AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her “lame excuse of a husband,” Kanye West. (Kardashian and West are, in reality, divorced.) She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don’t stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can’t afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. She’s being kind of rude.

But she can also be very sweet. She gives a vanilla pep talk: “If you are having a bad day, just know that you are loved. Don’t give up!” And she just loves the outfit you’re wearing to her concert.

She is also a fan creation. Based on tutorials posted to TikTok, many Swifities are using a program to create hyper-realistic sound bites using Swift’s voice and then circulating them on social media. The tool, the beta of which was launched in late January by ElevenLabs, offers “Instant Voice Cloning.” In effect, it allows you to upload an audio sample of a person’s voice and make it say whatever you want. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. The audio has some tonal hitches here and there, but it tends to sound pretty natural—close enough to fool you if you aren’t paying enough attention. Dark corners of the internet immediately used it to make celebrities say abusive or racist things; ElevenLabs said in response that it “can trace back any generated audio to the user” and would consider adding more guardrails—such as manually verifying every submission.

Whether it’s done this is unclear. After I forked over $1 to try the technology myself—a discounted rate for the first month—my upload was approved nearly instantly. The slowest part of the process was finding a clear one-minute audio clip of Swift to use as a source for my custom AI voice. Once that was approved, I was able to use it to create fake audio right away. The entire process took less than five minutes. ElevenLabs declined to comment about its policies or the ability to use its technology to fake Taylor Swift’s voice, but it provided a link to its guidelines about voice cloning. The company told The New York Times earlier this month that it wants to create a “universal detection system” in collaboration with other AI developers.

The arrival of AI Taylor Swift feels like a teaser for what’s to come in a strange new era defined by synthetic media, when the boundaries between real and fake might blur into meaninglessness. For years, experts have warned that AI would lead us to a future of infinite misinformation. Now that world is here. But in spite of apocalyptic expectations, the Swift fandom is doing just fine (for now). AI Taylor shows us how human culture can evolve alongside more and more complex technology. Swifties, for the most part, don’t seem to be using the tool maliciously: They’re using it for play and to make jokes among themselves. Giving fans this tool is “like giving them a new kind of pencil or a paintbrush,” explains Andrea Acosta, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA who studies K-pop and its fandom. They are exploring creative uses of the technology, and when someone seems to go too far, others in the community aren’t afraid to say so.  

[Read: Welcome to the big blur]

In some ways, fans might be uniquely well prepared for the fabricated future: They have been having conversations about the ethics of using real people in fan fiction for years. And although every fandom is different, researchers say these communities tend to have their own norms and be somewhat self-regulating. They can be some of the internet’s most diligent investigators. K-pop fans, Acosta told me, are so good at parsing what’s real and what’s fake that sometimes they manage to stop misinformation about their favorite artist from circulating. BTS fans, for example, have been known to call out factual inaccuracies in published articles on Twitter.  

The possibilities for fans hint at a lighter side of audio and video produced by generative AI. “There [are] a lot of fears—and a lot of them are very justified—about deepfakes and the way that AI is going to kind of play with our perceptions of what reality is,” Paul Booth, a professor at DePaul University who has studied fandoms and technology for two decades, told me. “These fans are kind of illustrating different elements of that, which is the playfulness of technology and the way that it can always be used in the kind of fun and maybe more engaging ways.”

But AI Taylor Swift’s viral spread on TikTok adds a wrinkle to these dynamics. It’s one thing to debate the ethics of so-called real-person fiction among fans in a siloed corner of the internet, but on such a large and algorithmically engineered platform, the content can instantly reach a huge audience. The Swifties playing with this technology share a knowledge base, but other viewers may not. “They know what she has said and what she hasn’t said, right? They’re almost immediately able to clock, Okay, this is an AI; she never said that,” Lesley Willard, the program director for the Center for Entertainment and Media Industries at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “It’s when they leave that space that it becomes more concerning.”

Swifties on TikTok are already establishing norms regarding the voice AI, based at least in part on how Swift herself might feel about it. “If a bunch of people start saying, ‘Maybe this isn’t a good idea. It could be negatively affecting her,’” one 17-year-old TikTok Swiftie named Riley told me, “most people really just take that to heart.” Maggie Rossman, a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the Swift fandom, thinks that if Taylor were to come out against specific sound bites or certain uses of the AI voice, then “we’d see it shut down amongst a good part of the fandom.”

But this is challenging territory for artists. They don’t necessarily want to squash their fans’ creativity and the sense of community it builds—fan culture is good for business. In the new world, they’ll have to navigate the tension between allowing some remixing while maintaining ownership of their voice and reputation.

A representative for Swift did not respond to a request for comment on how she and her team are thinking about this technology, but fans are convinced that she’s listening. After her official TikTok account “liked” one video using the AI voice, a commenter exclaimed, “SHES HEARD THE AUDIO,” following up with three crying emoji.

TikTok, for its part, just released new community guidelines for synthetic media. “We welcome the creativity that new artificial intelligence (AI) and other digital technologies may unlock,” the guidelines say. “However, AI can make it more difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction, carrying both societal and individual risks.” The platform does not allow AI re-creations of private people, but gives “more latitude” for public figures—so long as the media is identified as being AI-generated and adheres to the company’s other content policies, including those about misinformation.

But boundary-pushing Swift fans can probably cause only so much harm. They might destroy Ticketmaster, sure, but they’re unlikely to bring about AI armageddon. Booth thinks about all of this in terms of “degrees of worry.”

“My worry for fandom is, like, Oh, people are going to be confused and upset, and it may cause stress,” he said. “My worry with [an AI fabrication of President Joe] Biden is, like, It might cause a nuclear apocalypse.”

Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.

Influencers in the Wild has been turned into a board game with the tagline “Go places. Gain followers. Get famous. (no talent required)” And you get it because social-media influencers have always been, to some degree, a cultural joke. They get paid to post photos of themselves and to share their lives, which is something most of us do for free. It’s not real work.

But it is, actually. Influencers and other content creators are vital assets for social-media companies such as Instagram, which has courted them with juicy cuts of ad revenue in a bid to stay relevant, and TikTok, which flew some of its most famous creators out to D.C. last week to lobby for its very existence. In some ways, their work makes them the peers of those in the broader platform-based gig economy, which includes anybody else whose income is dependent on an app—Uber drivers, DoorDash bikers, TaskRabbit handymen, etc. But though some categories of workers whose jobs are similarly reliant on apps have been able, to an extent, to get around their lack of official employee status and put direct pressure on tech companies to improve their working conditions, content creators so far have not. (Of course, the work is very different: Deliveries and car rides happen in physical space, with the attendant occupational hazards, and influencers have a lot more individual control over how they monetize themselves across platforms.)

Instead, online creators are facing a kind of existential crisis. They have never been more valuable to their home platforms, yet they’re still struggling to turn that value into meaningful leverage. For years now, the wide middle range of creators—the people who can make some money on social media, even if they have not attained superstardom—have complained about product changes, opaque algorithms with shifting priorities, and arbitrary content-moderation decisions that limit their reach. Will the relationship between influencers and the internet ever change?

Some in the industry are determined to prove that it could. They’re trying, not for the first time, to organize an incredibly diffuse group of individual personalities. And the attempt is, also not for the first time, going up against stark odds. This industry is all about the establishment and marketing of personal brands in unforgiving feeds—it would seem to forbid worker solidarity. But it is also at a crucial turning point. After more than 10 years of instability, clout-chasing, and competition, something has to give. As a creator, your market value is set by your metrics—but there could be greater strength in a different kind of number.

[Read: The internet, but for hot people]

Some influencers even think they should unionize. TikTok creators started discussing the possibility last fall, and Emily Hund, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the online creator economy since its beginning, explicitly advocates for unionization in her new book, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.

Creators must “recognize themselves as the cultural laborers they are and organize accordingly,” Hund writes. She contextualizes the rise of influencers and the beginning of the social-media age in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, the cratering of traditional media, and the beginnings of the platform-based gig economy. As certain kinds of stable and reliable work disappeared for many, making money on social media became a viable alternative. “The influencer industry is both a symptom of and a response to the economic precarity and upheaval in social institutions that have characterized the early twenty-first century,” she writes.

To describe the type of work that influencers do, she draws on a range of academic papers that have proposed similar concepts such as “aspirational labor” and “visibility labor.” “Risk is shouldered by the individual,” she writes, “self-promotional, always-on work styles are the norm; labor is oriented toward nebulous future payouts; and inequalities of gender, race, and class persist.” The work is hyper-personal and amorphous, which makes it an awkward fit with the ranking and quantification that take place on a huge platform like Instagram or YouTube.

With these issues in mind, a TikTok creator who goes by JeGaysus is currently part of the effort to organize a TikTok union around pay and transparency issues. (He asked to be identified by his username because he’s previously received online threats.) So far, the group has about 400 interested people in an active Discord chat. “It’s kind of hard to say what revenue creators should have because it’s a closed book,” he told me. He said creators are frustrated because they have no recourse—they can’t call TikTok when they have a problem. “They have that email, legal@tiktok.com,” he said, “ but you can write to it and you’re never going to hear from them.” (TikTok did not return a request for comment, and hasn’t previously addressed the possibility of a union directly. “We look to our creator community for valuable feedback and continue to listen as we work to evolve our offerings to better serve their needs,” a spokesperson told Business Insider when asked about the would-be union last year.)

Although this would-be union is focused on the relationship between creators and the platform, influencers have also been incorporated into Hollywood’s Screen Actors Guild. Some creators have been hesitant to join, wary of things like union dues and eligibility requirements, but others have been enthusiastic. Anybody who makes videos for brands can use the guild’s “influencer agreement” to put their deals under the purview of the union. “Not a single day goes by, Monday through Friday, in which I’m not speaking to an influencer who isn’t yet a SAG-AFTRA member about covering their brand deals through our Influencer Agreement,” Shaine Griffin, the guild’s manager of contract strategic initiatives, told me. (SAG-AFTRA declined to say how many influencers had joined the union; Giselle Ugarte, a TikTok creator and talent manager, told me that she didn’t know anyone who had.)

In the past, when posters have flirted with unionization, it hasn’t been very successful or even particularly literal. In 2019, Instagram-meme creators received press attention for forming a sort of union, which they called “IG Meme Union Local 69-420.” Their Instagram account posted union flyers (a raised fist gripping a smartphone) playing off of retro aesthetics and adding modern messages such as “Smash the algorithm.” (One riffed on the then-popular “I’m baby” meme with the phrase “Alone we am baby but together we am united.”) The short-lived “union” wasn’t really a union, though—it was more like a club or a thought experiment. It was mostly interested in getting people’s deleted posts or accounts reinstated by the platform, and its goals didn’t have anything to do with pay.

A more serious previous effort, the Internet Creators Guild, was started by the popular YouTuber Hank Green in 2016, primarily with the intention of helping creators protect themselves in the “cut-throat” world of brand deals and confusing contract language. Green’s group met with YouTube to discuss its ever-changing monetization policies, but Satchell Drakes, a YouTuber and former member of the guild’s board, told me that nothing really came out of the relationship. (“The free catering was always good though,” he joked.) The Guild shut down after three years, citing a lack of interest particularly among the already successful. “Creators with big audiences often don’t feel the need for support from a collective voice,” a farewell letter noted.

[Read: The GIF is on its deathbed ]

In this way, not much has changed in the past few years. It’s still the case that the biggest influencers have nothing much to gain from joining forces with those below them. They have their own agents, managers, entertainment lawyers, and leverage. “They are small businesses on their own and they don’t need help from others,” Jon Pfeiffer, a Los Angeles–based lawyer who represents online creators, told me. “It’s only if you’re starting out or you’re a micro-influencer that you want to band together for strength in numbers.” He started representing influencers in 2015—mostly taking on clients in the 1-to-5-million-follower range—and said “not one client” has ever asked him about an industry association or other groups they could join.

