#735: Ambiguous irony and Wiki woes

Plus an investigative tour de force on DOGE

Hi, hello!, and happy weekend, you beautiful souls. I can’t thank y’all enough for your response to Thursday’s post. In case you missed it, I’m actually and no-longer-secretly on the teetering brink of maternity leave: Jason and I are expecting at the end of March. Links will publish on a modified schedule while we learn how to care for a tiny human. You can read more about our tortured journey to this point on Elle and in Thursday’s edition.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re pregnant

I’m still working through all the emails, Substack DMs and comments you sent. I’m really gonna try to get to them all. If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I’ve literally gone into labor and someone forcibly pried my laptop from me at the hospital.

But as a preliminary, blanket thank you: I’m so grateful for your kindness and encouragement and support, and for allowing me to write so vulnerably here. It’s a rare gift to have that kind of platform and community, and I don’t take either for granted.

I also want to specifically thank the 62 people who upgraded from free to paid subscriptions over the past few days.

As I explained in Thursday’s newsletter, I am a self-employed freelancer and do not receive paid maternity leave. I’m relying on the support of Links subscribers to let me take that time with my newborn, and also to keep Links going strong while I’m out.

I set a goal of signing on 120 new subscribers before I leave. If you’ve ever considered supporting Links before, the best time really is right now.

As a paid supporter, you’ll get access to some subscriber-only features I’m really jazzed about, including our first-ever print zine (… coming later this summer). If you can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, forwarding this to a friend who might love Links, commenting on Substack and sharing on social media also really help support and sustain the newsletter.

Either way, thanks again for being here. I plan to keep Linking until Sprout comes. So without further ado…

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If you read anything this weekend

“Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup,’” by Makena Kelly et al. for Wired. There are nine bylines and two additional reporting credits on this investigative tour de force from Wired, which I … don’t think I’ve ever seen before! Based on interviews with more than 150 people, it synthesizes all of the magazine’s DOGE reporting from the past two months into one comprehensive and compulsively readable feature.

Some of the details here are just incredible: Elon Musk had his gaming rig installed in a government office building, for instance. DOGE staffers living at SpaceX’s DC headquarters trashed a men’s bathroom with chewed gum and Zyn. These entitled man-children then gained unfettered access to the personal and sensitive information of millions of Americans. The silver lining, such as one exists, is that all this has taken a real toll on Musk: Witness the naked desperation of his White House Tesla shtick.

“How Generative A.I. Complements the MAGA Style,” by Dan Brooks for The New York Times. Brooks goes deep on the viral Trump/Gaza video — which I’ve been trying to forget, with little success — and finds in it the purest expression of MAGA’s evolving internet aesthetic. It’s a visual, discursive and political style that blurs the lines between reality and irony in a way that keeps the speaker’s true meaning ambiguous … and allows him or her to get away with almost anything, because they can always just deny they meant it. This should sound pretty familiar: It’s also the dominant mode of 4chan. Further proof that the internet’s darkest corners have somehow conquered our politics.

Three reads on art in the age of deception. None of these pieces quite met my arbitrary internal threshold for if-you-read-anything links on their own, but together they work almost like assigned reading for an introductory art and ethics class. (Complimentary; I loved school.) The first, by Kelley Engelbrecht for Chicago, recounts the creation of two pretty punk rock tools that help artists defy AI scrapers. The second, by Kelly Grovier for the BBC, unspools the older, time-honored methods of predigital art forgers. And the third, a profile of Kazuo Ishiguro by Alex Clark in The Guardian, includes some fascinating reflections on the ethics of creating art and telling stories at a time when many people/politicians are putting those skills to antisocial use. Please be prepared to discuss in class! Thank you.

“The Cult of Baby Tech,” by Kelli María Korducki for Business Insider. Relevant to my personal interests these days, SURE, but also interesting in a more general regard: No other realm of consumer technology has more effectively capitalized on routine human anxieties … or more convincingly sold surveillance as a solution.

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In case you missed it

The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter concerned the second coming of the dirtbag left. If you liked that, you might also like this conversation in Dirt about the so-called “dark mode shift.”

#734: Instagram cringe and millennial redemption

In Thursday’s edition, I announced some personal news and went long on why some millennial parents-to-be have turned on the pregnancy announcement. Someone (not me) should really write more about the aesthetics of these Etsy templates.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re pregnant

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Postscripts

• A consideration of YouTube’s legacy as it turns 20 (Variety)

• The rise of “Talibro” tourism (Business Insider $)

• Reddit’s new rules jeopardize the ethos that’s made it the social internet’s last good platform (Slate)

• Ongoing Wikipedia woes: Edit wars in the Middle East and (infamously) bad celebrity photos (Bloomberg $, 404 Media)

• How the radicalization of one real estate influencer exposed the perverse incentives of YouTube (Slate)

• AI is coming for laptop workers (Vox)

• The new right-wing women’s media (Semafor)

• Dumbphones as a solution to “the self-esteem crisis” (Dazed)

• A reading list on typefaces (Longreads)

• Extremely intrigued by Letterloop, “a group chat for bad texters” (

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• Bummed we can no longer follow the basic/overpriced “work looks” of this wannabe DOGE influencer (CNN)

• The future of online ticket sales (The Verge)

• The fatigue of Gen Z trend cycles (NYT $)

• A website anyone can update by calling this number — chaotic!!!

• Seed oils are FINE, actually (AP)

• “It resembles the other things on Netflix more than it resembles anything in Márquez” — on streamers’ endless hunt for new #content (NYT $)

• Why TikTok is flooded with religious spam (Mashable)

Below the paywall, paid supporters can find my deranged recent books spreadsheet and unlocked links from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic.

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

Caitlin