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.

I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the internet encourages you to look outward. A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message.

Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted.

Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, their expression can be as varied as every individual human.

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

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.

Brat is asking for forgiveness instead of permission, because red lip gloss and watery eyes will get a “ok, go ahead—but just this time” out of any grumpy, middle-aged parking enforcement officer.

We’re captivated by femme fatales and Bond girls. We make muses out of women like Marilyn Monroe—her breathy “Happy birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden can make us feel embarrassed, mesmerized, or even disgusted, but one thing it can’t make us feel is angry: How can you get mad at an attractive woman for showing off what she has (without admitting your own envy or insecurity)?

Brat is wearing dark sunglasses to watch men play beach volleyball.

Brat is exchanging looks with a girl friend whenever a shirtless man walks by, synchronously swallowing a smirk that could’ve wiggled out of control, then going back to the conversation.

I care about how something is written as much as I care about the plot. That’s why commercial nonfictions are like Kleenex—to be used and discarded, if used at all.

I don’t want information; I want enchantment.

Jung said that the study of the soul begins and ends with Mercury, the pagan god of merchants, profits, and thieves. He’s the Tinder Swindler. He’s Anna Delvey. He’s a trickster and a master storyteller. He’s in the Forbes-30-under-30-to-prison pipeline. The Ancients designated a deity to mischief because it is a vice to try too hard to be sincere. You’re either sincere or you’re not; one does not try to be sincere. For example, if I say, “I’m humble,” am I actually humble? What mature person has to say, “I’m mature”?

Mercury represents a kind of detachment. I’m not saying that it’s good to lie or cheat; I’m saying that trying too hard isn’t the best way to get what you want. There’s something blatantly wrong with the pickup artist, yet, there’s something not quite right about someone who doesn’t have any game. You may be a good person, but what if you’re just not fun? If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?

Brat is a kind of transparency. It challenges hypocrisy and shakes up complacency. Brat is a splash of brandy in the cake—a little genuine fun in polite society.

Paradoxically, you need a dose of Mercury to keep things honest. It’s why the goofiest faceless accounts on Twitter are the most genuine people in real life, or why you and your close friend use the most unserious memes to describe the darkest times of your lives.

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.

Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.

Forget words! Don’t think! In today’s digitally-mediated landscape, there’s no need for knowledge or understanding, just information. Scroll the feed and you’ll find countless video clips and posts advocating this smooth-brained agenda: lobotomy chic, sludge content, silly girl summer.

“With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” says writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, who specialises in programming language critique. For the meme-fluent, the form isn’t important, but rather the message it carries. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.” To understand this way of “speaking writing posting” means we must embrace the malleability of language, the ambiguities and interpretations – and free it from ‘real-world’ rules.

Hey guys, I just got an order in from Sephora – here’s everything that I got. Get ready with me for a boat day in Miami. Come and spend the day with me – starting off with coffee. TikTok influencers engage in a high-pitched and breathless way of speaking that over-emphasises keywords in a youthful, singsong cadence. For the Attention Economy, it’s the sort of algorithm-friendly repetition that’s quantified by clicks and likes, monetised by engagement for short attention spans. “Now, we have to speak machine with machines that were trained on humans,” says Basar, who refers to this algorithm-led style as promptcore.

As algorithms digest our online behaviour into data, we resemble a swarm, a hivemind. We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases.

Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.

While most full-time therapists whose rates are set by insurance companies max out at around $100,000 per year, therapists who are full- or part-time content creators can make much, much more. @TherapyJeff, real name Jeff Guenther, an individual and couples therapist in Portland, Oregon, says he can make eight or nine times that amount on social media in the form of brand deals, merch, and direct subscriptions. When I clarify whether he’s making nearly a million dollars, he says, “It’s been an especially good year.”

What works on the app is simple, visually arresting videos that make you feel like they landed in your lap with a kind of cosmic destiny (the comments on these videos often repeat some version of “my For You page really said ‘FOR YOU.’”)

Therapists do cute little dances next to cute little graphics about what it’s like to have both ADHD and PMDD; they’ll lip sync to trending songs in videos about how to spot a depressed client who might have made a suicide plan; they’ll hop onto memes as a way to criticize parents who haven’t gone to therapy.

The most successful TikTok counselors don’t typically advertise their one-on-one therapy services; instead, they’ll sell products that establish themselves as mental-health experts but have the potential to net influencer-size salaries.

