Hell, I have no idea
This week: Cursed Olympics, New Gawker, the "good" internet, fake quotes, chicken nuggets and chatting with the dead
Hi friends. Today is July 30, 2021.
We’re on Day 8 of the Cursed Olympics and Day 2 of the New Gawker. It’s been six years since the adoption of the middle finger emoji, because we needed more ways to lose our tempers. The sun is in Leo. The “king” is in Philly. The fastest-growing subreddit is this schadenfreude bomb. (Y’all liked this schtick last week, so I’m doing it again! Now let’s read some articles.)
If you read anything this weekend
“The Jessica Simulation: Love and loss in the age of A.I.,” by Jason Fagone in The San Francisco Chronicle. This runs perilously close to the plot of an early Black Mirror episode — the one where the nice, grieving British lady keeps reincarnating the eldest Weasley brother as a dead-eyed, obedient robot — up until the very end, which is a … relatively happy one! See also: these two new pieces on the limits of A.I. text-generation — they still can’t write real poetry or exercise any kind of values or ethics.
“The Day the Good Internet Died,” by Katie Baker in The Ringer. This is ostensibly about Google Reader, a service I did like and miss 100 internet years ago. But it’s also about that old internet — the navigation, the weirdness, the serendipity — and the lived experience of aging out of/with it, which resonated more than I’d like it to. “Did a Good Internet ever even exist, or am I just nostalgic for my youth?” Hell, I have no idea. But compare the pure, naïve innocence of Google Reader to, say … the TikTok algorithm.
“Why So Many Millennials Are Obsessed With Dogs,” by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic. Pups, paleoanthropologists, class anxiety — regular readers of this newsletter will recognize that this story is basically catnip (…pupperoni?) for me. I *am* sort of skeptical of the notion that dog-ownership is some long-haul side effect of surviving the recession … but I guess you can’t just write “they’re good dogs Brent” in The Atlantic.
“Hundreds of Ways to Get Shit Done, And We Still Don’t,” by Clive Thompson in Wired. To-do apps are legion, but they don’t work. Even their creators apparently understand this. But fixing the to-do app — “a curiously moral type of software” (!) — requires more philosophical and psychological introspection than I think the average user would go in for on a daily basis.
“The Internet’s Fake Quote Machine Keeps Attributing This Corny Line to My Mother,” by Eleanor Margolis in Gawker. On the weird and wonderful industry of quotation websites, which are very often wrong.
The classifieds
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Postscripts
Despite the Olympics many problems, this year and generally, I am very much here for Olympics #content, including Olympic tattoos, Olympic TikToks, and this fascinating explainer on “the twisties.” The crypto bubble in hip-hop. The disinformiest of the dozen. Between QR codes and that gross priest-outing incident, I’m getting pretty paranoid about sharing my location.
The planet is burning and Covid is back, but there is good news! — we’re living in “the golden age of dinosaur chicken nuggets,” according to the Wall Street Journal. In praise of the single-serve site. How pandemics change architecture. RIP Clubhouse, we hardly knew ya.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin