It is January 6, 2026. Three days ago, the US captured a head of state.

This should be the most serious news story of the decade. But if you look at your phone, you aren't seeing history. You're seeing a roast.

You're seeing deepfakes of Nicolás Maduro crying in a puddle of baby oil. You're seeing his propaganda cartoon, "Super Bigote," getting beat up by a Fortnite character. You are seeing a geopolitical earthquake filtered through a Snapchat lens.

Welcome to The Meme Coup.

In this episode, we break down the media theory behind the chaos. The US didn't just execute a regime change; they executed a Vibe Shift. We explore how they are using "Memetic Warfare" to strip a dictator of his dignity, turn a war into content, and distract the world with absurd spectacles like buying Greenland.

The Syllabus:

• The Death of the Real (Baudrillard): Why the AI deepfakes feel "truer" than the official news photos.

• Context Collapse (Danah Boyd): How linking Maduro to the Diddy memes turned a political prisoner into a tabloid joke.

• The Society of the Spectacle (Debord): Why the "Greenland Purchase" is the ultimate distraction.

The revolution will not be televised. It will be shitposted.

If you use AI to write an email, and I use AI to summarize it... did communication actually happen?

Or did two piles of code just perform a handshake while we both stared at a screen, hallucinating productivity?

In this episode, we argue that the Dead Internet Theory isn't just about bots on Twitter anymore. It has come for your inbox. We are witnessing the industrialization of communication, where human interaction is replaced by a "Zero-Human Feedback Loop."

We break down the sociology of 2026 using three critical frameworks:

1. Goodhart’s Law & The Zombie Loop: How optimizing for "responsiveness" turned us into biological API keys for our own tools.

2. The Hyperreal (Jean Baudrillard): Why AI-generated empathy feels so repulsive. We explore the "Uncanny Valley of Vulnerability" and why we are starting to crave friction over flow.

3. Costly Signaling Theory: Why the elite are going back to analog. In a world of infinite digital content, "face-to-face" is the new luxury good.

The glitch isn't the problem. Believing the glitch is meaning is.

While the internet was busy arguing about domestic politics, the US Navy just went back to the 17th Century. On December 16, 2025, the White House designated the Venezuelan government a "Foreign Terrorist Organization" (FTO).

That designation wasn’t a diplomatic move. It was a heist.

In this episode, we break down the seizure of the Bella 1 oil tanker and the new "No Entry" zone in the Caribbean. We explain the "magic trick" of international law: once a government is labeled a cartel, their national resources aren't "sovereign property"—they are "terrorist financing." And that means we can legally steal them.

This isn't just about oil; it’s a masterclass in modern imperialism. We analyze the strategy through three critical frameworks:

1. Necropolitics (Achille Mbembe): The blockade isn't a military tactic; it’s a biological one. We look at how the US is weaponizing the survival of the Venezuelan population to force a surrender, effectively creating a "death world" where the population’s status is reduced to the living dead.

2. The Großraum (Carl Schmitt): The era of the Global Free Market is over. We are returning to "Great Spaces." We explain Schmitt’s theory of the Großraum—a closed sphere of influence where the dominant power (the US) has the right to evict "spatial strangers" (China) and rewrite the laws of the sea.

3. Accumulation by Dispossession (David Harvey): Why is the US acting like a pirate? Because capitalism has run out of new markets. Harvey’s theory explains that when growth stalls, the system shifts to cannibalism. We aren't trading anymore; we are looting.

If you have oil and you aren't our friend, you aren't a country anymore. You're a crime scene.