One of the main issues TrueAnon are focused on right now is the “influencerization” of everyday people, brought on by the migration of so much daily life onto the internet during COVID. They’re also concerned about the US economy’s reliance on insubstantial and unstable financial instruments, business models, and technology: vaporware, b2b SaaS, NFTs, and, of course AI (one typical estimate says that AI investments drove nearly 92% of GDP growth in the first half of the year). Franczak also worries about what’s happening to the generation of kids nursed on MrBeast, a YouTube star she describes as “cybernetic,” “part-machine,” a digital specter “optimized for the algorithm, not for a viewer” who feels like “looking into something very dark and sinister.”
“It’s funny ’cause everyone’s like, there’s no mass culture, there’s no monoculture,” Franczak says. “But the feed is mass culture. Literally, people are speaking in YouTube cadence, learning from videos. These ineffable ways that this stuff is changing everyday life…. It just makes me want to retreat more and more. Not in a ‘touch grass’ kind of way, but almost like I’m fucking scared of it.” She used to tweet daily but now she’s mostly stopped: “I got a glimpse of myself as a commodity and I’ve never been able to get back into it.”
Belden, on the other hand, seems to be diving fully into the ether. He’s become something like a prompt Picasso in the domain of futurist avant-goonslop. He has a personal archive of AI weirdness he’s concocted, including a mutation of Senator John Fetterman in a squalid, dimly lit room; his tongue lolls out in famished urgency, and his two massive, mud-speckled feet jut out like an offering. He’s also created a sort of feminized self-portrait, topless, with breasts.
Belden got into AI slop after sinking into Instagram Reels, the holy land of shortform stupidity, and being served up AI clips of “sexy girls with quadruple amputations.” He learned that these armless, legless figures are called “nuggets,” which is slang among those with acrotomophilia, or an amputee fetish. “It seems like a pretty risky fetish to have, right?” he muses, stroking his chin. “Because what if you’re like, This will be the ultimate orgasm—and I cut off my leg and it’s not?” From there, he explored the myriad other ways shitform video makers try to seize your attention online. “That’s the reason I started getting all this Down syndrome AI porn. Through that I investigated AI porn, and now I make John Fetterman porn.” He shows me even wilder, more disturbing AI blueprints he’s made, explaining that they’re part of a larger conceptual project too secret for me to detail in print. He also, completely unrelatedly, is writing for an upcoming TV show that hasn’t been announced yet.
