Freak Show
“Algorithms reward attention, and if you can’t get the good kind, then the bad will do.”
THE NEW CRITIC
*Postscript, our series of author interviews between New Critic writers and editors, continues below Theodore’s essay.*
Theodore Gary is a 22-year-old senior undergraduate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying English and History.
I watched a man with an intense face shamble into the university library three years ago. He sat down at a computer, turned it on, and maneuvered with fits and starts to Facebook. I watched surreptitiously, careful to avoid eye-contact. He either rocked back and forth, snorting and grunting, or sat sinisterly still. He scrolled quickly and roughly, without any discernible scheme, leaning slowly toward the screen, his eyeballs right up against it. He picked up the phone and called, I assume, his ex-wife. They discussed a little boy of unknown origin. He had not, it sounded, had a good experience at somebody’s home. From my side of the one-way conversation, I learned that the bathroom had been fixed. I also learned that things were safe, and that it was time for the boy to visit his dad. I did not get the impression, from the angry noises the man made when the phone call ended, that this was going to happen. He frantically searched Google, and then he left, and the library was quiet again.
I have ever since then wondered what he looked at after the call. His ex-wife’s Facebook? Pictures of his son? I remember he was on YouTube at one point, listening to music. What is his algorithm like? What is he marketed? Does Google know he is mentally ill, that he is wandering around the University of Illinois’s main library? Is there a little checked box for that sort of thing in his data profile? Does Google know about his lost son? His divorce? Maybe the algorithm could procure for him a diagnosis, a treatment facility, a battery of pills, and the kind of father’s rights attorneys they advertise on sports talk radio. That would be nice.
As it stands, Google does nothing. It neither helps nor hurts the poor, twitchy man. I suspect its products even provide him validation, joy. It must serve him that which it also serves us: pictures of family, clips from beloved movies, songs from favorite bands, conspiratorial podcasts — all aimed at manipulating those pathetic neuroses we share collectively, inspiring pain and joy, fear and love, endless possibility and stifling inertia. The internet is an ambiguous place. It has no character. We consume it. We populate it. We consume ourselves. It, like a court eunuch, shapes our desires while yielding to our commands. It is a refuge from everyday life and a ceaseless reminder of it. I wonder how much content is created by the wandering and crazy? How fast could I find a picture of the twitchy man’s wife and son? How fast could I track down his life’s wreckage? I could imagine an enjoyable hour, maybe two, spent sifting through that.
I would like to find his accounts. They are intensely interesting to me. Here is a real man, an unpretentious human life, laid out in pictures, in Facebook comments, in Instagram reels — all of it in fine quality and perfect detail. What a new frontier in entertainment, something truly wilder, weirder, and crazier than its precursors. I would like to watch him smoke meth on Instagram live. This would enthrall me, my sheltered upper-middle class mind — a glimpse of disgusting and intriguing social disorder. On the internet, where we all are equal, I — cocooned in a blanket — may catch a glimpse of those awful, strange things. The algorithm notices, and feeds me more, and an industry is born.
The internet is a freak show like the old circus. Step inside the tent; see the hermaphrodite, the bearded lady. Enjoy it, but never admit it. You weren’t there. You’d never go. You don’t know anything about it at all. And though much has changed since P.T. Barnum, there remains a serious, well-funded industry of promoters and managers and marketers whose income depends on their association with the physically deformed, mentally ill, and socially maladjusted. These people — famous for their ugliness, homelessness, binge-drinking, and public freakouts — are these days called “Lolcows” by the internet; that is to say, they produce “lols” like a cow does milk — endlessly, or at least until they die.
The best-known among them must be WorldofTShirts — Joshua Block, to use his given name. Josh is an autistic, gangly twenty-something forced into a liver-shredding alcoholic stupor over the past half-decade by a series of noxious handlers. He has 4 million followers on TikTok. His account blew up during the pandemic, as he, still young and fresh-looking, posted videos of himself doing goofy dances and reviewing various boba teas. In 2021, a video of him screaming the lyrics to “Empire State of Mind” in Times Square amassed 27 million views. So, clever as he is, Josh did it again, and again, and again. Soon enough, he was on a Times Square billboard. Dixie D’Amelio followed him shortly thereafter.
