A Guide to Child Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Why Do Kids Throw Fruit in Toilets?
In this episode, we’ll take a deep dive into youth culture and answer questions you might not have asked yourself, like: “Why do young people throw fruit in the toilet?”, “What does it mean when I’m told to ‘visualize spinning apples’?”, “What is glass skin?”, and “How can Minecraft help us understand the age of the universe?”
Why do young people throw fruits in the toilet?
It’s a strange story, but young people are throwing fruit into toilets in honor of rapper Lucki. The backstory: On October 3, the Atlanta rapper, best known for his track ” New Drank ,” was at ComplexCon in Los Angeles when a clash between his entourage and Playboi Carti’s crew erupted, resulting in Lucki being stabbed.
In response, the hashtag #throwfruitinthetoiletforlucki emerged on Instagram and TikTok, and kids began throwing fruit into the toilet and posting videos like this:
and this one:
Here’s what’s going on; why it’s happening is a little more difficult to explain. People have been posting screenshots pointing out that Lucki’s song “Y Not” includes the line “When I get stabbed at ComplexCon, throw fruit in the toilet” in the lyrics—but those words aren’t actually in the song, and it’s hard to imagine many fans believing it. Some have suggested that the trend is a dig at Lucki’s lifestyle and weight, a clear hint that he needs to eat more fruit. Perhaps, but I think it’s a classic example of online inconsistency. I don’t think anyone is genuinely trying to honor Lucki by posting these videos. It seems like pranksters are trying to get the rapper’s fans to throw fruit in their toilets so they can then say, “Look at these weirdos! We tricked them into throwing fruit in their toilets!” But it doesn’t seem to be working. Everyone I’ve seen throwing fruit seems to “get the joke,” which actually turns the joke on its head. In any case, Lucky is doing well and is expected to make a full recovery.
What does the phrase “imagine spinning apples” mean?
The second popular fruit-related meme this week is “imagine spinning apples,” a way to insult pretentious idiots online. Explaining how this expression got that way is a whole other story, so let’s get started.
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize things. If you can’t picture apples, you may have aphanasia. The idea that some people can picture apples and others can’t is widespread on 4Chan, Reddit, and other online communities populated by young people who want to assert their superiority over others but can’t do so based on money, attractiveness, or any other traditional criteria of superiority. Despite neurobiological studies showing a correlation between aphantasia and slightly higher IQ, these internet weirdos have decided that having aphanasia means a person is stupid or lacks an inner life. Some have gone even further and suggested that intelligence can be measured by the number of apples a person can visualize and whether they can imagine them spinning.
Here are some memes:
and posts of this kind:
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This method has come to be used to ridicule people who boast about their intelligence by using criteria that actually make them look stupid. It’s like bragging about online IQ test results or Mensa membership.
What is glass skin?
“Glass skin” is a beauty trend sweeping TikTok. Based on Korean skincare trends, it envisions skin so smooth, radiant, and clear it seems to glow. How to achieve this effect is debatable, but there’s no shortage of how-to videos and ads for creams and tinctures promising to make skin glow like glass. Like this one:
I’m not against people looking as oily as they want, but viral “glass skin” videos don’t provide good advice— a recent study found that nearly 95% of viral Korean skincare and “glass skin” videos on TikTok are misleading, and many may even be dangerous.
What is the “Door Kick Challenge” (and does it really exist)?
This week, reports of new “door-knocking challenges” are coming in from all over the country, from Portland to Phoenix , West Virginia to California .
Here’s how Taylor County, West Virginia, Deputy Sheriff Chris McQueen describes the “door-kicking challenge”: “There’s a new trend that’s been called either the ‘door-kicking challenge’ or the ‘donkey-kicking challenge.’ Essentially, it involves teenagers kicking doors late at night and then recording their reaction as they run away. It’s definitely not a game of ‘ding-dong-ditch.'”
There are so many things wrong with this statement. First, the “door kicking challenge” is nothing new. Here’s a 2021 report about this supposed challenge . Since then, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of similar news stories have been published regularly across the country, constantly warning about this dangerous trend. But it appears to be untrue.
I looked at the doorkickchallenge hashtag on TikTok and similar resources on other video platforms and found no evidence of young people “recording their reactions” to kicking down a stranger’s door or mentioning the challenge in a “you should try it too” kind of way. There are plenty of videos of people kicking doors, but they’re all filmed using doorbells or security cameras, presumably posted by homeowners, and we have no idea who’s doing it or why. It could be stalkers, burglars, or someone angry because they left their keys on the coffee table. So, there’s no discernible trend or challenge beyond the increasing number of people installing doorbells.
The police officer’s final point, that “this isn’t a game of doorbell,” is debatable. Doorbell has been around since the early 1800s, and I can’t find any evidence that the rules have changed since then or that kids are more likely to kick doors instead of ringing doorbells. No one keeps statistics on this, but it seems reasonable to assume that today’s kids do stupid things just as often as you and your friends. That’s always a safer bet.
If police departments want to warn the public about a truly deadly trend, they could look at the number of adults shooting teenagers on their porches . They could then hold a press conference warning about the “Killing Kids for Ringing the Doorbell Challenge.”
Viral Video of the Week: “Playing Minecraft Until It Defeats Itself”
Looking at the amount of AI-generated content flooding video platforms, it’s easy to conclude that young people can’t imagine spinning apples. But there’s also evidence to the contrary. For example, this week’s viral video: ” Playing Minecraft until it defeats itself.” It’s about a children’s video game, but on a deeper level, it’s about deep time, evolution, the second law of thermodynamics, and much more.
This video simulates a Minecraft world to prove that if you set the correct seed and let Minecraft run long enough without intervention, the victory condition (killing the dragon) will occur, even without a player, completely randomly. You’d have to run your computer for a billion years instead of 100 hours of Minecraft , but it would still happen.
The idea that anything that can happen will happen, given enough time, is not new, but the concept of such vast timescales can be difficult to grasp. This video uses a relatively simple model (well understood by viewers) to imagine billions of years.
I have no doubt that the seven million people who watched that video (and played enough Minecraft to understand its meaning) understand the concept of a billion years better than those who haven’t: a billion years is roughly the amount of time it would take for an Enderman to randomly drop a carved pumpkin onto two snow blocks, and the resulting snow golem to cause a creeper to explode next to the walls around the End portal, so that Endermen can randomly move enough blocks from the Overworld to the End to create piles so high that randomly moving snow golems can throw enough snowballs to destroy all seven crystals protecting the Ender Dragon.