Bushido’s Backyard
The internet’s relentless. Most of it vanishes, but sometimes something catches and stays with you. Five things rattled around in my head recently, and they share nothing except that they all caught me mid-scroll.
Bushido being a suburban neighbor is genuinely funny. The German rapper built his whole career on street credibility and toughness, and now he’s in Kleinmachnow dealing with actual neighbors. Imagine that disconnect—the persona versus the guy who probably gets noise complaints about his backyard. It’s absurdity that only works when you’re famous for the opposite of fitting in.
Kids learn about sex from Pornhub now, not health class or magazines or any actual conversation. They learn from platforms designed for adults watching other adults get destroyed on camera. The education question everyone circles around is simple and unanswerable: what happens when that’s your sex ed? How does it shape you? I don’t have an answer, just a bad feeling we’re failing something basic.
Silicon Valley keeps proving that exploitation works better when it’s wrapped in good design and marketed as progress. Facebook, Google, Amazon—empires built on extracting value from people and burning out their own employees. The machine gets more efficient, and we keep using the apps anyway because stopping feels harder than staying.
The speedrunning community keeps grinding away at Super Mario Bros., people spending decades shaving milliseconds off their times. Entire obsessive subcultures built around frame-by-frame analysis and muscle memory practiced until it’s automatic. There’s something genuinely beautiful about that focus—the absolute purity of trying to be perfect at something that doesn’t matter in any material way.
Poppy decided the internet deserved performance art that’s intentionally artificial and resistant to explanation. She built an audience by leaning into mystery instead of solving it, doing things that defy categorization. In a space where everyone performs authenticity, she just performs artificiality straight-faced and somehow that’s more honest.
These five things don’t connect except they’re all proof that culture is stranger and more fractured than anyone admits. We’re thinking about gangster rappers and porn education and corporate evil and 30-year-old game records and internet performance art simultaneously, often in the same hour. That’s our actual landscape right now.