Sometime after his original first surge in popularity, he takes a trip to Mexico. Josh drinks his first drink here, then chooses to have quite a few more. He loses his phone in an Uber. He turns 21 soon after, and with this Josh has had enough of boba tea. He now drinks liquor, as much as he can get. The songs persist, now sung drunkenly, and a manager enters the picture: Michael Quinn. The former owner of Feltman’s Hotdogs, an oval-faced, barrel-chested, strangely tanned, heavily accented New Yorker, Quinn comes upon Josh’s budding fame and decides to grab a piece of it for himself. Armed with a compulsive need for attention and the money to secure it, he sets about dragging Josh and his roller backpack to the bars, restaurants, and pizza shops of New York City. Together, they have a goofy, silly time. But all is not well. You wouldn’t know it yet, but the man is becoming more erratic, his content more unhinged. Unsupervised by Quinn, Josh records himself licking the subway floor.
Around this time, Josh meets Jason Itzler, Jeffrey Epstein associate, Josh’s second manager, and the King of All Pimps. In the mid-aughts, Itzler became a sort of small-time New York celebrity as the owner/operator of the high-priced escort service New York Confidential. Sent to Rikers in 2005 for his operation of the company, he reemerged in 2008 as a bit player in the prostitution scandal that scuttled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s political career. In 2011, he was identified as an occupant of the apartment where 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student Julia Sumnicht overdosed on GHB. Now on Kick — which is where they send you once you’re banned by Twitch — he streams under the name Mr. Based. Flanked from behind by a gold statue of the Buddha, a human-sized gnome, a replica sarcophagus, and a several-feet-tall Tony the Tiger, he now spends his nights like a dirtbag cam-girl: $50 to take a shot of Johnny Walker Blue, $200 to smoke a blunt, $300 to huff Galaxy Gas.
Itzler, I’m sure, needed no advice worming his way into the life of a naïve twenty-something. Isolate. Manipulate. Make him reliant on you. The content became meaner, the fans more rabid, as Itzler established himself in Josh’s life. Gone was that silly and sweet stuff in Josh’s videos, replaced instead by an unrelenting drumbeat of triggers designed to make him go ape. Fans on the street, egged on by Itzler, would yell, “Put the fries in the bag.” “Fuck you, bitch!” Josh would yell back. Mostly, the two sat in Itzler’s opulent apartment, with Josh away from the camera and Itzler right up next to it, drinking until collapse, until Josh went limp. These streams, hard as they are to watch, function as something like a real-time account of Josh’s descent into hell. In a clip pretty neatly summarizing their dynamic, Josh huffs nitrous oxide from a balloon. He jerks and flails and suddenly stops, looking terrified. “I feel lightheaded,” he yells. Peaking over his shoulder, Itzler laughs and points his thumb toward Josh, a smile plastered on his lips. “Look at this guy,” he says. The clip has over 300,000 views.
Itzler is out of the picture now, relegated once again back to the status of depressing middle-aged man, but the Joshua Block money-making operation churns ever onward. Managed today by MAGA influencer and cocaine aficionado Tony Beam, Josh and his entourage can be found on Parti — which is where they send you when you’re banned by Kick — engaged in the same crap. Josh goes to a bar and gets blackout drunk. Josh gets punched for saying something racist. A sampling of the top posts on his subreddit read, “Josh Confuses a block of cream cheese for his phone,” “Josh block crashed out on me and smacked my phone,” “Josh crashout in Austin,” “Josh says N word hard R,” and so on. You get the picture.
It is miraculous that the scheme continues. So self-evidently awful is it that even Nick Fuentes, beacon of moral clarity such as he is, considers it “unethical.” Josh’s viewership is down, sure, but based on the arrests, scandals, and international incidents, he should be done, out of the public eye. But, of course, the craziness is the point. Algorithms reward attention, and if you can’t get the good kind, then the bad will do. What is inevitable, since private people will never do it themselves, is state intervention. One day, Joshua Block will have to be institutionalized and removed from public life forcibly. And mercifully, that process has begun. As of January 23, having complied with a court order, Joshua Block is now in rehab. He no longer has access to a phone.
Did you know that in 2005 Itzler, pathetic as he is now, had the clout to command a serious profile in New York Magazine? I was surprised when I stumbled upon it, though maybe less so when I considered the preoccupations of mid-aughts tabloids. I think Britney Spears was then at her peak. For them, Itzler must have been a fascinating creature. His combination of stupidity, shamelessness, and success anticipates our own time. Interviewed in jail — I imagine him sitting a table away from Johnny Sack — Iztler thoroughly enlightens us on the theory which animates his mind.
“I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies, best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy.”
If Itzler’s goal was to bring together the best people, the most powerful minds and bodies, then what is he doing with Josh, a man who once tried to eat his own phone? It doesn’t need to be so thoroughly explained, of course. It is plastered across his taunting, giddy smile. If he can’t indulge the best, then he’ll settle for torturing the worst. Deep within that superficial, childish mindset, I have no doubt he considers Josh to be at fault for his own suffering. The mockery and public humiliation is deserved, I’m sure he’d claim. “Get your shit together, man,” I can hear Itzler say, as Josh slurps down his fifth Twisted Tea.
Though Josh is not the first person to have their life placed on public display, he is among the vanguard of a type of new reality TV. Unlike past exercises in public bullying, his story takes place in real time. You watch him live, like an NBA game. You make a comment; he responds. And though he follows in the tradition of internet creators like Filthy Frank or Idubbbz who also marketed themselves as gross freaks, he is not engaged, as they were, in some kind of low-brow performance art. His art involves no performance. His freakouts are real freakouts. His tears are real tears. His drunkenness is real drunkenness. He is the content, and there can be no differentiating between the one and the other.
The internet demands this anti-performance and a similarly warped authenticity. Better a forthright monster than a hypocritical one, says the attention economy. Contrition, that humbling of oneself before others, is hard to watch and harder to monetize. Under the current scheme, the worst a man can do is not to cause others pain but to pretend that he does not. All the lolcows, whatever else they may do, act forthrightly as themselves. From Grace VanderWaal obsessive Daniel Larson to the brony Chris Chan, all share an absolute divorce from reality. For us, the content is a joke cruelly played. For them, it is the real world. If you take social media to function something like Foucault’s panopticon, then the lolcows don’t even know they’re in jail. They feel instead that they are noteworthy and influential people — celebrities, in the true sense of the word. As Chris Chan told the police during her arrest, “I’m famous on the internet.”
The content is laughably simple. In Josh’s case, somebody carries around a camera, points it at him, and films as he drinks in a bar or Itzler’s room, or walks around some city, or rides in an Uber, or picks his nose. And so strange is he, that watching him do even this is interesting. What is he thinking about? you wonder, Why is he fidgeting? Watching Josh, I feel as I did while observing that man on the library computer — like I have seen an alien or an animal escape from the zoo. I gawk, is what I’m trying to say, and anyone else watching Josh has done much the same. He has jokes played on him. He is tormented in ways he cannot and does not seem to understand. He is examined as if he were a bad work of art, every detail scrutinized in order to come up with an ever more complex explanation of the same dull truth — that the man is disgusting.
What is supposed to keep people from seeking this out, if that’s what they want? The instant Josh’s drinking slows and his life improves, some other attention-starved dirtbag will step right over his healing body to supplant the celebrity he’s crafted over five long years. For Josh to retain his place among the attention-elite, he must continue to drink, and he must continue to act crazy. He might even need to become crazier, since appetites for the grotesque and the extreme, these days, seem to know few limits. To keep his celebrity and his sanity is impossible. He has to choose. And let me assure you, Josh will not choose correctly.
Because, poor guy, it’s not up to him. Josh is trapped, but not by the handlers who buy his drinks and exploit his ignorance or the systems which deliver and monetize his content. No, he is trapped by his fans, the everyday people who watch, comment, like, and share. The responsibility for his grotesque state of affairs lies with them because they are active participants in his life. He acts as he does because he is told to. Through their comments and likes, they encourage his worst impulses. When confronted with the consequences, they react as all bullies do, throwing up their arms with an expression of horror, explaining, “I didn’t tell him to do that!” His fans, in all cases, push him toward further degeneration, toward a more intense meltdown. You know, I’ll give Itzler this, that forthright scumbag: he is right to treat Josh the way he does, if only because he has correctly intuited the audience’s desires. They want to watch Josh reach the limit. They want to see him die.
