post-human humor

Last year for Halloween I dressed up as the brainrot character Tung Tung Tung Sahur. It was an interesting way to gauge how much time everybody spent online. Half of my friends didn’t understand the reference, although the costume was a massive hit with trick-or-treating middle schoolers.I’m convinced I was ahead of my time. This year, Spirit Halloween also started selling brainrot-themed costumes, and people are racking up tens of millions of views for dressing up as AI slop characters. None of this should really surprise you: Halloween costumes are a reflection of pop culture, and generative AI is playing an ever-larger role in shaping that culture.Me fighting Tralalero TralalaBut there’s something deeper going on here. Well beyond a single holiday, it’s become a trend to ironically embody machine subjectivity. There are countless viral videos of “humans stealing AI jobs” and skits recreating AI slop in real life and musicians performing the saxophone riff from AI microdramas. The…