Group chats, AI girlfriends and algorithmic culture

Plus: How Mormon influencers popularized the Stanley tumbler

Stanley’s previous aesthetic. Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.

First things first: Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for the outpouring of love and empathy last week. Longtime readers know I think the internet’s a shithole, but you guys disprove my cynicism regularly. It's a real risk to write outside my newsletter lane — and yeah, I lose subs whenever I do — but I'd rather have a few real ones than fake it for a crowd. So, truly: Thank you.

Also, I'm still working my way through your emails (!) and plan to respond to all of them soon. Until then, I have a pretty fun Q&A this week. Without further ado…

Chalk up another win for Mormon women, those unsung pioneers of internet culture. 

They perfected the mommy blog. They rule Instagram and Pinterest. And now they’re the reason you can't escape those inexplicable Stanley tumblers.

Stanleys are objects of cult fascination; to call them pricey water bottles would almost miss the point. The 40-ounce Quencher, in particular, has become ubiquitous on TikTok and Instagram, where a certain type of wealthy, well-contoured woman fusses over the bottles in her collection as if they were show dogs or racehorses.

In Target stores across the country, meanwhile, Stanley stans have literally run, jumped, and camped overnight to score their tumbler of choice. Google searches for the term “Stanley” have almost doubled in the past three weeks alone, and the hashtag #Stanley has three billion views on TikTok. 

What transformed this particular product from a camping stand-by to the must-have accessory of 2024? I did not have “the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” on my bingo card, but

Paul Matzko

saw it from a mile off. 

In December, Matzko — a historian and a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute — posted a widely circulated TikTok video arguing that Mormon influencers sparked the original hype around the Stanley tumbler. (It's a thesis backed by journalist McKay Coppins, who is himself Mormon, and long-time readers of Mormon lifestyle blogs.)

I was intrigued by these Mormon Stanleys. Nay — I was fascinated. So I reached out to Matzko for more details. The following is an edited/reformatted transcript of our email conversation. (And if any of this interests you, which I’m sure it will, you’ll also want to check out Matzko’s Substack!!)

When did you first make the connection between Stanleys and Mormon women? Is that a digital community you spend time in yourself — or is it something you discovered later?

I only made the Stanley/Mormon connection in mid-2023 as my TikTok FYP started filling with Stanley fit checks (tumbler matching outfit), folks showing off their sizable collections, etc. Originally, the Mormon tie was just intuition based on how the videos looked; there’s a similar visual aesthetic and obvious demographic to Mormon influencer accounts, which I was familiar with from prior knowledge of Mormon mommy bloggers/vloggers. You know it when you see it.

Curious, I then started digging around and found this 2022 NYT piece about the sisters and cousin who run the Buy Guide, which played an important role in the popularization of Stanley’s tumblers.

But what immediately surprised me about the piece was the utter absence of religion, when a quick check told me that at least two of the Buy Guide founders were Brigham Young University grads. [Caitlin note: More than 98% of BYU students identify as Mormon.] And several of the highlighted Instagram influencers are known for their Mormon affiliations. That’s when I knew there was something there in terms of religion that the Times style beat reporters either missed or were uncomfortable covering (which leads to another conversation about representation in modern journalism). 

For the record, I did some backgrounding on the Buy Guide myself. They don’t publicly identify as Mormon or as Mormon influencers — but there are, as you said, some suggestions. The Buy Guide recommends, for instance, a book called A Case for the Book of Mormon, which claims to help “readers clearly understand … that the Book of Mormon is true.”

When I reached out to The Buy Guide and shared your TikTok with them, however, they kind of demurred. I quote: “Hmm.. This is an interesting take. I think that idea has more to do with the concentration of influencers in Utah (which we could discuss enough for a completely separate article). MANY influencers sharing in Utah helped the quencher's popularity grow among their followers.”

They go on to say they are still the top-selling influencer of Stanley tumblers, but that “we obviously wouldn't have any statistics (or care) about [the] religious views” of their followers. 

It doesn’t surprise me that Buy Guide would say that (though do note that they deny nothing!). I find that Mormons are, understandably, often leery of being made fun of or misrepresented by outsiders, so I’d chalk a little of the wariness down to that. 

I believe it’s unfair, but more Americans have a negative skew in their view of Mormonism than they do of any other religious tradition, which is a fact that Mormons pay attention to. It’s also probably not ideal branding for one's corporate entity — whether you're Buy Guide or a soda shop chain — to be pegged as Mormon when you’re trying to build a broader general audience.

I’m glad you brought up soda, because that’s a big part of the Mormon Stanley story. I wasn’t very familiar with this history, but I learned (from your interview with the CBC!) that observant Mormons do not drink coffee or tea, and historically many abstained from other caffeinated beverages, too. But that shifted in 2012, and a huge youth soda culture grew out of the change. Can you tell me more about that?

I’m not sure how much of this made it into the CBC piece, but a critical NBC documentary about Mitt Romney in August 2012 mentioned a caffeine ban. That led the Mormon church a few days later to put out a statement on its blog clarifying that the official position only prohibited coffee and tea, not caffeinated soda per se. There’s all kinds of reporting that you can find from 2012-2017 about Mormons going crazy for soda, e.g. BYU putting in a soda fountain with Coke (!) as an option after a sixty-plus year ban.

So there was a youth movement of college-aged Mormons who suddenly felt free to drink soda without feeling bad about it in the early 2010s, which led to the creation/expansion of soda shop chains like Swig and FiiZ. It’s no accident that Swig’s original location was across the street from Utah Tech (which was then Dixie State University; don’t ask, lol).

And people were’t just buying sodas at chains, right? They also made all sorts of concoctions at home, adding cream or flavored syrups and powders to plain sodas. Those "dirty sodas” were huge on TikTok in the summer of 2022. Fast forward a year, and you have all these #WaterTok influencers mixing syrups and powders with plain water in their Stanley tumblers. The through line there is pretty clear.

I’m curious, looking at this more broadly — Mormon women are a really powerful force in internet culture, especially in the lifestyle space. Do you have any sense why that is?

Mormon women were influencers before we’d even invented the concept! Mormonism is a product of the 1820s/30s religious revival movements during the Second Great Awakening. At the time, it was common for Christians of all stripes to idealize what historians call “republican motherhood,” or the idea that women were domestic guardians responsible for the care and instruction of the next generation.

That’s the milieu when Joseph Smith codifies his ideas. It’s in the air. And so there’s always been this strong emphasis on family, on forever families sealed into eternity, on genealogy and so on. Family is core to Mormon theology and practice and always has been. And today, that still means Mormon women — despite high education attainment and high incomes, which tend to correlate with lower birthrates — still have nearly twice as many kids as the American average (!).

But for most of U.S. history, that’s meant a kind of confinement, where Mormon mothers were stuck at home, out of sight, out of mind. The internet changed all that, allowing these mothers to give the world a window into their households. 

And so when mommy blogging took off in the 2000s, Mormon women had an outsized role to play. Like, if you enjoy that content, you’re going to get twice the bang for your buck with the average Mormon family! And that’s been encouraged by Mormon leadership as a way of testifying about the verity and value of their faith. It’s a message that says without words that if you want a happy, picture-perfect family like this perfect blogging/gramming family (complete with oversize tumbler), then why don’t you check out the Latter Day Saints?

Is there anything bubbling up in Mormon social media circles now that you expect will be ... the next big thing?

I don’t know … but I know where to look! The Stanley craze has probably jumped the shark this Christmas, but whatever comes next when it comes to trad-adjacent consumption trends will probably percolate up from a similar space. And I would expect that to continue for another decade as millennials/elder millennials — which non-coincidentally includes the Buy Guide founders — continue to age into peak earnings/consumption during their late 30s and 40s.

You can read and subscribe to Matzko’s Substack here.

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If you read anything else this weekend

“Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet,” by Kyle Chayka for The New Yorker. Every major news org, as far as I can tell, has excerpted or reviewed Chayka’s new book this week … which made it difficult to choose just one excerpt to share! But, since you subscribe to a newsletter with the anachronism “Gchat” in its title, I went with the elder millenial nostalgia trap. Chayka, undoubtedly one of the best writers we have on internet aesthetics and culture, traces his journey from the “fragmented, DIY web” of Livejournal and AIM to … whatever the hell we live in now. (And, okay, if you’ll allow me ONE more recommendation: “The Tyranny of the Algorithm,” in The Guardian, revisits one of my all-time favorite pieces of internet criticism.)

“How Group Chats Rule the World,” by Sophie Haigney for The New York Times Magazine. In its most insightful and essential sections, this essay is less about “group chats” than it is about the state of being continuously and inescapably connected to all of your acquaintances. This is not a state I personally exist in, nor would I ever want to (plz see elder millennial discourse, above), but it feels like a logical evolution of the cultural trends that began with the social web 20 years ago. I’d actually read these first two pieces back-to-back, if you have the time for them.

“How Platforms Killed Pitchfork,” by Casey Newton in Platformer. Among the many eulogies for Pitchfork this week (see: Defector, Rolling Stone), I appreciated this analysis of the larger trends that doomed the internet’s premier music publication. The discussion of Spotify, in particular — and all that its easy, endless abundance has meant for the way we consume music — reminded me of criticisms leveled at dating apps. You get more options, maybe, but … less depth!

“How AI Is Changing Gymnastics Judging,” by Jessica Taylor Price for MIT Technology Review. I like this mainly as a parable for AI disruption in any field that mixes art and technical skill. (AI’s truly coming for everyone if it’s coming for gymnasts.) But these new AI judging systems are also exacting in ways that seem …. dystopian? They spot errors so small that human eyes literally cannot see them.

“The Internet Is Being Ruined by Bloated Junk,” by Caroline Mimbs Nyce for The Atlantic. ~Content~ of all types is getting too long. This newsletter included. 😕

👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was on the European libraries ~of the future.~

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Postscripts

Cheapfakes. TikTok tarot. Miss Conspirituality. There is NO evidence that remote work harms (or helps!) worker productivity. What happens when schools ban smartphones. Andrew Tate’s lesser sins. “A single man in possession of a computer must be in want of an AI girlfriend.”

How your reading habits compare with the U.S. average. How a song becomes synonymous with a TikTok niche. Internet reactions mean nothing anymore and politics are fandom, increasingly. Awaiting a union for content creators. Despairing that my AI radar is so poor. Last but not least: Does a teapot or a ruler draw a better circle? (The answer speaks reassuring volumes about how much language models understand the world.)

That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.

— Caitlin