Explain it to anyone, get them to think about it for a minute, and they will cringe, because Josh is suffering, on camera, for money. But why, if the suffering is so self-evident, isn’t the content rejected wholly and immediately, like a cake baked with salt instead of sugar? I don’t think most people search him out. On the algorithmic hamster wheel, Josh simply bubbles up. One moment you’re watching a cat stuck in a jar, the next you’re watching Josh, with a BAC of 0.3, fight a 16-year-old. Maybe you watch a little. Maybe you scroll away. But Josh comes back, and you watch some more. It may be gross, but next to car crash compilations, it’s not that big of a deal.
Giving in makes sense. Reconciling to the assumption that chaos is endemic and confusion is inescapable might be the only plausible way to interact with content that overworks the conscience, making it unable to distinguish good from evil, fact from fiction. And yet, despite its dopamine dependencies, society remains a collection of individuals, all with an equal capacity for reason and compassion — all capable, in equal measure, of scrolling past Josh’s big dumb face.
There is a strangely earnest faction in the comments beneath Josh’s videos. They write little notes like, “this poor suffering soul,” and “hope you’re doin okay buddy,” or “be kind Josh.” They hope, so far as I understand, that he will quit drinking, that he will return to the goofy stuff that first made him famous. What these pity viewers do not understand is that their views count the same as every other. They help him not at all, since Josh is doing it for them, for their attention, and the only way to stop him is to grant him none.
One helpfully self-aware poster on the WorldofTShirts Reddit seems to get it:
“He’s been locked up for almost a month now, and I’m starting to forget about fry boy. If Josh graduates rehab and tries to stream sober, who will still watch? Honestly, I’m not interested in listening to his yelling, screeching voice, or what he claims is singing. I don’t want to watch him scream and wag his finger around in front of a camera. I only watched Josh to see him get sloppy drunk and run around unhinged in NYC. I watched for the crashouts and racial slurs. If I don’t see those, I’m bored.”
What do you do about a person like that? About somebody who enjoys the suffering of others?
About somebody with a conscience so lazy he can’t be bothered to move his thumb half an inch upwards? This is a morally diseased person, a true nihilist, but can he help it? I said earlier that we are capable of making the right choice, and I believe that, but you have to understand that these people, the people who watch his streams, who pay him money and who ambush him in the street, are more than voyeurs. They don’t feel sickened; they feel nothing. They grew up on car crash compilations, on ISIS beheadings, on the most visceral porn that you can imagine. Submerged in an ocean of shit, does Joshua Block smell worse than anything else?
The main room of the University of Illinois’s (UIUC) Student Union is best known for its Starbucks. There’s a little one tucked into the room’s eastern corner, which, with its faux-leather upholstery, doubles as a fake café. Engineers are hard at work, future executives consult ChatGPT, humanities students waste time — for six-and-a-half days a week, the noise level never rises above a gentle patter. But those who arrive after seven o’clock on Wednesday evening are greeted by a very different scene. An island materializes in front of the room’s modest stage as four of five of the café’s small tables are pushed together by a single group, dressed to the nines, that has gathered for the week’s main event. It is karaoke night.
Katie, the karaoke czar, is up on stage and wants to let us know that “Sign-ups for karaoke are open!” The call goes largely unacknowledged, except for on the island, where a great deal of activity has begun. These people are not here to study but to sing. Michael Sligting, who has a great voice, and Dan, who trails in his wake, are first up on stage, singing Backstreet Boys’s “I Want It That Way.” Allison and Bella gossip quietly on the side before getting up to sing “Do I Wanna Know?” Allison has come to karaoke every week for the last four years because, as she says, “No one is judgy. You can dress up and be yourself.” There is also Tom, who for some reason has a hammer looped onto his belt, and Ray, who seems to exclusively sing German heavy metal. Gary, a large and solid man, shuffles a deck of cards. Terry, who has the best voice of them all, sits quietly on his computer. The celebrity, the man I am there to see, Michael DeCoste, has just finished his set.
