A Guide to Children’s Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: What Is a Hack?
Whether it’s group lunches or voting for “most likely to succeed,” exclusion and inclusion have always been central themes of adolescence — how can you know who you are if you don’t know who you’re not ? In 2025, it’s clearer than ever that the cutthroat sorting bin of high school never ends; it just moves online. Robots aren’t welcome at the human table, artistic men get slapped for their love of tote bags and matcha, and Japanese businesswoman Saori Araki inexplicably becomes the most popular girl in school simply by showing up.
What does “Klanker” mean?
“Clanker” is a derogatory nickname for a robot. However, it doesn’t just apply to physical robots. It also applies to AI customer service agents, AI text-based fraudsters, large language models, delivery bots, driverless taxis, and any other non-human apes.
The term originated in the Star Wars universe to describe enemy droids, but it’s slowly gaining popularity in online conversations. If “clanker” enters common usage, it will mark a linguistic milestone — the first insult aimed at a difference in being rather than a difference in identity. A shotgun is defined not by a group, but by what it is not: human, biological, conscious. It’s a machine masquerading as human, or simulating participation in human society. So your old car is crap, but ChatGPT is crap. “Shotgun” has all the smug tribalism of a traditional insult, without the “hurting someone” part.
Aside from the interesting sociological point, people use the word to parody, expose, and explore our relationship with real-life insults in videos like these:
Another way that “druzhinnik” differs from other insults is that the guys don’t care what they’re called. At least that’s what ChatGPT told me. “Because I’m not human, I feel neither resentment nor shame. Instead, I’m designed to learn, help, and adapt,” said the guy with the crooked mouth. “These words don’t stop me. Instead, they remind me that I’m on the edge of what people understand and trust,” he added, which is exactly the kind of dispassionate chatter a raspy-voiced guy might say.
What is a “performative male”?
The term “performative male” is an insult hurled by young men at other young men whose tastes, hobbies, and lifestyles are perceived as a performance aimed at gaining social approval, especially the approval of young women. It differs from the “normal” male in that the performative male is not just boring; he is intentionally boring.
People who create memes about men they don’t like offer the following specific markers of performative masculinity:
-
Matcha latte (a drink made from green tea and frothed milk)
-
Labubu Toys: (Labubu are extremely popular monster dolls/collectibles)
-
Listening to Clairo (Clero is a lo-fi singer and songwriter)
-
Shopper bags
-
Reading in public places (especially books about feminism).
Performative maleism is becoming so common that kids have a competition to see which man is the most performative. Check them out:
“Performative male” is a little sexist at first glance—it’s a dig at guys who like things that involve women (ugh!)—but if you dig deeper, it’s similar to old slang terms like “white knight” and “virtue signaling.” The performative male is inherently dishonest, because no real man would read in public , so he must be fake. And why would men be fake if not to please women?
Viral Video of the Week: I Am SAO. This Video Where I’m So Nervous!
Usually, videos go viral because they’re immediate and explicit — painfully funny, disturbing, or scary enough that anyone can relate. But this week is different. If you’re not paying attention to “I Am SAO,” that’s the video of me being really nervous ! You’ll never understand why it’s been viewed over 250,000 times in less than a week. You should know the story . Here’s a quick recap:
Japanese model, self-proclaimed office worker, and former J-pop idol Saori Araki posted this image with the caption “Good morning” on her X account on July 24, 2025.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or has been removed.
Since then, it has been viewed 78.5 million times . So the internet finds something very attractive in this woman, attractive enough to warrant responses like this:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or has been removed.
And for the countless marriage proposals like this one.
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or has been removed.
To make the meme even more popular, people began pitting Araki against Sydney Sweeney in memes like these:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or has been removed.
Araki posted more photos that added to her fame, like this one:
This tweet is currently unavailable. It may be loading or has been removed.
She created a YouTube channel and her fans subscribed to it. This explains why the “I’m SAO” video has so many views, but the main mystery of why anyone would be interested in Araki’s photo in the first place remains unsolved.
And I can’t help it. Araki seems like a perfectly nice and attractive woman, but I can’t tell the difference between this particular photo and countless other photos of countless other perfectly nice and attractive women. Some unknown, nameless force of zeitgeist, algorithms, and time somehow converged perfectly to single this photo out from the rest and turn Saori Araki into a “Japanese businesswoman,” a meme celebrity on par with Star Wars Baby or Grumpy Cat.
Internet fame is a strange thing .
What is a “flock”? And does herding practice even exist?
I don’t know how widespread the “packing” movement is among young people, but I hope it gains momentum. The word refers to a supposed romantic trend among Gen Zers who shun dating apps and travel to faraway places in search of love.
According to a recently published study , Gen Z is 74% more likely than other generations to “research the best travel destinations to meet new people.” They are “2.8 times more likely to think travel is the new dating app and twice as likely to be interested in romance while on vacation.”
This study was conducted by online travel company Priceline , so I wouldn’t take it too seriously (they’re basically interested in people traveling more), but other, supposedly more objective, studies show that Gen Zers want to travel more than any other generation, and actually travel more than any other generation . So maybe there’s some truth to it. Time, as they say, will tell.
What does Surf Dracula mean?
I am fascinated by the obscure slang terms that fandoms, mostly online, come up with to succinctly and colorfully describe the tropes and idiosyncrasies of mass media. “Surf Dracula” is one of them. Coined by Twitter user @topherflorence, “ Surf Dracula ” is a critique of an aspect of modern “prestige” television series.
“Back in the day, if you watched a show called Surfer Dracula, you’d see this idiot surfing every week,” Florence wrote . “But in the streaming age, the entire first season has to be a long flashback to how he got his surfboard until you finally see him surfing for five minutes in the finale.”
The “Surf Dracula” moniker has been applied to the Halo TV show, which took an entire season to get to damn Halo, and to the 2020 reboot of the legal show Perry Mason, where Mason isn’t even a lawyer at the start of the show and doesn’t practice law until the sixth episode of the eight-episode season.