Motorola's $1,600 Signature 27 will become the company's first smartphone to support the security- and privacy-focused GrapheneOS that completely strips out native Google services and telemetry at the OS level. To help justify the price, Motorola equipped the Signature 27 with top-of-the-line specs, including a tandem OLED display, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, up to 16GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 512GB of UFS 4.1 storage (up from a base configuration of 12GB and 256GB), and a 200-megapixel periscope telephoto camera. According to Motorola, the EVS action sensor (telephoto camera) is the first in a smartphone, offering "new possibilities for photographing moving subjects and captures even fast movement with impressive clarity and precision." It'll be available in markets worldwide in the coming months.
There's a BlazeTV YouTube video whose thumbnail shows the presenter with his arms around Anakin Skywalker and a gender-flipped Draco Malfoy called Malfoid. “Total Chud Victory?” It says. The video's title: “Young Right is Reclaiming Culture and Liberals Are Mad About it.”
BlazeTV posted the video on November 2, the day before Democrats swept the midterms and started a political realignment in America so overwhelming that Republicans lost control of all the most powerful state positions in Texas.
The video is a profound misreading of the political and cultural moment. It reminded me of stories of the Bolsheviks seizing the Winter Palace to discover tarot card playing courtiers who had no idea a revolution was happening in the streets.
The American version was watching defense contractor Palmer Lucky dress up like Harry Potter on Halloween while standing next to his Malfoid wife. And it was Elon Musk — who spent roughly half a billion on the election only to see his chosen candidates fail — posting an AI generated picture of Anakin Skywalker sitting at the head of a happy fascist Star Wars family two days before the midterms.
The online right has dominated American culture for a decade, or at least has dominated political narratives picked up by the mainstream media. Its memes and conspiracies drove news cycles. At first, the right’s memes filtered from random people on obscure Discord channels to Reddit’s r/the_donald or 4chan to Trump’s Twitter feed. More recently they’ve come from AI slop farms, from Musk, or from the administration itself. Powered by a well-funded media and podcast ecosystem, Fox News (and a propensity for shamelessness) its comedians, podcasters, and pundits became powerful celebrities and influencers, at least within Elon Musk’s X.
This insular, often inscrutable world has given us Ben Shapiro, Nick Fuentes, Gamergate influencers, the streamer Asmongold, and a revolving door of characters who have shuffled interchangeably between Twitterverse celebritydom and actual government; Kash Patel, DataRepublican, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Dan Bongino, the list goes on.
It has been said many times that “Twitter is not real life,” and that posting too much anywhere will rot your brain. Never has that been more apparent than now: Much of Trumpworld spent the week before an election in which they would get utterly trounced using AI to generate barely legible Anakin and Malfoid memes for an inconsequential ingroup on the social media platform run by the biggest loser on the planet.
“It certainly seems like it has had its high water mark and that reality has FINALLY caught up with the Republican Party,” Michael Senters, a research assistant at the Anti-Defamation League who studies online and gaming culture, told 404 Media.
In 2016, 4chan posters talked about “meme magic” — the pseudo-ironic belief that pictures on the internet could manifest great change in reality. According to legend, Trump strategist Steve Bannon was running a World of Warcraft gold farm when he realized the angry gamers could be harnessed into a powerful reactionary political force. Bannon and others would successfully parlay Gamergate into an endless culture war that’s dominated online life in the Trump era.
During the midterm livestream of Bannon’s War Room podcast, his guest read exit polls that suggested the right-wing had lost young men — a group long thought to be its strongest soldiers. The split between the parties was even, the guest explained. “That can’t be right,” Bannon whispered, signalling he’d lost touch with the constituency he’d harnessed on behalf of Trump ten years ago. As the election results began coming in, right-wing podcasters, livestreamers, and newscasters across the internet went through at least a few of the stages of grief. First they struggled to understand what was happening, suggesting the votes must be wrong. Eventually, many of them ragequit.
"Okay, I'm going to be honest. I'm absolutely rage quitting. I'm so frustrated. I am so unbelievably frustrated. I'm so mad. I think Trump didn't do 50 different things he should have done. I think he should have gone a thousand times harder. I think that he wasted his time selling trinkets and nonsense,” Asmongold said as the returns came in. He lives in Texas where Democrats swept in a shock victory.
“I wish that there were more people who thought like me that weren’t sorry about it. But you know what? There’s not. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s OK,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.
