New on ICYMI: Ed Zitron came on the pod and proved that, somehow, there is someone who hates AI even more than I do.

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Five years ago, my relationship with technology was at its absolute worst. I was on a constant drip of Twitter and Instagram that shaped how I felt about the world and myself (bad). My sense of reality was skewed by what I consumed on screen, and I spent countless otherwise pleasant days in the throes of emotional turmoil about the world and my career and if anything would ever be good ever again.

As I learned more about OCD and got properly medicated to address it, I saw how my phone had become the ultimate form of reassurance-seeking. Without what other people said or liked or commented informing my decisions, I didn’t trust who I was or how I felt about anything. I genuinely wondered if I would need to change careers, if writing about internet culture was not worth the distress caused by being on the internet.

I started a long process of trying different limits and deleting certain apps and abstaining from online behaviors that would send me down a slippery slope. You can see this playing out in real time through Embedded:

Now I’m about as not on social media as someone can be while still writing about social media, which is to say: still more than I’d like. My daily average screen time on my iPhone is three hours and 42 minutes, which is pretty good—but I’m a laptop girl, and my total screen time cannot be calculated (because it turns out that I, uh, never turned that setting on for my computer). Whatever the number is, it’s not good enough, because I still end each day feeling like:

I won’t be fully logging off any time soon. But in the wake of Vulture’s authoritative investigation in the “clipping economy”—a case against the internet if there ever was one—I’m envious of the people who can opt out of all of this without sacrificing their careers. If I lived in a vacuum, my social media diet would look extremely different.

I’d delete: TikTok and Twitter

In fact, I long ago deleted Twitter, and can tell you that it takes less than two days to stop missing it. It is a cesspool run by a Nazi who has exploited and manipulated the algorithm and all but eliminated any choice you have in the content you see. The algorithm issue is also why I’d delete TikTok. Algorithms in general are black boxes that shape almost all of our cultural narratives, and the passive nature of consuming TikTok means that’s where we are most susceptible to misinformation—sorry, “narrative campaigns.”

I temporarily deleted TikTok a few weeks ago when everyone was making their little jokes about Hantavirus starting the next pandemic, and it was startling how little I missed it. You will not feel out of the loop or even that bored. Viral moments will still make their way to you, and without the option of blacking out and scrolling for an hour, it turns out you just go and do other stuff.

I’d keep: Instagram and Reddit

This is not an endorsement of Instagram, but an acknowledgement that you would feel cut off without it. It has overtaken Facebook as the “proof of life” platform—the first place people look up the person they met at that party or need to contact. Instagram also gives you more control than other platforms over what you see, which, if you continue to snooze suggested posts like I do, is only people whose content you’ve opted-in to (even though their posts appear on your feed in nonsensical order). Important caveat: Don’t ever open the Reels tab (TikTok for boomers).

Reddit is where I get my pop culture news, learn about drama in my neighborhood, find answers to my questions about my cats’ hairballs and why a part of my body hurts the way it does. It’s the first app I open after watching a horror movie with an ambiguous ending or when the new Love Island lineup drops. It’s the most human place online (for better and sometimes for worse).

I’d watch: YouTube

Over the years, I’ve carefully curated my YouTube to form a safe space of gentle vlogs and crafting tutorials. My subscription box is filled with 40 minute-long videos about British women going about their weekends in the countryside, and episodes of Taskmaster. I’ve spent hours catching up on YouTube and I never feel bad after it the way I do with TikTok. As long as you’re not susceptible to clicking on recommended video titles like “The Economy Is Bad Thanks To FEMINISM????” you shouldn’t find yourself falling down any dark rabbit holes.

I’d add: Homepages, RSS feeds, and other methods of intentional consumption

The number one fear people have about cutting back social media is being “out of the loop.” But just because TikTok makes staying in the loop easy by delivering what’s trending directly to your drooling face doesn’t mean all the other ways of keeping up have disappeared. The path out of social media-induced despair is to switch from passive to active consumption—putting yourself in control of what you see online.

This doesn’t entail anything radical. The steps would be too obvious to write out, were it not for the fact that so many of us have stopped taking them. For instance, you can set a homepage like (if you hate yourself) The New York Times. Or have your browser open to a site like the one that picks a Rothko painting to represent your local weather, and get your news through podcasts and newsletters hosted and written by people you trust. (I recently heard from an ICYMI listener who deleted TikTok and instead got Slate Plus to stay informed by listening to all our episodes—wow, what a great idea!) You can set up a Google alert so you only get the headlines you want; my friend Maya has had alerts for “stolen bees,” “possum removed,” and “mascot gun t-shirt” for years. You can join a book club so you’re reading things you wouldn’t normally—and have people to talk about them with.

None of these are groundbreaking ideas on their own, but together they will slowly help you reverse the status quo, re-relegating the internet to a tool instead of our entire reality. Or, your reality. I’m still stuck here (for now).

Please settle a media-centric, Seinfeldian debate I’m having with Nick: When an editor or hiring manager takes you out for coffee/lunch/drinks, should you do “the reach” even though you’re pretty sure you won’t be paying?

—Kate

Not pictured:

• The “surprise musical guest” (a James Brown impersonator, because, as one rumor had it, they could not land a certain singer-songwriter).

• Nick spilling his entire iced Cortado all over the floor (embarrassing) while waiting in the cookie line (humiliating) directly in view of (career-ending?).

• The indoor swimming pool they told me I couldn’t get in before I even said anything and so even though I didn’t want to get into it initially the fact that they told me I couldn’t meant I suddenly did (apparently you had to pay extra).

• , , Caiwei Chen, , , , and at a pre-summit dinner at Demo hosted by and of Pangram talking about the AI non-apocalypse, the bonkers editing process for freelancers at The New York Times (and why “house style” is dead), and the reason AI company logos all look like buttholes (because they are accidental metaphors for the diarrhea of discourse unleashed by the internet, if we heard the argument correctly).

The Future Is Gossip

Google Zero is almost here which, is the final_finalrevised_finalFORREAL_V4 nail in the coffin of digital media, the hammering of which has followed me my entire career. With Google’s latest announcement about AI search, it’s unlikely it will continue to deliver even the already dwindling traffic it currently does, let alone the kind that, for a period in the 2010s, powered entire websites.

This is bad. But there is cause for maybe not optimism, but something other than utter despair. Websites powered by search engines had to cater to search engines. This often meant writing not about what was new or interesting, but answers to what people were most likely to be Googling. Unfortunately, people don’t often Google things that have particularly profound answers, which is why the monthly Refinery29 report of trending search queries contained things like “Peppa Pig height.”

As said in her presentation at the Substack new media event yesterday, there is no longer an incentive to write any kind of SEO explainers or “summary” content. These are being totally eclipsed by by Google’s hastening shift to AI, not to mention the chatbots that pushed Google to make this change in the first place. It is a waste of time to try to compete. Genie, you’re free.

This means it’s worth considering what digital media outlets can provide that AI can’t, and Jasmine had a prediction for this, too.

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Today we welcome Julia Vitale, the editor-in-chief of Air Mail, where she started as a senior editor at its launch in 2019. Before that, she was an editor at Vanity Fair. Julia is a strong proponent of limiting your Instagram following to people you actually know and suggests having a small child in order to limit one’s phone use. —Nick

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EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

JULIA VITALE:

EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?

JULIA VITALE: I honestly can’t think of anything I’ve ever wanted to do less than Tweet. I think I just never cracked the algorithm, and now with Musk all over it I’m more turned off than ever.

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

JULIA VITALE: Inspiration. And story ideas!

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

JULIA VITALE: Vogue makeup tutorials that I will never get anywhere close to replicating, and my kid’s last-resort, “Wheels on the Bus.”

EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?

JULIA VITALE: I’m obsessed with TikTok. No notes.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

JULIA VITALE: The essentials: The Daily Mail, the New York Post and its excellent California edition, the New York Social Diary, the East Hampton Star, the Shiny Sheet, Dagospia, and Paris Match. But also: the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Times of London, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Spectator.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

JULIA VITALE: Minimally, unless it’s juicy and light and fun. Air Mail is meant in large part to be a haven from the ceaseless negativity of the daily news cycle, which is, incidentally, how I like to live my life.

EMBEDDED: What’s a popular misconception that you see repeated online?

JULIA VITALE: That Air Mail is a conservative publication because our “About” page details our “catholic” tastes. It’s an adjective that means “all embracing” when it’s lowercase!!

EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?

JULIA VITALE: I could not be more biased, but: Air Mail’s. Our Saturday issue, which offers the perfect weekend morning read, but also: Week in Culture and Book Report, our culture and books newsletters, which come at a time when neither area is covered nearly well enough; LOOK, our beauty-and-wellness newsletter, edited by the ever intrepid Allure founder Linda Wells; Dress Code, our newly launched fashion-and-style newsletter, edited by Rickie De Sole and geared for people with great taste; and AIR SUPPLY, our irresistible shopping newsletters, superbly curated by Jen Noyes.

