you won't remember this š¤š¤
On the incoming false memory economy and exploring a new friendship scam.
Airman dies after setting himself on fire
āWild to see on CNNā
This is the story of the week. Itās remarkable that this hasnāt gotten more attention, as it captures a turning point both as far as activism, media representation and reaction, and the state of war. RIP, Aaron Bushnell.
Sizeable āuncommittedā vote in Michigan
And Democrats wonder why voters are turning up to vote for no one. See also: the poll of people who say Biden is too old and Trump is too dangerous. This isnāt hard, people!
Court Throws Wrench Into Trump Trial
These continue to be nothingburgers until they are realburgers but this is justā¦stupid. We gotta redo that Supreme Court, yāall! I hope Ruth Bader Ginsburg is enjoying her rest at least, or relishing in leading the charge to gerontocracy.
Oil and gas profits triple under Biden
Joe Biden I stg I will hunt you down and steal your dementia medicine.
CDC ending five-day COVID isolation
Can someone set an alarm in two months, when thereās an uptick again? Ludicrous!
Musk: 'Media Blackout' in Death of Georgia Student
My mom tipped me off to this āimmigration boogeymanā murder story in Georgia, which Musk has been fanning the flames in the stupidest ways.
Ghana passes bill making identifying as LGBTQ+ illegal
Um.
Cherry blossom forecast: peak bloom March 21
This feels very wrong, if youāre at all familiar with the very-April phenomena of cherry blossoms in DC.
Microplastics found in human placenta
Maybe sheās born with it, maybe itās just microplastics.
Vice ends town hall after thumbs-down emojis
lmao
The dementia crisis is here.
"Dementia tsunami is coming"
āDementia is not a jokeā
āWhatās Oscars?ā
The (very sad and exploitative) Wendy Williams documentary has seized a moment for an important conversation: we are entering an era of high levels of dementia. This will be an ongoing subject of interest!
I was at dinner where we landed on the subject of notation apps. Some use Notion, some use Evernote, some use iA Writer. I use Appleās Notes app. So simple, so stupid, backed up by the cloud. I could do something fancier but I am tired of constantly starting over with technology, or investing in a technology that dies, taking with it all of your memories, investments, and time. There one day, disappeared in a computer meltdown or the magically unsaving Microsoft Word file. While less frequently occurring, to participate in technology is to understand that everything you have in your type-type box will disappear. It happened to me with with Rdio, with This Is My Jam, with MySpace, with Xanga, with Path ā and it will happen again. Will it be Blogger? Last.fm? Twitter?
This is what happens when your tools are based around capital, yes, but it doesnāt end there: ask any writer and youāll hear about all the writing that theyāve done that have disappeared, going down with defunct publications, lost websites, and digital outlets lacking archives. I have an entire catalogue of writing, of work, of history that is justā¦lost. All those artists that I wrote and took pictures of for Los Angeles, Iām Yours? Nowhere to be found. A capsule of a time and place simply bye-byeād by technology. This wouldnāt be a problem outside of bruised egos and a loss of oneās own āworkā but it becomes problematic in situations when the work you did gets mentioned in legitimate archives, like an interview I did of A.L. Steiner being a literal footnote in Made In L.A. 2014: people will search for a record of nothing.
Now we are entering a mass version of this, a precarious space where so many aspects of our lives are being deleted or rewritten with AI: we are entering a false memory economy, as brilliantly coined by TikToker @inner_werk. Let me explain with examples: you choose to retouch pictures of yourself but save over the raw photos; you write something that Grammarly edits, sharing the edited version; you appear on a recorded Zoom call with the ātouch up my appearanceā option turned on; you delete an event in your calendar from a week ago because you didnāt like the event and donāt want to remember it; you make a joke on Twitter that flops or does too well ā and you delete it, as to note draw attention; you crop out someone who you donāt want to include from a picture; you use Photoshop to extend an image a little bit, or to completely remove something that you donāt want in the image; you try to write something in another language but have a translation service rewrite it for you; you and some friends record a song for fun and opt to auto-tune it; you create and share an AI headshot. You get what Iām getting at?