Bearded, standing at a lanky 6-foot-3-inches tall, and with the softly angular features of Jacob Elordi, Michael is unmissable. He’s sweaty, offering a monotone “Hey” as I greet him. His well-worn trench coat is set aside on a nearby chair, and exposed atop his green button-down shirt is the heavy silver cross which never leaves his neck. I’d arranged to meet him days before. But even had I not, locating him would have been no trouble. At 6:20 p.m. he posted a smiling thumbs-up selfie on Snapchat, reminding the world to join him at karaoke night. He did so again at 6:55 p.m.
Across the various social media platforms onto which Michael uploads his content (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok) you will uniformly find videos of his version of Risk Astley’s 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up.” Dressed in the full Rick Astley outfit — striped tee, white collared shirt, suit jacket — Michael replicates the exact Rick Astley moves — snapping fingers, shaking hips. The rickroll, that old meme, he has transformed into a signature. And you cannot attend karaoke without watching him perform it.
The thing is, Michael can really dance. He’s genuinely good. There is something seriously captivating about the confidence with which he executes the absurd movements. It’s not smooth or suave or charismatic but representative of somebody who has overcome their neurosis forcibly, through absolute determination and will. The performance does not come naturally, but it is executed flawlessly, and there is something deeply admirable in that.
The Michael Decoste character began on Star Wars day in a cafeteria at Parkland, the Champaign-based community college where Michael spent his freshman year, when an acquaintance’s ironic karaoke performance of John Legend’s “All of Me” caught his attention. He snuck on stage to mimic his friend’s performance with his arms spread wide in a sort of operatic caricature. He got a laugh. He was asked to sing. He thought about it for a moment, ran through his rolodex of jokes, and settled on the classic meme, the rickroll.
“It kind of started as a joke,” Michael said when I spoke to him in December. “And then it became a bit more serious like, ‘Hey, I can make a little gimmick out of this. A niche gimmick of a few people.’ And then it was [at] the end of sophomore year that I finally was like, you know what, I can make this a whole thing.”
Soon enough, he began recording his performances, uploading them to the university’s shared Snapchat story (you are added after supplying Snapchat your student email). The attention came immediately. “A lot of people started adding me, and they were like, ‘Wow, I love this. This is hilarious. I love it so much.’ And I was like, ‘You know, I’ll just post a little bit more on here,’” Michael said.
And post he has. So far as I can tell, a single week has not gone by in the last three years without a minimum of one Michael DeCoste post on the UIUC ’26 Snapchat story. They usually come from karaoke night, but sometimes he throws something else on there, too — a reupload, a sponsorship, or a goofy workout video. The key to his success must be at least partially attributable to his sheer persistence: annoying at first, curious after a while, and then sincerely beloved, he is a celebrity by way of Stockholm Syndrome.
Though Michael does not drink — he is a devout Catholic in that way — you may, on a Friday or Saturday night, find him dancing for the benefit of those waiting in line outside the major UIUC bars, where wait times regularly reach 30 to 40 minutes. The reaction to Michael’s dancing is decidedly mixed. Requests for pictures blend with manic shouts of “Oh My God.” Peals of laughter amidst expressions of outright contempt come from the “drunken frat bros, who would be ‘shouting at anyone… if anybody’s doing anything,’” according to Michael. But though I’m sure these guys would shout at anybody, Michael rarely receives their outright scorn. Talk with them, and what you will actually discover is a mocking toleration. They dap him up, say a few nice words, take a picture with him, and share it with the group chat, laughing at but not with him.
Most are not so cruel. Mya, a sophomore I encountered at karaoke night, finds that Michael “gets people in a good mood.” I got a different perspective from my friend Lily, who pleaded with me, “Don’t give him attention. Don’t encourage him.”
But that ship has sailed, so far as I can tell. “There are people who come to karaoke night every week,” Michael told me. “And I always bump into people who are, like, fan-girling or fan-boying. They’ll be like, ‘I’m your biggest fan.’ It still catches me by surprise.”
But I’m not so sure that the notoriety has gotten to him. “It’s cool that I’ve gotten the positive attention. You know, the thing is, I was happy before, and I’m happy still. It didn’t really alter things that much.” Katie, the karaoke czar and Michael’s friend, tells me that when they walk down the street together, “Everybody recognizes Michael.”