Also: ’s trusty , ’s Borowitz Report (his takes on world news are true comedic gold), and ’s Breaker (when I’m not in it).

EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?

JULIA VITALE: The benefits of staying offline and out of the discourse cannot be understated.

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

JULIA VITALE: Don’t do it!!

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

JULIA VITALE: Yes—I highly suggest having a small child.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

JULIA VITALE: That no one—not even my 90-plus-year-old grandpa—is immune to the lures of the algorithm. Instagram actually taught me the term for old Italian men who stand in front of construction sites all day—umarell. Well, now my grandpa does that through his phone.

EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?

JULIA VITALE: The old-school way—word of mouth, pitches in my inbox, and reviews.

EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?

JULIA VITALE: I literally have 500 followers on Instagram. I am a strong proponent of limiting your Instagram following to people you actually know—so that’s an impossibility for me.

EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?

JULIA VITALE: See above—no one follows me!

EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?

JULIA VITALE: On Instagram: Camille Charriere, Air Mail’s newest columnist, and Leandra Medine Cohen. They cover fashion in such a refreshing and un-buttoned-up way. Tatiana Hambro Arader, for pure visual bliss. And, not a person, but: Italy Segreta. The definition of Italian charm, and great for day-dreaming when your reality is sitting in an office in New York City all day.

On TikTok: Paige Lorenze. Love her or hate her, she won the tennis WAGs war, got a reverse boob job, is about to get married, and looks impeccable despite being a self-avowed Kraft Mac ‘n’ cheese fanatic … need I say more?

@paigelorenzeYA

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EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?

JULIA VITALE: Lisa Taddeo.

EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?

JULIA VITALE: I hate receiving voice notes and have never sent a single one. I’m always in the street trying to listen amidst sirens and my kid screaming and inevitably miss three quarters of what the person is saying. Plus, I like to have things in writing. Stay tuned for Air Mail’s forthcoming story on the subject.

EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? What’s a show that you’re really into right now?

JULIA VITALE: Rivals, Season 2. Jilly Cooper forever.

EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?

JULIA VITALE: Yuka. It tells you how “clean” products actually are, from food to beauty. It kind of becomes a torture, because once you use it you can’t stop, but it’s a good kind of torture.

EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?

JULIA VITALE: Probably Paige Lorenze on TikTok.

EMBEDDED: Is there a site you like for product recommendations? How do you decide, for example, which air filter to buy?

JULIA VITALE: I thankfully have a man who lives for this stuff. Truly the bane of my existence. Why would I want to look up air filters when I could spend my time reading, editing great stories, and running after my kid?

Thanks Julia! Subscribe to Air Mail.

More My Internet Sam Kriss ∙ Scaachi Koul ∙ Sam Adler-Bell ∙ Kat Rosenfield ∙ Chrissy Correa ∙ Yi-Ling Liu ∙ Kaitlin Phillips ∙ Emma Specter ∙ Liz Franczak ∙ Anthony Fantano ∙ Alison Roman ∙ All

There was some good micro-discourse on Substack this week (none of those words appear in the Bible btw) about our media “sliding doors” moments, the job we did or didn’t take that altered the trajectory of our careers. Of course, the close calls are the ones most fun to read about. I never interviewed anywhere particularly salacious (although this one was probably the weirdest), but what happened with Rolling Stone is probably my version of this trend (if you want to see the email I sent after that happened, scroll to the bottom). If that had panned out, however, I never would have had a Refinery29 colleague refer me to her husband who was hiring for an internet culture publication a year later—the husband, spoiler alert, was Nick.

I do genuinely feel that everything happened the way it was supposed to happen (although I’ll admit I’d make some tweaks), which means I can now look fondly at a screenshot like this:

— Kate

Why I Assigned a Profile of Clavicular (and Stand By It)

By Nick Catucci

“Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds—which is most of them, most of the time—can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and then make it real by covering it.”

That’s me. I’m the editor who gets his ideas from social-media feeds. In fact, I assigned a profile of Clavicular, one of the very internet celebrities that Lane Brown—who wrote the (admittedly somewhat devastating) call out above in his great New York magazine piece on clipping, The Feed Is Fake, last week—uses as a key example of this paid simulation. I also published a profile of Cameron Winter’s band Geese, the other key example. (As I mentioned in last week’s media_gossip, I’m leaving GQ at the end of May.)

Why did I do this? Was it because I was taken in by clips of Clavicular’s livestreams created by workers who were paid $1 or $2 (or $30) for every 1,000 views they were able to gin up on TikTok and other platforms?

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Ok. —Kate

New on ICYMI: Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick dropped by to confirm the vibe shift you may have started noticing online: Yes, the right wing media ecosystem is starting to crumble.

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Ever since I got my new phone, I’ve been having to whack-a-mole a slew of new AI features that came pre-loaded into my device, U2 album-style. I’ve turned off Siri (rip) and opted out of “prioritizing” my email (PR pitches were being classified as urgent messages I needed to get back to), but no matter how thorough I think I’ve been, another feature pops up. If Apple is so insistent that I use AI to streamline my phone use, I thought, should I take a page out of Mel Robbins’ possibly-plagiarized book and “let them”?

I decided on an experiment: For a few days, I would not only tolerate but enthusiastically embrace one of these new features. As I’ve written before, I am terrible at responding to texts. First I feel overwhelmed by messages and then guilty for not responding right away, which means it often takes days for me to get back to people who’ve asked me simple questions. If I embraced Apple’s AI suggested replies feature, however, there was a possibility I’d defeat this bad habit. After all, I’m hearing so much about how incredible and sophisticated AI technology has become. Maybe this wouldn’t be like before. Maybe this would be the beginning of a whole new me.

In many ways, it was. Except this new me wasn’t affable and communicative. She was vague, confused, and sometimes downright rude.

“Power walking there now,” my friend texted me on her way to the movies. “Thought I could use the bus but no there’s some bike race. Need the wind to help blow me there.”

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My favorite part of working at any media company is the inevitable Slack channel dedicated to industry news and gossip. For years I’ve said that if I wasn’t writing Embedded, my newsletter would basically be that: a shamelessly navel-gaze-y report detailing whatever media workers are talking about, my thoughts on it all, and a cheeky blind item or two thrown in for good measure. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I realized the two newsletters were not mutually exclusive. Embedded routinely publishes media criticism that gets just as much, and sometimes more, engagement as our internet culture coverage. And so, here’s media_gossip, modeled after my favorite Slack channels, sent directly to your inbox every Friday.

Paid subscribers get full access (it is gossip, after all), but those who are decidedly not interested in what a bunch of journalists think about each other (my husband) can go ahead and click here to toggle this sub-newsletter off while still staying subscribed to Embedded itself. I won’t be offended. Media_gossip is for the real sickos only. —Kate

It wouldn’t be a media newsletter launch without a little scoop, and here’s one from me, Nick. I am leaving GQ, where I have been the site director for a little over three years, at the end of the month. Making a men’s magazine in the shadow of the manosphere—and at the dawn of a less timid and self-important era in media—has honestly been the most fun I’ve had in my career. I love my friends at GQ and wish them the best!

If you want to hear any more about that, you’ll have to reply to this email and ask. But I can share one non-GQ thing from this week that I had a small hand in: The launch of Living for the City, a show about music hosted by the great Hanif Abdurraqib (watch or listen). —Nick

I Hate Myself Because I Didn’t Work At Gawker

(For those unfamiliar)

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This bonus free post is brought to you by ! —Kate

New on ICYMI: The rise of “blue dot fever,” and why nobody wants to go to concerts anymore.

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I have made my problems with dine-in movie theaters known, but have always held a begrudging respect for Alamo Drafthouse because of their aggressive no-phones, no-talking policy. Those are two things that should go without saying in a movie theater, but Alamo had not one, but two loud, flashing warnings ahead of the feature presentation that said them anyway. You’ll notice that sentence is in the past tense.

For those who haven’t been, Alamo used to work entirely analog, with guests writing their orders on cards the servers then surreptitiously took while the movie was playing. About ten minutes later, chicken fingers would be delivered. There is literally only one way to make getting chicken fingers delivered to your seat in a movie theater bad, and Alamo drafthouse just did it.

Gone are the pencils, papers, and even the physical menus. Now, everything is done on your phone—not just before the movie starts, but during it, too. You can even do it while the PSA that says you’ll get kicked out if you’re caught using your phone is playing, because they’ve updated it to have a little caveat: unless you’re using your phone to order.

Obviously this is insane. The dam has broken. Allowing people to have their phones out at all means the phones can come out any time. The only way to know if someone is using their phone for “the right reasons” is to monitor them. But I didn’t come to Alamo Drafthouse to watch someone else’s phone. I came to watch a movie. But I don’t even know what happened in Hokum, because a family with all their phones out (including the phone flashlight, at one point) had me agitated the entire time. Yes, we asked them to stop, and yes, we hit the “help” button on our phones (for fuck’s sake) to alert a manager when they didn’t. We got an error: no managers available.

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Who Broke It explains why. The twice-weekly newsletter from dives into the sometimes dark corners of the internet where these political conversations are happening, and delivers the trends to watch and personalities to look out for directly to your inbox—a Godsend for someone like me who wants to stay informed but very much still has the word “Trump” blocked on almost every platform. From the side of TikTok prepping for nuclear fallout to an analysis of if Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point digital empire is really as successful as it seems, Weinstein covers our dystopian political reality with measured skepticism and necessary humor.

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This was just one particularly bad experience, but it’s endemic of a larger attitude shift. As my friend Rachel pointed out during the many, many texts we exchanged about it after, what’s maddening is that, to some people, this is no longer maddening.

“if people want to pull their phones out just to check em who the hell are you to stop them,” goes one reply to a Reddit post about phones in movie theaters.

“I have ADHD” began another defense I couldn’t bring myself to finish.

“As long as someone is not answering a phone call during class, then it really is not that imposing,” reads a reply to a Reddit post lamenting phone usage in yoga class. “Shift your mindset and focus on your breathing instead of worrying about your neighbor! Your practice is in your control :)”

There’s no amount of yoga and mindset-shifting that’ll stop me from wanting to smash that smug smiley-face with a hammer. What happened to our social contract? Now, it’s on us—the sane people—to stay home or adapt if we dislike people using their phones inappropriately in public. I understand that some have emergencies or accessibility issues for which a phone is necessary, but not all of you can, and you can’t keep citing those things when you, personally, just want to scroll Instagram because otherwise you know it’s stupid to say “well I just want to scroll Instagram.” I can only imagine what you’re asking ChatGPT for help with.

I should have known things were headed this way when, in another memo I never got, it was announced that headphones were no longer required when listening to things in public (by the way, I know I’m on the right side of history when Adrian Chiles is ranting about the same issue).

There have been attempts to curb this decline, like signs reminding people to silence their smartphones and events prohibiting them. But I don’t want the only thing standing between a person and their rudeness to be a venue-mandated plastic pouch. In the words of Jennifer Aniston in The Break Up, I want you to want to do the dishes. I want the default way we exist in public to be one in which we don’t need to be reminded that other people are also having an experience. We already know and respect it.

Instead, nothing matters outside the world we’ve created between ourselves and the device in our hands. We might even be vaguely cognizant of the fact that our behavior is disruptive, but to who? If our most important relationship is with our phones, then everyone else is essentially an NPC. And if playing computer games as a kid taught me anything, it’s that NPCs are for running into over and over again to see how much you can annoy them. Now, as a grown-up, and apparent NPC myself, I know the answer—it’s a lot. You can annoy me a lot.

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Every other week (or so) we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome , the author of a cutting, widely discussed recent Harper’s article about the 21-year-old founder of the startup Cluely and his obsession with “high-agency” behavior. Sam has also written for Jacobin, Unherd, and The New York Times and publishes the newsletter Numb at the Lodge. Sam wants more deranged right-wing censorship of TikTok and says Substack hosts a lot of nerds convincing themselves they’re the cool kids’ table. —Nick

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EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

SAM KRISS: I think there’s only one meme that has ever made me actually, genuinely laugh. All the other ones I’ve seen either elicit a weak heh or I just sort of scroll past them having registered their contours in the same way you might vaguely notice the leaves on the pavement. Future generations, if there are any, will think we were pathetic for having pretended to find this shit funny. Anyway the only exception is this one, which had me in a genuinely alarming state, red-cheeked, tears streaming down my face, making unattractive gasping noises. I don’t know why.

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

SAM KRISS: About three years ago my girlfriend came up with an idea for a project, which was to cook a meal from every country in the world, from north to south, vaguely following Wikipedia’s list of countries by northernmost point. Three years later and we’ve just got to Myanmar. I use Instagram almost exclusively for posting poorly composed and badly lit pictures of food from around the world. In the description I will paste an enormous and basically unreadable paragraph in which I ramble on about the various dishes, why I chose them, whether they taste good, how tricky they were to make, how they fit into the vague and offensive national stereotypes I have about the countries in question, etc. I have no idea who’s looking at this. Instagram used to show me pictures of my friends going to parties and so on, and now it pretty much exclusively shows me videos of total strangers in the Third World falling into unsanitary-looking pits of filth. Whatever systems govern the feed still keep a very close eye on my interpersonal relationships, because whenever anyone I know is dating someone new they’re all over my feed, right up until the moment I actually meet them in real life, at which point they’re instantly replaced by loads more videos of Bihari military recruits rubbing each other down with cow slurry. To be honest I think this is a good thing. When I was much younger the normal thing was to take loads of blurry overexposed club photos every time you went out, and usually in the middle of the next day’s comedown someone would be badgering you to put the photos up, with up meaning online: everyone needed to have a constantly updated public record of their social lives, and sometimes you got the sense that we were mostly socialising for the purpose of feeding the archive. For a moment we were all pretending to live like celebrities, curating our public image, and it was deranged; it drove millions of people insane. Now there’s absolutely no chance anyone who matters to you will see any of the stuff you post on Instagram, which means we’re free. Social life is social again, it happens entirely in the space and time in which it actually happens. I don’t know why I still feel the need to show strangers my mole poblano on Instagram. To be fair it did take ages to make.

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

SAM KRISS: Mostly it’s old British comedy shows someone uploaded in 320p a decade and a half ago. That’s about it. I used to watch a lot of entertaining conspiracy theory videos on there but YouTube seems to have clamped down on those, and everything else made specifically for the platform is hideous. I genuinely can’t imagine wanting to sit down and actually watch YouTube. I can barely even comprehend what that would involve. Three hour video essays about how children’s cartoons are insufficiently leftist? Those game shows where a bunch of braying children’s-entertainer types blindfold people and make them say racial slurs? Mr Beast?

The only made-for-YouTube stuff I ever briefly watched was a guy who would phone up scammers pretending to be someone very old and very gullible and string them along. Usually by the end the scammer would be reduced to a screaming heap of mental jelly; it was brief sadistic fun. Nice to see cynical people get some kind of comeuppance. But there was one video where he pretended to be a crusty Wicca psychic type and used a few very basic cold reading techniques to convince the scammers that he was legit. All his prophecies were about the fact that these guys were scamming people, but they barely even noticed; they kept crowding him with questions about their families and their children’s health and happiness, and suddenly it became very hard to ignore that these people all lived in dirt-poor towns in Uttar Pradesh, with lives that involved a level of desperation very few people in the West will ever experience, and while those of us on the receiving end of their cackhanded attempts to steal money might find it infuriating, they have a very different set of concerns once they put down the phone, and frankly if they do manage to con a few swollen golfing Americans out of their pensions then maybe that’s some small measure of cosmic justice. I couldn’t really stomach the scambaiters after that. Some cooking videos are ok.

EMBEDDED: Are you concerned by the claims of censorship that some users have made since TikTok was taken over by investors led by Larry Ellison, an ally of President Trump?

SAM KRISS: Absolutely not. I want more deranged right-wing censorship of TikTok. I don’t ever look at it myself but I have noticed that absolutely everyone who gets any of their political opinions from that app is actively deranged, huge chunks of their brain have simply rotted away and the space left has filled with a kind of black pus of incomprehension and mental illness. One of the things people are worried about is that TikTok is now censoring information about the genocide in Gaza. I’ve been involved in Palestine solidarity for nearly two decades now, and the movement has never been dumber or worse since it was revitalised by large numbers of people who get all their information from TikTok. These people know literally nothing. The think the fact that some Israelis get skin cancer is a devastating argument against Zionism. All their opinions were downloaded from a video that begins “um so ok.” I want every view I agree with to be ruthlessly purged from TikTok. Much better to have many fewer people on your side, as long as they all have functioning brains.

EMBEDDED: Do you watch Twitch, Kick, or any other livestreaming services? If so, which streamers?

