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Reluctantly Monitoring the Situation—This Week on VICE: Members Only

Words you’re too old to use and bars that shouldn’t exist: an intervention for the terminally online.

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To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year gets you the full digital package plus 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door.

It is a source of great personal shame that I know who Clavicular is. I’m 36 years of age. I should be blissfully unaware of Clavicular. I should be phasing the last band T-shirts out of my daily wardrobe and panicking about my eggs. Unfortunately, I was raised to love being online, and the online world I was born into—a clandestine paradise free from advertising and the average adult—is now dead. In its place: a surveillance hellscape that constantly asks for my biodata, that I am forced to share with 16-year-olds tending to their investment portfolios and boomers getting misty-eyed over an AI-generated image of a dog fireman lifting a small Chinese girl out of a flood. 

As a result, instead of any useful or enriching information, my head is now full of tid-bits about streamers and influencers born after 9/11. For at least 20 minutes every evening I sit on my couch—one of the few things in life that I actually own outright—holding my phone over my face, watching a lad called Gymskin try to stop traffic with his aura. I don’t feel good about this and, if this scene is recognizable in any way, neither should you. 

Speaking of “aura”—is that a word you feel a little strange using? You say it because that’s what everyone says, don’t you, but should you? Maybe you’re pushing 30, or even 40, and throwing words like “aura” around is starting to feel like the verbal equivalent of wearing a studded belt to the bar. If you’re not sure, VICE has assembled a slang amnesty: a handy guide to which words you’re now officially—and this ought to come as a relief—too old to use.

For instance, here is the entry for “ate.”

“While it was cute to appropriate gay culture in your twenties, there’s a distinct desperation to hurling compliments at the drag brunch once you’ve got smile lines. The only thing you should be ‘eating’ these days is rice cakes. Your metabolism isn’t what it used to be.”

To find out if you’re too long in the tooth to be saying “ate”—or slay, chopped, delulu, and a whole load of others—read the full piece below.

Elsewhere on the Members Only area this week: VICE’s roving reporter Nick Dove bounced from partying with Nick Land, Grimes, and Curtis Yarvin in San Francisco to crashing the opening of “The Situation Room.”

I know what you’re thinking, but unfortunately it’s not a tanning salon run by former Jersey Shore star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino. That would have actually been quite good. No, The Situation Room is in fact a new concept bar in Washington D.C. conceived by Polymarket, the global crypto-based prediction market currently making headlines for paying out nearly $1 million to a customer who seemed to have inside knowledge of U.S. military action in Iran.

Why does a prediction market need its own fucking bar? Nick explains:

“‘Monitoring the situation’ has long been a term favored by politicians aiming to imply they’re doing something when usually they are not. More recently, it has evolved into a memetic, tongue-in-cheek catchphrase for terminally online political junkies who spend their free time surrounded by screens, observing and commentating on often-dismal real-world events for their own entertainment and occasional enrichment, as they respond to rolling TV news channels and flight trackers by placing bets and tweaking their investment portfolios.

“Polymarket, alongside its competitor Kalshi, has monetized this pastime, providing these enthusiasts with a platform to gamble not just on sports or elections, but disarmament negotiations, developments in war, disease outbreaks, and many other matters of life and death, pricing cynicism in real time.”

Addressing the queue outside the venue on its opening night, Neal Kumar, Polymarket’s chief legal officer said: “We view this as our ‘coming out’ party in D.C.—we’ve proven that the concept of prediction markets exist, we’ve proven that the concept is here to stay, and we want to be a part of the conversations here in D.C. Where better to have the conversation than in a bar?”

Oh, I don’t know, maybe X? A really boring Telegram channel? A stranger’s living room, hunched over a kitchen table at 5AM next to a laptop farting out a deep house mix? Anywhere that doesn’t serve alcohol—a substance widely known to make annoying cunts much, much worse—to people who say things like “I pledge allegiance to the bag” and what they’re referring to is their investment portfolio?

Read the full report below. 

Emma GarlandDeputy Editor, VICE

To get past the paywall, sign up for VICE membership. A Digital Only subscription is $2 a month (or $20 a year, if you prefer), while $70 a year gets you the full digital package plus 4 issues of VICE magazine, delivered straight to your door.

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