HAPPY TENTH SURVEILLANCE SUMMER!!!! 😎

Digging into the issue of surveillance summer to explore how "normal" all this is, and speaking with a new LA literary figure on trends he's into.

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• 🌀 THIS FRIDAY! IN BARCELONA!! 🌀 We’re doing the local launch of Culture Slop! Pop by, say hello, and grab a drink and copy of the magazine before you head out for your evening’s affairs: RSVP here!!

• 🦿 HIP REPLACEMENT 🦿 this week is with Brittany Antoinette, who chats with Ben Dietz and I about growing up in New York City, the hullaballoo around the latest (Atlantic-based) literacy crisis scare, and some more thoughts on Backrooms. Catch it on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify!!

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ICE halts most traffic-stop arrests
Trump says ICE should not give up traffic stops
“Complete bullshit”
“shot and killed him”

Insert the meme where the old guy pulls back the calendar to reveal a date from the past, as tragedies not only repeat from January but from so many other instances of the past two decades (and beyond).

Iran targets military bases

As the Times put this week, we are quickly entering another forever war.

RIP the US state department

A very good story about how Trump gutted our international diplomacy system, obviously to the detriment of our international relations, which ties into Marco Rubio trying to take down the ICC. Trump’s corruption never ends either, as he’s claiming election meddling, is selling access to his social posts, is intertwined with betting markets, and has a skeezy gas station scheme. Very ready for the scammer influencer-as-president era to be OVER.

House to make daylight saving time permanent

This is the shit that’s getting prioritized by the government? This? I guess a win is a win but also…can I get any Democrats to do anything about the other items listed above??

The Atlantic’s newest marine invader has arrived
Scientists probe drop in Chesapeake Bay’s crabs

Are these things related? Probably not. In any event, hope you all love clams because we need to start eating the fuck out of them!!

Lake Powell reaching critically low elevation levels
“crisis on the Colorado River”
The Pacific Ocean is running a fever
U.S. Wheat Output Lowest Level Since 1970

Despite these frazzled times of shit and fire, rumblings of large environmental failures are happening too. This is a collection of a few items from the west over the past month that I keep seeing but haven’t put together until now. I haven’t gotten through all of it, but this KQED deep dive on the collapse of the Colorado River is good.

Wildfires Rage in Ontario
“Gotten a little scary”
Wildfire Causes Unhealthy Air in NY

Exactly to the above, to what has been said for decades as this shit reaches a point: what are we doing about this? Have we not had enough? Which leader, country, etc. will be brave enough to institute a radical shift? I said this back in Q1 — and will continue to say it — but what comes after AI pops is focusing on sustainability. We need to make summers not-evil again, and taking the climate seriously is the first step. (Meanwhile, out in LA, a water main break is wreaking havoc. Pick your poison, I guess!)

FCC Approves Test of Space Mirror
“SPACE MIRROR”

Did you hear about the literal mirrors in space to make mass light at night? In killing “night,” we would effectively be killing ourselves. Like. What’s the point of living? This is dystopian, and would take our fucking up ecosystems and environments to another level. Terrible.

Apple sues OpenAI
“stealing trade secrets”

I hope this drama brings down OpenAI, but of course it won’t. Either way, it may bring down little people — and hopefully will mean no more Jony Ive scamming.

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I

I know you love me (Daddy!)
‘Cause you’re always watching me (Daddy!)

Protecting me from evil
Protecting me from terrorism
Protecting me from child molesters
Protecting me from evil

Watch me, Watch me, watch me

There’s a sexual tension to being watched, isn’t there? There’s a push-pull, no matter if someone is doing it because they love you or because they’re taking from you, extracting your image or information. “I know you love me because you’re always watching me,” Anohni sung just over a decade ago, blurring the tension of a lover’s gaze with monitoring by the state. This May 2016 context was the fodder of many memes, that government agents were inside your computer watching your every movement, monitoring your information so they could discipline you, inspiring a late 2010s trend of camera covers that Covid’s “always on” video state broke. The song —l like the album — isn’t meant as a joke but is a deep protest, specifically of Democrat-led politics. “[Obama] was elected on a campaign of transparency and closing Guantanamo Bay,” the artist told Loud and Quiet then, explaining her critiques. “We didn’t expect that that would mean the NSA scandal and execution of every future terrorism suspect overseas…[The album]’s more about my naivety and how infantilised I’ve become that I’d expect to elect a man to look after me and to look after this world.” Remember: this was what Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing was about, revealing the extent with which the government monitors us.

