tung tung epstein (pt. 1/2)
de(re)territorialization in algorithmic space
I want to place two of the most popular meme figures of the 2020s in conversation with each other: Tung Tung Tung Sahur of Italian Brainrot and Jeffrey Epstein of Pedophile Corruption Cabal.
To be clear, my interest is less in the real Epstein or the real Tung Tung Tung Sahur than in the ways they have been represented and the forces underlying those representations. Ultimately, I want to figure out how those representations “cross the screen,” to borrow Hito Steyerl’s evocative phrase — how AI-generated monsters the “algorithm” likes become mass-market toys that children like; and how real-life monsters the “algorithm” cares about become corruption issues the political system must confront.
Although these cases arrive at two very different destinations (a shelf of gas station tchotchkes on the one hand, and the US House of Representatives on the other) both testify to the processes by which the internet makes the real, which in turn remakes the internet.
With both Epstein and Tung Tung, there is no singular screen-crossing event, but a continued series of recrossings, back-and-forth over a permeable border. The structure formed by the linkage of the internet and real life is rhizomatic, drawn not by a linear chain of cause-and-effect but by a continuous oscillation between deterritorializating and reterritorializating processes — an idea I take from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Territorialization: something happens between people in a specific place and time, which is assigned particular meanings according to what it relates to — things like a narrative, a thesis, a price. Deterritorialization: the internet yanks that interaction out of its original moment and geography, throwing it up on a platform where it lives as a post. Reterritorialization: online, that interaction is situated by reference to a different set of coordinates, and assigned particular meanings according to what it relates to there — things like a view count, a comment section, an RPM.
The process continues. From out of that new territory, that “online world” where Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein both live, the interaction deterritorializes back into reality as a trend people watch, write about, and use as a point of reference for public debate in newspapers and dinner party conversations. It then crosses back online as people post about other people talking about the trend and monetize, riff, and ironize. This has never not been happening.
Take the following as an example. I present it as a linear, causal process for the sake of clarity, but in practice all of this is happening simultaneously:
In reality, Clavicular goes to the club.
On the internet, the stream of him going to the club exists as a monetized video on Kick.
In reality, somebody watching that stream sits down and clips it because it will make them money.
On the internet again, the clips of the stream of Clavicular at the club circulate,
In reality, people watch the clips knowing the clips are there because somebody else watched them first,
On the internet, people post jokes making fun of the clips and the culture involved with them,
In real life, Clavicular goes to the club again because the jokes, clips, and stream did so well.
etc. etc. ad infinitum until the end of the world.
At each point, we see a deterritorialization and a reterritorialization. The moment when Clav says to a girl by the pool “Are you okay? Looks like you’re byyourselfmaxxing…” starts as an interaction between two people in Florida, then turns into a segment in a stream, then turns into a parasocial moment between a viewer and their computer, then turns into a clip, then turns into a moment for someone scrolling and seeing the clip, then turns into a joke, then turns into a quote-post — each turn yanks the moment out of the territory it was sitting in and places it on a new map where it connects to new things, new people, and new forms of measurement.
The turns happen through processes intrinsic to both reality and online platforms. Many of these processes are economic. Algorithms and monetization work to recode events, people, and images into new contexts — they price what was not previously priced, making what was a casual interaction into a video that, as more and more people watch it, accrues money for its makers. The real world becomes a field to clip-farm in. But the more of the world’s territory that is clip-tilled, the more the place where clips get posted becomes the world itself, since the clips are the basis by which people evaluate, plan, and conduct real life business such as selling, thinking, and going to war with Iran.
Comparing Tung Tung and Epstein
In the sense that all phenomena on the internet are subject to this process, Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein are the same. But they also bear a more specific set of similarities since each meme functions as a kind of commentary on the process of screen-crossing itself.
Both Jeffrey Epstein and Tung Tung Tung Sahur are figures of “folk horror,”contemporary Slendermen living in a mostly AI-generated lore-world. Tung Tung Tung Sahur will hit you with his bat and Epstein will take you to his island. Each is also, for the most part, mute. Save for clips from his interview with Steve Bannon (which only went viral recently) most memes of Epstein have not featured him speaking. Like Tung Tung, he is typically narrated about, projected onto, and distributed virally. Both are pre-loaded into my TikTok as AR-animated characters that you can superimpose onto footage of real people and make them dance, fight, and kiss you — inspiring a trend where people ironically depicted Tung Tung Tung Sahur as an abusive boyfriend.
I am thinking here not of the Jeffrey Epstein that exists for CNN, nor of the Jeffrey Epstein that existed in early 2020s memes, but the brainrot Epstein that every fifth grader in America knows — a name inserted into viral algospeak the way “skibidi” and “gooning” are; the face of the AI-generated kitten birthed by the Donald Trump AI generated cat and fathered by the Elon Musk AI-generated cat.
The only other faces I saw more often on TikTok in 2025 were Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump, and possibly Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Epstein posthumously has a level of name recognition usually reserved for Presidents. A full accounting of Epstein’s posthumous meme fame would take a whole other post.
