A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).

Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content.

No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.

Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans.

we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?

Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective.

Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.

in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.

What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.

the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.

what is the future of branding in the age of slop? The provocation for this particular stream of thought was a Tiktok video by brand strategist Eugene about branding in the era of brainrot. This video declares that the age of brands as stories has ended. There are no more ninety second spots that tell a tale, he argues, now there’s only vibe, something more like sentiment or affect – what's picked up in a crowded feed, two or three seconds between footage of catastrophic climate change and a monkey who’s learned to do makeup tutorials. He gives the example of a Twitch stream: it may be too hectic to read the individual posts, but you can monitor the sentiment. You can catch the vibe.

New things – brands, products, trends – are increasingly defined in relational terms to such an extent that they become devoid of any unique story, character, or essence.

Moodboarding as a practice is maxed out. It’s become a nearly absurdist consumer hobby, and it’s part and parcel of our algorithmic reality, targeted yet vague. Similarly, slop can’t be meaningfully curated because there are too many actors, algorithms, and microtrends being expressed simultaneously, in too many automated iterations.

When the brand is a person, an entity with a personality. The idea is that you can hone this personality in order to define your organization better and make more money out in the world. “All organizations have an identity whether they control it or not. A corporate identity programme harnesses and manages this identity in the corporate interest,” Wally Olins wrote.

Brand as story is the other conventional frame that’s been very popular, as mentioned in the Tiktok that kicked this off. This one is all about using things like narrative structure and the hero’s journey to structure the way a brand shows up and communicates, and also using stories as branding opportunities. Brand “lore” is an updated subset of brand as story.

These stories tend to coalesce around a charismatic founder (Tesla and Elon), a social cause (Patagonia and the environment), even a countercultural position (SST records and punk rock). The depth of the lore is directly correlated to brand value. Consumers can become pay-to-play characters of the story.

Brand as pattern is about creating something that shows up iteratively in the world, rather than repeating messages rotely. This has classic examples, like Absolut ads, and more mimetic ones, where users take on the pattern and create the brand themselves

Memes are an advanced form of this practice – everything from Pepe to Brat makes use of this repetition to create flexible and iterative meaning.  Brands that rely heavily on UGC are often related to brand-as-pattern.

Then there’s brand as world, the less eggheaded, more contemporary version of brand as story. Worldbuilding as a brand activity feels intuitively more digital and immersive, less linear than straight narrative.  Many luxury brands employ this practice to help us imagine a world of accessible wealth where people are more beautiful, more free, more actualized. Disney offers an accessible, albeit more fanciful version of this practice – creating an actual destination with its own culture and characters. In either case, the brand is a portal that gives you partial access to an alternative reality.

Brand as coherence is another more philosophical way of looking at brands, one that Nemesis-friend Michael Rock of 2x4 talks about a lot. In this world the brand is the je ne sais quois or x factor that makes everything fit together. It’s the systematic principle itself.  This coherence can be emotional… “When we talk about a strong brand, what we mean is that it consistently delivers the emotion it promises. The most successful brands, or at least the ones everyone emulates, have the knack for using design to produce an emotional coherence that spans from content to product to experience. Think Apple or BMW or Chanel. Not everything has to look alike, but it all has to feel alike. Whenever we encounter them we get that familiar brand sensation. That tingling tells you it's working.” (Michael Rock, Hooked on a Feeling) Or technical… “I know that [branding] is an incredibly distasteful term in cultural and academic organizations, but like it or not branding has become one of the major organizing principles of the world as we know it right now. States have brands, corporations have brands, people have brands, institutions have brands — everyone’s talking about that, and when they talk about brand, they may all be talking about different things, but I think it’s a way of thinking about this idea of assembly…I would say maybe that branding is this act of assemblage that creates seemingly coherent entities.” (Michael Rock, Berkeley design lecture)

there’s the brand as vibes. These are not just brands that have us asking what the there-there is. They’re also brands like Marc Jacobs’ Heaven, which has brought together disparate objects that fit a sort of dreamy Gen Z moodboard to great effect, creating new life for what was quickly becoming a legacy brand. Then there’s A24, perhaps one of the greatest vibe brands of them all.

vibes are something we feel, and have something to do with a sense of recognition or belonging.