The holy fool is, in the Russian Orthodox belief, an “unconventional saint,” who lives a “life of physical and mental extremes: they feign madness and willingly expose themselves to others’ scorn.” They are a prominent feature of Russian literature, especially that of Dostoevsky, often presented as seers and truth-tellers whose strange and provocative behavior “serves to publicly unmask the sinfulness and hypocrisy of their contemporaries.”1
I feel that Michael Decoste is something like a holy fool. His experience is one I cannot help but compare to Joshua Block, his evil twin. They are fundamentally similar, both creations, at differing scales, of the attention-sapping algorithms which order so much of our social world. Where one’s experience of parasocial fame has been so extraordinarily violent and degraded, the other lives joyously and normally. Nobody follows Michael around or demands that he “put the fries in the bag.”
But Michael is not chasing attention, at least not so ruthlessly as Josh. There are things he simply will not do because he is grounded, because he has belief. “I want to be kind of an inspiration for some people,” Michael told me, “because there’s so many times where I’ve had imposter syndrome and [felt] doubt about myself. And I’m sure everyone’s struggled through that, you know, in their teenage years.” He has succeeded through a mix of Catholicism and Tai Kwon Do (he is an instructor at a gym in nearby Mahomet). “Know yourself, know your limits, know what you’re capable of, and try to work it the best you can. I think that if everyone lived by that philosophy, a lot of our problems would disappear…You just have to have that willpower to do it.”
Tonight, Michael performs the usual dances, but for the social accounts he has in store a special performance of “Last Christmas” by WHAM. There’s no special dance to this song, no unique or goofy moves. Standing at the mic, he bobs and sways and follows the music. I realize now that this is the reason he has on a green button-down. This is also the only performance of his to be recorded tonight. The rest will disappear, lost to time and fading with memory. But Michael is not here for the attention, he is here to inspire. “I want to be kind of an inspiration for some people,” he told me. “And I kind of go over the top, you know, with how I dress and [perform]... look, if I can do those things, despite the fact that I was homeschooled and socially awkward and Covid happening and everything...despite the fact that all that happened, I still found a way to do this. So sure enough, you can find something, too.”
Katie told me that by nine o’clock most nights, karaoke sign-ups will fill up completely, and tonight they have. Taking turns on stage are no longer just Michael Decoste and company but also now new and unexpected groups. A squad of sorority sisters take turns at various Christmas songs. Together on stage, a girl and a boy exchange nervous glances. Tom and both Michaels swivel their hips to “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead or Alive. They look ridiculous, but they are laughing, and so am I.
The boys — Michael DeCoste, Tom, Dan, and Gary — rope me into playing the Russian card game Durak. They are very nice and very serious players. They shuffle the deck, cut the cards, and deal me in precisely. When I make a mistake, everybody gets upset. “You forgot the suit,” Michael yells, explaining to me my mistake and instructing me how to correct it. These sweet boys, I like them. All around is singing and smiling, laughter and joy. There is no judgement here, no contempt, no liquor — an antidote, I think, to the cynicism of a cold, cold world.
*What follows is a conversation between Theodore Gary and the founding editors of The New Critic.
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Below we discuss WorldofTShirts’s campus visit to the University of Illinois, the origins of Michael DeCoste, middle school boys, and the end times of streaming.*
POSTSCRIPT
ELAN How did you first come across WorldofTShirts?
THEODORE He came to campus is what happened. He was here at [the University of Illinois] Urbana-Champaign right when I was sort of germinating on the idea [of writing the piece]. I was just going to write about Michael DeCoste, and I had spoken to DeCoste — I’d just sort of talked with him informally. And then I came home, and I was talking to my roommates, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, you know, WorldofTShirts came to campus.” I was like, “Who the hell is WorldofTShirts?” And then one of my roommates explained it to me, and he explained it very matter-of-factly, “Oh, it’s this guy who, you know, he’s taken advantage of by his managers, and they do this and this and this.” And as he explained it, I just became more and more viscerally disgusted. It was as if he was describing our lawn in terms of matter-of-factness. This is sort of the germ of the piece — I was like, how the hell can you not be just viscerally disgusted by all this? And how does it not make you angry that this exists? And that’s what I’m trying to explore in my writing.
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