In short, the recent history of influencer coordination has not been a series of victories. Even so, these efforts are emblematic of something: Influencers tend to care and complain about the same issues, and have for years. They’ve started to make modest progress with the public. Popular understanding of concepts like the “attention economy” have given them and their followers some language to express how performance translates into value for platforms. And they are beginning to test boundaries by experimenting, for example, with strikes of a sort.

In the summer of 2021, Black content creators on TikTok organized a protest against the pattern of white creators profiting off of dances choreographed by Black performers. They agreed to announce publicly that they would not be coming up with a new viral dance to go with the latest Megan Thee Stallion single. But as the New York Times story about the strike noted, as the industry is currently set up, if a creator doesn’t post new content for a day or a week, TikTok isn’t the party that’s going to be hurt by it. Only the individuals who give up views and their spot in the mysterious algorithmic ranking would be making a sacrifice. “That was obviously the most successful ‘strike’ in the space so far because they were able to gain a lot of visibility,” Hund told me. “But many individuals had very valid reasons for not participating and I think before there can be a more meaningful strike, there has to be more meaningful solidarity building amongst the influencers.”

When I spoke with JeGaysus about this, he said he wasn’t sure if a true TikTok strike would ever be possible. Even if his proposed union were able to persuade 10,000 creators to not post for some amount of time, the platform wouldn’t feel much of anything. “As soon as those 10,000 accounts step away for a week, there’s another 40,000 accounts making videos,” he said. “Even if you had Charli D’Amelio, there’s 5,000 other 18-year-old girls who are going to be doing a dance trend.”

What content makers require is a cultural shift, Drakes, the YouTuber, argues. This has already started—platform ad-revenue sharing is now a norm, while at one point the idea of creators being paid directly by social-media platforms was seen as ridiculous. But he’s still waiting for a crucial last step: for creators to be seen as workers and for them to see one another that way. That has to happen before the average person will identify content creation as work. “I think it’s really easy to draw an analogue between a cab driver and an Uber driver,” he said. “It’s a little bit harder for people to conceptualize their friend making YouTube videos as the same thing as a late-night-show host—and in many ways it’s not, but the protections should be similar.”

This type of labor may be looked down upon simply because everyone who uses these platforms is subject to the same flood of data. Maybe you’ve fretted over the number of likes you’ve received on an Instagram post; a professional influencer might do the same thing, though their concern comes from a different place. You’re being vain; they’re worrying about their livelihood. “People still roll their eyes at the influencer, creator economy,” Ugarte, the TikTok-talent manager, told me. But maybe that’s just a phase.

The most important election of 2023 may also offer crucial insights into the most important election of 2024.

Next Tuesday’s vote for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been justifiably described as the most consequential election in the nation this year, because it will determine whether liberals or conservatives control a majority of the body. The election’s outcome will likely decide whether abortion in the state is completely banned and whether the severely gerrymandered state legislative maps that have locked in overwhelming Republican majorities since 2011 are allowed to remain in place.

But the contest between the liberal Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge Janet Protasiewicz and the conservative former state-supreme-court justice Dan Kelly has also become a revealing test of the electoral strength of the most powerful wedge issues that each party is likely to stress in next year’s presidential race.

Protasiewicz and her allies have centered her campaign on portraying Kelly as a threat to legal abortion and an accomplice in Donald Trump’s schemes to undermine democracy—the same issues that helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in last November’s elections. Kelly and his allies have centered his campaign on presenting Protasiewicz as soft on crime, the same accusation that Republicans stressed in many of their winning campaigns last year.

With the choice framed so starkly, in a state that has been so evenly balanced between the parties, Tuesday’s result will measure which of those arguments remains more potent, particularly among the suburban voters who loom as the critical swing bloc in 2024’s presidential contest.

