the CAMERA is the KILLER 👹🔪📹

On the rise of horror films that turn the industry of Hollywood into the villain and on the give-and-take of negative news (and how that crafts depressive people).

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What Yahya Sinwar’s Death Could Mean
Now that Hamas’ leader is dead…ceasefire!! But that clearly is an oversimplified hope.

SpaceX launches Starship, catches booster
Admittedly, this is cool. Still hate that divorced billionaire who gave $75M to Trump and is trying to buy the election!

What a Crackdown on Immigration Could Mean
Trump intensifies nativist message
Trump hasn’t won but a dark future of deporting immigrants would be a colossal mistake. Just ask Ron DeSantis’ Florida, then connect the dots with Elon Musk’s robo-slavery vision.

Who Won Kamala Harris’s Fox News Interview?
I didn’t watch the Kamala Fox interview (IM TIRED!!!) but seems like she held her own and that this, in many ways, was the Trump debate she longed for. This was great though. (Related and not: the Mary Katherine Gallagher thing is such a middle class Irish Catholic dog whistle.)

"A Latino farmer asks Donald Trump"
"This Univision audience was A++"
“Mr. Gonzalez is undecided no more”
Kamala on Fox got all the attention but what you really needed to watch was the Univision Trump interview. Is there an Emmy award for audience of the year? Because they deserve it.

Takeaways From the Texas Senate Debate
Now this was a debate. The “Stop laughing, you lil prick!” moment was incredible. (Like all of these: will it change anything? Eh. Who knows!)

Georgia Reports Record Turnout on Early Voting
Early voting is happening! I cast my ballot and, sheesh, it did not make me feel any less uneasy.

NC authorities arrest man after threats against FEMA
Real apocalyptic vibes multiplied by fucking idiot moron vibes. “They were out hunting FEMA” is grim.

University has a new requirement: climate change course
This is a downer but also: smart.

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness and its opposites, particularly after sharing my own experience of depression a few weeks back. You’d be surprised how many notes I got from readers and friends on the subject, many offering thanks but most wanting to commiserate, to explain that they too have been in a similar situation these past few years. The feeling is that to be depressed is to feel stained, like you have been branded with a feeling that you cannot let anyone else see. Ironically, it’s the talking about the condition that makes it better: by revealing these problems, others can speak to them — and you both can share in creating solutions.

Mental health culture is a definitive 2020s trend that may ultimately be an obvious mask: depression is likely the trend of the decade as the failures of over-therapizing our lives has turned therapy-speak into an overused pseudo-salve that reinforces the issue of separating our problems from our lives. When we talk about the loneliness epidemic and the loss of community and seeking shared (third) spaces and app-based solutions, depression is what we’re actually talking about. It doesn’t help that the world is a constant drip of big and little bads that keep you sad and dehumanize you: Kroger wants to surge price and track your face; private equity is killing everything you love for profit; meteorologists are being attacked for explaining reality; the loss of technicolors and the rise of beets; the rise in overworking to the point of death; the six day work week — not four — gaining traction as side-hustles turn toxic, filling weekends with work (appointments, house cleaning, writing essays like this); the constant threat of AI to replacing "low" performing humans as heartless losers crusade in the name of a bottom line. Also? Genocides, climate apocalypse, racism and xenophobia, war, etc. that your existence somehow reinforces.

I try not to think of the world as expressionistic, that what is happening outside of me is a reflection of my own inner turmoil — or that what is happening outside of me defines what happens inside of me. I think about this every week, writing these newsletters, sketching out an idea for an essay that focuses on a positive subject but ultimately yielding to the calls of the wild, to the more critical and sometimes “serious” subjects that are more important. This is and isn’t me, in the same way that it is and isn’t you: this is the law of negativity bias in media, that “the bad” courts attention, that audiences and news curators alike can be cursed with this inclination. As Vox explored last year, negative news is like feeding yourself candy instead of carrots — and this can emphasize the issue of depression. Thus we have our decade of depression: ironically and not, those who eat overly sugary diets have a 31% higher likelihood of depression according to a study that came out this week; whether because of sugar or the news, the number of people who have been diagnosed with depression is at its highest, which a new study points to this population mostly being young adults; zoom in further, a study this month on teenagers and social media found a correlation to poor mental health; depression remaps your brain to exert less effort into things another study found this week. “Mental illness is the world’s leading public health challenge,” one of these study’s professors told Financial Times. As study after study after study says, we’re all more depressed, our diet of food and media support this, as our brains are rewiring themselves, affecting the parts of our mind that help us change. Why do anything other than swipe, than rot?

“Our society right now is in a complete depression,” the comedian Leslie Jones preached to the The Drew Barrymore Show audience this month. “We have completely let corporations and networks and media make more money off our sadness than our happiness.” This is exactly it: we live bland and unfulfilled kidified adulthoods where we aspire to be non-working professional children because we’re endlessly unhappy, dopamine shocked (and deprived) post-people. Modern life is less about living — and that’s a problem without a clear solution. Sharing good news can help — Leadership and executives are becoming more liberal! Women are becoming the breadwinners of the world! Over a million people have had their student loans forgiven! There’s a meteor shower this weekend! — but that too can be false nourishment for our emptiness, to put sugar on the wound instead of addressing the wound itself.

