual dress codes, knock-offs for the plebs available from Temu in bulk, shipped to your door.

But as we let the internet into our deepest selves…we also left the door open, and the internet escaped into the real world.

And that’s what’s going on right now. What’s been going on for a some time. You can see it with almost every single scandal that hits the mainstream hive-mind—and it is a hive-mind, a constant feed of everyone’s most random, formerly private thoughts, good and evil, mundane and bizarre, running constantly in the background of every simple action we ever take? Yeah, that’s a hive-mind, and primitive as it is, we weren’t even close to ready to handle knowing everybody’s lunch order, let alone the nasty crawlies clicking around the brainpans of people who had never felt seen or valued until clickingcrawlies.com gave them an unlimited dopamine drip.

It would almost be funny if it weren’t a wrecking ball coming in for a kiss.

See, some of us have seen all this before. It just didn’t matter then.

Because we allowed, nay, encouraged and cheered on, the internet metastasizing into every corner of the real world and take it over, the problems we who lived online before it was decidedly not fucking cool, during the awkward adolescence of the internet, had to deal with in the 00s became the problems that are, right this very minute, dissolving this world in acid and dancing through its slowly liquefying flesh like Gene Kelly in Singing in the Rain.

What a glorious feeeeling I’m deaaaad inside!

Power mods gone mad, lolcows, fandom flamewars, sockpuppets, trolls fed and unfed, dogpiling, meme wars, scams, images having been pastede on yay, lies and facts being mostly interchangeable, walled gardens, weaponized irony, parasocial relationships, the economy of attention, viral everything, sea lions, slacktivism, hacktivism, the endless September…all of these have been ported directly into real life, where they are happily chewing away at the deepest root of society: the ability to connect to another human being in some way other than bashing their head in on sight.

What is Elon Musk but the ultimate Power Mod gone mad? He runs his little message board as he pleases, banhammering away, boosting those who praise him and running multiple sockpuppet accounts while insisting lurkers support him in email, making random shit up on the internet, calling his minions to dogpile anyone who suggests any of it isn’t the precise truth, and accidentally roping in a lot of lonely people who just want to feel something bigger than dread about work tomorrow…we’ve been through all of this when it was about Harry/Hermione fanfic or Slenderman or poorly photoshopped images of Dominic Monaghan and if you don’t know what I’m talking about THAT IS SIMPLY WONDERFUL FOR YOU.

But all that, in the early 00s, was going on online while the real world was real worlding along separately. The run-up to the Iraq War did not take place on Livejournal. Dick Cheney did not buy YTMND.com or SomethingAwful and turn it into a Nazi petting farm (real talk: wouldn’t have been necessary, really). But millions upon millions of young people who are far past youth now, and millions more all over the age spectrum, were super busy laying down dopamine mechanisms in their brains that they’d never escape. They were just too intense, too immediate, too randomly-reinforcing, too easy to refine into money, power, fame, and an infinite narcissistic supply of praise.

Sadly for the future of humanity, the early 2000s were not an overly kind time on the pimply, awkward internet, and one of the easiest ways to get that attention was through trolling, which did originally mean posting things you didn’t actually mean just to get a reaction. But the problem with irony is, if you do it often enough, no one can tell the difference between you being a dick for a laugh and you just being a deep-down dick. Not even you. After a couple of decades of saying the opposite of what you mean being the marker of a Cool and With It Person, FUCKING NO ONE KNOWS WHAT’S REAL ANYMORE. The Epstein Files fiasco is classic power mod behavior—lie, delete anything contradicting the lie, refuse to engage, ban everyone, change your username, and pretend it never happened. My god, how many times, in how many places you loved, has that shit gone down?

Elon Musk is 53 years old. He was part of that early internet boom, and as utter whaleshit as his version of his role in that is, he very clearly got hardcore addicted to internet attention long before ketamine. What he does is to get his fix, however he can. He will never stop, because it’s been 30 years of wiring his psyche to digest only the adulation and approbation of strangers.

Even the tsunami of bots, troll farms, and AI slop is just the industrialized Pokemon evolution of sockpuppet accounts, forum trolls, and shitty Photoshop wars. ChatGPT is a great chatbot, but it’s literally in the name, my friends. That’s all it is. A jumped-up Furby who fucked a Clippy.

RFK says I can approve drugs all by myself!

My friends, the Blair Witch Project kids had real human adults totally convinced they released genuine footage of a real supernatural witch murdering people into theaters near you for $5 on matinee Tuesdays. And my siblings in Satan, that was in 1999.

