🐢🐌🦥 why can't we be slow again lol

On our need for speed and trying to figure out why Jennifer Lopez sucks.

If you like the free Sunday dispatches, you’ll love the paid dispatches too: upgrade your subscription to access!

Facebook’s Algorithm Is Boosting AI Spam
"whatever this is"
"The hellscape that is FB"
“Facebook during an election year”
“ashli babbitt catacombs”
This was a breakout week for Facebook AI farms. Be careful out there, peepaw and meemaw!

U.S. Sues Apple, iPhone Monopoly
lol okay sure

MacKenzie Scott donates $640M
We don’t talk about this queen enough!!

Marriage rates are up, divorce down
I think the Millennials-actually-care-for-each-other-in-relationships thing is having a measurable effect.

As Harris Visits, Call for End to US Colonialism
"We want to know what you think of the colony."
Kamala visited Puerto Rico and it did not go well. I haven’t seen Veep but the “dance” video gives me that energy.

"A message from Catherine"
“All of us”
“Big day for the scoldy community”
“People should respect”
Closing the loop on the Princess Kate thing. While There has been a big tsk-tsk scoldy movement, I disagree: these are the richest, most powerful people on earth who “rule” countries — and they failed to roll out a wellness check? That deserves scrutiny.

Finland Is World’s Happiest, US Drops
The big takeaway was that the US fell out of the top 20 due to young people’s anger — but I think a bigger story is how Israel is number five. I wonder where Palestine is on the list? Oh, right: number 103 out of 143. (Also? Lists like this are bullshit but they get attention.)

Europe’s First Black Head of Government
You read that right. It reminds me of being in groups of Europeans, where people share that diversity is “crucial.” Then, a minute later, they talk about how people of certain “breeds” need to stay out of their country. European racism is wild. (NOTE: As a commenter noted, this is a very one dimensional view that paints a whole continent one way and minimises progress — and I regret framing this as such! Not a good look and I retract this generalization. Find more context is in the comments, as what was said reflects being in and of a specific place[s].)

World’s worst polluted cities
Air pollution is one of my niche passions and, if you’re concerned about it, I recommend investing in an air quality monitor. I am obsessed with the Temptop P10! Dystopian but here we are.

I sit down to watch The Traitors — but I only have 45 minutes before I have to go to bed. I poke around the screen, finding an encircled ellipsis. I call up a menu of numbers and push x1.25. Why not watch a bit quicker? The speed is subtle enough that it cuts out empty space in the episode, all the dramatic flourishes of mood-setting cheesy music reduced to breaths between scenes. I shave off ten minutes and am in bed only a few minutes late. I read a few pages of a book and fall asleep.

I have ten minutes before a meeting and I want to watch some TikToks, mostly for fun but also “for research.” I keep a finger to the right side of the screen, to press down and double the speed whenever someone is getting just a bit too long winded. I watch more TikToks than I have digits for on my hands, on my feet — on both combined, doubled twice. It’s time for my meeting, which I am late to because I didn’t stop watching after ten minutes. “Hi,” I say. “I was reading.”

I go for a walk and I listen to an audiobook. I always listen to audiobooks when I walk, when I clean, when I’m doing anything where I can listen (except for writing, which is where I draw a line). The book is a bit dense and the words are zipping between my ears too fast. I turn the speed down from 3x to 2.8x. Better. I can understand what they’re saying. The words aren’t sprinting but now taking a meaningful run. I nod and walk and I nod and I walk. I’m learning. I’m reading.

Do you do this? I think you do. In 2022, YouTube shared in a blog post that revealed that, outside of normal, the most watched speeds are x1.5 and x2 speed. “YouTube users saved an average of over 900 years of video time per day when watching at faster speeds,” the blog reads. On TikTok, speed up songs have become a modern gesture of sonic expression, which NBC posited was so fans could fit more of a song into shorter video. “By speeding up songs, fans can transform a track into a dance hit or high-tempo anthem,” a TikTok representative told NME last year. “Providing an entirely fresh take on songs from a huge range of genres.” In 2022, WhatsApp introduced a feature that let you speed up voice messages. “Play voice messages at 1.5x or 2x speeds to listen to messages faster on both regular and forwarded messages,” Meta explained in a blog. “Amazon delivered packages to its Prime customers at the fastest speeds ever in 2023,” Amazon said.

It would be simple to call this speeding up only a tech thing: it’s not — and it’s probably not great for us. Recent observations are finding that sped-up media affects short term memory, making it “more difficult it is to grasp the message and its details.” Post-lockdown teens were observed to show faster signs of aging. Don’t tell this to Gen Z, who have been in a frenzy all year over if they are aging too fast or not. Don’t forget about Sephora Kids! Energy drinks are surging in popularity, which are colliding with observations that heavy consumption can lead to heart failure. Why? “Energy drinks are known to raise blood pressure and can trigger heart rhythm abnormalities,” a study found, along with ADHD and anxiety for young people. Lest we forget the heart pumping “charged” lemonade deaths.  Elevated heart rates are linked to dementia, which plays into a larger health trend of monitoring heart rates. Up in the air, powerful jet streams are making commercial planes fly faster due to temperature differences. Speaking of, scientists are getting worried that climate change is speeding up, that temperatures are getting warmer faster than expected. It’s not just us either: while completely normal, the Earth is spinning faster as time moves faster now than it did following the Big Bang.

We can attribute this to the “always be optimizing” thing. More information, less time. Run faster, consume more. Hurry up and wait. Why wait when you can overnight it? Can we skip to the good part? When did I become so impatient? Time feels limited but so much fuller. Revenge Bedtime Procrastination transformed into Revenge Stuff-As-Much-As-You-Can-Into-Every-Pocket-of-Time. You no longer watch one thing but you stream one thing while watching another. Attend a meeting while working at the same time. Multi-task, multi-task, multi-task. Is this that growth economy ghost in my machine again? Why do I always feel that greasy feeling of wanting to consume? Have I been so trained to work, to “do something,” that my minutes are always bursting? When was the last time I just sat in silence and did nothing?

There is a limit to what we can take in, physically and mentally. There are speeds with which we will never be able to hit. Perhaps we will enter an era of information poisoning, death by TMI. We all feel it, we all want to “unplug” — and I think we are, whether consciously or not: since 2022, US social media app users are plummeting. Hopefully we’re getting outside. Hopefully we’re doing something other than having enrichment time in our enclosures.

Where the Wild Things Went
This was a must-read for me, as it investigated if the “anthropause” Covid moment of “nature was healing” did anything. Turns out it didn’t, as one can assume evolution and our relationship to animals meant creatures were less out because herbivores find safety in humans to scare carnivores away. Interesting!

Intermittent fasting: New research casts doubt
I’ve been very fasting curious but this study is definitely a tick against the act.

Does cheese give you nightmares?
Someone mentioned this in my Spanish class this week and…I guess it’s true??

Directors Explain Using AI Art in the Film
“Most hyped horror movie to being boycotted”
OpenAI Courts Hollywood in Meetings
"Generative AI is theft on a massive scale, period."
While only three images, a big debate this week was around the buzzed film Late Night With The Devil and its use of AI. Meanwhile, Open AI is taking meetings in Hollywood. This is to say what we talked about last week: a battle for the soul of creatives and creative industries is underway.

"Azealia has a bit to say about Cowboy Carter "
"greatest music writer of all time"
"she sits down and THINKS"
"criticism ate down"
All I will say about Cowboy Carter is that: I second what Azealia “bell hooks” Banks has to say. Azealia, if you’re reading this, I’d love to offer you a column in this newsletter!! Also: the Guggenheim thing was real weird.

“Street parking will have to do”
“Ashes”
Singing in parking decks isn’t new, but this viral TikTok captured the trend best. It also made me realize something…sad: these displaced singers, seeking reverberating spaces, are turning to places where you park cars instead of…churches? I’m not pro-church by any means, but I do think this is one of the clearest statements of some sort of cultural loss that hasn’t been appropriately redirected. I wrote about this two years ago and I think may be one of our culture’s greatest problems to solve. What do we do with these flowers?

I Can't Dream Anymore
Fabiana Palladino
I am no Jai Paul stan (Idk but he’s very “We have Prince at home!!” vibes.) but I caught wind of his kinda sorta protege Fabiana Palladino this week, whose album drops April 5 and…it slaps. It’s like Jessy Lanza was Tirzah, but with that Jai Paul twang. This very well could transform into the 2020s Rhye, if it gets put into the wrong hands. Don’t let Howard Schultz or Adam Mosseri listen!

who are shakespeares of our times?? 🖊️🎭🔮
Paid subscribers got an investigation seeking to answer this question. It was an interesting exercise! Also: this week I’ll be sending out the first of a new series about how to be a creative, given the big reception to last week’s essay.

Between the Kate Middleton theatrics and Facebook Boomer AI posts, another saga was gripping the internet this week: Jennifer Lopez being “from the block.” “I like taking my hair out like this,” she says in the viral video, which was posted by the Amazon Video TikTok. She sits on a weight bench, taking off equipment and fluffing her hair. “It reminds me of when I was 16 in the Bronx. Running up and down the block.” She squints at herself in a mirror. You can feel the weight of performed profundity.

The post was a disaster, inspiring literally everyone everywhere on every platform to come out and slam J.Lo for being cringe, inauthentic, mean, and out of touch. Her fans fought for their lives, grasping for positive stories, while questions of her taste and the point of her recent creations came into question, thus invoking the power of the TikTok algorithm to feed more and more satiric, cringe content about her. This is compounded by news that she’s cutting her tour short, along with a Variety “hit piece.” Allison P. Davis said it best in Vulture back in late February: “She prefers to stay in the clouds, making vague references to the grand gestures of love. The nonspecificity is meant to make her relatable. But we don’t really want the Everywoman bit anymore when she’s crying in the rain, in a silk gown, in front of an outdoor fireplace at some fabulous mansion. It’s gotten boring to have to pretend.”