These are every day āblipsā in our lives, microaggressions of truth that we play on ourselves that we ādonāt noticeā but are our accidentally deletions of our own archive in real time. In the grander, culture-wide scale, we see this with true-or-not culture wide Mandela Effects which are reinforced by media and tech companies changing the record. This past Super Bowl, when Alicia Keys flubbed her first note, CBS, the NFL, or whomever was quick to fix the flub creating a fact that is fictional. We also have Google working to remove the News tab and soliciting publishers to have AI write stories for them, both of which create altered versions of truth, a lack of ability to pinpoint records, while eroding the credibility of everyone involved. (Lest we forget: Google liberalād too close to the sun recently, with AI that produced women popes and Black nazis. Talk about altered archives!) Facebook agrees, as theyāre removing their news tab because āpeople donāt come to Facebook for news and political content.ā In using AI tools, the tools often make shit up ā and people take that as truth. When celebrities get plastic surgery and lie about it, a similar editing of truth happens, as
so sagely has chronicled in the case of Kylie Jenner. But itās not just Kylie: weāre in an epidemic of young people scrubbing out their youth and likenesses because of cosmetic procedures. The Row recently made a stir by disallowing phones at their fashion show, which is a āwinā for old-school, anti-tech experiences ā but this also means youāre only getting what the brand deems worthy of sharing. No outtakes, no ugly off-looks, no non-curated anything: you only get what āthe stateā gives you as truth. As ugly as they are, more and more public figures are getting veneers to suggest their teeth have always been perfect. This may seem ābigā and like something that happens only to business persons, celebrities, and politicians ā but just ask the students who are being plagued by AI generated nudes at school. Are they not dealing with a crisis of truth, that anything can be faked or real at the same time now? How can one qualify such a situation?Now think: what happens when issues like rewritten history, an inability to preserve our records, and the AI generation swirl together? We enter a very concerning space where truth disappears. You know this, as has been written again and again and again, but this āpost-truthā time is here ā and we canāt blame it all on AI: itās from an inability to record keep, neither in the macro (Alicia Keys at the Super Bowl!) or the micro (Altering an image!). I deleted my Facebook and Instagram account ā and so did my personal history of over a decade! Thatās a trivial me thing but the deletion of Flash and similar technologies is that an entire era of life and work goes away too. Those pictures you took of your now-deceased friend on your old phone? Those photos are all gone. Think of the kids, who will see something like Olivia Rodrigoās Deliaās inspired concert items and believe that this is the first time something like this āhas been done.ā Do references even matter anymore, if thereās no paper trail to bring us back to them? There was a time when we carried cameras around to keep memories, which isnāt why young people are carrying around physical cameras now ā but this reveals just how far in the technology game weāve gone, only to realize we optimized too much. Weāre now deleting life instead of simply improving life.
As we said in the beginning of February: big tech has busted. This is just another side-effect. We live in a state of cultural veneers, where everything is āperfectā but not-real at the same time. We take this for truth despite knowing better, or until we forget the truth at all. That doesnāt feel so good, but thatās the world today. There will be a day when we have memories of having memories.
Glasgow's Sad Oompa Loompa
"The Julie Ragbeer discourse"
Where's Kate Middleton?
This was a week when it came to memes. These stories capture them, but donāt account for, other popping items like the crying Taylor fan, the 97 year old dinner, PUSSY IN BIO, and the mix there of. I almost had an essay about this but we witnessed a rare, digital cultural souping where all these phenomenas collide. The echoes will exist for years, as this Bjƶrk/Lorde/Charli joke reveals.
"#LinenMoves"
Please donāt buy the hype: GAP made an ad with some TikTokers that literally rips off and recreates that viral Jungle video. Itās so lazy, but people in the comments are like āMARKETING TEAM ATE!!ā Like? How deranged is that? Everyone needs to get a life: this is a commercial. Itās not art! Talk about dissolving truth!!
