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This week, youth culture offers us both a hero and a villain. Incongruently, the online world has appointed accused UnitedHealthcare CEO murderer Luigi Mangione as the former, and Hailey "Hawk Tuah Girl” Welch as the heel, and the reasons why are difficult to unpack. I'm also going to subject you to "Sigma Boy Sigma Boy," the internet's most annoying video (so far).
The internet is rallying around a killer
Twenty-six year old Mangione is an unlikely vigilante. The child of an affluent and influential Baltimore family (the Mangiones aren't just members of the country club, they own the country club), he was valedictorian of his class at the elite Gilman School and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a masters in computer science. But then something as-yet-unknown diverted Mangione from his expected upper-class trajectory, and he ended up accused of gunning down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a NYC street corner. Currently, he is facing second-degree murder charges, weapons charges, and other crimes.
Considering he's allegedly a merciless killer, it make strike you as odd that since his capture, Mangione has been highly celebrated online. He has been heavily memed, merchandise has been created in his honor, and people have offered to pay his legal bills. Venerating killers and criminals is nothing new—bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde left bodies in their wake during a Depression-era crime spree but became a public sensation anyway, speaking at least in part to the anger many people felt about the then-devastating economy. And sure enough, on social media, people of all political persuasions are hinting at (if not outright stating) the belief that even if what Mangione did wasn't exactly admirable, given just about everyone has a health insurance horror story to share, it was at least understandable.
It really wasn't though. No matter how much we may hate insurance companies, and how much blame for their ineptitude we may place at the feet of the people in charge of them, extrajudicial killings rarely work out like you might imagine—instead of Robin Hood stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, or even the Punisher gunning down villains the justice system won't touch, you get nightmares like the KKK and Salvadorian death squads. And instead of planning to change the capitalistic policies causing suffering, you get companies planning to beef up security for their top brass.
Generally young people on the internet are not interested in moral complexity, however. They've decided that Mangione is a hero, and are finding different ways to venerate him. Such as:
Saying he’s like the Riddler: In keeping with their comic book level understanding of how anything works, conspiracy theorists are imagining Mangione left behind cryptic clues in the header of his X account, including a picture of the Pokémon Breloom, pokedex #286, which is believed to be a reference to Proverbs 28:6: “Better is a poor man who walks in his integrity than a rich man who is crooked in his ways.”(But it could just as easily be Leviticus 28.6: “The clay pot the meat is cooked in must be broken; but if it is cooked in a bronze pot, the pot is to be scoured and rinsed with water.”)
Pointing out that he’s hot: This one is hard to argue with, but noting Mangione’s attractiveness has become a popular subject for memes.
Suggesting we must pitch in (monetarily) and help him: Various crowd-sourced legal defense funds have been established (despite the fact that Mangione’s family is probably at least as rich as his alleged victim), and #FreeLuigi is trending everywhere.
Comparing him to fictional characters: He has the same name as a Nintendo character, but looks like the chef in Ratatouille.
Thinking he’s just like us: He listens to popular music and shitposts on X.
Mangione is not just like us, though—at least I hope not. Because I think it's best if we all don't consider ourselves simply killers in waiting.
The internet hates Hawk Tuah Girl
Back in September, I suggested Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah Girl, should monetize her 15 minutes of fame as thoroughly as possible, but I didn’t mean like this: About a week ago, Welch launched a new memecoin (HAWK) on the Solana blockchain. Memecoins are cryptocurrencies based on memes, because that's what people do now.
According to Welch and her manager, this was not a scam. "We don’t want to break securities laws,” Welch’s manager, Jonnie Forster, explained to Fortune. “We would say that we’re almost, like, tokenizing, in a sense, Hailey’s fan base.”
The coin shot up in value upon being offered to the public, topping out at a total market cap of $490 million. But in a development that no one could have seen coming, HAWK soon plummeted, cratered, crashed, and burned. The price fell by more than 90% in only a few hours because someone seems to have purchased 17.5% of the supply of the memecoin—worth $993,000 at the time—then sold all 135.8 million of those HAWK tokens about 90 minutes later. Total profit: around $1.3 million. Wow! Who could it have been?
Welch denies her team had anything to do with it, posting on X:
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She later added:
There's talk of lawsuits over the imbroglio, but should there be? No one should lose money due to unscrupulous financial marketers, just like no should be gunned down in cold blood on a New York City sidewalk, but it's hard to come up with an excessive amount of sympathy for someone who "invested" in a Hawk Tuah memecoin. They would have eventually traded that money for magic beans or something anyway.
"Sigma Boy Sigma Boy" explained
From the heroes and villains of youth culture to their annoying little brother. The latest soundbite/meme/song taking off among the brainrot set is "Sigma Boy Sigma Boy," a snippet from a Russian song called Сигма Бой by Betsy and Masha Yankovskaya.
Below is the song's video, but I advise you not to watch it.
That's pretty annoying, but it wasn't annoying enough to really go brainrot-viral until TikToker Dahoodapollo made it faster and screechier and added Roblox characters. Please don't click this:
Then other kids started making their own versions, where they add incomprehensible nonsense, or took away everything but the lyrics, or added ducks. None of it means anything, but each of the videos I've linked to has been viewed tens of millions of times, and there are over 240,000 videos using the song on TikTok alone. Is there something wrong here? I think there's something wrong here.
Viral video of the week: "Rankin Bass Guy"
Young people are clearly having a bad week, but I don't want to end this on a down note, so I'll point to something that will make you smile: The videos of @cameronCortinas. This TikToker's account is blowing up (not Sigma Boy blowing up, of course) because he makes perfect re-creations of those timeless stop motion Christmas specials from Rankin Bass.
Check out this famous dance number from Santa Claus is Comin' to Town:
Uncanny, right? How about the Heat Miser's joint from The Year Without a Santa Claus?
He's using some kind of filter to get the choppy look, but it's really about dude's performance. He embodies these characters, and displays an almost scary ability to get the details right. Other TikTokers are working the same side of the street, and many of their videos are fun, but the original is the master.
from LifeHacker https://ift.tt/2hbH6OR
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