you don’t want to go viral.

for better or worse, the internet has changed

failure is overrated, a hundred thousand words, but success is only a few.

these are cruel labels, to be sure but hmm… what to do about it, what to do about it…

when confronted with this, i simply pull on a ski mask and crash out a pane-glass window onto the street, making my sly scenic getaway from the fuzz and the spectators and the bedlam.

barreling down armitage avenue i can make it pretty far down the street in the winter as the police cars are slipping and sliding around on top of the ice, maybe i can even make it onto the bed of an inconspicuous absent-minded pickup as it speeds away… that’s all to say, you’re riding the motorcycle of your own misfortune just like i’m riding the jetski of my own... Riding away from the cops huffing and puffing now… “hey, copper… let’s say we combine forces… losers united, llc… insecurity international, inc…”

priorities change: the internet has changed.

the internet has changed. there was a time not terribly long ago when a user might want to go viral on these streams. the 2010s were a fairly generous time to the first and second waves of internet celebrities and the centers of memes, many were paid unseemly sums for insurance commercials, sometimes cast in films, sometimes given music careers.

for a lot of young people, and here i’m talking about many of my little brother’s classmates of 15 year olds, going viral is the goal of all of this. in a world of vanishing career options, going viral represents an escape hatch from the world of late-stage capitalist drudgery. and for a long time, generally, going viral was the unstated goal of the place — god, you know, you too could go viral. there’s a winning condition, you know. you could break free and above all these pedestrians… and this was the promise, until, of course, the ultimate virality hit, that being covid-19… sorry… low-hanging fruit…

well anyways as the decade hits its half-way point, now five years into the pandemic, the internet is wearing itself heavier on our collective shoulders with every passing month and it’s become increasingly very clear — to me at least — that if you’re an online person, someone who writes or posts or livestreams or whatever it is you do online, you increasingly want to be “popular” in an online sense as opposed to “viral”.

Online virality resolves around a certain moment of circumstances coinciding with the endless hazy web of mainstream discourses whizzing one way and another. The moment happens, is taken in perpetuity as a snapshot with links, be they intentional or unintentional, to dozens, potentially hundreds, of different subcultures online. But this does not at all mean success for the person at the center of the viral moment. In fact it may lead to the opposite.

We saw this with haley welch especially — the Hawk Tuah girl — who attempted to turn a viral moment, a conflation of the frat network, the zynosphere, and a resurgant cultural capital for the country/rural-coded, into a long-term popularity and profit source. Who can blame her for trying? Getting selected for that sort of virality feels like being selected by some sort of deity of the channels. If there are any Shakespearean tragedies to be written about the underclasses in wealthy countries today, they would be centered around social media personalities.

As the novelty of such personalities diminshes due to the sheer oversaturation of faces and names, internet celebrities have more and more of a short use-by-date, so much so that the marketing firms hoping to use their license don’t even bother to form lasting relationships since speed is of the essence. based on how quickly they get overloaded with scams or their own hubris, this speed is of the essence. Haley Welch went down because she was bamboozled, seemingly without her knowledge, by a couple of crypto bros who brought her in on a Hawk Tuah coin which they promptly pulled the rug out from. She has more-or-less disappeared from public life since.

In terms of positive cases in which the center of a viral moment turns that virality into something sustainable, we have the Rizzler, a living 🤔 emoji who seems to have done perfectly fine turning virality into a long term popularity quite simply because he’s a third grader in a seemingly relaxed family that doesn’t put too much pressure on his celebrity status.

But then, on the other hand, was the Rizzler ever truly viral in the same way as Welch? Unlike Welch, with her one huge moment of virality, one single video, her “spit on that thang,” the Rizzler’s appearance on the Tonight Show, being caught watching the Godfather pt. 2 on an airplane, or modeling high end fashion, come together to form a cacophony of small moments. Rizzler feels more like a kid in the online neighborhood more than anything. And his family seems decent enough to keep from signing contracts they don’t understand to hand away their son’s likeness to crypto bros looking to use it for a rug pull scam a la haley welch.

That’s to say, you don’t really want to go big-scale viral. You don’t want people being obsessed with you or your life. My old friend Josh told me all you need is a thousand people to read your stuff every month or want to watch your videos, basically to see what you’re up to creatively, enough to give you five dollars a month, and then you’re kind of set for a while. This is an online “popularity” as opposed to a “virality”.

The goal of an online “popularity” is to be widely read, watched, listened to, but rarely posted about. Many of the best podcasts and newsletters work like this. If you do accidentally stumble into virality, try to be a normal person until the storm passes and then, well, continue to be a normal person.

A normal person? buddy don’t you know a normal person is a continuum, a flexing plate glass, a strand of dna twisted around each other by crick and watson each holding one side and… everyone! on three! One… Two… twiiiiiiist..

But getting back to the topic at hand, now that the DNA strand is twisted back into shape, I think it’s good to be very weary of celebrity. This is well established, sure, but the cult of media and personality is a sticky religion. It’s awfully hard to shake.

It’s a shame no one went up to whisper into Michael Jackson’s ear, “ambition made an exile of you”. Maybe it would have saved him. MJ sang for his work. People listened. But wait… I sing while I work too. I’m singing to myself, sometimes whistling, sometimes humming, while I’m writing this. And when I work at the restaurant I work at, too, a tune will come to me and I’ll hum it to myself. Do you sing while you work? Well why don’t you? As Animal Collective said, OpenUpYourOpenUpYourOpenUpYourThroat.

Just turn the internal microphone off, you fool.

Who’s behind this curtain in the corner of my room? Thomas Hobbes?!

Ever since the fall of the soviet union conservatives in the united states have wandered around country bumpkin grocery stores and gas stations asking passerbys “ave you sean me daddy,” and they were of course talking of The Leviathan.

Once in the vision of Reagan, then Bush, now Trump. Interestingly, The Leviathan has to be someone from outside their ranks, someone with a media career whom around them can form a rather clear cult of personality. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised the GOP are a party of sycophants.

new style here on the huffer (new phone, who dis?)

Clouds bite the hand that holds up the sky and the sky says ouch: thunder. birds. do aerial stunts outside my windows. i’m getting a new rug next week. i’m working on a new style for these posts and i think it’s a good one i just need to get offline more to get my head on more straight about what’s good work and what’s bad work. i like the casual feel of this. substack as a whole has felt very (um) dry as of late and i miss how weird this app was before certain people were chased off of it.

anyways, i feel very stifled when i look online and see a lot of people writing the same thing while i’m here off in the corner doing something completely different. but i think it’s important to believe in your bit. here’s hoping at least someone picks up on it. but hey, i tell myself, at least you’re not doing youtube thumbnails on substack like some people.

oh go suck on a youtube thumbnail you ipad adult.

go flatten your face to better fit the screen you dolt.

cry me a river but not on my brand new samsung galaxy experience 6.3 128 gb 5g.

you shelter your dogma like you’re worried exposing it to the light will burn it out of your hands, and maybe it will but if it’s real enough maybe it can reflect off of something and only then will it be real in the world like you want it to be real. Clear breeze and swaying curtains mean nothing without an apple. I don’t know why this is true but I find it to be so. Digital detox. Digits relaxing. My hands look like Ariana when I’m typing too much.

I should rename this substack dashing contradictions. I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s too early in the morning for these conversations. I fall into self-loathing like a coinflip.

thoughts on two vastly different films about music

this past weekend i watched two spectacularly different “music” movies, (1) The Decline of Western Civilization¹ and (2) Amadeus². both films deal heavy in father issues, and i think the contrast brings out a lot of depth in the punk movement in the us at the time.

the punk kids chronicled in The Decline of Western Civilization part 3, concerning the gutter punks of the 90s, were always coming so long as punk became less about grand social upheaval and more about an American individualistic angst towards parental abandonment and towards an overwhelming disciplinary structure imbued in the state becoming gradually founded in a carceral edge.

whereas Mozart’s character in Amadeus was protected by his raw talent behind a piano, the punk kids were protected by nobody and nothing except the bouncers at the few bars in LA which they were still allowed to play. They couldn’t play their instruments in a real way. But they could play their instruments in their own way, the way they had taught themselves — thereby elaborating on the whole new sound that Sex Pistols had brought to the States after their nationwide tour ended the year before. But unfortunately, at the same time as all of this, Heroin had fully saturated the scene, combining ably with the death drive inherent to many of these punk bands’ ethos’s.

