The photo that kept me up at night
In this week's edition: credit card points, Ben Affleck, dancing goth dogs, context collapse, FIRE influencers and the platformed mob
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I’m writing this in the dark on my phone from an hour of the night I don’t typically see. It’s very early Thursday morning, and I spent the past 12 hours captive to my Twitter feed. The need to consume every whiff of unfolding detail was consuming in itself. At one point I made dinner, took the dogs for a bath; but in every idle moment, I itched for my phone. Tapped in the passcode. Refreshed the Twitter app.
In that way I wasted a full day, furious and heartbroken, never quite exhausting the one resource that fueled this mob’s transformation from online ghouls to flesh-and-blood insurrectionists: namely, ample access to other people’s attention.
You might also call this a “platform” — a comfortable online perch from which people can spew any conceivable bullshit. Without such a perch, most extremists would presumably remain in their little crevices. But the platform — that access to the attention of acquaintances and strangers — gives their bullshit substance. One paranoid, paramilitary wannabe is, in isolation, a joke. But what is he in a Stop The Steal Facebook group? Or a Gab “Great Awakening” thread? Or in the depths of the president’s Twitter @-replies, devouring the digital excrement of another attention-seeking extremist?
Facebook and Twitter still don’t appear to fully understand this; both platforms took partial, timorous action against President Trump far too late to really matter, and only after censoring internal criticism (Facebook) and equivocating for hours over apparent calls to violence (Twitter). Their actions didn’t address the weeks of coordination or broadcasting conducted on their platforms. By all accounts, the bad guys won: They didn’t get “four more years,” maybe, but they got their selfies, their gloating livestreams, their 15 minutes of infamy in the mainstream media. Now they’ll bemoan their half-assed “cancellation,” again conflating their right to speak with their desire for a large and attentive audience. No one has any right to that, of course, though these actors have been granted it for so long maybe their entitlement is understandable.
There’s one photo, in particular, that’s keeping me up. It’s the one of a man sitting at Nancy Pelosi’s desk. He’s lounging, mouth open, his work boots slung atop a stack of official papers like he’s back in his living room packing lip with his friends. My first thought was: Good, they got his face. Maybe there will be consequences.
But now I think: shit — what a small, spiteful man. Grown fat, like his heroes, on all our attention.
If you read anything this weekend
This journey through the online empire of The Points Guy — and the weird economic netherworld his work inhabits. I am nostalgic for a time, roughly 48 hours ago, when I believed this article would mark the peak of this week’s befuddlements. Nevertheless: It’s a fascinating deconstruction of a totally fake and illogical currency — credit card points — that exaggerates the problems of our (real) economic system. Will never swipe my Chase card unthinkingly again. [Jamie Lauren Keiles / NYT]
This essay on the pressures of our increasingly demanding, context-collapsing social media selves. What can I say, I identified with this! “I am not performing my totality on social media. No one is; no one should. What should we expect from people we follow? That they act like people.” [Alicia Kennedy / Substack]
This feature on the timeless appeal of “F.I.R.E.” influencers, the peddlers of a seductive economic fantasy. The movement and the acronym may be fairly recent, but the philosophy behind it has a long history. [Tara Jacoby / The New Republic]
This very clever bit about Ben Affleck’s instantly iconic Dunkin’ Donuts photos. It’s been a bad week. We deserve some lolz. [Josh Gondelman / The Ringer]
And now for something completely different
Postscripts
North Korea’s most famous YouTuber. TikTok’s most famous museum. The end of the infamous tech co cafeteria and the issue(s) with @GaysOverCovid. Bean Dad sucks, but so does Twitter. Listen to Wikipedia. Why do Republicans keep posting photos of gross-looking food? (Maybe it’s a dude problem.)
A worthy new year’s resolution: kick Amazon & Instacart. Japanese 7-11s are a gem and a wonder that I often think about. An oral history of the Ratatouille musical. A linguistic history of they/them pronouns. Last but not least, if you too are obsessed with the eve6 Twitter, you’re gonna wanna check this long Q&A out.
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As many of you know, I think (?) my day job these days is in local news. (Hence the newsletter writing at 2 a.m., the sending at lunch, etc.!) Andrew is one of my favorite colleagues at the paper … and not just because he knows all the best restaurants in the greater upstate region. THANK YOU to Andrew & everyone else who shares this newsletter. Your referrals are the main way it finds new readers.
— Caitlin