Helicopter parents, cheap tequila and the internet's last great mystery
In the age of AI and facial recognition, why can no one ID this celebrity?
I drafted a whole introduction for this week’s edition about the demise of Jezebel, a site whose comments section arguably raised an entire generation of very online feminists. I read a lot of eulogies and personal essays. I skimmed an entire Ph.D. dissertation! And then I saw a Thread about a TikTok about a weird subreddit … and all my takes on Jezebel promptly vanished.
The subreddit is called r/CelebrityNumberSix, and it’s devoted to solving a mystery so banal that at first I believed it was some kind of troll. (I’ve not ruled out that possibility — but if it’s a joke, it’s a long-running one.)
The mystery started, members of the subreddit claim, when a user asked for help identifying the six stylized celebrity faces printed on a set of tacky curtains they bought in Finland 15 years ago. Five of the six faces were easy to identify: They include Josh Holloway, Jessica Alba and Orlando Bloom. But one face defied identification, even with the help of advanced facial recognition tools.
It could be the model Carolyn Murphy. It could be a younger, longer-maned Brad Pitt. Whoever it is, they’re currently known only as Celebrity Number Six.
“Thousands of people have tried practically everything you can think of to try to identify who Celebrity Number Six is,” declares the TikTok that got me into all this. “… This mystery is one of the internet’s greatest.”
Leaving aside the triviality of this search for one moment — and yes, I’m aware just how trivial it is — the stubbornness of this particular “mystery” does defy immediate explanation. Celebrity Six sleuths claim to have contacted the suppliers of the fabric, tracing it back to a bankrupt Finnish company. They’ve used Stable Diffusion, ControlNet and a host of other AI tools to reconstruct a photo of Six’s face.
And of course they have tried PimEyes, the terrifying facial recognition search-engine beloved by TikTok sleuths and would-be doxxers, which trawls the bowels of the social web to surface obscure pictures of anyone with even an incidental internet presence. PimEyes, you may recall, has previously been used to identify everyone from overdose victims to Capitol rioters to Eras Tour cameramen.
And yet, despite the alarming accuracy of these tools in other contexts and the growing ubiquity of facial recognition writ large, thousands of people have found themselves stumped for over two years by these (objectively ugly!) Finnish curtains. I’m not sure how long that can possibly last — the subreddit doubled in size last month — but I like the idea that, even now, the internet harbors its enigmas.
To quote the moderator of another subreddit, dedicated to a different minor mystery covered last week in Rolling Stone: “Especially in 2023, with everything digitized … it’s probably very interesting to a lot of young people that this … is seemingly untraceable.”
ANYWAY: We can always do Jezebel next week! I would love to hear what the site meant to you, if anything. Plz drop your takes in the comments section, which I am bravely opening for the very first time … and don’t make me regret this bit of early-Jezebelian liberality!!
If you read anything else this weekend
“A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft,” by James Somers for The New Yorker. You don’t have to know anything about programming to appreciate this reflection — a thoughtful, nuanced and ultimately (frustratingly) unresolved essay on what AI will do to any beloved craft or vocation. Doesn’t the process often matter as much as the product? Isn’t there inherent value to gathering skill over time? Will my work feel the same — will it matter as much — when much of it involves writing prompts for AI?
“How China Took Over the World’s Online Shopping Carts,” by Viola Zhou, Caiwei Chen, Laís Martins and Ester Christine Natalia for Rest of World. If you want to see the future of online shopping, look to Chinese retail giants like Temu and Shein: They’re massive, they’re expanding and they’re disrupting longtime norms in fields from marketing to import law to supply chain management. I bought some stuff from Temu for the first time last month (I know — but I was curious!!), and I can confirm that neither the economics nor many of the products made a ton of sense.
“The Final Frontier for Helicopter Parents,” by Juno DeMelo for The Cut. This was my introduction to the bonkers world of college-parent Facebook groups, where some preoccupied progenitors stage-manage the friendships, class schedules and relationships of their (purportedly independent, adult) children. My only complaint is that this story is short. The people want more details, Juno!! I would happily read another 10,000 words on planned play dates for college students.
“Inside The Strange, Secretive Rise Of The 'Overemployed,’” by Aki Ito for Business Insider. My biggest curiosity about the remote workers holding down two or three jobs has always involved the sneaky, sordid logistics of it all. Like — what do you put on your resume? How do you handle last-minute calls? This story delivers on all the delightful specifics, from locating your jobs in two different time zones to freezing your employment history with the credit bureaus.
“Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas,” by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic. I think The Sphere looks extremely cool, and it once pained me to admit that. It’s a shrine to screens. A stimulant you stand in. A multi-billion-dollar spectacle built to extract money and social shares from curious dads. (Hi, Dad.) But this essay convinced me that might be okay — that The Sphere does accomplish something pretty interesting: It recasts the boundaries between technology, art, artists and the audience (… all while fleecing you for rail drinks!).
Plus, a bonus read: “When The O.C. Killed Marissa: ‘What Have We Done?’,” by Alan Sepinwall, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage for Vanity Fair. Imagine your author reading this oral history of The O.C., positively riveted to every damn word, and increasingly devastated that the lack of internet angle bars it from newsletter inclusion. Then, roughly halfway in — hallelujah!! An extended reference to a long-dead TV blog. “TV Without Pity” apparently played some circuitous role in the downfall of the early aughts’ best teen soap opera.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this piece on teenage “looksmaxxers.”
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Postscripts
Sad beige. Barkitecture. Girl internet. A “translation” app for animals and a fantasy league for music. Two profiles of the “godfather of AI.” One wild novella on teenage hackers. There’s no fix for fake reviews and no such thing as “deinfluencers.”
We’re all living in “bespoke realities” now, and that doesn’t seem great. The dubious death of Tumblr. The town that Airbnb made. Where the speed of carrier pigeons exceeds the internet. What a TV show made for TikTok looks like. Is no industry on earth safe from the ravages of AI?!
Osama bin Laden is the new Tide pod. Reddit is the new Wirecutter. All the TikTok drama of 2023. An argument for worse smart phone cameras. The internet is full of cool people penises. Jeff Bezos drinks cheap tequila (… and other variably fascinating, personal revelations). Last but not least: “The three decided to meet up in a public parking lot, where Kyle gave Angela a cup of his semen.”
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin