There have always been college-sports fans on the internet, consigned to some of the worst message boards you can possibly imagine, but it’s only in the past decade that the internet has become so ubiquitous and culturally hegemonic that it’s been able to sustain a large population of current and former fraternity members, degenerate gamblers, and Southern party girls, and in turn to convince those people to participate actively in the culture of social media.
But these groups may never have really been organized into a subculture absent two other important developments: The first is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which has been extremely beneficial to all kinds of demonstratively macho subcultures for reasons that have been discussed ad nauseaum. The second is the legalization of sports gambling in many states, which has flooded media properties that cater to Zynternet demographics with cash, either as advertisers or often as owners.
The result is an internet culture that is on the whole much frattier than it was in 2014. I would say “for better and for worse” but I’m not exactly sure what the “for better” part is. While Hawk Tuah in and of itself is relatively benign, and Welch seems to be a happy and remunerated participant in her own viral fame, the other meme spreading across the Zynternet this week was the name and photo of a girl whom an anonymous account claimed, apparently arbitrarily, slept with “35 percent of the SEC.” This happened on “the Burnerverse,” a network of anonymous Zynternet Twitter accounts seemingly dedicated to reproducing 4chan with southern-frat characteristics. The “good news,” such as it is, is that while the Zynternet is broadly conservative, it’s never quite as committed, partisan, or ideological as some of its adjacent networks would like.3 The bad news is that its main belief system is a kind of epicurean libertarianism (protect Zyn at all costs) combined with an all-purpose misogyny.
— Read on maxread.substack.com/p/hawk-tuah-and-the-zynternet
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