The McDonalds Fan Wiki Is An Omen

I’m worried the internet is about to get a whole lot less useful

June 23, 2023

Programming Note - I’m gonna take next week off from the newsletter (unless something really juicy happens and compulsion takes over). See y’all in Q3! 

Fight! Fight! Fight!

Just like everything else from 90s/Y2K culture, Celebrity Deathmatch is getting the “reboot but make it worse” treatment. Apparently, Elon and Zuck want to physically fight each other. Heterosexual masculinity and extreme wealth are both prisons of the mind that seem to constantly drive these men to the most childish public behavior. I don’t understand the brainworms that make middle-aged men think MMA fights and boxing matches are some kind of modern pistol duel for honor (which were also very stupid). Why can’t these two put aside their differences and go take a nice submarine ride together?

Platform Updates

Instagram 

The Rest of Meta 

TikTok

YouTube

Discord

Reddit

LinkedIn 

Twitch 

Twitter

The Product 

The Dumpster Fire

Twitter Alts 

Culture Movers 

Film & TV

Creator Economy 

Gaming 

AI 

Scams

Big Purple Mess

I love wikis. In high school, we used to play this game called “5 Clicks to Jesus,” where you’d load up a random Wikipedia page and see how quickly you could click through to the page for Jesus. Listen, religious school is traumatizing for a lot of reasons, but it was fun then and instilled an admiration for the vast amount of useful information a wiki can hold. I also love fan wikis. While keeping track of random side characters and lore details in video games, anime, and comic books comes somewhat naturally to me, I appreciate being able to cross-check details sometimes. I can even get into a corporate wiki so long as people actually maintain it with up-to-date information. 

Mcdonald's hates wikis. Well, at least is willing to treat the Fandom-run wiki page for Grimace as a big ad. Fandom is a wiki-hosting service with an almost monopoly-level grip on the fan wiki-hosting business. Anyone who’s watched Wikia’s transition to Fandom and the massive explosion of ads on their wikis (which make pages slow and buggy to the point of near-uselessness is probably not surprised by this McDonald’s campaign. 

An older-looking photo of Grimace–the giant purple creature and McDonald’s mascot–at what appears to be his birthday party in a McDonald’s store. His eyes are vacant, and stare back at you through the screen. He does not fear death. Perhaps you should. 

At first, glance, letting a business come in and edit a wiki page to fit their current promotional campaign is pretty innocuous looking on the surface. But fandoms live separately from the brands and creators they follow for a reason. A fan wiki is a living document and record of how something landed in culture and becomes culture itself by sparking conversation and creation. I don’t love the idea of a brand paying to override that. Imagine Marvel paying to take over wiki pages for comic characters that once appeared in stories with dated attitudes around race or gender. Or Sega scrubbing a wiki of any reference to the very strange world of Sonic fanart. 

I don’t want to go full “RIP Useful Internet” just yet, but things are not looking great. Reddit and Twitter, as companies, both seem perfectly happy trading the utility of the service for any small short-term revenue improvements. Google search has been getting worse for a while now, and now adding “Reddit” to your query might take you to a private link. AI can produce a large volume of content, but we are far from it being able to consistently produce quality solutions to many of the problems a Reddit forum, Twitter thread, or fan wiki solved. 

I have some hope still. Even if many of them will not survive, the wide range of Twitter and Reddit alternatives people are starting feels like a powerful moment. It’s fun being on Bluesky and watching new folks get excited about the platform when they join. There’s joy in rediscovering how fun just chatting with people around the world can be. I hope that stays around.

P.S. I do kinda want to try Grimace’s Birthday Shake

Padam? Padam!

San Francisco Pride is this weekend. I expect to hear Kylie Minogue’s new single “Padam Padam” approximately 17 million times. I’m beyond excited. I love Kylie, and while this track isn’t my favorite of her effortlessly danceable songs, it’s a fun time. Kylie is an undeniable mega-hit in her home country of Australia and in Europe. America, being the godless nation that we are, has never caught Kylie-mania in the same way. This upcoming album feels like it might be the moment the US catches up with the rest of the world in stanning her. 

If her music alone isn’t enough to get you onboard the Kylie train, read up on what happened when Kylie Jenner tried to trademark “kylie.”