And then there’s Donald fucking Trump. My god. If I hadn’t grown up hearing what a piece of shit this guy was, a hundred million years before I knew what a modem sounded like, I might think the internet had just invented a person. It’s so easy to forget that he was there from fairly early in the game, gossiping about celebrities and being a general-issue bloviating dork on social media talking shit about rubbish. The reality TV show was a big deal in terms of putting him in the living rooms of Americans, but—and when I say this, I am not meaning to downplay in any way how dangerous, horrific, or murderous this long, dark shart of the American soul truly is—but I think his real power, the reason his grip is so unshakable, is that Donald J. Trump is the Apotheosis of the Lolcow.

If you’ve never heard that word, or if hearing it in 2025 merely wakens something deep within you from a dark slumber, a “lolcow” is the subject of particularly fierce internet drama. Someone whose activities can literally be milked for laughs, both because they never, ever stop fucking up, and because their fuck-ups are so positively Byzantine in their elaborate, over-the-top, pants-on-Pluto stupidity that you simply cannot look away. More than that, people often encouraged the lolcow into even further, messier, more dangerous acts of life-ruining idiocy, simply to enjoy the show and consume the popcorn, literal and metaphorical, that accompanied watching someone ruin their own very real lives and others’ for entertainment.

Yep. This behavior ended the world. Hope everyone had a good time shitting on Jedi Kid. By the way, that’s Jason Momoa.

Any of this sound vaguely familiar?

I honestly don’t even want to give examples because severe mental illness is a constant factor, some of them were deeply abusive people, others true victims, and either way, milking said lolcows was almost always an act of intense cruelty. It doesn’t feel kind to drag any of these actual human beings (or their victims, or their enablers) up again. But the fact is, Trump’s swollen udder has overflowed with unceasing bounty for over ten years, and will never dry even after his death. Chris-Chan could never begin to compete with the dairy production of the Little Caesar’s Caesar and his gang of edgy, edgy trolls.

Lolcows provide adrenaline to themselves and dopamine to everyone involved in the drama, whether they invited that drama or not. That’s why the big ones go on and on. Why people followed their trashfires so intently, why it became addictive, why to this day there are people all over the Chan boards still milking lolcows from twenty years ago. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it really did tend to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of stupidly dangerous clownshit and stealing his userbase. There was always a huge microeconomy of weird activity around a lolcow, pushing them into more extreme behavior, forming fake friendships and narratives with and around them in order to have access, outside sites documenting the whole thing and commenting on it—each one is a little industry.

Or a big one.

Back in 2015? The people who did support him almost always said they did because he was funny. The young Trump voters in 2025 often say the same.

And a lot of both groups are still laughing. They do actually think Alligator Alcatraz is hilarious. Because it’s abstract to them. It barely registers as real; they treat it as a meme. Our government goes on television and laughs about feeding human beings to alligators and the media barely yawns and that’s just life now.

Those who aren’t laughing have joined the document and commentate portion of the lolcow cycle—and because the internet got way better at monetization streams than it was in the aughts, shittons of the Fandom Wank mods of today rely on this lolcow for their entire income. They won’t stop, either. It’s how they get what they need, too. Unless a bigger lolcow comes along, it tends to keep going and going until someone implodes. I suspect that’s why Trump kept Elon so close for so long—Musk was the only one to actually threaten Trump’s deathgrip, by showing the potential to become a bigger mushroom cloud of malignant fuckery.

What is Donald Trump but the infinite lolcow that now dominates and nourishes every moment of the media cycle with his antics. No one can look away—because the internet got out and now online drama is threatening our lives and livelihoods instead of our fandoms. We replaced our everyday lives and connections with the internet, and then the internet poured itself into a carcass called Trump, the walking embodiment of the worst shit that went down on the worst sites you ever knew about. 4Chan, and later 8Chan, made the Trump Presidency. He was their lolcow first. Now he;’s our nocow to, and the nos and the lols define the whole being of the country..

And now we’re fucking stuck. Every newsday is about him. Every sporting event. Every movie release. Every fucking half-time show. Every holiday. When it’s not about Elon Musk or one of the other Big Name Fans on the periphery of the constant, constant drama. It all swirls around what he’ll do next. And even those of us who hate him beyond words spend the precious hours of our lives doomscrolling and commenting, dissolving into the adrenaline (fear at the next disaster for us, fear of the other for them)/dopamine (validation at others sharing our fear for us, Trump’s IV line to their entire endocrine system for them) combo it seems impossible for so many to turn away from. We aren’t enjoying this on any level—but we’re stuck. We’re engaging. All the time. We want it to stop. We need it to stop. But they don’t. They need it to go on. A lot of Trump’s most fervent followers were never really online much before his rise—they have no natural defense or suspicion of this stuff, because by the time they logged on, the engagement algorithm had already made a shitstew of the concept of the truth, and people who’d cut their teeth lying and manipulating on the internet were ready and excited to screw the noobs.

