The Verge’s Internet Culture section is the home for daily coverage of how our online lives influence and are influenced by pop culture and the world around us. The ways in which we communicate, create, and live with each other have been radically altered by the internet’s powerful connective tissues, from the platforms we inhabit, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram; to the policies, laws and guidelines that govern them (or don’t); to the subcultures, communities, and memes that bring us together there — for better or worse. Here you’ll find our coverage of life on the web, with an eye on what’s next.
In the process of getting through his thoughts, he does a pretty good riff about the people who say they “make” stuff with AI. As for Musk’s version of The Odyssey, Johnson says, “I’m excited for the Cyclops to have two eyes.”
This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.
[Stephen Follows]
Nilay called it back in 2024, and now the Gray Lady is on board with recognizing the demise of the open web. It takes a look at how Google went from being a gateway to the internet to becoming the internet for many users who never leave the cozy confines of its AI summaries.
AIM chimes. Teletype machines. Floppy drives. Dialup modems. Tamagotchis. The whole thing is a wonderful soundboard that instantly transports you to a bygone era. There’s not much to do here besides click a few icons and listen to the sounds, but it’s still a nice way to kill a few minutes.
[Museum Of Endangered Sounds]
Its founders insist the event platform offers a simple service for free. But in a time when users are aware of privacy and surveillance, Partiful has to prove it’s not too good to be true.
Readers are scrambling to develop ways to detect whether generative AI was used to write fanworks. The results are questionable.
What’s in, what’s out, and what’s a bit of both this summer.
After more than a year and a half in court, satirical news site The Onion is rebooting Alex Jones’ InfoWars — even as the conspiracy channel hangs in legal limbo. Comedian and writer Tim Heidecker has been tapped as creative director, and he came on the show to share his vision for the platform. Also mentioned: peptides, The Beatles, and the state of Tim’s vocal chords. Enjoy!
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Malik, who founded the tech blog GigaOm in 2001 before eventually transitioning into venture capital, died on Wednesday at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said Om’s family in a post on his website.
[On my Om]
Over the weekend, the DoorDash X account posted repeatedly about the World Cup, but instead of tagging New Zealand soccer player Tim Payne, the account tagged musician T-Pain — who responded accordingly. The posts had no indication that they were an ad (as the Federal Trade Commission requires).
I asked DoorDash if this was a coordinated effort and whether T-Pain was paid for his posts. Head of social Zaria Parvez said in an email that the company noticed Payne was a fan favorite and happened to share a nearly identical name with T-Pain. “So, in partnership with T-Pain, we executed a fun campaign to connect fans from around the world and remind people that DoorDash has whatever they need throughout the World Cup.”
A major case surrounding lookalike products (“dupes”) came to a close this week, in which Deckers, the maker of UGG boots, sued direct-to-consumer brand Quince, alleging it had knocked off its shearling ankle boot. A jury found that Quince’s version was indeed substantially similar to the design patent for the UGG boots — but also that the patent itself was invalid in the first place.
As I wrote last year, brands are increasingly using design patents to go after dupes. The Deckers decision stress-tests that tactic.
The YouTube star has gone from reviewing synths to taking on the surveillance state.
A handful of supporters showed up to a pretrial hearing with New York City-issued press passes.
I was on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast to talk about why our feeds are just clips now — what we’re calling “the clippening” of content online. You’ve probably seen these videos of podcasts, musicians, TV shows, livestreams and more. Underneath it all is an economy of clipping companies pumping out mountains of paid content.
Some evidence collected by police in the killing the UnitedHealthcare CEO can’t be shown to a jury, a judge ruled on Monday — including a cellphone, a passport, a loaded magazine for a handgun, and a computer chip found during a search of Mangione at a McDonald’s.
But the ruling is a mixed bag: the judge overseeing the New York state case against Mangione also ruled that other items discovered — including a notebook and a gun — can be used as evidence.
If Palantir can stick its logo on French workwear, why not The Verge? That gets my vote in our new call for Verge merch ideas.
Blernsball:
French chore coat obvs.
