#774: Outed by autocomplete
Plus: Admin Nights, future houses and the new reigning consumer aesthetic
Recently someone posed to me a delicious little riddle: “Three married, big-name journalists are in a secret polycule,” they said, “but I’ll only tell you who if you can guess all three of them.”
Holy shit! Manna from heaven. Gossip of the absolute highest order. And I don’t get very much gossip these days, seeing as … I work from home in Buffalo.
I guessed one of the three on my very first try. (Yes: I am really proud of that.) The other two took a lot of prodding and hinting and “surely not X…? OH MY GOD, IT IS X???”
Later, I tried to Google their names in various permutations. XYZ produced nothing: “They are three prominent American journalists,” the Google AI said. X and Y in combination yielded no results. X and Z turned up an old podcast. But as I typed Y and Z into the search bar, Google autocomplete raced ahead: “Y Z relationship,” it proffered, unprompted.
Now this was intriguing, though inconclusive. (The search still turned up nothing of note.) Google’s autocomplete feature, which has gotten the search giant in trouble before, is designed to predict what you’re going to type based on other people’s previous searches. The fact that Google surfaced this word, relationship, suggested that maybe my prime, extra-rare gossip was making the rounds somewhere else. Or, somewhat less interestingly, that Google recognized that any two names in combination are often followed by the word “relationship.”
Anyway, this has been your low-stakes blind item for the week. And no, I will not tell you the names … unless you upgrade your subscription guess all three!!!
If you read anything this weekend
AI has made cyberattacks faster, smarter, vastly more common, and extremely difficult to defend against, which means that — at some point in your earthly existence — you, or a service that’s core to your life, will almost definitely get hacked.
Worse (oh, it gets worse?) is the size and scale and intimacy of our so-called digital footprints, those vast and ever-multiplying troves of emails, text messages, photos, searches, social media posts and browser clicks that document a second, secret version of ourselves known only to the internet. Those troves are increasingly and alarmingly vulnerable to public discovery, either through hackers or lawyers, and the methods for safeguarding them are … uh, intense. A privacy expert told author Bridget Read to delete every old app and website log-in she’d ever had, to only access the internet through a VPN, to get a dummy email address and phone number AND to switch to Signal and Firefox, among other precautions. [The Atlantic, New York]
There was a lot of hubbub last week about a new study that combined two things the Substacking classes love to discuss: the presumed evils of smartphones, and the so-called fertility crisis. The study looked at US birth rates from 2007 to 2011, after the iPhone was introduced. It concluded that birth rates dropped more dramatically in counties with AT&T coverage, where the iPhone was readily available.
But the presence or absence of AT&T service — “it’s just the internet…on your phone” — wasn’t the only difference between the counties in question. iPhone counties were also wealthier and more urban. The Great Recession might also have hit them differently. (Inconveniently, you can’t really untangle the effects of the Great Recession from the effects of screens.) “I am personally sympathetic to the idea that smartphones and social media have played a role in the social and demographic changes of the last twenty years,” writes the Oxford demographer Jenn Dowd, who goes on to debunk the iPhone/birth rate thesis several different ways. But running with that confident narrative, she adds, risks oversimplifying how people choose to have kids — and writing off the role of economic uncertainty, which policy supports could actually address. [Data for Health ]
Perez Hilton was a defining figure of the early 2000s internet: a vicious, traffic-chasing gossip blogger who has since moved to Vegas, found God and … become a “journalist.” This man is on his ninth life and his 90th hustle, and a part of me almost -— almost — respects that. But then I realized that the $43 Virgin Mary sweatshirt he now sells in his online store was emblazoned with a clip-art image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that he bought on Etsy for like, 60 cents. You can’t tell me Perez Hilton is reformed. That’s his most shameless grift yet!! [Slate]
I was recently talking to a friend about the parallels between Ballerina Farm and Magnolia: They’re both lifestyle empires built around an idealized vision of domesticity, led by photogenic husband-and-wife teams with tons of kids and strong/weird religious leanings. I don’t think Joanna Gaines has ever taken the heat that Hannah Neeleman has, though. Maybe because she came up through HGTV and always presented as a businesswoman? Maybe because she and Chip have stayed strenuously nonpartisan? Maybe because she did not come from or marry into vast amounts of inherited wealth?? All this and more, probably. It’s an interesting question.
