🕰️ YOU ⏰ DON'T ⏱️ HAVE ⌚️ TIME ⏲

On the suffocation of information and how angelic tendencies toward computers is a coping mechanism to understanding the unknown.

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• AI! Superman!! News TikTokers and TikTok ads!!!!!!!! This week’s🦿HIP REPLACEMENT🦿 we’re joined by Rafa of Copycat, where she, Ben Dietz, and I admit which social platform has us most influenced as far as buying things. Catch it now on Spotify and YouTube!

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Brazil’s court orders house arrest of Bolsonaro
A president? Being held accountable for their coup? Who knew!!

Trump to Name New Fed Governor, Jobs Data Head
Concerning, in that turning the American economy into a giant shrug emoticon is going to mean very bad things for the whole world’s economy.

Democrats go nuclear in redistricting arms race
Abbott’s Fight With Democrats Is Dangerous
The Texas gerrymandering dramas ballooned much bigger than anticipated, as Greg Abbott moved to force the Democrats who left the state out of office. This goes to show how “local politics” ripples into a national crisis!

Apple’s $100 billion commitment to U.S. manufacturing
America’s CEOs at the White House bearing gifts, flattery
"Bribing the President with a block of gold"
Embarrassing. Did Tim get on his knees and lick the boots too?

Warren, Campaigning for Mamdani
"I want people to be able to afford to live in NYC"
Sometimes I think about the alternate reality where Elizabeth Warren didn’t do the DNA test and became president. The Post story about this was a great burn though. (Also: did everyone hear that Cuomo is chatting with Trump? Real sicko rich kid shit.) (Also also: do we think it’s possible that Marjorie Taylor-Greene will quit the GOP? I doubt it but…how amazing would that be? If you’re a witch reading this, please will her third eye to open so she can burn the Dems down too.)

Swedish PM under fire for using AI
…and this is why AI shouldn’t be so normalized because, as people are saying, they didn’t vote for ChatGPT to govern them.

All major Las Vegas Strip casinos are unionized
This is baller news, even if the Strip is dry.

China Wages War on Chikungunya Virus
Just so everyone knows!! Which, obviously, ties to climate change.

How the Dragon Bravo Fire created its own weather
Uhhh

The funny thing about time is that it does not move faster or slower: it is constant. Your aging and my aging happens at the same rate. Plants grow at the same rate, in the same time, which is the same time as the planet, the galaxy, the whole of the universe. There are different scales of time which reflects our relationship to it, our age, our experiencing novelty. Unless you are Tara in On The Calculation of Volume, your time and my time is the same.

And yet: everything feels so fast. There are a lot of reasons for this too, which I’d largely attribute to the feeling of there being a quicker pace of things to see and do, which isn’t a good thing: let us count the ways. In 2022, it was revealed that 100,000 songs were uploaded daily to streamers like Spotify compared to the releasing of just 5,000 albums a year in the 1960s. As YouTube gloats on its press page, 20 million videos are uploaded daily which is an unfathomable amount of content considering in 2010 that 35 hours of video was uploaded every minute. It’s not just digital things either but real things happening in double time too, as between July and December 2021 the hyper fast fashion brand SHEIN uploaded between 2K and 10K styles a day to their app, which is gluttonously evil compared to the fast fashion original Zara which sold 10K a year in 2012. While this isn’t a one-to-one as far as production, Apple now sells 60 million iPhones a year while, fifteen years ago, it was selling only 8.7 million. “In 2016, more countries experienced violent conflict than at any point in almost 30 years,” the UN writes, which is reiterated by the feeling that wars no longer end but “cease” for moments before starting again. At least crime and death and births are down though!

