#716: Fake computer jobs and ripped CEOs
Plus the most morbid Google searches!
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 single grande PSL … please consider upgrading your subscription. And thanks!
If you read anything this weekend
“The Contingency Contingent,” by Leigh Claire La Berge for n+1. I’m a little late to this one, but ahhh — it’s so good: just a witty, clear-eyed portait of the absurdity of corporate work. Twenty-five years ago, La Berge was employed at an global advertising firm, helping arm them for Y2K. But as is the case with many a computer job, her role was largely performative, “documenting” pseudo-preparations for a “crisis” that never actually took place. “The employment agency through which I got my fake job made no epistemological distinction between knowing something and knowing about something,” she writes, in one of many clever tidbits that feel generalizable to swaths of modern labor as a whole. (“How many of these AI jobs are totally fake?” She recently tweeted. “How overvalued are these companies? How much longer?”)
“‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine,” by Jason Koebler for 404 Media. Four Thieves Vinegar Collective reverse-engineers patented drugs and teaches people to make them at home illegally, typically at costs that double as indictments of the entire pharmaceutical industry. They can make misoprostol, a drug used in abortions, for 89 cents per pill. They manufacture Sovaldi, which cures hepatitis C, for roughly 83 cents per pill. Those same drugs are $160 and **$1000**, respectively, when sold at the pharmacy. It would not be an exaggeration to say I have thought about this story — and the original Motherboard profile of Four Thieves — more or less constantly since I read it. I just wish it contained some response from the drug cos, who must (?) have this ragtag crew in their cross hairs.
“The Accelerationists’ App: How Telegram Became the “Center of Gravity” for a New Breed of Domestic Terrorists,” by James Bandler, A.C. Thompson and Karina Meieer for ProPublica. Pity the poor reporters at ProPublica and Frontline who probably spent months on this investigation, only to rush it out when French authorities fingered Pavel Durov for all the app’s illicit content. Durov, the eccentric and impossibly ripped founder/CEO of Telegram, was arrested two weeks ago on charges that he allowed fraud, drug sales and money laundering (etc, etc.) on the messaging app.
Long-time readers know Telegram is a subject of enduring fascination to me, in part because of its obscure, former Buffalo connections (during a previous period of political exile, Durov was even rumored to be hiding out here) and in part because the app has so openly enabled an astounding range of criminal activity and behavior. In particular — as this story chronicles — Telegram has become the app of choice for white supremacists, accelerationists and other far-right extremists around the world. Unrelatedly, I’m sure, Durov and Telegram have also recently become symbols in some kind of anti-woke culture war.
“Here’s What Americans Want to Kill, According to Google,” by Andrew Van Dam for The Washington Post. I very much believe in Google search as an oracle for the personal/cultural id, so was delighted to see data genius Andrew Van Dam tackle this morbid little corner of it. There are lots of intriguing insights here, like the fact that people in rural areas search “how to kill time” most frequently. Or the fact that searches for “how to kill yourself” don’t correlate at all with suicide rates. (“How to kill myself” is, sadly and mysteriously, a different story.) For more on this general theme, check out “Search the Market” — a crowdsourced compendium of intimate search terms — or this weird found poem I composed from my pandemic searches.
“Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era,” by Roland Allen for The Walrus. This never really explains why notebooks endured, despite competition from tablets and phones; the closest we get is some Moleskine marketing-speak and a passing reference to David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog. But as a devotee of analog notebooks, myself (my theory is that screens are fundamentally ill-suited to certain types of deep or associative thought), I really appreciated this history of the iconic Moleskine, which is both much younger and more … contrived? … than I would’ve wagered. Paid subscribers can find a superior notebook rec below the paywall. ;)
In case you missed it
Links was off last weekend for Labor Day, but the most-clicked link from the weekend before that was this Bustle article on Ezra Klein as unlikely sex object.
On Wednesday, I wrapped up the Gamergate series with a classic Links reading guide. You’re probably pretty eager for a change of scenery, and candidly, at this point … I am too! But I’m tremendously grateful to the paid subscribers who let me dedicate some time to this important subject, and to
for kindly shouting-out the project.
Postscripts
“Dorm Room Mamas.” TSA tray aesthetics. This NaNoWriMo AI controversy (!!!). Spotify’s fake-band problem and the next frontier in dubbed TV. A rarely discussed drawback of hybrid work. Inside the original dating app. Brazil’s war on election disinformation … unexpectedly came for the stans.
Molly Fischer on Ina Garten. Ted Chiang on AI art. I have never seen a Stanley backpack in the wild … and I sincerely hope I never do now. Where to find new music in the age of algorithms. This week in engagement bait: dumb questions and culture fibs. The boom in niche affinity apps. The states passing deepfake porn laws (since the country isn’t). Finally: The apps are so bad that daters are turning to news aggregators, Google Forms and … cryptic fruits. Even romance guru Esther Perel doesn't seem sure just what to do.
BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:
Unlocked links from the The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic
A better-than-Moleskine notebook, an offbeat mythology adaptation and some recs for useful apps and good fiction
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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