Asmongold (@Asmongold) realizing in real time that he's a total fucking moron who got duped by the most cartoonishly obvious con-man of all time and ragequitting his election night coverage pic.twitter.com/XgtnqNjAaf
Many right-wing personalities went into Tuesday somehow expecting to win despite a disastrous war, a disastrous economy, disastrous polls, and a doddering president whose closing argument seemed to be more about his ballrooms, golf courses, and the Reflecting Pool than anything else. Since Trump was re-elected, these same people have called everyone else out of touch, convinced by their X algorithm and prediction markets that no blue wave would materialize. The media has similarly spent many thousands of words suggesting that Bluesky is an out-of-touchleftist echo chamber while mostly failing to suggest anything of the sort about the AI-pilled Silicon Valley executives, bots, and racists shitposting on X. Tuesday’s election wipeout highlights how detached from reality the Malfoid/Anakin-shipping, X-brained billionaires and their acolytes have actually become.
“Blueskywave. Those of us on here, across the board, were out of touch. I see no other conclusion,” Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast (who is a serious, good journalist), said in a post on X after the election amidst a sea of Anakins tonguing Malfoids.
The meme game and general demeanor of Trump and his followers has grown wildly tiresome in his thus far-disastrous second term. Under the guidance of White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, official government accounts have posted racist Halo memes, used AI to put a studio Ghibli face on anti-immigrant propaganda, and fully embraced Malfoid and Darth Vader as cultural heroes. The base on X loved this stuff. No one else did.
As our friend Gita Jackson over at Aftermath wisely put it immediately before the election,”The idea that they can meme magic their way into a red sweep by posting about Anakin Skywalker a lot is pure desperation [...] Their values have been rejected by popular culture at large, and they are now resigned to exist in the margins.”
Senters said the midterms showed the hard limits of memes as a political tool. “The power that memes have has always been, in my opinion, the power to help define linguistic and community lines in the amorphous space of the Internet. You create a community when you ‘get the joke’ behind a meme but memes generally don't persuade,” he said. “I'll be curious to see if the government accounts will continue to post these far-right cultural memes in the wake of the defeat or if they'll change their tune at all. Like do they double down on the meme posting to try to rally their base? Because it very clearly had ZERO appeal to anyone outside their base.”
Yet the right-wing has spent the last ten years acting as if their memes had moved the country politically. “They deluded themselves into believing that memes carry persuasive power and that their bubble on X represented material reality in a meaningful way when that was no way close to the truth,” he said. “They saw how many ‘numbers’ the Malfoid and Anakin memes did on X and convinced themselves that this was a real cultural awakening moment and that the volk were on their side.”
It cannot be overstated how culturally significant Anakin poasting is. I dont think you could engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in lab if you tried.
Alyssa Mercante, an internet culture reporter who is writing a book about politics and video games called Rage Game, agreed. “I think what it's really showing is that when you start to get a little bit too deep in the weeds of this hyper online culture war stuff, it cannot escape the internet,” Mercante told 404 Media. “It is not working anymore. The material reality of America is just not good enough.” Gas prices are up. Everything is more expensive. And ICE has killed Americans in the streets.
“This conspiratorial mindset is wrecker mentality. It is just destructive for the sake of destruction. There is no goal beyond pulling away any sort of legitimacy from the media or from democracy,” Mercante said. “When you get so deep in the weeds of this anti-establishment conspiratorial thought process, you just can't make anything or do anything of value. You're just upending tables and pointing at them and laughing.”
Democrats crushed Republicans who leaned into the online culture war during the midterms. Bo French — an overt racist who ran for railroad commissioner in Texas — sent text messages to voters that depicted himself as Master Chief from Halo. His opponent beat him by more than a million votes.
In Nevada, Halo composer Martin O’Donnell ran as a Republican for a House seat and lost to incumbent Susie Lee. O’Donnell announced his campaign on Discord and leaned hard into an extremely online gamer identity. “He’s like, ‘I wrote the Halo music and I’m voting for Trump and you should too.’ He did a Halo LAN party campaign fundraiser. The imagery was him as Master Chief,” Mercante said. “This dude is like: ‘My personality is gamers, gamers are not woke and they're resisting this [...] and Trump is the person that is going to help us resist,’ and he's polling like absolute dog water.”
It’s been 12 years since Gamergate set the tempo for online culture wars and a decade since Trump won in 2016. In 2026, Star Wars, Halo, Harry Potter feel dated in a way they didn’t back then. “What 22-year-old kid is going to be like ‘they took Halo from me.’ They don’t know Halo to have it taken away from them,” Mercante said.
She stressed that so much right wing online culture is about distraction — she likened it to jingling keys to capture the attention of a baby. “If the economy is the number one issue for both Democrats and Republicans going into the midterms, no amount of Malfoid scissoring Anakin Skywalker is going to change that need for people to be in a better financial position,” Mercante said. “The tech oligarchs pushed this stuff straight into our eyes for two years straight unfettered [...] And I wake up and gas is this expensive? I don’t care if you take a Taylor Swift song and make JD Vance walk out to it.”
