idk dude we're all lost 🥴
Trying to understand how we forgot how to be human and sharing a big fear for fading big cities.
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🗣️ I was on the Day One podcast! It was a fab lil conversation with the crew, where we talk about the genesis of this newsletter, how brand world has shifted into psychosis, and the need for gatekeeping: listen here!
🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 featured my somn Lukas who joined Ben Dietz and I to talk Gen Z doing age drag as Millennials, young women as a key Substack demographic, and the importance of compliments: listen now on Substack, YouTube, and Spotify!!
Epstein file leaves big questions unanswered
How Epstein broke the internet
Epstein’s Money Mingled with Silicon Valley
“unbelievable sadness”
“How come every VIP”
I’m of the opinion that the Epstein files won’t do anything substantial, but the bombs going off around certain figures and industries are important. See the runoff in the UK and around the Clintons — but this ain’t gonna do anything to Trump! (My two favorite Epstein posts are: the one about the awards and the one about K-pop.)
Layoffs in Jan highest since 2009
US Flirting With Population Decline
Two concerning stats, one that emphasizes K-problems and the other proof of anti-immigration success (that will age poorly with JD Vance’s failed white baby racing).
Spain to ban social media for under-16s
“Dirty Sanchez”
Another instance of the teen social bans continuing to take off, this time with the potential to hold executives responsible. (I’m doubtful that will actually happen though, given how big-talk-no-action Spain tends to be.)
Loss of life was avoidable in Channel
One of my favorite books of the last year was “about” this 2021 tragedy in the English Channel, where more than thirty immigrants died between the UK and France.
US to fund Maga think-tanks, charities in EU
To the above, the American brand of hate has been exported for years as Trump brain rot spreads — all of which makes seeing Melania ads in Barcelona all the more "understandable” given it’s now a global movement we aren’t prepared for. (Will the Melania movie take off abroad? Probably not, but such is the point of propaganda: to wander, to linger, to brainwash over time to reinforce a movement.)
Washington Post Cuts More Than 300 Jobs
Inside the WaPo’s Existential Meltdown
“a murder in plain sight”
A tragedy, given Washington Post has been one of my favorite journalistic outlets for the past decade. But unsurprising! Given the dumbass owner also being the financier behind the Melania propaganda.
New Stat on Kessler Syndrome Will Give Stress
“it’s happening all the time”
If you want something else to stress about, enjoy this update on space trash.
I wish I could draw a map for us to figure out how to be human again but I don’t know how to draw anymore. I’m not a cartographer and I barely can follow a map, the Boy Scout in me long dead as the Google Maps Lady Voice™ tells me how to get anywhere, orienteering with her compass because I gave my compass to the Goodwill a decade ago. For the years I was an assistant, I printed out Mapquest for my boss, to help him get to and from each studio. I’d give him his agenda and the maps for his meetings, sometimes going over the directions with him. I don’t know how he did it because he was almost always rolling calls on his Blackberry, via his Bluetooth ear worm, talking and driving and trying to follow the dumb paper maps I gave him. He never complained about my over-preparing him in the least helpful ways, although I don’t think he needed the preparation at all: you live and work in a city like Los Angeles long enough, you can get almost anywhere on vibes. But can you get there quickly? That didn’t matter in the late aughts when he was driving because everyone went at the speed of the present — but now? Just ask any (Philippines operated) Waymo and they will tell you: the real streets no longer exist as you have to instead pass through the small pedestrian corridors to avoid the mass highways of everywhere, weaving around tents and school buses, creating dog ears and wormholes to jump from one neighborhood to the next and the next and the next.
We’ve forgotten how to live, how to be, which we’d realize more often if there wasn’t a whole economy dedicated to trying to fix us in increasingly odd ways, which is where this idea of mapping comes from: I was scrolling through Instagram and every other post was an explainer of how to be, each a didactic and “think piece”’d guide on something so basic that you’d think we all were struck by an object and have been struggling with amnesia. (Or maybe this is the main side effect of our always being on reality television, our becoming so stupid that we’re too scared and ignorant of our own ways of being.) “What to Do If Your Friends Keep Leaving You Out” TIME offers as a pep talk, as if we’re all middle aged middle schoolers. “Is Good Taste a Trap?” the New Yorker worries, before pinning you down with the subheader, “The judgments we use to elevate our lives can also hem them in.” “Move Your Eyes, Change Your Life,” New York says of a new therapy trend, after spending years crafting therapy trends that have brought us into ourselves while making us further removed from ourselves. “A psychologist says this exercise can make you more hopeful in 14 days,” Washington Post offers. The exercise in question? Literally being outside, with trees, looking at plants. “Why you should put down your phone and daydream instead,” Washington Post wonders at you. And why should you daydream? The answers range from (literally) “You will probably enjoy it more than you think” to (literally) “Daydreaming may help you solve problems.” Then there’s the final boss of New York-based overthinking and modern self-flagellation: The New York Times, who offers you buckets full of honey with “24 Simple Secrets to a Healthier Life” and “What a Baby’s Laugh Actually Tells Us” and “How DoorDash and Other Food Delivery Apps Are Reshaping Mealtime in the U.S.” and “In Search of a Platonic Co-Parent Online” all to stick you to the bottom of a bucket it will sell you ways out of. No, you don’t know the secrets of your own life. No, you don’t know what it means to smile. No, you don’t know how to eat. No, you don’t know how to parent. You don’t know how to do anything! Does anyone? Do I? Not anymore, it seems, as the aliens who have been watching us for decades laugh and laugh at our folly.
There’s a trend called “planned remembrance” which isn’t new as we’ve all experienced it, a FOMO for the past in the present, where you no longer have to worry about missing out from an event from by being removed from it: now you have to be worried about missing out on it from within the experience you are experiencing. A man taking a video of himself reacts to a leaping whale that he isn’t looking at, weddings upon weddings upon weddings not as a ceremony but as a moment to perform actions and hit marks for cameras, countless content zones that turn concerts and clubs and holidays into live artefacts: don’t live but instead relive at some other time. “Event slop“ and “search slop,” “KPIs” and “ROIs,” “conspiracy theories” and “bean soup theories”: so many paths we’ve taken around and around the ideas ourselves that we no longer know a way out. So beloved that no one can leave us, so hot that we only see ugly. A delivery robot slowly swerves around a homeless person. Debating decanting black olives and Asian podcast hosts. Going completely batty over whatever Connor Storrie is doing. “Can you talk to me a little about the pin you’re wearing tonight?” a reporter asked Jack Antonoff about his ICE pin. “It’s time to — It’s just — For every reason you can imagine,” he replied, starting and stopping, sentences all left unfinished until he declared himself finished. A path back to me, to you, to the human: signs everywhere but none of them mean anything, except that those of us “feeling this way” are of a certain class of toward-the-top of the vibe K-economy who can afford to stare at these blank things searching for the meaning we’ve lost. Death by email job when the trees have been there all along, when our bodies have always held the answers. Games and conversations can cure overthinking. Gain a little weight and be a little happier. “Go out and do something!” I yell from within the screen. Dehumanize me one more time so I can go on another multi-year quest to figure out all the insignificant things that I think have made my life harder only so I can over pay for overly complicated solutions that I will indulge to fix, less for the solutions and more for the talking points with friends, online. Give me more things to worry about! As if a polycrisis wasn’t enough.
This is a crisis of mattering: whether we are small and large cogs in machines, whether we are side characters or main characters in our own lives, it seems we have lost our meaning, our thesis for being — and it’s unsurprising that a slurry of solutions have appeared in the past decade to heal us of ourselves while spinning us around and around and around. “Mattering is the sense that we are valued by others and that we have value to add to the world,” Jennifer Breheny Wallace of The Wall Street Journal noted in January of an incoming crisis — for retired people, which seems to apply to most of us. “When people feel they matter, they thrive. When they don’t, they suffer. In one study of suicidal men, two of the most common words used to describe their distress were ‘useless’ and ‘worthless.’“ Tell me I’m worth it, we all seem to crave, the human in us trying to break out from the algorithmic present. Unfortunately, that system only craves chaos.
“We were not supposed to leave,” Jack trembles to Kate on the last episode of a middle season of Lost. “We have to go back,” he says, starting to cry, only for her to leave him, driving away, as he screams alone in the dark, from the future he wished he never existed in. “We have to go back!” To what? To where? When was the point that our over-complicating ourselves to the point of withstanding an entire economy dedicated to losing ourselves began? Maybe the aliens will tell us when they come back to give us the map we’ve long lost.
What a “Melania” Cinematographer Hoped
Melania Won’t Be Remembered for What She Wore
“Michael Jackson”
“I went and saw”
I will not pay to see this dumbass movie but I will def get drunk and watch it at some point. It feels like the makings of a camp classic? The second item is by the queen Robin Givhan too. Bless!
Homeland Security targeting Americans
This is a crazy story about how Homeland Security is using a backdoor technique to pry into Gmail accounts. Unsurprising, considering Google’s help with Israeli AI and the Department of War.
Anti-ICE chant erupts at AEW wrestling
Putting this here, as this seems like a big signal. We’ll see how the Olympics and Super Bowl resonate such thoughts. (RE: the Super Bowl: Did you know the Wayans are the reason why the modern halftime show is what it is?)
Ski jumping: penis injection claims
“sharing this like it’s self-evident”
I am legally obligated to share the Olympic drama involving ski jumping and pumping up dicks so men can fly further.
@KamalaHQ relaunching as Gen Z ‘content hub’
“went in on a meme that’s already way past”
“leak a content idea with no context”
“there are so many bad posts”
When the literal White House is posting AI shitposts and the president is posting racist AI slop, a “Gen Z headquarters” using old memes to “dunk” on ????? really exposes how you still don’t get the medium that is the internet. (If I were them? I’d stfu and hire thousands of AI slop farmers to shitpost mini-vids joking about how Trump is the child rapist, given he’s already a big slop subject.)
Savannah Guthrie’s Mom’s Kidnappers
Guthrie’s Video Shows a Rare Reality
“Kidnapping just got stranger”
The Savannah Guthrie missing mother story is a very sad personal drama played out on the national stage. It also feels like a gift to the dumbass House Inhabit true crime conspiracy crowd, who will be eating this up any moment now.
Kristen Stewart Buys L.A.’s Highland Theater
“I’d like to make movies in Europe and then shove them down the throat of the American people”: an early quote of the year. We need to give her a Nobel Peace Prize! More of this anti-corporate attitude!!
The Official History of ‘UNHhhh’
It’s hyperbolic to say UNHhhh is a definitive 21st century work, one that continues to craft the landscape. A must-read for drag fans and fans of internet culture!
I have two big fears about Los Angeles, after returning to my adopted hometown for a month following three-ish years away. The first? The power vacuum from the loss of Hollywood isn’t going to create a new Detroit but a series of stacked Tenderloins, Skid Rows fanning out from every neighborhood that many will be pin to the city and state for “poor handling” of inequality and homelessness when it is instead the fault of unregulated tech that gauged the city of jobs and opportunity, leaving a trail of the displaced and destitute in its wake. The city of dreams as yet another techno cautionary tale: I don’t think that will actually happen — but it’s a feeling I haven’t been able to shake. The other fear? My beloved city will play itself to survive, moving from a cinematic trope and into a reality that befalls cities that are treading cultural waters, turning to touristic voyeurism as an economic crutch to uphold a metropolitan economy as outsiders pay to see sights, to touch monuments, to stand near ancient relics that their parents and parents’ parents talked about. This is a more realistic fear that has long been true in some forms but could become even more pronounced given the Netflix of it all, given the Weekend At Bernie’s-via-Waxwork that befalls cities once venerated and now vacated by industry.
I don’t say this lightly: this is a warning as I keep encountering this feeling in cities across the world, namely in Europe. While London and New York certainly have spaces dedicated to “this” (Piccadilly Circus, Time Square) along with sizes and industries that make this threat moot, some cities are being forced into city wide performances that use social media as an advertising funnel that doesn’t spit out money but instead shoots double-sided swords of overtourism at all on the ground. My current city of Barcelona is a great example given it’s petite geography along with places like Venice, Italy and Athens, Greece, where sites and sights — Sagrada Familia! The canals! The Acropolis! — are held over any other culture in the city. This is an oversimplification but also isn’t: smaller cities are flattened to a series of abstract tiles, gondolas and gondoliers, and crumbling columns all as tarta de queso and tiramisu and baklava pave over anything new trying to breakout, any imports or exports that go beyond a place playing itself for money. It’s a distressing feeling to witness in real time, as the hearts of cities clear for tourists to roam, as locals dig into and indulge anti-diverse (and at times xenophobic) feelings because the rich from the rest of the world came to spoil theirs. (And to the point of Spain: it’s unsurprising that there has been such a big PR push lately around immigration, ehe economy, and general politics as this is an extension of the city-plays-itself logic, a performative advertisement that uses ideology to court certain types of moneyed visitors.)
A city like Los Angeles is primed to lean toward such a state — but so is a city like Paris, given its own political precarity and economic wobbliness. This was certainly the feeling during my last trip to Paris, where the city felt more in a loop versus advancing its own culture forward. Like Hollywood, see the stalling state of fashion was shocking given the industry has similarly been suffocated by business (and tech) interests over creative evolution and art. Caving to Shein, caving to AI, caving to the far right, this is a place in a similar cultural do-or-die: can it maintain its soul? Or will it accept payments as it sells itself off? This is the problem of “every city is the same” by another name: when cities become amusement park rides for people to zip around, to climb the Eiffel Tower and to stroll the Champs-Élysées, bygone ideas of a place rise, keeping emerging culture down. A place becomes a time capsule to visit a specific past as other cities rise above them. Events like the Olympics only help so much, which kinda-sorta worked for Paris but is posing massive problems for a place like Los Angeles. (To keep abreast of that, I highly recommend Alissa Walker’s Torched newsletter.) What’s a city to do when all else fails? Crank “La Vie en Rose,” pop on a beret, and serve crêpes, it seems — or play “California Love,” carry a skateboard, and sell brunch.
This is less a problem of cities giving up, or of local cultures wanting such money while hating such money: it’s simply the state of the world, the result of a century where culture — and place — is squeezed of life as the tech and economic whims of leaders play out, forcing people to fight for their lives as short term gains for some become existential crises for everyone. “We don’t read about how little of tourism money trickles down to society by way of decent wages and taxes,” Francesco Pacifico muses in a brilliant reflection on these issues in December, speaking of and from Rome. “Pull back the curtain, and you start seeing the void over which the entire economy hovers.” This is less place-as-content and more that places are being locked out of the future, disallowed to advance themselves despite their protestations (All of these cities boast tech leadership, by the way.) as they are jailed for not reigning in the systems that sold them a better pats only a mirage.
“a Skyrim shout”
“when someone flirts with me”
“Me and twin”
“she’s so me”
“baby blue eyes”
“this was next level”
The Grammys were really a big eh to me (Even the Billie stuff!) (To a point!!), but the biggest breakout was PinkPantheress’ going Skyrim/Avatar on a reporter.
“the last two seconds”
Yes, this is the Shamwow guy’s political ad. Yes, the last two seconds are a reminder of the power of media made without AI. If interested, two other great right wing posts: one where the ending of Weapons happens to a MAGA dude and another that uses AI to trans Mario Rubio.
“your wig slide back”
Some advice: even if you win, don’t wear a hair piece to your boxing match.
“catch a bird”
A quick guide on how to catch a seagull.
“Why does he keep saying sorry??”
“eh sorry”
”none of the lyrics match”
Lithuanian Justin Bieber can save music. I know it. Here’s his full performance and an interview with this new meme king.
“Devastating blow to the English language”
Typically I “get” what shit like this is saying on a slang level but — Reader. — a lot of this is undecipherable for me, which is also to say: read the first essay.
“channelling her today”
My most watched video this week, which is from 2019. IT’S WINTAH. HELLO? (This is my second-most watched btw.)
And, finally, what I would like to be paid in.
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Who's going to take the "devastating blow to the English language" slang and turn it into the next examination of masculinity disguised as sci-fi like Gibson with slang he heard on the streets of Toronto in Neuromancer or Burgess with Clockwork Orange?
Love that "new Gen-Z led progressive content hub" with no video, images, links, default About page text, and that hasn't been updated in three days 🙃