13 ways of looking at tung tung tung sahur

Tung Tung epstein 2/2

1.

Holding a real Tung Tung Tung Sahur in your hand is one of those moments when the lived experience of existing within late capitalism feels so fucked-up that it almost approaches the sublime. It feels in your heart like he should not exist, but you know in your mind that of course he exists.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is one of the most popular, profitable, and recognized characters in global media today — and yet he is fundamentally uncopyrightable. Produced by shitposters using AI generators in decentralized, digital collaboration, Sahur now forms a piece of the Anthropocene’s permanent fossil record across several continents.

The attraction of Tung Tung Tung Sahur lies less in his smile or in his bat, and more in the way he epitomizes a world-system that we do not yet understand, but which surrounds us all the same.

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3.

I’ve been fascinated by two essays touching on Tung Tung published in Algorithmic Folklore here on Substack, both of which are worth your read. The first, by Gabrielle de Seta, concerns the material life of Italian Brainrot, reflecting on the bizarre fact that if you go to a gas station in Virginia or Los Angeles (as I have) or Bangkok, Hong Kong, South Korea, or the Italian countryside (as de Seta and their friends did) you can find Italian Brainrot toys made in a factory in Dongguan, China. “Italian Brainrot,” de Seta writes, is “the first consistent repertoire of AI-generated content to become material through established channels of physical manufacturing and commercial circulation.”

You might see the physical Tung Tung Tung Sahur as harbinger of a new form of culture industry. “The vernacular origins and uncopyrightable nature of Italian Brainrot,” de Seta writes, “suggest a provocative claim: if this is not the first distributed property to have widespread commercial success without a major IP holder behind it, one is probably just around the corner.”

By this reading, the old form of culture industry— which involved characters a corporation could own, that circulated through channels of centralized distribution it could physically control — has been eaten by a new form, which relies on characters nobody owns and channels of decentralized distribution that nobody controls. Mickey Mouse might have been the first representative of that old form, while Tung Tung Tung Sahur is the avatar of the new one.

4.

Capitalism is always violently breaking itself apart and then stumbling into reassembly. It creates systems that depends on established orders (copyright, central channels) and then performs its own revolution (brainrot, algorithms).

What disconcerts me — and what I think also baffled people way back in the 1800s — is the alien straightforwardness of the new products and the new experiences they create in us. They dispense so easily with all the context they came from. When I’m holding the die-cast Tung Tung Tung Sahur in my hand, all the things I know about it — the layers of irony, decontextualization, recontextualization, and posting which brought it to me, in physical form — are like a vestigial organ.

He smiles, he costs $3.99, the gas station attendant who is about fifty doesn’t even know who he is, just that he sells, and in the eyes of society that is the verdict which matters.

Landscapes spanned by the 1800s railroad, seen through the window of a train, must have presented themselves with a similarly barren matter-of-factness: you will be in Denver tomorrow, no sunrises, tavern conversations, no exposure to the weather involved; and you will get there for a predictable sum at a predictable pace. The answer by ChatGPT offers a similar cleanliness: it shows you that it’s thinking, dots trembling the way they do when a person’s writing you a text message. It swirls the labyrinth of its neural net, and what emerges are two sentences:

5.

Here I am in a Backrooms-esque site I accessed off a YouTube advertisement for an Italian Brainrot “educational children’s video.” The two pop-up ads it served me were, first, for a teen mental health crisis center and, second, an AI integration for my small business.

The joke of this intricate system, which so ably anticipates desire (or claims it can) is that half the time it doesn’t work. I asked ChatGPT for two sentences in the prompt above, and it gave me four. I try to click the “Mysterious Call from the Wooden Friend” Tung Tung Tung Sahur video and I keep getting this other one.

There is a carelessness which feels demeaning here. You get used to it, learn to click around the dumb obstacles, scroll past the porn-adjacent “microdrama” on your feed that you never asked for. It becomes background scenery, hardly even registers as friction.

The carelessness arises because none of this is for me. I am reduced to a third party, simply enabling a conversation between two machines. I do my part to train the models, contribute to the page view counter, and move dollars and data from the real world into the digital world. In return for facilitating interactions between computers (which if you follow the stock market seem to be the main value-generating function in the economy) I am connected to an increasingly slim payout of information, mild satisfaction, and social connection. The user sits in a cuck chair watching two computers make love, trained to find pleasure in the spectacle of an algorithm smooching an AI generator through the medium of a slop reel.

The only way you feel kind of involved is when you repost Tung Tung Tung Sahur, and the irrational lust of technical systems mingles with your own sense of whimsy to make something that, more than the other pointless content, feels real.

6, 7.

As Willy Staley wrote about memes in a fatally Twitter-minded New York Times magazine piece, in reference to 67:

It’s too weird for a human intelligence to have come up with. Instead it was conjured into being by something else, some entity we’ve created by disappearing into our phones for several hours a day.

Maybe we could live peacefully with such an entity were its influence confined to the realm of jokes, slang and pop culture. But it seems capable of influencing just about everything, even the government of the most powerful country in the world.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is more the spawn of that entity than he is the spawn of any author — let alone the specific Indonesian and Islamic context he comes out of, which Luigi Monteanni describes in the second Algorithmic Folklore piece that I love. Monteanni attributes the virality, ultimately, to Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s sensonarrative power:

The sensonarrative power of Italian Brainrot compels users to participate in the production and circulation of this specific genre of content. This capacity to generate circulation, replication, and, eventually, meaning does not derive from the formal qualities of the genre, but rather by what its material instantiations do to us sensorially when we encounter them in the wild.

In past posts on this newsletter, I’ve written about memes as a kind of sensorial encounter — Adam Aleksic has also written eloquently about that. The “meaning” of a meme is often in the way it makes us feel, the way it affects your body (evidenced by the use of the word “brainrot” to describe an entire genre) and the social uses you put it to. Although the “material instantiations” of Tung Tung or any meme are diffused — flickering images on phone screens, the tongue bouncing off the mouth’s roof while saying “tung tung tung” — they cohere by means of networked devices and algorithms. Millions of eyes, fingers, and tongues pass over and engage the same post like voices finding the same melody. It is the voice that matters, prior to the lyrics, which many people don’t even make out.

8.

Para Beatriz on Substack, Dante Conero on TikTok (creator of maybe my favorite shitpost ever) writes brilliantly (and I, with Google and a friend’s help, translate from the original Spanish):

A 16-year-old teenager makes an elaborate story about Tung Tung Sahur. Tung Tung Sahur wanders through the neighborhoods of Lima, flies through hallucinatory shopping malls, and ends his life with a shot of heroin in a nameless plaza, all while a Crystal Castles song plays in the background….

Perhaps in a few days, his post will garner thousands of likes, and it will seem perfectly normal to think Tung Tung Sahur can do all of this. Perhaps some of his peers will create similar stories, and the broader lore of this particular brainrot will be altered forever. Or perhaps not.

I am not familiar with the reel of Tung Tung Tung Sahur OD’ing in Peru, but the process rings true: a meme is as available to a 16-year-old in Lima as it is to the Indonesian audience that first did it; and it is as available to me as it is to the President. We can all change the rules and vibe of the meme. Whether the modifications any of us make to it become a piece of its ongoing “lore” is up to chance, the organic “swerve.” Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, writes:

When atoms move straight down through the void by their own weight, they deflect a bit in space at a quite uncertain time and in uncertain places, just enough that you could say that their motion has changed. But if they were not in the habit of swerving, they would all fall straight down through the depths of the void, like drops of rain, and no collision would occur, nor would any blow be produced among the atoms. In that case, nature would never have produced anything.

If pieces of internet culture moved like rain, drawn by a defined gravity in a logical, regular motion, nothing would happen. Innovations like Angel Tung Tung Tung Sahur, or his romance with Ballerina Cappuccina, occur not through planning but by an accretion of random chances, of swerves. Somebody sees it, somebody shares it, somebody likes it, and the entire structure can alter from that.

It is a strange continuity which emerges from these swervings, and in Dante’s telling, the art of the “memero” (one could also say, meme page admin) is to “administer recurrences” and create this continuity.

[Meme accounts] construct a living archive where each post rewrites the ones that came before and prepares the way for those that do not yet exist.

If a meme truly matters, it is not because it was seen for a single night. It is because, after seeing it, the world remains in some small way reconfigured, and what follows can never be quite the same.

In this sense, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a continuity created by a swerve of human creativity in the stream of machine-generated culture, and administered by diligent human effort.

9.

Staley’s “entity” finds its perfect vessel in 67 — a meme that, like Tung Tung Tung Sahur, once came from a specific cultural context but is now purely, defiantly, a sensonarrative experience in the way Monteanni describes — just a thing you say and a motion you do that carries meaning because, across a billion screens and a billion moments, it keeps getting done (it recurs).

On top of that core sensonarrative experience, anyone can add their bit — but your bit remains just something extra, never final, and he’s never yours. Tung Tung can expand into an endless lore — he can die, be born, hate Tralalero then love Tralalero, sing a tune or swing a fist. He can have an online meta-narrative as a “niche meme” then a “popular brainrot,” then an “old meme.” But there is just a core collectively-shared sensonarrative experience at the bottom of it all.

You hold him in your hand, and he is just a piece of plastic with those same great empty eyes, and you giggle in the way you did when you held him in your hand and he was just a plain of bright pixels. I don’t have to be me to feel the way I feel about him, I can be anyone — and in the moment I regard him, I am anyone, the same anyone you are, and the 16-year-old Lima teenager is, when we look at Tung Tung Tung Sahur.

This “anyone” is, maybe, Staley’s entity.

10.

Most of all, that “anyone” is the girl reading this.

11.

I’ve heard people call memes the internet’s inside jokes. But lately, memes feel more like the entire world having the same song stuck in its head, all at the same time.

It is not repetition, but recurrence at play — a continual returning, with changed characteristics. In my previous post, I talked about both Jeffrey Epstein and Tung Tung Tung Sahur in this respect:

With both Epstein and Tung Tung, there is no singular screen-crossing event, but a continued series of recrossings, back-and-forth...

A meme is kind of like a pinball bouncing around a machine, paddled between real sensonarrative experience and computer-mediated responses. It attains power and velocity by its collision with the walls (“this is not real,” or “this is dumb”) that seem to contain it, but instead serve to refract it. The meme page admin, like the person playing pinball, manages recurrence by sending it back out again, or, watching as it returns, timing the exact right moment to strike.

12.

This agency is trying to copyright Tung Tung Tung Sahur — a pointless endeavor if there ever was one. The whole point is that Tung Tung is ours. He cannot be anyone’s exclusive property, nor should he be, since the creativity that produced him was collective. The entity that authored him is “anyone.”

But in a more fundamental sense, the biggest cucks of all are production companies and agencies. Culture, in its current form, is computer systems making love to each other with audiences serving as the means to do it. The traditional creative industries linger on the outside, watching this happen, searching for ways to interject themselves and get a piece of the action.

13.

Holding a real Tung Tung Tung Sahur in your hand is a mark that the internet has “crossed the screen” not once, but a multitude of times. And so have you. In the acid bath of algorithmic content our selves burn away, until all that’s left are the bare wires which computers and money use to transit across our desires, our bodies. These wires exist in anyone.

Tung Tung Tung Sahur is not a joke, a story, or answer — he is a jolt. And by feeling him, watching him move through the circuits, we can view the whole network that we are in. We can demonstrate our own power within it by amplifying the swerves, the moments of human weirdness that interrupt an otherwise static deluge of data flowing from computer to computer in a manner that each day is further optimized away from ourselves and what matters.