#741: A slippery thought experiment
Plus em dashes, empaths and TikTok birth control skeptics
Next week I’m headed to New Orleans for the Online News Association Conference, where I’m speaking on a panel of independent, creator-model journalists. In our prep meeting a couple weeks ago, we were told to expect lots of questions re: the sustainability of our businesses.
“Gee, Caitlin,” such a question might go — the asker of this question would *absolutely* say “gee” — “given the complete devaluation of the journalism profession, and the rapid degradation of the information landscape writ large, and the cacophony of subscription products competing for dollars … why would ANYONE pay you for a newsletter?”
And I will say: “Thank you so much for the question, Carl.” (This hypothetical has maybe gotten out of hand.) “You are correct that the vast majority of readers do not pay to support my work. Why, even among long-time Links subscribers who open every edition and click through all the links, only a fractional percentage support the newsletter!!
“But that fractional percentage — of wonderful and universally attractive people, I might add — has allowed me to replace almost 70% of my income from my former job in local news, and I’m slowly working to build from there. For instance, I now open every email with these lengthy and occasionally batty CTAs to remind people that this newsletter takes many hours to curate, and if that curation brings them any joy or understanding or utility at all, they can personally sustain the whole project for the low monthly price of $7.”
“Just $7?!” Carl will say. “I’d like to subscribe myself!” Then I will give Carl a Links laptop sticker and together we will share a nice, knowing laugh.1
It’s rare for most outlets to take down a published story, and rarer still when that story’s a rigorous, long-form investigative piece. So imagine my *intense* curiosity, if you will, when a reader emailed to tell me MIT Technology Review had removed the big article on invasive faith tech that I recommended (highly!!) the other week.
The editors’ note was, at the time, pretty vague. And we were very freshly off the Margaux Blanchard scandal, in which a fake AI journalist hoodwinked editors at Wired and Business Insider. So I immediately wondered if Alex Ashley, the author of the faith tech piece, was in fact a real person. While possessed of an apparently human voice and body, he had a curiously thin professional footprint … and his websites and LinkedIn were both offline when I checked them.
As I clicked through Ashley’s various other social profiles, utilizing the keen Google-stalking skills I honed over years as a journalist (also, formerly: an online-dater and teenage girl), I spiraled into a slippery thought experiment that remains with me 10 days later. Given the current capabilities of generative AI tools, across multiple mediums, what level of online evidence would prove to me beyond a doubt that this person, or any person, actually existed? A voice can be faked by AI now. So too can a photo or a song. An especially ingenious puppet master could engineer an entire network of AI personas to lend social and professional proof to them all.
Really cooking and paranoid now, and beginning to doubt the porous boundaries of reality, I emailed some editors at Tech Review and asked if they could clarify the issue for me. “I am not at the stage myself where I feel like we have all the answers yet,” EIC Mat Honan wrote by email — the magazine had hired an independent auditor, and the results of that investigation weren’t back. “But I can tell you I do not have concerns about [the] story or author being AI generated.”
Sure enough, Tech Review took the story down for good this week, with an update on its review process. What a relief — and, frankly, a bore?? — to learn that the problem was good old-fashioned reportorial messiness. Per a new editor’s note, the story’s (very human) author relied on outdated information for much of the piece. It’s not a great look for anyone involved. But it is, dare I say … deeply humanizing!!
If you read anything this weekend
“How Wikipedia Survives While the Rest of the Internet Breaks,” by Josh Dzieza for The Verge. Kinda wild that Dzieza, perhaps our greatest working writer of internet/tech features, has no Wikipedia page of his own. But the slight has not prevented him from writing the definitive story of Wikipedia as it exists now: a shining anomaly on the enshittified, post-truth internet — that rare place where people can productively disagree — and an obvious target for governments bent on creating their own realities.
“‘Who Am I Without Birth Control?’” by Emma Goldberg for The New York Times. Last fall I texted my friend Christine with an urgent, out-of-the-blue question: When the hell did college-age women develop such disdain for contraception?! Christine has worked with Planned Parenthood; I was teaching a college journalism class. And I’d just learned, via a lively and alarming in-class discussion, that many of my students believed hormonal birth control could alter their personalities and damage their health. Anyway: I can’t find Christine’s response now, but it was something to the effect of: “Yep! TikTok” — which is also essentially the takeaway of this Times article. Between 2019 and 2024, per one analysis, the percent of young women using the pill fell from 13 to 10%.
“Tit for Tat,” by Piper French for The Baffler. A keen and entertaining argument that — far from representing some prurient or contemptible crevice of society — the creators, customers and “chatters” of OnlyFans are actually the platonic ideal of the modern capitalist economy:
The whole thing registers as a particularly homegrown marriage of delusion and deceit: the seller’s hustle to make their small business ever more scalable colliding with the consumer’s desire for better goods and on-demand services for less money—not to mention the middleman’s commitment to profiting on both ends while doing very little … Everyone’s taking advantage of everyone else. No one is above reproach.
Two reads on AI as an empathy fail safe. Doctors treating patients with chronic conditions should be able to address them with care and kindness, but Viola Zhou’s mother embraced “Dr. DeepSeek” because the bot was more patient (... if less accurate). Similarly, you’d expect a therapist to know how to respond to a patient’s grief over a dead pet. But “because she’d never had a pet herself, she’d turned to AI for help expressing the appropriate sentiment.” So much AI discourse concerns the ways it can flatten or degrade human work and relationships … but little details like these remind me that people are sometimes pretty good at acting inhuman. [Rest of World / MIT Tech Review]
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was this essay on eroticism, privacy and internet surveillance from Links reader Sarah. Please keep those guest links coming!!! The people love them.
From the group chat
This week’s guest link comes from Stephen M, who’s been a paid supporter since May 2024. “Amidst the chaos of the world and my own life,” he wrote, “I value a trusted voice picking through the vastness of available articles and providing a curated list of content (with commentary!) that, at worst, I will find interesting and delightful, and at best, will help me learn something or consider an issue in new ways.” May actually print out those very kind words to revisit on a rainy day.
For your consideration: “Stop AI-Shaming Our Precious, Kindly Em Dashes—Please,” by Brian Phillips for The Ringer. “I am a longtime Brian Phillips fan, and was thrilled to see his commentary on (and critique of) how em dashes, to many, are a sign of a piece of writing being AI-generated,” Stephen wrote. Em dashes are irrefutably the best punctuation mark, and I also hate to see them slandered so.
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: the trad writers of Substack, the last users of iTunes, “the least-effective slur in history,” a new psychosomatic syndrome, ghosting as redress and the end of the golden age of online shopping.
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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