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On January 11th, 2025, 27-year-old Arizona man, Nautica Thaddeus Furches Malone would shoot himself in the head, tragically ending his own life, and leaving behind his wife and two children. He is remembered by his family as “man of integrity, kindness, (and) generosity” and he is remembered by the rest of the world as the “goon lord.” In the simplest and most polite terms, “gooning” refers to chronic, prolonged, masturbation, and the gooners are its practitioners. While the term seems to have gained popularity due to Gen-Z meme culture, there seems to be a growing group of Gen Z men claiming it’s more than funny-slang, it’s a lifestyle, centered around achieving a greater sense of peace.

So how did Nautica Malone’s name become so connected with this way of life? Well, on January 8th, 2025, Malone would go to a drive-thru coffee shop, part of a chain called “Bikini Beans.” The establishment is staffed almost completely by women in Bikinis, referred to as “Bikini Baristas” These women, because of the nature of their job, are no stranger to sexual harassment, and also no stranger to Malone, who has reportedly visited this location several times. As a bikini-clad barista took his order that day she noticed the man had no pants on and suspected he was masturbating. She called over her manager who promptly began filming Malone as he pulled up to the window. The video, only 14 seconds long, shows the camera person approaching his car asking if he has been there before. Once she gets close enough to confirm suspicions, she says, “Sir, you need to leave. Unacceptable” and Malone speeds away in his Dodge Challenger. Bikini Beans would post the video, and within 72 hours he was found deceased in the very same car. 

This would become the catalyst for a discussion surrounding privacy, some saying that posting that video of Malone was akin to public execution. Commentators, like one such Zach Galsky, point towards YouTube videos in which pedophiles are set up and exposed online for their actions, making claims that “putting the spotlight on a mentally unwell individual in order to humiliate and torture them in front of an audience of bloodthirsty strangers simply does not deter other mentally unwell individuals from repeating the transgression, as their distorted psyche will compel them to act out their perverse desires even when they know what risk potentially awaits for them on the other side.” Others, like Trey Sellers, would go as far as organizing a candlelight vigil in the parking lot Malone committed suicide, dubbed “The Gooniversary” and “The Gooneral” The candlelight vigil was really more of a lousy protest, where young men holding signs gathered around chanting nonsense about their right to goon. Sellers, as an act of devotion to Malone purchased the same make, model and mileage car as Malone, occasionally taking it to Bikini Beans so that he can shout at the Baristas for “killing that man.” 

While it seems that the gooniversary attendees are serious, their sentiments, captured by the YouTube channel, Channel 5, are simply too ridiculous to not be satire. “I think it was a stand for bravery– an act of heroism” says one young man, no older than 20 years old. His friend agrees, “It took a lot of courage for him to do that, not everyone can do that.” The reporter, a woman, responds back “Right, not everyone can commit a sex crime.” and the group of 4 nod their heads in agreement. 

There are so many layers to this, from the onset of the term gooning, to bikini baristas, to Malone’s death, they are all symptoms of the same issue; The sexual degeneracy of men in this country is at an all-time high and so is the porn addiction. It wasn’t the video that killed Nautica Malone, it was the consequences of his actions catching up to him, a result of a complex interplay of personal, psychological, and social factors. While the video may have intensified those pressures, it didn’t remove Malone’s agency, or constitute an act of violence against him. To compare what happened to him to public execution implies a state-sanctioned, non-consensual death penalty carried out as a spectacle, turning Malone into the victim of a situation in which he was the perpetrator. 

This case reveals the terrifying reality women can never seem to escape, that even when they are the victims of a sex crime, they will be blamed for the “ruined life”, or in this case murder, of a man who did both those things himself. This subset of Gen-Z men rebranding chronic porn addiction and public masturbation as a “lifestyle” or “act of heroism” removes the social stigma from crimes like these and incentivizes acts of sexual deviance. Nautica Malone was a real person, who made real mistakes with real consequences, and the true tragedy here has been carried out posthumously. This dead man was completely stripped of his dignity to be made a martyr to a cause based around porn-addiction and the relentless, non-consensual, objectification of women. That is the real public execution, and to suggest otherwise is to demand women suffer in silence so that men never have to face the reflection of their own actions. 

