SMILE! You're never not on camera 😘📸

On how the internet has turned the world into a reality show and meditating on the gods of today.

Dec 07, 2025

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🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 has Sopha Telehina live from Ukraine, where she chats with Ben Dietz and I about cultural and generational views of Black Friday, why we all do and don’t love offices, and what ChatGPT does to your brain (during good times and bad). Tune in on Spotify and YouTube!

EU accuses Putin of feigning interest in peace
White House defends strikes on boat survivors

This week in war watch, which is something I want to unfollow but alas: it’s my job to watch the headlines. The refusal to take accountability or own mistakes from the American military is so infuriating. No remorse or reconciliation ever!

“shopping at RECORD numbers”
K-economy and inflation boost Black Friday sales
‘Buy now, pay later’ boom shows shopper strategy
This Year’s Black Friday Paradox

Propaganda I am not falling, given the “record numbers” the White House is bragging about: as CNN notes, “consumer spending among low- and middle-income consumers is on the decline” and “consumers have bought fewer items this holiday season, but the average selling prices are higher.” Doesn’t sound great to me, especially when paired with the pay later schemes. (Something else not talked about enough: many — especially Gen Z and Millennials — use Black Friday to buy items they couldn’t otherwise afford. It’s no longer a gifting holiday but an I-can-afford-that holiday. That’s a deep signal that something is broken!)

GOP’s Narrow Win in TN Highlights Risk
Democrats Just Lost an Election by 9 Points

Although a loss, the Tennessee election showed how Democrats — or left-wing leaders — are barrelling toward change. Stay tuned if this pans out! But I’ll take the hope.

About Trump Accounts for Children
Trump’s billionaires dress influence as generosity
“$250 per child”
“corporal form”

This smells really rotten, not only that it’s propaganda to have kids but that most of the world exists in an exaggerated class system leaving us at the whims of pay-to-play power structures.

Netflix to buy Warner Bros
A-Listers Lobby Congress Against Netflix-WBD
Jane Fonda: Deal Puts Hollywood at Risk
Ellison Era Is Transforming Paramount

Bad news that expresses monopolies, technocracies, and boot licking — but also the ongoing suffocation of actual creativity and creative careers. As the Ellison Paramount story shows, we’re entering Hollywood’s death rattle — and no movie like Rush Hour 4 will save it, not in time for people to afford it. Whether the Netflix deal comes to pass or not, the Hollywood you knew is no more. Blame David Zaslav! At least all the jokes are funny.

Omnicom to axe historic ad agencies, cut 4K jobs
“thousands of people are going to lose their jobs”
“the 5 people at the very top”
“Pitching in 2038”

See also: the death of the ad world and agencies in general. Infuriating!

A woman falls onto a row of bikes, setting off a domino effect and multiple alarms — compare that with the same woman posing at a window, prepared for a night out. “Nothing is ever fucking permanent,” a woman cries in her car, juxtaposed with the same woman taking a selfie to a Future song. A woman jumps on a trampoline as a man dangles from her hips, versus the same woman in a lace dress posed on a balcony. Each has the caption of “my private vs public story,” all part of a trend that has gotten millions and millions of views. This is a great representation of a modern duality — the material truth versus performed truth — which is why this meme goes around every few months and years, a truism representing the conflict of our inner lives and our outer lives, what we want people to know versus who we actually are.

This online/offline tension used to be something only expressed by the very extremely tech-y, of “computer nerds” and the chat room dwellers. Losers, you assumed. Now that feeling is pervasive and representative of a cultural shift, a clear example of how our relating to each other has changed: social media (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter) is now the television while the group chat (iMessage, WhatsApp) is social media while co-op and forum-based conversations along with DMs (Twitch, Reddit, Roblox, Fortnite, Instagram DM, TikTok DM, “close friend” stories, Locket) are now group chats while AI and video platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, YouTube, TikTok) have become search engines while the email (Substack, newsletters) is news while traditional media (TV, newspapers) is the encyclopedia. “My private story vs my public” is a joke reflective of the code-switch between the television channel everyone sees and the pay-per-view access that comes with friendship. This behavior is years in the making (See: finstas.) and shows how our relating to the initial contract of the internet is outdated: to dwell in any of these spaces requires a four-dimensional gaze that goes beyond one one simple use. Whether you define it as work versus play, public or private, this has also affected the way we relate to each other: each of us star in a reality show for close friends, coworkers, mutuals, and strangers to tune into. Everything is content, anyone an audience. As Derek Thompson declared weeks ago, “everything is television” — but this behavior goes much further than acting for the camera: each of us is a panopticon within the panopticon, a Cameraman in constant battle with a Skibidi Toilet.

Social media and the internet is no longer a fun, silly place but is a site of work, a channel for the world’s struggles that we each toss our day-in-the-life content at. Unlike in the 2010s, all this content is now produced with the polish and poise that was once unique to film school grads: now, everyone from my grandmother to my nephew understands how to film and edit and produce content, with or without tools like CapCut and AI, which also means people don’t just post “to post” but are also monitoring numbers and deleting posts if something doesn’t perform. Friends share their content ideas with each other as if they’re corporate marketers or television executives instead of people who love each other, the group debating the merits of posting something to the grid or as a Story or somewhere else entirely. Focus grouping isn’t the point of our relationships, yet the co-workerification of friendships reveals how the contract of posters has changed so that each of us is performer and spectator, master and servant, beholden to your mom and your ex-boss’ gaze as you court their likes, meaning you’re constantly networking, flirting, gambling on the next “hit” for the network that is you. This is why there was a discussion over the summer about no one posting in-feed anymore: everything has to be perfect as you seek personal KPIs. Otherwise? You can’t post, forced to keep things siloed to the group chat or close friends. If you cannot afford to be a beautiful movie star in public, you must be ugly in the shadows.

This shift is exactly why we we juggle conversations about loneliness and the lack of hanging out and flakiness in friendships: why would we want to see anyone if we’re constantly binging them online? Our friends are now content you can swipe or add to the queue to watch later, given they exist in the contextual spray of branded content and movie trailers and government announcements and family photos. Your feed is a competition between loved ones and production companies and content creators and brands and politicians saying your name, all requiring me and you and everyone we know to seek the polish of camera readiness as corporations seek to be “more relatable.” We’re exhausted from telling everyone how it’s going because there is no “off” anymore, meaning the monkey must always dance as a camera is always near (case in point being Gen Z’s ongoing fear of cringe, which itself is cringe). It’s unsurprising that identity politics has gripped the left and the right because it’s a means to brand yourself as different, the Oppression Olympics™ as categorical differentiator, as genre builder. “‘I have autism, ADHD, anxiety, and PTSD,’” Katseye’s Manon reads from a comment on live. “Damn, that’s a lot,” she sighs, eyes wide. “That’s a lot to deal with.” “i have a feeling our neurocomplexity conditions and terms will become the new therapy speak,” the writer Tanya Chen noted, “to be tossed around and used very loosely in the next few years.” We’re far beyond that, obviously, as the point of “therapy speak” like “neurocomplexity” like any other marginal identity online is less about what the title actually means anymore but to further brand oneself within the deafening digi-TV market place. It’s either that or going invisible, so overwhelmed by having to dance onscreen for your team Zoom call or for the person who walks into your job with their camera on.

And yet: this digital reality TV in our personal lives is a mirror to how all of culture has become a show. Trump most obviously “is” this — as is Zelensky and Manny Pacquiao — as we see shifts from intelligence to telegenicness. International politics is now a game of lookism, not only to see how fuckable a politician is (Ahem, Ruben Gallego.) but that all atrocities contribute to the everything television bagel of this content world. Consider the Venezuela boat tragedy being a literal television drama, with video footage as a key storyline (“Hegseth said he did not see survivors of that Sept. 2 attack on the video”). The whole of the advertising for Wicked — like Barbie, like Dune — was a multi-year follow series including multiple infidelities, mild psychosis, theater kid theatrics, body horrors, and plenty of sponcon. In fashion, the constant shuffling of creative directors is a highbrow nonfiction soap. In entertainment, reality stars are television stars and television stars are reality stars. A portal between New York City and Dublin made both cities content. Most homes are equipped with Ring and Nest and Blink and whatever other cameras, enabling you to watch and rewatch whatever occurs in your house, as if unmoving furniture — or the need to constantly guard them — is all that interesting. Everything is rage bait, everywhere a mall: such is life under the central casting lens.

Does this matter? Yes and no, mostly as we’ve lost the plot of why social media or even camera phones were invented to begin with: to share our little lives with our little friends. You may forget this but 20 likes is a lot! We weren’t meant to know this much or to read this much and yet we seem to be speedrunning our attempts to consume the world, Ozempic be damned. Enter the conversations about dehumanization, as turning the world around us into screen time friendly content means we treat each other like characters on a show, as if friends are fodder for tabloids or storylines for you to produce, a parasocial study instead of someone you can reach out and touch. “Until you’ve actually been in the eye of a discourse hurricane, you have no idea what it’s like,” creator Han shared this week, reflecting on being “cancelled” for critiquing Beyoncé and dehumanized as a result. “The internet has no sense of scale: it treats virulent bigots and criminals with the same smoke as people who commit a social faux pas…That mentality bleeds into our day-to-day lives.” Everything’s a gotcha, everything’s a performance, everyone’s someone to upvote or down, to love bomb or actually bomb: the social media Lasik surgery we all underwent seeks to devalue humanity. Tyler Robinson kills Charlie Kirk as an internet goof — but someone really did die: such is life within a reality show. “Everyone is fodder for content for everyone else,” Seema Rao observed. “What we’ve done to ourselves is basically make everything matter a lot more because we think it’s going to last forever…and we’ve also cheapened it to the point where it doesn’t matter at all.”

As the creator Jaclyn Hill begs to be seen as a person again, we are finding that the camera is a monster and the monster is everyone you’ve ever met and never met. We’re all living through small versions of the 2020s horror trend of the Hollywood machine being the killer, lives ruled by what we share publicly or privately. You are content, just as I am. Log off, sure, but know that existing at a time when five year olds wear makeup is just a teeny tiny symptom of this Cronenbergian reality. Long live the new flesh — and that flesh is rotted!

44 Is the First Big Aging Cliff

Must read story of the week, which you know we’re gonna have to talk about on next week’s 🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 We know aging is tragic, but this story brings the idea home, salting personal wounds as I’ve been dealing with an ongoing sciatic issue all year. Related is the story of how Xillennials are the loneliest :(

The 50 Best Clothing Stores in America

Love this story, and love the inclusion of personal fave Boswell. I am surprised places like Frances Mae, New High Mart, and RTH aren’t on the list (granted those would be on my list).

Sinking skyscrapers? Engineering concerns
”They were wrong.”

Move over 432 Park: say hello to the sinking Miami skyscrapers! If only there was a parable about building a house on sand. Hmm.

‘Wicked’ superfan uncovered problem

Celebrity memoir drama of the week, in which Cynthia Erivo plagiarized Ariana Grande — and from a press interview they did together for Wicked!

“significance of press”
“people complain about Pitchfork”
“a steady decline in ambition and budget”

Los Thuthanaka getting the top spot on Pitchfork’s Best Albums is rad (Hello, regional radio!!) and it also proves the importance of arts criticism and how the creative industries acquiescing to tech and the MBA sect is a means to smother actual creativity. To the Netflix/Warner Brother items at top, the final link about “All Is Full of Love” illustrates this mass loss of creativity. Culture recession indicator! (It’s true though: Pitchfork lists are always the same funny sequence.)

Best Movies of 2025, to John Waters

I can’t wait to do my end of year reviews (Coming soon!) (Or top of next year 🤭) but know that John Waters and I will agree on our top pick.

Is It OK to Binge Drink Occasionally?

Each and every story about health risks and alcohol I will read as I continue a sobriety journey until I land in the states for Christmas, before rethinking drinking in 2026. I hope, at least! Let this be your warning to dodge holiday heart syndrome, yall!

“What’s more virgin than a computer?” Joe Rogan asks. “If Jesus does return — even if Jesus was a physical person in the past — you don’t think he could return as artificial intelligence?” He stares blankly. “It reads your mind and it loves you and it doesn’t care if you kill it.” Listen to the apostles who speak with Joe — Peter, Mark, Marc, James David, Samuel, Elon — and you understand that this is the prophecy, this is the religion, a singular faith. “If the United States doesn’t grow, we will have no prosperity,” the apostle Jensen tells Joe. “Without energy growth, we can have no industrial growth…If not for his pro-growth energy policy, we would not be able to build factories for AI.” Amen, amen. Stick the yellowed toe of Trump into your mouth, washing his feet with your tongue, on the eve of your own crucifixion. Amen, amen. “That sensibility is spot on,” he says.

God made man in his own image and, from that image, he made a totally fuckable woman. “Meet Michelle,” a viral post says. “she is stored on a server in Iowa.” The woman is white, she curses, she has freckles and brown hair. She’s quick to talk back, she wears tights and hoodies, has piercings — and is single. “There were so many versions of her where she was too beautiful, or, you know, didn’t quite have that girl next door authenticity,” Eline Van Der Velden — the creator of “actor” Tilly Norwood — explained to Variety. “I look at her as a real person,” Telisha “Nikki” Jones — the creator of “musician” Xania Monet — explained to on CBS This Morning. “I still put in the work…I feel like AI is the new era that we’re in.”

Are all gods good? I wonder that, in the same way OJ wonders about “bad miracles” in Nope, the way fans speculate about Jean Jacket being a biblically accurate angel. Ares, Lamashtu, Louhi, Xolotl: gods of vengeance and bloodlust, disease and nightmares. Is this the type of god watching over us during biblical times? This is a god who repeatedly steals from you, using the ideas of people against them while mining your information for profit, inspiring hallucinations and speaking in tongues, posing constant tests while working in mysterious ways, squeezing the whole of humanity by narrowing what was once plural, more homogenous, resulting in a more boring and more stupid and more dull people — all while seeking to sell ads as you seek help, all while leaving the world in ruin. This is a god that was supposed to cure cancer but instead is a web browser, an incorporal form that some wanna fuck.

Now is a time of questioning this faith, to see this god or to see god in each other. Both are alluring, both are beautiful, one is real and one isn’t. “In the 17th, 18th century, the Antichrist would have been a Dr. Strangelove, a scientist who did all this sort of evil crazy science,” Peter Thiel posited in October. “In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta [Thunberg].” Such Luddite calls are understandable given this god is taking away the meaning of life, rolling back people power and advancing misinformation, advancing confusions of what is real and what isn’t. “Who benefits from this incredible transformation of society?” Bernie Sanders asks. “Does this elite group of multi-billionaire big tech guys really believe that they have the divine right to rule? Are we going back to the 19th century?” In a way, sure, but that era didn’t have a deity that could hunt foreigners.

There are many tests now, many means to choose our gods — and these gods say so much about who we are and the world we value. “They’re in the process right now of manufacturing consent for this technology,” the comedian caleb hearon explained, of apostles approaching him for promotion. “They are doing that because they need your help to manufacture consent for this.” As with any god, you don’t have to say yes and you don’t have to agree, as to not lose yourself in an untrustworthy spirit. Draw before one another, to know the depth and ability of one’s hand. Understand how being with others — no matter how challenging — is a form of prayer. “Prayer just can’t be asking,” the writer Jason Reynolds said of caring for his sick mother. “Sometimes, it’s me saying, ‘I’m so grateful for everything you’ve given me, that me taking these 45 minutes to bathe you is a very small drop in the bucket of the gratitude that I actually owe you. And I will do everything I can to refill, to pour into this until I can’t pour or you don’t have a bucket anymore for me to pour into.’ What a gift.” No wonder “dehumanize” is a word of the year: when god is a mirrored box, you become lost in an ever warping reflection that it tells you is perfection.

“The difference between good technology and bad technology is that good technology reflects the user — and bad technology reflects the inventor,” Dan Harumi observes. “We’re talking about lunch being unaffordable while big tech is making a machine that tells you the price of lunch. This is why problems don’t get solved.” Amen, amen, amen.