In a sense, vibes are procedurally generated, created by following resonant patterns and associations rather than by directly expressing new ideas or unique sentiments. The value assigned to brands built on vibes is similarly transitive – if you like X you will probably like Y.  In the best cases, a brand can create and embody its own ineffable vibe that imbues all of its products and endeavors with a sense of magical value. Seeing the new A24 film is more about experiencing a new iteration of the brand than it is about the movie’s actual plot, cast, or story. Fans want to see a particular sensibility applied to the world around it.

When a brand is a person, you have an emotional connection with them (they also have rights: see Citizens United). When it's a story, it entertains you and holds your attention. When a brand is a world, there's immersion and escape. When it's a pattern, you can replicate it and play with it.

With all this in mind, the key to successful brands after vibes may be in creating... something dense and irrefutable: a brand that flaunts itself as proof of work, that makes clear the amount of real information and human effort that went into creating it, that can’t become blurry. The brand is labor itself, a direct expression of the work that produces it. something exceptionally simple – logo only, that is, just one coordination point…or better yet, a ticker, a single letter, a point of pure speculative energy. Something so singular it can’t be spun off into iterations, but due to its singularity, can freely attach to and feed itself by anything and everything. The brand is an atom, a particle, a single-cell organism. something like dazzle, the makeup that helps a face escape facial recognition software: something so incoherent it can't be read by the model or algorithm, something that cannot be expressed as or compressed into a vibe.  In  this case, the brand is noise, something rule breaking that jams an orderly system of meaning / value.

My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating.

the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better?

we are inundated with cold, beautiful stats, some publicized by trade publications or broadcast by authors themselves on all socials. How many publishers bid? How big is the print run? How many stops on the tour? How many reviews on Goodreads? How many mentions on Bookstagram, BookTok? How many bloggers on the blog tour? How exponential is the growth in follower count? Preorders? How many printings? How many languages in translation? How many views on the unboxing? How many mentions on most-anticipated lists?

A starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, but I wasn’t in “Picks of the Week.” A mention from Entertainment Weekly, but last on a click-through list.

There must exist professions that are free from capture, but I’m hard pressed to find them. Even non-remote jobs, where work cannot pursue the worker home, are dogged by digital tracking: a farmer says Instagram Story views directly correlate to farm subscriptions, a server tells me her manager won’t give her the Saturday-night money shift until she has more followers.

What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. Likewise, the search for romance has been refigured by dating apps that sell paid-for rankings and paid access to “quality” matches. Or, if there’s an off-duty pursuit you love—giving tarot readings, polishing beach rocks—it’s a great compliment to say: “You should do that for money.” Join the passion economy, give the market final say on the value of your delights. Even engaging with art—say, encountering some uncanny reflection of yourself in a novel, or having a transformative epiphany from listening, on repeat, to the way that singer’s voice breaks over the bridge—can be spat out as a figure, on Goodreads or your Spotify year in review.

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure—photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry—are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

In a nightmarish dispatch in Esquire on how hard it is for authors to find readers, Kate Dwyer argues that all authors must function like influencers now, which means a fire sale on your “private” life. As internet theorist Kyle Chayka puts it to Dwyer: “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.”

what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience.

We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth.

When we scroll, what are we looking for?

While other fast fashion brands wait for high-end houses to produce designs they can replicate cheaply, Shein has completely eclipsed the runway, using AI to trawl social media for cues on what to produce next. Shein’s site operates like a casino game, using “dark patterns”—a countdown clock puts a timer on an offer, pop-ups say there’s only one item left in stock, and the scroll of outfits never ends—so you buy now, ask if you want it later. Shein’s model is dystopic: countless reports detail how it puts its workers in obscene poverty in order to sell a reprieve to consumers who are also moneyless—a saturated plush world lasting as long as the seams in one of their dresses. Yet the day to day of Shein’s target shopper is so bleak, we strain our moral character to cosplay a life of plenty.