On March 29, 2026 a TikTok user with the username @mikalawest posted a video of her friend, Cheyenne, and an unidentified guy, captioned “my friend found her soulmate last night in Huntsville Alabama after the lineman rodeo and we know nothing about him except his name is Mike and his friends kept calling him like the birds in finding nemo (Mike! Mike! Mike!) help us get nemo home!” The video contained clips of the two dancing together and whispering in each other's ears– it was clear the pair hit it off. In typical TikTok fashion, users were moved by the cute moment and got to work sharing the video in their hunt for Mike. The video got so popular however, that before it could find Mike, it found his wife, Laura. She made herself known commenting, “Hi I’m Michael’s wife. He’s busy explaining this to our two children right now.” 

Upon the shocking revelation that Mike had a wife of 10 years, Mikala and Cheyenne did not take down the original video, instead they leaned into the scandal, posting a 20 minute Q&A on the situation, giving audiences a play-by-play of their night with Mike. The video, which has since been taken down, was posted before they had even talked with Laura, let alone given her an apology. It is obvious that to Mikala and Cheyenne, Mike and Laura aren’t real people with a mortgage and kids, they’re just a means to get more followers. This highlights a growing trend of “main-character syndrome” which is really just social media speak for the normalization of narcissistic behaviors, a disturbing trend which grows more apparent with each generation. In “exposing” Mike, they’re using moral framing to mask their self-centered opportunistic growth, while turning up the heat on a woman who is not only raising two children, but dealing with the dissolution of her decade long marriage. The internet now expects Laura to provide updates, trashing Mike or leaving him publicly, all because of actions she didn’t know her husband was committing, that he didn’t know were recorded.

This case shows the bad side of the “community” aspect of social media. What began as a good-natured collective effort to help a girl find her “soulmate” morphed into a mob, eager to get their fix from a woman who is already a victim. Furthermore, it puts her in a position where she has to show these children a video of their own father’s infidelity for fear of the internet showing it to them first. The story of Mike the Lineman serves as a grim reminder of the dehumanization inherent to the attention economy.  

Suzanne Somers was a lot of things, A sitcom and infomercial star, a wellness guru, an author, and as of October of 2023 Suzanne Somers was dead. As of now, however, she's a robot. This shocking announcement, made during March of last year was part of a plan devised between Somers, her husband Alan Hammel, and futurist Ray Kurzweil for “digital immortality” back in the 1980s. Developed by Hamel, in collaboration with Hollo.AI and Realbotix, the AI Twin (Not clone, as Hamel emphasizes) was trained on all 27 of Somer’s published books and hundreds of hours of her interviews, getting the twin to a point where Hammel himself claims,  "When you look at the finished one next to the real Suzanne, you can't tell the difference. It's amazing. And I mean, I've been with Suzanne for 55 years, so I know what her face looks like, and when I just look at the two of them side by side, I really can't tell which one is the real and which one is the AI."

It’s the bot's purpose, however, that makes this whole thing even weirder. Once he’s satisfied with the digital twin, Hamel plans to host his dead wife’s likeness on SuzanneSomers.com where her fans “can just come and hangout with her” and “ask her any questions they want” any time of the day. He encourages fans to reach out with their health issues so that Suzanne can answer them, assuring audiences that “Everything that Suzanne wrote in her books, because most of them were interviews with doctors, was cleared by Life Extension, which is a large health company that employs a lot of doctors and scientists. So every word of the interview and the claims that were being made were checked by them… the last thing we wanted was to have any issues about providing interviews about people's health issues that were incorrect.” It’s worth noting, however, that Somers has faced heavy criticism for promoting forms of alternative medicine, such as Bioidentical hormone replacement therapy and alternative treatments to chemotherapy, so the validity of her medical advice, and the people verifying it remains in question. (My favorite health claim of hers by far has to be that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza may have been driven to commit the shooting because of the level of toxins in his diet and his exposure to household cleaners.)

If you thought the dead-person hotline wasn’t bad enough, Hamel has spoken about additional plans to initiate a revival of Three’s Company just as soon as he can get John Ritter’s family to make him a twin too. And it’s never been easier thanks to Hollo.AI. Now an immortal twin isn’t just for the elite as it was thought to be in the 80s. With this platform users can generate a digital them that “clones your voice, knowledge, and style to chat and call for you 24/7.” Critics have coined the term “spectral labor” to describe “how the dead can be made to work again through the extraction and reanimation of their data, likeness, and affect.” This along with the suggestion of the sitcom’s revival suggests a future where not even death can ensure rest, and actors never film their final scene. 

In this post we’re going to be discussing “Sigil Kult”, what is essentially the lovechild of a crack house and a content house. The group, based in Downtown LA is made up of 20-something year old influencers and self proclaimed artists including Ruben Cloud, Salvi June, KaattzRealms, M Jay, Egg God, the oldest of the group at 32, and his new girlfriend, formerly missing teen, 20-year-old Litzy Albino. A random assortment of characters orbit the group constantly as they harass Downtown Los Angeles with their degeneracy. 

Sigil Kult gained their most momentum with the addition of content creator and musician Salvi June into their circle. Salvi, who already had a small following before his introduction to the group began posting clips of their day-to-day life, and it was their living state that catapulted them onto people’s feeds like never before. Residing in what was once the most luxurious hotel in Los Angeles, the Alexandria, which has now become subsidized housing, Egg God’s name is the only one on the lease, but his crew have certainly made themselves at home in his one-bedroom apartment. They sleep on piles in the floor, break things in drug-induced fits and they’ve covered every inch of the walls in unimpressive graffiti. 

Audiences were left wondering how it was possible the group hadn’t been evicted yet, but the eviction notices came. Some believe it was Salvi’s posting that would earn them their first eviction notice, of which there were seven after, and most agree it was he and Kattz who put the nail in the coffin once footage was released of the two breaking a door to the hotel and assaulting a security guard was released online. 

The combined internet footprint of these people is absolutely massive, to go through and explain all of the lore surrounding Egg God and crew would take me weeks, and even if I could, I’d have some moral qualms about it; The rise of Sigil Kult exemplifies how the attention economy eats itself. Visibility is no longer driven simply by talent, aesthetic, or relatability, it’s driven by extremity. 

What makes Sigil Kult particularly compelling is the way their environment, behavior, and documentation blur the line between performance and reality. There is no clear boundary between “content” and real life. Destruction, instability, and even interpersonal harm are byproducts of their lifestyle, while also being integral to their brand. In this sense, the group reflects a broader shift in influencer culture, where authenticity has been replaced by spectacle, and spectacle increasingly requires escalation.

At the same time, their trajectory exposes the limits of that model. Evictions, legal issues, and public backlash signal that while the internet may reward chaos, the real world still imposes consequences. The very content that fuels visibility also accelerates downfall, creating a cycle where virality and self-destruction are tightly intertwined.

When actor Jim Carrey appeared at the César Awards in Paris just last month to accept an honorary lifetime achievement award, the moment was meant to celebrate a decades-long career in comedy in film. Instead, the internet quickly turned the appearance into a viral conspiracy theory; some social media users claimed that the person on stage wasn’t Carrey at all, but rather a clone, body double, or someone in an elaborate mask.

The controversy began almost immediately after clips from the ceremony circulated across social media platforms. Many viewers commented that Carrey looked “unrecognizable” pointing to differences in his facial structure, demeanor, and voice compared to previous public appearances. In just a few hours, speculation escalated beyond simple curiosity. Some users suggested plastic surgery, while others proposed more extreme theories– that Carrey had been replaced by a clone.

The rumors gained additional traction when performance artist and makeup illusionist Alexis Stone posted an image online implying he had turned into Carrey for the awards using prosthetics and masks. The photo Stone posted of the Jim Carrey mask was later proven to be AI, and while the post appeared playful, it amplified confusion and helped further spread the conspiracy across social media. 

Eventually, both the organizers of the César Awards and Carrey’s representative confirmed that it was Carrey himself who attended the ceremony and delivered the speech. Carrey had reportedly prepared for months to accept this great honor and even delivered his acceptance speech in French. Despite the official clarifications, the rumor has continued circulating online, demonstrating how social media ecosystems can sustain misinformation even days after it has been debunked. 

From a social media perspective this incident illustrates several dynamics that define the modern digital information space. First is the algorithmic amplification of novelty. Algorithms across platforms prioritize content that generates engagement. Unusual or sensational claims, such as a celebrity being replaced by a clone, naturally attract comments, shares, and reactions. (I myself sent the first video I saw on the topic to my boyfriend almost immediately.) As a result of this behavior, speculative posts often spread faster than genuine, factual, explanations.

Second, the situation reflects the declining trust in visual-digital media. In an era of deepfakes, hyper-realistic makeup, and AI generated imagery, audiences increasingly question whether what they see online is authentic. For example, for the past few weeks the internet had been consumed with a video in which a man seems to encounter a woman that looks eerily similar to the supposedly imprisoned convict, Ghislaine Maxwell. All along, the video was a deepfake, but initially these explanations were buried under the noise surrounding the initial video. Ironically, the technologies that make this kind of deception possible also make people suspicious of legitimate images. When Carrey appeared slightly different after some time away from the spotlight, viewers were primed to interpret the change through a lens of technological information, rather than the old Hollywood way of just assuming they got some work done. 

Finally, this incident highlights the power of participatory conspiracy culture on social media. Online users don’t simply consume the rumor as they once did in one-way communication models like Broadcast television, instead they can build these theories together. Threads, memes, and speculative posts allowed participants to contribute “evidence,” turning the narrative into a collaborative digital puzzle.

In the end, the clone theory says less about Jim Carrey and more about the current social media landscape. In a media ecosystem driven by speed, virality, and spectacle, even a routine celebrity appearance can quickly transform into a global conspiracy narrative. For communicators, journalists, and public relations professionals, the lesson is clear: in the age of social media, perception often spreads faster than reality– and managing public perception before it gets out of hand is a central challenge of digital communication today.

In previous weeks I’ve discussed some of the darkest sides of the internet, but today is a bit of a palate cleanser. If you haven’t heard of the next big boy band, Boy Throb, one of two things must be true, you’ve avoided social media completely throughout the past few months or you live under a rock. Boy Throb, comprised of Anthony Key, Evan Papier, Zachary Sobania and Darshan Magdum, have taken the internet by storm with their customized pink tracksuits and confident declarations of an upcoming Grammy win. Their ultimate goal however? Get their fourth member Darshan, who currently resides in India, a Visa so that he can join his fellow band members in America. How do they plan to do that? Simple, get a million followers. 

Following their emergence on the scene, Boy Throb gained popularity fast hitting their goal of one million within a month of their first post. They left audiences asking if this whole ordeal was simply satire or if one million followers was a viable method to get Darshan to the states. The band quickly responded, reassuring that they couldn’t be more serious about their budding music careers, and posting a handful of song parodies educating viewers about the O-1 Visa. The O-1 Visa provides a pathway to live and work in the United States and is reserved “for individuals with extraordinary ability in the arts, entertainment, sciences, athletics, or business.” Eligibility is determined upon evaluation of an individual's full body of work, considering professional achievements, collaborations, press coverage, peer recognition, and work in the states to come. 

Boy Throb’s content isn’t just entertaining, it performs an important educational function, acting as an informal civic educator, increasing public literacy around immigration policy in a time where the topic is hot. They’ve depoliticized the issue without trivializing it, addressing the topic through music comedy and friendship. This approach lowers barriers that prevent people from engaging in the topic, such as avoidance to explicitly political content. In such a polarized climate they’ve created digestible content that doesn’t trigger the same kind of defensiveness that traditional, more in-your-face advocacy does. 

Just a few days ago the band would make their first appearance at the Grammy’s, much sooner than anybody thought that they would. While they haven’t released a Grammy nominated hit yet, they’ve amassed 1.2 million streams on their first single on Spotify alone. As for Darshan, his visa application has been submiited, so now it's just a waiting game. 

https://www.instagram.com/boy.throb/?hl=en

In last week’s blog post, I described the dangerous ideations that prey on young men on the internet, and this week it is time to discuss the opposite sex. And just like last week, this one comes to a head in a very familiar way: attempted murder.

