This week's deep dive into young people culture answers questions you may not have thought to ask, like, "Why are young people throwing fruit in their toilets?" "What does it mean when someone tells me to 'visualize spinning apples'?" "What is glass skin?" and "How can Minecraft help you understand the age of the universe?"
Why are young people throwing fruit in the toilet?
This is a weird one, but young people are throwing fruit in the toilet in honor of the rapper Lucki. Backstory: The Atlanta rapper best known for his track "New Drank" was attending ComplexCon in Los Angeles on Oct. 3 when an entourage vs. entourage tussle with rapper Playboi Carti's crew broke out and Lucki was stabbed.
In response, the hashtag #throwfruitinthetoiletforlucki appeared on Instagram and TikTok, and kids started throwing fruit in the toilet and posting videos like this one:
and this one:
So that's what's happening; why it's happening is a little harder to explain. People posted screenshots indicating the lyrics to Lucki's "Y Not" include the line "When I get stabbed at ComplexCon, throw fruits in the toilet"—but the song doesn't actually include those lyrics and it's hard to imagine many fans bought into it. Some suggested that the trend is a dig at Lucki's lifestyle and weight: a not-subtle suggestion he eat more fruit. Maybe, but I think it's a classic online non sequitur. I don't think anyone is legitimately trying to honor Lucki by posting these videos. It seems like jokers trying to get fans of the rapper to throw fruit in their toilets so they can say, "Look at those weirdos! We tricked 'em into throwing fruit in their toilets!" But it doesn't seem to be working. All the fruit-throwers I've seen seem like they're "in on the joke," which actually reverses the joke. Anyway, Lucki is doing well and expected to make a full recovery.
What does "imagine spinning apples" mean?
The second fruit-related meme trending this week is "imagine spinning apples," a way to insult pretentious dinks online. It's a journey to explain how it came to mean that, so here goes.
Aphantasia is the inability to visualize things. If you can't imagine apples, you may have aphantasia. The idea that some people can imagine apples and some can't is big on 4Chan, Reddit, and other online communities populated by young people who would like to claim superiority over others, but can't do it based on money, attractiveness, or any other traditional measure of preeminence. Despite the actual neuroscience showing a correlation between aphantasia and a slightly higher IQ, these online weirdos decided that having aphantasia means you are dumb, or lack an inner life. Some took it even further and suggested that intelligence can be measured by the number of apples one can visualize and whether you can visualize them spinning.
So memes like this:
and posts like this:
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started showing up as a way of clowning on people who boast about how smart they are using a metric that actually makes them look dumber. It's like bragging about the results of an online IQ test or joining Mensa.
What is "glass skin"?
Glass skin is a beauty trend taking over TikTok. It's based on Korean skin care trends and refers to skin so smooth, luminous, and clear, it seems to shine. How one can achieve this look is debatable, but there is no shortage of videos giving instructions and hawking creams and tinctures that promise to make your skin shiny as glass. Like this one:
I'm in favor of people looking as greasy as they want, but viral "glass skin" videos are not giving good advice—a recent study found that almost 95% of viral Korean skincare and “glass skin” TikToks are misleading, and many can even be dangerous.
What is the "door kick challenge" (and does it exist)?
Reports about the new "door kick challenge" are coming from all corners of the nation, from Portland to Phoenix to West Virginia to California this week.
Here's how West Virginia's Taylor County Sheriff's Office Deputy Sheriff Chris MacQueen describes the door kick challenge: "There is a new trend out that’s either referred to the 'door kick challenge' or 'donkey kick challenge' and what that essentially is, is teenagers late at night are donkey kicking doors and then recording their reactions as they run off. This is absolutely not ding dong ditch."
There's so much wrong with this statement. First, the "door kick challenge" isn't new. Here's a report from 2021 about the supposed challenge. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of similar news stories have been published regularly since, all across the country, a steady drumbeat of warning about this dangerous trend. But it doesn't seem to be real.
I've looked through TikTok's doorkickchallenge hashtag and similar places on other video platforms, and I can't find any evidence of any young people "recording their reaction" to kicking a stranger's door or mentioning the challenge in a "you should try this too" kind of way. There are plenty of videos of people kicking doors, but they're all shot from doorbell or security cameras, presumably posted by homeowners, and we have no idea who is doing the kicking or why. They could be stalkers, robbers, or angry because they left their keys on the coffee table. So there is no discernible trend or challenge, beyond the trend of more people having doorbell cameras.
The cop's last point, that "this is not ding dong ditch," is debatable. Ding dong ditch dates back to the early 1800s, and I can't find any evidence that the game has changed since then, or that more kids are kicking doors instead of ringing doorbells. No one keeps stats on it, but it seems reasonable to assume that kids today do dumb things as often as you and your friends did dumb things. That's where the safe money always is.
If police departments want to warn the public about a truly deadly trend, they could look at the number of adults who shoot teenagers on their porches. Then they could hold a press conference warning about the "murdering children for ringing your doorbell" challenge.
Viral video of the week: "Running Minecraft Until It Beats Itself"
Looking at the volume of AI-generated brainrot that floods video-sharing platforms makes it easy to conclude that young people are not able to visualize apples spinning. But the counter evidence is out there, too. Like this week's viral video: "Running Minecraft Until It Beats Itself." It's a video about a kids' video game, but on a deeper level it's a video about deep time, evolution, the second law of thermodynamics, and more.
This video runs a simulation of a Minecraft world to prove that if you have the right starting seed and leave Minecraft running long enough with no input, the winning condition (the dragon being slain) would happen even if there was no player, by chance. You'd have to run your PC for a billion years instead of playing Minecraft for 100 hours, but it would happen.
The idea that anything that could happen will happen if enough time passes isn't new, but it's hard to grasp the concept of time scales so vast. This video uses a relatively simple model (that viewers understand intimately) to make the billions of years imaginable.
I have no doubt that the seven million people who have viewed this video (and played Minecraft enough to understand the implications) grasp the concept of a billion years better than the people who haven't: A billion years is about how long it would take for an Enderman to randomly drop a carved pumpkin on two snow blocks and for the resulting snow golem to lead a creeper to blow up next to the walls around the end portal so Endermen could randomly carry enough blocks from the Overworld to The End to make piles high enough that randomly moving snow golems would throw enough snowballs to destroy all seven crystals that protect the Ender Dragon.