(Unsplash) Technology The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life? BY THEA LIM Updated 17:52, Sep. 20, 2024 | Published 6:30, Sep. 17, 2024 W HEN I WAS TWELVE, I used to roller-skate in circles for hours. I was at another new school, the odd man out, bullied by my desk mate. My problems were too complex and modern to explain. So I skated across parking lots, breezeways, and sidewalks, I listened to the vibration of my wheels on brick, I learned the names of flowers, I put deserted paths to use. I decided for myself each curve I took, and by the time I rolled home, I felt lighter. One Saturday, a friend invited me to roller-skate in the park. I can still picture her in green protective knee pads, flying past. I couldn’t catch up, I had no technique. There existed another scale to evaluate roller skating, beyond joy, and as Rollerbladers and cyclists overtook me, it eclipsed my own. Soon after, I stopped skating. Y EARS AGO, I worked in the backroom of a Tower Records. Every few hours, my face-pierced, gunk-haired co-workers would line up by my workstation, waiting to clock in or out. When we typed in our staff number at 8:59 p.m., we were off time, returned to ourselves, free like smoke. There are no words to describe the opposite sensations of being at-our-job and being not-at-our-job even if we know the feeling of crossing that threshold by heart. But the most essential quality that makes a job a job is that when we are at work, we surrender the power to decide the worth of what we do. At-job is where our labour is appraised by an external meter: the market. At-job, our labour is never a means to itself but a means to money; its value can be expressed only as a number—relative, fluctuating, out of our control. At-job, because an outside eye measures us, the workplace is a place of surveillance. It’s painful to have your sense of worth extracted. For Marx, the poet of economics, when a person’s innate value is replaced with exchange value, it is as if we’ve been reduced to “a mere jelly.” Wait—Is ChatGPT Even Legal? AI Is a False God How Israel Is Using AI as a Weapon of War Not-job, or whatever name you prefer—“quitting time,” “off duty,” “downtime”—is where we restore ourselves from a mere jelly, precisely by using our internal meter to determine the criteria for success or failure. Find the best route home—not the one that optimizes cost per minute but the one that offers time enough to hear an album from start to finish. Plant a window garden, and if the plants are half dead, try again. My brother-in-law found a toy loom in his neighbour’s garbage, and nightly he weaves tiny technicolour rugs. We do these activities for the sake of doing them, and their value can’t be arrived at through an outside, top-down measure. It would be nonsensical to treat them as comparable and rank them from one to five. We can assess them only by privately and carefully attending to what they contain and, on our own, concluding their merit. And so artmaking—the cultural industries—occupies the middle of an uneasy Venn diagram. First, the value of an artwork is internal—how well does it fulfill the vision that inspired it? Second, a piece of art is its own end. Third, a piece of art is, by definition, rare, one of a kind, nonfungible. Yet the end point for the working artist is to create an object for sale. Once the art object enters the market, art’s intrinsic value is emptied out, compacted by the market’s logic of ranking, until there’s only relational worth, no interior worth. Two novelists I know publish essays one week apart; in a grim coincidence, each writer recounts their own version of the same traumatic life event. Which essay is better, a friend asks. I explain they’re different; different life circumstances likely shaped separate approaches. Yes, she says, but which one is better? I GREW UP a Catholic, a faithful, an anachronism to my friends. I carried my faith until my twenties, when it finally broke. Once I couldn’t gain comfort from religion anymore, I got it from writing. Sitting and building stories, side by side with millions of other storytellers who have endeavoured since the dawn of existence to forge meaning even as reality proves endlessly senseless, is the nearest thing to what it felt like back when I was a believer. I spent my thirties writing a novel and paying the bills as low-paid part-time faculty at three different colleges. I could’ve studied law or learned to code. Instead, I manufactured sentences. Looking back, it baffles me that I had the wherewithal to commit to a project with no guaranteed financial value, as if I was under an enchantment. Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it. As the publication date advanced, I was awash with extrinsic measures. Only twenty years ago, there was no public, complete data on book sales. U

In the past, I’ve only seen coverage of Edits focus on four things:How this is a popular form of content that is only being created more and moreHow those who create Edits have the ability to make clips take on an entirely new meaning and provoke strong emotions in viewers How they’re geared towards TV, film, and music – as that’s the realm of culture this form of media originated And lastly, the debate around Edits in terms of copyright and/or other infringementsBut today, we’re covering how the power of TikTok Edits is far greater than just those observations. Because as this person stated, “You can convince people of anything if you put it in a TikTok with a catchy sound.”

Edits now play an integral role in how people get introduced to topics and how they continue to keep up with them. While Edits have had various evolutions, in their current form, they can be defined as “compilation videos, typically set to music, that convey a narrative about a person, place, thing, or cultural topic.”

You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway.

You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a new ad at the start of it.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for money.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.

Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).

If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.

content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.

That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.

Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways: Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,

With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.

even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.

When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.

While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least

TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.

YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”

Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too

Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.

90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.

YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens: “There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”

If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.

All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).

certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.

The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.

Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.

I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.

The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).

