#777: Happily surrendering our leisure to lines
Plus: the physicality of data, the second coming of froyo, and the rise of "dopamine sites"
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If you read anything this weekend
Roschelle is a stressed-out single mom who develops a close relationship with her Alexa smart speaker just as her teen daughters start to “befriend” AI chatbots of their own. But this is less a story about artificial intelligence than it is about human care — the gaps in human care, specifically; the places where someone reaches out in need, and no one ever reaches back to them.
I don’t know how else to put it: This piece is haunting. There’s a twist halfway through that gave me full-body chills. And while it’s not at all written in a moralizing or heavy-handed way, I think it’s stuck with me all week in part because it forced me to take a second look at some of my own relationships and social interactions. Like: When have I been that person who didn’t reach back? Who in my life is buying a dozen Alexas because other human beings aren’t showing up for them…? [The New Yorker]
Here is a non-exhaustive list of theories for the inexorable growth of LINE CULTURE, a phenomenon so incredibly foreign to me that it might as well be snaking around the moon:
Young New Yorkers are essentially lemmings and will eat or do whatever TikTok tells them to.
FOMO is the governing emotional force in modern culture.
The cult of optimization has taught us to seek out the very “best” of everything, even at the expense of comfort, time, etc.
The social validation of a post from a trendy spot > the time it took to stand there.
Lines put you in communion with your fellow man.
Lines reacquaint you with the inconvenience and inefficiency that apps have otherwise excised from your day-to-day existence.
These theories contradict and collide against each other, which is maybe why this summer’s record lines have attracted so much fascination. (Also, surely, the side-eyeing KIDS THESE DAYS of it all — I have never felt so old or so smug as I did reading about this.)
I think the bleakest possible reading is that lines are a blatant, embodied sign of how completely digital capitalism has come to dominate us — willingly! Joyfully, even!! We’re all happily surrendering our leisure and freedom to these opaque, multinational corporations.
A marginally less dystopian, but still pretty bleak, read is that our social or communal lives have become so degraded that standing in a line really feels like having fun. And then there’s the cool kids’ shrugging explanation, embraced by the authors of both pieces linked here: It’s just a little froyo! What’s the fuss!
I haven’t yet decided which camp I belong to, having never experienced these lines myself, and being unlikely to ever experience them, since I have a toddler who would require a steady, low-dose drip of puffs to get through any type of line situation. If you have embraced line culture, though, do tell me what you think. And until then, we’ll all anxiously await more line trend pieces. [Curbed, Bloomberg, The New Atlantis]
Cloud computing is an intentionally vague, ethereal term, intended to disguise what is actually is: Your information isn’t vaporous and free-floating. It just sits on banks of remote servers somewhere, instead of on your laptop or tablet. We tend not to think about the physicality of our data — the fact that it takes up space and electricity and water, that it sits separate and parallel from us somewhere — until we’re reminded by a catastrophic failure, such as climate change (data centers are a massive source of emissions, with some consuming the energy of two million homes) or spectacular, caper-like thefts (like British thief Terry Ellis’s.)
In 2007, Ellis and his crew carried out an Ocean’s-Eleven-like heist at a heavily fortified Verizon data center in London, impersonating police, subduing guards, and stealing 80 servers for a mysterious banking client. He was caught and served an almost nine-year prison sentence. But on the other side of that, the data storage business has grown larger than ever, and those facilities still aren’t wholly secure. Your (physical, “cloud”) data is vulnerable to terrorist attacks and insider theft, in particular. [New York Times]
It’s the single most stubborn and insufferable tell of AI writing, but no one really knows what causes it. One theory is that chatbots love to say “it’s not X, it’s Y” because human reviewers who graded early AI models favored that construction. Another theory is that it’s statistically safest to continue a sentence that starts with “this is” by saying what this is not. (Put another way: There are a trillion words or phrases that could follow “this is” — this is Sparta, this is what you came for, this is your brain on drugs — and “this is not just” is probably the most common of the bunch.)
Regardless of which theory is correct, “it’s not X, it’s Y” — also called negative parallelism, contrastive phrasing or metalinguistic negation — is a really tricky tendency to engineer out. Which is good news, I guess, for those of us who like to think we can still distinguish AI-written texts from human ones. [The Atlantic]
Welp, here’s another one to file under “joyfully surrendering our leisure to digital capitalism”: “DOPAMINE SITES” — a South Korean export, naturally — are websites that simulate the experience of shopping for food or clothing online, but you never actually purchase anything.
“The entire experience can be pleasurable,” said one “certified financial therapist.” (Is that even a certifiable profession?!) “It’s browsing. It’s deciding what you want to add to your cart. It’s the excitement of hitting enough in your cart to get a coupon. It’s the excitement of tracking your packages.” [Washington Post]
Postscripts
➤ “The Spotify model is like saying your favorite restaurant should just be giving you free food until you decide to buy a t-shirt.” [Pigeons & Planes]
➤ NPR interviewed five music influencers who admitted that they often take money to promote specific songs or artists, without ever disclosing those paid sponsorships. [NPR]
➤ Science has validated what Rusty Foster memorably observed five months ago: Whatever the economy-shaking, civilization-toppling hype around artificial intelligence … babies still learn things better and faster than LLMs. [Wired]
➤ A sprawling ecosystem of YouTube and Substack creators are going long on “self-education content”: performatively intellectual lectures, essays and reading lists that claim to act as a counterweight to brainrot and passive algorithms. [SSENSE]
➤ A backlash is reportedly brewing against wellness optimization, as more people realize that things like wearable health-trackers and sleep-tracking apps are “a form of self-surveillance.” [Dazed]
➤ I liked froyo a lot better the last time around, when it came without all the fraught “clean girl” connotations. [Vox]
➤ Family-oriented AI assistants promise to liberate parents — and mothers, in particular — from the cognitive labor of managing their household’s logistics. But historical labor-saving innovations, like the washing machine or the modern stove, haven’t exactly freed women from chores. [The New Yorker]
➤ “Surveillance chic” is a (subversive?) trend in which people use security tools, like elevator cameras and Ring doorbells, to snap selfies or document their outfits. [kate lindsay]
➤ The average American and European smartphone user receives an estimated 146 notifications per day, an almost three-fold increase since 2016. [Ruby Justice Thelot]
In case you missed it
The most-clicked link from last week’s edition was this Verge profile of Partiful.
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