A fireball of chaos and internet drama
In this edition: the end of geography, Saint Bernards, chocolate chip cookies and covid disinformers.
A couple months before all this started in earnest,
at least in the United States, the writer and game designer Ian Bogost wrote an essay whose almost creepy prescience sunk in for me just recently. In it, Bogost argues that because digital technologies allow us to do just about any task anywhere, individual places have no real distinction or meaning anymore. “It’s possible to do so much from home,” he wrote, “so why leave at all?” (😭)
Bogost was writing about archetypal places: offices, grocery stores, malls, theaters, bars, arcades. Decades of hardware and software development have let us replicate those places digitally (and literally, in some cases).
But I’ve also been thinking about geographic place, and to what extent the pandemic will also change our relationship to it. Just yesterday, Tinder announced it would soon allow regular users to nix its “geography” filter — which feels like a small but telling step in the post-geographic direction. The very term “end of geography,” coined by a bank economist in the early 1990s, grew out of the fact that new phone and computer networks made physical trading floors redundant.
In Buffalo, the geographic place where I live, the end of geography is a v. popular topic of speculation. The Rust Belt is plagued by persistent brain drain and population decline, so the prospect of remote workers untethering from bigger cities provides a real glimmer of optimism. In one recent survey, a plurality of Redfin users in Boston, New York and San Francisco said that, if allowed to keep working remotely, they’d move somewhere cheaper. The ability to do any task in any undistinguished place, and far removed from other people, could potentially remake the urban landscape forever.
Ironically, for me, I moved to Buffalo because I wanted to be physically, geographically closer to people I can now see only with the help of video-conferencing apps. On Tuesday, as I FaceTimed my grandmother in her nursing home, I found myself wondering why we didn’t do this all along — why it took a pandemic for her facility to buy a couple of iPads. If they had, maybe we wouldn’t have uprooted our lives and careers to move back here. Maybe place wouldn’t have mattered quite as much as I thought it did.
But of course, I didn’t know it was “possible to do so much from home” until I was confined to it.
Links you can use
A list of podcasts to soothe your pandemic panic: Because “The Daily,” despite its best attempts, doesn’t exactly cure dread.
A virtual cookbook club, launching June 1: For those who have tired of sourdough bread.
A free resource for learning Spanish (or just catching a lol?): I am *actually* obsessed with these very droll and painfully over-annunciated YouTube videos.
If you read anything this weekend
Making sense of Elon Musk, the tech anti-hero of the covid era. A truly brow-furrowing examination of Musk’s psyche, by his semi-estranged (?) biographer. [Businessweek]
One last Alison Roman take. THE LAST ONE!! The very last!!!! Truly, as someone who has read a lot of think pieces on Roman: this thoughtful and wide-ranging essay by Navneet Alang is the best. [Eater]
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: Every house on TikTok is more or less the same. Blame suburban aesthetics, big-box retailers — and the moderation guidelines of TikTok itself, which favor a certain type of place. [Curbed]
Meet the left’s answer to the Ben Shapiro, the Daily Caller and the rest of the conservative Facebook machine. “Occupy Democrats” is run by two political amateurs who have amassed more online power than the actual Biden campaign. [NYT]
“Like most great online institutions, LearnedLeague was created because someone was bored at their white-collar job.” Enormously intrigued by this 23-year-old, invite-only trivia league, which somehow counts Mick Mulvaney, Ken Jennings AND David Benioff among its patrons. [The Ringer]
Postscripts
Instagram ruined the chocolate chip cookie. Giphy ruined the GIF. The joy of purging photos from your phone and the right way to internet in a pandemic. “A fireball of chaos and internet drama.” A “don’t-@ me” that actually (sort of) works. An exhaustive, tell-all history of Black Twitter and a run-down of the Covid-19 “spin doctors.”
Online food delivery remains an incredible scam: exhibits A and B. In unrelated scams, fake AI is the dumbest trope on reality TV. A step-by-step breakdown of how “Plandemic” went viral (… if saying “went viral” is still cool?). The woes of performing social distance for social media. “Hide and Seek” takes me straight back to 2005 — I will never not share a new story on it. Last but not least: Zoom meetings have promptly become yet another place for … women to feel inadequate.
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— Caitlin