If Kelly wins, after being significantly outspent on television, it would underscore how much risk Democrats face from rising public anxiety about crime. But a Protasiewicz win, which most political observers in Wisconsin expect, would suggest that support for legalized abortion has accelerated the recoil from the Trump-era GOP that is already evident among college-educated suburban voters. And such a shift could restore a narrow but decisive advantage for Democrats in a state at the absolute tipping point of presidential elections.

“The margins are still very narrow, and of course the economy and other issues will come into play next year, but if it simply becomes a test between abortion and crime, I would say yes, [abortion] is more powerful by a slight, slight margin,” says Paul Maslin, a Democratic pollster who has worked in Wisconsin for decades.

[Read: How working-class white voters became the GOP’s foundation]

Like the state itself, the Wisconsin Supreme Court is closely divided. Conservatives now hold a 4–3 majority (though Brian Hagedorn, one of the four conservative justices, has voted with the liberals on some key cases, particularly four rulings denying Trump’s effort to overturn the state’s 2020 election results). The retirement of a conservative justice has provided Democrats this opportunity to secure a 4–3 liberal majority.

Though Tuesday’s election is technically nonpartisan, the race has become a brawl between the two parties. The state GOP is mounting an extensive get-out-the-vote campaign for Kelly, who was appointed to the state supreme court by Republican then-Governor Scott Walker to fill an unexpired term in 2016 before losing his bid for a full term in 2020. State Democrats, meanwhile, have raised and transferred millions of dollars into the campaign for Protasiewicz, who served as an assistant county district attorney before winning election as a county-circuit-court judge . The tension between the race’s openly partisan character and traditional notions of judicial neutrality and nonpartisanship has itself become a central point of contention in the campaign.

Protasiewicz has pushed the envelope for a judicial candidate by offering voters explicit declarations of her views. She has unequivocally affirmed her support for legal abortion, described the gerrymandered state legislative maps as “rigged,” and declared that the signature legislation Walker passed to eviscerate the power of the state’s public-sector unions is unconstitutional. But in the next breath she insists that those views—which she calls her “values”—will not affect her decisions on the bench.

The juxtaposition of those two assertions can be head-spinning. At a forum this week on the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee campus, Protasiewicz declared, “I’ve been very clear with everybody that I think women should have a right to choose. Obviously, I can’t comment about what I would do on any case. That robe goes on; my personal opinions go out the door.”

After her appearance, I asked Protasiewicz why her “values” should matter to voters if they are irrelevant once she dons her judicial robe. “I truly believe that people have an absolute right to know what a candidate’s personal thoughts and personal values are,” she answered. Even if, I asked, they are irrelevant to your decisions? “I put them aside,” she said.

Kelly and other Republicans have argued that Protasiewicz’s candid expression of her “values” renders her too partisan for a judicial position. (At the Milwaukee forum, the conservative state-supreme-court justice Rebecca Bradley, appearing for Kelly, maintained that Protasiewicz would be forced to recuse herself from cases involving abortion, redistricting, and other issues because she has expressed such clear positions on them—a view that other legal experts reject.) But Kelly is, to say the least, an imperfect messenger for the argument that anyone else is too biased. He has been far more involved than Protasiewicz in direct partisan activities: Kelly has served as a paid legal adviser to the state’s leading anti-abortion group as well as to the state Republican Party.

Andrew Hitt, the former state GOP chairman, testified to the congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection that he had “pretty extensive conversations” with Kelly and another lawyer about the fake-electors scheme that Trump supporters developed after the 2020 election in order to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Kelly says his involvement was limited to a single 30-minute conversation in which he explained he was not “in the loop” on the plans. But at the sole debate between the candidates earlier this month, Protasiewicz described Kelly as “a true threat to our democracy.”

In the past, local observers say, Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have more narrowly centered on debates about crime and criminal justice (even though the court isn’t directly involved in handing down sentences). “Law-and-order candidates have traditionally done very well,” Mark Jefferson, the executive director of the state Republican Party, told me.

