You drive me crazy
Doll moms, AI ads, Miss Texas, cottage cheese and the Google Effect
Marriage is, among other things, the indeterminable zen exercise of acclimatizing to another person’s quirks. I married an otherwise amazing guy … but his use of Google Maps is the absolute worst.
Jason cannot drive more than a mile without cuing up digital directions. And it doesn’t matter how frequently we visit the destination.
My parent’s house. The farmer’s market. Our respective offices. The grocery store that is *literally* one left-hand turn away. Jason’s geographical amnesia bothers me so much that I sometimes take his phone and challenge him to guess the route (… not the all-time greatest path to marital harmony).
Jason suffers from a phenomenon sometimes called the Google Effect: the tendency to forget, or to never learn, the things we can access readily through search engines or their like. We are, in fairness, all afflicted.1 In fact, people have outsourced their memories in some fashion or another since the beginning of recorded time.
But the sheer volume of information available on the internet — or maybe the constant, convenient presence of that information in our purses and pockets — makes it all the easier to let slip some easily Googled things. (I literally just Googled “synonym forget,” because I have not taxed myself with that kind of mental exercise since at least 2013.)
The rise of AI could mean further changes for cognition and memory. Last week, the Pew Research Center released a report in which they canvassed a group of more than 300 experts about the near-future harms of AI and other digital technologies. Their responses included most of the usual suspects: disinformation, bias, surveillance, job displacement, social isolation, privacy.
But this one caught my attention: “They” — the experts — “worry that people’s cognitive skills will decline.”
On one hand, they’ve been saying that forever.
On the other hand … they’ve been right!
If you read anything this weekend
“AI is Killing the Old Web, and the New Web Struggles to Be Born,” by James Vincent for The Verge. Welp — that didn’t take long. Just eight months after the launch of ChatGPT, the web is already awash in AI-generated content. Nonsense books clog Amazon’s top ebook lists. Next-gen content farms are spinning up en masse. AI’s work is everywhere … and most of it is bad.
“Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement,” by Ava Kofman for ProPublica. Putting the phrase “penile enlargement” in a headline feels like a cheat code, but this story’s recent virality was very well-deserved: It’s empathetic and rigorous, but also satisfyingly sordid? — tracing the tendrils of a fast-growing, life-changing industry from message boards and medical conferences to operating tables.
“The Doll Mommies Are Fighting,” by Jessica Lucas for Cosmopolitan. As someone forced to survive a tearful overnight home ec assignment with an “infant simulator” 20 years ago … I cannot fathom why anyone would voluntarily bring one of these things into their homes. That said, we love a weird internet subculture and this one’s a doozy — complete with debates on fake-baby chemo and the ethics of breastfeeding.
“A.I. and TV Ads Were Made for Each Other,” by Mac Schwerin in The New York Times. This is a clever, quick little read — on the natural affinities of AI and ads, which both deal in tropes and cliches. “Sparkling suburban kitchens; slow-motion ice-and-soda splashes; pleasant, wordless canoe trips that indicate relief from irritable bowel syndrome or moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis ... A.I. swallows it all and spits it back in our faces.” (See also: this dispatch from the other Cannes, where ad and marketing people pretend they’re movie stars (??), and where all the buzz this year involved artificial intelligence.)
“An Unlikely Provocateur, Miss Texas, Takes on the State’s GOP Leaders,” by Molly Hennessy-Fiske in The Washington Post. Averie Bishop is a lawyer, a TikTok star, and the first Asian contestant to win Miss Texas — a platform she’s used to push abortion rights and affirmative action. Would happily watch a Miss Congeniality reboot based on her experience.
👉 ICYMI: The most-clicked link from last week’s newsletter was this essay on pantry #content.
Thanks for being one of my 15,000 hypothetical Gchat friends.
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Postscripts
Second Life is 20 years old. Google Reader is 10 years dead. Do you talk too much in remote meetings? This extension could help! The buffet and the blimp are both BACK, baby. IRL was, in fact, fake. How Alexa learns accents and Reddit crushed the biggest protest in its history.
The Supreme Court case was real, but the website was not. Amazon creeps further into our economic fabric. The U.S. is exporting anti-LGBTQ hate and Goodreads is grounds for harassment. Gen Z has discovered cottage cheese. Queer cottagecore icons Frog and Toad. Last but not least: The Password Game (… is totally unwinnable).
That’s it for this week! Until the next one. Warmest virtual regards.
— Caitlin
It took me eight years to memorize Jason’s phone number, for instance. Yes, I’m a hypocrite. Other common examples of the Google effect, besides phone numbers and maps: spelling, general trivia, things/experiences you photograph.