“I have been accused of being a toxic validator,” he admits. “Like, imagine that your ex-boyfriend is watching my content. Somebody might be coming across, like, a piece of my content that they can use in order to feel better about themselves, even when they should probably actually be doing some work and taking accountability.” But ultimately, who TikTok shows his videos to isn’t in his control.

Even if viewers know watching therapy content isn’t the same thing as actually going to therapy, when a professional therapist comes up on your feed to tell you exactly what you most want to hear at a time when you’re most in need of hearing it — that you are good, that you will be okay, and also here’s a cute little visual hook — you’ll keep watching.

Guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, they bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film.Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a museum curator pulling works together for an exhibition, they organize the avalanche of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing context and building narratives. They highlight valuable things that we less-expert Internet surfers are likely to miss.

Andrea Hernández, the proprietor of Snaxshot, a newsletter and social-media account dedicated to “curating the food and beverage space,” told me recently, “Curation is about being able to filter the noise.” (I follow Hernández for her skill at discovering the wildest examples of direct-to-consumer drinks startups, such as Feisty, a purveyor of “protein soda.”) She continued, “I go out and I scour through the Internet and I come to you with my offerings.” Unlike a museum curator, however, the digital personalities I have taken to following also become the faces of their work, broadcasting recordings of themselves, on TikTok and Instagram, as a way of building a trusting relationship with their followers.

One such curator is Derrick Gee, a former online radio d.j. who lives in Australia. I first encountered Gee on TikTok and was pulled in by his architect-ish look: thin wireframe glasses and stylishly baggy, often monochrome outfits. He records videos of himself talking into a microphone in a low, soothing voice, breaking down trends in contemporary pop music and reviewing high-end audio equipment.

Laura Reilly, who lives in Brooklyn, runs a newsletter and an Instagram account called Magasin (the French word for “store”), which she launched in 2021. Now with more than twenty-eight thousand subscribers, Magasin touts itself with the tagline “It’s a store. It’s a magazine. (It’s a fashion shopping newsletter.)” But it goes beyond simple recommendations, championing lesser-known brands—the provider of earthy, upscale basics Studio Nicholson; the knitwear maker Lauren Manoogian—and often interrogating the act of shopping itself. “The more you learn about a brand,” Reilly told me, “the longer you’re going to hold on to those pieces.” In other words, her informative posts are an antidote to fast fashion.

In a previous era of the Internet, we might have thought of figures like these simply as influencers, whose ability to attract large followings online gives them a power that sometimes surpasses that of traditional publications. But the idea of an influencer has, as Reilly put it, become “a little flattened over time,” connoting shallow, uninformed, even misleading content dictated by sponsors. “There’s a distinction between influencing and what I do,” Reilly insisted. The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of culture beyond themselves.

Digital platforms are largely devoted to making users consume more, faster—think of TikTok’s frenetic “For You” feed or Spotify’s automated playlists. Curators slow down the unending scroll and provide their followers with a way of savoring culture, rather than just inhaling it, developing a sense of appreciation.

witter’s main constraint is encouraging concision. It’s hard to dwell on word choice when you have so little space to work with. Twitter’s conversational tone also helps here—I can just write like I talk, and any fancy words would seem out of place. And of course, I can’t tweak fonts and margins, which cuts off a distraction vector.

each idea has to be wrapped in a little atomic package. I find this helpful for figuring out the boundaries between my thoughts and clarifying the discrete units of an argument.

a thread is linear! No indenting allowed. This forces a brisk straightline through the argument, instead of getting mired in the fine points of the sub-sub-sub-arguments of the first idea.

I think Twitter is useless for persuading a skeptical reader; there’s simply not space for providing enough detail and context.

I prefer to use Twitter as a way to workshop ideas with sympathetic parties who already have enough context to share my excitement about the ideas.

Overall, it seems that we want constraints that help keep us on track with fluid thought, but don’t rule out too many interesting possibilities. Considering both of these criteria together is a subtle balancing act, and I don’t see easy answers.

low barrier to finishing. On Twitter, a single sentence is a completely acceptable unit of publication. Anything beyond that is sort of a bonus. In contrast, most of my blog posts go unpublished because I fear they’re not complete, or not good enough in some dimension. These unpublished drafts are obviously far more complete than a single tweet, but because they’re on a blog, they don’t feel “done,” and it’s hard to overcome the fear of sharing.

This seems like a crucial part of sketching tools: when you make a sketch, it should be understood that your idea is immature, and feel safe to share it in that state. There’s a time and a place for polished, deeply thorough artifacts… and it’s not Twitter! Everyone knows you just did a quick sketch.

