i miss the computer room :(

How the internet went from a place to a stalker—and it's time we talk about our loneliness.

2023 heat was record-smashing
I want to cry. I am so sick of the damn heat! To that, New York is now technically classified as “humid subtropical.”

Hearings at The Hague
Regarding Israel’s attacks on Gaza and if they are human rights violation. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands marched worldwide for Palestine, asIsraeli soldiers write drag queen names on missiles. Gross.

Yemen: US & UK carry out strikes
Not only is Joey’s unapproved antics killing literal people but he’s also killing his chances of winning, while also killing multiple country’s future. What a nightmare to have to work through.

Half of World Heads Into an Election
Again: people talking about just how much the world will change this year because of elections. Speaking of, the newly elected president of Taiwan is 1.) the third win in a row for the pro-sovereignty party and 2.) this has China real upset.

Trump won't be on Nevada's 2024 ballot.
Why? Because he — and DeSantis and Vivek — didn’t fill out paperwork in time. Idiot!!

Michelle Obama terrified about 2024 election
bitch me too tf!!!!! Been saying this for weeks and Joey keeps beefing it.

Trump Connecting With Different Evangelical
“MAGA pastors”
“on the rise”
A lot of talk this week about pro-Trump evangelicals, who don’t actually attend church and equate Dems to demons.

Charlie Kirk Plans to Discredit MLK
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day 🙄

Pope Francis calls for ban on surrogacy
Look: who cares, I know. But, given liberal support, this could become a new abortion style fight.

Duolingo cuts workers, relies more on AI
Twitch to Cut 500 Employees
Google Cuts Hundreds of Jobs
“blamed her performance”
"That’s a normal quarter."
Nothing to see here! Especially not Cloudflare’s corporate buffoonery!!

"WebMD return to office"
"Rise and fall of the office park"
Anyway, Siri play “Back to the office (Absurd Bullshit Remix).”

Hidden Chabad Passageway Drives Chaos
The Jewish-tunnels-under-NYC was one of the wildest news moments in a long time. This TikTok breaks it down real well. 

Florida pulls dictionaries for ‘sexual conduct’
And this is how you create the stupidest people imaginable.

Can Plastic in Bottled Water Harm You?
DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s bad for you and the planet! Enjoy your microplastic bender!!

Elderly couple dead, home heater to 1,000º
"How is it possible?"
Huh?

The internet was a place.

I mean this literally. If you’re of a certain age, you know what I’m talking about. The internet was a room with a giant computer or a dedicated desk area by the kitchen or a place in a school or library where you went to “go online.” The internet — and the act of going on the internet — was a destination. You had to proactively seek out the interconnectivity and knowledge that it provided. 

This changed with smartphones, when this “place” turned into a vehicle that ran you over repeatedly by either the temptation to find an answer (“Let me look that up!”) or to continue what you were working on at said place (“Oh, an email!”). The introduction of quality cameras then turned this mobile place into a television production van: now the internet follows you—and it demands you perform. The audition room is no longer a place, neither are stores nor are recreation or community centers: the internet is everything everywhere all at once.

This is important to think about as two things are colliding: the first, as mentioned, is the idea of “brb,” the inability to go offline, combined with disconnection nostalgia and internet fatigue; the second is the state of social media and the influencer economy, which is creating different digital classes. 

The talk of the internet town for weeks is how the online experience, namely social media, has changed. How? It’s now a space of people selling and entertaining versus “posting.” This has created two types of users: audiences and entertainers, which means content-comes-to-you via algorithms versus see-what-your-world-posts via your friends and family and thing you chose. The internet as a place was more of a home but now it’s a bad mall full of flashmobs — and you’re either trying to run errands at increasingly worse dollar stores or you’re trying to get someone to smile as you dance. At best, these dancers (creators) replace friendships and or are community leaders — but the majority of “creators” or those aspiring toward the title are NPC-esque pop-up ad people who are corrupted by capitalism (a la TikTok Shop informercialists) in the pursuit of being paid to be unrelatable. (Here’s a hack for bypassing the TikTok shop.)

The results of audience-versus-sellers yields intellectually bankrupt products, as modern culture’s best assets (Memes! Jokes! Sharing! Conversation!) turn it into mindless doo-doo dribble that eventually carcinizes into sales tactics. Either selling news to friends or selling products, we see a symmetry in the personal/professional via the “brain rot friend” and “influencer lobotomy” / “run don’t walk” cultures: the linguistic tools that, at one point, were of a culture (“slay”) or profession (“snackable”) have merged into neither. This is how the long ballyhooed 2023-ism that is girl marketing has people self-infantilizing to the point of mania. This all builds on the commodification of identity (Cultural language!) and therapy talk (Professional language!) morphing the personal into an ad for…sharing how uniquely oppressed you are? You — like the internet — are now a travelling site that has to be as distinct as possible, a point of sale for your ongoing performance, the audience as protagonist as customer as salesperson.

This is a time of confusing friendships for sales and sales for friendships, as social media has dulled relationships to their most basic, transactional forms. The “parasocial” is irrelevant when everything is B2B, creators selling to you but you also selling yourself to creators and your community. No wonder we hate being online! No wonder we have no friends. The internet was a place we could leave so that we could resume life and actually be. Now the internet haunts us, eats us, transforms us into inside out mimics of something-we-saw-on-the-pocket-television. It leaves us culturally famished, starved. No wonder bar reading groups and suffocating talk (and startups) around third spaces reign: we all want to escape the exhausting paradise that is the infinite scroll.

Substack is at a crossroads
Substack says it will remove Nazi pubs
Substack’s woes deepen as tech blog leaves
It's time to leave Substack
A Continual Christmas
From

Garbage Day

to

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

, this week started the death rattle of Substack: they fucked around and found out as far as platforming Nazis—and their top creators are abandoning ship. Again: this is more of a “tool” issue for creators (a la, readers like you probably have no idea), but it’s important for you to know. As I wrote about this a few weeks back, this happens (and will happen) everywhere online unless you are making your own, artisanal internet—which is impossible. To rely on a product is to rely on someone else’s poor choices. Anyway, I was going to launch a paid vertical this week, but I’m going to wait the month as I may be ~leaving this platform~

Lynn Yamada Davis Dies at 67
“the best mom”
Very sad and, if memory serves, Cooking With Lynja is the first big “older” creator at this level of popularity to die. Say a prayer for Baddie Winkle and the Old Gays!

Can schedule send save us emails?
If you are sending an after hours email (a la, 7PM) instead of scheduling for the next morning (a la, 8AM), you’re an antiquated asshole who can’t be bothered to take two seconds to consider the people and lives on the other side of the email. You are a bad person. Period.

BuzzFeed’s ‘Dire’ Debt Problem
Once this goes down, we’ll hear so many Millennial culture stories. This relates to the now-and-then-ism 2024 prediction!

Jewish entertainers criticises Academy
"New Hollywood letter dropped"
A group of actors are campaigning for Jewish persons to be considered an underrepresented group in Hollywood, as they are “an ethnic group, rather than just a religion.” Okay.

“Hi Barbie!”
Recess Therapy at the Golden Globes was a breakthrough, which is to say: we are going to see Julian and his cast of kids a lot more on red carpets. It’s going to become a talent agency!

Chicago 'rat hole' becomes sensation
"Saw the rat hole"
“paying tribute”
The Chicago “Rat Hole” is having a moment and I want to see it.

Florian Hetz Wants to Abolish Artist Statements
I did not get to finish this but I enjoyed every second of Florian speaking with Brontez Purnell.

Marina Abramović releases a skincare range
Marina at Sephora WHEN?? This is stupid.

Ariana Grande drops ‘Yes, And?’
If Beyoncé’s Renaissance was an okay echo of house, Ariana Grande’s “yes, and?” is like Kidz Bop house. It’s a musical theater kid’s idea of dance music,a RuPaul song for dressing rooms. The lyric “Say that shit with your chest.” in her kinda-sorta blaccent is so bad too. The memes are the best thing about this return!

Kanopy
“let me put y’all onto something”
I no longer have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc. and largely watch via [REDACTED] but I recently input my library card into Kanopy and was tickled to see a huge A24 and Criterion collection. Support your libraries and start streaming with this free service!!

Read while listening to this or this.

How long can you go in a day without speaking? There are days where I go three or four or five hours without saying anything. That’s not because I’m making the effort, but because there is no need for my physical voice. No one at the door, no asking for something, no one in need of me to speak. My voice goes unused, curled up like a dog, resting on the pillow that is my tongue. There are opportunities to speak as this can occur when I am at home or at a store or at the gym, riding a bike or going somewhere by bus. This usually happens in the morning, from just-waking until my first function. Sometimes this stretch occupies the middle of the day, as writing and work and me being me require nothing to be said. Rarely does this happen at night, but sometimes that can happen too. It’s just you and your thoughts, which I rather like. I like myself! I like being by myself. I am a middle child and a Taurus. Of course I enjoy my solitude and my own company.

This silence I do not call loneliness, but it is related. The loneliness is different. The loneliness is watching a television show and not having anyone to talk to about it. The loneliness is doing something great but not having anyone to share it with. The loneliness is swallowing something that you would say — Or want to say! — but have lost the ability or confidence or technique to share when with people. That is the loneliness, which isn’t to be confused with its soft but sinister counterpart: sadness. The sadness comes and goes, but the loneliness stays with you, covering you, a weighted blanket that removes you from the world while being in the world.

I know you know what I’m talking about. Going to a party and feeling like you’re in a school of fish rather than a social occasion. Going to a concert but feeling like you’re somehow missing the beat that everyone else is enjoying. Going to the bar only to want to go back home to resume sitting by yourself. Loneliness creates more loneliness, which is its seductive trap. Being able to say “I like my own company!” is a necessary adult skill, but it can be poisonous. The individual is a value, but being an individual by itself, divorced of community, is useless. You start to feel alone when together with others, that you still haven’t found “your people,” whether that is true or not. You always know there is something better out there. You feel like you’ve never truly been seen. Longing and longing and longing. Is this a real feeling? Or is this a moment? Certainly it’s not forever.

I am not alone in this. You know this too, which is the irony. There is an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. You may say “Covid!” but this is a phenomena decades in the making, from the fall of religions to late 2010s lonely talks to elderly health issues due to isolation. (Fun fact: I actually did volunteer work for years to curb elderly isolation.) We talked about gay loneliness in 2017. A book published in 2011 hoped to decode this tech-induced problem. Is loneliness due to work culture making all social activities planned? Can we blame loneliness on our inability to experience things communally? Is it because we cling to competing individualism that isolates instead of unites? “i miss everyone i have ever met,” a Tweet I saved this week reads. “and i miss the ways the birds sounded when i was growing up and i miss all of the pets i’ve ever lost”

shit you should care about

just published a guide to being lonely. Watch this recent New York Times documentary with teens to nonagenarians sharing their loneliness experiences. It’s crushing. We’re being crushed. By who? Culture? Ourselves?

Being with people is like bike riding. The more you do it, the more confident you become. You have to do it in your own way, whether that’s talking to people while playing a video game or starting a book club. I’ve done everything from run an art gallery in my apartment to start a magazine, all efforts to bring people together that were successful in myriad ways. I’ll do this again at some point. (And hope these silly emails can help someone, in some way.) But it’s important to know that we are all lonely. If there was any mood of the now, in these times of wars and disease and disparities in equity, it’s that isolation keeps people down enough to stay docile. But, like dating or finding a job or making a work of art, change doesn’t just “happen”: it takes effort. You have to chip away at it every day because no one is going to save you from your loneliness but you. That’s why it’s hard, because loneliness “doesn’t feel that bad” day to day. But in the month to month and year to year, you find you have no souvenirs of life lived. Shows have been watched, games have been played, books have been read—but who did you share that with? Only the lonely.

“slayper rifle”
“cuntanamo”
“radiocuntivity”
"where do we draw the line"
Remember the “motherquake” and “mother plane” from last week? It evolved into an extreme-but-creative-and-annoying cunt, slay, mother, etc. trend. Vivek did it too.

"dogs when u film"
"how do they know"
"weirdly accurate"
But dogs really be acting like that.

“don’t mind if I do”
“how I retired”
I think Boomers are starting to understand that work is bad as well.

“not even the fart”
“not even the fart”
Ice Spice is my Shakespeare. Also: what’s up with the trend of rappers talking about poop in 2024?

“best friend”
“knockout”
“meet the mechanic”
Certainly something picking up speed, but this is the only way videos should be edited.

“sorry horse”
“roar”
First best horse post of the week, second best. (The second is becoming a meme style.)

“when I try to go to sleep”
I love that feeling of drunken almost-asleep-ness.

“Don’t smoke with me”
I just love Kamala Harris videos.

"one of those weeks"
I’ve known about this wine-named-Josh for a long time but, seeing it in this context, it’s so dumb. (This was also a big Twitter talking point this week.)

“drew barrymore’s tv so small”
I am obsessed with this ugly room and small television.

“sisyphus when he’s allowed”
Best Tweet I saw this week.

“America states”
Now this is an American kid!! Get that kid 78 hot dogs!!

“woo woo”
Watching Brittany Broski as Rugrats was the thing I watched most this week.

“Enjoy my masterpiece”
I lied: I watched the rizz cover of “West End Girls” the most.

And, finally, a very important message for my fans.

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