Did Lena Dunham just confirm the Lorde/Jack Antonoff internet conspiracy?

I don’t know exactly what year we live in.

Let me be more specific. I can’t tell what year it is endlessly online we are alive. We are in an unprecedented time of technological advancement, what with artificial intelligence taking control of our lives and astronauts literally returning to the moon. But everywhere I turn, I see remnants of the past: People yearn for the hipster aesthetics of 2010. Avatar: The Last Airbender fan cams are full of my FYP. Celebrities are thin again, and thinspo pages and eating disorder content are taking over TikTok.

But the most confusing thing: Lena Dunham and Jack Antonoff are back in the news.

Dunham (actor, writer, and director) and Antonoff (Bleachers frontman and pop-girl collaborator) from 2012 to 2016. Their relationship was of the period. It was a mess. Then came “PowerPoint.”

Responding to rumors swirling after Lorde’s 2017 single was released melodrama, a former Twitter user named @buzzkillary put together a thesis. In her account and an accompanying 29-slide PowerPoint, Buzzkillary says Lorde and Antonoff were a couple and that the singer’s song “Green Light,” among other things, was about her.

This conspiracy has, like all internet conspiracies, lurked in the dark corners of niche fandoms until it became a worthy Hollywood headline — like Lorde’s 2025 album VirginAntonoff’s marriage to actress Margaret Qualley, or Dunham’s latest show about a young woman who was cheated on – took it out of the shadows. But Dunham’s new memoir, Illnesscame down, and everything became a little more real.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

In IllnessDunham describes the complete breakdown of her relationship with Antonoff for the first time, recalling the intimate details of the emotionally complex relationship she had with a “pop star” (the Internet, and PowerPoint, long assumed it was Lorde).

Dunham says the singer and her co-star spent hours “getting together” and called her “Aunt Lena” when Dunham used a walker due to chronic illness. One quote was especially bad in the eyes of the internet. He explains that the star in question “fell on our side sofa, crying in Jack’s lap as he told him that ‘your youth is for testing’ in a comforting voice, it almost brought me to tears.” He goes on to say, “It had been a long time since he spoke to me with such great generosity.”

Then, Dunham admits to her own faux pas: She cheated on Antonoff when it all got too much. The internet, of course, had more ideas. Which cheating scandal was worse, Antonoff’s or Dunham’s? Who was killed here?

Even Tumblr got involved.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

There are those who have taken Dunham as a full confirmation of the unusual relationship, which reinforces the knotted web mentioned in PowerPoint. Many sympathized with Dunham, who has been at the center of many controversies since the 2010s.

For others, this was an opportunity to visit other connections, including Taylor Swift. It is possible his songs have been about the Antonoff/Dunham debate all along, the viewer and one of their close friends?

Then there are others who, in a real nod to the old internet, had only mean words women involved in the emotional love triangle. Dunham and Lorde — both of whom have been the targets of critical comments related to their looks and their art — were misfits, or pathetic, or just plain bad. Antonoff was…there.

Lorde, who may have been in her twenties and early 20s when she first collaborated with the then-32-year-old Antonoff, is one of many young pop women who have collaborated with the producer. And Antonoff wasn’t the only old man in Hollywood he was involved with. As users try to spot the Antonoff/Dunham parallels in Lorde’s discography, some rightly point to the most likely muse, a Universal Music promotions director named Justin Warren whom Lorde dated in 2015. He was 17 years older than her.

Dunham’s quote, taken in its full context Illnessadmits a major problem: That Antonoff was too close to many of his collaborators and that they were responsible for not being invited to join.

These are layers that even the infamous PowerPoint on the internet can’t summarize.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. Either it is loading or it has already been downloaded.

Amidst all the chatter on the internet, I ask: What outcome would comfort the masses? Do they need to see a mass erasure of Lorde? Or Antonoff or Dunham, both of whom have been cybercriminals for years? Or is this just a big “I told you so!” PowerPoint moment of truth? Ultimately, what do we gain by theorizing about any of it online?

Dunham herself admitted to the conspiracy during the press cycle Illnessbeing honest about his past that the internet has come to respect him as he’s grown up and embraced his cultural heritage – that’s hardly a relic of the old internet. Dunham says she saw the presentation years ago and “it was so convincing that it made me think again about the events I had been in.” He even admitted that he reached out to the creator of PowerPoint during a “down time.”

Dunham, through Illnessis still processing what happened during the early years of internet rumors and cancellations, just like every other social media stranger on the internet at the time. And we still don’t know what to make of it.

If 2016 really was “the last good year,” as many TikTok videos suggest, 2026 is trying hard to reheat nachos — even going so far as to link to Buzzfeed articles about the Lena Dunham PowerPoint theory.