Saved

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.

now it’s three years later, and look around: First, we had two years of inflation news. Now, there is war in the air. A prolonged conflict in Ukraine and instability in Europe. Hamas’ attack on Israel, disturbing images out of Gaza, and a hot debate about U.S. support for Israel’s military. Headlines are everywhere about the growing specter of China invading Taiwan and the Iran-Russia alignment. On top of that, there’s a migrant crisis at the border and in some major U.S. cities. And, once again, protests abound — this time pro-Israel and pro-Palestine protests on college campuses and in urban areas.

I hope this doesn’t sound ungrateful in light of all the achievements that I shared earlier (which I still can’t believe all happened?), but I’ve been feeling weird the past month and found it hard to focus. These achievements are supposed to “prove” what I’ve been doing hasn’t been a whole waste of time. They are supposed to be the extrinsic progress markers I’ve always wanted to make my research and art legible to other people.

I still get these incredibly nourishing bursts of creativity and momentum, but they fizzle faster than before, and then I find it hard to pull myself to work on the things that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I’m gaining a growing backlog of unfinished projects and as the list grows, it becomes harder to kill off my babies and prioritize which to dedicate my time to. The decision fatigue of choosing each day makes it harder to build the momentum for a new project, and the vicious cycle takes hold.

I revisited some old memos where I’ve struggled with being restless and remind myself that I am doing well as long as I’m “practicing a way of being I love” each day. I don’t feel like I’ve been doing that lately, but mostly because of this unyielding pressure I feel to produce work and manifest the works that call to me.

I want everything that I dream of, and I don’t want to compromise. And even though I know how long a life comprises, I feel like there’s not enough time for all the things that I want to do. I feel antsy with desire and perhaps a bit of a need to prove myself, to show that I am worthy of sticking with what my own heart tells me is important.

It’s natural that I feel antsy when I’m trying to focus on so many things. Maybe this is part of the work that I so wish to avoid, part of “our struggle to find a way through” as Yohji Yamamoto recounts. Maybe a month of flailing to reorient my focus is a given. There are no free lunches, and so too does being independent (and working on whatever I want) come with the territory of enduring existential dilemmas and wavering motivations to see my questions through. This is not an easy lifestyle, nor is it something that can be forced all the time. Every day I feel like I’m answering my life’s questions. I should feel exhausted, even if all I do in a day is think about that question, even if these questions feel like my life’s calling.

I tried to create a spreadsheet that would guide readers through the appeals process for all the different types of insurance and circumstances. When a patient needs care urgently, for instance, an appeal follows a different track. But with each day of reporting, with each expert interviewed, it got more and more confusing. There was a point when I thought I was drowning in exceptions and caveats. Some nights were filled with a sense that I was trapped in an impossible labyrinth, with signs pointing to pathways that just kept getting me further lost

You may think that UnitedHealthcare is your insurer because that’s the name on your insurance card, but that card doesn’t tell you what kind of plan you have. Your real insurer may be your employer.

Government insurance is its own tangle. I am a Medicare beneficiary with a supplemental plan and a Part D plan for drug coverage. The appeals process for drug denials is different from the one for the rest of my health care. And that’s different from the process that people with Medicare Advantage plans have to follow.

The federal government sets minimum standards that each state Medicaid program has to follow, but states can make things more complicated by requiring different appeal pathways for different types of health care. So the process can be different depending on the type of care that was denied, and that can vary state to state.

I sought help from Jack Dailey, a San Diego attorney and coordinator for the California Health Consumer Alliance, which works with legal-aid programs across the state. On a Zoom call, he looked at an Excel spreadsheet I’d put together for Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, based on what I had already learned. Then he shook his head. A few days later, he came back with a new guide, having pulled an all-nighter correcting what I had put together and adding tons of caveats. It was seven single-spaced pages long. It detailed five layers of the Medi-Cal appeals process, with some cases winding up in state Superior Court. There were so many abbreviations and acronyms that I needed to create a glossary. (Who knew that DMC-ODS stands for Drug Medi-Cal Organized Delivery System?) And this was for just one state!

It’s especially complicated in oncology, said Dr. Barbara McAneny, a former president of the American Medical Association who runs a 6,000-patient oncology practice in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “My practice is built on the theory that all the patients should have to do is show up and we should manage everything else … because people who are sick just cannot deal with insurance companies. This is not possible,” she said. McAneny told me she spends $350,000 a year on a designated team of denial fighters whose sole job is to request prior authorization for cancer care — an average 67 requests per day — and then appeal the denials. For starters, she said bluntly, “we know everything is going to get denied.” It’s almost a given, she said, that the insurer will lose the first batch of records. “We often have to send records two or three times before they finally admit they actually received them. … They play all of these kinds of delaying games.”

