Whether it’s clique-based lunch tables or who gets voted “Most Likely to Succeed,” exclusion and inclusion have always been central themes of young adulthood—how can you figure out who you are if you don’t define what you’re not? In 2025, it’s clearer than ever that the merciless sorting bin of high school never ends; it just moves online. Robots aren’t welcome at the human table, performative males are getting swirlies for liking tote bags and matcha, and Japanese businesswoman Saori Araki has inexplicably become the most popular girl in school, just for showing up.
What does “Clanker” mean?
“Clanker” is a derogatory term for a robot. It’s not just for physical robots, though. It also refers to AI customer service representatives, text-based AI scammers, large language models, delivery bots, auto-driving taxis, and any other non-human aping humanity.
The term originated in the Star Wars universe in reference to enemy droids, but it’s catching on in online human discourse. Should “clanker” makes its way into general usage, it will mark a linguistic milestone—the first slur directed at a difference in being rather than a difference in identity. A clanker is defined not by the group it belongs to, but by what it is not: human, biological, conscious. It’s a machine masquerading as human, or imitating participation in human society. So your old car is a clunker, but ChatGPT is a clanker. “Clanker” offers all the self-righteous tribalism of a traditional slur, without the “hurting someone” part.
Beyond the interesting sociological moment, people are using the word to parody, expose, and explore our relationship with real slurs in videos like these:
Another difference between “clanker” and other slurs is that clankers don’t care If you call them that. Or so ChatGPT told me. “Since I’m not human, I don’t experience offense or shame. Instead, I’m designed to learn, assist, and adapt,” the glitch-lipped clanker said. “Words like that don’t slow me down. If anything, they remind me that I exist at the edge of what people understand and trust,” it added, which is exactly the kind of even-handed claptrap a beep-wheezy clanker would say.
What is a “performative male?”
The term “performative male” is an insult young men throw at other young men whose tastes, hobbies, and lifestyle are seen as a performance aimed at obtaining societal approval, especially the approval of young women. It differs from “normie” in that the performative male isn’t just boring; he’s boring on purpose.
The kinds of people who make memes about men they don’t like have offered the following specific markers of performative maleness:
Matcha lattes (A beverage made with green tea and steamed milk)
Labubu Toys: (Labubus are extremely popular monster dolls/collectibles)
Listening to Clairo (Clairo is a lo-fi singer/songwriter)
Tote bags
Reading in public (especially books about feminism.)
Performative maleism is becoming such a widespread things, kids are holding contest to determine which male is the most performative. Check ’em out:
“Performative male” is mildly sexist on the surface—it’s mocking dudes who like things associated with women (gasp)—but if you go deeper, it’s similar to older slang words like “white knight” and “virtue signaling.” A performative male is fundamentally dishonest, because no real man would read in public, so it it must be fake, and why would men be fake if not to make women like them?
Viral video of the week: I’m SAO. This is a video of me being very nervous!
Usually videos go viral because they’re immediate and visceral—viscerally funny, disturbing, or scary in a way anyone can understand. But this week is different. If you come in cold on I’m SAO. This is a video of me being very nervous! You’ll never understand why its been viewed more than 250,000 times in less than a week. You have to know the history. Here’s the lore dump:
Japanese model, self-describe office worker, and former J-pop idol Saori Araki posted this image of herself with the caption “Good morning” to her X account on July 24, 2025.
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Since then, it’s been viewed 78.5 million times. So there is something the internet finds very appealing about this woman, appealing enough for responses like this:
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And for countless marriage proposals like this.
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Adding to the popularity, people pitted Araki against Sydney Sweeney in memes like this:
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Araki went on to post more pictures that added to her fame, like this one:
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She started a YouTube channel, and her fans followed her there. This explains why the “I’m SAO” video has so many views, but the larger mystery of why anyone cared about the photo of Araki in the first place remains unsolved.
And I can offer no help. Araki seems like a perfectly nice, attractive woman, but I can’t see the difference between this specific picture and countless other pictures, of countless other perfectly nice, attractive women. Unknown, unnamable forces of the zietgeist, algorithms, and timing converged perfectly somehow to place this photo above all the the others, and transform Saori Araki into “Japanese Businesswoman,” a meme celebrity on par with Star Wars Kid or Grumpy Cat.
Online fame is weird.
What is “flocking?” And is flocking even a thing?
I’m not sure how widespread “flocking” is among younger people, but I hope it takes off. The word refers to a supposed romance trend among members of Gen-Z who are eschewing dating apps and traveling to far flung locations to find love instead.
According to this newly published research, members of Generation Z are 74% more likely than other generations to have “researched the best travel destinations for meeting new people.” They’re “2.8x more likely to believe traveling is the new dating app, and they’re twice as likely to be interested in a vacation romance.”
This research was conducted by online travel company Priceline, so I wouldn’t take it that seriously, (they have something of a vested interest in getting people to travel more often) but other, presumably more objective, research suggests that Gen-Z both wants to travel more than any other generation, and actually does travel more than any other generation. So there might be something to it. Time, as they say, will tell.
What does “Surf Dracula” mean?
I’m fascinated with obscure slang terns that very-online fandoms come up with to succinctly and colorfully define tropes and characteristics of mass media. “Surf Dracula” is one of those. Coined by Twitter user @topherflorence, “Surf Dracula” is a critique of an aspect of modern “prestige” television series.
“Back in the day if u did a tv show called Surf Dracula you’d see that fool surfing every week,” Florence posted, “But in the streaming era the entire 1st season gotta be a long ahh flashback to how he got the surfboard until you finally get see him surf for five min in the finale.”
The “Surf Dracula” moniker has been applies to the Halo television show, which took a full season to get to the damn Halo, and the 2020 reboot of legal show Perry Mason, where Mason isn’t even an attorney at the beginning of the show and doest practice law until episode six of an eight-episode season.
