#772: Gratuitous pandering
Plus: Timeline acquaintances, digital clutter and the grown men bullying kids on Twitter
I am wistful for the era when “weird corporate Twitter” consisted of brands acting like your friends. Today, the weirdest accounts are fast-food chains behaving like your MAHA-pilled aunt.
I write this in reference to @SteaknShake, the X account of a regional burger chain that has recently pivoted to right-wing punditry. I learned of this after someone dropped a Steak ‘n Shake tweet about the Iowa gubernatorial primary in my work Slack last week, and I fell down a tallow-slicked rabbit hole in my efforts to confirm it wasn’t a parody.
But yeah, no — Steak ‘n Shake is MAHA now. They banished seed oils and microwaves. They advertise a Tuesday special for Tesla drivers. They contribute to the Trump Accounts of employees. Should you peruse @SteaknShake, which I wouldn’t necessarily recommend, you’ll find a pinned photo of RFK Jr. standing slightly pigeontoed in an unspecified Steak n’ Shake location. The signs visible on the self-serve kiosks around him say “credit only” or “cash & credit,” but that is incomplete — because Steak n Shake also accepts Bitcoin, for those of you who’d like to purchase your tallow-fried tots with cryptocurrency.
Writing in the Indy Star last August, one columnist and former Steak ‘n Shake fan called these moves “gratuitous pandering” and “a sad final act” for the 400-store burger chain. The first is certainly true, and the second may very well be: Rather like many of MAHA’s human adherents, Steak ‘n Shake came to the movement seeking a cure for preexisting maladies.
More than anything, though, I see the transformation as a cynical bet that politics are truly and overwhelmingly central to most Americans’ identity. A good bet, if a costly one!! On Twitter, Steak n’ Shake fans are now demanding domestically sourced beef, filler-free ketchup and “ancient grain pesticide free sourdough” buns.
If you read anything this weekend
This new Taffy Brodesser-Akner piece has been everywhere, and for good reason: It’s a “profile” of the much-hated AI “actress” Tilly Norwood that doubles as a meditation on the celebrity profile as a genre, what we want from performers, and what ultimately makes art/work (of any variety) meaningful. [New York Times]
Everything you know about lorem ipsum is wrong — if you know anything at all, that is, which possibly (and justifiably!) you do not. Personally, I’d always believed (via, I think, my one college graphic design class) that lorem ipsum was Latin-esque gibberish that had been used to mock up print pages, layouts and templates since the 1600s. In fact, lorem ipsum is based on real Latin text and didn’t take off until the Mad Men era. [Rabbit Hole on YouTube]
I am developing a reflexive and justifiable suspicion of all Wayfarer sunglasses, given that some scumbags are using Meta’s smart variety to film people in public without their knowledge. More than 7 million pairs of Meta smartglasses were sold in the US last year, all of them with a front-facing indicator light that’s meant to signal when the glasses are recording.
But it’s not difficult to disable the light or pay a local tinkerer to do it for you, as many right-wing creators, “rizzcammers” and other rage-baiters are learning. “They’re stress-testing the social contract,” Embedded’s Kate Lindsey said, of these hidden-camera influencers. To make matters worse, Meta has reportedly developed a facial recognition system that identifies people captured in smartglass videos. Like for real, I am no longer speaking to any strangers wearing Wayfarers. [New Things on YouTube / Columbia Journalism Review / Wired]
Speaking of hidden-camera influencers — though not, I don’t think, of Meta glasses — this is one of the sadder and more deranged catfishing tales I’ve recently read. A woman named Alysia Gamble went on half a dozen dates with an aide to then-New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy in order to record him for her husband’s boss’s right-wing YouTube operation. The dates included kissing and lavish gifts; the recordings turned up nothing of substance or scandal. The aide, meanwhile, is devastated to a degree that should invite intervention from his family and friends. (My dude: Six dates are not enough to decide you love someone.)