McAneny thinks that for insurance companies, it’s really all about the money. Her theory is that insurance companies save money by delaying spending as long as possible, especially if the patient or the doctor gives up on the appeal, or the patient’s condition rapidly declines in the absence of treatment. For an insurance company, she said, “you know, death is cheaper than chemotherapy.”

the market didn’t so much pull ChatGPT out of OpenAI as they pulled the ambition to be a consumer tech company out of a group of researchers.

in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often “overshoot” their market: They give customers more than they need or ultimately are willing to pay for. And more importantly, it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow. This was the basis for insisting that the iPhone must have a low-price model: surely Apple would soon run out of new technology to justify the prices it charged for high-end iPhones, and consumers would start buying much cheaper Android phones instead! In fact, as I discussed in after January’s earnings results, the company has gone in the other direction: more devices per customer, higher prices per device, and an increased focus on ongoing revenue from those same customers.

Apple seems to have mostly saturated the high end, slowly adding switchers even as existing iPhone users hold on to their phones longer; what is not happening, though, is what disruption predicts: Apple isn’t losing customers to low-cost competitors for having “overshot” and overpriced its phones. It seems my thesis was right: a superior experience can never be too good — or perhaps I didn’t go far enough.

Jeff Bezos has been writing an annual letter to shareholders since 1997, and he attaches that original letter to one he pens every year. It included this section entitled Obsess Over Customers: From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling.

This year, after highlighting just how much customers love Amazon (answer: a lot), Bezos wrote: One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before — in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.

when it comes to Internet-based services, this customer focus does not come at the expense of a focus on infrastructure or distribution or suppliers: while those were the means to customers in the analog world, in the online world controlling the customer relationship gives a company power over its suppliers, the capital to build out infrastructure, and control over distribution. Bezos is not so much choosing to prioritize customers insomuch as he has unlocked the key to controlling value chains in an era of aggregation.

consumer expectations are not static: they are, as Bezos’ memorably states, “divinely discontent”. What is amazing today is table stakes tomorrow, and, perhaps surprisingly, that makes for a tremendous business opportunity: if your company is predicated on delivering the best possible experience for consumers, then your company will never achieve its goal.

In the case of Amazon, that this unattainable and ever-changing objective is embedded in the company’s culture is, in conjunction with the company’s demonstrated ability to spin up new businesses on the profits of established ones, a sort of perpetual motion machine

Owning the customer relationship by means of delivering a superior experience is how these companies became dominant, and, when they fall, it will be because consumers deserted them, either because the companies lost control of the user experience (a danger for Facebook and Google), or because a paradigm shift made new experiences matter more (a danger for Google and Apple).

what I cheered as an analyst was Altman’s clear articulation of the company’s priorities: lower price first, speed later. You can certainly debate whether that is the right set of priorities (I think it is, because the biggest need now is for increased experimentation, not optimization), but what I appreciated was the clarity.

The fact that Microsoft is benefiting from OpenAI is obvious; what this makes clear is that OpenAI uniquely benefits from Microsoft as well, in a way they would not from another cloud provider: because Microsoft is also a product company investing in the infrastructure to run OpenAI’s models for said products, it can afford to optimize and invest ahead of usage in a way that OpenAI alone, even with the support of another cloud provider, could not. In this case that is paying off in developers needing to pay less, or, ideally, have more latitude to discover use cases that result in them paying far more because usage is exploding.

You can, in effect, program a GPT, with language, just by talking to it. It’s easy to customize the behavior so that it fits what you want. This makes building them very accessible, and it gives agency to everyone.

Stephen Wolfram explained: For decades there’s been a dichotomy in thinking about AI between “statistical approaches” of the kind ChatGPT uses, and “symbolic approaches” that are in effect the starting point for Wolfram|Alpha. But now—thanks to the success of ChatGPT—as well as all the work we’ve done in making Wolfram|Alpha understand natural language—there’s finally the opportunity to combine these to make something much stronger than either could ever achieve on their own.

This new model somewhat alleviates the problem: now, instead of having to select the correct plug-in (and thus restart your chat), you simply go directly to the GPT in question. In other words, if I want to create a poster, I don’t enable the Canva plugin in ChatGPT, I go to Canva GPT in the sidebar. Notice that this doesn’t actually solve the problem of needing to have selected the right tool; what it does do is make the choice more apparent to the user at a more appropriate stage in the process, and that’s no small thing.