SAM KRISS: I had to watch some of the more popular streamers for a piece I wrote. Some utterly tedious gamer with pink hair, a kind of manic imbecile who kept complaining that he wanted ice cream, a few grating political bores; I hated it. I could only stomach this stuff in 20-second increments. I have no idea how people manage to digest it for hours at a time. I would rather take a pair of pliers to my own fingernails than sit through another minute of it again.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

SAM KRISS: I don’t know. I seem to have a generally pretty good awareness of what’s going on; I can tell you about recent ethnic conflict between Bedouin and Druze in Suwayda Governorate, I’m broadly cognisant of the ideological bent of the new Japanese government, but I have absolutely no idea where any of this information comes from. I barely read news sites. I’ll look at the Guardian front page in the morning, flick through the headlines without really reading anything, sometimes I’ll skim something interesting in the Financial Times, but I don’t really read the news in a way that has any explanatory power. The only possible conclusion is that I must get my news through a powerful form of intuition mysterious even to myself. I see a flock of pigeons rise on the street in London and something in the pattern of their flight allows me to unconsciously peer through the chaotic chain of causes until, without me being aware of it, my background knowledge about the world now includes recent trends in South Korean shipbuilding. I don’t know what would happen if I started actually following the news but it’s probably best for everyone that I don’t.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM KRISS: I follow like three accounts on Instagram that obsessively seek out Twitter discourse and then screenshot it all. Good for keeping it all at arm’s length, and you only really need to check in every week or so. Most of the stuff is very low-resolution. You can see one or two posts on a topic and pretty much work out the exact contours of the whole dumb discourse from there. I’d ignore it entirely but every so often some idiot comes up with a position so beautiful and strange that I’m genuinely lost in admiration, and this is the stuff I feed on.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?

SAM KRISS: After this whole Lindy West thing I’m very close to looping round again and becoming pro-polyamory on purely contrarian grounds.

EMBEDDED: What’s a popular misconception that you see repeated online?

SAM KRISS: Literally everything people say online is wrong. People on the internet think the problem with data centres is that they use too much water. People on the internet think medieval peasants lived lives of leisure and ease. People on the internet have beliefs about food and the proper way to prepare it that are so insane that every time I see them I start circling my jaw like a psychotic slasher. People on the internet will say things like “it’s my birthday.” No it’s not. That’s actually a popular misconception. You haven’t even been born.

EMBEDDED: How would you describe the culture of Substack, in terms of the types of writing and thinking that it has encouraged?

SAM KRISS: Unbearably chummy. There are a lot of people on Substack who seem very infatuated with the platform and all the wonderful new forms of writing it’s producing, and then you read the stuff and it’s cack. The most popular form of Substack writing is the wistful musing on nothing in particular, in which the writer thinks about various topics without ever actually thinking anything in particular. The other is the people who capitalise the b in “beauty.” The site hosts a lot of nerds convincing themselves they’re the cool kids’ table. There are of course plenty of very interesting writers who use Substack too, but one thing all the best of them have in common is that they do things that are entirely and completely theirs, and which would be the same in basically any venue. Anything that feels Substacky, like it’s a Substack essay specifically before it’s the expression of any particular writer, is always terrible. There are too many writers. At any given time there should be a maximum of 50 working writers, and all of them should hate each other.

EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?

SAM KRISS: If you really want to know I wrote about this at excruciating length.

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

SAM KRISS: …Don’t?

EMBEDDED: Have you found Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tools useful? How so?

SAM KRISS: I’ve found exactly one use for generative AI, aside from the usual Google-substitute work everyone secretly gets it to do now that Google is basically unusable. If I’m stuck on an essay, I’ll explain the topic matter and ask it to generate a Sam Kriss piece on the subject. I can then read the output, see what the most rote and boring and obvious approach would be, and do something else.

EMBEDDED: Do you believe that advances in AI will spawn a new “underclass,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested might happen? Or do you believe that the AI bubble about to burst?

SAM KRISS: I did think AI was a bubble initially, and in the slightly longer term I think it still might be. A lot of the bubble believers seem to have this idea that once the bubble pops and all the overvalued AI firms start to deflate, that AI itself will simply go away. This is not going to happen. What will happen is that advances in AI really will create a new underclass. All the people who let AI do their thinking for them are going to die. They’re going to die in the same way that an ant whose brain gets colonised by a parasitic fungus dies. The AI will sprout weird new structures out of their corpses and the world will be inherited by those people who had zero exposure to this stuff, who will mostly be ultra-orthodox Jews and nomadic cattle herders.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

SAM KRISS: Jonathan Haidt is about 30% of the way to me.

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

SAM KRISS: Literally just don’t have one. I gave up my smartphone for 40 days and it really is completely doable. Draw maps on little pieces of paper. Arrange to meet people at a particular time and place and just turn up. If you don’t like looking at it all the time, it is completely possible to get rid of it.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

SAM KRISS: Everyone online is a boomer. There are only boomers on the internet. You think I’m wrong. In four years, have another look at everything you’re posting right now. You’ll see. You were a boomer all along.

EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?

SAM KRISS: Is Lorde cool? Lorde follows me on Instagram. Is Nick Mullen cool? I don’t know. I’m old. I do have some truly crazy names on my Substack email list though. Cool probably isn’t the right word for those. It’s deeply alarming that these people are reading my nonsense.

EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?

SAM KRISS: So there were a bunch of questions in the middle of this questionnaire that I thought I may as well answer together. This one, one about what my go-to emoji is, one about the names of my group chats, one about which subscription streaming service I’d keep if I could only keep one, that sort of thing. Every so often in life you encounter something that reminds you that this world is very big, and contains many different types of people, going around in a social reality that’s physically isomorphic with your own but totally different in every other respect, and right now you’re cheek by jowl with people living lives you can barely even imagine. This was one of those encounters. I suppose everyone thinks the way they live is best, and all the other approaches aren’t as good; if they couldn’t think this I suppose they’d have to start living differently. In this I’m not really different to anyone else. But I do think that as a writer it’s my job to not fall into this kind of easy prejudice. One of my maxims is from Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I try to live by it. Still, receiving these questions is a bit like being asked by a Bushman of the Kalahari what my favourite spear is for hunting springbok, or what kind of grubs I like to eat, or what dances I perform to the medicine-songs. All I can say is that I belong to a different tribe and live differently. I don’t have a go-to emoji. I’m not in any group chats with funny names, I don’t pay for any streaming services, and I definitely can’t think of any big celebrities whose internet presences I particularly appreciate. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. Actually I guess there’s Azealia Banks. Ignore everything I just said.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

SAM KRISS: I think the problem I face with this interview is that it’s basically about the things I like on the internet, and I fundamentally don’t much like the internet. I seem to spend more time on here than I want to so obviously there’s some appeal but whatever it is that’s keeping me screenbound does not involve the parts of the psyche that deal with things like pleasure or joy or emotional attachment, or frankly any part of the conscious rational mind. I think there were previous incarnations of the internet that were a lot more loveable. When the internet was made of websites, a sea of weird personal projects that you could just launch yourself into, bobbing with the flotsam of the world. The internet of Time Cube. Probably the last thing online that really brought me joy was a website in which someone claimed to have discovered the secret name of Rome. As you probably know, the city of Rome had two names: a public name and a secret name. The city’s secret name was also the name of its tutelary deity, but knowing the true name of anything gives you power over that thing, which is why the name was a closely guarded state secret; in the first century BC a tribune called Valerius Soranus was executed for revealing the secret name. Whatever it was, the name is lost now. There’s a deeply annoying tradition in which it’s Amor, which is Roma backwards, and the guardian deity is Venus. But I found someone who thought he’d worked it out, and made a website about it. His reasoning involved dozens of bizarre nuggets of Etruscan history and all of it was impeccable. I’m not going to tell you what the secret name was, or how he got there. That site’s been gone for years. The important thing is that this person only moonlighted as an investigative classicist; the main purpose of his website was for his main gig selling Hawaii real estate. Its tagline was “To boldly sell what has been sold before.” That was a very long time ago. I’m not sure there’s any stuff like that any more. Everyone’s packed into a few hellish gigaplatforms, where they spend all their time screaming like maniacs for attention. Everything’s arranged around constantly updating feeds. Nothing can simply exist. It sucks. The internet sucks. It’s a low-quality product.

Thanks Sam! Subscribe to his newsletter.

More My Internet Scaachi Koul ∙ Sam Adler-Bell ∙ Kat Rosenfield ∙ Chrissy Correa ∙ Yi-Ling Liu ∙ Kaitlin Phillips ∙ Emma Specter ∙ Liz Franczak ∙ Anthony Fantano ∙ Alison Roman ∙ All

New on ICYMI: I chatted about this very topic with for ICYMI. It was such a fun, increasingly unhinged convo:

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My college was home to just 1,600 students. By the time senior year rolled around, I realized I knew something about the sexual history of every single person who walked through the door of the one bar on campus. What came to mind then is a phrase that’s often employed on the internet now: “We should know less about each other.”

Four years on a one-mile long campus will convince you of that. So will graduating directly into the personal essay boom, as I then did. I was able to start in journalism because I had become okay with my life being on display. But, being 23, I quickly ran out of personal stories worth sharing. Meanwhile, the public’s desire to read about other people’s experiences faded—not because we stopped being interested in them, but because social media had become basically one big Thought Catalog. There was no need to keep commissioning people’s deepest darkest secrets, because they were offering them up for free on Instagram and TikTok. 