BTS Fans Demand HYBE Fire Scooter Braun
āBTS stans renting trucksā
Like the Aaron Bushnell item, this captures a change in the publicās relationship to the Israel/Palestine conflict. See also: Selma Blair getting dropped by her reps due to Islamaphobia.
Craft carrying Koons sculptures loses power
Jeff Koons sent sculptures to space only for the device to fall over and die: absolutely crying. Whoās surprised though? Itās a SpaceX craft.
Surrealism Is 100. The Worldās Still Surreal.
Surrealism has turned 100, which is interesting because the weird world that yielded it is still weird. Cue the memes-as-dada conversation!
Iris Apfel Dies at 102
RIP TO A LEGEND WHO WAS OLDER THAN SURREALISM!!!
Taylor, BeyoncĆ© Drove āLiterally Allā AMC Revenue
As annoying as both of these films were, I do think this is the future of media, as we discussed last week. Say what you will about deranged Swifties in the front row but theyāre getting at a locally activated group experience!!
Jodie Turner-Smith Talks About Divorce
More people need to talk about how admitting failures ā Especially in relationships, between lovers, friends, and family! ā is actually a very important thing to do.
Mom loses $800K disability case
From photos of her throwing a tree. This story went very viral this week for good reason.
No, you donāt need to be drinking raw milk
āmillions of babies used to dieā
Whatās up with raw milk right now? Itās not good for you, morons.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
I just read this and, as everyone said last year, itās a must-read, incredible, no notes, brilliant capturing of technology, health, politics, and so much more. Which is all to say: she talks about shit like the above, which turns people into anti-vax āJust asking questions!ā morons in the name of āhealth.ā
Have you heard about the Target scam? People on TikTok (Women! Femmes!) are sharing how people are coming up to them, chatting them up and befriending them, only to get lured into a multi-level marketing scheme. It happened to this woman twice and to this woman twice, while a similar version (Not at Target!) happened with this woman after her son died.
Scams happen and are always based on the vulnerable but I want to highlight whatās particularly pernicious about this: the ācontractā of the scam is based in friendship and freedom from work, two things that are very much on the American mind. In all of the aforementioned situations, a person is targeted (lol) because they āseem friendlyā and are looking for friends. They are then lured into a conversation where the person explains how they do little work, thanks to their mentor. This is when people smell the fish and, after some time, realize that this is not legit. Couched in āfinancial freedom,ā this is the Amway scam which is very well documented, very high-functioning, that pops up literally every decade, and is tied to Betsy DeVos.
While scamming is the gesture of our times ā Elizabeth Holmes, Donald Trump, the wash-your-groceries fad, Fyre Festival, this weekās Willy Wonka fiasco, Joanne The Scammer ā this specific scam is colliding with this weekās viral new-old story of the plague of Americans no longer hanging out, which is interesting when we consider loneliness an expression of political, corporate, and economic fatigue. What this new āscamā does is promise freedom from all of our modern maladies, while ostensibly sweeping up the now largest religious group: people without a religious affiliation, who lack community and connection.
Iād like to pair this with something else happening: media about realizations, or stories about discovering that you are locked in a cage and have to get out. I recently watched Severance and had this thought, as this show about work-life imbalances but also about the meaning of oneās life and relationships. Barbie was a similar thing, with the song āWhat was I made for?ā summing up this philosophical dilemma so succinctly. Jury Duty, The Good Place, Parasite, The Rehearsal: we are steeped in media about going through the motions, about being suck in something, about realizing slowly or quickly, happily or sadly, that everything is a fucking joke. The scam is the simulation! Everything, fact and fiction, somehow has become The Truman Show ā even things that are wrapped up and delivered to you as the promise of friendship.
