Imagine you, swarthy and covered in that sweat, jaunty hat, breathable cotton 'cause its hotter than fuck in the desert-y dunes you'd have to scramble over just to get right here, right now. Big metal rod of a box-cracker in one hand and some sort of burning stick in the other, you approach that delightful little tomb dedicated to Les Artes Mercantile.
Behold — the Tomb of the Sarcopho-guy.
You're here for the mummy, but you know you're really here for the money. So eager to gather up a couple fivers or ten quid or thirty trillion Zimbabwean that you scramble hand over fist to get that crow's bar in the crow's feet and crack open what feels like thirty centuries ago. And when that inky black blackness craps thick powdery dust all over that hot and skanky jacket of yours, you know you've unleashed the curse of hundreds of dollars in unpaid website hosting fees.
And then, from within, that throat of a thousand years creaks open and spits straight fire upon you:
"Sweet Jesus, what a fucking nightmare this place turned out to be."
THE LAST SIX YEARS: A LISTICLE FOR PEOPLE WHO JUST EMERGED FROM THE COVID BUNKER
2020: THE YEAR THAT TAUGHT US WE'D BEEN WRONG ABOUT BREATHING
A bat allegedly sneezed on a pangolin and the entire global economy responded by purchasing bread flour and watching Tiger King. A virus called COVID-19, which sounds like the name of a Soviet military satellite, proceeded to murder approximately everything good about going outside. By March, the most ambitious thing most people accomplished was maintaining a sourdough starter and pretending that counted as a personality.
Somewhere in the middle of this, the United States held an election. A man in a suit who used to run The Apprentice lost to a man named “Dark Brandon” who enjoys ice cream. The losing party responded by printing signs that said “STOP THE STEAL” and storming a building, which is either a coup or a deeply misguided escape room scenario depending on how charitable you're feeling.
Both parties insist it was the other one or that treason isn't a crime or that crime isn't a crime.
2020–2021: THE REDDIT INSURGENCY AND THE JPEG ECONOMY
WallStreetBets, a subreddit populated by people who refer to themselves as “apes” and call their money “tendies,” collectively decided to purchase GameStop stock and briefly destroyed several hedge funds in the process. A man in a red headband named Roaring Kitty became a folk hero and briefed Congress. He came back in 2024 to do it again because he learned nothing and is joyful about it.
Shortly thereafter, someone convinced a meaningful portion of the internet that owning a certificate pointing to a cartoon ape constituted a 'non-fungible investment opportunity'. People spent hundreds of thousands of real dollars on these. Matt Damon told you fortune favors the brave, and the market subsequently lost 97% of its value. The apes remain technically owned by someone, we guess.
2021: THE YEAR NOTHING WAS RESOLVED
A man in a horned fur hat sat in Nancy Pelosi's chair and the country spent the rest of the year processing this at varying speeds and levels of apathy. Meanwhile, the withdrawal from Afghanistan happened in a manner that suggested no one had written anything down. Twenty years of nation-building, concluded over a long weekend, with the energy of a group project where everyone assumed someone else was doing the final slide.
The vaccines arrived. Half of everyone got them immediately. The other half went to Facebook, which is where people who think the moon is a government projection go to feel understood. Horse drugs were ingested by people who felt like that was the appropriate response.
2021—NOW: THE EPSTEIN FILES, OR THE LACK THEREOF
Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in federal custody in 2019 under circumstances that a meaningful percentage of the population found suspicious, left behind a vast client list that the public had been promised, threatened with, and teased about for years. Court documents were unsealed in batches. Names appeared. Most of them were already known or tangentially connected. The specific bombshell that half the internet had been waiting for — the definitive list that would take down everyone simultaneously — did not materialize in the way the mythology had suggested it would.
What did emerge was ugly and dumb and horrifying. Rich dudes behaving in the manner they historically behave in comic books or tin-foil hat conspiracy. The conversation about accountability and the conversation about conspiracy theory had by this point become so thoroughly tangled that distinguishing between them required more effort than most human brains allow.
The files are still being released in pieces like a fucking murder mystery subscription box full of the same fucking mystery: babies thrown off yachts again and again and again.
2022: THE YEAR OF THE GRIFT
First of all I would like to remind everyone that the grandfather of Cryptocurrency, 'Bitcoin', got its start at Mt. Gox, also known as the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, where people would buy and sell cards for a card game primarily played by people who show a lot of butt crack in public. Remember that? Just — keep that fact in your mind.
Elon Musk purchased Twitter for 44 billion dollars and then immediately made it worse in ways that feel almost artistically committed to the bit. The platform was eventually renamed “X,” which is what you name a product when you've given up trying to communicate what it does. He then turned the verification system into a subscription service, which meant that the blue checkmark became a marker of someone who paid eight dollars a month to feel important. It is now the internet's premier venue for people who want to argue about things that happened three years ago with strangers who have anime profile pictures.