ChatGPT will seamlessly switch between text generation, image generation, and web browsing, without the user needing to change context. What is necessary for the plug-in/GPT idea to ultimately take root is for the same capabilities to be extended broadly: if my conversation involved math, ChatGPT should know to use Wolfram|Alpha on its own, without me adding the plug-in or going to a specialized GPT.

the obvious technical challenges of properly exposing capabilities and training the model to know when to invoke those capabilities are a textbook example of Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of integration and modularity, wherein integration works better when a product isn’t good enough; it is only when a product exceeds expectation that there is room for standardization and modularity.

To summarize the argument, consumers care about things in ways that are inconsistent with whatever price you might attach to their utility, they prioritize ease-of-use, and they care about the quality of the user experience and are thus especially bothered by the seams inherent in a modular solution. This means that integrated solutions win because nothing is ever “good enough”

the fact of the matter is that a lot of people use ChatGPT for information despite the fact it has a well-documented flaw when it comes to the truth; that flaw is acceptable, because to the customer ease-of-use is worth the loss of accuracy. Or look at plug-ins: the concept as originally implemented has already been abandoned, because the complexity in the user interface was more detrimental than whatever utility might have been possible. It seems likely this pattern will continue: of course customers will say that they want accuracy and 3rd-party tools; their actions will continue to demonstrate that convenience and ease-of-use matter most.

the tech keynote has diminished in importance and, in the case of Apple, disappeared completely, replaced by a pre-recorded marketing video. I want to be mad about it, but it makes sense: an iPhone introduction has been diminished not by Apple’s presentation, but rather Apple’s presentations reflect the reality that the most important questions around an iPhone are about marketing tactics. How do you segment the iPhone line? How do you price? What sort of brand affinity are you seeking to build?

The company is considering the use of carbon nanotubes to improve the conductivity of battery materials, delivering better performance from lesser-used battery materials. Apple is also looking to increase its battery's silicon content, replacing graphite to increase capacity, and shorten charging and discharging times. The result is expected to be an innovative battery type that has not yet been commercialized. A source familiar with Apple's plans suggested to ETNews that the Vision Pro headset has dramatically increased the company's need for high-performance batteries. The headset features just two hours of battery life. Other devices such as the Apple Watch and iPad have been left with the same "all-day" battery life since their introduction. Apple's custom battery project was reportedly co-developed with the company's electric vehicle project, but the mobile applications are now the main target for the technology. It is expected to begin being added to Apple devices starting in 2025.

Many of the most pressing concerns around AI safety will come with these features, whenever they arrive. The fear is that when you tell AI systems to do things on your behalf, they might accomplish them via harmful means. This is the fear embedded in the famous paperclip problem, and while that remains an outlandish worst-case scenario, other potential harms are much more plausible.Once you start enabling agents like the ones OpenAI pointed toward today, you start building the path toward sophisticated algorithms manipulating the stock market; highly personalized and effective phishing attacks; discrimination and privacy violations based on automations connected to facial recognition; and all the unintended (and currently unimaginable) consequences of infinite AIs colliding on the internet.

That same Copy Editor I described above might be able in the future to automate the creation of a series of blogs, publish original columns on them every day, and promote them on social networks via an established daily budget, all working toward the overall goal of undermining support for Ukraine.

Which actions is OpenAI comfortable letting GPT-4 take on the internet today, and which does the company not want to touch?  Altman’s answer is that, at least for now, the company wants to keep it simple. Clear, direct actions are OK; anything that involves high-level planning isn’t.

For most of his keynote address, Altman avoided making lofty promises about the future of AI, instead focusing on the day-to-day utility of the updates that his company was announcing. In the final minutes of his talk, though, he outlined a loftier vision.“We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency at a scale we've never seen before,” Altman said, “And that will elevate humanity to a scale that we've never seen before, either. We'll be able to do more, to create more, and to have more. As intelligence is integrated everywhere, we will all have superpowers on demand.”

New real-time syncing libraries like Partykit (and my inspired creation playhtml) are making it incredibly easy to make websites multiplayer, which many games incorporate as the default. This prediction is wise in a lot of ways in terms of interaction, narrative, tutorial, and multiplayer design, and more and more people desire a liveness and tactility in websites that we take for granted in video games.

Websites are the future of video games. They are the “end game” of video games. They are spaces where the end players (the website visitors) have the agency to freely interact with others, and not towards any predetermined object, but purely for themselves, discovering who they are in each new environment and finding new ways of relating to one another.

