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.
A sport historically averse to internet culture is finding success embracing fandom, trends, and influencers.
Let’s travel back to when memes were new, anyone could get their 15 minutes with a silly dance, and the amount of data tech companies collected about you was slightly less creepy. Mozilla reunited some of the biggest names in late ‘aughts memedom for its “come back to Firefox” campaign.
The list of sites that had to go down, at least temporarily, because of the recently disclosed PHP vulnerability keeps growing. Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s ops team quickly got things patched, secured, and back online. Digital librarian Brewster Kahle posted his thanks on Mastodon last night: “Given the severity, there are heroes in many many orgs from last night. Could have been no lights, no traffic signals, real problems.“
I’m pretty militant about keeping my unread count under control, but it’s hard to stay on top of things. As I’m writing this, I have 144 unread emails. That pales in comparison to my friend Abel’s 11,425, and my wife’s staggering 23,166. Where do you fall on the spectrum? Are you all in on inbox zero? Or have you just given up?
Inspired by XKCD 2347, this interactive data visualization explores how modern digital infrastructure relies on just a handful of dedicated individuals. From time zones on four billion phones to essential code libraries, discover the people quietly maintaining the crucial open-source projects that keep our connected world running.
Write Love Pens, a small pen and stationery shop, had initially used AI-generated images (including one of a pen with two clips on the cap) to advertise surprise boxes that the shop puts together. After getting yelled at on fountain pen Reddit, the shop’s owner apologized, and replaced the AI images with extremely cute amateur drawings.
The company says it will “reduce the reach” of Shorts content that’s re-uploaded without significant changes in an effort to prioritize “original content.” Instagram has made similar promises — but that hasn’t stopped swarms of anonymous accounts from taking over social media feeds through a practice known as clipping. I wrote about the ecosystem in May.
The Jimothy craze has died down up here in Seattle just in time for a new Weird Internet Thing: three mysterious bowls of water on the walking path around Green Lake. It started with an innocent question on r/Seattle: what’s up with the bowls? Commenters turned it into a bit, because we can’t resist a bit, which inspired an on-the-scene report by City Cast Seattle. Spoiler alert: it’s probably just water for dogs, but I like the mysterious “geese” theory.
The folks over at This American Life couldn’t figure out why their comments section seemed to be filled with what appeared to be bots. It wasn’t until someone younger on the team took a look that they realized the bots were actually young people just …hanging out.
Charges against the 20 year old “looksmaxxing” manosphere influencer (real name: Braden Peters) were filed on September 8th, and include one count of rape, one count of drugging someone for sexual intercourse, and one count of procuring alcohol for someone underage. Arraignment is set for October 14th.
Frazier, who died in June at age 35 after a heart emergency, was the creative force behind the “LOL nothing matters” rotating gif, among other certified bangers. Business Insiders’ Katie Notopolous calls her “probably one of the most influential people in internet culture of the 2010s and how things look now.”
Rewatching We’re All Going to the World’s Fair had me thinking about internet lore, creepypastas, and urban legends. Personally, I’m a sucker for a good haunted videogame like Ben Drowned or Petscop. But I want to know what weird and creepy internet rabbitholes you think are worth diving down.
A really excellent essay about how Philip K. Dick predicted our current day, “filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown. Musk and his brethren seem more like escapees from this universe than the Asimovian super-geniuses they imagine themselves to be.”
[Financial Times]
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.
