The Titan memes are not that deep
Titan memes, bullshit jobs, pantry content, "Tay-baiting," reunion tours and the rise of chat
Blame billionaire resentment or “death clock” media coverage or social platform dynamics, but damn: An awful lot of people spent the past week wishing slow suffocation on five strangers in a seabed-trawling minivan.
“It was a grieving ritual which also served to vent anger and alleviate disillusionment,” one researcher wrote.
… in 1986. About the Challenger disaster.
The ‘80s are supposed to be “back” right now, so maybe the parallels here are apt. The Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after takeoff in 1986, killing all seven people on it. The incident, I learned this week, also sparked an “omnipresent” wave of “sick, cruel, tasteless [and] gross” jokes1 — followed, predictably, by a lot of hand-wringing, soul-searching cultural analysis.
But maybe cruel disaster jokes actually … aren’t that deep. The youth today™ hate billionaires; they like making memes. Youth in the ‘80s may not have hated astronauts — please correct me if I’m wrong? — but the only astronaut ever named in Challenger jokes was the public school teacher Christa McAuliffe.
In other, fairly obvious words, it may just be human nature to reduce the victims of some high-profile tragedies to symbols of the institutions we resent. Especially when tickets to the tragedy cost a quarter-billion dollars and involved the Titanic.
If you read anything this weekend
“AI is a Lot of Work,” by Josh Dzieza in The Verge. Before AI takes all our jobs, it’s creating millions of new ones — mind-numbing, low-paid, precarious “bullshit jobs,” like annotating photos for AI learning systems. The details of that work are both alienating and surreal, as Dzieza learned through interviews with dozens of annotators and a stint as one, himself. “It’s a strange mental space to inhabit, doing your best to follow nonsensical but rigorous rules, like taking a standardized test while on hallucinogens.”
“Merchandizing the Void,” by Kelly Pendergrast in Dilettante Army. This is an essay about Khloe Kardashian’s hideous walk-in pantry, but also about pantry content writ large — and the rise of online shopping, and the changing shape of women’s labor, and the impulse to reclaim some kind of household power via neatly labeled canisters and glass jars. In other words, it is extremely my shit and I’m grateful to have encountered it (… via Web Curios, if you’re interested).
“Inside the Illicit Market for Abortion Pills on Telegram,” by Lily Hay Newman and Dhruv Mehrotra in Wired. This is one story in a five-part series about technology and abortion access one year after Roe — all of them quick, alarming reads on the unexpected ways that change has played out across online platforms. In addition to Telegram’s shady, emerging marketplace for abortion pills, TikTok stands accused of removing reproductive health content and Google has provided tens of thousands of dollars in free ads to “crisis pregnancy centers.”
“The Age of Chat,” by Anna Wiener in The New Yorker. “Chat” is increasingly the preferred medium for all kinds of interactions, from search engine queries to fast food orders. But those perceived gains in ease or efficiency or optimization mask other types of losses — for the workers training the chat bots, for instance, or the users taken in by them.
“Taylor Sheridan Does Whatever He Wants: ‘I Will Tell My Stories My Way,’” by James Hibberd in The Hollywood Reporter. Not an internet culture story, per se, but since I binged a shameful amount of Yellowstone last week — please enjoy all this credulity-straining trivia on the multi-hyphenate hitmaker and apparent asshole who single-handedly revived the western fantasy.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from the last newsletter was this essay on the online travails of millennials.
Thanks for being one of my 15,800 hypothetical Gchat friends.
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Postscripts
Tay-baiting. Faux-mindfulness. Good night phone. How Spotify is prompting reunion tours and TikTok is changing quesadillas. Some wealthy people shop at the Dollar Store. Some micro-influencers make millions. Color me unsurprised that Moms for Liberty and the Proud Boys have so very much in common.
A good explanation of the Reddit blackout, which we’ve yet to discuss here: Far from an isolated, single-platform “freakout,” it exposes deeper tensions in social media. Speaking of tensions … ugh nevermind, I can’t even joke about this “cage fight” stuff. It’s troubling that Reddit and Meta’s CEOs both take cues from Elon Musk.
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
Caitlin
Much of this is pulled from “The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher,” where you can also (with a free JSTOR registration) read examples of Challenger jokes. Most of them are riddles and none of them are funny, e.g.: “How do you get rid of a teacher?” “Challenge her.”