Life should be a constant pursuit of widening the self, of seeking to learn and grow and become a fuller version of yourself, to fit into the bigger picture more snugly versus removing yourself from its image. Strange, then, that the latter is what’s happening to most of us: we’ve exited prematurely or are obsessed with the idea of the exit, too invested in short term (positive and negative) highs to truly see ourselves. Again: sugar on the wound. There is magic in life and in each other, if we can allow ourselves to see it. That seeing makes all the difference.

We all just need a bit more awe in our lives, more experiences of undoing, of nothing, of nature, of each other. That’s what I’m trying to heal myself with, prescribing a bit of what psychologist Dacher Keltner speaks of in his book Awe. Maybe it’ll work for you too?

In moments of awe, we shift from the sense that we are solely in charge of our own fate and striving against others to feeling we are part of a community, sharing essential qualities, interdependent and collaborating. Awe expands what philosopher Peter Singer calls the circle of care, the network of people we feel kindness toward...Being surrounded with awe-inspiring plants led people to volunteer more time. The last pillar of the default self—striving for competitive advantage, registered in a stinginess toward giving away possessions and time—crumbles during awe. Awe awakens the better angels of our nature.

One direction singer Liam Payne dies
The death of One Direction’s Liam Payne is very sad and it captures a few things: first, it may have been Gen Z’s first major premature death; second, it sort of crashed into meme culture in a way that people couldn’t fully understand; third — and maybe a result of the first — was that it spiked a lot of speculation, conspiracy theories, and finger pointing, from drug use to dancing on the grave, likely because there was an inability to process it all; and fourth that this somehow reminded people that celebrities of all sizes don't manage their own social media.

America's Newest Millionaires: Plumbers
I keep seeing those “How much do you make?” TikToks and many a blue collar job make me go “Wait. You’re getting paid what?” This speaks to that, but also the private equity-ization of things.

Protesters demand Kellogg remove artificial colors
Yellow food dye turns skin transparent in mice
California prohibits six artificial dyes
It’s interesting how this is the new parent-mad-at-thing trend, considering that I was a “DO NOT DRINK THAT RED DRINK!!” kid as any fruit punch would turn me into a hyperactive maniac. Only took them thirty years to start solving this issue!

5 Cities. 13 Schools. 47 First-Day Looks.
My forever hot take is that kids are exactly the same and stories like this prove the great law of kids being kids. Outside of alpaca hair, these kids look exactly like kids I went to high school with, less literally stylistically and instead the same gestures of pure youth.

The boom in home schooling
This story is interesting more for the look at how UK homeschooling compares to US homeschooling, which is to say: some seek alternatives to education for education versus politics.

‘Terrifier 3’ Not Clowning Around
This week in “the kids are alright,” ticket sales of family film The Wild Robot were likely boosted by kids buying tickets to sneak into the ultra gruesome Terrifier.

How did bookshops suddenly become cool?
GEN Z PICK A LANE AND PICK UP A BOOK AND READ IT DONT JUST USE IT AS AN ACCESSORY YALL MAKE ME LOSE MY MIND SOMETIMES!!!!

It’s Time for Electronic to Turn Dreams Into Reality
This story by king Philip Sherburne really puts into words something that keeps coming up in electronic music, that creativity is somewhat stalled. I felt this yesterday at a Dee Diggs show too, which was less about Dee’s music and more that people who go “dancing” could care less about what music is actually playing. And the real electronic fans? They’re too small a community to really move the needle beyond "that.” Pair this with the music’s embedded nicheness, there’s also an argument that we’re hitting a ceiling of what’s possible, which is a larger story of the 2020s and creativity. We’re becoming mirrors facing mirrors in so many ways.

"Christina Aguilera & Charli xcx backstage"
Bobby was telling a friend this week that I’m holding a grudge as an OG fan (Maybe?) but I find the celebrity theatrics of the Sweat tour so supremely weird. Ariana? Jennie?? Kesha??? Tate McRae???? HELLO?????? These are such supremely uncool people, which is to say: Charli’s in the master’s house with the master's tools, etc. Every piece of media I see feels like a business meeting, which proves the culture of dance music has been sold because of its own lost soul. (a la: see Philip’s essay above!!) The Weekly Work’s assessment said it best: “Raves don’t happen at the Kia Forum…Charli XCX is like Kohl’s Cash.”

In 1978, advertiser and activist Jerry Mander wrote a book that intended to take down — or at least expose — the power of television. Called Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television, the book sketched various stances on how media could colonize viewers, that economic and patriotic behaviors could be embedded in viewership, that the format (artificial light, noise, image exposure) could make one crazy, and that it had the power to build biases and break down information.

I’ve skimmed the book several times and, while I own a copy bequeathed to me and marked up by a now-deceased autodidact, I’ve yet to read it in full. I’m repeatedly drawn to it, as a recovering television worker and as someone who will always have a relationship to tubes, old school and new. Here’s a taste of the thinking, which is from a section refuting the idea of television and media as “neutral” entities —

If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behavior in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.

If we think about this idea of all media, all screens, as advertising shapes behavior, we can fully understand the world we live in. I can’t think of a time before television but I can think of a time before mobile phones. Kids (some Gen Z, def Gen A) can’t remember a time before mobile phones and the internet, but they can remember a time when they watched television instead of phones. This shapes you. This shapes culture! This is why we are a society that struggles with reading, with matters of attention, with being civil and being polite, with depression: the screens have changed us all, try as we might to escape such morphings, try as we might to roll our eyes at these non-issues as we did a decade ago when digital detoxes were first en vogue. If only we knew. To be loved is to be changed, as the saying goes, and by that metric we are beloved. We are bursting with televised agape for our cameras, for what we watch, for how we believe we look on our screens. “I am Narcissus and my little zoom square is my lake,” a viral Tweet once said.

What then do we make of Hollywood’s decline? We know this dismantling isn’t because, say,  David Zaslav had a Scrooge-like experience, waking up and realizing that media needed to treat people better: no, no. It wasn’t that, but the hubris and lure of the other screen that has led to the erasure of the self. It’s one of the scariest fairy tales which, ironically, dovetails into another creepy crawly trend: the biggest horror breakouts of 2024 are all about the horrors of the screen, where the screen — the camera, the executives, the medium — is the evil. Decades ago, television was the medium for evil: “They’re here,” Carol Ann famously declared in Poltergeist; Ringu and The Ring famously made evil capable of crawling out of the television to meet you, to kill you; lesser films like The Video Dead and TerrorVision had similar channeling of monsters too. It wasn’t until the double whammy of Halloween III — where watching could kill — and Videodrome — where pain and pleasure of the broadcast were held equally — that synthesized the idea of the television not as a gateway but as the evil itself. The V/H/S series and virtually any found footage horror movie form a wreath around these films: to document is to see horror, to be horror.

What’s interesting is that the breakout horror films of 2024 make production itself the monster: it’s not just the television or what comes out of it but the entire machine of Hollywood that is evil. Late Night With The Devil turns the pursuit of television success and the broadcast industry into a sinister machine. Mr. Crocket tells the tale of children’s television careers turned demonic. I Saw The TV Glow speaks to the great gaslighting that comes with being entertained, escapism turned toxic. MaXXXine, like X and Pearl, finds stardom as a form of mania, that one must scream they’re a star until they literally bleed out. The Substance defined itself as a modern classic by cleverly skewering the television's demand of our beauty — and how we all, old or young but mostly femme, feel that pressure. Entertainment is the killer these movies say which, to the point of social media and depression, is a fact that plays into many, many movies before these.

There are myriad other recent horror movies that play into how entertainment mediums and ideas of “being watched” is a horror — Nope, The Watchers, It’s What’s Inside, Abigail, Skinamarink, The Invisible Man, M3GAN, Watcher, The Rental — but the best of the best and the spiritual throughline of these films is that they’re the twenty year old children of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, a deeply existential horror movie where an entire city makes corporal the entertainment industrial complex’s monster. All of these show that your dreams are your nightmares, your seeking yourself through the television, through movies, through fame, is to take a knife and plunge it into your heart.

That is the test of these times it seems, what Jerry Mander was getting at some forty years ago: the television is a tool and it’s being used to undo us. “Will you break the camera?” these movies ask in his wake. “Or will you break yourself?” It seems we’ve committed to the latter.

“im crying”
"Also spotted this one in NYC today"
“I bought Israel”
Yes, someone really hacked billboards to put these words in Mr. Beast’s mouth. Incredible. (Also in Mr. Beast’s mouth? Moldy Lunchly snacks.)

“the flag for Greek”
“ALMOST cooked”
"a funny SNL skit"
The woman tearing down “Israeli” flags really sums up a lot of culture.

“Zones of Interest everywhere”
If you could see how far back my eyes rolled! This Tweet about the video is also perfect.

"NOOOO"
Regret to inform you that Marvel did a Locktober post 😞

"is your pvssy green??"
The Cynthia Erivo “don’t erase me” diva drama this week was very Streissand effect that exposed the actress’ own cultural illiteracy. Anyway, this post was great.

“witch cursed demi lovato”
Speaking of meme targets: poor Poot.

“can’t stop laughing”
This was the closing ceremony to 2024’s Hispanic Heritage Month imo

"I *almost* called the feds"
This post went very viral and I…had to search through many results to figure out what was going on. I didn’t “see” what it really was for a while.

“Living in Bushwick”
The can-you-read-properly to dressing like a wild one pipeline is real.

“running a marathon with no training”
I commented this but simultaneously inspiring and upsetting.

“Oh god, he’s going for”
Unfortunately, I’m the old man in the t-shirt.

“moo deng makeup”
They grow up so fast!!!

“comically large”
Look at this mouse’s huge ass y’all.

"I went as a straight up flasher"
This Tweet went viral because everyone, like me, didn’t realize the watch selling bit wasn’t real.

And, finally, how it feels to be getting this email at 7:04AM PST.

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