#729: Chosen families and sugar highs

Plus: An unscheduled phone call DOES suggest someone has died.

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend … “happiness,” of course, being relative these days, and important to seize where you find it. Personally, I have derived some satisfaction (if not, you know, unadulterated joy) from reading Reddit threads by federal mutineers and watching tech titans discover how much it sucks to have your work stolen by AI. Does this make me feel better about the world? Does it make me feel good about myself? Lol, I mean — not exactly, but I had gratuitous morning ice cream for that.

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If you read anything this weekend

“The Cultural Ascendancy of the New Young Right,” by Brock Colyar for New York. This inauguration party dispatch is brimming with tiny, telling, appalling anecdotes about Trump’s hippest devotees, from the jokes they tell amongst themselves to the shots they drink. But I was mainly fascinated by the way these MAGAites talk about “humor” and “political correctness” — they are so seduced by the license to say anything they want, no matter how rude or transgressive. That’s a posture I associate largely with 4chan, but it’s clearly very much in the mainstream now: the end phases, maybe, of a dispiriting process that began with the alt-right during Trump’s first administration.

“The Future Is Too Easy,” by David Roth for Defector. David Roth went to Vegas for CES, and all he got was this grim vision of our hollowed-out future:

“The fantasy and utility of AI, for the unconscionably wealthy and relentlessly wary masters of this space, converge in a high and lonesome abstraction—technology designed less to do every human thing for you than to replace all those human things with itself, and then sell that function back to you as a monthly subscription. ...

It is both the nature and the business of casinos to make the outside world disappear, but there was a greater recession at work here—all these miracles and potential miracles worked to push users into the same stilted and solitary prisons of ease.”

“Are You Lonely? Adopt a New Family on Facebook Today,” by Lexi Pandell for Wired. This takes the concept of “chosen family” to a new, very literal level: a Facebook group that matches surrogate grandparents with stand-in children and grandchildren. It slots really nicely into all the ongoing consternation about modern estrangement and loneliness; it also made me wonder how the internet has changed our fundamental understanding of what family is. Kindly goat farmer/grandma Karen is for sure hiding something, though.

“‘No, I’m Not Phoning to Say I’m Dying!’ My Grueling Week of Calling Gen Z Friends Rather Than Texting Them,” by Kate McCusker for The Guardian. I would love to read a longer reported piece on the death of the phone call and what we gain or lose in the regression back to wholly asynchronous communication. (Does that piece exist, and if yes … can you point me to it??) In the meantime, however, I appreciated this funny, small-scale act of stunt journalism, which felt very relatable even to my aged millennial eyes: An unscheduled phone call from most people in my contacts list would immediately suggest to me that somebody had died.

“How My Trip to Quit Sugar Quickly Became a Journey Into Hell,” by Caity Weaver for the New York Times Magazine. This has nothing to do with the internet, nothing to do with tech … nothing to do at all, really, with this newsletter’s remit. And YET, don’t we deserve a little Caity Weaver? As a treat? I can virtually guarantee that this account of her stay at a “medical health resort” will be the most riotous and pleasant thing you read this entire week.

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Bloomberg investigation into the Rogansphere.

#728: Online lacunas and true randomness

For the mid-week edition, I considered the enduring appeal of Myspace Tom, the tech bro that got away.

Ground control to Myspace Tom

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Postscripts

• The right-wing backlash against Wikipedia (CJR)

• The “cinematic universe” of the Trump administration (Wired $)

• Affluent “millennial rebrand syndrome” (Blackbird Spyplane)

• How digital culture reshaped our faces (TED)

• Ruby Franke’s daughter published a memoir (The Guardian)

• BookTok predicts the next big reading trends (Elle)

• A reminder that maps don’t just reflect the world — they actively color and shape it (Wired $)

• Inside the Facebook group where New Yorkers find roommates (Curbed)

• Live from the Excel World Championship (Straits Times)

• In defense of algorithmic ranking (Dynomight)

• But also: how to reset yours, if you need it (Washington Post $)

• “The internet is growing more hostile to humans” (The Atlantic $)

• “Extinction at the speed of the internet” (Financial Times $)

• “One of the core fantasies of a cozy game is getting to live in a community where … everybody pulls together.” Imagine that! (Reuters)

• New, anti-Trump algospeak just dropped (Fast Company)

• When did the right reclaim “crunchy moms”? (NYT $)

• Last but not least, the single best sentence I have ever read about LinkedIn: “a lavish psychoanalytic corpus, bursting with naked ambition, inspiration, desperation, status-seeking, spiritual yearning, brownnosing, name-dropping, corporate shilling, and self-promotion.” (New Yorker $)

Paid supporters can find some thoughts on the pending VHS renaissance — you heard it here first! — and unlocked links from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic below the paywall.

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

Caitlin