This oversharing was rewarded by likes and engagement, and “Storytimes” became their own genre. Being “vulnerable” online and using your platform to “normalize” things by divulging personal information somehow turned “transparency” into something we unequivocally owe one another—despite the damage this can cause in reality. And that’s how we end up with things like this breakup text that went viral last week:

Amidst of this glut of intimate information, the personal essay boom has recently rallied, thanks to outlets like The Cut and ’s Hate Read. Some stories, like handing $50,000 in a shoe box to a stranger, require more than just a 30-second video to explain. And some opinions, like this one on the dire state of media parties, could only be made public with the promise of anonymity. Twitter, in turn, has felt like its old self again. Which makes me wonder whether its decline may have had as much to do with a dearth of fun things to talk about as it did Elon Musk. 

But is this fun? While I certainly spent the media party Hate Read day glued to Twitter for the first time in years and have read all 620 of the Blogsnark comments on the the throuple baby story, what starts exhilarating too often ends in exhaustion as the discourse stops being playful and turns inexplicably…angry.

“There is a lot of talk of people wanting the frivolity of the ‘blog era’ back that always fails to investigate the core reason why that can't happen,” Slate writer Luke Winkie tweeted. “Because you, me, and everyone you know have grown pickled, cranky, and exhaustingly Serious, well past the point of no return.”

We don’t allow ourselves to just be “annoyed” by things anymore. This fact, which has plagued the discourse for a while now, became plain with this spring’s return of the Twitter monoculture. It’s now painfully obvious that we need to legitimize and validate our feelings of disgust or even just dislike by pretending our petty annoyances are involuntary and incontestable expressions of moral outrage. It’s not, “I don’t like the Brooklyn throuple because their living situation (and baby name) is needlessly complicated,” it’s, “I don’t like the Brooklyn throuple because I think they’re bad parents” (It should be noted that the backlash to that piece is tangled up with transphobia). Here’s what one user wrote on Blogsnark:

I’m going to say it - I think a lot of you all are confusing being annoying with being bad people. They aren’t inviting you to dinner and you don’t have to be their friends. They are FAR from the only folks in the world who have had a kid when they were broke…Some weird arty people have a weird arty baby and it doesn’t seem like anyone is being harmed. Gawking is fun, I think they enjoy having people gawk, but some of the doomsaying is over the top yall.

This pattern repeats itself over and over: The Cut essay from a woman who married a rich older man went from “entertainingly out of touch” to “normalizing right-wing gender roles.” Emily Gould’s divorce retrospective had people armchair diagnosing her mental health. Readers suggested the author of the shoebox scammer essay be fired. Fired? So that if in a few years she loses her social security card after accidentally putting it into a vending machine, we wouldn’t get to read about it? Are you crazy?

We not only don’t deserve the personal essay boom, we are quickly smothering it. Instead of getting on our hands and knees to thank the writers for giving us something fun to talk about online again, we’re digging up their parents, their financial records, and whatever other information we can to make them feel unsafe and aggressively discourage whoever might write the next viral hit.

This is supposed to be fun, and you’re so outraged that you’re attacking real people for their little essays. If you behaved like this at a party in real life, you wouldn’t be invited to the next one. But as we now know, the party probably wasn’t that fun anyway.

The clash of the discourse titans… —Kate

New on ICYMI: CNN uncovered a telegram chat of nearly 1000 users they describe as a global “rape academy.” The internet saw something else.

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Everybody’s been talking about Lena Dunham, Lindy West, and forever war in the Middle East. The Twitter jokes are all true: It’s 2016 again. Nostalgia culture is just culture now, period—have we all got our tickets for The Devil Wears Prada 2?—and now, apparently, extremely online millennial media figures are also grist for the mill. Lena and Lindy both, of course, have new memoirs looking back on the past ten years and how they’ve weathered their own particular storms of public scrutiny and cruelty. But the receptions to the two could not be more different.

Dunham, who had so much to apologize for, has achieved through Famesick what many in 2016 would have declared impossible: redemption. Lindy West was only ever outspoken and honest in ways that made the worst parts of the internet uncomfortable, and yet her own memoir, Adult Braces, has landed her in a far more precarious place.

I’m not writing this from an emotional remove. I am satisfied with the explanations and apologies Dunham provides for her past behavior and empathetic to her story. And say what you will, but goddamn it, this woman can write.

It’s not important to me that anyone else forgives Lena Dunham, and I say all of this knowing that I’m the exact type of person (white, brunette, tattooed with a Hillary Clinton quote from an earlier time…) who is most likely to do so. But I also read Adult Braces— written by someone whose work I also voraciously consumed in the 2010s and who has never once defended a rapist or made bizarre sexual comments about a Black man completely unprovoked—and left it feeling like I might need to revise my feelings about her legacy. Why?

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Sent from my laptop! —Kate

New on ICYMI: Got the Coachella influencer scene report from !

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There’s a kind of post that goes around every year or so about the people who insist on using a laptop to make major purchases or complete important tasks. As a millennial, there are just some things—like buying plane tickets or doing taxes—I cannot, for reasons I’m hard pressed to explain, imagine doing on my phone. While I’m not as cursed as my husband, who watches YouTube Shorts on desktop, I do pretty much everything but my scrolling on the big(ger) screen.

My phone is my Go-Gurt, saved for when I’m out and about or need to fire something off quickly. Otherwise, I work on my laptop, write on my laptop, watch YouTube on my laptop and even, to the horror of everyone who hears about it, sometimes prop my laptop up near the tub to watch HBO while taking a bubble bath. But no one was more horrified than me to come across this recent TikTok about tax season.

@libby_laushe never fails me 🤩🤩 #taxday #taxes #taxseason #taxreturns

Tiktok failed to load.

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“My personal computer when I revive it once a year to do my taxes,” read the caption on the video, which shows the user booting up their machine for the first time in presumably 365 days.

I expected to open the comments to a spirited debate about whether or not this behavior resonated with viewers, but turns out that I was the odd one out. “Not one original experience,” a commenter wrote.

“Lmao same,” reads another. “Haven’t used my laptop since I graduated school 5 years ago.”

And: “I literally spend every feb-hopefully april lookin for it.” LOOKING FOR IT? Where in your home did you lose it?

The fact that only one person was in the comments disagreeing with this was approximately a thousand people too few for me, so I went investigating—only to find a similar video from 2024.

@jessy.the.messyim still a writer i promise i just have the worlds longest streak of writers block rn #college #writer #laptop #macbook #fyp #foryou

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“Me once a month when I actually open and use my laptop since I’ve graduated college and have minimal use for it now,” reads the caption. And again, the commenters agreed.

“Omg I’m so glad I’m not the only one,” one wrote. “My MacBook is from like 2018 I have only used it to job hunt since.”

“I bought a MacBook Pro with a touchbar during lockdown and it’s sitting in my closet unused for the last year lmao.” At least they know where it is.

Gen Z has seemingly relegated the laptop to school and work. For a specific subset of them, I can absolutely see why:

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Every other week we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome Scaachi Koul, a senior writer at Slate, where she recently profiled Lindy West; co-host of the podcast Scamfluencers; and author of One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter and Sucker Punch. She also writes the newsletter . Scaachi believes there’s nothing greater than the comment section on TikTok and tries to avoid internet discourse, especially if she’s involved in it. —Nick

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EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

SCAACHI KOUL: There’s this horrible, horrible man named Nathan Hare—he’s a comedian who makes these wretched videos pretending (I hope???) to be the worst guy you have ever met. His videos always make me laugh and then, immediately, vomit. I’m nauseated just thinking about them.

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

SCAACHI KOUL: Ego management.

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

SCAACHI KOUL: Old Intervention episodes, stand-up clips, late-night talk show appearances, compilations from The Graham Norton Show, news broadcasts, white influencers eating Indian food for the first time which my father will not stop watching and then sending to me.

EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?

SCAACHI KOUL: Nothing greater than the comment section on TikTok. I can’t believe how funny people are in there, how jokes somehow carry from one comment section into another unrelated one, and it’s completely unreplicable on any other site. “Did the journal factory explode?” remains one of the funniest rejoinders I’ve ever seen on the internet.

The bad part of TikTok is, I think, coming in your next question.

EMBEDDED: Are you concerned by the claims of censorship that some users have made since TikTok was taken over by investors led by Larry Ellison, an ally of President Trump?

SCAACHI KOUL: Right, yes.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

SCAACHI KOUL: Reddit, The Shade Room, peering over the shoulders of people reading Apple News alerts on the subway.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SCAACHI KOUL: I try to avoid it, especially if I’m involved in it.

EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?

SCAACHI KOUL: Ask Polly, Bitches Gotta Eat, .

bitches gotta eat!

judge mathis recaps + milf-on-milf romance

By samantha irby

EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?

