RIP CULTURE ???? - 2025 😭

How losing TikTok means losing more than an app and on the rise in cities that survive by performing themselves.

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Israel’s ‘heinous crimes’ continue despite ceasefire
Israel's Cabinet approves a deal for a ceasefire
US 'confident' Gaza ceasefire will begin on Sunday
Who claims credit for the Gaza ceasefire deal?
This was big news, which hopefully holds, which we are literally finding out as you read this. Of course much of the conversation has been a silly American pissing contest.

Biden warns of the rise of American ‘oligarchy’
‘Oligarchy’ Gained $1.5 Trillion Under Biden
Sorry, I didn’t want to hear shit about “oligarchies” in the final breaths of your presidency, Joe. Remember when Janet Yellen refused to curb this shit at the G20? That was an opportunity to do something! Anything! Yet…the rich got richer and we all lose as a result. Let’s not forget to log the forcible removal of a reporter who questioned Anthony Blinken in these final hours. Ethel Cain for president!!

Hanging out at Starbucks will cost you
Amazon cuts mentions of DEI and LGBTQ rights
"Coca-Cola gives Trump a special Coke"
"drag the whole world into fascism"
Other things to file under these meaner times in Trump’s world America.

Supreme Court to uphold TikTok ban
Biden administration will leave it to Trump
Can a VPN get around the TikTok ban?
Why TikTok Users Are Downloading ‘Red Note’
Duolingo: 216% spike in US users learning Chinese
The RedNote founder welcoming ‘TikTok refugees’
A stupid, wishy-washy end of an era. In any event, this Red Note fart in history has been a fascinating development, made more interesting by users from Canada, Mexico, the UK, and Europe following suit. As I’ve said again and again, in myriad ways, America is that girl. We are the entertainment, we are the trendsetters, the bellwether: where we go, the world follows. (Speaking of red things being banned, bye bye red food coloring — and hello Zyn!)

Openly gay men can now become priests
Huge, but…too-little-too-late? This is very out of step with macro-Catholic culture and, as the book Opus alludes, once Pope Francis dies, the church is going to take an incredibly grim conservative turn. They’re eagerly awaiting his death.

What do we know about the LA fires victims?
"the power of rightwing propaganda."
This week in the LA fires, which weren’t “as bad” — but the disaster continued. I’m not holding my breath on this shifting the climate change narrative into action.

A taste for cocoa alternatives
I meant to share this last week but a theme of the now is the race to find actual alternatives for major climate crops, which may or may not catch on (as we’ve see with Impossible and the like).

NOTE: This was written, um, before they took the site offline, meaning some links are dead for the time being. Posts elsewhere in this dispatch have been corrected.

Today TikTok disappeared in the United States, or at least until Donald Trump saves it in a dramatic and staged dark night of the soul performance that will end with an executive order reinstating the service, forever wrapping it around an orange pinky, which will enable Elon Musk to playact corporate apartheid with the app’s Singaporean CEO.

What I’m thinking about is, win or lose, our entering a drought — a cultural drought, where more media is controlled and more companies are placating to power instead of freedom of expression that evolves humanity. It won’t just be multiple versions of The Chicks versus George W. Bush happening in big and small ways, in personal interactions and on Hollywood red carpets, but more that the 2020s culture incubation machine is being euthanized in favor of an internet of ten years ago that no longer exists. As something like “pop cultural stims” was building to replace ASMR via the TikTok culture generator, we’re likely to see such momentum blunted, to die in the puddle of cultural precum. That peach lady who went viral this week? Done. German brain rot? Fun while it lasted. The propulsion of book sales, of consumer trends, of the whole music industry? Bye bye. Nothing will ever top the energy and output of the TikTok algorithm. Why else did cores and aesthetics define half the decade, rewiring both fast and luxury fashion in the process?

Sure, sure: Zuck clout fellating Trump but, as I’ve learned in my experimenting with trend capturing in the past few weeks across Tumblr and YouTube and Snapchat, these sites — chief among them Instagram — have long shifted to negate timelessness, presenting few things in the present in favor of a dulled reality of aftertastes, of posts from days and weeks past (save for Stories, which is a relic of the 2010s). As people ruminated this week, Instagram — like the wider internet and social media as a whole — is not by or for posters but is the heterosexual high school mall of social media, the thing you left when you discovered there was life outside the walls: Instagram is what Facebook was ten years ago, which has become an overly branded content-full space that is culture reactive. Like Facebook ten years ago, we’re obligated to be on Instagram because so much of business and our working lives are tied to this place where people muse about babies getting stabbed, heavy machinery accidents, and impossible user experiences. Thus, a major breakdown in the culture machine, which volleys timely culture curation back to the broken media system, which barely exists in the micro or macro after also being euthanized for the past decade as it attempted be social as social suffocated it, a trap that the whole of Hollywood is struggling with now, which Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone won’t save anyone from. Few will be around to catch what’s happening, save for those who are still on Twitter, the completely flawed but still in-real-time outpost to pour the world into your ear without lag (but not necessarily without, um, unique challenges).

This is the end of fifteen years of people degrading taste, where people end up more stupid, more docile, more mean — and more voiceless. Yeah, yeah Project 2025 — which is bad — but we have that atop the podcast-as-news thing and the incoming swing of movies to the right, which are all awful but particularly rough given how people have turned into voids (which TikTok may or may not have contributed to, which Covid may or may not have contributed to). The logical conclusion of the techno present is community disenfranchisement, deeply anti-social norms, the end of friendships and dating, and the loss of what it means to be a good person. From homeschooling to the manosphere to the loss of religion (and its right wing male push), Carly Rae Jepsen called it three years ago: these are the loneliest times — and we’re all worse as a result. The Atlantic blew this idea up with its barn burning must-read “The Anti-Social Century” —

Eroding companionship can be seen in numerous odd and depressing facts of American life today. Men who watch television now spend seven hours in front of the TV for every hour they spend hanging out with somebody outside their home. The typical female pet owner spends more time actively engaged with her pet than she spends in face-to-face contact with friends of her own species. Since the early 2000s, the amount of time that Americans say they spend helping or caring for people outside their nuclear family has declined by more than a third.

This ain’t great and, as John Burn-Murdoch lamented this week on the data of these anti-social times, “the last decade is a story of young people retreating from the pursuits that bring them the most fulfilment, and replacing them — consciously or otherwise — with pale imitations.” Oy. Take that personally! Culture is dead and it was by our own doing.

Paired with Gen Z conservatism, the TikTok loss atop all this may create a deeper imagination gap upon the already deep gap we’re in. It’s not just the sequelitis, it’s not just the constant reboots or AI slop, but it’s that we’re stuck in a nostalgia longing for the recent past instead of building a better future. It’s not just “Make America Great Again” but something as simple as comparing Millennials’ longing for Japan and selvedge denim against Gen Z longing for the American Bible Belt and Carhartt shit. Sure, quit drinking because it’s bad for you. Quit going to clubs because you’d rather stay home! Stop having sex because it scares you! But nothing interesting happened while home alone, longing for your own backyard. No change happened simply watching videos or lingering in its memory and, yet, that’s the conclusion of the last decade plus, to flock toward the suspiciously curated Red Note “in protest,” as refugees, instead of actual shit stirring. Maybe it’s good TikTok has disappeared? Maybe all this was unsustainable, for our minds and the planet? Maybe this is the lemon we needed to make the lemonade of change?

Regardless, the time to dream is over. We had our fun, we got to run around our enclosures, watching videos and talking to the gay people in our phone. The social ecosystem that we once had is gone and we’ll now feast on various flavors of propaganda, which many may not have the palate to discern.

35 Simple Health Tips Experts Swear By
If you read anything, let it be this, as it’s a lovely round-up of health tips that can “change your life.” I will be rereading this so that I can change my life! Lots of good, little things that seem both easy and actually useful, some of which I’ve already implemented.

I just didn’t expect them to be losers
A deliciously scathing analysis of the male billionaire capitalist shit-era we’re in, that the kings are people like Zuckerberg and Musk. Miserable!

What Janelle James Can’t Live Without
One of my favorite recurring stories, which are largely boring now but this Janelle James one is hilarious and reminds of why this format hits when it hits.

Baldoni Alleges Taylor Swift Pressure Him
Lively: “Another Chapter in Abuser Handbook”
This whole controversy is a waste of everyone’s time, namely the public as it should have just gone to arbitration. It reminds of a conversation I had a few weeks back with some friends, that this situation both erodes and undermines a lot of the work done by activists to make the stories of victims credible. These rich people will be okay but real victims will suffer, outdone in court until they’re silent.

Dry January Is Driving Me to Drink
A great dissection of Dry January by the icon Tressie McMillan Cottom, who connects the idea of the moment to everything from self-branding to consumption to racism to the cancer complex. This dovetails into the above loneliness item!

James Turrell’s quest to build
Creative inspiration of the week, via the American light and land artist putting egos in check. I’m hoping to swing by Paris to see the show in May, if anyone else will be in town!

MouseGoggles offer immersive look into neural activity
”Researchers developed VR headsets for mice”
Little mice with Alzheimer’s wearing VR headsets may help us! The video is wild. (Another wild video: The first ever sound of a meteorite hitting the earth.)

Soccer club fires falconer for photos of his penis implant
*squinting* Oh, I did read that correctly. The way this is a sign of these gendered times, in that he did this to feel “more masculine.” So Italian! So neo-fasc-core!

Read while listening to Bad Bunny’s “Lo Que Pasó En Hawaii.”

Something I’ve been thinking about: at this point in the Anthropocene, do industry towns still exist? While the 2000s and 2010s gave us Silicon Valley (and Beach and Alley and Hills), it was the creations from these Silicon Places that voided the idea that geography and industry are tied. Post-industrial economies means places are no longer defined “by industry.”

An example: Detroit, known as the Motor City, vrooms vrooms much quieter now as focus strayed away from cars. Atlanta, a city originally called “Terminus” because of its train junctions, is now the corporate Delta-Home Depot-Coca-Cola capital via the Ted Turner/Tyler Perry neo-Hollywood. Sacramento was once a gold hub but now is a state capital much like any other. There used to be coal towns but, until Trump revives them (which he will), they are no more too.

Think about a place like Los Angeles though, the technical capital of Hollywood: its identity has been shifting for two decades, as strikes and pandemics and fires and tax breaks shifted and decentralized Hollywood as an industry — and Hollywood as a place. No, LA isn’t going anywhere but it reminds that cities of such a scale — like New York or Paris or London — are singular because they contain past, present, and future economies. They’re everything and nothing because of their evolution beyond “industry” town, achieving the unthinkable by manifesting what a post-industrial place looks like: lands of opportunities that are a catch-all for anyone with ideas, hopes, and dreams, as they are a venue for any type of work or play. Of course, modern industry towns still exist in ways — Bentonville to Walmart, Beaverton to Nike, Orlando to Disney — but the future of the modern company town is demure, if not existent at all given our great techno-economic slump. The only places that are immune are capitals (DC, for example.) which will always carry an industry town-ness so long as political systems hold.

This means most modern cities work by performing themself, which can be difficult to see when you’re living in it, missing how it markets and gives itself over to those who are visiting. That brings us to places like Barcelona, where I am now (and which is tied to a history of industrial colonies), where self-exhibitionism is a slippery part of the city’s identity, creating a friction as it welcomes people to come and piss all over it, driving up prices and pushing out locals as a result. This isn’t unique as similar happenings are occurring in Amsterdam and New Orleans and Hawaiian cities, places brimming with unique cultures — past and present — that survive in part by performing the idea of the place. Puerto Rico is perhaps the best representation of this push-and-pull, a modern geo-local identity crisis complicated by the whims of new and old colonialism, tourism evolving toward country-wide gentrification. Something gets lost when a place must star in a reality show about itself to survive, when its industry becomes a theme park idea of its own culture: it stunts (or overshadows) evolution as its only a venue for the imagination of others and their wandering, numb vacation brains.

Is there a solve? Yeah, sure, but like our own loss of culture via something like TikTok a city being forced to perform itself is what happens when economic shifts occur with a rejection of socio-cultural change. There’s undoubtedly a line to be drawn from the fading of company towns to the rejection of the immigrants and transplants, those who arrive to contribute. The greats — LA, NYC, London, Paris, etc. — work well because they are by, of, and for the non-local to come and help evolve the place forward. (This isn’t to mention the impact of, say, climate migration, which we’re experiencing the effects of in real time.) There’s room for everyone! In places where the non-local is simply allowed instead of worked with, a place reduces to a party venue instead of active site. Such is the post-industrial city slip, where the heart and soul fades as a past is clung to. If I had to guess, this model — which is neither new nor novel — is going to be the fate of most places, becoming a battle for the more interesting performances of self or the embracing of forward momentum. (Again: Detroit.) Without an open culture, celebrating shifts while holding ground, a place gets locked in amber, muttering about bygone eras of brilliance versus the power it holds today.

AI Brad Pitt Cons Woman Out of $800K
Brad Pitt responds to woman being scammed
This went very viral this week and…I’m obsessed with her. She handed nearly a million to the scammer! To be this delulu! To see these shitty pictures and go, “Yep! He loves me!”

“HIS MOTHER DIES ON A BOAT”
“perfectly curated Instagram”
“Leaked photo is insane”
More proof we gotta stop AI.

“fubo mubi freevee philo tubi roku!”
"Jabba the Hutt is brat"
Are we poised to have a Jabba the Hutt moment? Probably — and it somehow ties to Jeremy Allen White.

“Me in Severance therapy”
Where are my Severance fans at?? (I am also abstaining from watching the new season until all episodes are out. That is self-care!)

"Bookstagram people are from a different earth"
Not to be a snob but this is a big smoking gun when it comes to taste and the state of being-able-to-read.

"looks like James Baldwin"
This is the most accurate take about Michael Shannon somehow becoming, um, James Baldwin. It’s wild.

“a hand came out of my vagina”
Elite Maury clip. (If you’re wondering who the father is…here you go.)

“who’s responsible for making this”
The Drag Race episode that we’ve all been waiting for.

And, finally, how I will be spending my time in the afterlife.

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