Online Culture Is the Whole Culture
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 30 January 2026
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There was a time, just before the pandemic, when folks would say “Twitter isn’t real life” as a means of dismissing the horrors of social media. This was a cope, a way to ignore the worst political and cultural actors who now dominate our psychic landscape. Now those people are in charge and they’ve manifested Twitter into real life in a way previously thought impossible.
The White House is posting Stardew Valley memes about whole milk. A Customs and Border Patrol official is asking people if they’re triggered when they respond with empathy to the murder of a woman. Laura Loomer, one of the most online gargoyles to ever live, is a serious policy player in administration. The Secretary of War has a video game tattoo.
How did we get here? Michael Senters, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech, is here to explain how online culture became the culture.
- It’s all for the posts
- A YouTuber comes to town
- What, exactly, does it mean to be terminally online?
- The right goes all in on identity politics
- The pandemic drove us all crazy
- Turns out the post-modernists were correct
- Posting yourself into a different form or reality
- Survival tips for the extremely online
- Depraved art and Hearts of Iron IV
- Deus Vult?
- Video games as propaganda
- We should have been harder on the online Nazis
- John Romero will make you his bitch
- A brief history of Something Awful
- Fighting the performance regime
How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch
Six Prosecutors Quit Over Push to Investigate ICE Shooting Victim’s Widow
Do you have stairs in your house?
Fuck You And Die: An Oral History of Something Awful
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast. |
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| 0:05.4 | It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. |
| 0:09.1 | Just click the link in the show description to support now. |
| 0:17.8 | Hello and welcome back to the first conversation about conflict on Angry Planet in 2026, the first fresh one anyway. |
| 0:25.8 | I'm here with a returning guest. |
| 0:28.1 | Sir, can you introduce yourself? |
| 0:30.7 | Hi, I'm Michael Senters. |
| 0:32.2 | I am a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech studying the translation of online culture into American politics. |
| 0:40.4 | How does it feel to be the guy I'm now calling when there's an extrajudicial killing in America? |
| 0:49.7 | It's not great. |
| 0:51.4 | I never wanted it to get to this point, right? |
| 0:55.0 | It's, it's really, really not fun to be that guy. |
| 0:58.7 | I guess it's a form of job security in a way, |
| 1:01.6 | but it's a really bleak form of job security. |
| 1:05.5 | And, you know, the fact that just this morning on Twitter, Bonvino was responding to somebody calling out |
| 1:15.7 | like ICE for literally murdering somebody, right? And he, he had a one word response and it was just |
| 1:21.3 | triggered question mark. And I was just like, I'm pretty sure I screamed when I saw that. |
| 1:26.6 | Like, I think, like, I screamed a little here at my apartment because it's just like, yep, that is, that is something someone would post on a 4chan thread back in 2014, right? |
| 1:38.1 | So it's just like, here we are. |
| 1:42.0 | It's the posting regime, right? |
| 1:44.2 | That's, that's kind of what's, that's what's happening. That's why you regime, right? That's that's kind of what's happening. |
... |
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