SCAACHI KOUL: Men are so weak that we have to make up words like “looksmaxxing” and “mogging” and “optimization” just to get you fucking losers to take care of yourselves.

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

SCAACHI KOUL: Get a grip.

EMBEDDED: Have you found Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tools useful? How so?

SCAACHI KOUL: I’ve never used any of these and somehow have managed to make grocery lists and book several trips and write my little articles just fine. You needed AI for that? How embarrassing for you.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

SCAACHI KOUL: Anything is bad for you if you make it your entire world. People who refuse to learn how to maneuver a smartphone are as incapable of moving through the world as people who are getting 18 hours of screentime a day.

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

SCAACHI KOUL: The more sex you have, the less you’re on your phone. I’m really not on my phone that much.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

SCAACHI KOUL: Boomers want to be heard, Gen Xers want to be seen, Millennials want to be acknowledged, and Zoomers want to be ignored entirely.

EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?

SCAACHI KOUL: No. Please do not google me to confirm.

EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?

SCAACHI KOUL: My niece. She’s 16, sprightly and funny and brutally self-aware and able to punch up with impressive and terrifying accuracy. She’s effortlessly cool and I am so afraid of her. Sometimes she likes my Instagram stories and it has the same chilling effect on me that an email from my boss saying “come see me” would have.

EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?

SCAACHI KOUL: I’m really delighted by Nikita Dumptruck; she’s smart and snappy and analyzes complex geopolitical issues in a way that I understand but isn’t condescending. She seems like a delightful bitch and I hope the internet doesn’t dull that edge.

EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?

SCAACHI KOUL: Mine! Scamfluencers! Every Monday!

EMBEDDED: How would you describe Tumblr’s legacy?

SCAACHI KOUL: ED inspiration and pictures of girls in skater skirts and flannel and wide-brim fedoras leaning against bright blue fixies.

EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?

SCAACHI KOUL: IRATE

EMBEDDED: Do any of your group chats have a name that you’re willing to share? What’s something that recently inspired debate in the chat?

SCAACHI KOUL: My cousins and I have a groupchat called Keeping Up With The Kashmiris. It’s mostly a clearing house for talking about how our parents are mentally ill.

EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?

SCAACHI KOUL: My friend made one of the emoji bending over and pulling his cheeks apart so you can see his butthole. What? What’s wrong?? Why are you leaving!!!!!!

EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?

SCAACHI KOUL: I love a voice note—so intimate! Voice notes are for long stories that can only be articulated by speaking, something you could only trust a close friend with, someone who would only ever be delighted by hearing you talk for five minutes straight. It’s all a part of a long-held transition of oral storytelling! My “friend” Isaac Fitzgerald sends voice notes all the time, which I usually enjoy, until he starts sending ones that are three or five seconds long and just say things like “yeah, I agree.” I cannot explain how annoying I find this. It is an abuse of the long-held tradition of oral storytelling.

EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?

SCAACHI KOUL: Transit. It tells me when the subway is coming.

EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?

SCAACHI KOUL: Isn’t it cute that the Save icon is still a floppy disc? My niece asked me what it was once so now I’m saving for my own burial plot, which I should need any second now.

EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?

SCAACHI KOUL: There are five episodes of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, one of my favorite shows, considered so offensive that they’ve been pulled from streaming. How bad could those episodes be? It’s not like they did blackface over and over again or anything.

EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?

SCAACHI KOUL: I like when stuff looks like other stuff so I bought a purse that looks like a brown paper bag on eBay. I think $30 is perfectly reasonable for it to look like I’m carrying around a wet ham sandwich everywhere. (Please don’t tell my mother I live like this.)

EMBEDDED: Is there a site you like for product recommendations? How do you decide, for example, which air filter to buy?

SCAACHI KOUL: Gee Thanks Just Bought It is the only place I seek consistent recommendations. Caroline Moss runs it, and she has immaculate taste which means I am always buying stuff I love. She is taking money out of my pocket every few weeks at this rate. She got me to buy one of those red-light face lasers, and worse, it really, really works. I hate her.

EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?

SCAACHI KOUL: I really loved ’s new memoir, Famesick. Dunham remains an excellent writer, and this book is a testament to taking your time, logging off, and shutting the fuck up for a second. It was such a clarifying lesson on listening to your body and your heart, and refusing to submit to your own commodification. I need the reminder, all the time.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

SCAACHI KOUL: What??

Thanks Scaachi! Read her writing, buy her books, listen to her podcast, subscribe to her newsletter, and follow her on Instagram.

More My Internet Sam Adler-Bell ∙ Kat Rosenfield ∙ Chrissy Correa ∙ Yi-Ling Liu ∙ Kaitlin Phillips ∙ Emma Specter ∙ Liz Franczak ∙ Anthony Fantano ∙ Alison Roman ∙ All

This is an anti-Alexa newsletter…—Kate

New on ICYMI: A wildly chaotic episode with Annie Rauwerda of DepthsOfWikipedia:

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I’ll be the first to say that I’ve taken my relationship with Siri for granted. Most of our interactions happen by accident, when I hold my iPhone’s side button down for too long and her pulsating orb appears. “Siri shut up I don’t need you,” I instinctively say. “Here are the results I found for ‘Siri shut up I don’t need you,’” she always replies. I guess that’s just our thing <3.

Siri is, by 2026 standards, a simple creature. She can put on music and transcribe and send texts, but she cannot, for instance, order from the Starbucks app (I know this because my mom tried to make her order from the Starbucks app—nevertheless, Siri #resisted).

Siri hasn’t changed much since she was originally forced into my iPhone, U2-album-style, all those years ago. Recently, as we’ve entrusted AI with everything from summarizing our emails to helping plan unprovoked missile attacks on other nations, I have become worried that Apple had given up on nurturing Siri, and that she’d soon join Clippy in user-assistance heaven, like when Paddington Bear accompanied the Queen to rejoin her husband. But after taking a closer look, I learned something much worse is happening: They’re going to massacre my girl.

Since 2024, Apple has been teasing a Siri 2.0 that’s fully revamped with AI, but the release date has been continuously pushed back. Now, these updates are expected to begin rolling out in May, according to TechCrunch. What exactly this means is not clear, but the information I can find isn’t good: “The goal is to transform the technology from a traditional voice assistant into a systemwide AI agent with deep integration across applications,” Bloomberg reports.

In other words, they seem to be turning her into a chatbot. Powered in part by Google Gemini, she’ll serve as a standalone app that can do it all—talk conversationally, provide more detailed responses, and, probably, do things like order Starbucks from the app.

To which I say: Leave Siri alone! The things that make her dated are also what make her feel safe. Siri can’t go rogue or hallucinate. She can’t spy on my data in any meaningful way (I don’t think). She can’t encourage me to kill myself. She can do, like, one in four things when I ask, and that’s how I like it.

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Did not realize today’s post would end up being a counterpoint of sorts, but that’s simply one of the delightful coincidences of being human!!! —Kate

New on ICYMI: joined us to talk Chappell Roan, but really, what’s behind the hate campaigns that tend to plague famous women.

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AI has always been a worker issue. Almost as soon as LLMs began rolling out to the public, data analysts and consulting firms and even the AI companies themselves started regularly publishing reports on what jobs AI might replace and when. Now, companies like Oracle are conducting layoffs so vast, they’re being done via automated emails in order to reach all of the estimated tens of thousands of employees being axed as the company increases spending in AI.

The risk of any given job being lost to AI depends on its exposure to it. How many of the role’s most important activities could be replaced with or are already assisted by AI? Most of these mass, headline-making layoffs have affected tech jobs. In 2023, around 32% of workers in “information and technology” believed AI would help them more than hurt them; 11% felt the opposite. It seems safe to assume, then, that a good number of these employees began incorporating (or were forced to incorporate) AI tools into their workflow—and perhaps unintentionally demonstrated that they, the human, were the most expensive and least effective part of the equation.

I worry the tech industry’s largely unopposed embrace of AI tools is playing a role in expediting its human workers’ obsolescence. I also worry the same thing is about to happen in journalism.

After tech, media jobs like advertising, content creation, technical writing, and journalism tend to be next on those lists of roles most threatened by AI. For a while, journalists seemed largely united in their opposition to using generative AI. But last month, the dam started to break.1 The Wall Street Journal profiled Fortune editor Nick Lichtenberg, who is “all in” on AI, using it to help write seven stories a day (my thoughts on that can be found here). New York Times book reviewer Alex Preston was let go after using an AI tool, which ended up pulling verbatim from a Guardian review of the same novel he was writing about. The book Shy Girl by Mia Ballard was pulled from publication after widespread claims that Ballard used AI to write the book without disclosing it.

