In a time when the algorithmically determined social internet serves primarily to trick people into becoming hosts to various parasites or simply drive them mad, it might be perversely comforting to imagine that the people on the other side of the screen are knowing, cynical actors, free from the brain-shredding effects of life online. Noxious as it is, some sort of harmony or human logic would at least be familiar and capable of being understood. But no, those guys are the algorithm's subjects too.
Two of those guys are Hunter Biden and YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan, presently involved in what I'll call a crypto scam email whoopsie perpetrated by the former with the unwitting help of the latter. I find it quite instructive. You can see in the odd anti-collaboration something like the algorithm talking to itself. There are no good proper nouns here, only two people driven to make the world a little worse by the incentives of their platforms.
Presumably you know who Biden is. The son of former president Joe Biden was a fascination of right-wing media for years, both for the salacious details of his years of addiction and for the various sinecures his father hooked him up with. In October 2020, the New York Post published a bunch of supposedly damning emails from a laptop the younger Biden inexplicably brought into a Wilmington computer repair shop. The laptop scandal was less interesting for its particulars than for the way it turned him into a sort of hyperobject among right-wingers. To them, Hunter Biden was the neat personification of both the personal moral decay and corrupt dealings of their opposition.
Biden released an autobiography in 2021 but mostly has stayed out of public view as he's gotten sober. That is, until this past June, when he made a big play to become a public figure in charge of his own destiny and narrative, by joining X.com and posting LLM-written tweets with a million line breaks, becoming a prolific Substack poster, and appearing on any podcast willing to have him. Last month, the Wall Street Journal published a curious story about Biden's public turn that attempts to balance BidenWorld spin about the supposed nobility of posting 600-word tweets written by chatbots—“The world needs a righteous bad boy willing to call out and take on the bullshit,” said Ashley Etienne, a former adviser to Joe Biden—with the much more convincing explanation, which is that he needs money. With his father out of power, he's turned to posting.
As part of his PR blitz, he appeared in a joint interview with white nationalist Nick Fuentes in July, conducted by Andrew Callaghan of the Channel 5 YouTube series. Callaghan is a guy who interviews various public figures and documents fringy political gatherings. He got his start filming interviews with drunk people on the street, parlaying his successful viral vertical videos into the steadier and supposedly more dignified work of looking stupid on YouTube talking to Nick Shirley, Clavicular, various people living on the fringes of society, and for some reason Pete Buttigieg. His whole thing is being willing to say Damn that's crazy to anyone, about anything, and he's succeeded mostly by being in the right place at the right time. He claims the mantle of investigative journalist.
Callaghan has also been accused of sexual assault and rape by several women. After half-apologizing, half-denying the accusations, first reported by The Stranger in 2023, he took a few months off making videos then came back as if nothing had happened. The horrifying allegations aren't incidental to the strange circumstances of his notoriety, but rather a reinforcing factor. You don't have to pass a background check to make videos of unhoused people telling you about the worst moments of their lives.
The media literacy and critical thinking skills required for a potential viewer to find out about the many, many accusations against Callaghan have been increasingly chipped away at by the very platforms on which he makes his money. Crucially, even the reflexive disgust I'm sure many people who are aware of the allegations feel toward Callaghan doesn't necessarily translate to lower view counts. Callaghan's primary audience, after all, isn't any of those people, but rather the unfeeling algorithm.
Anyway, Callaghan conducted Biden's first big sit-down interview last summer, and has had him back on several times since. After their last interview together, Callaghan says the Biden team asked him for access to his full list of email addresses because they wanted to conduct a free giveaway. The Biden team's message read “All [recipients] have to do is click a link and claim the money to pay the rent, to pay their bills, to buy their groceries,” which is the sort of thing you'd only fall for if you were the sort of person who, as Callaghan claimed, didn't even know he had the email list he was being asked for.
Biden wanted those email addresses so he could promote his new memecoin, $LAPTOP. Is it less dignified to shill a memecoin or to gullibly break the law in service of letting someone else do so? Either way, Callaghan handed over a CSV file, and all those people got emails from Hunter Biden.
The specifics of the Hunter Biden memecoin rug pull are hardly worth sketching out, as they're of a now-familiar form. The person selling the obviously fake asset—to a group of buyers all trying to musical-chairs each other—broadcasts the premise that this is a project for the long-term, and that people connected to the launch of the coin won't sell anything for two years. The music starts, the price goes up, the music stops as wallets connected to the launch sell a bunch, the value tanks, and scam's orchestrator records a front-facing video in their car being like What happened? Who's to say?
All that stuff happened. Here come a bunch of numbers. $LAPTOP launched at 8:00 a.m. on Sept. 9, initially trading at $37.26. Its price ballooned within minutes—the Washington Post reports a high of around $190; Coin Gecko has the high at $199.51; the New York Times reports $222.75; CoinMarketCap says $401.12—and within only a few more minutes abruptly collapsed. By 10:00 a.m. that same morning, according to CoinMarketCap, $LAPTOP was trading at $1.26. By 8:30 that evening its price had fallen below a dollar, and it has not surpassed that threshold since. As of last check, a little before 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning, $LAPTOP was trading at a whopping $0.24, up from a low of $0.19.
Once again an oddly credulous Journal story furnishes some of the new little twists, which include the claim that some of the coins will be sent to people who lost money on Donald Trump's memecoin and also Channel 5 email-giver-overers. The price graph looks like this.
In this really dumb confluence, we see two distinct ways to be driven crazy by the same forces. Hunter Biden sought agency, a public platform, and, eventually, the means to monetize said platform. Maybe a few years ago he would have written another book or tried to get in front of as many TV cameras as possible in search of a media career as a talking head. But now that those avenues barely exist, the simplest way to get attention is by injecting oneself into the algorithm, and the simplest way for a quasi-celebrity to monetize that attention is to execute a pump-and-dump. All that separates him and Haliey Welch is her skill as a performer.
As for Callaghan, his role in this saga has its greatest value as an illustration: The suite of incentives fueling the rise of supposedly mold-breaking new journalists, who operate with flexibility and independence the mainstream media lacks, don't lead anyone to a better understanding of the world. They create dumb-dumbs like Callaghan, who mistake algorithmic success for editorial and intellectual aptitude, who don't know a crypto scam when it's staring them in the face.
