The screen is one weekly column devoted to everything that happens in the world of WIRED culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.
Stupidly, it’s perfect for the internet. In early December, someone posted a mirror on TikTok with the caption “imagine how good your life would be if you had a 26-year-old nursing assistant by your side, now replace S with N”. At that time, people were a bit confused: “nurning annintant”? Weeks have passed since then, and while videos come and go as viral clips often do, TikTok continues to plague the social network.
This became apparent on Thursday when a friend sent a tweet went to one of my group chats with a screenshot of TikTok and it said, “Every day, at least once I’m obsessed with this.” As of this writing, the tweet has been viewed more than 14 million times and its replies contain every kind of conceivable theory. Some controversies that replacing S with N would mean swapping South for North, thus completely changing your point of view; others, more reliable, suggest that the answer involved going from “very good” to “not very good”. My friend in the group chat just said, “It’s like 2001: Space Adventures of our time, what does it do mean? Move over, Kubrick — here @thisis_bex!
Perhaps the biggest part of the mystery, @thisis_bex’s TikTok account disappeared not long after the video appeared. Detectives were able to discover that the Daily Dot appears to have found @thisis_bex, who claimed that “the answer is that it means a brain stem. It makes no sense at all.” But honestly, that doesn’t seem right. It’s not that the Daily Dot didn’t investigate correctly, but the answer they got must have been a misdirection. Why create a meaningless ‘brain’? It’s not a puzzle, it’s just… silly.
You can take @thisis_bex in their own words, but when you claim that TikTok is part of some psychopath or from a user about to pull off the longest scam ever, The real game will begin. What if “replace S with N” was the best puzzle of the 21st century? Start saying it in the deep voice of Indiana Jones and it becomes the “but in the Latin alphabet, Jehovah begins with I” of a new generation. Or, as the OP of that tweet called it, The Voynich Manuscript.
Perhaps this is what the internet needs: an unsolved mystery with very low stakes. Over the past few years, every online arrest has become a wild forensic experiment as people try to investigate everyone from political figures to political figures. release Twitter files. Meanwhile, pop culture’s fascination with podcasts and true-crime shows has turned many online detectives into armchair police detectives, with mixed results.
All that said, maybe this mysterious 26-year-old nursing assistant is named Bex (if that’s their real name) deserves some of the brain power of the internet. No one will know what was in the classified documents found in President Biden’s office for a long time. Perhaps figuring this puzzle out is a better use of everyone’s time.
