#731: Space rocks and soul machines

Plus a better theory of "brain rotting"

⚠️ I’ve recently heard from several readers who aren’t getting Links in their inbox. This seems to relate to a change Substack made to its app notifications. You can read more about the issue and how to fix it here. ⚠️

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend. As you may have heard, scientists recently gave a very large asteroid a 2% chance of colliding with earth. That estimate sounds low to me, actually. I mean — I can’t speak to this specific astronomical event. But I do have the definitive, pervasive feeling that some vague misfortune is hurtling through the universe, ready to swamp us at any moment. Will it be a space rock? A preventable pandemic? A rash of eye-rolly corporate branding stunts? Only time will tell, my friends. (Also, possibly: Wikipedia.)

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If you read anything this weekend

“Can a Machine Find You a Soulmate? Inside the AI-Powered Matrimony Boom,” by Mihika Agarwal for The Walrus. Online dating and all its attendant problems have come for India’s matchmaking market, setting up a fascinating natural experiment around the best/most efficient way to find a partner. In one corner: centuries of cultural tradition, human intuition and familial meddling. In the other: matching algorithms, compatibility tests and the “indefinite exercise of swiping.”

“Seeking God, or Peter Thiel, in Silicon Valley,” by Emma Goldberg for The New York Times. An utterly fascinating and understudied angle on Silicon Valley’s much-discussed rightward shift: The recent, sudden growth of non-denominational evangelical churches preaching a new prosperity gospel for tech’s 1%. Networking is (literally) next to godliness here. Any job can be considered a “sacred vocation.” And it doesn’t really matter if your killer app er, actually kills … as long as you’ve accepted Christ as your lord and savior.

“How a Computer That ‘Drunk Dials’ Videos Is Exposing YouTube’s Secrets,” by Thomas Germain for the BBC. This is a write-up of a long-running academic project that scrapes random YouTube videos by the billions — and while the project/its findings aren’t exactly new, they’re fun and counter-intuitive enough to merit a revisit. To wit:

• YouTube grew from 9 billion to 14.8 billion videos between 2022 and 2024 alone.

• The median video has 41 views (!) and is only 64 seconds (!!) long.

• “When you examine how people are actually using YouTube, it looks less like TV and more like infrastructure.”

If this intrigues you, I’d also recommend this short essay one of the researchers wrote for The Atlantic just over a year ago and this extremely cool site that aggregates barely watched videos. And while we’re overthinking YouTube, you might also have noticed the site recently tweaked its signature shade of red. Google just published a Q&A with the designers behind that project.

“What Is Rotting, If Not Rest?” by

Haley Nahman

for Maybe Baby. This is one of the best meditations that I’ve read on “brain rot,” the 2024 Oxford Word of the Year that launched a thousand think pieces. Oxford defines brain rot as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” especially as a result of over-consuming mindless online content. But Nahman has, I think, a much more nuanced and interesting conception of rotting, which also gets at the (telling!) distinction between idle scrolling, leisure and rest: “Rotting may have a particular posture, but I think what separates it from other activities that involve horizontal entertainment is its catalyst: avoidance.”

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Ars Technica almanac of enshitification.

#730: Instagram poems and Substack it girls

For the weekday edition, I wrote about the endless, cacophonous nightmare that is our current political news environment — and talked to the writer and curator Matt Kiser about how to build a healthy news diet.

How to stay sane *AND* informed

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Postscripts

• An Instagram account that surfaces old Flickr photos and an interview with its curator (

  Molly Soda
  )

• Because we still deserve nice things: a visit to “dog college” (Popular Science)

• The legacy of Black Twitter (Nieman Lab)

• The sociology of r/WaitingtoWed (

  Tell the Bees
  )

• Why protein ate the entire culture (Grub Street)

• How the internet changed gossip (Defector)

• “Techno-fascism by chatbot” (The New Yorker $)

• One writer watched Rotten Tomatoes’ 40 lowest-rated films (The Guardian)

• Denizens of Reddit’s influencer snark forums explain their fixations (The Cut $)

• We have no idea what people watch on TV (NYT $)

• Book blurbs are a (disappearing!) scam (Slate)

• MapQuest is one of the few platforms that hasn’t caved to Trump’s Gulf of Mexico rebrand (Wired $)

• Weaponized SEO (The Guardian)

• The case for staying online (Embedded)

• A Playboy mansion for the OnlyFans age (The Daily Mail)

• Generative AI probably does make you dumber (The Conversation)

• Dating apps absolutely put profit over safety (The Pulitzer Center)

• How Wikipedia is preparing for right-wing assaults (404 Media)

• Last but not least: haunted by Ancestry (The Offing)

Paid supporters can find unlocked links from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic below the paywall, as well as some additional reading recommendations and a very chaotic photo of my dog.

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

Caitlin