Welcome to the season of socialized nostalgia
In this week's edition: deranged holiday people, feminist Ponzi schemes, cartel TikTok, chill millionaires and a hearty screw-you to year-in-review memes.
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2020 was a year, all right (!), but YouTube isn’t commemorating it. In mid-November, the video behemoth announced it would skip its much-hyped, much-debated December “rewind” out of fears the feel-good recap wouldn’t be appropriate.
“Rewind was always meant to be a celebration of you,” the company said on Twitter. “But 2020 has been different.” Ain’t that the understatement of the year.
Other tech companies have taken different approaches to the sticky problem of “celebrating” 2020. Forget the holidays — December is traditionally the season of socialized nostalgia, the month of viral wrap-ups and rewinds, Instagram Top 9s and years-in-review, “best” lists and “most” lists and assorted other lookback memes.
Some platforms are still forging ahead with that season, like a deranged holiday person bent on quarantine Christmas cheer: Spotify actually bumped up its personalized review, called “Wrapped,” very slightly this year. For a period of roughly 12 hours on Wednesday, my Twitter feed — and probably yours, too — devolved into a stream of navel-gazey jokes about the same five, very sad songs we all apparently played on repeat these past 12 months. (2020 was at least good to Phoebe Bridgers!)
Meanwhile, Facebook has not yet released its “Year in Review” — that typically rolls out in the second week of December — but appears to have changed nothing at all about the day-to-day workings of its “Memories” feature. Likewise Google Photos, which occasionally push-notifies me collections of old, overexposed food pictures I happily forgot as soon as I took them. If Google attempts its “Best of X Year” photo book again, it’ll likely come out in the next three weeks or so.
This year, however, even those bad, forgotten food photos will — I suspect — hit very different. They were taken in restaurants that have long since closed, during meals with friends I haven’t seen in ages. “The very recent past is suddenly another country,” Catherine Nixey wrote in an essay about time and memory and anticipation that has been on my mind a lot lately. To me, there is little so perverse, in the midst of the pandemic’s ghastly second wave, than the blind, blindsiding reminders that you were so much happier at this point in 2019.
Similar criticisms have been made of these features before, of course, particularly when they surfaced photos of dead loved ones to grieving relatives and friends, or posts from past abusers to their victims. But at that point we weren’t all engaged in a sort of slow-moving, collective trauma, which has complicated even ordinary memories from past years and thrown a shade over much of this one.
I’m personally not eager to revisit photos of what I was doing in December 2019 or 2018 or 2017, an era so removed from my current reality I might as well have dreamt it. And I’m certainly not craving some sort of neon-toned, shareable artifact that reduces this past year to a list of takeout orders or videos or songs, as if that encompasses any substantive information about what the past nine months were or meant. You mean, the takeout we ordered when we were too scared to grocery shop, tipping 30 or 40 percent out of guilt? You mean, the songs we played over and over on that one flat grey hollow afternoon when we found out a friend or relative got sick?
YouTube has the right idea: 2020 has been different. And — sorry/not sorry to be a general buzzkill — but a playlist of songs optimized for social sharing is … not how I plan to remember it.
If you read anything this weekend
This dig into the rise of “direct digital giving” — Venmoing money to strangers as a form of charity. Full disclosure: I wrote this one. But I wouldn’t if I didn’t think it was extremely interesting (!!). The rise of direct digital giving goes hand-in-hand with a multitude of other trends: the rise of P2P payment apps and patronage platforms; the popular re-emergence of mutual aid; a widespread decline in institutional trust; the entrenchment of affinity-based online communities. This story also features Russian anarchists, 100 years of philanthropic history *and* a very chill 25-year-old multimillionaire named Jake. What did I say? Extremely interesting. [Caitlin Dewey / OneZero]
This shot/chaser on the rise of morally dubious digital assistant apps. First: read Nathan Heller’s new piece about the platforms that will outsource “whatever you most hate doing in your life” to low-paid workers in India and Kenya. Then revisit Indi Samarajiva’s essay from a year ago on how the gig economy writ large is basically just middle-class white people “rediscovering” servants. [Nathan Heller / The New Yorker & Indi Samarajiva / Medium]
This beautifully written appreciation of TikTok, which somehow captures everything I like about the app. It’s less about the dance routines and Gen Z memes, and more about the never-ending, wide-ranging display of human ingenuity and weirdness. [Charlotte Shane / Bookforum]
This deep dive into the online fandom around American Girls dolls. File into the folder: huh, now there’s a YouTube subculture I did not know about. Especially fascinating: the DIYers altering the dolls’ races and gender identities to make them more representative. [Amelia Merrill / Narratively]
This short feature on the rise of “cartel TikTok.” I remain obsessed with the esoteric workings of the TikTok algorithm, which I think is why I was so very fascinated by this story on how it’s inadvertently delivered a lot of Mexican gang propaganda to unsuspecting kids. [Oscar Lopez / NYT]
And now for something completely different
Postscripts
The joylessness of quarantine cooking. The dark side of the “ephemeral internet.” Catching up with that doctor who went viral for Lysoling his groceries. (“The whole metaphor of going viral, in the face of a virus — it was just really ironic.”) Science fiction without the fiction. Going full cottagecore. This week in people we stan: Cody Rigsby, Deb Perelman and the TikTok chef who cooks elaborate meals in hotel rooms.
The latest Covid casualty: scented candles. How Santas are coping with quarantine Christmas. “Failure once allowed you to stop trying — that was, famously, the one good thing it had going for it.” The crisis in male friendships. Feminist (?) Ponzi schemes. Last but not least: the loveliest thing that I read this whole damn week.
Sharing is caring
I was in the beer aisle at Wegmans, inwardly cursing the obscure commercial forces that clear out all the pumpkin beer well before Thanksgiving, when this tweet popped up on my phone and I literal-loled … embarrassingly loudly! Apologies to the startled shoppers in the Wegmans beer aisle, but THANK YOU to Lauren & everyone else who shares this newsletter. Your referrals are the main way it finds new readers.
— Caitlin