But this isnāt new, is it? Ponzi schemes are now timeless, as is longing for friendship. In my own short-long life, I almost fell prey to something similar: when I first moved to Los Angeles after college in the late aughts, I was starved for a role model, for friends to guide me, and turned to the internet for help. I posted an ad on Craigslist looking for a mentor. I heard back from one person, who was very kind and seemed to be like myself but a few steps ahead. We met for the (now closed) WeHo Starbucks. He gave me advice, before trying to inspire me to reach financial freedom ā and he could help, he could coach me. I immediately felt like I had been robbed, or like I was naked, even if I didnāt realize then what had happened other than being so foolish to think I could find a lifelong friend by simply asking the internet for one.
And here we are, the snake looping itās tail around. You donāt even need to advertise youāre lonely now to be targeted apparently. But doesnāt it feel good, to be desired in this way, to be sought out as you shop for little treats, while escaping your shit-life at Target? Weāre all locked up, waiting to be released. Itās so easy to be lured by the promise of a key.
Some words and phrases that are ~popping~ that you may need to know about, in case you donāt know about them. Many are not new-new but are peaking and get at something weāve discussed months ago: words and phrases are badges of internet cool. Get on our level!!
"hit the pentagon": I was delighted to see this this week in
because itās a hilarious 9/11 reference to now mean ādid it again.āāgnawingā / ābars of my enclosureā: Horny on main, as if a caged animal who needs to be free. This came from Brittany Broski via that one Appalchian creator. See also: āfoaming.ā
āopen the schools!!!ā: This just means someone did something dumb but is a reference to Covid school restrictions.
āwell yes / well no / sorta kindaā: The least new, these are used exactly as they are used and reference a now iconic Tokyo Tony interview.
āteaā: Serving, typically body.
āsprinkle sprinkleā: This is something people will leave in comments but gets at a specific type of you-help-me transactional relationship. Some are seeing it as a new form of feminism!
ālittle treatā: This is just a snack, one that scares away how shitty life is. See also āsweet treat.ā
āmewingā: This is a facial fitness exercise that is going off with kids, largely to represent alpha male / Chad behavior and being āabove it.ā Thereās a gesture involved and more to this, which this article can explain.
ābookieā: Variation of pookie, sometimes used less lovingly.
āoh thatās notā: Means exactly what it means or surprise/double-take, as drawn from this cringe Kelly Osbourne The View clip.
"if Roger doesnāt win"
āMEET THE QUEENSā
I will not keep this a secret anymore: my obsession for the past few weeks are AI cartoon character Drag Race competitions. I leave comments and vote and everythingā¦.take me TO JAIL. I am wrong, but I am free.
āwe saw the videoā
Rihanna performed at a richie rich wedding in India. This is the best take. Talk about Savage by Fenty!!!
"weāre late"
"oh my god"
While you were at the Willy Wonka experience, I was at the Autism Reality Experience.
ālessons to be taughtā
New unhinged Kamala Harris video just dropped!! Sheās just like me.
ānothing couldāve prepared me to hit translateā
This translation is how I felt about those Paul Mescal photos.
āmarathon at Costcoā
I love the marathon-at-Costco woman.
āfavorite film ever madeā
This what-I-did-in-a-weekend video from 2022 is a must-watch.
āBjƶrk and Vivienne Westwoodā
I guarantee you wonāt guess where this post is going.
"2036 Democratic and Republican nominees"
It wouldnāt be funny if it werenāt true!
āBabies trapped in my kneesā
Zendaya has babies trapped in her knees.
"amazed at what Ai has given us"
Thank you, Google, for making fart house a real genre.
āFacebook is wildā
Let more kids play video games, you know?
āI reassembled himā
Oh! I didnāt realize these cigarette packages were collectibles.
āhop on one legā
This is deeply unsettling.
āNEEEEED THISā
Babe, wake up? Your alarm clock killed you.
And, finally, a proper reply to each of these dispatches.
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I really enjoyed your links to legit news stories by legit news organizations and then your five hundred words on notation apps. Riveting.
Yeah the simulation has really been simulating lately..