[Read: The four quadrants of American politics]

Kelly is running in that tradition. Ads from his campaign’s final days are focused almost exclusively on lashing Protasiewicz over rulings she made to sentence a rapist and other violent offenders to limited or no jail time. So many sheriffs are appearing in Kelly ads that it’s reasonable to wonder who is still patrolling the state’s highways this week.

Protasiewicz has responded with ads defending her record on crime, and also jabbing Kelly over his work as a criminal-defense attorney. But mostly her advertising has insisted that Kelly would uphold the 1849 state abortion ban that snapped back into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court last year overturned Roe v. Wade. (Both sides agree that the state supreme court will eventually need to decide whether to sustain or strike down that law, which prohibits abortions in almost all cases, and is now being challenged in a lower state court.) Protasiewicz and the groups supporting her are heavily stressing abortion in their ads and have aired nearly four times as many ads across all subjects as Kelly and his backers, according to AdImpact, a group that tracks ad purchases. (That disparity exists largely because Democrats have raised enough money to allow her to buy the ads directly through her campaign, which receives lower rates, while Kelly’s relying mostly on outside groups that must pay higher rates.)

That huge tactical advantage for her is one reason some observers are cautious about drawing too many conclusions from next week’s outcome. Conversely, Trump’s indictment yesterday might inspire enough Republican turnout to lift Kelly, especially because far fewer people vote in these off-year contests than on a typical November Election Day.

Yet a Protasiewicz win could put an exclamation point on a subtle but discernible shift in the state’s political direction.

Though close elections are usually the rule in Wisconsin, early in this century it often leaned Democratic. The state was part of what I termed the “blue wall”: the 18 states that voted for Democratic presidential candidates in all six elections from 1992 through 2012. (Democrats actually started their Wisconsin presidential winning streak in 1988.) Democrats also controlled both U.S. Senate seats throughout most of that same period, and the governorship for two terms after 2002.

But the tide began to shift around 2010, with the election of Republican Governor Walker and a GOP sweep of the state legislature. In 2016, two years after Walker won reelection, Trump dislodged Wisconsin from the blue wall, carrying it by 22,748 votes. Like Trump’s 2016 victories in Pennsylvania and Michigan, which had also been part of the “blue wall,” the former president’s Wisconsin breakthrough symbolized his success at forging a winning coalition that revolved around massive margins among non-college-educated and non-urban white voters.

Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette Law School poll in the state, says Wisconsin today remains divided almost evenly between the parties: 45 percent of voters identify as Republicans, 44 percent as Democrats, and the rest are unaffiliated. Yet since Trump’s initial victory, Democrats have won most of the state’s key contests. The Democrat Tony Evers beat Walker for governor by about 30,000 votes in 2018 and won reelection by triple that amount last year. In 2018, Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin won a landslide reelection. Democrats also won big in state-supreme-court elections in 2018 and 2020. Biden carried the state by about 21,000 votes in 2020. The major Republican victories over this period have been narrow ones: Hagedorn’s 6,000-vote 2019 win for the state supreme court and the roughly 27,000-vote win last November by GOP Senator Ron Johnson over the Democrat Mandela Barnes.

Those results suggest that Democrats have come out slightly ahead from the demographic and geographic re-sorting of the electorate that Trump accelerated here. As in states across the country, Republicans have grown stronger in heavily blue-collar and white rural areas, primarily across Wisconsin’s northern and western counties where Democrats once competed effectively. But Democrats have been boosted by offsetting gains in the state’s most populous cities and towns, many of them relatively more racially diverse or better educated. (About 90 percent of Wisconsin voters are white.)

Craig Gilbert, a fellow with Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education, calculated that from the 2018–22 governor races, Evers improved his performance in all 30 communities that cast the most votes except for Kenosha (where he was hurt by a backlash against the 2020 riots over the police shooting of a Black man in the city). The places where Republicans are winning “simply aren’t growing,” while Democrats are generally improving in the places that are adding population, Devin Remiker, the executive director of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, told me. “It’s getting harder and harder for them to keep up with that trend.”