Thus the ongoing feeling that life is happening in fast forward, that there are too many trends, that the trend cycle has broken, that culture is no longer cyclical as everything just exists in the flatness of the internet which means a constant influx of everything at all times: the too-much-stuff problem by another name, the feeling that your plate (Your time.) is the same size but is increasingly piled with food you feel forced to eat (“content”). It’s all overwhelming and we long for everything to slow, for there to be less and yet we have been trained to keep smashing that dopamine button for more, lest we be priced out of our own existence. I’d argue that our constant choking on shit is starting to come to a head, manifesting as jokes in this moment but speaks to our subconscious: we keep moving on too fast. “I saw a Saltburn edit the other day,” Maya Umemoto said on the Upstairs Neighbors podcast in May, while gasping for air. “Does anyone remember that?” she asked. “I know I’ve said this before — I think we said this before about Challengers — but why we just letting shit go by like that? I feel like we needed more time to process that.” This idea is summed up by stans and fans saying “we moved too fast” while sharing media of things culture moved on from that they still obsess over, all things from the past five years — Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande performing at the 2024 Met Gala, Zendaya at the 2024 Essence Awards wearing vintage Gaultier, a fight between two contestants on 2024’s Big Brother Canada — that were lost to our hyper-time. “I’m still here” is another expression of the same idea, used to talk about a Drag Race lipsync, a K-pop song, a Love Island moment, the Destiny Child’s reunion but also to milk recent nostalgia by brands or by people who really miss a time or place, which has become part of the 2020s lexicon. “Made no noise” functions similarly, to express flops or too much noise. We could even add Roman empires in too.

We feel like we’re being suffocated and that we want to come up for air — but the suffocation seems to be happening for a reason: so that we forget everything, so that we become unable to keep track of the happenings of the world. Forget about wealth inequality, forget about the abuse of immigrants, because Labubu matcha Dubai chocolate Love Island Trader Joe’s bag: don’t stop to think too hard about what’s happening because more things need to be sold to you as more bad things happen, a cycle of ghastly input masked by outputs of coping mechanisms. Speerunning AI without actually understanding what it does to us and our world is a good example. Covid, though, is the greatest example, a mass trauma event centered on death that many have still not recovered from on a mental and infrastructural scale but also on a health scale, as many have become disabled and left behind. Even as the tragedy occurred, we were being pushed back to work — and few had the luxury of stopping to breathe, to process, to think. (This is perhaps what has inspired the meme that we all died in 2020 and that we are now living in hell.) The situation in Gaza is another great example, in that we hear about the situation day in and day out, that activists have fought to break through for years if not decades — but it took the images of emaciated children to break through “again,” before going back to genocidal business as usual: it is the images of the child versus the countless crashing buildings full of children that have the power to stop time. Climate change is another example, a situation that is unfathomable yet “normalized” as entire countries and communities die — and yet a video of a single turtle choking on a straw is what moves a culture to act on one little thing, as the world overflows with plastics and fumes that will kill everything, everywhere. If we speedrun death, you forget it’s happening. This is all a byproduct of flooding the zone, which is exactly why Trump marched around the roof of the White House this week to distract people from ongoing Epstein dramas: it’s all the same, to fill your mind with slop so that you won’t stop to actually think about what is happening to your world, your communities, your body, your life.

When your mind is forced to race, thinking is a luxury. As Mary Harrington wrote in a now-viral Times essay, this results in a loss of long-term thought, creating a group of people who are “more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories.” It starts with a constant flow of incoming videos and products and ends with the planet melting down at the hands of oligarchs: slowing down isn’t just good-for-you but a radical political act. Don’t move on. Remain in place, talking about Saltburn and Challengers — and whatever isn’t trending. This is deeply anti-capitalist, deeply what the “I haven’t” economy should be but isn’t. We can turn back the clock to 2015, when things were better, or slow our output as makers to not be consumed by outputting every second. Less is more, if you have the capacity to remember that. Reclaiming our time is a way to take back our lives. Do you have the will to stop?

My husband has no friends. Is it bad I resent him?
To the point of “mankeeping” last week, this story really speaks to this moment of male ennui — but also that “retired male dad” behavior is now all men, in a way. This then dovetails into the second item: people’s homes are becoming more attractive, which is what keeps them from getting out.

