🚽 The internet’s gone down the toilet

Remember the good old days, when you’d race to invest in a hot startup that just went public at an enormous valuation, then watch your money vanish within months?

OK, so that was two years ago and it was not particularly good.

Well, times have changed — as have interest rates — and US companies raised only $9.1B through IPOs this year compared to the usual ~$27B, as investors scrutinize profitability.

M&A? More like MIA

It’s not just IPOs. Globally, between higher rates, geopolitical issues, and recessionary concerns, deal volume for mergers and acquisitions dropped 40% YoY to $1.03T so far, down from 2021’s $3.83T record, according to Bloomberg.

What’s more? M&A volume in unicornland is on track for its slowest year since 2013, per Crunchbase, with just 429 venture-backed US startups making M&A exits in the first half of the year, down from 1.7k in 2021 and 1.1k last year.

There are bright spots

For instance, Savvy Gaming Group is acquiring gaming company Scopely for $4.9B, T-Mobile is buying Mint Mobile for $1.4B, and Databricks bagged MosaicML for $1.3B, to name a few.

The stock market, spurred by easing inflation, is also on a hot streak, warming up the bread maker for expected IPOs from companies like Arm, Klaviyo, Turo, Birkenstock, and Instacart.

But let’s not get greedy, people

What we don’t want to see is another meme-stock situation the second the gates open up.

Perhaps we have not yet learned our lessons there: The Solactive Roundhill Meme Stock Index is up 67% this year. and retail traders’ bullish sentiment is its highest since 2021.

So whaddya say we keep up the good work on bringing IPOs and M&As back to life, but not mess things up again in the process?

Fifteen years ago, I remember watching the uber-viral Charlie the Unicorn. Another thing I remember: my friends’ common response to Charlie’s nightmarish trip to Candy Mountain — “LOL so random.”

The internet’s collective sense of humor has long followed that “LOL so random” vibe.

• It kinda had to; how else can you make something memorable when TikTok adds ~34m videos, YouTube adds 700k+ hours of video, and Instagram adds 1.3B images every day?

“WTF?” moments have been central to online life for decades now — yet we’ve never seen anything like today’s creators.

Weird is the new mainstream…

… and it’s being taken to new, lucrative extremes.

Skibidi Toilet, an animated series launched on YouTube earlier this year by user DaFuq!?Boom!, started with an 11-second video of a head popping out of a toilet and singing.

More head-scratching videos followed, in which toilets with heads protruding from their bowls seek world domination.

• How big is this thing? Hold on to your toilets, people — DaFuq!?Boom! videos have racked up 8.7B+ views on YouTube alone. Its subscriber count? 22m+. (For context, that outduels the NBA, Harry Styles, and every single traditional media outlet.)
• Where does this go? The cash-in extensions have already started — a “Toilets Attack” mobile game reached 1m+ downloads on Google Play in its first month, and a PC game releases soon.

The oddball channel isn’t some one-off thing…

… we warned you: It’s an all-new era of internet weirdness.

Look at NPC streaming, another viral trend with livestreamers speaking in non-sequiturs, discomfitingly staring and thrashing about, and doing things like popping individual popcorn kernels with a straightening iron.

Oh, and making $7k+ per day doing it.

“LOL so random” indeed.

Imagine you’re chilling in your apartment at night, trying to watch a movie, when the fire of a thousand suns comes streaming through your window.

That’s apparently what happened to one San Francisco man when X — formerly Twitter — put a strobing “X” sign on its HQ last week. (TBF, the man said he didn’t know how to describe the brightness, so we went with the sun thing on his behalf.)

A city inspector — who was denied access to the building — was told it was a temporary sign “for an event,” per NPR. Still, you do need a permit for that sorta thing. Not to mention…

Light pollution

… is defined as the the excessive or inappropriate brightening of the night sky and includes:

• Glare (brightness that causes discomfort)
• Skyglow (brightening over uninhabited areas)
• Light trespass (light where it isn’t needed)
• Clutter (confusing groupings of light)

It disrupts human sleep patterns and confuses animals, causing sea turtle hatchlings to wander into cities instead of the sea or birds to migrate at the wrong time.

It’s also gotten worse over the years…

…  thanks to controversial digital billboards and other modern tech.

Astronomers — who hate light pollution because it makes seeing constellations difficult — voiced concerns (and doubted the necessity) of a 500-drone light show in NYC celebrating “Candy Crush.”

BTW: Space billboards are apparently a potential thing. They’d appear as pixelated images in the sky, potentially earning companies up to ~$5m annually per billboard, per Insider. And guess who wants to launch space ad satellites? The same dude who put that “X” up in San Francisco.