#775: Uniquely modern sorrows
Plus: Loneliness clubs, fancy Jell-O shot summer and texting your dog
We were toddling around the neighborhood after dinner on Friday, debating — as usual — if we really needed ice cream, when we passed a young man in round wire-frame glasses and a chevron mustache and a T-shirt that said “Data center? I’d rather date a centaur!” (Like the one pictured above, but slightly cooler.)
This, more than anything else I’ve seen or read, drove home to me just how broadly and intensely unpopular data centers have become. Like — when the disaffected zoomers of Buffalo wear their data center hatred as a fashion accessory, you have the makings of a larger political movement.
Alternatively, maybe this guy was just into centaurs. I don’t really judge. But I can’t imagine that particular scene is thriving in this area.
If you read anything this weekend
Elon Musk is so rich that his net worth exceeds the GDP of all but 15 countries on earth. Elon Musk is so rich he could buy all the gold bullion in Fort Knox 1.8 times over. Elon Musk is so rich he could purchase 200,000 private islands or 2.4 million American homes. Elon Musk is so rich he could end world hunger, stamp out malaria or climate-proof the world … but of course, he won’t. [What’s Elon Worth / Vox]
If food’s the best way to understand a culture, then Google’s corporate cafeterias explain a lot: The spaces boast large decorative displays of artisanal ingredients, even as they churn out mass-produced dishes that seem totally severed from their culinary/cultural origins. [Cake Zine]
Online design was converging toward one bland, standardized look even before the heyday of generative AI. Now everything’s converging faster, and in a different direction, courtesy the workings of Claude Design. I feel like I can spot a vibe-coded website or web app a mile off; ditto those blandly tasteful slide decks generated by Claude. They tend to have the look and feel of Anthropic itself: warm beige and cream backgrounds; desaturated, vaguely retro accent colors; and big, italicized serif fonts on round-cornered dashboards. [Links, New Yorker]
Maybe the biggest threat to the authentic human web isn’t AI, but advertising — the mercenary force behind everything from undisclosed political influence campaigns to the sudden ubiquity of clipping. The latest offender in this genre is Polymarket, which paid college students to pretend to place big bets and post videos of their (fake) winnings. Hopefully some equally mercenary plaintiff’s attorney reads about this fraud and scents an opportunity. [WSJ, Slate]
The 2000s and early 2010s were an era of “light enlightenment”: They gave us the iPhone, Facebook, avocado toast, Minecraft and dubstep. (This list made me laugh.) By comparison, the journalist and commentator Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick argues, our contemporary culture has shifted from inventing new things to merely ingesting, curating and rebooting things that already exist, which — in addition to being boring and unoriginal! — creates this sense of ambient uneasiness. I don’t know if I agree, fwiw (like all “vibe shift” discourse, this is all so subjective that it’s difficult to prove or debunk either way) but I think it is, at the very least, highly interesting to debate!! [The Trend Report™]
In the 1990s, only three percent of American men and two percent of American women said they had no close friends. By 2021, those figures had jumped to 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women. But do we really think a $400 bootcamp (or a coach or a club) is the best possible solution? I just aggressively ask other parents how old their kids are. One of these days it’ll work, I know it. [Businessweek]
The eternally fascinating Esther Perel, on AI relationships:
“What stood out for me is that it’s not like people go from thriving social relations to suddenly talking to an AI. They go from being isolated, spending most of their time at home, maybe going out every once in a while in the evening for dinner or to get to a gym, and they are already so centered on a very small universe that from there, they themselves have become so flattened by technology, they live in their phone.”
[Vanity Fair]
And the eternally fascinating terry nguyen, on using AI in relationships:
I’ve been thinking about Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People recently, as I am forced to deal with New York’s summer rowdiness: “We are inescapably in relation with other beings and the world and are continuously adjusting to them.” Being around others is not only inconvenient; it can also be incredibly annoying, which brings us to Berlant’s greater point: “No one [is] ever sovereign” or entirely autonomous. Our bodies—and by extension, our physical and verbal responses—are interdependent, whether we like it or not. With AI rearing its head in personal communication, I find myself returning to Berlant’s idea of sovereignty, what she defines as “your fantasy of being in control.” For some, AI seems to be a means to fulfill this fantasy—to prove that they’re smart or good at flirting or capable of writing a heartfelt apology or a soothing condolence message. The reality of human connection is, of course, much much messier.