The threat of AI to media is obvious, but the industry’s stance on it seems to be rapidly diverging. Use it at Fortune and you’ll be profiled in the WSJ; try it at the New York Times and you’ll be fired. In one case you proudly disclose it. In the other, you attempt to get away with it. We haven’t as an industry decided where we draw the line, because, as it’s becoming clear, we aren’t even all talking about the same thing.

AI—artificial intelligence—is a broad category. It simply means any computational system that can simulate human intelligence, quickly parsing large swaths of information or recognizing patterns. It was not invented in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. That, along with Claude and Grok and Sora (RIP) and the like, is generative AI. Generative AI is a subcategory of AI that is trained on pre-existing data to generate entirely new text, images, video, and software code. But since generative AI was the first time we, as regular people, had an everyday reason to use the term “AI” at all, the two seem to have been conflated.

Personally, I see AI as a tool for rabid capitalism and a threat to workers and therefore I feel my opposition to it falls squarely within my leftist values. But unless we’re clear on what that specific threat is, we’re not going to be able to advocate against it without coming off ill-informed.

In reality, journalists have been using AI for at least the past ten years, mainly through transcription services. We just never called them by their name. But now some people’s knee-jerk distaste for AI means journalists and websites using tools that have been staples of the industry for over a decade are being retroactively branded as traitors—for instance, some people were disgruntled by the fact that the transcript for our viral ICYMI ep was automatically generated by AI, something that is and has been true for almost every podcast you’ve listened to for years. It’s creating division during a time when we most need to be organized.

We need to decide where we draw the line with AI use, so here’s mine: I use automated transcription services for every interview, and while I won’t use an LLM for research or to automate any of my administrative tasks or do whatever “vibe coding” is, I do not care if anyone else does. While this may go against someone’s personal values, I do not see this to be in contradiction with the values of journalism.

Generative AI, however, goes against the very tenets of journalism. Generative AI is trained on the work of other people. I think using generative AI for your writing is plagiarism.

Generative AI also erodes worker solidarity. LLMs like AI agents are the new hires companies pay less money to do more work. I think the journalists using generative AI to eventually replace themselves and the rest of us are scabs!

There’s likely a contingent of people who take a “them’s the breaks” attitude to this sort of thing. And it’s true: transcription services and built-in spell-checkers have already made certain roles in journalism precarious or obsolete. But a wholehearted embrace of generative AI for our writing risks eliminating all of the roles, and I invite anyone who thinks it’s unrealistic to codify job security to go and try to fire a tenured teacher in the New York City public school system.

Journalism is a public utility, one our current moment needs desperately as the media outlets that don’t end up shuttering are instead consolidated under the ownership of one of three companies with political agendas and who now control the flow of information—agendas that the AI companies behind these generative AI tools gunning to replace us appear to agree with. The new AI overlords may be coming, but I, for one, will not welcome them.

This bonus free post is brought to you thanks to a sponsorship from Squarespace. Thank you Squarespace!!! — Kate

New on ICYMI: Rebecca Jennings spent the past few months profiling Taylor Frankie Paul. Then it all went wrong.

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The first year I moved to New York, I went to see Lindy West read from her debut memoir Shrill in the cramped basement of a Brooklyn bookstore. I know it was my first year in New York because my memory of trying to find the store in a place called “Greenpoint” is tinged with the abject terror that accompanied almost all of my experiences that year. No matter where I was—be it my own apartment or a public event—I was always waiting for someone to come up and tell me I shouldn’t be there.

But even though I didn’t know anyone else in attendance, and even though it wasn’t immediately clear where the event even was, I powered through. I needed to see Lindy West. I had long been a writer, but it was West who taught me how to write for the internet. I was doing a poor man’s imitation of her throughout my tenure on my college’s blog and then again as I forced my foot into the door of digital media by writing confessional essays of my own. She taught me that I already had stories worth sharing, that there was value in even just one woman finding solace in them, even though, if you showed me those essays of mine now, I’d rather have my retinas burned out by a blowtorch than read them again.

If I had shown that version of myself an Instagram dump of what went down this past week, she’d be horrified (though thrilled to learn you can post more than one photo on Instagram now). But the takeaway I’d want her to have isn’t about the discourse or the questionable emails or that I don’t think Lindy West will ever be my friend thanks to a podcast. It’d be this: There are no happy endings on the internet. (Continued below.)

Things don’t go viral in one place anymore. When our ICYMI episode about Lindy West took off, it wasn’t just on Apple Podcasts. There were tweets, Instagram comments, and full TikTok videos about it, which made it even more important for me to have a website where everything people need to know about me was in one, easy to find place.

Whether people know me as a podcast host, a writer, or a ceramicist, Squarespace has the design tools for me to tailor my website to whatever hat I happen to be wearing. For a few years, I used their commerce features to sell my pottery. Now, I have both the ICYMI podcast feed and Embedded’s subscribe function integrated into the homepage. My website funnels viewers into whatever project I’m working on, and Squarespace’s analytics tools allow me to see how they find me and what they’re most interested in learning.

To start your own free trial on Squarespace, head over to this link and use the code “embedded” for 10% your first purchase of a website or domain!

An unspoken rule of the Personal Essay Boom was that at the end of every trauma-dump the writer revealed themselves to be healed. That was what made the essays inspiring: You, too, could overcome memories of your teenage sexual assault with the help of a Taylor Swift lyric. No one wants to read that someone who was sad is still sad. So you wrote yourself a happy ending, even if you didn’t mean it. Did I really, according to an essay that can no longer be found online, “learn to put away the padding and love my small boobs”? Or did I, a few years later, happen to achieve an adult woman’s weight and now—sorry haters—have the perfect boobs I no longer need to pretend I didn’t want this whole time?

But enough about my perfect boobs. Stop bringing them up! Lindy and I were both in the business of selling happy endings, even if we didn’t believe them. Lindy’s happy ending in Shrill was marrying Aham after a lifetime of being told she was unlovable. But sharing your happy ending with the internet, all wrapped up in a bow, is kind of like saying goodbye to someone only to realize you’re both walking the same way. Unless you quite literally die or refuse to ever show your face online again, the story continues, and things won’t stay the same.

Lindy and Aham did get married, but not quite how she originally told us. Her new memoir, Adult Braces, reveals that a stipulation of that marriage was that Aham could have relationships with other women. That might still be a happy ending for some people, but in Lindy’s own words, it was not for her. In fact, the new memoir reveals that much of the confidence and peace she wrote about finding in Shrill did not actually take. So you’ll forgive my and other people’s skepticism when Adult Braces ends in an eerily familiar way: A romantic relationship, this time shared between three people instead of just two.

A very much spoken rule of the Confessional Memoir Boom is that the book needs to be “prescriptive.” It’s the word I heard over and over in my first few attempts to sell a nonfiction book of my own. I didn’t have the answers to what I was writing about, but publishers only wanted books that did. It wouldn’t surprise me if Lindy’s publisher didn’t want her dedicating 300 pages to coming to terms with her changing relationship only for the final page to read, “And I still haven’t!” I don’t think readers would have been pleased with that, either.

Because we’re also the ones demanding happy endings. We don’t want to hear that life can be nuanced and that people change and that everyone’s entitled to make morally ambiguous choices. No: We want people who fall in love to live happily ever after. We want husbands who do bad things to get dumped. We want to believe we can combat society’s treatment of women’s bodies by accessing a previously undiscovered self-confidence somewhere in the pages of a memoir. Lindy can’t give us that because no one can. Her only crime was being someone who tried.

• Scaachi’s profile

My appearance on Commotion:

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Every other week we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome Sam Adler-Bell, a cohost of the Dissent magazine podcast Know Your Enemy, columnist and feature writer at New York magazine, and book reviewer who recently took on Ibram X. Kendi’s latest. Sam is vaguely concerned about everything having to do with Larry Ellison, a profoundly sinister figure who should probably be in prison, and likes to walk around his apartment reading ridiculous parts of The New York Times in print out loud to his girlfriend and getting agitated. —Nick

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EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

SAM ADLER-BELL: There was a clip on Twitter of Trump taking questions from reporters and one of them says, “As you know, my son is a third year relief pitcher at the University of Maryland...” and Trump interrupts him and says, “How would I know that? He said ‘as you know’... I don’t even know who this guy is.” I laughed at that. There was always something simultaneously unmooring and comforting about how funny Trump can be. Perversely, as his presidency has become more fundamentally scary and fucked, these little moments help keep him right-sized in my mind.

EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I mostly tweet out new episodes of my podcast and pieces of writing. The twitter algorithm remains entirely capricious about links; some of these posts get traction, and some sit there like a dead fish. But I persist. Every once in a while, an old-fashioned posting mood catches me; I get exercised by some discourse and end up saying something sincere about politics or whatever—I nearly always regret this.