Democrats have benefited from improved showings mostly in two areas. One is the so-called WOW suburban counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington) around Milwaukee. Though the GOP still comfortably wins all three, Democrats have noticeably narrowed its margins. As Gilbert calculated, in Waukesha, which he described as “the most important Republican county in Wisconsin,” 21 communities have shifted at least 20 points toward the Democrats in gubernatorial races since 2014.

Even more significant has been the explosive Democratic gains in Dane County, the highly educated hub for biotech, insurance, and government jobs centered on the city of Madison, home to both the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin and the state capital. The Democratic share of the vote in Dane County has increased from about 70 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to 75 percent for Biden in 2020 to 79 percent for Evers in 2022; Dane actually provided Evers a larger net vote margin than Milwaukee County did, something that would have been almost unimaginable even a decade ago. Franklin says Dane has become a triple threat for Democrats: “It is growing fast, the turnout keeps rising, and the lopsided partisan margins keep growing.”

The flip side of the Democrats’ improving performance in Dane and the Milwaukee suburbs is rising concern in the party about lackluster turnout among Black voters, especially in Milwaukee. Some local leaders fear that a political competition between the parties focusing more on social issues such as abortion simply doesn’t engage enough lower-income Black voters, who are focused more on material needs such as jobs and health care. “If people feel like their issues are not going to be reflected, they are going to sit out,” Angela Lang, the executive director of the group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, told me.

Lagging Milwaukee turnout next week would be another signal that Democrats, as in 2020, continue to face challenges not only with non-college-educated whites, but also with blue-collar voters of color. But if abortion rights, in effect, trump crime and allow Protasiewicz to extend the Democrats’ gains in white-collar suburbs, that could signal trouble for anti-abortion Republican presidential candidates in 2024—not only in Wisconsin but in the suburbs of any swing state. The Democrats’ rural and inner-city troubles in Wisconsin, which still might allow Kelly to eke out an upset win, testify to the fragility of a modern Democratic coalition bonded less by economic interests than by cultural values. But a Protasiewicz win, in a state that Republicans probably must recapture to regain the White House in 2024, would demonstrate again that there’s formidable power in that new coalition too.

On Tuesday, two men at a museum in the Netherlands lifted a black sheet off a table to reveal a cantaloupe-size globe of overcooked meat perspiring under a bell jar. This was no ordinary spaghetti topper: It was a woolly-mammoth meatball, created by an Australian lab-grown-meat company called Vow.

The meatball, made using real mammoth DNA, supposedly smelled like cooked crocodile meat, and in press photos, it looked oddly furry, like it had been coughed up by a cat or rolled around by a dung beetle. Still, meat from a long-extinct behemoth that lived during the Ice Age—how could I not want to try it? Although some on Twitter were clearly grossed out, many others were also intrigued. “Bet it tastes better than Ikeas,” one user wrote.

Disappointingly, the meatball was not made for consumption. Because it contains proteins that haven’t been eaten in thousands of years, the scientists who made it aren’t sure it would be safe. It was a marketing ploy cooked up by a creative agency that worked with Vow. I eventually realized that I wanted the meatball for the same reasons I wanted the Doritos Locos Taco, KFC’s Double Down Sandwich, and Van Leeuwen’s ranch-flavored ice cream: sheer, dumb novelty. This was Stunt Marketing 101 applied to the future of food, and I was the sucker falling for it.

Food marketers have made an art of using stunt foods to draw attention to brands and court new audiences. Starbucks’s unhinged Unicorn Frappuccino begged to be Instagrammed; Buffalo Wild Wings chicken coated with Mountain Dew–infused sauce pandered to anyone who has ever experienced the late-night munchies. Typically unexpected, funny, or edgy, stunt foods are “pure marketing,” Mark Lang, a marketing professor at the University of Tampa, told me. They work because they’re bonkers enough to break through the noise of social media and get people talking, he said. But so far, they have caught our attention by twisting familiar items. Lab-grown meat, and all the permutations of protein it makes possible, is pushing us into a new era of stunt marketing, one involving foods people may have never tried.

