#711: Of brats and ballerinas

Plus: "perception is emerging as a big theme in therapy for young people"

Jul 27, 2024

∙ Paid

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend. You’re reading the Saturday edition of Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends: a lovingly curated collection of brand-new writing on internet culture and technology, culled from the hundreds of RSS feeds I read each week for this ~express~ purpose. Last week, I screened <3,974 links, plus dozens of newsletters. I still can’t prove that JD Vance didn’t fuck a couch, but neither can professional fact checkers.

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✨ A request: ✨ It’s been almost three months since I relaunched Links, and I’m marking that milestone in Wednesday’s edition. I plan to share a pretty candid take on what it’s like to make your living as a freelancer: the good, the bad and the stuff no one tells you before you get into it. If YOU have any questions about this world, then please hit reply to ask me. I’m a pretty open book! I’ll include questions and answers in Wednesday’s post.

If you read anything this weekend

“Meet the Queen of the ‘Trad Wives’ (and Her Eight Children),” by Megan Agnew for The Sunday Times. Is Hannah Neeleman happy? Is she even … okay? Megan Agnew got unprecedented access to the Ur tradwife and mega-influencer, and not all at Ballerina Farm is what it seemed. Neeleman’s husband, David, comes across as a controlling, manipulative bore who conned his wife into dating him and pressured her into marriage. Hannah herself sounds regretful about leaving her career and moving out to Utah to make David’s dreams happen. This profile couldn’t be better timed: Regressive, essentialist gender politics — of the type the Neelemans aesthicize and embody — have gained enormous traction on the American right, most recently with the rise of cat-lady-hating JD.

Three short reads on the Kamala Harris memes. Mainstream media outlets are falling ALL OVER themselves to explain the Kamala memes, which — if I understand all this correctly? — is not very brat, actually. But it is exciting — hopeful, even! — to see young voters get so jazzed about a candidate. So: If you want a straightforward and only slightly winking rundown, the LA Times has it. The Washington Post spoke to Harris’s campaign and also, pretty comically, Jake Tapper’s teen daughter. Meanwhile, The Atlantic’s daily newsletter asked the one question I *really* want to know: Does internet virality win elections? (You might not love the answer.)

“Roblox Is Fighting to Keep Pedophiles Away and Not Always Winning,” by Olivia Carville and Cecilia D’Anastasio for Bloomberg Businessweek. I imagine that comms people at major tech companies have Carville’s photo taped up near their desks, like restaurants do with tetchy food critics. If she calls you, you fucked up … and Roblox fucked up big. The kids’ gaming platform Roblox — which, inconceivably, lets all users exchange messages by default — last year reported more than 13,000 instances of child exploitation. Moderators say they’re understaffed and under-resourced; predators say the platform makes it “very easy” to meet kids. Roblox, meanwhile, insists that it’s doing all it can … but if this is “all it can,” maybe it shouldn’t exist.

“AI Can’t Make Music,” by Matteo Wong for The Atlantic. Read this less as a case study of AI music and more as a framework for thinking about AI and creative work in general. AI fundamentally can’t make art, Wong argues, and so claims that AI poses some existential risk to art/artists are overblown. At the same time, there’s a whole lot of creative labor that isn’t “Art,” capital A, that AI can actually, probably do. For some artists and creatives, that’s very useful. For others (commercial composers, video game concept artists), it imperils their entire livelihoods.

“Has Social Media Made Sightseeing Deeply Uncool?,” by Darshita Goyal for Mashable. We know Gen Z struggles with ~being perceived,~ but this neurotic, self-aware little travel diary really cut to the heart of the whole thing for me. Goyal went to Spain and Portugal last April, but was plagued by anxiety over how the trip played on social media. As one therapist memorably told her afterwards, “perception is emerging as a big theme in therapy for young people”:

“Now that we frame our experiences through the lens of external presentation, it’s much harder to figure out what we actually want as opposed to how we’d like to appear … This puts us at risk of potentially fragmenting our identities. We lose sight of what we actually feel and instead start to view ourselves from an outside perspective.”

Postscripts

80 years of teen beauty trends. 40 years of celeb literacy posters. An “internet phone book,” a sly surveillance game and a robot that solves jigsaw puzzles. The “unexpected poetry” in PhD acknowledgements. The whimsical word salad of TikTok baby names. Tech billionaires have a new uniform and online shopping worsens air quality.

Tesla’s Cybertruck: “a culture war on wheels.” Amazon’s Alexa: a very costly smart timer. How news of the Trump shooting spread on X and why we’re learning so much news through “bizarre digital formats.” Why it’s hard to tell if Google’s actually getting worse. Why albums are getting so veryyyy lengthy. Meme tattoos. Skibidi futures. The Liam Neeson of cybersecurity. Here for Gen Z’s sassy OOO messages. Devoured AHP’s Dallas Cowboys take, of course. (If you’re not yet following DCC on Instagram, I recommend it for the scathing comments section alone.)

Last but not least!: Voting for the 2024 Tiny Awards opened this week. Check out this grab bag of refreshingly odd and artsy noncommercial sites, from “one-minute parks” to old-school webrings.

BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:

Unlocked links from the The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic
This week’s TV and book-length reading recs
All 40 stories Jacob and I read for Wednesday’s scam syllabus

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,

Caitlin

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