“[They] really thought that this would just last forever,” she added. “When you build up a meme presidency, eventually the cards just collapse underneath you, and there's just nothing to show for it.”
Though this midterm signals a move away from Gamergate-style culture war politics, both Senters and Mercante cautioned that this type of rhetoric is still dangerous, and can still be destructive. “They’re still very good at doing propaganda on the internet — they wrote the book in many cases,” Mercante said.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly "off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. [...] That latter point is central to a new study out of Northeastern that conducted 5,943 experiments across twelve commercial "smart" TV devices. The researchers found that most smart TVs utilize automatic content recognition (ACR), a technology that captures audio or video snapshots of viewed content and then monetizes that data to help build personalized profiles of viewers.
TV makers insist that users are supposed to be able to opt out, but the choice simply doesn't work across a large segment of TVs. Companies like Vizio simply ignored the consumer requests entirely more often than not: "We find that the advertised ACR opt-out fully suppresses ACR-attributable traffic on only four operating systems; on Samsung Tizen traffic consistent with ACR activity persists in more
than 60% of evaluated scenarios, and on Vizio SmartCast a content correlated endpoint hosted on Amazon Kinesis continues to receive traffic in 100% of opted-out scenarios."
[...] The researchers say since they can't see the precise scope of what's being collected due to encryption, they're unsure whether Vizio is technically violating its FTC agreement (not that we have a current FTC that would care if they were): "The opt-out setting has no observable effect on traffic sent to this endpoint; however, we cannot inspect the payload due to encryption so we cannot confirm whether this violates the FTC settlement." Results of whether opting out of ACR tracking actually stopped ACR tracking were all over the map. Roku, for example, ignores opt-out requests when users are watching Roku's own channels. None of the smart TV vendors track Netflix viewing for fear of violating agreements with the streaming giant. Samsung's opt out function was more likely to actually work when a user was watching antenna broadcasts.
On two Smart TV platforms, personal viewing data collected by ACR remains unencrypted, despite years of bad press and scandal on the subject. Many appear to be violating the law, but because U.S. regulatory oversight has been gutted, they see no meaningful accountability. That includes smart TV OS' like VIDAA, which is most prominently found on Hisense and Toshiba smart TVs: "VIDAA OS sends ACR data to servers run by Unruly over MQTT without encryption, so anyone on the network path between the TV and those servers can read it. Each message carries a Client ID, a permanent identifier for the TV that can't be reset, along with the time zone, the app name, the input (antenna, HDMI), the antenna channel and an audio fingerprint."
Sen. Chris Murphy is expected to fully recover from his stroke. The acronym BE FAST can help you remember the symptoms of stroke and what to do when it happens: Call 911 quickly.
The Guardian reports:
Meta staff discussed deploying a "whisper strategy" to undermine the influential US academic whose work has inspired a global social media crackdown, according to court documents. Employees at the parent group of Facebook and Instagram sought to discredit Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, a book that helped tip the debate about online safety towards more stringent measures such as the under-16 ban in Australia.
Minutes of internal meetings contained in a recent legal filing in the US showed that staff discussed how to "get the academic community to disavow Haidt". They appear in a document titled "Well-being Meeting Sound-check Notes", which refers to discussions of how Meta could "turn other academics against Haidt" and to a "whisper strategy" aimed at achieving that goal. It also mentions "debunking" his work. Minutes from a meeting on 8 March 2023 mention "Curtiss", an apparent reference to Meta's then vice-president of research, Curtiss Cobb. It states: "Curtiss's goal for this work: how do we get the academic community to disavow Haidt. Can't co-opt them, so how do we enrage them ... so the media finds him not credible."
It then adds: "Not thinking about this as a loud strategy. A below-the-line campaign...."
The minutes were produced before Haidt published his book in 2024 and discuss responding to a Substack post written by the academic in which he reviews "a bunch of articles".
"It is not clear whether Meta acted on the ideas outlined in the minutes."
Patrick Stewart, best known for his roles in Star Trek and X-Men, has died at age 86. A message posted to Stewart's Instagram account says the actor died in his Los Angeles home on Wednesday "following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia."
Born in 1940 in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England, Stewart began his acting career in theater. He eventually landed the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from 1987 to 1994. Stewart returned as the Star Trekcaptain in subsequent films, including Star Trek: Generations (1994), Star Trek: First Contact (1996), Star Trek: Insurrec …
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