In Montana, on January 13, 2026, at approximately 4:23 p.m., Billings Senior High School teacher Jason Rader was stabbed during an altercation with a newly 18-year-old student, Kaylie Wirkman Lear. The girl then turned the weapon on herself, sustaining three self-inflicted stab wounds. Both were taken to the hospital for their injuries, which proved to be non-lethal, and that is largely where the story ends in terms of journalistic coverage. One look at Kaylie’s online past, however, suggests there is much more to the story.

Kaylie’s TikTok account, @imrealllypretty, reveals the dark content she interacted with online. Her reposts are filled with material romanticizing student–teacher relationships or praising Jodi Arias, the infamous murderer who stabbed her ex-boyfriend, Travis Alexander, 27 times in the shower as a result of her obsessive attachment to a man who no longer wanted her. Kaylie’s Pinterest account with the same username continues the theme, featuring “aesthetic” stills from films like The Crush, in which a 14-year-old Alicia Silverstone falls head over heels for an older man. When he thwarts her advances, the girl stalks and sabotages him throughout the course of the film. The account even includes a board titled “let’s make love with our teachers.”

Internet users who claim these events are local to them report that Rader was a good man—a dedicated husband and father—and extremely unlikely to have groomed Kaylie. Some even say that Rader approached the school with concerns regarding Kaylie’s obsession with him and that nothing was done in response. Others, however, insist the girl was groomed and that the relationship turned violent when the man refused to engage in a public relationship with the newly legal student. Scouring Reddit reveals additional, more shocking claims about the girl, but the validity of many of them remains in question.

Speculation aside, the information we know to be true is cause enough for a conversation. Kaylie had been seeking out a relationship defined by an inappropriate power dynamic, and whether she was taken advantage of by a predatory man or obsessively attached to an innocent one, the fact remains that the development of this girl’s delusions has been documented online for quite some time. One cannot help but wonder whether the internet helped foster them.

While it is worth mentioning that Kaylie was born as Logan Lear, she spent the majority of her adolescence living as a girl—presenting as a girl and identifying as one. For all intents and purposes, Kaylie Lear is a teenage girl. Describing this kind of behavior from a Gen Z lens to outsiders is difficult, but in plain terms, Kaylie strives for the “coquette, schoolgirl, Lana Del Rey, Girl, Interrupted” aesthetic. All girls are training to become women and can fall into toxic ideas of what a woman should be. They fall into particular danger, however, when they begin to wonder how a woman should be perceived by a man. It seems that in searching for the meaning of femininity—a process made more difficult for Kaylie than for other teenage girls, as it was both physical and mental—she arrived at the wrong conclusion.

This young girl saw images of confident young women online, idealistically feminine and so irresistible that they could bend the will of the ultimate power figure: the older man. The media Kaylie consumes—the artists she claims interest in—are geniuses. Lana Del Rey is a poet, Sofia Coppola a visionary, and The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is one of my personal favorites. But Kaylie is not consuming this media as it is intended. She resonates with the aesthetics of Coppola’s films and Del Rey’s lyricism while ignoring their purpose entirely, missing the point completely.

When algorithms endlessly feed you what you want to see, social media can become an echo chamber very quickly. Kaylie is not the only young girl who thinks she knows who she wants to be because she made a Pinterest board about it, and she will not be the last. There are already ethical issues surrounding the control of content consumption, and controlling content interpretation is impossible. If it were not for Pinterest, I may have never discovered some of my favorite works of literature. Still, it is hard not to feel regretful that Kaylie views these tragic stories of womanhood—recorded in film, music, and writing—and believes that is as good as it gets.

Billings Senior High School appears to be a tight-knit community, quickly launching a fundraiser for the math teacher that was met with overwhelming support. As for Kaylie, little is known about her medical or legal status. One can only hope that she receives the help she needs. This case mirrors last week’s discussion of young men pulled into dangerous online ideologies. In both instances, social media does not simply reflect insecurity, it hardens it into belief. For young men, that belief may manifest as obsession with dominance, appearance, or control. For young women, it may take the form of romanticized vulnerability, desirability, submission to power, or in Kaylie's case, even violence. 

