STOP THE COMMENTS!!!!!
On brands commenting down below and meditating on work and life balances.
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ICC prosecutor seeks arrest warrants
Israel ordered to immediately halt offensive
Spain, Norway, Ireland Recognize a Palestinian State
Amal Clooney advised ICC prosecutor
The news of the week, obviously. The Amal Clooney item was a nice surprise!
"Netanyahu speaks on allegations of war crimes in Gaza"
This Good Morning America interview is unhinged, especially the 1:30 moment.
Biden announces additional $7B in student debt relief
As my own hope for the upcoming election continues, I will say this is great — but will it get overlooked by people in November? Absolutely.
Rishi Sunak makes election announcement
It’s so flop to call snap elections, it’s even more flop to hold press conferences in pouring rain.
Trump loudly heckled at Libertarian Convention
Trump confronts repeated booing
lol read the comments on the video. Game recognizes game, which is to say: losers saying “exactlyyyy” to each other.
Second human case of bird flu
Cool! Thanks, raw milk hive!
Health worker shortage ripple
The state of healthcare work continues to dim, which will collide with declining birthrates.
Millennials are 'quiet vacationing'
Why workers are sneaking off on holiday
“shut the fuck up”
This week in “Workers are just trying to have a life!”
Researchers find tiny particles in men's testicles
Big week for plastics, which inspired many posts.
This Hurricane Season Could Be a Doozy
I’m dreading the summer and the storms, given what seems to be a month’s worth of horrible storms in the south and midwest. (Which reminds: can some meterological person dig into the freak warm weather hail and snow storms that happen in Mexico?)
Swaziland Gets A Name Change
This is roughly six years old but I just learned that the country Swaziland changed its name to eSwatini. I had no idea! Why? To shed the country’s ties to colonialism. I’m surprised more places haven’t done this (or, rather, that we don’t hear about it more) considering how many colonies territories — like Senegal, like New Caledonia — are speaking out.
My friend Hannah has gone viral a few times and I interviewed her, to understand the experience of being a normie who suddenly has millions of people viewing your life, entering your home through their phones to judge you on your humor, your politics, your taste, your looks. “The big viral video now has 9 Million views which is 1M shy of the entire Los Angeles population,” Hannah explained in our conversation. “It is an incomprehensible number to me when thinking of it in the terms of people who have now seen my face…That anyone would want to be an influencer or make themselves available to the internet masses on a regular basis is actually insane.”
This is just one of the many side effects of “going viral,” which happens more and more to more and more people given the egalitarianism of TikTok. As I was talking to other friends this week, a few of whom have had videos crest into the higher stratosphere of views (intentionally and not), they all share that the eyes are one thing — but the comments are something else entirely. Hannah mentioned this, that people are still arguing in her comments months after a video goes viral. “Humanity gets really dark when it is allowed to remain anonymous, it’s like people in their cars but on steroids,” she said. This reveals another side-effect of posting on TikTok and to a lesser degree Twitter and Instagram: strangers will pop up and say any damn thing they want — and you’re the one who has to deal with it, with limited or confusing help.
But there’s a complication here: it’s not just people but brands too. Graduation cap tutorial? Microsoft Education has an opinion on that. Your bulldog reluctantly putting their paw on your hand? Skincare brand LaRoche Posay’s US account has a thought. Discovered Dr. Pepper Snack Sticks? Pest extermination company Orkin has a musing. Got a riff on the “Man In Finance” song? Mr. Clean and Tetris Mobile approve. Thinking about Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”? Ritz Crackers, Urban Decay, Verizon, ALDO Shoes, and Marine Layer have something to say. This is the “new normal” of comment sections, as brands pursue humanity despite more savvy, less charmed audiences: show up in the comments, try to fit in, build your reputation. Brands do this to each other (Peruse a Spongebob or Teletubby post.) but it works best when a post aligns with product (Guy who uses Google Sheets for packing, Google and travel brands reply.) or you have a cultural entry point (The “who they’re actually emailing” was bombed by brands like Microsoft.). This behavior — which is called “community management,” “community engagement,” and or “social listening” — is a very subtle social marketing tactic that attempts to trade clout for business. It’s how brands “reach the kids” these days.
But what was once niche and novel five years ago is now de rigueur for all brands brand. All this branded noise supposes something awful, that anyone posting publicly is “fair game” to get pissed on, to become a canvas for advertising. Showing up in the comments, as a person or a brand, is an opportunity to express politics, humor, services: it’s all a means to steal attention, walking into someone else’s wedding, wearing a white dress with a blue checkmark. For many videos, this behavior places a great burden on regular people, whose non-influencer, personal social media becomes a public forum for commercialization. Conversation dissolves into B2B marketing: the comments section is an expression of the panopticon, that brands are truly always watching, that your phone really is listening all the time. Ads follow you, right into your comments, leeching out the fun for profit. Ten years ago, this was cool. In 2020, this was funny. Now, it’s an annoying burden, that being online means you are real estate. You are not a person: you are potential ad space.
People react to this in a few different ways: there are people who welcome the commercialization, responding with surprise, happiness, or reflective simping in the hopes of a prize (See Sweetgreen offering a salad for a song.); some have consumer requests (Lidl commenting on a dog.); some ask for gift cards or discounts (Elf Cosmetics commenting on a leash.); most tell the brand off, which is an absolutely normal response (Rice Krispie Treats reacting to PB & mayo, Wendy’s commenting on a shitpost, Google commenting on a French post.). Again: this is fine, these are the “rules” of public, internet activity, but we forget that normal people, who are living lives and not working in social, aren’t equipped to manage comments nor are they posting for brands (and yet brands watch, looking for organic fun that they can party poop on). When a post goes viral, there is no help or guidance. Billion dollar brands aren’t offering any guidance either but instead fan the flames: it’s all up to the poor poster, who has to run their own crisis communication and community management strategy by themself. And we wonder why people are so annoyed by social networks, big business, and capitalism: social media is work for everyone.
This gets at
’s dopamine culture crashing into ideas of digital consent, which will become a greater and greater subject, manifesting the unionizing of consumers which we saw a bit of with the Met Gala mass boycott. This TikTok about the cruelty of the internet now offers a glimpse into why the ad spaciness of these times is a problem: there is so little respect of personal space online, a fault of which is tech companies and big businesses encroaching upon these areas as they unsubtly pursue profit, furthering economic chasms and environmental destruction.So what do we do? The salves are threefold, representing the three internets of now.
Amplify — don’t mooch — social realities in real time, as Marc Jacobs and Loewe are doing, which rewards online participation with real, tangible rewards versus self-serving comment drops. This also “takes things offline,” which AI will exacerbate and which endears talent and customers alike.
Enable a more just economy. You can participate in the “viral debt forgiveness” trend, where people are gaming the algorithm and creator pay models to boost videos in the service of helping people pay off bills. This also manifests as using social gestures to amplify support causes, helping local philanthropy, and creators doing telethons: this approach refashions social media and the comment as a chaotic good. This undoes capitalism for profit, imagining social profit as mutually beneficial to the community first — not brands.
Embrace tradition: revert to older models of commenting — meaning don’t comment, or use brand ambassadors to react and post in real time, to be one’s surrogate. Let people come to you instead of hunting them: be a store, not a stalker. The days of the comment section being useful are long gone, as its been a decade since websites started to depreciate these forums. Comments aren’t “all bad” but its an imperfect system that doesn’t work in favor of the creator, poster, etc. No one is working to improve this, least of all brands. Thus, the devolution everything, of all comments becoming spam, noise, and or advertising.
Hundreds of people named Kyle gather
Thank you to everyone who sent me the Kyle, Texas story. I did not attend, nor do I think I ever will (unless a publication would like to pay me to go in which case…reply to this email!!!).
Pope Francis Clears Way for First Millennial Saint
Big week for the pope and Millennials. People “becoming” saints is so fascinating because it’s one part magic, one part mass delusion. Here's to you, God’s Influencer!
Catholic hermit in comes out as transgender
Obsessed with this local news story in Kentucky that shares how a hermetic Brother in the church recently came out as transgender — and is believed to be the first trans person in the church.
Shiba Inu that inspired countless memes has died
RIP, Doge. An incredible 18 years you had, angel!
How Many Politicians Curl Up With Their Wife on the Floor?
A very good kinda sorta oral history on the iconic Gavin Newsom/Kimberly Guilfoyle rug photo.
Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan Saw a Gap in Pop
As we talked about last week, yes.
"if we don’t go opening night the movie will flop."
'Furiosa' Lowest Memorial Day Opening in 41 Years
Fans Lament the Closing of Mara Hoffman
"the depressing thing about mara hoffman"
This week’s documents of the creative world’s slumping.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”
See above. You tell me how you feel about this because I just don’t know.
The Midwife
I love Rachel Cusk and, hopefully, by the end of this weekend I will have finished this excerpt from her new book, which is about a mid-life artist. Extremely my shit. Extremely Second Place, which is one of my favorite books.
Jessica Pratt - Here In The Pitch
This is very much not-my-shit but, after
A collage, to read while listening to Nourished By Time’s “The Fields.”
“I had an assistant who moved to New York to work with me,” Law Roach said on The Cutting Room Floor. “I did 32 magazine covers. I had a team with six assistants…He came to me and was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I want to be consumed.’ I said you’re 24 years old. How do you think I got to be where I am? I am consumed by my work. He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be consumed.’” Someone commented on this post, “I hope this era of work consuming our lives to be well fed ends.”
“What bothers me is the unspoken assumption that not getting bigger is a form of arrested artistic development or failure,” Kyo Maclear wrote in her 2017 book Birds Art Life. “I don’t know how to make things bigger…I am searching for other models of artistic success. The small is a figure of alternative possibility, proof that how much the market tries to force consensus there will always be those making art where the market isn’t looking.”
There is a man on TikTok with half a million followers, who makes day-in-the-life videos of having a 9-to-5. “Normalize the simple life,” he says as he drives to work, eats Panda Express in his car, cleans his already clean house, and eats delivered Mexican food. His videos — championing the middle class, explaining why you should get a 9-to-5 — follow the same formula, getting thousands and sometimes millions of views. One video features the words of poet Bianca Sparacino: “You're going to realize it one day that happiness was never about your job or your degree or being in a relationship…It was never about being like the others.” As many comments say, which the creator has hat-tipped, all these videos feel like The Matrix.
“Our lives are measured in adventures, not years,” a man explains on TikTok. “Imagine that your life was so terribly routine that every single day was pretty much the same. As a result, at the end of your life, you’d have only lived just one day…Live a dull life, your life shrinks.”
In 2002, poet Eileen Myles interviewed actor Daniel Day Lewis for Index.
EILEEN: In some weird way, the spaces between the work are what's really interesting.
DANIEL: Definitely. That's obscured when you're young because your drive is always leading you from one place to another. It's the resting places or the periods of lying fallow where you do the real work.
EILEEN: The thing that's scary about not doing anything, or not doing what people are inviting you to do, is you feel like you are facing death in a way.
DANIEL: Yeah, I think you're right. It's a little death and you have lots of little practices. How do you work?
EILEEN: I started writing poems in my twenties. It got to be how I made a map of the world. That's always happening, though it does stop sometimes. I started writing fiction slowly in my thirties, then that became novels. Making a living as a poet is a huge trick, so I stumbled into performance and teaching, writing about art. I'll be very, very busy, but at the end of the year, I'll think, "What did I do this year?"
“Isn’t it the non-dimension of the present that makes life possible,” the artist Eduardo Chillida mused. “Just as the non-dimension of the point makes geometry possible?”
There is an ad for the calendar app Motion. A man is looking around a dark kitchen. “POV: you refuse to live a mediocre life,” the (Instagram Story) ad reads. This is qualified by two statements: “You became #1 at work” and “Started playing pickleball weekly.” Someone commented, “Bro sounds pretty mid to me.”
“Once or twice I prayed to Jesus,” Marcus Brown as Nourished By Time sings. “Never heard a word back in plain English / More like signs or advertisements / Telling me to be keep consumerizing.”
I am enrolled in a Granta nature writing workshop. This week we had a talk with author and educator Michael Malay, reflecting on his piece “Nightfishing” about the lives of eels and his joining an eel hunt. I asked him how he navigated such an encounter with nature while staying present, avoiding the need to document, to take notes, to figure out “how to use” the experience This is a trap I always find myself in. “I didn’t know if this would be a piece of writing in the end,” he explained. “I just became really obsessed with eels at one point…I just wanted to do anything related to eels.” He explained that he takes notes at the end of his day and always carries around a small notebook, a Moleskine that he took out to show everyone. He looked up to the camera, pausing. “What if our motto was to really be present and enjoy stuff all the time?” he asked me. “What if writing was an offshoot of that modus operandi, of being there, of doing deep listening, of just being curious?”
“the 9/11 of television”
“gm”
“no fucking way”
“lana”
Something is happening in the skibidi space. The Colbert item is…dark.
“Stoned To Death”
“Paddington Bear guiding Raisi”
“Who dey”
“RIP KINGS”
Deeply irreverent posts about the death of President Raisi that, yes, made me laugh and groan. If you want similar irreverence, enjoy.
“The baby when”
Fully Conscious Baby discourse died with a Stone’s story and an ABC News interview but this post is just so good. Actually, this one and this one are good too.
“I need a husband”
“I need husband”
“I love Facebook”
“Who needed a human curation team”
“Working in tech”
"Thank you Google AI"
“how does sandy dive”
Some AI freaks for you.
“actually speechless”
“most insane GIF”
“Lyme Disease its IBS”
Three batshit items you should watch.
"All time #WheelOfFortune moment right here"
Put more gay people on game shows.
“Cam’ron went on CNN”
Best thing CNN has done in a long time.
“can’t get you out of my head”
Welcome back, Wing. Or, as someone commented, Kylie Ming xao.
“Bullying back then vs. now”
Really don’t like this!
“I inherited things.”
I miss Louie Anderson and I wish he had been given a Christine Baskets spinoff :(
“Hi Dexter is dead”
Been crying over this.
“You’re in his DMs”
That’s me. And I’m doing this while watching TikTok too.
“sending me in a spiral”
Love being hispanic :)
“38 year olds looked like in 2005”
“at least they’re not 38”
2005 was a really dark time. I think Tuesday’s post will be about this!
And, finally, me holding onto all my bookmarks and saved links to share with you.
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At the risk of negating the message of this entire newsletter, here’s a comment (copied directly from a WhatsApp conversation I was having with a friend this morning): Something I keep hearing in brand spiels is ‘we want to show up where our customers/ community are’ which is basically spin for what is relentless opportunism and flooding into any potentially lucrative market gap. It feels like a game of Pac-Man - we’re being chased around by brands, nowhere is safe. That’s another reason why the trend cycle is going so fast, bc brands and commerce keep following us down every new rabbit hole, so then we have to uproot and find a new one to escape them.
So I'm the person who does this for a very popular beauty retailer's social, but we're very choosy on when we comment on people's post because we don't want to feel 'thirsty' or too random. It has to make sense, but also I can see why this 'commercialization' can feel done and unwelcome. It's a delicate balance sometimes. Luckily in our case it's usually met with surprised delight, but yes sometimes even I think with some brands it's kind of random and I wonder what their strategy was or if it's just to be seen.