Two and a half presidencies and eight Kardashian children later, the last decade has not only normalized the once-scandalous idea of surveillance but has shifted the notion of “being watched” as a government overreach to a normalized behavior of the everyman. We’ve advanced from body cameras for cops (and their misuse or non-use of said cameras) to the contentification of arrest videos, to AI companies courting cops to better recognize the faces of citizens and courting you to upload your identity. “You are not supposed to see this,” Wired journalist, Andy Greenberg, said this week in a viral exposé featuring various persons being watched from above. “The only reason you are is because cops in San Francisco livestreamed highly sensitive surveillance drone footage on the open web.” This is thanks not to a brand like Palantir but to Skydio, a multi-billion valued “killer” drone maker used in Ukraine and Israel — and in America. As is proven by the Wired exposé, such drones are watching countless people from the sky without notice. “Their small size and high altitude make them virtually invisible,” Greenberg said. “In other words, you would never even know that you were being watched.” Isn’t that how this always works?

It’s ironic that, as surveillance systems and cultures multiply exponentially, the necessary watchful eyes close: the CDC sees its surveillance of pathogens reduced — a potential enabler of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak — as WHO sees its surveillance of diseases cut, a likely enabler of the current ebola outbreak. (Next up: dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, historical systems like the Smithsonian, and the Election Assistance Commission.) We have become the live animal on cams from the early 2010s, gleefully going Live as careless caretakers extract from us, giving us toys that help them see deeper into us. The rightfully maligned “surveillance chic” trend makes panopticism a Kardashian-approved fashion accessory is the boldest example as fashion skips into the arms of fascism, rebranding tech’s long “quiet” nefariousness as a physicallized cutesy “it” item. As if this were the only example of cultural soft surveillance! A decade of Ring doorbells normalized the watchful eye in the name of community safety and content when it really was to trap people. Flock cameras “keeping cities safe” are now being pushed with community watches that the company head calls “terrorism.” Trends that I’ve written about again and again — anyone online participating in a reality show (Dec 25), on the need for workers to perform on camera to get and keep jobs (Jan 26), our obsessions with “monitoring the situation” (Mar 26) — further this watch-and-be-watched moment, a culture of constantly filming strangers simply because the world is happening, the draw of the television so strong that simply living now is “making television.” Any accident, any literal misstep, becomes camera content, either to out an evil armed officer or a wrongful Karen — but also to capture a slightly confused person or the vulnerable, to broadcast their missteps, flattening their personhood, making them a non-human fool: whether to police or to monitor, content is content. The eye of the camera doesn’t differentiate who is bad or who is good: this televisied state of mind turns us not from auteurs but to cop-judges (Jun 25).

Is this why the past decade has felt flat? Is this why the 2016 vs 2026 trend felt so bad because it revealed how exaggerated our worst tendencies have become? 2016’s air space evolving to 2025’s global hegemonic culture, a feeling of universal sameness that is an indirect reaction to cameras everywhere, to eyeballs on everything. “Sameification” is a word that is picking up, as it captures how New York neighborhoods are becoming the same, which reflects how we are becoming the same: standing in lines waiting for the same things, after years of dressing the same, as a generation blurs together for fear of sticking out given social media panopticism. This might be why gaming and nerd terms slight the new normie (“NPC,” “larping”) and is certainly why we’re being subjected to an ongoing rise in conversations about “taste,” which tech is seeking to capitalize on so they can sell you worldviews when you’ve become too bland to have an opinion. Your flatness means you have no opinion and cannot discern anything, offering (AI) companies the chance to outsource your thinking so they can further a caste system, “taste” as an excuse for widening issues of class while equating (racial, gender, etc.) biases as “preferences.” The rise of streetwear in the past decade from something of a community to being worn and championed by Mark Zuckerberg is a great example. “We as a society are forcing people to either become posers or extremists because we devalue certain aspects of others’ identities,” Logik explains of the larp.

Another key difference between the “NSA is watching me” memes of then to now is we moved from a time of most of us being offline and off camera to all of us becoming a hybrid of entertainers and entrepreneurs, post-Covid digi-gig workers for big tech, we all playing the lottery of “creating” and “hustling” to solve an economic crisis of their making. The 2020s trend of dehumanization has heightened this as we see each other in the ways brands and tech companies see us: not as people but as stores to rob. Everything is ad space — television shows, movies, sports — making anything seen by any eye as advertisable. This is why the fashion world continues to sputter as B2B apparel rises, brands now “fashion houses,” your body advertisable in the pre-cum that is fashion, media, and tech fucking each other. OpenAI swag reheats Kith’s nachos and Palantir swag resurrects French work wear to further confuse “taste” with ad space. “The most beautiful short film you’ve seen in three years is actually an advertisement for an AI company,” someone says, “Every sports betting ad looks like it was shot and filmed by Luca Guadagnino. These are problems.” Corporate raves rage as culture is cannibalized, as Goldman Sachs executives become DJs, as Charli XCX moves from wannabe thought daughter to wannabe marketer. Mad world, ad world, etc.

Just outside of Oxford, George Orwell’s body lies, 42 years after the year 1984, 77 years after he wrote that book. He got a lot right (newspeak, totalitarianism, “Two Minutes Hate”) yet, despite the show, the dominant theme of his work that has come to define the modern moment is what Anohni was pushing against, eroticizing her anger and helplessness to hysteria: “Big Brother is watching you.” What he got wrong — as did Anohni — was that the brother and the daddy wasn’t just the government but each one of us. The anger around Meta glasses signals a change and a chance to stop this — but it’s so much more than “that,” than our little cameras being tools of AI learning and mass surveillance: they pull back your autonomy and our differences while promising the future. Meta has used AI to lay off workers with medical conditions, revealing how none of this is about help or entertainment but about creating profits from your losses. “I said this about AI well over a year ago,” the artist J. J. Ellis wrote Wednesday. “Using it to diagnose and fire people with medical conditions so they lose their insurance AND their income is somehow even more heartless and evil than I’d predicted.” In China and the US and everywhere in between, surveillance is “in.” Flock, the glasses, Reels and what not: these are gifts for us to do their work, assuming a final form having been primed to become ad space over the last decade. We’ve become so glutted with content, foie gras for The Matrix, our lives and minds and souls becoming blander and blander and blander as we have less and less and less economic opportunity to allow our escape. Another version of us would use these cultural losses to yield rich counter-culture, to protest and rebel. Instead, the television comforts as it kills. You’ll become a Cameraman too in order to survive as they push us further down this Skibidi toilet. I wonder, as we watch each other sliding further into this septic tank, if we’ll have that moment where we realize none of this is entertaining or fun, let alone normal. How, then, will we climb out of the bowl? Will we connect the dots between the data centers and the Meta glasses and the fires and the poisonings and the poverty? We’ll watch what happens live, as we peel off what was wheatpasted over us to prevent us from being ourselves.

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Democrats Became Great by Fighting the Left
I am a centrist Democrat and I am terrified
Democratic Socialists can’t hide its extremism

Two of the three of these stories are not what you think: they’re not propaganda. The first story is great, about how the larger Democratic apparatus needs to work (“fight”) with the further left to remake itself. The second is a great skewering of centrism in the Democrats. The last? It’s a fucking Dem propaganda piece, which highlights how “stories like these” are trending. This is perhaps why Abdul El-Sayed is distancing himself from the DSA: it’s less abandoning ideas and more “looking like a Democrat” for respectability purposes and muddy their propaganda.

Eating spicy food could lead to longevity
Coffee may be make your liver healthier

Big week for stories-that-validate-behaviors. No, I will not be drinking coffee despite my liver needing it but I will go harder on spice. (See also: this you-can-sleep-less story.)

_________ are cutting back most on alcohol
Where _______’s time goes, why experts are worried

Let’s play a game of generations. Of all the generations, who is cutting back most on alcohol? And who is wasting the most time? The results aren’t really that surprising, although I don’t need to tell you who the best generation is. Here’s a data look at that second story and this story on class over generations is great too.

“Parent to your parent”

This New York Times documentary on caring for aging parents is devastating. Surely this cannot be the only way? 💔

Scientists Find Sugar Deep in Galaxy
NJ meteorite contains amino acids

Two “Huh? What?” stories about extraterrestrial items of human nutrition.

Eartheater on motherhood
“having an earthquake inside you”

Loved this RA interview with Eartheater, especially her thoughts on the body and the changing of the body during pregnancy. “Distortion is so beautiful in sound,” she said, “Watching the way the body distorts is just stunning.” Another highlight? She talks about how the love she has for her baby is like getting “Lasik on your heart.” Ugh. This is a literal mother! Your creative inspiration for the week. Put more hair in your pasta!!!

Meet ‘Jimothy,’ Seattle’s internet-famous raccoon

The animal of summer 2026 is the short-spined cute freak, Jimothy, who has dominated social media all weekend.

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l

Something that will come to define this year — if not the 2020s — is how everything is becoming gossip, tabloid fodder that functions somewhere between information gathering and entertainment. Gossip is sticky! That’s why it’s useful and fun, not to say that all gossip “is good.” I’d be lying if I didn’t say I love a good gossip session, that I adore any cup of hot tea. Who doesn’t love such things these days? It is a small joy to share a bottle of wine and bitch as such. Is that not why a gossip column culture has emerged for every industry, from the late 2010s rise of Diet Prada to TMZ’s recent pivot to Washington? Is this not accountability via entertainment? Or, at least, when the form is at its best it’s that.

It’s this context that makes something like Sammy Loren’s literary conceptual tabloid, On The Rag, feel particularly resonant as it balances the literary and artistic worlds with pulpy and reality-based gestures. Sammy runs the reading series Casual Encountersz and curates Made In helLA, making him very much a West coast lit-art-guy-about-town. To get his take on tabloids (and why he started On The Rag), we had a quick chat on trends, exploring a new LA literary scene, the importance of hanging out, and why he really does not like “creator” culture.