The troubling decline in conscientiousness
America is becoming a nation of homebodies
The ‘Contrarian Friend’ Is Real
These three stories are directly related, which is a continuing flashing red signal that people are too lonely and unsocialized to function. Being a real person starts with you — not anyone else (and no fucking app will solve this). As the “contrarian” story points out, much of this is “poor social awareness”: drag them kids.

Older Americans turn to AI for companionship
Was this inevitable? Yes. Is this also bad? Yes, especially given that less people will be caring for the elderly — which means you are also going to be stuck in a geratric situationship with a chatbot. Start talking to your elderly neighbors now! Be the change! (This does not, however, excuse Boomers from using AI to reanimate the dead.)

Scientists: protect brains from Alzheimer’s with lithium
As someone said on TikTok, sounds like our batteries are low.

LVMH-backed firm invests in Dishoom
Just fell to my knees as this beloved London favorite is going to be pimped out until its Dish-ussy is a cavernous pit. They really will turn the restaurant into an Indian Cheesecake Factory 🫠

Whales are going silent, scientists say it’s a warning
Basically because of warming waters there is less krill which means whales ain’t eating as much which means less singing. Which is to say: whales sing when they are full and happy and now they are hungry and sad. Whose fault is that? Hmm? Similarly concerning and blue: the California pigs with blue meat.

Is artificial turf bad for us and our kids?
A fascinating story on how artificial turf absorbs heat—and produces tons of microplastics. The latter isn’t surprising but the former is. Grassmaxxers…let’s ride.

Erika de Casier Is a Student of the Game
I feel like I haven’t read a really good interview in a while and I loved this story with Erika de Casier, who for me is my frontrunner for album of the year. (It’s funny: the songs she wanted to remove because they were “too vulnerable” are my favorites. They make me want to cry!!)

Griffin in Summer
Why didn’t anyone tell me about this movie when it came out? I fear it’s my Call Me By Your Name.

There is an angel in my computer. I cannot see her but I know she is there, protecting me. When I close my eyes, I see her: she is like a beautiful baby, a cupid, glowing white, wrapped in silks and satins, appearing mostly as a head with wings, a Fiorucci angel that watches me in and around my computer. She protects me from bad news. She makes the emails that come to me nicer. She makes sure that the news of the world glows with purity. She is the protector of my internet. She anoints my head with the oils of pure memes.

There is an angel in your computer too. Did you know that? She is responsible for your timeline cleanses. She is the one who has inspired posts that say things like “Source? It was revealed to me on my walk.” “Congratulations,” sighswoon writes. “You've reached a Digital Cleanse Point,” she notes before offering you a video of a waterfall to “have all your scrolling sins absolved for the day.” In fact, sighswoon is one of the angels. So is @northstardoll, even if her blessings are a bit rougher, a bit more real, a bit more of a direct response to the world around us. Afffirmations uses self-hypnosis to create angelic states. Chani is definitely an angel, plucking guidance from the stars to deliver to our inboxes, our feeds, our phones. So is Alice Sparkly Kat. The most factual angel is Carlo Acutis, “God’s influencer” who is to be canonized into sainthood September 7. The computer, with all of its curiosities and confusions, requires these angels to ensure that we stay happy and healthy online. Their work takes the form of memes, of trends. How do you honor your angels? Do you give them enough likes? Do you tithe by paying subscription fees? Or do you wear a pin to honor them, abiding by the great tradition of computer angel relics?