Tokimeki Memorial gives the impression where your agency comes into conflict with several others’, each with their own desires and personalities. At the end of this season, he concludes that more video games should ditch combat mechanics and instead focus on how your choice of actions question and ultimately shape who you are and what you care about.

As I watch Tim talk about all this, I think about how websites feel like multiplayer video games, all of which are part of the broader “internet” universe. One in which the “creatures” are the cursors of other, real people. And where we can’t fight each other at all, only talk to one another.

Somewhere in the push to make the internet the infrastructure of a global capitalist economy, we lost this perspective on what the internet is. If I asked people to define what websites are to them, they might talk about the capabilities they provide: “the world’s information at your fingertips,” “AI that does whatever you ask of it,” “a platform for selling products.” Or as design artifacts: they provide the basis of interactive, creative pieces of art, media, and writing. But if we distill a website down to its base components, it is a space that allows people to talk to each other. In the era when the internet was new and before we had predetermined what it was “for,” everyday internet pioneers found ways to talk to one another by making websites for each other. The conversations spanned webs of personal websites, revealing intimate detail in exchange for intimate detail. They bartered histories for kinship, stories for solidarity, identities for community.

The websites of our modern-day internet experience reflect quite a different perspective on what websites should be “for.” Websites are often the expression of a corporate unit, optimized for flow, retention, or the latest trendy design aesthetic. We focus on animation design and gradient layering rather than the interactions that govern how we relate to one another.

How do we make websites feel more like embodied objects? What does a website that can become well-worn or passed down feel like? How does a website become a living gathering space, one that evolves with the activity of its participants? How can a website enable showing care to each other? How can it facilitate solidarity between people?

As video games have shifted towards hyper-optimization, the internet has gone a similar direction. Friction has been systematically eliminated and sophisticated automated experimentation infrastructure enables optimization of key metrics at a microscopic level of detail. In return, we’ve come to view websites and the broader internet more and more as a purely utilitarian medium. Even social media, which at some point was positioned as something for self-expression and community-making has become almost entirely a space for influence climbing.

We need more websites that gently guide us to trust our own choices and intuitions, that chide us when we try to do it all and work ourselves to the bone, that nudge us to find beauty in unexpected places, to find the poetry in the lazy.

Apple’s M-series silicon team is simply on fire, doing some of the most impressive work in the history of computer architecture design and engineering. PC laptops in this class weigh over 6.5 pounds and offer terrible battery life; the 16-inch MacBook Pro weighs 4.7–4.8, the 14-inch MacBook Pro just 3.4–3.6, and all offer remarkably long battery life. It’s not like Apple’s silicon team had one breakthrough moment back in 2020 and have since been regressing to the mean — they continue to increase their lead over the rest of the industry in performance-per-watt.

“While history is often written about with great authority, the reality is that history by its nature is inherently anecdotal,” Weaver says. “We've had an opportunity to interview the people who actually created an entire industry, in their own words. Long after all of us are dead, the future of our industry is cemented in the words of the people who created it.”

Before we have sorted out who or what failed and why, many people have focused on restricting gun access. I will not blithely dismiss that discussion. There is simply no getting around the fact that America has a lot of guns, and it would not be intellectually honest to dispute that the mass availability of guns makes attacks like this easier to commit. Were there to be a wholesale gun confiscation in America, there would doubtless be fewer attacks like this.

The inability of society to properly monitor and manage people experiencing mental health crises is behind many problems, and is largely attributable to the well-intentioned but ultimately problematic choice to deinstitutionalize mental health care in favor of a model of community-based management.

I’m certainly not advocating for “re-institutionalization” but clearly something has to change, and the pendulum needs to swing back toward stronger interventions. Maine and the nation can design a better system that preserves humane treatment while simultaneously taking seriously the need to protect both society, and those like Card who desperately needed help and didn’t get it.

Wesleyan President Michael Roth called Basinger “a demanding and caring teacher, helping her students discover cinema as a way to see, to think and to feel, as an opportunity to explore the human experience.

Bridging the gap between James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” remains one the greatest and most instructive movies of its kind because it shows that denial is the real ectoplasm that binds ghost stories together, and love just the most satisfying conduit through which it might be made flesh.

The great project of someone’s life might be the pursuit of a sustainable balance between doubt and conviction, or fear and security; most people will construct and/or cling to whatever answers might spare them from the mortal horror of being hounded by certain questions. To that end, it’s no coincidence that many of the most unsettling ghost stories ever told revolve around characters who refuse to accept that they’re in one to begin with, as no other genre is so fundamentally dependent upon the power of denial. Likewise, no other genre is so determined to erode it.