#715: Snark forums and nerd daddies

I didn't see the Ezra Klein craze coming

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 full month of Links gives you as much joy as a faux-bread fast-food sandwich … please consider upgrading your subscription. And thanks!

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If you read anything this weekend

“How the Harris Campaign Beat Trump at Being Online,” by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker. I am still feeling a bit pissy at the Harris campaign as I write this Friday morning, because I stayed up very late to maybe see Beyoncé or Taylor Swift at the DNC last night and neither they nor any other “surprise musical guest” was ultimately forthcoming. Fine, fine. Fake news! I suppose that’s not their fault. And in either case, it doesn’t seem like Harris needs a house band to resonate with young voters. Her TikTok team, staffed by five people under age 25, has churned out a run of viral hits. Her VP pick, Tim Walz, has mastered a vloggy, front-facing-phone-camera style that seems honed by his years in front of high school students. Social media might be Trump’s battleground, but on some level, he’s still fighting the last war. (For more analysis on campaign vibes, consider this Vulture essay on “Obamacore”; also, The Guardian’s guide to the DNC’s (many!) invited influencers.)

“No One’s Ready for This,” by Sarah Jeong for The Verge. Links is generally not interested in the feature updates of mobile phones, but Sarah Jeong has absolutely persuaded me that the release of the Pixel 9’s Magic Editor tool is a terrifying ontological problem. The AI feature allows users to easily and convincingly edit their photos, in ways that could cause obvious mayhem: Jeong, for instance, casually edits a bomb into a photo from the New York City subway and drug paraphernalia into a photo of her friend. Photo manipulation isn’t new, but this degree of ease and access is. What does it mean when we can’t assume a photo shows reality? And how long will it take people to jettison that very long-held assumption?

“My Brother Died. His Facebook Page Lives On,” by Charley Burlock for The Atlantic. Zombie chatbots and AI death apps may be all the rage right now, but our most foundational and pervasive form of “grief tech” is arguably the Facebook memorial. These digital grief groups and their various offshoots (virtual guest books; obituary comments; online support groups of all sorts) are so common that they don’t seem remarkable anymore. But it IS actually remarkable to grieve in public, when for decades the culture trended in the opposite direction: “Some scholars of digital culture argue that the internet is turning grief from a private experience back into a communal one,” Burlock says.

“In Snark Forums, Fans Are Haters And Haters Are Friends,” by Alex Sujong Laughlin for Defector. I could have happily read another 1,500 words on Reddit’s burgeoning snark forums, where extremely online haters congregate in their thousands to analyze and pillory influencers. But the focus here is less on the forums, themselves — which can be very funny, and also very mean — and more on the nature of the snarker’s fixation: Is there any practical difference between a passionate hater and a devoted fan, when both camps are building communities around the same celebrity?

“Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?” by Maggie Bullock for Bustle. As a woman who briefly worked at the same place as Ezra Klein — and regularly saw his pale, bespectacled face over the edge of various cubicles — the current rush to daddify him was … not on my personal Bingo card!! But I love to see it, truly. Please give America’s unmoored nerds something else to aspire to. (And in all seriousness: I think this funny, silly little trend maybe says something telling about the idealized characteristics that women now look for in partners.)

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was

Anne Helen Petersen

’s five-part deep-dive on Bama Rush, closely followed by this essay on the tween Sephora craze.

#714: Beauty discourse and chatbot marriages

On Wednesday, I interviewed Elle Reeve, the author of the new book Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. We talked Nazis, tradwives, Gamergate, the far-right’s comical obsession with being hot and why — despite everything she’s seen! — Reeve still has “faith in the normies.”

How the darkest corners of the internet took over U.S. politics

If this stuff interests you, you might also consider bookmarking the novella-length investigation of far-right infiltrators that The New Yorker published this week; it’s definitely a put-your-phone-away-and-devote-an-hour-to-this sort of project read, but it touches on some of the same characters and themes.

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Postscripts

Future medieval. Very demure. The “hotelification” of offices. Why so many people hate PSLs (… which, PSA, returned August 22). Liberals also weaponize (fake) local news. The quest to avoid a digital dark age. What happens when a child YouTube star grows up and why carnivore influencers always eschew plates.

“Thinking is not my idea of fun.” The backlash to YouTube-style editing grows. Hot people play fewer video games and faxes are getting more popular. An ode to the new mushroom emoji. Snapchat is a minefield for teen friendships. I love the idea of an app that pairs strangers for meals, though none are available in midsize cities yet. A subreddit helping mourners to “edit out their grief.” A site for taking selfies with New York traffic cams. Scrolling actually makes you feel more bored, though we didn’t need a study to tell us that. As far as corny marketing stunts go, the Hinge lit mag is kind of neat. Last but not least: Give the people a shitty summer fairy smut movie already!!!

BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:

• Unlocked links from the The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic

• My platonic ideal of a visual culture Substack, a riveting new podcast, a good, gritty novel and an easy travel hack

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

Caitlin