There’s a fatal near-sightedness to the script: It may be possible to puzzle out the characters’ motivations in any given scene, but there’s no guarantee those motives will continue into the next one, and in fact they probably won’t. This lends the show an overall incoherence. There are sharp, funny, and even poignant moments, and it’s certainly beautifully shot, but it’s so impressed with the sheer abundance of its own ideas that it fails to commit to a genuine artistic perspective. Instead, it’s pure provocation. The show wants to shock viewers with its violent imagery and moral ambiguity, but provocation without perspective is just spectacle.

we have And Just Like That, a show whose first failure is its name. While the second season is currently dropping week by week without too much fanfare, the first season garnered almost as much attention as The Idol. Everyone was wondering how HBO could possibly reanimate the glittering albeit “problematic“ New York of Sex and the City in 2021, and they were right to wonder. The overly self-conscious reboot has been ridiculed mercilessly for trying to right the wrongs of the original series with a heavy hand—and at huge narrative costs: jammed-in “diversity” in the style of high-school science textbook covers, story lines that seem constructed solely to demonstrate the characters’ awareness of social issues. A friend recently described it to me as “Sesame Street for adults,” which made me laugh. (Of course I continue to watch.)

To describe the plot of And Just Like That would be impossible, because there are anywhere between six and 10 subplots happening at any given time. This is an almost poetic consequence of the creators trying to say too much—and please too many people—at once. A peek: Carrie’s husband has died (trauma plot), she’s navigating the world of podcasts (age plot) and pronouns (pride plot), grappling with her willingness to say vagina on air (sex plot), developing a friendship with Seema, her girlboss Indian real estate agent (new friend-of-color plot—each original cast member gets one), whose Birkin was just stolen (tough-on-crime plot?). This covers about 1% of it and leaves me with no time to introduce the other eight main characters. Whatever sense of curiosity and spirit propelled the original series is revived here only in rare glimpses. The rest is reheated Twitter discourse.

Both The Idol and And Just Like That are fueled by internet-sourced neuroticism. Each is overly focused on audience reception as it manifests online, only with different aims: one hopes to shock, the other to appease. These goals aren’t surprising—they merely demonstrate the inevitable result of mistaking a marketing strategy for an artistic one.

Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are.

I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.

Can’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. Just make up something else.

Eventually every platform wanted the same kind of content, but to fit specific algorithms and specific demographics, which no one would bother to do, so the same videos just got posted everywhere until none of the networks felt distinct from each other and every site just pivoted away from the whole idea.

a global pandemic struck, markets crashed, and the possibility of a democratic socialist presidency in America started to fade. Much of our work with clients has been about how to address new audiences in a time of massive fragmentation and the collapse of consensus reality.

All the while, people have been eager to launch new products more focused on impressions than materiality, and “spending on experiences” has become the standard of premium consumption.

it’s time to reassess the consumer experience that came along with the neoliberal fantasy of “unlimited” movement of people, goods and ideas around the globe.

Umami, as both a quality and effect of an experience, popped up primarily in settings that were on the verge of disintegration, and hinged on physical pilgrimages to evanescent meccas. We also believe that the experience economy is dying, its key commodity (umami) has changed status, and nobody knows what’s coming next.

Umami was the quality of the media mix or the moodboard that granted it cohesion-despite-heterogeneity. Umami was also the proximity of people on Emily’s museum panel, all women who are mostly not old, mostly not straight, and mostly doing something interesting in the arts, but we didn’t know exactly what. It was the conversation-dance experience and the poet’s play and the alt-electronica-diva’s first foray into another discipline. It was the X-factor that made a certain MA-1 worth 100x as much as its identical twin.

“Advanced consumers” became obsessed with umami and then ran around trying to collect ever-more-intensifying experiences of it. Things were getting more and more delicious, more and more expensive, and all the while, more and more immaterial. Umami is what you got when you didn’t get anything.

What was actually happening was the enrichment of financial assets over the creation of any ‘real wealth’ along with corresponding illusions of progress. As very little of this newly minted money has been invested into building new productive capacity, infrastructure, or actually new things, money has just been sloshing around in a frothy cesspool – from WeWork to Juicero to ill-advised real estate Ponzi to DTC insanity, creating a global everything-bubble.

Value, in an economic sense, is theoretically created by new things based on new ideas. But when the material basis for these new things is missing or actively deteriorating and profits must be made, what is there to be done? Retreat to the immaterial and work with what already exists: meaning. Meaning is always readily available to be repeated, remixed, and/or cannibalized in service of creating the sensation of the new.