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The data mining company with extensive defense contracts is making merch to signal which side you’re on.
I missed this last week, but the XOXO organizers put together a wonderful website where you can watch all the videos from past years of the conference (which held its last iteration in 2024).
I encourage you to explore the whole site, but if you watch just one talk, make it this one from Panic’s Cabel Sasser.
[XOXO]
Verge favorite Matt Levine weighs in on the New Allbirds Thing. The financing is the crucial part — so some “institutional investor” is “essentially buying $50 million worth of stock at the old, defunct-sneaker-company price, and selling it at the new, AI-neocloud-company price,” maybe. Neocloud market looking frothy, imo.
[Bloomberg]
Glitchy lo-fi art. Inscrutable plot. Fake backstory about a 35th anniversary release. Kings. Swords in stones. Spaceships. Oh, and an absolutely killer soundtrack. You owe it to yourself to go spend a few minutes exploring the strangely beautiful (in an ugly sort of way) world of Ruin.
Developer Niels Leenheer decided to see if he could recreate the classic FPS using the language that describes webpage formatting. cssDOOM is a bit messy and definitely pushing the limits of what is possible using cascading style sheets, but it’s undeniably impressive.
The popular fanfiction archive has been up and down since around noon ET yesterday. While service was temporarily restored by 8PM ET, the platform went down again shortly after, and will remain so for “at least several hours” while AO3 attempts to resolve the issue.
[Organization for Transformative Works]
Redfin is doing a geoguessing-themed game of skill to give away a million-dollar house in its app, based on clues found in its Super Bowl ad, and Rainbolt is part of the promo — but he’s not allowed to help, based on the rules here.
Meanwhile, Salesforce’s Mr. Beast ad promises a million-dollar giveaway based on the clues in its 30-second ad.
If you believe internet rumors claiming the Stranger Things finale had “two hours” cut from its two-hour runtime, and have ignored actors and others saying that the claim is fake, the show’s creators have responded.
Asked about it by Variety, Matt Duffer said, “Obviously, that’s not a real thing,” while Ross Duffer added, “I don’t think there’s a single cut scene in the entire season.”
Critic Ben Davis rounds up the art words that helped him better process 2025. I think the term “delightmare” hits the spot:
A word I latched onto in an essay thinking about the prevalence of the feeling of “being terrorized by stupid shit.” This is a horror-adjacent genre of cultural stuff linked to overconsumption and brainrot. Because it’s all about stupid trivia becoming actually sinister, it spans art and the news. It was on my mind all year with the gibbering ghoulishness of the White House’s social media feeds and its yen for A.I. art.
It’s also present at this year’s most cursed art installation in Miami. For more on that specific vibe, read this.
Frog costumes, Luigi hats, and the press frenzy at the viral murder trial.
In court Thursday during evidence suppression hearings, prosecutors showed a hand-written note that police say they found among Mangione’s possessions. It was only briefly shown and hard to make out, but one day’s tasks included buying USBs and a digital camera from Best Buy. Journalist Lorena O’Neil reports one section of the note may have referenced archiving social media pages, which were scrutinized by the public after Mangione’s arrest.
As usual, Google is back with another set of the year’s top trending searches, as well as archived lists for previous years. Just don’t be too surprised when you see 2025 top spots taken up by Charlie Kirk, KPop Demon Hunters, or Arc Raiders.
These lists don’t present the most-searched terms; instead, Google is highlighting terms with the “highest spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2025 as compared to 2024.”
Though Club Chalamet started off as just another stan account, The Wall Street Journal reports that Simone Cromer — the woman behind the Timothée-obsessed page — has found new success on Substack where she has generated enough revenue to “cover the cost of her summer vacation to Italy” with just a few hundred subscribers.
[The Wall Street Journal]
We’re back in New York court this morning for pre-trial hearings on whether key evidence in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting case will be barred from being shown to jurors — that includes items like a firearm and notebook recovered when Mangione was arrested. As I left the courthouse last night, some Mangione supporters were already “in line” to try to get inside on Tuesday. They camped out across the street in tents overnight.