Also: crypto collapsed. NFTs collapsed — the pictures of the monkeys that were also tied to crypto. The Metaverse — which was supposed to be the future of human interaction and turned out to be a sad waiting room with legs — collapsed. I believe they were trying to sell virtual land to people that was tied to NFTs which, yep, crypto.
FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange run by a man named Sam Bankman-Fried who wore cargo shorts to congressional testimony and was subsequently convicted of fraud, took a large portion of the ecosystem down with it. This was also the year Polymarket, a prediction market gambling site, quietly started being more accurate about elections than most polling aggregators. This raised no meaningful questions that anyone cared to act on.
Meanwhile, Russia invaded Ukraine. The Ukrainian flag showed up on every social media profile within 48 hours, including profiles belonging to people who couldn't locate Ukraine on a map 49 hours prior. Supporting Ukraine remains a thing because there is still a war going on in eastern Europe. Using it as your avatar for three weeks before pivoting to FIFA content is a choice.
2023: THE YEAR EVERYONE BECAME AN AI EXPERT
The NFT market finished dying. The AI market started its current phase of not. Every company acquired an AI strategy, most of which amounted to putting a chatbot on their website and calling it a transformation. The chatbot told several people their return policy was whatever it felt like that day. AI generated images, text, music, legal briefs, student essays, and a stunning variety of hands with six fingers. Every LinkedIn post became indistinguishable from a press release written by a very confident golden retriever.
Kevin McCarthy spent 15 rounds of voting to become Speaker of the House, which is a record, and was then removed from the Speakership nine months later, which is also a record, and the first time it had ever happened. The House then spent several weeks not having a Speaker, which is the kind of institutional void that sounds fine until you remember it's the legislature of the largest economy on earth.
The Titan submersible went to look at the Titanic and did not come back, which is a sentence in so many ways. Five people paid several hundred thousand dollars each to descend in what has been described as a pressurized camping cooler and the world held its breath for four days before the ocean resolved the situation through mano-a-oceano combat. This story contained every possible element — hubris, the Titanic, a Bluetooth controller, billionaires — and yet somehow didn't feel like satire.
On the same weekend in July 2023, a film about a plastic doll having an existential crisis and a film about the invention of the atomic bomb were released simultaneously, and audiences responded by going to see both in the same day, sometimes in costume. Barbie made over a billion dollars. Oppenheimer won Best Picture. Together they briefly restored the cultural institution of going to a movie theater, which had been declared dead in 2020. Nobody has fully explained why these two films specifically did it, and attempting to explain it only makes it less interesting.
Inflation peaked, tapered, and remained the explanation for everything costing too much. Economists called it transitory. Transitory. Motherfucking TRANSITORY.
2024: CAMPAIGN SEASON, THE RECURRING NIGHTMARE
Kristi Noem wrote a book. In it, she described shooting her 14-month-old dog in a gravel pit for killing some chickens and being difficult to train. She framed this as leadership. The public framed it as the only thing they wanted to talk about for two weeks. She was considered for Vice President, but did not get it.
Lauren Boebert, sitting U.S. Representative for the state of Colorado, was removed from a touring production of Beetlejuice the Musical in Denver for vaping, filming, and groping her date.
Luigi Mangione allegedly shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside a New York hotel in December. He left an alleged manifesto about the health insurance industry. His alleged merchandise appeared on Etsy within days. None of the underlying issues were addressed.
America held another election, as is the custom. Kamala Harris got a vibe and a coconut tree joke. Donald Trump, having survived several legal situations that would have retired most normal humans, got re-elected in a manner that produced roughly four hundred think pieces per hour for six consecutive weeks.
Lets roll them cabinet-pickin' bones here, folks:
Vice President: JD Vance. Author of Hillbilly Elegy, former venture capitalist, former Trump critic who became Trump's most loyal ally with the kind of speed that suggests he wrote the original criticism in pencil. Third youngest VP in American history. Looks like he's always just received mildly disappointing news.
Secretary of State: Marco Rubio. Former Florida senator, former 2016 presidential candidate who called Trump a con man and then became his top diplomat. The arc of his career is a masterclass in updating your priors.
Secretary of the Treasury: Scott Bessent. Hedge fund manager. Former chief investment officer for George Soros, which the people who confirmed him are aware of and have chosen not to mention loudly.