The essential mechanics are simple: it’s stating there’s a there-there when there isn’t one. And directing attention to a new “there” before anyone notices they were staring at a void. It’s the logic of gentrification, not only of the city, but also the self, culture and civilization itself. What’s made us so gullible, and this whole process possible, was an inexhaustible appetite for umami.

eyond its synergistic effect, umami has a few other sensory effects that are relevant to our theory. For one, it creates the sense of thickness and body in food. (“Umami adds body…If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it’s thicker – it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food.”) For another, it’s released when foods break down into parts. (“When organic matter breaks down, the glutamate molecule breaks apart. This can happen on a stove when you cook meat, over time when you age a parmesan cheese, by fermentation as in soy sauce or under the sun as a tomato ripens. When glutamate becomes L-glutamate, that’s when things get “delicious.””) These three qualities: SYNERGY, IMPRESSION OF THICKNESS, and PARTS > WHOLE, are common to cultural umami, as well.

Umami hunting was a way for the West to consume an exotic, ethnic, global “taste” that was also invisible and up to their decoding / articulation.

when something is correctly salted, Chang argues, it tastes both over and undersalted at once. As a strange loop, this saltiness makes you stand back and regard your food; you start thinking about “the system it represents and your response to it”. He argues that this meta-regard keeps you in the moment and connected to the deliciousness of your food. We counter that it intensifies a moment in a flow, temporarily thickening your experience without keeping you anywhere for long.

strong flavors, namely umami, mark a surge of intensity in the flow of experience. It also becomes clear that paradox itself is at the heart of contemporary consumption. For example: “This shouldn’t be good but it is” “This doesn’t seem like what it’s supposed to be” “This is both too much and not enough” “I shouldn’t be here but i am” “This could be anywhere but it’s here”

Parts > Whole is just another way of saying a combination of things has emergent properties. In itself this doesn’t mean much, as almost any combination of things has emergent properties, especially in the domains of taste and culture. Coffee + vinegar is worse than its constitutive parts. A suit + sneakers is a greater kind of corny than either worn separately. Most emergence is trivial. The Umami Theory of Value centers on losing your sense of what’s trivial and what’s valuable.

If you tried to unpack your intuition, the absence of the there-there would quickly become evident. Yet in practice this didn’t matter, because few people were able to reach this kind of deep self-interrogation. The cycle was simply too fast. There was never time for these concoctions to congeal into actual new things (e.g. create the general category of K-Pop patrons for Central European arts institutions). We can’t be sure if they ever meant anything beyond seeming yummy at the time.

This was not meant to be a nihilistic, Gen-X faceplant (“nothing means anything any more”), since we think that perspective can paper over the nuances of consumer experience, business realities, and cultural crisis. Instead, we wanted to link macroeconomic and macrotrend observations to everyday experience, especially in the context of burgeoning collapse.

Money became increasingly fake-seeming as it diverged more and more from a hard day’s work and most conventional wisdom.

The growing number of people taking chances that they barely believed in (starting an Onlyfans, going all in on a memecoin, becoming a performative racist for clicks) reflected a rational response to seeing absurd and/or conventionally shitty ideas have outsized success (Bored Apes, Trump, the Babyccino).

bucking conventional wisdom in any direction became the order of the day. Contrarianism became incredibly popular. Taking the diametrically opposed position to consensus as a shortcut to standing out in a crowded and volatile field was a key Clown Town strategy.

As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially popular. Hot Sauce involves taking something basic or mid and applying a socially forbidden or mysterious spice to it (in place of, or to function as, the X factor or the je ne sais quoi). This element had to be shocking, bad, atavistic, or otherwise “not normal”—it could be Nazism, grooming, the Occult, Catholicism, outright aggression, the threat of violence, or the attitudes of obscure-to-you political groups—but in smallish amounts. It made peoples’ hearts race and adrenaline pump while they consumed something otherwise bland. (This was the Tension Economy as the new Attention Economy.)

If the 2020 degen was a gambler willing to go all in on a whim… …the 2023 degen is a sophisticated risk manager We have found ourselves in a new cultural era in which multiple overlapping crises and rising interest rates have led to an emergent reckoning. It is now widely understood that it was very stupid to play crazy games with tons of excess money instead of actually improving material reality. But certain questions remain: What the fuck is anything worth today? What’s the best way to manage risk while it all comes falling down?

In chess, today’s average player is more skilled than the one from yesteryear because online exposure of advanced theory has led to regular players making the moves of masters. As Virgil once said, “One kid does a new skateboard trick, then hundreds more can do it the next day around the world.”