George Pappou, Vow’s CEO and founder, told me that the meatball was meant to “start a conversation about the food that we’re going to eat tomorrow being different from the food that we eat today.” Although the stunt drew attention to Vow—I am writing this, and you are reading this, after all—the company doesn’t have any products on the market yet, only plans to introduce lab-made Japanese quail to diners in Singapore later this year. So what did it accomplish, exactly? “I don’t think of this one so much as a stunt as a demonstration,” Lang said. “It’s an exaggeration of the physical capabilities of new science.”

Because lab-grown meat is still meat, just without animal husbandry and slaughter, it’s often held up as the future of sustainable, ethical carnivory. Beef or chicken made in this way probably won’t be widely available at your grocery store anytime soon, but according to an estimate by McKinsey, the industry as a whole could be worth $25 billion by 2030. Lab-grown meat—or “cultivated” meat, as the industry likes to call it—is made by growing animal cells in a large tank until they form a sizable lump of tissue. Then it’s seasoned and processed in much the same way as conventional meat, forming foods such as patties, nuggets, and meatballs. Vow’s meatball was grown from sheep cells that were engineered to contain a short mammoth-DNA sequence, sourced from publicly available data. As a result, the cells produced the mammoth version of myoglobin, a protein that contributes to the metallic, “meaty” taste of muscle.

Theoretically, this process can be used to create meat from any animal whose cells are readily available or whose DNA has been sequenced. Think of DNA as essentially an IKEA manual for building tissue. Even animals whose sequences are incomplete can be partly resurrected: Gaps in the woolly-mammoth DNA were filled in using sequences from elephants, like using Billy-bookcase instructions to build a Kallax shelf. Growing the mammoth meat, in a relatively small amount, was “ridiculously easy and fast,” Ernst Wolvetang, a scientist who worked with Vow, told The Guardian. The same could eventually be said of any type of cultivated meat if the industry can surmount the significant cost and efficiency-related challenges involved in scaling up.

                                                  

Imagine the stunts that could be possible then: nuggets for every dinosaur in Jurassic Park, even human meatballs. Already, a few companies besides Vow are pursuing more exotic fare: The New York–based Primeval Foods plans to release cultivated lion burgers, ground meat, and sausages, followed by meat from giraffes and zebras, founder and CEO Yilmaz Bora told me. Diners are always looking for something new, so food “must go beyond the current beef, chicken, and pork dishes and come without the expense of nature and animals,” he said.

Using stunt marketing to raise awareness about the potential of cultivated meat doesn’t guarantee that people will want to eat those products if they ever become widely available. Sometimes the creations are too gross to even consider seriously, such as Hellmann’s “mayo-nog” and Oscar Mayer’s “cold dogs,” which were, uh, hot-dog-flavored ice-cream weiners on a stick. Yet people don’t have the same frame of reference for a meatball made of cultivated mammoth meat. “The risk is that it’s off-putting,” Michael Cohen, a marketing professor at NYU, told me. Or enticing.

If the mammoth meatball made you think They can do that?, then perhaps it will have done some good. If not, then it was, at the very least, a valid attempt to engage with the science. “The meatball thing was a very well-crafted marketing activity for a product”—lab-grown meat as a category—“that I think is going to have very low adoption,” Lang said. A majority of Americans have “food neophobia,” a reluctance to adopt new foods, he said; many don’t even eat seafood. Still, in the past five months, the FDA granted its first two approvals to lab-grown-chicken products, clearing a regulatory pathway for even more cultivated meats. If the technology is ever able to scale up, perhaps foods like mammoth meatballs will no longer be seen as a stunt. Eventually, they might just be dinner.