It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right
Twitter, cults, jungle juice, bot boyfriends, floppy disks, Ask Jeeves and life coaches
With apologies to new subscribers
Every Musk down in Muskville, the slavish and the wronged,
continued — despite the bad news piling on!1
They HADN'T prevented a “hellscape”! IT HELLED!
Repeat outages outed their fuck-ups as well!
And Elon, with his fast-thumbs tapping on his phone,
Stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?"
"We freed all the speeches! We green-lit fake news!"
"We survived the collapse of ad revenue!"
And he puzzled three hours, till his puzzler was sore.
Then Elon thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Twitter," he thought, "is too gone to be saved."
"Maybe the bird … perhaps … should go back in its cage!"
If you read anything this weekend
“The Man of Your Dreams,” by Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz in The Cut. Discussions of AI romance tend to involve human men and female bots — a power dynamic that sometimes gets pretty gross. But women and non-binary people are also falling for AI, and often for totally different reasons: to cope with fertility and pregnancy issues, to work through abuse or sexual assault, or have the kind of sex they don’t have IRL. (Not that robot boyfriends are perfect.)
“The $2 Billion Question of Who You Are at Work,” by Emma Goldberg in The New York Times. Some companies are turning to personality tests to smooth the edges of remote work — who should be hybrid, who should be hired, etc etc. But it’s not totally clear if the tests are effective … or even accurate. (Personally skeptical of these, but … where are my fellow ENFJs at??)
“The Real Life Consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI Obsession,” by Ellen Huet in Bloomberg. We love a cult story, and this is a good one — on a “blurry,” “deeply influential” group of “self-jailbreaking,” polyamorous AI researchers. Members of the subculture are, perhaps unsurprisingly, prone to psychotic episodes; it’s also “a hunting ground for con artists [and] sexual predators.”
“The Untold Story Of Andrew Tate, The Internet’s Most Notorious Influencer,” by Tom Warren and Ikran Dahir in Buzzfeed. This is less the untold story of Andrew Tate than the untold story of his family, which is not universally riveting throughout. But if you too have wondered how a failed reality-TV contestant/otherwise unremarkable misogynist captured the imaginations (& algorithms) of zillions of Young Men in Crisis™ … here lie some answers to your questions!
“TikTok’s Viral Monks Are Clashing with Buddhist Authorities,” by Fiona Kelliher in Rest of World. On the rise of “MonkTok” and the broader, universal question of how religions adapts to technological and cultural changes.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Slate piece on the “eventification” of everything.
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Postscripts
Brought to you by the floppy disk: Chuck E. Cheese and custom vests. Brought to you by the wide world of TikTok: jungle juice, parasites and car theft. #Menwithpodcasts. Peak trauma. The tradwife-to-white-supremacy pipeline. The vindication of Ask Jeeves and the emerging aesthetics of AI.
Why so many people need glasses now. What YouTube does and does not let you say. A celebration of @NYT_first_said — and neologisms generally. Celibacy is having a moment. Short-form video dubbing will have one shortly. A browser for people with ADHD and grief as seen through Google Translate. Yes, “inspiration” is on every damn thing. Nope, IG’s “[fill in the blank] coaches” are not legit. AI v. OnlyFans. “Unwise” computers. Finally: Don’t think “no humans” is the flex you think it is.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin