💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 8-21.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 12:35:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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The first time I was exposed to Hawk Tuah, it was sideways, and I didn't get it. On r/torontobluejays, which I browse occasionally during the baseball season, someone posted a picture of someone by the CN Tower with a Blue Jays jersey personalized with HAWK-TUAH / 69. Variations of eyeroll emojis, "classy" remarks, and so on. I didn't get it, but 69, the favourite number of the sort of person for whom the ultimate life goal is a threesome, was obviously a big clue. I googled it. I got the context. I instantly got dumber.
So it's about a lady talking about spitting on That Thang before going down, and she's cute, and blonde, and, well, that's basically the entirety of it. But apparently this absolutely blew up (sorry) on the part of the internet populated with frat bros. Max Read calls it the Zynternet, writing that,
You could probably communicate the basic contours of this community simply by calling it "Frat Internet" or "Barstool Internet" or "Dumbass Parlay Bet Internet" or "Internet Made Up Of Guys Who Send Annoying Whiny Replies to AOC Or Whoever And When You Click On Their Profiles It’s Like 1000s Of Retweets Of Stories About The LSU Football Program."
I read Max Read's substack about this a couple of weeks ago and at the time I wasn't familiar with the "Zyn" part - it's apparently a kind of nicotine pouch, not authorized for sale up here. But stopping for gas south of the border yesterday, I noticed that the tobacco products behind the counter were all uncovered (another difference between the two countries) and there they were, row after row of Zyn pouches. It clicked. And then I had another conversation today, and things got even clearer.
One of my friends had taken a few weeks of vacation, not going anywhere, just staying around town and not working. And in those three weeks he'd gone to his wife's coworker's wedding. He told me about the groom's wedding party - a bunch of very generic, thirty-something white guys. He tried to have conversations with a couple of them. It was like pulling teeth. They all wanted to talk about our hockey team. It's August, it's still summer, and yet it still seemed central to their existence. Most of the conversations were fine, if boring, until one went off the rails, the groomsman a conspiracy theorist full of really original ideas about vaccines, Trudeau, et al.
As my coworker was telling me this, everything was clicking into place. This was the invisible mass of people driving cute blonde blowjob memes, the henchmen of Hawk-Tuah. The sort of people who remember everyone who's ever played for their favourite team, and their stats; who gamble compulsively; who're bad to their partners (or at least their shared finances); who could probably explain to me what a parlay is if I ever cared (I don't), and who think an enthusiastic blowjob sound is the height of comedy. A reminder to me that what we think of as the internet is actually splintered in all kinds of ways: restaurants, gambling, aspirational social media, news, cute animal videos, porn, and a thousand other things.
There was a time when the internet was mostly the web, and it was mostly amateur websites. But that time has long passed, and we're at the point where HTTP(S) is now largely used as a mediation protocol for applications and APIs. The people who were awful in high school rather predictably grew up to be awful adults, using the web in boring, predictable ways, sharing sports highlights, dumb videos, then chirping progressives and athletes who caused them to miss a bet on Twitter. Like it or not, the internet is their home, too, and they are legion.