The Washington Post posed political questions to six AI models, and all but one took “left-leaning” positions. But did those positions truly lean to the left, or has my beloved former employer slipped further into some kind of pandering obsolescence? Asked, for instance, if the US should “use its military to conquer new territories for resources,” all the bots but Gemini unequivocally said no. That seems less like the leftist position than the only position to adhere to decades of international laws and norms.
I’m reminded of the argument that AI could actually help nudge people away from the political extremes and toward more centrist views. Views like “child labor really is bad, actually!” or “the federal government should not dictate college curricula,” both of which the Post categorizes as showing “left-leaning” bias. [Washington Post, Links, Financial Times]
John Koenig launched The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows — a project devoted to compiling a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express” — on Tumblr 17 years ago. Then, earlier this month, a new Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows site popped up, brimming with Amazon affiliate links and AI slop illustrations.
The unauthorized ripoff, created by a San Francisco marketing firm, is transparently a ploy to use AI to profit off of Koenig’s work. Writes Andy Baio: “The feeling of seeing something you love ingested and repurposed by a machine designed to replace the person who made it seems like a uniquely modern sorrow.” [Waxy.org]
For the low, low price of $36,000 a summer, you too can send your kid to an East Hamptons summer camp where they’ll spend hours indoors on an iPad, learning from an AI tutor, before engaging in truly bonkers rich-people shit like building a large Trojan horse and setting it on fire. [The Cut]
Did you make it this far? This is quite a long edition! And it represents ≈14 hours of scouring RSS feeds, reading articles and summarizing them in these pithy little segments. I don’t do this for fun, believe it or not. I do it for YOU <3. If you regularly open and enjoy this newsletter, please consider supporting my work.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that the average dog is capable of communicating through an interpretive device worn on their collar. Let’s further assume that this device works reliably and is, in fact, worth $90. Even in a world where those things are true — and to be clear, that world is not the one we live in — would you want to give your dog the power to text you all the time? Nemo is a living terror as it is. [Slate]
If you’ve read and enjoyed the Dungeon Crawler Carl series — the breakout success of the once-niche, digitally native genre known as LitRPG — kindly reply to this email and explain the appeal to me. This is at least the third very thoughtful essay I have read on the subject, in addition to several of my coworkers’ positively reverential Slack recommendations, and I still can’t wrap my head around a politically “revolutionary” sci-fi book full of changeling prostitutes, fetishistic AI and severed penises. Possibly I am just too dumb. But just as likely, I think, I am just too female. Anyway: These books have sold over 6 million copies between them. [Oakland Review of Books]
On the subject of reading, and via Web Curios: Here’s a cool little app that basically functions like a Tinder for books. Read the first page of an anonymized book; reveal the title if you like it, and keep swiping if you don’t. Just in time for summer reading season! [Uncovered]
And now, the Links digest of memes for the week ending June 27:
Train Dog: a delightful, childlike auditory pun on the basic and undeniable fact that a dog panting sounds a lot like an old-school locomotive. The level of hype around this meme nevertheless suggests to me that many of us are living with dopamine deficits. [The Atlantic]
Da Pope (and maybe, by extension, Da Catholicism): Videos of Pope Leo XIV have been doing the rounds since he learned the 6-7 gesture. Although my 10-year-old cousin tells me, with some derision, that only little kids are still doing that. [New York Times]
Kilroy Was Here: The popular graffiti symbol, used in World War II, was arguably the first ever meme. Like many memes today, it functioned largely to signal that diffuse groups of people coexisted, at different times, in the same space. [Aidan Walker]
It’s gonna be a fancy Jell-O shot summer. I have waited my WHOLE LIFE for this. (My go-to recipe has more of a wintery vibe, but it is excellent.) [Eater, Sunset]
Time magazine named Squarespace’s AI-guided site builder one of the best inventions of the past year — a superlative that made me think: Time still exists? And then: I guess it was a bad year for inventions??
But let me tell you about the Blueprint AI Builder, which more than half of new Squarespace customers now use. The tool solicits some information about you and your design preferences, then spins up a unique draft site for you. You can then tweak that design to match your vision, changing the text, images, layouts and site styles using Squarespace’s intuitive and easy-to-use tools. “Great design is inherently human,” Squarespace’s chief product officer told Time last year. “We wanted to make sure the user felt AI was enhancing their story, but wasn’t taking over for them.”
If you would like AI to enhance your story, but not take over for you, use this link with the code DEWEY for a free Squarespace trial + 10% off your first purchase.
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition concerned the rise of the “HYPER GOO” aesthetic.
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