Attorney General: Pam Bondi. Former Florida Attorney General. Replaced Matt Gaetz, who was Trump's original pick and withdrew after his own nomination became a different kind of news story entirely (for Baskin-Robbins new flavor of the decade: Underaged Sex Trafficking). Bondi is considered the boring option, which in context is a compliment.
Secretary of Homeland Security: Kristi Noem. The dog lady. Running the department that oversees immigration enforcement, border security, and FEMA. She shoots things she finds difficult. She now has a very large portfolio.
Secretary of the Interior: Doug Burgum. Former Governor of North Dakota. One of the less theatrically alarming picks. Primarily notable for having also briefly run for president in 2024, during which he offered debate attendees a $20 gift card to sign up for his campaign, which is either charming or deeply sad depending on your threshold.
Secretary of Commerce: Howard Lutnick. CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm that lost 658 employees on September 11th and famously kept going. Now overseeing trade policy during the tariff era, which is either the right background or a profoundly specific kind of irony. In the Epstein files under the heading "again with the sex criminals."
Secretary of Health and Human Services: RFK Jr. Yep. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man who ran as an independent, dropped out, endorsed Trump, disclosed the brain worm, and was confirmed to oversee the nation's public health infrastructure. He has expressed skepticism about vaccines. He runs the agency that recommends vaccines. The worm is still in there, we guess. He admitted to snorting coke off a toilet seat on a podcast with Joe Rogan who might be the next press secretary.
Secretary of Education: Linda McMahon. Co-founder of WWE. Former head of the Small Business Administration in Trump's first term. Now running a department that Trump has repeatedly said he wants to abolish, which makes her job description philosophically complicated.
Secretary of Defense: Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host, was confirmed by a tie-breaking Vice Presidential vote following hearings that included allegations about his conduct and drinking submitted by his own family members. Subsequently included a journalist in a Signal group chat containing active war plans. He remains Secretary of Defense.
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: Kash Patel. Wrote a children's book reimagining the Russia investigation as a medieval fantasy in which Trump is a wronged king. The book is called The Plot Against the King. He sold it at CPAC. Yes, he runs the FBI.
There were several attempts on the life of the suited goo what keeps posting bizarre AI pictures of himself on the internet and also runs our government. They continue in rapid staccato to this day, but in 2024 there were some prominent ones, like the Mar-a-Lago shotgun guy and someone just charging into the Correspondents' Dinner, again, with a shotgun.
Dr. Oz also got a government job. I hope you are enjoying this. Have you seen our new shop?
2025–2026: THE CURRENT UNPLEASANTNESS
DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency, not the dog coin, though the branding confusion feels intentional — materialized as a real thing that Elon Musk was doing near the White House with the energy of someone who just got admin access to a server they probably shouldn't have. Government agencies were reorganized, reduced, and in some cases simply stopped picking up the phone.
Tariffs came back with a vengeance. The kind of tariffs that make economists visibly age on cable news in real time. Everyone blamed everyone else. Prices went up. The word “transitory” was not used this time because everyone remembered what happened last time.
ICE operations expanded significantly, generating sustained legal conflict between the executive branch and the judiciary over deportations, due process, shooting two Americans dead in the street, opening concentration camps including "Alligator Alcatraz/Auschwitz" in Florida, and using a Salvadoran detention facility to house deportees. A man was sent there in what was acknowledged as an administrative error but the government declined to bring him back. The courts had opinions about this and the executive branch had opinions about the courts having opinions.
AI kept going. More things became AI-powered that did not need to be AI-powered, including but not limited to: your search results, your customer service hold queue, several major newspapers, and the response you got when you emailed your congressman. Our Wendy's drive in no longer has people, but it shouldn't have had any in the first place.
We stole Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela like Carmen Sandiego. Just lifted him and flew off. I think he is in jail in Brooklyn on narco-terrorism charges which should cause concerns to anyone who might still work at the CIA. We forgot about this entirely once we invaded Iran.
The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran in February, killing Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and starting a war. This is an active and ongoing situation that the news cycle is currently processing at a pace that suggests everyone is very tired.
NASA's flew around the moon again and took pictures of the dark size of it which did not reveal any aliens. The Onion bought Infowars, which is the best outcome that could have happened and still reads like a headline you have to check twice.
The President knocked down a significant part of the historic White House, specifically the Rose Garden that was made by, you know, someone a while ago I guess. He's gonna build a ball room and some sort of arch. Maybe he can throw babies off it. I don't even fucking know.
TODAY — RIGHT THE FUCK NOW
Got it? That brings us to today. Gas is a billion. So is bread. No one has any jobs. I think we still have a lot of people in various detention across the country. Like Nicolás Maduro.
But you know what is free? Abusing the internet for therapeutic reasons.
We asked our new AI wizards to generate a picture for the 2020's and this is what it made:
