What happens when the people we left behind on the old internet kept changing without us?

There is a blue Tobuscus T-shirt in my attic.

I need to start by admitting that.

It has ‘Tobuscus’ in that kinda rock font, and at some point in my life I liked Toby Turner enough that I exchanged actual money for it. I wore it. I mean here is proof.

I found it again recently while putting baby clothes into the attic (Ok, my husband was doing the heavy lifting but who’s splitting hairs?), and now I don’t really know what to do with it.

I don’t want to wear it.

It feels weird donating it.

Throwing away a perfectly functional T-shirt feels wasteful.

So it has entered a kind of clothing purgatory, sitting in my attic because apparently even my old YouTube merchandise can become an ethical dilemma.

The T-shirt did, however, make me wonder:

What the hell happened to Tobuscus?

And this is where I made a mistake.

I Googled him.

Tobuscus has been frozen in my brain for about 12 years

There are certain people from the early internet who aren’t really people in my memory anymore.

They’re timestamps.

Tobuscus exists somewhere alongside Jenna Marbles, Ray William Johnson, Tumblr dashboards, badly edited fandom videos and the period where every YouTube video seemed legally required to end with someone pointing at a subscribe button.

Around 2012 Toby Turner was a major part of my daily wind down before bed. This was the era of the 10 minute gaming playthrough, long before creators had a video of themself in the corner. It was just commentary and vibes. I’d watch his Terraria series, the Minecraft series- both of which were the long running ones- and then whatever other video was on the go. My favourite to this day was the Witches House.

I remember the Dead Island Literal Trailer, the Cute Win Fail series, the lazy vlogs and trying to figure out who was dating who on Youtube through who was appearing in whose videos (Olga Kay, iJustine… )

I remember “Bless your face.”

I remember I Can Swing My Sword.

I still sing ‘did you know that cashews come from a fruit’ because it’s just plain funny.

And then, at some point, I stopped watching. Toby Turner simply stopped updating in my brain. My version of him remained somewhere around 2012 or 2013: floppy hair, frantic editing, Literal Trailers and that particular style of loud, random humour that absolutely dominated the internet for a while.

Apparently Toby Turner did not, in fact, cease to exist when I stopped watching him.

This feels obvious in retrospect.

Oh.

If you haven’t thought about Tobuscus for a decade either, I’m afraid I have some news.

In June 2026, Toby Turner released a song called Invader Scum.

Yes.

That Tobuscus.

The man from I Can Swing My Sword.

I was convinced it was AI. Satire. It had to be satire, right? But there it was. F bombs and all. To add insult to strangely specific injury in the corner of the video the wee Minecraft figures that I used to watch were walking across the screen. A creeper next to a literal bomb. Bang.

The song is explicitly anti-immigration. This isn’t a case of someone clipping a line out of context or an old creator making an edgy joke that has aged terribly. The entire thing is the political statement.

And people watched it.

A lot of people watched it.

Suddenly there were posts from people who appeared to be going through exactly the same psychological process I had:

Wait.

Tobuscus?

Tobuscus Tobuscus?

This is probably the strangest part of rediscovering someone from the old internet. I didn’t gradually watch Toby Turner’s politics evolve over a decade. I didn’t see the intermediate steps.

I went directly from:

Tobuscus then: I can swing my sword, sword—

to:

Tobuscus now: Invader Scum.

There was no loading screen.

Obviously, there is a missing decade here

It would be unfair- and frankly much less interesting- to pretend Toby Turner woke up one morning in 2026 and decided to become a completely different person.

There is a whole lot of history between the Tobuscus I remember and the one I found.

And some of it is uncomfortable.

The point where I stopped watching

I was in China at the time of the big scandal between Toby Tuner and AprilEfff. In 2016, Turner faced serious public allegations about his behaviour towards women. Turner denied allegations of sexual assault, and no criminal charges resulted. It was a mess. I’m not going into it in detail, but read it here.

And in that moment I was out. I needed to pick another Youtuber to feed my gaming addictions. (I picked Markiplier. Wise choice.)

As a fan, it was horrible. As a woman, it was horrible. The lack of criminal charges weirdly made it worse- a black and white either way would have made it easier to figure out what to do with the damn t-shirt. I chose to stop engaging with his channels, but keep the memory I had of those silly videos I had in my routine.

I wasn’t alone. His enormous YouTube audience also dwindled. The internet moved on from the particular type of content that had made Tobuscus huge.

But Turner kept posting.

And, politically, he moved considerably to the right.

The change hadn’t happened overnight. Turner had publicly supported Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, and by 2022 his politics were becoming a much more visible part of what he was putting online. That June, he posted about meeting Kyle Rittenhouse and made several videos about him, saying he’d wanted to meet Rittenhouse since watching the footage of the Kenosha shootings and describing himself and Rittenhouse as people who had both been falsely accused and mistreated by the media.

By 2023 and 2024, politics and culture-war subjects were increasingly mixed into Turner’s online output, including posts and videos about guns, abortion, political correctness and gender. He publicly supported Trump again in the 2024 presidential election.

So Invader Scum didn’t actually come from nowhere. By the time Turner released the anti-immigration song in June 2026, there was a trail stretching back years. I just hadn’t been watching any of it.

It feels like opening a time capsule and discovering the contents have developed political opinions.

The old internet wasn’t actually frozen

This is the bit I can’t stop thinking about.

We talk about the “old internet” as though it’s a place.

YouTube in 2010. Tumblr in 2012. Facebook when your status started with “Emma is…”

Spending an entire evening just firing up limewire downloads and hoping they would be ready to load onto your iPod before school the next day. Learning all the parts to the Potter Puppet Pals. Weebl and Bob.

When we remember those things, they’re static.

I can watch an old Tobuscus Literal Trailer today and I’m not really watching it in 2026. For a few minutes, I’m 20 again, sitting in the University Library, probably doing Sporcle quizzes instead of whatever essay was due.

The video hasn’t changed, but the person in it has. And that’s obvious, isn’t it? Of course he has.

So have I.

I’m 36, married with kids. I spend more time at the soft play than the club. I dance to baby shark instead of David Guetta. Caffine after 7pm is risky. I can’t stay up til 3am watching YouTube and playing World of Warcraft, the kids get up at 6am- that would mean death.

The strange thing is that I have been present for all of my own changes. They happened slowly enough that I barely noticed most of them. (not the kids part, that hits like a train)

I wasn’t present for his. So instead of seeing a person change over fourteen years, I’ve effectively put two photographs next to each other and the difference is enormous.

This isn’t really about Tobuscus

Well.

It obviously is a bit about Tobuscus.

There is still a blue T-shirt in my attic causing problems.

But what sent me down this rabbit hole wasn’t really a desire to find out whether an old YouTuber was still making videos. It was the shock of discovering that something I had mentally filed under MY INTERNET CHILDHOOD/YOUNG ADULTHOOD — DO NOT UPDATE had carried on without me.

I was sad but also understood when Jenna Marbles quit YouTube. I had told myself ‘yeah, she did it a long time.’ For some reasons ‘retiring’ was an official way of breaking up with us all, we could keep 2010s Jenna in our memory box.

I’ve written before about the slightly surreal experience of getting older alongside pop culture. Hearing Fall Out Boy turn up on children’s television is funny because it reminds me that the things I grew up with have aged too.

This feels like the inverse of that.

Sometimes you look back and think:

Oh. We’ve all grown up.

Sometimes you look back and think:

Oh. What happened to you?

And I suspect we’re going to experience this more and more. The first generation of genuinely enormous internet personalities are now old enough to have decades-long public careers. The people we watched when we were teenagers and twenty-somethings aren’t disappearing when we close the browser. They’re getting married. They’re having children. They’re changing careers. They’re changing beliefs. They’re getting stranger. Some of them are presumably sitting somewhere looking back at their own 2012 selves and cringing just as hard as I do when Facebook Memories decides I haven’t suffered enough that morning.

(Sometimes I used to write these weirdly third person statues like ‘Emma is most unamused by her male counterparts.’ What? Was I pissed off with a boy? Was I watching TV? Who the heck knows.)

The internet gave us an unusually detailed record of who these people used to be which means we can put then and now beside each other in a way previous generations couldn’t. Sometimes the comparison is lovely. Sometimes it’s depressing. Sometimes Toby Turner releases Invader Scum…

So what am I supposed to do with the T-shirt?

I still don’t know.

There is something weirdly appropriate about it remaining in the attic. It’s an artefact. Proof that for a period of my life, Tobuscus meant something completely different to me than Toby Turner does now. I don’t particularly want to erase that. I don’t think enjoying someone’s stupid YouTube videos fourteen years ago means I have to retroactively interrogate 20-year-old me about everything that person would eventually believe.

She didn’t know.

She just thought the Literal Trailers were funny.

She was just really emotionally involved with that really long candy brick, map long bridge built in Terraria to fight the wall of flesh.

Thus, we must be willing to move on and part with our weird internet pasts. I won’t rose tint it, some of it was indeed bad, but I can acknowledge that it mattered to me then even when looking at it now makes us say:

What the hell happened here?

Anyway.

If anyone knows an ethically neutral way to dispose of a Tobuscus T-shirt, please let me know.

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