GeoCities: The Digital Town That Died Twice

GeoCities was the early web's first mass platform. When Yahoo pulled the plug, millions of personal pages vanished and a fragile internet culture began to feel haunted.

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Government Hacking Tools Are Now in Criminals' Hands (with Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai)

The tools were never supposed to leave the room, but they always do. What begins as state-sanctioned capability inevitably degrades into something more portable, more anonymous, and significantly less controlled. The distinction between government operation and criminal enterprise narrows once the software changes hands, which it appears it already has. There is no clear moment where this becomes a problem, only a slow realization that it already is.

#hacking#surveillance

Scientists Gave a Bunch of Salmon Cocaine. This Is What Happened Next

Environmental contamination has reached a point where even controlled lab absurdities feel uncomfortably plausible. Researchers introducing cocaine into salmon habitats observed measurable behavioral changes, reinforcing concerns about trace pharmaceuticals in natural water systems. What reads at first like a novelty experiment instead underscores a broader pattern: human byproducts quietly reshaping animal behavior at scale. The study does not sensationalize its findings, but the premise alone carries an unsettling weight. There is something distinctly modern about ecosystems reacting to substances never meant for them. The absurdity fades quickly, replaced by a more systemic unease.

#science#environmental-contamination

Jim Carrey Won a Lifetime Achievement Award and the Internet Decided He Was a Clone

Jim Carrey showed up to the César Awards in Paris, gave a speech entirely in French that he apparently spent months preparing for, thanked his family, traced his ancestry back three hundred years to Saint-Malo, and the internet looked at all of that and said yes but what if it was a clone. The whole thing got rocket fuel when a drag artist posted an Instagram photo of prosthetics next to a picture of Carrey at the ceremony with the caption "Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris," which was almost certainly performance art but landed on a conspiracy-primed audience the same way a lit match lands on a gas leak. A source later told the Daily Mail that Carrey finds the whole thing "sad" — not because people mocked his appearance, but because, and this is a direct quote, "people are stupid." He is sixty-four years old, he hasn't been in public since November, and apparently that is now the exact amount of time it takes for the internet to decide you've been replaced by a satanist clone, which is a sentence I genuinely did not expect to type today.

#conspiracy#celebrity-clones

Dictionary.com's 2025 Word of the Year Is Not a Word

Dictionary.com sat down this year, looked at the entire English language, and said you know what, not today, and handed the crown to 67, which is not a word, is pronounced "six seven" and not "sixty-seven," and means absolutely nothing that anyone has been able to pin down with any confidence. It started with a rap song, got picked up by TikTok, attached itself to a very tall basketball player, and then somehow ended up in the mouth of every third-grader in the country, which is how these things go now. By the time Merriam-Webster weighed in with their own pick — "slop," defined as the ocean of low-quality garbage that AI dumps on the internet every twelve seconds — the two choices sitting next to each other started to feel less like a fun annual tradition and more like a note left on the refrigerator by the English language on its way out the door.

#language#internet-culture

Staunch Trump Supporters Are Now Asking If He's the Antichrist

Trump posted an AI image of himself dressed in white robes surrounded by golden light like a Renaissance ceiling painting come to life, and deleted it fourteen hours later like a man who checked his mentions and immediately regretted every decision he had made that morning. The people losing their minds over it were not the usual suspects — it was Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Texas pastor who fired up a livestream on the subject, and Tucker Carlson, who apparently had forty-three minutes of thoughts ready to go on short notice. A researcher quoted in the piece makes the point that's been sitting in the room this whole time: Trump spent years letting people call him chosen and anointed and sent by God, and it turns out the same Bible that has a verse for everything has several very specific verses about exactly this kind of guy.

#religion#evangelical

Wisconsinites Can Keep Watching Porn After Governor Vetoes Age Verification Bill

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers vetoed a bill this week that would have required age verification to access pornographic websites, which means the great state of Wisconsin will continue to handle this the same way it always has — on the honor system. The bill's supporters argued it was about protecting children, and the governor argued it was about protecting adults from having to hand their government ID to a porn site, which is one of those debates where both sides are technically correct and nobody wins. It joins a growing pile of similar legislation that keeps getting introduced, debated with great seriousness by people who have clearly thought about this more than they want to admit, and then either vetoed or struck down in court for being a privacy disaster dressed up as child safety. Wisconsin for now remains free, which is a sentence I did not expect to write today.

#age verification#internet censorship

‘BLOCKADE’: The Right Is Using AI Content Scanners to Try to Supercharge Book Banning

Someone sat down, thought real hard, and came up with the acronym BLOCKADE — Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism — which tells you everything you need to know about the people running this operation before you read a single word of the actual article. The program feeds books into an AI and scores them against a list of roughly 300 words ranked by how offensive they are to conservative values, which is a definition the AI itself gets to decide, because apparently the humans involved ran out of opinions halfway through and handed the rest off to a chatbot. One school district in Texas has already pulled over 1,400 books from its shelves while the budget to buy new ones sits frozen, which is the kind of number that tends to get lost in the discussion about whether the algorithm is biased. The whole enterprise is being sold back to the same districts it helped overwhelm, at five dollars a scan, which is either the most efficient grift of the decade or proof that someone out there has been paying very close attention to how this country works.

#AI#book banning
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Down the Digital Rabbit Hole

The internet is full of stories that don't have endings. Vanished Reddit users, coded radio broadcasts, collaborative myths that blur the line between fiction and belief — ROBOTJEANS investigates the web's most fascinating unsolved cases and the digital folklore they leave behind.

From the cryptographic puzzles of Cicada 3301 to the existential horror of the Backrooms, we dig into the stories that keep people searching long after the trail goes cold.