Screenshots from the apocalypse
Peak TV, summer branding, air quality apps, Kia boys, AI songs and personality tests
Code purple
It seems most everyone I know spent last week posting screenshots from one of a handful of air-quality apps,1 their stories cluttered with rainbow gauges and splotchy neon gradient maps. The colors rarely mean quite what you’d expect: a bright, almost firetruck red-orange is bad, but not nearly as bad as Barney purple. Worse still than purple is this very deep pink, which to me speaks of wine bars and nail polishes but in reality signals hazardous levels of pollution.2
I get the impulse to screenshot through this. Like all the hazy, orange-tinged photos3 shot by restless people sheltering indoors, weather-app screenshots memorialize a moment that — at least on the East Coast — still feels new and remarkable.
But they’re also even better than photos, I think: They provide some false sense of control. Measuring nature masters it. The color code imposes some kind of order.
Really, the mere existence of an app like Air Now should prove that humans possess the knowledge and ingenuity to address the climate crisis.
But the screenshots aren’t hopeful. They say to a one: Can you believe how fucked this is?!
If you read anything this weekend
“The Binge Purge,” by Josef Adalian and Lane Brown in New York. So-called “Peak TV” reminds me strongly of the whole “millennial lifestyle subsidy” discourse from a few years ago: In the 2010s, investors pumped money into services like Instacart and Uber, making them cheap, convenient and ubiquitous … but then, when none of those business models actually paid off, Uber/Instacart/et al got shitty and expensive. The same thing is happening to streaming, which produced a golden age of TV before the bills came due. (The future isn’t promising for writers or viewers.)
“Confused, Uncool, and Nowhere to Scroll: The Internet Has Become Hostile for Millennials Like Me,” by Harriet Gibsone in The Independent. I expected to hate this, based on the headline, but actually found it so funny I might read her book.
“Yet while my fringe interests were catered for, I quickly realised that [TikTok] was too hostile for someone of my demographic. Millennials were mocked by its younger users for using the laughing emoji or doing a crash zoom, for liking Harry Potter or depending on caffeine. Even the experience of being on the app felt out of my comfort zone – like walking into Vegas on a stag do, no sense of time passing, of how to get out, the lights dazzling bright or flashing sinister, the drugs too hardcore for a Tuesday night.”
“Why Do We Brand the Summer?,” by Callie Holtermann in The New York Times. We don’t name individual springs or winters, and fall only ever reps Christian girls. But Hot Girl or Hot Vax or Barefoot-Boy Summer express hopes for a season lived outdoors.
“A Personality Test Can’t Tell You Who You Are,” by Allie Volpe in Vox. The world is awash in personality tests, and mostly they’re … nonsense! TIL a mother-daughter duo with no psychological training created the Myers-Briggs.
“The Kia Boys Will Steal Your Car for Clout,” by Taylor Dorrell in The Verge. I see reports of stolen Kias and Hyundais at least three times per week on my local Nextdoor, and that’s in a small city of ≈280,000 people. The TikTok-fueled car thefts have grown so widespread that several cities are suing over them.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from the last newsletter was this long read on digital nomads.
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Postscripts
Far-right Cosmo. Fallen Snopes. “Timeless internet writing” and Reddit revolts. The internet’s most-used languages. A Hot 100 for AI songs. ChatGPT is: burning money and energy … and already taking jobs.
How streaming supercharged subtitles. Why airport-drinking at 8 a.m. is okay. I’m personally startled by the rapid growth of the AI actor- and voice-cloning industries. Stop trying to make the metaverse happen. 4chan’s immoderate moderators. “All these very real sentences carry the whiff of a society that has completely run out of words.” A better term for AI: applied statistics. An unrelenting cesspool: Instagram. Last but not least: “Does your online experience feel simultaneously TOO SMALL and yet TOO BIG, monolithic and lacking in magic?” The Tiny Awards aim to remedy that.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
Caitlin
Mostly AirNow, the ~official~ U.S. Environmental Protection Agency app, but also a few others — AirCare, Plume, assorted all-purpose weather apps.
This color scheme has been the U.S. standard since the late 1990s, when the EPA developed a color-coded air quality index, which runs from 0 to 500. Lower scores (green, yellow) indicate low pollution. Scores above 300 (maroon) are hazardous. The colors were controversial, even at the time, but no one thought purple or maroon would come up very often. Joke’s on them. Many other countries use different (superior??) color systems.
If your pictures weren’t hazy or orange-tinged, blame your too-smartphone: Color-correcting algorithms compensate for the haze in wildfire photos.