It's a no bones day for me
Spooky season, capybaras, latter-day dancing plagues, French bread, fictional influencers and the great rebranding™
Hi friends. Today is October 22, 2021.
The theme of this week is REBRANDS, and boy — we’ve got some good ones. Facebook’s rebranding as something more boring and definitely less evil. Q’s rebranding as a long-shot congressional candidate in Arizona. Donald Trump’s rebranding as a tech founder, complete with credible allegations of IP infringement and megalomaniacal pitch deck. Incidentally, today also marks the 13th birthday of the Google Play store … which you may have known, pre-rebrand, as Android Market.
(Psst: If you like today’s header, please check out Graham Smith’s full Flickr album. I could see this being a good party game. “Good,” of course, is relative.)
If you read anything this weekend
“Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor,” by Julie Jargon in the Wall Street Journal. Chances are high you’ve seen this already, but in case you haven’t: Holy shit, the brain is pretty crazy, isn’t it?! In this case, the brains of some anxious teenagers appear to have mimicked tics the teens first saw on social media. It’s basically a latter day dancing plague, with influencers!
“The Metaverse Is Bad,” by Ian Bogost in The Atlantic. This is perhaps the only good distillation I’ve yet read of the metaverse, the sci-fi “fantasy of power and control” that Mark Zuckerberg is betting the farm on. “The metaverse offers a way to leave behind worldly irritants and relocate to greener pastures. This is the rationale of a strip miner or a private-equity partner.”
“Raya and the Promise of Private Social Media,” by Kyle Chayka in the New Yorker. Raya “solved the problems” of social media by leaving most people out: It’s a very intriguing, tightly regulated walled garden where celebs like Lizzo and Ben Affleck purportedly hang out. Exclusivity aside, however, Raya isn’t unusual: Lots of us are migrating to closed online communities … because the open internet is self-evidently awful.
“Germany’s Promising Plan to Bring Conspiracy Theorists Back From the Brink,” by Alessio Perrone in Slate. This is a great, slightly more sober sequel to the Q therapist story I shared last week. In this case, a team of German psychologists helps families torn apart by pandemic misinformation. It works, allegedly (!), with adequate reserves of empathy and “tolerance.”
“Crazy Days And Nights Readers Fear The Gossip Site Has Gone QAnon,” by Katie Notopoulos in Buzzfeed. I’m not personally familiar with this site, but I love Katie’s analysis of why gossip fans may have been ripe for red-pilling. Most of us do, after all, kinda believe in some sort of conspiracy.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this Reddit thread on “useful unknown websites.”
The classifieds
This edition of Links is powered by pumpkins, Pumpking, these vicious texts of people quitting their jobs … and the following very wonderful sponsors:
Gag Me With a Chainsaw — Celebrate the spookiest month of the year with Gag Me With a Chainsaw, where your horror loving hosts, Corie and Sarah, make an attempt to watch and discuss every eighties slasher. That's right! Every. Eighties. Slasher.
Follow Friday — Do you listen to Follow Friday? It's the podcast about who you should follow online, as determined by your favorite writers, podcasters, comedians, and other creative people. New, free episodes come out every Friday.
The Museum of Marketing Madness — We curate, skewer and roast the worst of advertising to comic perfection. We never close. Admission free! (But you can donate through Patreon!)
📣📣 You too can get your product, newsletter or cause in front of 12,000+ subscribers, ALL while supporting the free edition of this newsletter. Fill out this form to book; ads are $35.
Postscripts
Spooky season. Shelter Tok. Stanford takes on the techlash. The math tutor teaching calc on Pornhub and Disney’s amazingly toxic fans. How fragile male egos fuel the far right. When your favorite TV show got bad. “The internet fosters narcissism, anxiety, and anonymous trolling — yet it’s also full of capybaras.” Hadn’t thought of it like that!
BONES OR NO BONES? It’s a no bones day for me. (And on a similar theme: bones, or overpriced miniatures you bought from a scammer accidentally?) The “limitations of machine ethics.” The wild immersive theater of fictional influencers. Last but not least — or perhaps very least?: 500 years of human labor are wasted every day on CAPTCHAs.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin