Chasin' the lulz
~ How to Safeguard Your Sanity in the Last Days of the Election ~
(The Official Links I Would Gchat You GuideTM)
Leave all social media except Pinterest. Begin a board titled "puppies."
Compulsively click through "Here Is Today" until "today" has no meaning.
Print out an adult coloring page. Make sure it's not a map of the U.S.
Utilize the Amazon 1-click button every time you feel election stress.
Indulge in a relaxing soak and purposely drop your phone in the bath.
Do not look at polls. Don't read 538. In fact, forget how to do math.
Develop an addiction to a branded mobile game. Look, even Oprah has one now!
Enter therapy for said gaming addiction, and give it four years before you come out.
If none of these work, here's a failproof fix: go out and vote early!! There are only five more days until we can return to ... something approaching normalcy.
1. How the Internet is loosening our grip on truth. (Or killing the whole concept, as the case may be!) Just look around Facebook: The whole thing's swamped with rumors, hoaxes and conspiracies. The reason, it seems, is that -- thanks to the Web!! -- people have simply *too much* information. And instead of sifting through it, like rational beings, they just glom onto the stuff that agrees with them.
2. How the Trump/Clinton election turned us all into trolls. That's trolls in the classical sense: cynical misanthropes, chasin' the lulz. The pursuit of lulz, or mean-spirited humor, has come to define a contentious election. Now it's hard to imagine a public space that isn't consumed by them.
3. How long until we geotag every place there is? It seems abstract, but some parks already face the implications. Tourists have flocked to once-remote areas after seeing them in Instagram pics. But those places often aren't ready for the influx... and the 'grammers themselves can kinda be dicks.
4. An appreciation of Instagram ads and their calculated aesthetic. All Instagrams advertise stuff, after all -- but only the ads empower you to buy it.
5. Sharing this delightful story largely 'cause I can't believe these guys exist: the bros who met their best bro friends on Bumble -- a dating site designed pretty explicitly for chicks.
Postscripts: Emoldjis. Napflix. Digital kitsch. The buffering agony threshold and the Pussy Project. How Twitter bots are shaping the election and where laptops go when they die. This is why -- in 2016!!! -- you still cannot actually vote online. The 50 best apps of the year; the most Kickstarted cities in the U.S. Why emoji have become far more realistic. Some advice for my friends (... and their "friends") who have recently gotten engaged. FYI: Facebook's fake news problem isn't going away.
Getting hacked is inevitable. "Read receipt" is pronounced RED. A handy guide to our visions of VR and the orgs that own the Internet. If I need Facebook to live longer, I'm down with dying young. I'm also rethinking my Twitter, having matched Takei on this one. Are you addicted to technology? (Er probably, I don't know.) How Clippy predicted the chatbot boom 20 years ago. Let's raise a glass for the diverse talent on Vine and an eyebrow at the people proposing to Alexa. Last but not least, the dangerous second life of your Twitter data.
Until next week!
@caitlindewey
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