Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the DoorDash driver who thinks we’re on the verge of a recession; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the Best Buy customer who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Setup here’s easy: Guy walks into a Best Buy and insists he needs a product that, turns out, does not actually exist. The other sales associate at Walmart told him a wireless adapter was only $40 at Best Buy, so he arrived committed to the mission.
He wanted to connect his Samsung subwoofer to speakers that he bought via Chinese online marketplace Temu. So not only was the adapter much more expensive than the Walmart guy said it would be, buying it would prove fruitless because the Temu and Samsung devices were incompatible.
The numbers show it’s the most-read Daily Dot post of the week.
I think it’s because we stuffed a lot of brands in there that got algorithmically picked up by Google Discover. We love a good “brand-stuffing” headline.
The story is definitely relatable, too. We are constantly clearing out wires that we hesitate to discard because they might be useful in some alternate reality where they kept making the Palm Pre.
Think of all the proprietary white cables you have from iPhone generations gone. Why are they still in your home office? The bricks that stopped charging. The iPod bay from 2008. The alarm clock. My goodness the alarm clock from college still lingers in my home. It’s a Simpsons line for most of us: Sure it’s not 1985 today, but who knows what tomorrow will bring?
And Temu has certainly accelerated this trend. My mother has gifted me ring lights and vests from Temu for Christmas. She got several ring lights for the whole family back in 2020. I still have fake Yeezys from Alibaba. We have more cheap, fast junk than ever.
And yet I pride myself on trashing material goods that do not serve me. Turns out I’m as bad as a Depression-era homemaker.
Perhaps it’s because only after we have accumulated lots of useless stuff, can we find transcendence via inanimate objects.
For instance, I am writing this while looking at a prestigious award that we received via mail in error… yet remains in my office. It’s from the 2015 Digiday publishing awards: finalist, publisher of the year, Sports Illustrated for 60th anniversary edition. It makes me extremely proud, even if I have never worked for SI. (You can pry this one from my cold dead hands, Sports Illustrated.)
When everything is a mountain of stuff, what’s the difference?
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