#713: Get-rich-quick schemes and tradwife twists
The friendliest forum on the internet is in Vermont, of all places
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.
A reminder: I’m able to write this newsletter twice a week thanks to my generous (and *beloved*) paid subscribers. Your support gives me the financial — but also, emotional? spiritual??? — security to keep reading and writing deeply about life online. I’m not exactly getting rich off Substack, but this newsletter is a big part of how I pay my bills. So if a month of Links brings you as much joy as one-sixth of a political camo hat … please consider upgrading your subscription. And thanks!
If you read anything this weekend
“Is Amazon Turning Into Temu?,” by John Herrman for New York. If you liked the piece I wrote last May about online furniture shopping — namely, the fact that so many stores now secretly sell the exact same shit — then you may be interested in learning that this dread phenomenon has crept into other corners of retail, as well. This story focuses on Amazon, where a growing number of Chinese manufacturers and wholesalers are shipping unbranded clothes, toys and electronics at wildly variable price points, but I suspect that similar dynamics are at play on third-party marketplaces of all types. Out of curiosity, I followed Herrman’s suggestion and checked Temu for a pair of heels I’d recently seen on Amazon. Sure enough, they were there! — just selling under a different brand name, and $15 cheaper. (Fwiw I don’t plan to buy either.)
“Inside GunTube, the YouTube Subculture Linked to the Trump Shooter,” by Jack Crosbie for Bloomberg. I have a long-time, deep-seated fascination with GunTube, dating back to the horrific massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. (My stories from that time are behind hard paywalls, really serving a civic good there!, but both Memetica and Everytown also produced reports on how online gun communities influenced the Buffalo shooter.) As Crosbie explains here, GunTube is a sprawling YouTube subculture that doesn't have a cohesive politics, per se — but it is permeated by a casual paranoia and violence that characterize an ascendant strain of right-wing politics in the United States. Fwiw, I can specifically remember coming home after working on my GunTube story investigation, having spent all day watching and annotating videos, and telling Jason: There is something very scary in the water that I did not fully grasp before.
“How Lucky Blue and Nara Aziza Smith Made Viral Internet Fame From Scratch,” by Carrie Battan for GQ. Any glossy magazine tradwife profile is an automatic top link, at this point, even if said profile is softball and simpering and overall kind of meh. (Respectfully, Carrie Battan is no Megan Anew, and she seems VERY taken by her subjects.) I do think this piece, along with Anew’s Ballerina Farm profile, are prompting me to reevaluate the so-called “tradwife” discourse: Both Nara and Hannah Neeleman are often described as the queens of this movement that preaches female subjugation and servility … but they're actually the CEOs of massive self-made media brands! It seems increasingly possible to me — and admittedly, I’m still noodling on this — that people idolize or despise these women because they do appear to “have it all,” not because they regressively or self-sabotagingly chose to give half of it up on behalf of their children/husbands.
“Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From,” by Jason Koebler for 404 Media. Of all the possible perversions that could prompt someone to generate AI images of bottle sculptures, shrimp Jesuses or child amputees, I’m personally relieved to learn the mundane, capitalistic truth: Those Facebook spammers were running a straightforward likebait scheme!
“The Friendliest Social Network You’ve Never Heard Of,” by Will Oremus for The Washington Post. More than half of all adults in Vermont belong to a site called Front Porch Forum, which could serve as a model for a kinder, gentler social web and which “reads like a cross between a neighborhood internet mailing list and a small-town newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section.”
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last Saturday’s edition was this Pudding interactive on sleep training. I received no angry emails regarding this, so perhaps it’s less divisive than Tom Vaillant claims!
There was no Wednesday newsletter, really, because I got Covid. Lmao at me for being too sick to do my computer job, while Noah Lyles got a bronze medal in the same condition.
Postscripts
Dark data. MatchTok. Death by selfie. The big online world of miniature houses. Microchopping as therapy. The questions people ask chatbots. A search engine for public works. News hustlers come for the UK. AIDS denialism returns.
ADHD diagnoses among young women are up 400% from 2019. “We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up for not being fed or watered or treated like human beings.” The first full-time influencer to run for U.S. office. The companies making money off obituary spam. This week, in odd perfumes: luxury dog and Auntie Anne’s.
Dozens of athletes crowdfunded their Olympic travels. How Zoom became this year’s breakout campaign tech. The world’s largest 3D-printed neighborhood. Clicker games like “Banana” fill me with dread. The life anti-checklist. What screen time doesn’t tell you. Zillow Gone Wild has been sued. Last, and also least (dog person here): “The videos are painstakingly sourced and curated by Braden, who says he watches 15,000 cat videos per year.”
BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:
Unlocked links from the The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic
An excellent (if anxiety-inducing) novel, the *one* tool I rely on to write this newsletter and a reality show that won’t leave you feeling ever-so-slightly grimy afterwards
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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