Laugh Epidemics and Spite Apps

"thank you to my chinese spy"

Remember that time Tom Cruise arrived on a red carpet via a motorcycle? Timothee Chalamet did that last night, except with a bright green Lime e-bike; Maya Hawke will make her off-Broadway debut in Eurydice; and a 2010 Heidi Montag song has emerged as the soundtrack to the 2025 apocalypse.

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Apologies for the jumpscare re: the word “refugee” in yesterday’s newsletter. A couple of readers expressed concern about my use of the phrase “TikTok refugee,” a viral term that, in the past 48 hours, has completely overtaken my news and social feeds.

Using “refugee” to describe creators leaving one app for another might strike you as insensitive, and understandably so, especially given the many people in LA who have recently lost their homes. But I fear we’re going to be hearing it a lot over the next week, maybe even longer, depending on what happens on Jan. 19th.

There are already 29.3K posts on TikTok using the hashtag, and Google searches for the phrase have spiked in the last three days.

However tasteless you might find the phrase, it undeniably reflects Gen Z’s sense of humor — dark, absurdist, macabre. They’re not trivializing the experience of actual refugees; they’re leaning into the absurdity of their situation and making fun of themselves.

It’s similar to the “Chinese spy” trend that’s suddenly all over my FYP, where Gen Zers are tearfully bidding farewell to their "personal Chinese spy” for surveilling them and populating their For You page with content.

Are they minimizing the very real threat of Chinese spies? Of course not.

They’re poking fun at security concerns surrounding TikTok while also processing life through the lens of memes, the only way many of them know how.

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TIKTOK PREPARES FOR IMMEDIATE SHUT-OFF IN THE U.S. ON SUNDAY, theinformation
A big scoop from Kaya Yurieff: TikTok plans to shut off its app for U.S. users on Sunday, the day a federal law banning the app takes effect unless the Supreme Court intervenes. Instead of allowing existing users to continue using the app — which many assumed would be the case — TikTok will display a pop-up message directing users to a website with information about the ban and offering an option to download their data. I’ll be honest: Only yesterday did I start to think that maybe this ban could actually happen, though I do still believe something is going to happen at the 11th hour.

TIKTOK CRISIS BUILDS UNLIKELY ‘CYBERSPACE BRIDGE’ BETWEEN US AND CHINA, semafor
The founder of a Gen Z business collective described Gen Z’s embrace of Xiaohongshu, a social app that has even closer ties to China than TikTok, as mass “trolling,” while Vulture summarized the dynamic this way: “The U.S. government said “Don’t give a Chinese company your data,” and the American public said ‘🖕 😎 🖕’”

CREATOR OF GAS AND TBH MAKES AN APP FOR DISAPPEARING PHOTOS VIA IMESSAGE, techcrunch
Nikita Bier just launched a new app called Explode, which allows users to send Snapchat-style disappearing messages on iMessage. On Twitter, he called it a “spite app.” “Two years ago, I met with Snapchat’s CEO to discuss acquiring my previous company. I openly shared how fast we were growing. Just a week later—over the Thanksgiving holiday—Snapchat kicked our app off the SnapKit platform, abruptly halting our growth,” he wrote before quoting Genghis Khan (“The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, rob them of their wealth, and see them bathed in tears.”).

WHO WAS THE CYBERBULLY HARASSING KENDRA LICARI’S TEEN DAUGHTER?, thecut
At Beal City High School in Michigan, a freshman girl endured months of relentless cyberbullying in the form of anonymous texts that mocked her appearance, basketball skills, and personal life. There were even messages urging her to kill herself. Initially, they suspected a popular classmate was behind it, but the bully turned out to be the victim’s own mother, who’d been using burner apps to send the texts. Dr. Marc Feldman, who specializes in Munchausen syndrome, attributes the behavior to “Munchausen by internet,” which experts think will likely become the most common sort. (This story already got the Lifetime movie treatment — starring Lisa Rinna, no less — but I suspect the writing in this article is better.)

AT THE MOVIES: TO LAUGH, CRY OR CRINGE?, nyt
There’s a “laugh epidemic” — “a term used by a movie theater spokesperson to describe the trend” — going around in multiplexes and art houses. Part of the reason, beyond generational differences about what’s funny, which I touched on above? “Social media, which allows scrollers to experience parts of a film as memes before they watch them unfold in a theater, may also prime people to find humor in scenes they wouldn’t have found funny otherwise, irritating some of the more serious film buffs in an audience,” writers Marie Solis.

One last thought:

@washedupmuseri think this will save TikTok #fyp #tiktokban #renegade #charlidamelio

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