Now, please understand I’m not trying to make jokes by calling him a lolcow, it’s deadly, grimly serious. It’s a disaster that might very well be the end of us, and I am afraid every day. The other ghouls behind Trump aren’t anyone’s lolcow—they’re the same fucking assholes who were pulling puppet strings on the internet back then, too. And Stephen Miller. I’m just trying to explain why this wet sack of a man has become the hemlock of the masses. We’ve trapped ourselves in a forum flamewar without end, and the billions of words spilled on actual forums back then should tell you how truly long this can go on. Even though it truly seems that no one, least of all the trolls themselves, is having any fun whatsoever these days. Well. Addiction is like that. You always need more intense highs to feel anything anymore.

Gotta bomb Iran or send the army into California or kill the concept of schools and weather. I do think Trump, deep in the dim corners of his alleged mind, understands one thing with crystal clarity: his power comes from engagement, just like the demonic algorithm. If he lets things get boring, even for a few days, he’ll begin to lose ground. He has to produce for his audience, and yesterday’s drama will never be enough for today’s maw.

And when you combine that “one good trick” with a clear, step-by-step agenda from the Republicans who’ve always been sociopathic Christofascist white supremacist monsters in Project 2025, you get July 16th, 2025.

And it does matter now. It is serious now. Very real people are dying, families are being torn apart, the economy is exsanguinating jobs and every one of those jobs is a real person’s next dinner. But the problem is, for a very significant number of both left and right white, straight, cis, privileged, vaguely Christian-ish Americans, which demographics are still in the bare majority, all of that, and the resistance to it, is only happening online. It’s happening through a tesseract of screens and performances that occlude reality just enough to paralyze almost everyone in either horror or delight.

Politics, for those with the privilege to only experience them through screens, is precisely fandom drama. People all the fuck over the place refer to themselves as fans of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, AOC or DeSantis (not so fast, Vance) rather than supporters, and that poisonous toadshit’s been going on for a minute. What a victory for the media to finally fully be able to smash politics into a fire3hose of turbogruel with sports and Hollywood and spray it in our faces without too much of that annoying pretending to be serious about anything or anyone. The horrors of the Texas floods, alligator torture, Palestine, assassinations, loss of rights everywhere, it all flows by in the same font, on the same background, as news of the latest Marvel casting or skibidi meme, and it directly affects most of those groups just about as much—so far. As long as they’re not one of the targeted groups yet, it’s all just fodder for the machine, that now pays out not only in “lols” (which were always somewhat sadistic), but in money, power, attention, praise, and brain chemicals real life has struggled to supply with the same overwhelming intensity, especially since we all got together, held hands, sang fucking Imagine, and worked very earnestly to come up with a holistic method of running society without human beings interacting directly with one another during the pandemic.

Is it absolutely revolting? Yes, of course it is. It’s fucking gross. But I’ve been on the internet a long time, and I’ve seen people bend themselves into Escher’s own pretzels justifying their participation in these lolcow orgies of shame. People like watching others suffer. Some a little (heh that young fellow was struck in the testicles with a sporting implement, eh wot?) some a lot (Alligator Alcatraz). But most people have that in them. They come up with a way to feel it’s deserved. That they would never be the sufferers on display, since they don’t deserve it. Cancelling, outside of people like Weinstein and Spacey, is really just this sort of behavior with a superiority complex. And so they kept, and keep, watching, and participating, even though it’s clearly grotesque.

And Trump is the zenith of this. The one true talent he actually has, and has leveraged his entire life—because he was a much more benign lolcow in the 80s, too—is letting people laugh at him or seethe at him for money and attention. And I don’t believe it truly matters to him which one.

Is there a way out? I’m…not sure there is. Because it’s been way too long. Multiple generations have been trained to expect this cycle of adrenaline and dopamine to be the main service government provides. Back in the time known as the day, lolcows ended when enough people got banned effectively enough, someone got very seriously hurt, and occasionally, when people got bored and wandered off. I’m not sure analogues of any of those are really on the table at the moment. It truly is something to be the man to enshittify liberal democracy and simple every day life. The only thing that ended that adolescence of the internet was this. So where we go from here, I struggle to say. Except that finding some way back to each other in the real world, to connecting, to talking, not to the FUCKING VOID THAT IS AI, but to other actual people face to face, is probably the only possible road, not out, but maybe, just maybe, through.

Trump pulled off his deal for power by trading the rules of the internet for the rules of real life. He stands in the middle of a planet full of pain like a sloppy, drooling Virtuvian Man, gorging on the left dogpiling him with rage and the right dogpiling him with worship.

It’s all the same to him, just as long as he’s covered in bodies.

It’s going to be the work of the rest of our lives to dig our way out.

Epilogue to follow on Thursday (promise this time, it’s already done)