#723: Social media wars and Redbox ruins

Plus, what MomTok tells us about modern womanhood

Hi, hello!, happy weekend. And please allow me to be real with you for one brief (!), awkward millisecond.

Keeping up with Links and all my other work has lately become … a real challenge. As many of you know, I left a full-time job in journalism just over a year ago and now make my living through a combination of this newsletter, teaching and freelance work.

Now, six months since the Links relaunch, I’ve replaced about half of my previous salary with Substack. It’s amazing, and I don’t take a cent of it for granted. But it’s also not enough that I can do this full-time. Almost 24,000 people subscribe to Links, and half of you open it every week … but only 2.2% of you currently pay for a subscription.

I get it: Shit’s expensive, and Substacks abound — but it means I have to take on a lot of other paid work, which is lately interfering with Links’ production. To give you a little transparency into my schedule, I’m currently working two temporary part-time jobs that together take up roughly 45 hours/week. I then report and write Links on top of that, which generally means I work six days and roughly 60+ hours each week.

That schedule is starting to catch up with me, though. Like — personally, and here on the page. Last weekend’s edition was a day late; I didn’t publish at all on Wednesday. I’d been working on a reported piece about online reviews, but I felt like I didn’t have quite enough reporting and I didn’t want to publish some half-baked thing. I really pride myself on the rigor I bring to both my curation and my reporting work — that’s what you’re supporting when you subscribe to Links.

SO! This is my long-winded way of announcing, with sincere gratitude for your patience, that I’m taking ONE more week off from Wednesday editions as I work to dig out of this. It’s also a supplication to those of you on the fence: If you value this newsletter and the work that I do, please think seriously about a paid subscription. Your support directly impacts my ability to devote more time to this project and the types of work I’ve already done here in the past six months: from interviews with fascinating artists and thinkers to extremely online investigations to deeply reported culture writing and difficult personal excavations.

Paid subscribers have also allowed me to keep virtually every substantive thing I’ve written in front of a paywall. I’ve gotten lots of advice to wall off more of it, but … I’d like to keep Links as accessible as humanly possible.

To those of you who do subscribe, thank you — abundantly, sincerely and from the bottom of my heart. I’ll be back in your inboxes next weekend!! Scout’s honor.

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If you read anything this weekend

“Jonathan Haidt Started a Social-Media War. Did He Win?” by Stephanie M. Lee for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Stephanie Lee is perhaps our premier chronicler of academic drama — see also this prior Links rec on Harvard’s Joan Donovan — so I can think of no one better for the definitive take on whether phones and social media are destroying kids. My general impression, having read this, is no … not entirely because Jonathan Haidt is wrong, but because data can only tell us so much about the messy inner workings of the adolescent brain/heart. Don’t just click through for that conclusion, though — there’s lots of fun and intrigue along the way! Like, apparently Haidt’s research assistant, and the guy who does all his stats analysis, is a snarky college drop-out in the Czech Republic whom Haidt himself has never met.

“As Schools Ban Phones, More Kids Are Using Smartwatches,” by Emily Tate Sullivan for EdSurge. Both Haidt and his assistant, incidentally, have had profound effects on American kids, whose parents now fear to give them smart phones … but still want to track their every movement! Enter the school-aged smartwatch, which allows for round-the-clock surveillance and evades smartphone bans while causing equal-if-not-greater amounts of classroom disruption. To me, this feels like the fruit of the same tree that gave us trunk-or-treating and the Wayfair trafficking panic. But what do I know; I’m not a parent!

“Who’s Afraid of These Gen Alpha Queens?” by Kate Lindsay for Bustle. Last but not least, in our accidental tour through the contemporary adolescent id: I am absolutely frightened of these smartwatch-wearing, TikTok-talking, internet-incubated little kids. They grew up with permissive parenting and unlimited media; now they’ve come to mock and intimidate us. “The middle school teacher … says she regularly feels bullied by her newly-emboldened Gen Alpha students.” What the fuck!

“MomTok Is the Apotheosis of 21st-Century Womanhood,” by Sophie Gilbert for The Atlantic. I haven’t watched The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives or spent much time with #MomTok, the cabal of Utah-based influencers who inspired the Hulu reality show. This is the piece that will get me to, though — an intriguing if slightly suspect argument that the toned, twerking moms of Secret Lives are *actually,* unusually empowered. It’s a good footnote in the larger tradwife/momfluencer discourse, regardless of whether it’s factually true … I will dabble in this show at some point and get back to you (!).

“Ruins in Reverse,” by Drew Austin for

Kneeling Bus

. Think of this sharp, evocative little essay every time you pass an abandoned Redbox … which, once you start looking for them, ends up being quite a lot:

In abandonment, the self-contained kiosks achieve a monumental purity. Freed from the duty to dispense DVDs, they are now only red boxes, and nothing more.

Disposability is a prominent theme of 21st-century culture, but it is usually invisible in a way that lets us pretend it’s less prevalent—the final leg of the supply chain that we’d rather know as little as possible about … Redbox represents the opposite case, in which the discarded parts are the parts that remain visible, like a brand acquired by private equity and hollowed out but left to publicly sputter, or a shipwreck but more mundane—lingering reminders of accidental or designed failure.

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition was this post about a weird Google Street View glitch.

#722: Everyday photos and streaming bandits

There was no post on Wednesday, as previously discussed … but I can assure you I’m working on it!!

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Postscripts

The chefs of Facebook Marketplace. A book written in Amazon reviews. How podcasts became key to politics and how stoicism became the hot philosophy du jour. The future of true crime might be less cringey. Almost half of Medium is AI crap. Influencers apparently don’t have to disclose when they shill for a candidate or a PAC. Right-wing militias still thrive on Facebook. Where’s Jezebel when you really need it? Counter the gripes on Twitter/X, everyone actually IS covering this.

The rise of the “clippers.” The re-discovery of that tape. An oral history of Wired, circa 1994. “The internet gives aging … a different flavor.” The eating disorder network hiding in plain sight on X. Why are Siri and Alexa still so underwhelming? Why don’t you cancel your Prime account, instead? Last but not least, on the eve of the election: New analyses of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s posts both show how they’ve poisoned discourse on the internet.

BELOW the paywall you’ll also find:

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

• This week’s reading & watching recommendations

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

Caitlin