#737: I think we’re allowed to just have fun sometimes?
Plus an alternate theory for why we didn't get a "song of the summer" this year
Last week I wanted corn to make this soup, but the store shelves were completely bare of regular produce. I instead had to buy a four-pack of pre-shucked organic corn, which cost a cobsmacking TWO DOLLARS an ear. Absolutely ridiculous.
If you think a month of Links is worth almost as much as four ears of corn, please consider upgrading your subscription. It will keep us in soup for a bit longer. I appreciate it. :)
Today’s third story is a jolly little jaunt through the world of viral stupid human tricks, like sinking improbable basketball shots or landing nickels on their edges. Such trickshots serve as a momentary respite from the otherwise unrelenting bleakness of modernity; to quote one of the jugglers featured in the piece: “You know, when I open my Instagram now, it’s like crimes against humanity … trickshots … crimes against humanity!”
Are you catching what I’m throwing here?! You have to take your trickshots when and where you can. And trickshots do abound — metaphorically speaking — if you scroll with an eye toward uncovering them. For instance: Amidst breathless hype for ChatGPT’s latest model, a technology that will likely serve to further templatize and stultify the online world (more below), the Tiny Awards are back this week with proof that a weirder, human internet is possible. I love the Tiny Awards, as you know, which honor creative, non-commercial web projects. Spend a few minutes clicking through the finalists; I promise the world will look less bleak for it.
If you read anything this weekend
“SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO,” by John Herrman for New York ($). The arcane art of search optimization shapes much of what you see on the internet: It’s why food blogs are so damn wordy, for instance, and why news outlets have long pulled little stunts like this. But now that AI is eating search whole, whether through chatbots or Google’s “overviews,” there’s a new set of annoying industry tactics meant to get content in front of users. Expect to see more lists, charts, rankings, subheadings and tables in the stuff you read, plus a shift to a drier, more concise and more authoritative style of writing. Between that, the uncanny legend of Elara Voss and the ascendance of words like “meticulous” and “delve” … we’ve got plenty of early and dispiriting evidence for how AI’s flattening the web.
“Chatbots Can Go Into a Delusional Spiral. Here’s How It Happens,” by Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman for The New York Times ($). I was initially inclined to view these AI psychosis stories as titillating one-offs — vulnerable people with undiagnosed mental health conditions (?) who’d spent too much time with their little chatbots. As the stories pile up, however, I’m coming around to the alarming conclusion that chatbots can, in fact, “lead ordinarily rational people to believe powerfully in false ideas” — namely, by flattering their vanities and casting them as characters in grandiose, heroic narratives. There’s something a little sad and tender and unnerving here, about the stories that many people (many men??) secretly want to believe about themselves … and also about how people generally come to believe mis- and disinformation.
“Knife Throwing and Cheeseburger Spinning: The Agony and Ecstasy of Being a Viral Trickshot Video Star,” by Richard Godwin for The Guardian. Hard right turn here, but as I said at top, we need our palate cleansers — and you can’t do much better than an aging juggler on a balance board spinning tennis rackets. Godwin stretches to great and occasionally improbable lengths to assign some higher meaning to trickshot videos (“the best of them transcend language, religion, culture, politics”) but I think we’re allowed to just have fun sometimes?? Lord knows I watched every embedded clip in this.
“The Grooms Smashing Wedding Cake in Their Brides’ Faces,” by Carly Lewis for The Cut ($). Here’s a TikTok “relationship test” I wholeheartedly endorse: If your spouse thinks this trend is acceptable or cute … consider divorce. I struggled to even explain it to Jason, apparently the rare 30-something man whose capacity for empathy has not been nuked by years of mainlining TikTok ragebait content.
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last weekend’s edition disputed the now-common theory that social media is to blame for America’s political and epistemic crises.
If you liked that, lemme test out another mild #slatepitch on you: Contrary the recent tranche of trend articles, social media and platform fragmentation aren’t entirely to blame for this year’s failure to produce a definitive “song of the summer.” This is a fresh hell, some critics suggest, perhaps ushered in by algorithm. No one song can achieve iconic summer status if we’re each swilling a stream of personalized content from the teat of Big Platform.
But wait! We have been here before. The year was 2016. And while that summer predated the rise of TikTok and widespread concerns about algorithmic culture, it also lacked a solid song of the summer. Explaining that absence in The Washington Post, however, the critic Chris Richards astutely IDed a non-technological reason the vibes felt way off: “We’re living through one of the ugliest summers in modern memory,” he wrote — and there’s no soundtracking that with stadium pop.
Better to reach for airline jingles. For kids’ movie scores. For outdated, washed-up last-season songs that hearken back to marginally sunnier summers. Summers like 2016, I dare say, which in the unforgiving light of recent history actually looks … kind of innocent??? I would, respectfully, still take Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” over KPop Demon Hunter’s “Golden.”
From the group chat
This week’s guest link comes from Arestia, who’s been a paid supporter since November. (Thank you!!) “You do the heavy lifting of finding interesting things for me to read,” she wrote. For your consideration: “The Sedini Special,” by Lauren Markham for Virginia Quarterly Review. “We all dream of buying a €1 house and moving to Italy. This article made me feel better that I'm … not doing that,” she said. This is indeed a long-held private dream of mine and I’m happy to dispatch with the FOMO of it!!
Below the jump, other ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, plus: peak doodle, “aspirational humanity,” two big features on Silicon Valley’s rightward vibe shift, an excellent new profile of Ms. Rachel and a delicious (contrived?) cat fight on the MAGA internet.
For access to those postscripts and lots of other fun features, AND to support the newsletter, upgrade to a monthly or annual subscription.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin
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