AI Use Disclosure: Chat GPT for Grammar Corrections

On Christmas Eve 2025, popular Twitch streamer and “looksmaxer” Clavicular was recorded on livestream running over a “stream sniper.” Let’s begin this discussion by defining our terms. Clavicular, also known as Braden Peters, is a newly 20-year-old internet sensation who gained popularity due to his shocking content. Peters is one of the biggest names in the looksmaxing community, a group of people dedicated to “ascending,” or reaching their peak level of attractiveness, through rather unconventional—and in Peters’s case, extreme—methods. These can include, but are most certainly not limited to:

• “Bone-smashing”: a technique aimed at reshaping facial structure by subjecting the face to blunt-force trauma (often with a hammer).

• Plastic surgery: Clavicular has discussed operations as extreme as limb-lengthening surgery, despite being 6'2".

• A myriad of Botox alternatives, all administered at home.

• Drug use: Peters was purportedly just 14 years old when he ordered steroids off the internet for the first time. He started with testosterone and has since self-prescribed more intense drugs, such as trenbolone and crystal meth, which he occasionally doses on stream in pursuit of “lean-maxing.”
  
  

Now the obvious question to ask is: how did this young man end up this way, so consumed with physical attractiveness that he breaks his body down more and more each day in hopes of “ascension”? What was he exposed to during his childhood? Both questions can be answered the same way: social media. Peters grew up on the internet, establishing his presence in looksmaxxing forums sometime around his freshman year of high school. Many of his posts are unsavory, displaying a distaste for people in general—but primarily women—and often recommending dangerous methods to members of his online community. It becomes obvious that this was a child who was extremely insecure, isolated, and vulnerable, and by believing that the key to success is physical attractiveness, he gives himself a sense of importance as well as a sense of control.

Young boys are repeatedly preyed upon by these questionable online role models, promised answers to all of their pubescent problems in exchange for blind devotion. The real turning point came, however, when an anonymous source disclosed his not-so-private drug use to his university, resulting in his expulsion and newfound freedom to dedicate all of his time to his online presence. Thus, the Twitch and Kik streams began. With each drug’s negative side effect, he took more drugs, and with every bit of attention he received, he became increasingly detached from reality.

It is clear that his greatest addiction of all is attention—and it is the one breaking him down the most. We are seeing the emergence of people addicted to being on livestream, convinced that if every moment is recorded, they will find success, without considering that some moments look far worse than others. The same reason a then-21-year-old Jack Doherty insisted on streaming his distraught girlfriend crying after being the victim of an armed robbery is the same reason Clavicular was willing to run down another human being live on stream. To these people, the weight of others’ real-time suffering feels light against a sea of roaring, drama-hungry viewers—especially when those viewers are paying the bills.

Clavicular makes for a fascinating and ever-evolving case study of how delusional and harmful ideas can pollute minds on a scale larger than ever before, thanks to social media. As for the events of that Christmas Eve, Clavicular—dubbed “Vehicular” by viewers—would ultimately claim self-defense, alleging that the “stream sniper” was harassing him and even standing in front of the vehicle. This made for a not-so-surprising twist when viewers heard the car drive completely over the man’s body. Despite the streamer’s wishes that the victim had “hopefully” died, he survived.

As if the ethical dilemma has not already presented itself, consider how we once turned on the TV to a handful of channels, and now we can watch a man be run over by a car over and over again, as many times as we’d like. This level of exposure is not good for us, and it is especially harmful for the younger, more impressionable portion of the population. We have become deeply desensitized to both consuming and exposing extreme content. At just 20 years old, Braden Peters has done more than enough to ruin his life—and all of it is public. It leaves one wondering: how much farther will someone like this go to advance their social media career if they truly have nothing left to lose? How many people will keep watching? For how long will free speech remain the norm across platforms, and how do we address its unintended costs?

AI Use Disclosure: Chat GPT for Grammar Corrections