A Guide to Child Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: Gen Z Redefines Espionage

This week’s Out of Touch Guide is dedicated to the dark, hidden corners of the Internet – those secret places that only young people know about. At least until someone commits treason and the New York Times gets involved.

Gen Z gamer spying for influence

Traditionally, when classified government documents are leaked, the motives for the leak are either political or financial. But Generation Z is redefining espionage. Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old member of the Air National Guard, was arrested this week for “unauthorized deletion, possession and transmission of classified national defense information” and appears to have been motivated to impress teenagers in an Internet post. board.

The alleged source of the leak downloaded or decoded dozens of classified documents to a group of mostly teenage boys, apparently just to impress them. “If you had secret documents, you would like to at least have some fun, like “hey, I’m a big guy,” said a member of the Discord group .

Leaving aside the national security and legal implications (which are huge), the leak reveals a strange connection in which history-defining geopolitics meets the culture of teen internet gamers. It’s a strange story, and the timeline is mesmerizing. Here is a shortened version:

January : An unknown number of documents were posted to a closed group on the gaming platform Discord in January, according to investigative journalism group Bellingcat . The “Thug Shaker Central” group consisted of about 20 people, many of whom were teenagers devoted to Christianity, guns, racist memes, video games, and a YouTuber named Oxide .

Early March : Over 30 documents, some labeled “top secret”, were posted to a Discord group dedicated to the self-proclaimed “shit-posting internet micro-celebrity” wow_mao . They were also posted to Minecraft Discord, apparently to settle an online dispute.

April 5: Documents appear on 4Chan. A few hours later, apparently rigged versions of some documents appear on the pro-Russian telegram channel Donbass Girl, and then on Twitter.

April 7 : The New York Times publishes news for the offline world.

Teixeira will likely have plenty of time in Leavenworth to consider whether admiration for online teens was worth his lifetime, but I hope he at least serves as a cautionary lesson to others about the limits of online anonymity.

AI is used to optimize and monetize slapping

Speaking of online anonymity, a lot of serious people are probably looking for a Telegram user named “Torswats” who apparently came up with an innovative way to swat people. It’s nothing new for people to report fictitious crimes or non-existent bombs to the authorities to harass rivals or close the school for the day, but according to a report on Motherboard , Torsvats has simplified, automated, and monetized spanking, effectively turning it into a side job.

Torsvats reportedly used AI or text-to-speech software to maintain anonymity and charged users $75 worth of cryptocurrencies for school closures and $50 for “extreme hitting” in order to force police to handcuff the victim.

Apparently, things went well. According to an NPR report , 182 schools in 28 states received false threat calls between September 13 and October 21. How many came from this user is unknown, but Torsvats posted more than 35 recorded calls to Telegram, including calls targeting a CBD store in Florida, an intelligence company that tracks extremism in Virginia, and people everywhere from Virginia to California.

Torsvats has closed the store since Motherboard published this story, so I’m sorry if you wanted to leave work on Monday. I doubt hiding low would make that much of a difference. Spanking is not only potentially fatal, but also makes the cops look stupid, so if I were Torsvats, I would talk to a lawyer before they kick down the door.

The strange world of fake video obituaries

I’m going to tell you about a sub-genre of internet video that looks like something out of a dystopian novel by William Gibson: There are several channels on YouTube where artificial intelligence creates video obituaries for famous people who haven’t died.

YouTube channels such as Hollywood Edition and Celeb News 265 show computer-generated obituary videos of living celebrities such as Ted Danson , Simon Cowell , and Clint Eastwood . Several videos are posted daily, and each one is basically the same: a computer-generated voice reading an AI-generated script over stock images of a “dead” celebrity while the same dark piano music plays. It’s very weird and creepy.

Most of these videos are unpopular, garnering several thousand views, but there are exceptions: this Jet Li obituary has over 250,000 views, and this Cassie Davis video has over half a million views.

The goals are easy to understand: all videos are monetized and probably require almost no human effort to create, so someone is making money off the oddities. But why YouTube doesn’t block channels that exist only to spread misinformation is puzzling. Celeb News 256 has been around since 2019 and is just one of an unknown number of other channels with the same business plan.

Viral Video of the Week: Shane Dawson Conspiracy Theories 2023

Most conspiracy theory videos are stupid and fake, but YouTuber Shane Dawson’s latest video details a real-life conspiracy you’ve probably been the victim of. In a nutshell (fancy pistachio): Supermarkets and grocery stores often sell the same products under different brand names at different prices, so Aldi’s trademark Cheetohs, which looks like a cheap fake, is actually Cheetohs in a different package. It’s not that it shakes the earth in itself, but the prevalence of this practice is eye-opening, and it’s encouraging that young people are using YouTube to say, “Don’t be fooled by this.” According to Dawson’s video, Aldi, Trader Joe’s, Walmart and other stores are stocked with cheap food in fancy packaging and vice versa, and they often sell the store’s brand and national brand next to each other. Also of concern is that no one should tell consumers they are being scammed, and the only way to know for sure is when there is a product recall.