I believe that quantity leads to quality. The students who make more pots in ceramics class improve faster than the students who obsess over making a single perfect pot. A tool with a built-in low barrier to finishing makes it easier to overcome the fear, do more work, and share it at an earlier stage.

For me, Twitter does an oddly good job at simulating the thrilling creative energy of a whiteboarding session. People pop in and out of the conversation offering insights; trees and sub-trees form riffing off of earlier points.

I’m curious to think more about the constraints/freedoms afforded by different kinds of creative tools, and whether we could get more clever with those constraints to enable new kinds of sketching. I’m especially curious about kinds of sketching which are only possible thanks to computers, and couldn’t have been done with paper and pen.

the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.

Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”

YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency

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).

This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years, during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero

a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on “Breaking Bad,” growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labelled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?

Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.

These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.

In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.

There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.

The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.

The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.

The first hyperlinks pointed within their own domain, like the doors separating the rooms in your home. However, with the world wide web, the doors became portals, and pioneers mapped out site directories to guide internet travelers to the frontier of development. Reject modern interstates and embody Tarzan, Jane, or the chimpanzee to swing from link to link, blue to purple.

if you like handmade websites, you should visit Gossips Web or Brutalist Websites. These are the digital equivalent to the jazz bar, punk record store, or other physical places where subcultures gather. There’s likely one made by a devotee whatever your interest, like cyberfeminism, tiny internet sites, cozy websites, niche museums, list of lists, LA sandwiches, and much more.

As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s. The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users. To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights. Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me. In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person. Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possible range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argument, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy education, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.

Beyond the narrow framing of previous literature that only considers the use of shitposting for social exclusion or as fascist propaganda, I argue for an encompassing approach to this discursive tool that embodies a polysemic and open-ended cultural politic.

The analysis presented here shows that the circumstances under which shitposts circulate hold significant information when trying to understand the potential of these texts within a critical pedagogy. Expanding this assertion to consider other discursive technologies, it follows that both public pedagogy and critical media literacy research must continue to examine not only media itself but how pieces of media circulate, considering both who (or what) this media circulates between and where in that circulation people can begin to challenge the digital milieu.

I contend that positioning shitposting as a uniform tool in terms of its politics within previous scholarship misrepresents the practice. Instead, shitposting can serve a multitude of pedagogical ends depending on how individuals and groups use shitposts.

shitposting represents one tool within this broader, holistic understanding of public pedagogy, albeit one that often manifests unintentionally. By producing turbulence within social media, shitposting can contribute to the public pedagogies of social media that mirror the goals of critical media literacy education. However, a deployment or engagement with public pedagogy does not guarantee a critically oriented outcome.

The purposive design, production and marketing of legal but health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit has been called ‘limbic capitalism’. In this article, drawing on alcohol and tobacco as key examples, we extend this framework into the digital realm. We argue that ‘limbic platform capitalism’ is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Accessed routinely through everyday digital devices, social media platforms aggressively intensify limbic capitalism because they also work through embodied limbic processes. These platforms are designed to generate, analyse and apply vast amounts of personalised data in an effort to tune flows of online content to capture users’ time and attention, and influence their affects, moods, emotions and desires in order to increase profits.

When asked how often they decide not to post on social media out of fear of it being using against them, older teen girls stand out. For example, half of 15- to 17-year-old girls say they often or sometimes decide not to post something on social media because they worry others might use it to embarrass them, compared with smaller shares of younger girls or boys.

While 9% of teens think social media has had a mostly negative effect on them personally, that share rises to 32% when the same question is framed about people their age.

this survey reveals that only a minority of teens say they have been civically active on social media in the past year via one of the three means asked about at the time of the survey. One-in-ten teens say they have encouraged others to take action on political or social issues that are important to them or have posted a picture to show their support for a political or social issue in the past 12 months.

larger shares of Democrats than Republicans say they have posted pictures or used hashtags to show support for a political or social issue in the past year. In total, Democratic teens are twice as likely as Republican teens to have engaged in any of these activities during this time (20% vs. 10%).

Not only do small shares of teens participate in these types of activities on social media, relatively few say these platforms play a critical role in how they interact with political and social issues.

18% of Democratic teens say social media is extremely or very important to them when it comes to exposing them to new points of view, compared with 8% of Republican teens.

Despite feeling a lack of control over their data being collected by social media companies, teens are largely unconcerned. A fifth of teens (20%) say they feel very or extremely concerned about the amount of their personal information social media companies might have. Still, a notable segment of teens – 44% – say they have little or no concern about how much these companies might know about them.