In either case, I was surprised and delighted to see Neeleman asked about the connection in a rare interview for Vulture, where she also tightrope-walked (with impressive, media-trained rigor) around questions of household help and gender roles. There was ONE slip, though: “I didn’t want to outsource someone raising my children for me.” Joanna Gaines would never. [Vulture]
How do you cultivate a sense of personal taste in — gestures vaguely — this environment? Rachel Aroesti spoke to some (presumably?) tasteful people and came away with a number of (faintly obvious?) tips. It’s her defense of taste, however, that really stuck with me — her assertion that having a highly individual style or point of view is actually essential to being human: “In an ideal world, personal taste is a privilege and a pleasure we should all have — it is the closest thing most of us get to self-expression.” [The Guardian]
Each of us has about 150 tasks to do on any given day, according to the psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, a statistic that goes a long way toward explaining why I am frequently overwhelmed and stressed out (!). In an effort to combat said overwhelm, however, enterprising and highly motivated people in cities around the world have begun hosting virtual and in-person “Admin Nights” where strangers work through their to-do lists together. This, to me, feels like a cross between the virtual coworking that became popular during the pandemic and the growing movement toward low-stakes hangs. As long as there’s wine and snacks, I’m game!! [New Yorker]
Every house encodes the norms and values of its era. It’s why I love (but sometimes hate) living in an old house — and it’s why I love speculating about houses of the future. These homes will, apparently, assume that technology is something you need to be shielded or separated from — that is, when it doesn’t come embedded in your lights, shower, bathroom scale, microwave, range and refrigerator.
I’m reminded of something the British researcher Paul Coulton told me a few years ago: “Screens and internet … have become home infrastructure like pipes or cables. And therefore, as with those, there is a tendency to want them to disappear so we focus on [the] task, not the toll.” [Architectural Digest, Links]
The last millennial brand left standing will apparently be Warby Parker, the rare circa-2010s, direct-to-consumer firm that actually managed to become profitable.
The last millennial BLAND, on the other hand, is officially no more. Designers have turned on the muted neutral shades and neat fonts that defined (ahem) my generation. In its place, they’re giving us a “visual language” that the Times has appallingly named “hyper goo”: “a style of glitchy, gloppy maximalism that has landed on consumer culture like a wet sneeze.” Ew. [Vox, New York Times]
“AI brain fry” is the term researchers have coined for the mental fatigue and fogginess that AI triggers in some workers; the phenomenon is especially intense for people tasked with managing swarms of AI “agents.” Overseeing these tools sometimes entails a level of interruption and task-switching that tests the brain’s cognitive limits. In one recent survey, 18% of developers reported AI-induced exhaustion. [The Atlantic]
More than half of the music and podcasts consumed on Spotify are in languages other than English, and that share’s growing steadily. The company’s senior VP of markets attributes the trend, in part, to Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” — lol?? — which “opened the ears of consumers to non-English music” and now has four billion Spotify streams. [Rest of World]
“It’s sort of just a waste of time, basically,” National Twitter Laureate Joyce Carol Oates says of the platform, where she still posts dozens of times a day, in delightful, erudite and unhinged fashion. [Vulture]
In a future where AI devalues most cognitive work, your ability to succeed may rest on the extent to which other people consider you … a “PEOPLE PERSON.” The tone of this essay is a bit more highbrow than that, and it never actually uses that term. But I think that’s what the author is driving at when she gestures at things like “human presence” and “humanness” and “social skills.”
Personally, I like this vision: Let’s make warmth and empathy and thoughtfulness core social values again. Also, I’m delighted by any vision for our dim AI future that might disadvantage the sorts of people who ushered it in. I am sure that Elon Musk, whatever his other gifts, has never been called a “people person.” [Julia Willemyns]
TIL that the CIA and National Geospatial Agency funded the start-up that later became the basis for Google Maps. [Literary Hub]
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the “influencer-ification” of bachelorette parties (also: weddings generally).
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