Lana Del Rey and the Department of Justice

Lana Del Rey played Saturday Night Live and it went badly. Not catastrophically badly, not career-ending badly in retrospect—she’s fine, obviously—but badly enough that everyone spent Sunday either cringing or piling on, which are the same thing. Her performance of Video Games was wooden in a way that felt deliberate and then seemed accidental and then circled back to possibly deliberate again. She stood there with the microphone like someone who had rehearsed looking fragile and then actually became fragile, right there on live television, in front of everyone. The internet ran with it for a week.

The other thing that weekend was Anonymous taking down the Department of Justice website after the feds shut down Megaupload. The SOPA and PIPA battle had been building for months—petitions, blackout days, the whole grammar of internet protest—and then the government actually moved on a real target and the response was immediate and chaotic. The DOJ went down, the RIAA went down, the MPAA went down. It felt, briefly, like something mattered. Then everyone went back to downloading things.

Two moments, one weekend. Both already forgotten by the following Friday.