Watching Germ’s performance of Manimal is terribly tragic. While Darby Crash was wobbling around stage moaning and screaming unintelligibly, guys from the audience rushed the stage to smear sharpie on him while the rest of the band played their instruments with big grins on their faces.

I couldn’t help but look up what exactly became of Darby and, well, he died a year after the below performance was filmed.

yesterday night at work on a slow night

i cut my own hair last night. i look like a talame! tålamond! and just like that i look like a dupe. exactlyheheheh, i press my palms together and make out like a bandit. i enjoy having a messy head of hair. i like living life as a productive mess and that’s kind of where i’ve found myself.

wait, after a proper moment of thought and reconsideration, i’ve decided i hate this story.

gasps, a muted applause before someone else grabbed their hands to stop them clapping. you hate this story? yeah! it’s dumb as rocks, baby. you’re no better than darby crash. unsubscribed.

my nose is still full of carrion. i blow it onto the platform before the train comes in.

oh the smell of a subway. that metal smell. i can’t picture it but i can imagine it, frame it, put it up on the wall of my memory board to poke at with a long stick and maybe go down a google rabbithole one day for real to figure out what’s the deal with that?…

god work is slow.

I can’t stand boredom like this. I have a problem. Three months into any job and I begin to get antsy. I begin to feel like this place, wherever it is, is stealing more of my time than I’m really getting out of it in terms of money. I need to get out I need to get out. I start pounding on the doors.

Just this past Saturday I was waiting for my replacement to come in and I tried asking my boss, hey if they don’t show up by 4:40 I might get out of here? to which he responded No.

No? I asked. He laughed. They’ll start trickling in soon. He said. He was right. But I got out of there at 4:40 anyways, though only because yes they had begun trickling in.

a brief encounter with netflix’s new UI

Someone is asleep on the couch of my apartment when I returned home from work. I know the person, they’re a friend sleeping over for the night. But they’re out like a light. Out out. My roommate is in the other room, also asleep. I walk past them to shut off the flat screen, still running reruns. Rerunning? But a voice comes from the screen, beckons me over, and with the smoothest of hands it reaches out and grabs me by the ears. One hand caresses the nape of my neck, not in affection but in ownership, and then both hands seize my shoulders and pull me with startling force into the television completely. The End.

Well the end is never complete. After the episode ended, I shut the television off. My friend rolled a bit in their sleep, groaned. I smell vodka vaguely in the air and go to my room to read for a bit.

Sometimes when I read, I’ll space out for a paragraph or two and think of my friends or family and once I return to the text it feels as though my friends and family have been in the book I’m reading the whole time, along with my thoughts and feelings on them. All of it mixes together. I suppose I’m ripping of Proust now just like I ripped off Cronenberg’s Videodrome above. Sobeit. I’m nothing if not a collection of shoplifted cliches.

Also! I should mention, my band West Wash played our first ever show last night at Dovetail Brewery in Chicago and I got the chance to meet

Jessica W

who was absolutely wonderful

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this publication, the briffin glue huffer, is what i would describe as a product of a “three coffees no lunch” process. this is either a great thing or a really terrible, annoying thing, depending on how you liked the above.

if you liked it, feel free to subscribe! if you want to support me doing more of these strange saucy screeds, absolutely feel free to throw some coffee money my way; a paid subscription is only $5, the price of a large black coffee at most of the places around my apartment, and with a certain amount of those $5 subscriptions i can both convince my family that this is a real job and have the time to write a second post a week instead of just one, and more importantly, to make it good.

if you hated it and found it very annoying, i also respect that. i annoy the hell out of myself most of the time so at least we share that.

1. a documentary chronicling the Los Angeles punk scene in 1989, two years after punk arguably “died” once johnny rotten stormed off stage in LA, saying “I don’t know what this bit is anymore.”

2. Mozart arrives in Vienna and is driven into a reckless spiral by a competing composer messing with his mind by pretending to be the ghost of his father — it’s a 3 hour movie but oh my god what a movie. every single scene was essential and it didn’t feel like there was a single lull. Can’t recommend Amadeus enough.