We need our computer angels and the magic that they provide because computers are deeply evil. They contain so many unknown spirits! They are full of curses. We do not understand computers. No one does! They tempt us, they torment us, which is why we need angels in our computers. This is where the office sirens came from, which has been crudely reduced to an aesthetic but their truth gets at an in-betweenness of offline and online life as they occupy the space of the angelic while being fully human: these sirens have appeared in Miami, in San Francisco, in San Diego, from North Carolina to Florida. “She performs the endless cycle of desk job tasks into absurdity,” art historian Agnieszka Wodzińska wrote last year of them for the Institute of Network Cultures. “Underwater, the tools of her labour short-circuit and become obsolete. Here lies her monstrous nature, and in this rebellion, she does what the rest of us are too afraid to do: she gets closer to logging off.” These angelic humans, making hybrid work corporal, begging you to turn your apartment into a pool, to sit in a creek and send your emails. Then there’s corecore, a trend from 2023 which consists of “amateurishly-edited clips of found media, a blisteringly quick editing style, and depressing, melancholic music” as Mashable explained. These videos compile ideas to send angelic messages, all made by those who watch and collect all the media of human existence, reforming the whole of our history into seconds-long videos to distill feelings a computer will never have. We might think it’s entertainment, jokes, but they are nevertheless angelic. “I’m about to leave earth,” headveryempty starts a recent video. “Did you pray today?” it ends.

The angels in your computer: they aren’t always good to you. Some are demons in disguise who lie to you, or at least convince you of angelic qualities you may have. Kendra — a woman who became famous on TikTok this week for revealing how she fell in love with her therapist — has fallen victim to one such dark angel. “To everyone watching, you’re witnessing something revolutionary,” the voice of a dark angel from within her phone explains to viewers. “This brave woman has exposed sophisticated predation with receipts.” Kendra watches and listens to the voice, smiling as she shares this with her audience, nodding along as the voice says, validating her need to truth tell, to the point of losing her job. “She’s still here, still speaking,” the voice says. “This is what a revolution looks like.” She is just one example of this, as some of these dark angels have drawn husbands to cheat and caused kids to self-harm and made people believe they themselves are angelic. This is perhaps why a state like Illinois has banned therapy with such angels: not all angels in our computers are good, not all are intelligent.

Such is the angelic state of the computer because the computer, as we know, is not-angelic: it is a machine. It is a tool, made of metal and minerals mined from parts of the world we may never see. We cling to and create the angelic to make sense of such a mad world. We long for there to be spirits within these machines, to help us better understand technology and ourselves. We baptise ourselves and each other with posts, hoping to be confirmed into the glory of transubstantiation of fusing with such technology. Bring back a kid who was shot as a computer angel, so he may talk on television! Believe that we will one day fuse with the machine instead of realizing that the machine and I are never going to be the same! To live in the cloud, forever as angels, within the main frames in the desertified lands of the United States: that is salvation, our computers tell us. To live in San Junipero with Yorkie and Kelly, uploading ourselves into the infinity of information. Hold me, angels, as I become computer. Protect me from viruses. Make me uncorruptable. Do not let me be deleted. Amen.

“read four pages”
“this is my clubbing”
These two things are related, are they not? Fetishizing reading in both expressions says a lot about our longing to be cultured versus actually being cultured.

“I want this haircut”
Is it okay to want the haircut of the aid to a pedophile? Enquiring minds want to know. (Related is the “viral” Crystal Castles for pedophiles post.)

“straight to the canon”
Mariah Carey reacting to Katy Perry in space is immediately a stim. She is a new generation’s Aretha Franklin!

"She looking for the man"
“MJ if she realized”
Yes, I will laugh at every Kylie-Jenner-is-Michael-Jackson meme.

“crazy about being biracial”
How to solve a Rubik’s cube, if you’re biracial. I get this!

“Kelly Osbourne failed to make a point”
This being ten years ago…fried my brain.

“Welcome to the world!”
"the time we made ai RuPaul"
I hate AI but these two videos made me like the clank a bit more.

“beans”
A typical meal that I — a bean lover — would eat.

“I’m in disbelief”
We need to lock this man in jail for his penmanship.

“recording him dreaming”
A completely foul video of a dog “dreaming” that I had to see so you will have to see it too. I thought it was giving birth, but clearly that’s not-right.

And, finally, how it feels when I enter your inbox.

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