Here’s my sketch of the de/reterritorialization of Epstein:
In real life, a pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein commits horrible crimes and leverages the structure of neoliberal political-financial power to cover them up, before finally getting caught and dying under strange circumstances,
Online, users interpret his death and his life as a kind of conspiracy theory, spreading the meme that “Epstein didn’t kill himself,”
In real life, the idea of an Epstein conspiracy becomes a profitable and poignant node within broader narratives across culture, leading to pressure for continued investigations
Online, the continued release by investigators of emails, documents, and photographs pertaining to Epstein and his connections turns into a continued flow of content,
In real life, the idea of the Epstein story becomes larger than the man himself, encompassing a broader feeling about elite abuse, the impossibility of justice, and the impotence of regular people — an idea which, even more than the specifics of the case, the media and politicians are unwilling to articulate
Online, joking about Epstein becomes a shorthand for talking about the issues in #5, and a symbol of affiliation for those who feel alienated from the conventional narrators,
In real life, people who are thirteen years old and literally not fully sentient in 2019 when this all started, encounter and consider “Epstein” as a topic of conversation they cannot avoid. And a random Florida man is spotted while driving by people who think he looks like Jeffrey Epstein.
Online, Epstein brainrot content made by children proliferates within a broader lore of politically-sensitive characters including Netanyahu, Charlie Kirk, and Donald Trump because, as O.A. Carry writes for Wired, “name-dropping Epstein and Netanyahu results in the videos getting more traction.” The random Florida man who looks kind of like Epstein gains 750,000 followers.
Here’s my sketch of the de/reterritorialization of Tung Tung Tung Sahur:
In Indonesia, a drum is beaten during the season of Ramadan to wake people up for sahur, the pre-dawn meal. The drum makes a sound like “tung tung tung.”
Online, people use AI to create a character that corresponds to the sahur drum and it goes viral, and is posted according to a pre-existing format.
In real life, a trend called Italian Brainrot has been happening across platforms and discourse — Tung Tung Tung Sahur is wrapped into it, representing the terminally online, and reporters write about it.
Online, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is posted into new narrative formats alongside other Italian Brainrot characters — a meme posted with the awareness that it is one of a group of trendy memes popular in the present moment,
In real life, a content creator, Bie the Ska, dresses up in an elaborate Tung Tung Tung Sahur costume and re-enacts the skits in the narrative formats
Online, his videos join an ongoing trend in which Tung Tung Tung Sahur is a meme representing the place of memes and memeticity in the world in general,
In real life, a toy manufacturer in Dongguan, China decides to make a Tung Tung Tung Sahur toy
Perhaps the most significant similarity between Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Epstein is that, for very different reasons, each is indigestible to the offline world. I sometimes think of this as the Wolf Blitzer test: if you showed Wolf Blitzer this thing from the internet, would he get it? Brainrot Epstein is indigestible to Wolf because Epstein means too much, wrapped up in crime, conspiracy, and politics. Tung Tung Tung Sahur is indigestible because he means too little; he is arbitrary, random, and strangely uninscribed — in the same way 67 was.
In both cases, the memes are almost like an attack against the real world — a refusal to recognize its processes of territorialization as more final and more valid than those of the internet. Both are uncopyrightable and untalkable-about in the registers of traditional, unbiased reporting which, Axios-pilled, seeks to tell an audience “why this matters.” But yet, each of them ultimately grows in a symbiotic relationship with a real world that always does find a way to monetize, decontextualize, and deploy what happens online through its own circuits — it seems often like the real world is bending towards the online world, but the online world also bends towards the real.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the interlocked process of de/reterritorialization by a comparison to the symbiotic evolution of flowers and pollinators. Replace “orchid” with “online world” and “wasp” with “reality”:
The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome.
It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But… something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.
This entire book, A Thousand Plateaus, reads like an acid trip. But what made me think of this passage in particular is the reference to “mimicry” as an insufficient account of an image’s reproduction. The word “meme” was invented by Richard Dawkins because it shares a root with “mimicry,” and he was most interested in the idea of imitation as the engine of culture, which is a dumb idea. Today, the word “meme” still carries a connotation of unoriginality, copying, and derivativeness.
But the first modern use of the word “meme” (to refer to something on the internet) matches the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari understand cultural reproduction — as a mutual becoming-towards of the represented and representation. In 1994, Mike Godwin wrote the essay “Meme and Countermeme” for Wired, and described what people know today as “Godwin’s Law:” the maxim that “the longer a discussion on the internet goes on, the higher the likelihood that a comparison to Nazis gets made.” Godwin describes the invention of this maxim as a “countermeme” in response to the “meme” of people making Hitler comparisons on web forums. That people started following his lead in posting the maxim, in order to discourage these inappropriate Hitler comparisons, was evidence to him of an early kind of “memetic engineering.”
The meme in Godwin’s telling is an intervention to change a real community’s behavior. There is a becoming-real of the meme (in that Godwin’s Law changes the way the community talks) and a becoming-meme of the real (in that Godwin’s Law is, somehow, always proven correct online).
Deleuze and Guattari continue:
The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, but the world effects a reterritorialization of the book, which in turn deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). Mimicry is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe phenomena of an entirely different nature.
Replace “book” and “world” with “Epstein Files conspiracy theories” and “real-world response to Epstein .” Or, alternately, replace them with “Tung Tung Tung Sahur” and “the idea of brainrot.”
In the next installment: the material life of Tung Tung Tung Sahur and Brainrot Epstein, the place of capital in D&G and in all of this. Distracted Boyfriend, deep frying, and the layered image as index of screen-crossing. Irony as line of flight.
This is a worthy sequel to There Is No Antimemetics Division (2025)
Actually valuable piece of fundamental critique, thank u