Everyone should be able to use their increased intelligence and awareness to better navigate the world. In reality, the irony is painful: When everyone gets smarter, things get harder. If everyone is reassessing the most-effective-tactics-available all the time, it gets harder and harder to win, even though you’re smarter and “should be in a better position.” The Yale admissions office realizes thousands of applicants have watched the same obscure how-to-get-into-Yale TikTok, and decides to change the meta: Leadership is no longer a valuable quality.

Max Pain means, even when you’re right, you’re wrong; it describes a climate in which everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time.

Whereas if you grew up online, the negative attributes of individual humans are immediately disqualifying. The very phrase ad hominem has been rendered obsolete, almost incomprehensible. An argument that is directed against a person, rather than the position they are maintaining? Online a person is the position they’re maintaining and vice versa. Opinions are identities and identities are opinions. Unfollow!

I’m the one severely triggered by statements like “Chaucer is misogynistic” or “Virginia Woolf was a racist.” Not because I can’t see that both statements are partially true, but because I am of that generation whose only real shibboleth was: “Is it interesting?” Into which broad category both evils and flaws could easily be fit, not because you agreed with them personally but because they had the potential to be analyzed, just like anything else

We are by now used to apocalyptic bad guys with the end of the world in mind, but it’s a long time since I went to the movies and saw an accurate representation of an ordinary sinner.

Spotting a hot young cellist, Olga, in the bathroom of her workplace, Tár later recognizes this same young woman’s shoes, peeking out from beneath those screens orchestra directors use to preserve the anonymity of “blind auditions.” Next thing we know Tár has given Olga a seat in her orchestra. Then decides to add Elgar’s Cello Concerto to the program, and to give that prestigious solo to the new girl instead of the first cello. And this move, in turn, allows her to organize a series of one-on-one rehearsals with Olga at that apartment she maintains in the city…There’s a word for this behavior: instrumentalism. Using people as tools. As means rather than ends in themselves. To satisfy your own desire, or your sense of your own power, or simply because you can

Every generation makes new rules. Every generation comes up against the persistent ethical failures of the human animal. But though there may be no permanent transformations in our emotional lives, there can be genuine reframings and new language and laws created to name and/or penalize the ways we tend to hurt each other, and this is a service each generation can perform for the one before.

what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.

A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism

Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.

The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.

While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.

he implied his firing was part of the conspiracy to silence the truth, and urged his loyal followers to subscribe to his Substack, as this was now his family’s only source of income. His new audience proved to be generous with both money and attention, and his need to meet their expectations seems to have spurred him, consciously or unconsciously, to double down on his more extreme views. Now almost everything he writes about, from Covid to Ukraine, he somehow ties to the shadowy New World Order.

I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.

I ensured that my brand image—the person that my audience expects me to be—was in alignment with my ideal image—the person I want to be. So even though audience capture likely does affect me in some way, it only makes me more like the person I want to be.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

David Foster Wallace once said that:The language of images. . . maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life. When you consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they had probably seen maybe a hundred kisses. They'd seen people kiss a hundred times. My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they ever kissed. Before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses. I know that the first time I kissed much of my thought was, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?”

A lot of the 80s and 90s critiques of postmodernity did have a point—our experience really is colored by media. Having seen a hundred movies about nuclear apocalypse, the entire time we’ll be looking over our shoulder for the camera, thinking: “Am I doing it right?”

York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”

even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional

Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.

TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.

what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.

It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.

to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.

Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.

in Instagram apologies, even when someone ostensibly confronts their ugliness, it’s hard to read the gesture as anything but an effort to publicly reclaim their image. But at least the Notes App Apology permitted us a semblance of sincerity, and suggested there might be a human being who typed the message—even if that human was an intern or assistant. There’s nothing sincere about a trickle-down excuse crafted to look pretty for Instagram grids, and the processed nature of Photoshopped Apologies implies the absence of the one thing all genuine apologies must possess: accountability straight from the person who committed the transgression.

I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.

It seems distant now, but once upon a time the Internet was going to save us from the menace of TV. Since the late fifties, TV has had a special role, both as the country’s dominant medium, in audience and influence, and as a bête noire for a certain strain of American intellectuals, who view it as the root of all evil. In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” from 1985, Neil Postman argues that, for its first hundred and fifty years, the U.S. was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium—in the form of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons—structured not only public discourse but also modes of thought and the institutions of democracy itself. According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”