#721: Early podcasts and conspiracy grifters

Plus: two glimpses of our surreal, post-human online future

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 1.33 Halloween pumpkins … please consider upgrading your subscription. And thanks!

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If you read anything this weekend

“Meet the Conspiracy-Peddling Gossip Blogger Who’s Cast Herself as a Trump-RFK Player,” by Anna Merlan for Mother Jones. I had never previously heard of Jessica Reed Kraus, an erstwhile mommy-blogger-and-lifestyle-influencer-turned-photogenic-sycophant-to-the-conspiracy-fringe. But WOW did I linger down that rabbit hole once Anna Merlan exposed me to it. Kraus is fascinating in her own right — by all means, check out her glossy, gossipy, conspiracy-laundering Substack — but she also functions as a figurehead for so many other trends in culture and politics: the rise of this pseudo-journalistic influencer class, the social media rewards of the rightward pivot, the way Covid radicalized so many people (read: rich white women!!) during the pandemic. I probably have more to say about this, but am cutting myself off before I spend another minute of my wild precious life reading Kraus’ dreadfully simpering blog. Could we at least demand that our right-wing grifters write a little better??

“I Can Navigate to Places that I'm Not Supposed to Go,” by

kate lindsay

for Embedded. I was thrilled to see long-time Links fave Elan Ullendorff interviewed in Embedded this week … especially since there is, as you’ll see, a little Links connection (!). Elan is the author of

escape the algorithm

and the creator of many brilliant, subversive projects that interrogate the way social platforms are built, from a website that exists solely to chronicle how people found it to an “IckTok” account primed to surface videos he hated. If you liked my interview with the artist and researcher Ben Grosser a couple weeks ago, I predict you will also really like this.

“2004,” by/for The Verge. As I was working on the Gamergate series a little bit ago, I found myself thinking that 2014 had been a uniquely pivotal year in internet culture. Such designations are subjective and selective and thus sort of bullshit, by default — but it’s mentally very tidy to view the past that way, I think, and thus I am happy to shelve 2014 for The Verge’s alternate pivotal-year-in-internet-history nomination. This package — plz click through for the design alone! — includes bite-sized essays on topics from early podcasts to baby Facebook; I also dug (heh) this interview with Digg founder Kevin Rose, which gets into why some of the magic and chaos of the 2004 web didn’t survive long-term.

“From the Outside, You Look Great,” by

J Wortham

for Channeling. Speaking of the 2014 internet, in a roundabout sort of way — I have always loved J Wortham’s writing on tech and internet culture, but they tend to focus more on other subjects these days. I was therefore delighted to catch this very brief but lovely essay on the “dehumanization” of the internet:

As someone who came of age online and on social media, learning how to comport myself into legibility is a familiar act. Lately, it’s more of an uncomfortable act. (There’s probably an entire essay on The Internet We Lost to write some day.) There has never been more distance between who I appear to be online and who I am in my actual life. I relish in the distance. I’m simply unwilling to try and capture the tensions, frustrations, delights, complexities of my exquisite human life on these apps. They don’t deserve it.

Two reads from our surreal, scary, dehumanized internet future. Already, AI chatbots exist that mimic real people without their consent, and actors who modeled for an AI video company have found their likenesses used in authoritarian propaganda (via Wired and The Guardian).

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In case you missed it

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

Haley Nahman

’s typically lovely and introspective essay on taking selfies.

#720: Post-truth nihilism and media graves

On Wednesday Thursday (this one *was* actually done on time, but in a weird/infuriating Substack glitch, it just … never sent?!) I interviewed PolitiFact founder Bill Adair about our never-ending misinformation epidemic:

"We’re not going to eradicate people believing in dumb stuff."

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Postscripts

The fall of airline magazines and angel numbers. The return of landlines, “thinspo” and Pod Save America. Boo baskets. Balloon boys. “Blasphemous” TikTok saints. How AI and YouTube could help decipher dog barks. Why faceless creators are all the rage. RushTok, but for college bros. The incredible succeeding Costco magazine. A #Slatepitch par excellence: The Northern Lights actually aren’t that great.

Fascinated by Austin’s fake new restaurant. Excited for the new site from the Pitchfork refugees. TikTok hooks the average user in 35 minutes or less. The internet loves watching pretty girls eat. How Cambodia became a cybercrime center. How to teach young children online literacy. A heat map of Jan. 6 defendants. A guide to spotting fake audio. Last but not least: The dating apps’ new answer to the culture they created … sounds awkward as hell.

BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:

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

• A few pre-election palate cleansers: an educational podcast that has nothing whatsoever to do with the news, a wacky action-comedy romp and the secret ingredient that improves many a fall soup (… a literal palate cleanser, that one)

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

Caitlin