#776: The first-ever content creator
Plus: Skill nostalgia, the uncanny editing of the human face, and the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy era's last meager remains
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to everyone who took the Links reader survey last weekend/emailed me your kind comments and strategy suggestions/forwarded that post to your own friends. I feel a bit like I trust-fell into a black pit, holding nothing but my phone and an extended metaphor, and hundreds of unseen hands materialized to catch me. Truly a bit of a miracle.
In case you missed it, here’s the rub: Links, as it’s currently written, is not emotionally or financially sustainable for me. I have been deeply discouraged by this fact, at various points over the past seven months, but right now? I feel energized. I feel … relieved.
It’s a relief to acknowledge, to myself and to you, that this actually isn’t working in its present state. And once the initial terror and vertigo wore off, it also became genuinely exciting to take a step back and to start to think about what I can change.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see the core of Links — this weekend round-up — ever going away. But I am thinking a lot about other shifts around that: the exact mix of topics I focus on, for instance; the types of additional writing I publish; the features I offer paid supporters; and the exact format of the weekend edition. (You’ll see that today’s send mirrors an earlier, circa 2024 version of Links, for instance.)
If you have 10 minutes and you haven’t already, please fill out this survey to tell me more about why you read Links and what aspects of the newsletter are most valuable to you.
I’m really and truly relying on your feedback as I figure out the newsletter’s next chapter. And if that’s not enticement enough, I’m also giving away five $25 Bookshop.org gift cards to readers who fill the whole survey out.
Thank you, and I love you, and also I’m sorry for doing feelings in your inbox again…? But think: You’ll miss all this unrestrained pathos when human writers and curators get replaced by artificial intelligence!!!!
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If you read anything this weekend
What do pandemic-era sourdough, nonnamaxing, worker’s jackets, sea shanties and Blown Away have in common? They’re all examples of so-called “skill nostalgia”: a longing for a type of old-timey, manual labor devalued by technology and automation.
This essay was a bit, ahem, academic for my taste (reading — another skill devalued by tech!), but I’ve found myself chewing it over in connection with several things I’ve read and watched since.
The tech critic Ian Bogost has a new book out, for instance, on the redemptive, “mundane pleasures of the physical world,” and many of those pleasures involve manual labor. The whole tradlife discourse concerns people who make their food or clothes or home-school curricula from scratch. The Trump administration has published — and indeed, this essay references — deeply unsettling, AI-generated posters of strapping white men working construction. How much of our modern discontent (political, spiritual, existential, whatever) actually flows directly from the way we work? I live in the Rust Belt, so this question shouldn’t exactly blow my mind — but something about the “skill nostalgia” framing really works. [Aeon, The Atlantic]
Something disturbing is happening to the human face. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. But only New York’s least apologetic Whole Foods shoplifter could distill it this way:
The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day … The face is no longer supposed to be something that holds intimate, idiosyncratic human information; it has been reconfigured as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual. It would be ideal, maximally profitable, for the tech and beauty industries if the gaze that emerges from the face learns to seek nothing but its own reflection.”
[The New Yorker]
I wish psychologist Peter Gray all the best in his publicity tour, but I don’t think his book’s going to earn the level of all-consuming mania his publisher is plainly hoping for. Gray is a former, now-estranged collaborator of Jonathan Haidt, and like Haidt, he’s confident he’s figured out the youth mental health crisis. But unlike Haidt, Gray’s theory — unsupervised screen time is good for kids, actually! — does not confirm parents’ preexisting fears and biases.
Gray argues, in a nutshell, that it’s not really the phones — that the loss of independent play over the past 50 years, and the rise of standardized testing over the past 20, are the actual drivers of youth depression and anxiety. As evidence, he points to the erosion of unsupervised play time, when kids historically learned to take risks and manage disappointments, and survey data that show students got way more stressed after the rollout of Common Core requirements. But his conclusions, like Haidt’s, are far from definitive, and I’m once again left wondering: Why can’t we just accept that multiple things can be true simultaneously?! [The Atlantic]
I predict that in the future, to differentiate their brands and their algorithmic signals on a hopelessly glutted web, people will be forced to invent ever narrower and more absurd niches to “influence” in. The “fast-growing field of Christian interior design” is such a pristine, tailor-made example, I couldn’t have invented it if I wanted to. And the quotes in this piece … ah, they’re so good. I guess it IS fair, in certain theological circles, to say that God was the first-ever content creator… [Architectural Digest]
Doorbell cameras don’t appear to reduce crime, but they do poison neighbors’ relationships: Research shows that the knowledge they’re being watched makes people more paranoid, more fearful and more vigilant. I’m especially interested in these findings in the context of Meta’s AI glasses and other AI wearables, which are fast multiplying in public spaces. What does it do to human relationships and interpersonal trust when the personal, porch-sized surveillance state goes mobile…? [Vox]
Postscripts
➤ Partiful may be the last, controversy-dogged remnants of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy Era. [The Verge]
➤ Plaintiff Zero in the big social media addiction case still can’t log off, two months later. [Bloomberg]
➤ There are now as many people on Threads as there are on X. [NYT]
➤ In praise of the glories of grocery-store tourism. [The Freeman]
➤ A browser extension that hides Amazon’s alphabet-soup knock-off brands. [404 Media]
➤ Do books exist to provide entertainment or enlightenment? [The New Yorker]
➤ Even if readers disavow machine-generated writing (or illustration, or music), AI will still make it harder to make a living as an artist by gutting corporate and commercial gigs. [Teddy (T.M.) Brown]
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was the aforementioned reader survey (THANK YOU AGAIN) followed by this local blog post on what I believe to be Buffalo’s most eccentric accommodations.
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