Reading this, I was especially struck by the coldness of the sting: The notion that you could draw so close to another person, and earn so much of their admiration and trust, and still see them as a worthy object of public ridicule and embarrassment. Sad!! But that’s the foundational sin of filming people in public, I think: It assumes, as its starting point, that the filmer is the person with narrative and personal agency — and that everyone else is an object, a prop, a hapless NPC. [Politico]
In studies of hundreds of thousands of college essays, researchers have consistently found that AI-written pieces contain more interesting language — but fewer and more homogenous ideas and arguments. [New York Times]
There are officially more bots, scrapers and AI agents surfing the web than there are actual humans. [NBC]
What most intrigues me about “loneliness influencers” — the young people documenting their lack of friends, partners, close relatives and any other sources of sustained human contact — is that their lives are still aspirational for at least two types of audience. The first, made up of other lonely young people, see a model for solitude or introversion without shame. The second, made up of people with more conventional social lives/obligations, see a quiet and undemanding fantasy. [The Cut, The Atlantic]
Why ARE young people so lonely, anyway? The answers could — and indeed, do! — fill entire books. But here’s one unfortunate explanation: the recent rise of remote work. A new study in the journal Science finds that workers in jobs that can be done from home, like programming and marketing, spend more time alone and feel worse for it than people in “nonremotable” industries. Intriguingly, it’s not just that remote workers are more solitary during the work day — they also spend less time with friends in the evening. Between this and the youth unemployment crisis, work-from-home is getting a bad rap this week. [Scientific American, Wall Street Journal]
A “timeline acquaintance” is a “novel, site-specific” type of online relationship that felt immediately recognizable to me: someone you meet once or twice, add on social media, and then follow (in a passive but weirdly intimate way) for all of eternity. “You’re privy to your timeline-acquaintance’s weekly goings-on, their yearly family trips, their dietary habits, their workout routine and … [pictures] of their partner or their parents. In a pre-social media world, you would never be privy to such information.” [being-on-line]
Here’s a piece I found enormously frustrating, on two unrelated counts. There’s the story itself, in which a group of college-aged men relentlessly bullied a six-year-old on Twitter. Then there’s the author’s puzzling choice to not only shield said men from accountability, but also shrug off their considerable misdeeds in a series of abstractions and rhetorical questions:
“I don’t know at what point performing for friends and rooting for your team falls over the edge into something darker,” she writes, of these men who “made racist comments about immigrants,” “called women ‘whores,’” “told people to ‘kill themselves’” and posted sexual innuendos about underage girls. “I don’t know at what point we forget that the person on the other end of our comments is a human being.”
Maybe I’m overconfident in my powers of moral discernment, but I feel like determining said point is not very difficult, actually (!). [Rolling Stone]
On TYPEFACES: AI companies are aping the aesthetics of institutional credibility and trust even as they erode those institutions as such. [Wired]
People often talk about AI as if it were this inevitable, otherworldly force bearing down on us. But take it from the memorable former pastry chef of one Meta data center: The engineers and product managers making AI are just as ordinary and contemptible as the rest of us. They don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom. They don’t dispose of their dirty plates even though the garbage can is right there. And whatever their world-changing pretensions, they’re mired in the same politics and mediocrity of offices everywhere. [Yeast Confections]
Apparently The Youth are reviving not only DVDs, iPods and wired headphones, but — and this demonstrates real dedication to the bit — gigantic box-style televisions. Said TVs, which use cathode ray tubes instead of LEDs, have been out of production since 2015. I just wanna know if we’re also reviving the stained oak entertainment centers of the ‘90s. [Racket]
This verifies a sneaking suspicion I’ve had during recent hotel stays: Whether you spend a little money or a lot … the rooms increasingly look the same. You can blame consolidation in the industry and the influence of social media, which has shifted designers’ focus to common spaces like lobbies, pool decks and spas. [Bloomberg]
On infinite cloud storage, digital clutter and the problem of saving “a metastasizing heap of incalculable, forgotten junk”:
“What we choose to keep should mean something. That which we cherish enough to hold on to through time can become an extension of the self, representative of our experiences and values, and what we leave of ourselves for future generations. When we default to keeping everything, we risk hiding gems in the mass.”
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from our last edition concerned the rise of online “mom aesthetics.”
Below the jump, ~friends of Links~ can find unlocked articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vox and The Verge.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards,
Caitlin