Tell me about a trend you’re following that you’re really into.
Naturally I’m really into the reemergence of print media and am a fan of so many cool print projects. My favorite, of course, is On The Rag, America’s Greatest Tabloid. Another is Umm... a conceptual alt-weekly run by filmmaker and art dealer Tif Sigfrids. We’re actually working on a double issue of On The Rag and Umm..., one cover/half will be On The Rag, then you flip it around and the other cover will be Umm... with the two issues meeting in the middle centerfold. I also love Diva Corp Magazine, the Mutt Art Review, The Whitney Review of New Writing, and The Big One, a literary magazine in LA. Each is unique and all in some sense support the other. I should emphasize that I personally do not fetishize print, in fact, for me it’s quite the opposite: print was the popular medium back in the day, and with On The Rag I’m trying to make it a popular medium again.

What’s a trend you hope never dies?
I hope even with the rise of AI that people continue to hang out IRL. I’m not sure if hanging out IRL is even a trend, but it’s sort of my favorite thing to do and I hope it never dies out. I’m trying to bring back the trend of friends just drinking on street corners under the stars. Any spot on earth can be a nightclub with a couple of friends, a couple of beers and the right spirit.

What’s a trend you are so over?
I hate the word “creators” and hope the idea of “creators” dies. “Creators” are the most pathetic and vacuous morons on earth. I’m only interested in artists, whose work is saying something, criticizing something, taking a position on something. ‘Creators’ are just commercial slop, at least have some decency and be the highest of all trades, a “shitposter.”

What’s the state of gossip now?
Tabloids get a bad wrap, but I think they document the dark underbelly of our society. Some say they sensationalize or focus on salacious or silly topics, but I believe we in the “yellow press” play an important role: reporting on the darker side of American life. Sex, fame, money, and crime are all essentially shadows of love and death, Eros and Thanatos, it’s all eerily Freudian what the public desires and wants. On The Rag is most interested in libertinism, expression, and freedom, so naturally we attract people on the internet posting and reporting anonymously on their romantic and sex lives.

How would you define LA’s media scene now?
The media scene in LA is dying and being reborn at the same time. Many of the legacy outlets are in freefall, which isn’t the fault of the many talented editors and journalists at them, but of bad leadership and cheap owners. That being said there are many publishers doing interesting work in LA such as On The Rag, The Page, The Big One, Diva Corp and LA Material.

Follow Sammy Loren on Substack and Instagram along with On The Rag on Instagram.

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“Come with me to protest data centers”
“My name is Sadie”

BADDIE OF THE WEEK!!!!!! AND WE NEED MORE BADDIES LIKE THIS!!! WE SHOULD ALL BE LIKE HER!!!!!!!!!!!

“a harry potter situation”
“first World Cup”
“World Cup for grannies”
“catching up”
“a terrible man”
“Pedro Sanchez, Donald Trump”
“el domingo”
“Thanks”
“Wrap this fucking World Cup up”
“Congratulations to Messi”

By the time many of you are reading this, the World Cup will be over, and I likely will be swarmed with Spanish and Argentine fans on my block loving and hating each other. But regardless! There were some good memes this week.

“Rihanna debunking”
“NOT her destiny”
“confirmed”

The Jay-Z shows were so whack, but at least one good thing came out of it: we can officially let go of our dreams that Rihanna will sing again.

“heard an Audrey Hoebert song”

This is actually exactly what she sounds like. Caroline Polacheck Taylor Swift ass.

“our generation’s Elizabeth Taylor”

Sadly, I am no Ariana fan — but I do enjoy the drama that swarms her. I also continue to enjoy the culture of Petal.

“SO camp”
“not serious”
“Test your lettuce”
“racist toward whites”
“He buys us groceries”
“Thank you, Mr. Mayor”

Some very good political content. Can you guess which one isn’t real?

“On the fourth of July”

Belated best content from July 4.

“I love love”

Perhaps the best engagement video of all engagement videos. And it’s real! I love them.

“a rather lynchian quality”
“personal favorite”

My character of the week was Uncle Greg, who makes sexually charged AI videos of him and the Chipettes. You really don’t know what people are doing in their houses, let alone with AI! See also: the Zoomer swag Trump-Bidens.

“Intelligence.”
“Intelligence.”
“Intelligence.”

The Family Feud of tragedy posts were a highlight of the week. A humiliation ritual!

“Minnie when Mickey”

A Tweet of the year, which is vulgar but we’re all adults.

And, finally, a version of the new Madonna that I hope drops.

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TR.BIZ: 7.16.2026

TR.BIZ: 7.14.2026

#adulting for almost twenty years