This saga specifically is about J.Lo, but it’s also about a widening group of celebrities and public figures who we relate to. As the aforementioned Variety story traces, Justin Timberlake and Madonna have a similar problem: the issue is less about the artist as an idea but more about the reality that they inhabit. For Jennifer Lopez, it’s a very specific Gen X the thing that defines and makes me alt (The Bronx.) which very much isn’t “them,” thus making any clinging for it feel inauthentic, faked, and a performance of an idea instead of “being themself.” For Timberlake, it’s an inability to face reality, to acknowledge the high tide against him (via Britney) while doing anything unique, a la: the same problem as Jennifer. For Madonna, it’s trying too hard but also “doing nothing”: same problem as Jennifer.

What these celebrities as such lack is a relationship to the real world. It’s the same problem that larger brands are having, that you’re trying to get us to buy your expensive products by telling us to eat cereal for dinner as a treat. Can you hear yourself? You released a movie and a documentary and an album and a tour, all of which feels like a product of 2004 when it’s 2024, which has little to say about anything other than yourself which is ultimately meaningless in a literally heated time in an even more heated election year. A too-much, not-enough effort that is the cultural equivalent of Ken parts. It can take years to build reputation — but a series of seconds-long posts can ruin everything. Just ask the #LoveDontCostAThingChallenge.

A similar trap is being walked into by other celebrities: Jojo Siwa’s “bad girl” era is coming and it’s becoming a punchline; Meghan Markle is attempting to build an empire but is having trouble forming a crowd; Dylan Mulvaney dropped her debut single, which is quietly plainly one of the worst songs ever made (and inspired a TERF tidal wave); Dua Lipa’s is participating in the 2024 Pop Girl Olympics but the new songs sound quite similar, which is crashing into a mounting relatability problem; Normani — who kept fans waiting for more than half a decade for an album — went radio silent for a month, inspiring a meme that may have forced a single release (related: Camila Cabello’s flop-or-not saga).

There is a seesaw of relatability that all relationships hinge on: I give a bit of myself, you give a bit of yourself — and we continue to meet at the same level, to evolve in parallel. For public figures and brands, you have to keep up with the non-Kardashian normies as they invest in your long-term success. This is a relationship with a faceless customer, which is why guarded authenticity is so crucial. The solution is simple, a note I would give to any creative or client: be as specific as possible in subject but use the simplest language or gesture possible to reach people. J.Lo, like all these celebrities and many brands, are in a cloud. Simply throwing lightning bolts at people doesn’t work: you have to become mortal, to walk with people without being noticed. Fitting in is hard work.

“when someone trauma dumps”
“mama, kudos”
“You’re so beautiful.”
“Thank you Q for sharing”
This is nearly a week old but it is my job as resident queer person who watches Drag Race to give you the context for the very viral “for spilling” meme. Watching it in real time, you had to laugh out loud. Plane Jane should win a Peabody for this.

"Welcome queens"
Speaking of Drag Race, you have to watch this unhinged AI Drag Race video. After sharing my love for cartoon Drag Race videos, I take full responsibility.

"Best Stan Twitter"
“Thread of images”
“They’re not fat”
Something’s happening with 2010s memes.

“Pocket Beagle”

“Pocket di Beagle”
One of my many current TikTok obsessions is this slightly hunky Italian who puts beagles in his pockets. I’m sure he’s a fascist but it’s cute for now. My other obsession? Her.

"on the department website"
Any old-versus-young Prince William meme I will look at.

"exactly the way Mariah Carey depicted him"
I don’t know what thinking about this puts me back in the 9th grade, watching the “Heartbreaker” video. What a Tweet.

“I love danny so much”
He’s so me. This also reminds me of this clip of him talking about being Filipino.

“Do not be hispanic”
Time to pack it up, mi gente.

"texts with my mom"
I want to believe this is true but I know better.

“Enjoyed spending time with you”
Alt title: texts with my dad.

“names like a strong Black man”
Raytheon…Northrup…what an observation.

“This happened to me”
I believe it. Save those dogs!

“Mommy’s coming”
Speaking of sped-up, you gotta watch this fast-forwarded cat rescue. I’m crine.

“Is this normal?”
You should be in jail if you turn your light off like this.

“used to record myself”
I think this pairs well with the yoga lady from last week.

“About to fall asleep”
Best use of “no Chick-Fil-A sauce.”

“Dealing with UK police”
Laugh to keep from crying!!!

“farm to pack”
Ah, yes: sustainable cigs.

“We are not like other agencies”
If you’ve worked in marketing, you may be entitled to financial compensation.

“hwo many mg was that edible”
I can hear her.

"yes I gay"
yes I gay

And, finally, me immediately after hitting send on these emails.

---

Give a tip & subscribe to The Fox Is Black.