Speedin' Across America 🚐

Plus: Some thoughts on yesterday

blog.ninety-two // Our mission to Make The Internet Feel Smaller is vague on purpose.

We arrived at this mission at the beginning of 2025. And since then, I’ve noticed a pattern: When people reach out to chat about our work, they tend to have different interpretations of what that mission means to them.

This is, again, by design. And I think my personal definition can mostly be summed up by a piece I wrote last November.

You can read that piece for my full perspective. But what I’ll say here is that the Internet is a vast, strange, wonderful collection of creative innovation and ingenuity, a platform for us to share ideas and express ourselves in a fashion previously unimaginable. It’s also a global neighborhood; as the YouTube creator and filmmaker Natalie Lynn once told me, “What are the odds my best friend in the world grew up down the street from me?”

Nevertheless, the Internet simultaneously serves as a launchpad for hate, with levers controlled by a small group of powerful people who enrich their gated community. If you’ve spent any time on the Internet over the last forty-eight hours, you’ll know that a violent video spread around the globe like wildfire. Troves of misinformation followed with it, and the reactionary discourse since has been—to oversimplify things—utterly devoid of hope.

You won’t find me sharing my personal opinions of a certain online provocateur. You will also never hear me condone violence.

Yet the commitment I wrote about nearly a year ago remains the same. The Internet is a beautiful, powerful tool, worth celebrating and worth interrogating. To Make The Internet Feel Smaller is to know our neighbors, to provide spaces for real conversation—and to hopefully inspire us all to craft more meaningful narratives.

Scroll on for today’s Neighborhood Watch reviews, including IShowSpeed’s eventful Chicago pit stop. And if you’d like to write a review in the coming weeks, you can pitch us here.

— NGL

P.S. Last blog, we celebrated the end of the Subathon. You can read it here.

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Video: ‘irl stream in America 🇺🇸 Day 12 of 35 (Chicago, IL)’ (2025)

Creator: IShowSpeed

Runtime: 11hr 51m 17s

Review by: Nathan Graber-Lipperman

Chat, is our attention span cooked?

Short answer: Yes…and no. YouTube recently shared that the platform’s most popular videos are getting both shorter and longer. In other words, people are watching more sixty-second, vertical videos—but they’re also sitting down for more hourlong video essays and streams, too. And nothing serves as a more evident depiction of this trend than the rise of Darren “IShowSpeed” Watkins, Jr., a twenty-year-old streamer currently on a thirty-five-day road trip across the United States.

Personally-speaking, the allure of streamers like Speed—who rose to prominence through his energetic reaction videos, Cristiano Ronaldo superfandom, and *checks notes* a penchant for barking at people—has often eluded me. You can write it off as a generational thing; after all, droves of teenagers fell in love with Twitch by virtue of sitting around during the COVID-19 pandemic without much to do, really.

Speed tackles KSI at the 2022 Sidemen Charity Match / The Sun

But for anyone who spends time charting the high seas of the Internet, Speed’s videos have become difficult to sail past, as the streamer took things global (literally). He produced several viral moments at British creator group The Sidemen’s charity match in 2022; made headlines after participating in Gloucestershire's famous cheese-rolling race in 2024; and became an overnight celebrity in China after a two-week tour this June.

Speed’s streams often run entire days while on the road, and like many, I’ve only ever seen the clips that emerge. Some of the highlights from his ongoing Speed Does America tour seemed to be producing genuinely quirky and (dare I say) somewhat educational moments—everything from touring the National Mall with an Abraham Lincoln impersonator in DC to hanging out with NBA star Jaylen Brown on a Tea Party-era boat in Boston Harbor.

So I decided to tune in Monday night as the streamer speedran our literal neighborhood in Chicago.* And I gotta say, he did a pretty solid job of exploring the city.

Speed meets an Al Capone impersonator / YouTube

Over the course of twelve hours, he:

• Walked along the Chicago River and touched The Bean;

• Grabbed a snack in Chinatown and deep dish at Lou Malnati’s;

• Dropped by Lyrical Lemonade’s office to drop a freestyle (and play the rapper BabyTron in one-on-one);

• Ate Harold’s Chicken as an Al Capone impersonator gave him a history lesson;

• And caught a Bears game at Soldier Field.

There’s a natural inclination to fist pump when someone shows off the city you love. Rowdy crowds popped out to follow along with Speed’s adventures and gas up Chicago; in turn, the streamer’s small army of burly security guards had to work hard to keep things moving (funny enough, at one point, Speed even interacted with people I know).**

me watching Speed’s Chicago stream

Past watching in a Leonardo-DiCaprio-pointing-meme fashion, there’s a certain inherent magic when tuning in live, a feeling that truly anything can happen. Speed’s superpower isn’t just his spark-plug ability to find anything exciting, but also his motor, to keep up this nonstop pace for a full day of surprisingly well-curated pit stops. It’s truly a daily TV show, and if we were to take YouTube views as ratings, Speed Does America is blowing traditional out of the water.

The question that then arises: what’s gained and lost as a streamer like Speed gains such profound influence? After all, he was banned from Twitch in 2021—along with the game VALORANT in 2022, upon telling a female player on stream to quit and “do your husband’s dishes.” That same year, he promoted a pump-and-dump crypto stream, and harassed a spectator at the FIFA World Cup by repeatedly hurling racist comments.

Speed didn’t turn eighteen until 2023, so it’s easy for some to write these incidents off as missteps by a minor who has grown up since. The truth of the streamer’s continuous rise is much simpler, though: Speed has become big business.

In May, YouTube trotted the twenty-year-old out on stage at Brandcast, an event intended to sell the biggest sponsors in the world on buying more ad slots. That same day, Roger Goodell stopped by to promote YouTube’s first-ever livestreamed NFL game; Speed was one of four creators tapped to host an alternate, “watch-along” stream during the game last Friday.

YouTube

And that tour in June? “Beijing gleefully celebrated Speed’s China lovefest as a soft-power win,” writes Semafor’s Zichen Wang. State media produced multiple broadcasts highlighting the streamer’s travels to landmarks and tech companies alike. Per Semafor, the government is now rolling out a ten-day, “all-expenses-paid journey through China” for American creators with at least three hundred thousand followers.***

All of this is to say: While Speed Does America feels like a step in the right direction, it’ll be interesting to track how the streamer’s output evolves. I genuinely think he has a case to make as one of the most famous people on the planet right now, and with that growing platform comes an increased need to use it responsibly.

And if YouTube viewing trends are any indication, get ready to spend a lot more time with him.

Nate’s Score: 3.7 / 5

A new section of Neighborhood Watch, dedicated to the books, music, movies, and physical media that played a meaningful role in stopping our scroll.

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Concert: ‘The Secret River Show’ (2024 - )

Artist: Lawrence Tome & Friends

Location: 41.932036, -87.681933

Runtime: High Noon - Sunset

Around five o’clock last Saturday, a long-haired man donning a cowboy hat skated along the banks of the Chicago River. After dropping his colorful pennyboard, the man climbed onto a boat, steering himself and four bandmates towards a platform floating in the water. The assembled group set up a guitar, keyboard, and plenty of A/V equipment…and promptly began playing country music to a crowd of roughly one hundred.

The long-haired man was Lawrence Tome, an indie artist known as “The King of the River.” He began organizing these “Secret River Shows” in 2024, dropping location coordinates on his website and Instagram story just days before each concert.

In the age of TikTok, something labeled a secret quickly becomes anything but. What started as an under-the-radar gathering became a local sensation—some of the more gatekeep-y folks I know have even stopped attending due to the show’s newfound popularity on social media.

Saturday’s “Secret River Show” / Photo by Joshua Mellin

My experience? Pockets of friends and loners, parents and their kids, all brought together by the River King. The music was soft, but melodic—Tome gladly made room for drum and clarinet solos from his bandmates. Bodies swayed; beers were swigged; and the fall wind whistled on by. Patrons paddled up to the platform and cracked cold ones in their kayaks. To top it off, the Chicago skyline served as the show’s backdrop.

In other words: The vibes were immaculate.

Towards the end of the show, Tome’s speakers gave out. When the band couldn’t figure out how to restart their generator, audience members yelled, Do it unplugged!

Tome shrugged. “Nah. See y’all next week though.” He then gathered his instruments with his bandmates and boated away—pennyboard in tow.

Nate’s Score: 4.5 / 5

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Film: ‘Lurker’ (2025)

Director: Alex Russell

Runtime: 1hr 40m

There’s a moment in Lurker when a fan stops the main character, Matthew, outside the trendy Los Angeles clothing store our protagonist used to work at. The fan has been following Matthew on Instagram for a while now—and tells him, “You inspire me to be myself.”

Matthew sheepishly thanks the fan; you can tell there’s a feeling of embarrassment mixed with pride. But then the fan follows up: “What do you, like…do?”

Lurker is a masterful debut feature by writer/director Alex Russell, who cut his teeth writing for black comedies like Beef and The Bear. The protagonist, Matthew, spends his days obsessing over a rising pop star named Oliver. Following a chance encounter at the clothing store, Matthew works his way into Oliver’s entourage—and as Matthew gains his own following, he’ll do anything possible to stay in the inner circle.

I often find that Hollywood gets lost when attempting to comment on the intricacies of modern fame, but Lurker is packed with moments like the fan interaction described above. It’s a movie about our constant desire to feel seen, and with that, Russell succeeds by showing more than telling.

It doesn’t hurt that the cast perfectly encapsulates the L.A. influencer scene, either. Who knew Zack Fox was this funny?****

Nate’s Score: 4.8 / 5

Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.

* At one point, Speed stops his car in the middle of the road to check out, you guessed it, a passerby's pet monkey. This incident, funny enough, occurred down the street from our studio.

** Shout-out to Rick and Tino Malnati, who debated Speed on his decision to wear a Derrick Rose Bulls jersey over an MJ as Speed dined in their family’s restaurant.

*** Semafor did point out that the U.S. engages in shady tactics, too, releasing cinematic videos in Mandarin in an attempt to convert disgruntled Chinese officials into spies.

**** Well, Abbott Elementary viewers. But that’s besides the point.