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I never learned how to use Instagram correctly, and it seems like the customs are always changing. I like to post photos of my pieces in physical magazines/newspapers. There’s that line in The Jerk (1979), where Steve Martin gets really excited about his name appearing in the new phonebook: “My name in print…things are about to start happening to me now…” Then there’s a quick cut to a deranged killer (played by M. Emmet Walsh) randomly pointing to the character’s name in the phonebook and setting out to shoot him. I like seeing my name in print, and I always think that line to myself when I do; but the obvious implication is that nothing good can come of it.

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

SAM ADLER-BELL: A lot of music stuff, VHS footage of Bob Dylan shows and country performances that were on TV. I really like watching comedians being interviewed on late night. The thing where the host asks questions to prompt them to do their material. I find that really comforting.

EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I don’t use it. Not for me. I think one should stop adopting new social media platforms after a certain age, in the same way one should stop following new fashion trends.

EMBEDDED: Are you concerned by the claims of censorship that some users have made since TikTok was taken over by investors led by Larry Ellison, an ally of President Trump?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I am vaguely concerned about everything having to do with Larry Ellison. A profoundly sinister figure. He should probably be in prison.

EMBEDDED: Do you watch Twitch, Kick, or any other livestreaming services? If so, which streamers?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I watched a lot of Nick Fuentes on Rumble while working on a piece. The odd thing is that Fuentes is not at all a typical streamer. He’s doing a throwback thing: looking into camera, no live chat, just monologuing. Incel Walter Cronkite. It’s really impressive.

I don’t watch him, but I approve of Hasan Piker, because I think it’s really important for left-wingers to be handsome.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

SAM ADLER-BELL: We get the physical New York Times at home. I like to walk around the apartment, reading ridiculous parts of it out loud to my girlfriend and getting agitated.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I try not to. All of my work is better when I don’t have that bullshit in my head. But I need to keep up with the right a bit, so I follow what they’re up to on Twitter.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Like most people in my field, I’m pretty disgusted by AI and the people pushing it. But what can you say about it? I had a lot of opinions about One Battle After Another that I kept to myself.

EMBEDDED: What’s a popular misconception that you see repeated online?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Some of my right wing critics think I am descended from the New York intellectual Daniel Bell and the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler. I love that. Hopefully they don’t read this.

EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I read and BD McClay ( ). I also like Jake Malooly’s Steely Dan substack I was really into ’s substack for a while. I always think I’m gonna like Zizek’s, but he needs to put more effort into it.

EMBEDDED: How do you think Substack has changed media, if at all?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Oh, I don’t know. It seems more a symptom than a cause.

EMBEDDED: How would you describe the culture of Substack, in terms of the types of writing and thinking that it has encouraged?

SAM ADLER-BELL: The worst is obviously all the resentful stuff. The “I didn’t get what I deserved from my career in media” stuff. Just disgusting. But apparently there’s a big market for that.

EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Nick Fuentes said something interesting: that for the incels, Clavicular is the answer to the black pill. These guys convinced themselves heterosexual coupling is reducible to looks and money—because women run the show, and they’re all completely vapid and uninterested in anything else—so to them, Clavicular is a hero because he found a work-around. You just gotta hit yourself in the head with a hammer, inject yourself with Chinese peptides, and spend all your time at the gym. I know I sound a million years old when I say this, but when I was a kid, the main message was that women will like you if you have confidence and a decent personality. I have found this to be true. But apparently it seems entirely implausible to the young guns. They would rather break all the bones in their face.

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Stop. This applies to myself.

EMBEDDED: Have you found Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tools useful? How so?

SAM ADLER-BELL: AI is super helpful for transcription. I understand there must be other harmless things that other writers use it for. But I am very hesitant to become reliant on it for anything. I don’t mind missing the boat. It’s okay. I am not good at what I do because I am very efficient or optimized. Inefficiency and friction is a big part of thinking, in my opinion.

EMBEDDED: Do you believe that advances in AI will spawn a new “underclass,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested might happen?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I really don’t know. I trust the Marxists. Whatever they’re saying is probably right.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

SAM ADLER-BELL: They’re obviously unbelievably bad. To deny this is crazy to me.

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I try everything. But this one works: my girlfriend and I set screentime limits for the apps we each use to waste time, then we set new screentime passwords that only the other person knows. (I know hers; she knows mine.) Which means if I want a few extra minutes on Twitter to tell someone to fuck off, I have to go to her and say, “uh, please baby can you unlock me?” and it’s so sordid and abject and pathetic that you have to have a really good reason. The way I wrote that, it sounds like a kink, but I promise you it’s not.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Millennials invented “wokeness,” but we did so in the brief period when there was actually a bit of venture capital floating around the “young progressive media” space—and so it wasn’t entirely sincere. There was some cynicism involved in our embracing those attitudes and building a culture around them. Millennial media people were never as woke as they seemed. We were at least a little ironic about it. But Gen Z-ers and Boomers didn’t know that. They thought we meant every word. Now liberal Boomers are more woke than you can possibly imagine. (This also has something to do with their guilt about not being good enough parents or not leaving their kids enough money.) And Gen Zers are either disaffected and reactionary, or so convinced that the world is on the brink of disaster all the time (because we told them it was!) that they can’t see the point of doing regular politics.

EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?

SAM ADLER-BELL: My girlfriend is a critic who has read most of the good books and seen most of the good movies. So I get a lot of recs from her.

EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?

SAM ADLER-BELL: It used to happen. When I found out that you could mute a viral post and it ceased to exist for you, it stopped being a big deal. I am a fan of that old Tyler, the Creator post.

EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?

SAM ADLER-BELL: John Early. I love him so much.

EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?

SAM ADLER-BELL: The guy who edits and produces our podcast, , is one of the secret geniuses of our time. He hosts a fake tech podcast called Tech Talk, that will be pored over one day as an essential cultural artifact of imperial decline. He also has a great substack where he writes about and shares playlists from the all-vinyl radio hour he hosts in Missoula.

EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?

SAM ADLER-BELL: My favorite podcast is Hollywood Handbook. I will say this at any opportunity, because the guys who host it clearly don’t want to do it anymore. Hope they see this.

EMBEDDED: Are you in any groups on Reddit, Discord, or Facebook? What’s the most useful or entertaining one?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I recently inherited a 2006 SAAB from my mother. It doesn’t work in some really interesting ways. And SAAB doesn’t exist anymore as a company. So I’ve been spending a lot of time on SAAB owners Reddit forums.

EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Meats

EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Salute emoji: I live to serve.

EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I don’t. My podcast cohost Matt sends me them sometimes, and I get really annoyed. But when I listen, it’s usually him saying something unbelievably sweet, and I feel bad for being mad.

EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Spotify. ’80s Van Morrison.

EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? What’s a show that you’re really into right now?

SAM ADLER-BELL: HBO! I love The Pitt!!

EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?

SAM ADLER-BELL: Relisten. It has the whole Live Music Archive from archive.org on it. So you can save and download Grateful Dead tapes on the go. It’s so wonderful.

EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I know this is vogueish, but I read that Walter Ong book about orality and literacy (because Joe Wiesenthal told me to). It was interesting. I definitely see its relevance to my life as a poster and podcaster.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

SAM ADLER-BELL: I recently watched basically all of the videos on youtube of the comedian James Acaster appearing on various quiz and gameshows in the UK. He’s great.

Thanks Sam! Listen to his podcast, read his writing, and follow him on X.

More My Internet Kat Rosenfield ∙ Chrissy Correa ∙ Yi-Ling Liu ∙ Kaitlin Phillips ∙ Emma Specter ∙ Liz Franczak ∙ Anthony Fantano ∙ Alison Roman ∙ All

No AI was used in the making of this post. —Kate

New on ICYMI: What was supposed to be a regular episode unpacking the Lindy West discourse went awry when West’s husband, Aham, decided to send a nasty email. (The BTS of making this episode will be out as a Screen Time Diary later this week—make sure you’re subscribed!)

Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶

Five years ago, a brand bragging that its television ad, social post, or other output was “human made” would have sounded like a fast food chain boasting that their burgers are made from “100% real beef”—unnecessary at best, a “my ‘not involved in human trafficking’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt”-type situation at worst.

But as has also noticed, as major corporations like Coca Cola and movies like As Deep As The Grave embrace AI-generated content in advertising and entertainment, other brands are attempting to stand out from the slop by claiming what was once taken for granted: That their post was not made by AI.

“This video from our friend @Origiful was created entirely by hand using digital art and real video footage, not AI,” the pinned comment on a recent Le Creuset Instagram post reads. “The background scenes were filmed in Collioure, France, including the balcony of the restaurant at @Hotel_LesRochesBrunes.”

In this case, as a result, almost every other comment on the post is about the brand’s choice to use real artists, and not the content of the post—or product—itself. “We love brands that value human creativity and work ❤️,” one reads.

Made-by-humans marketing has been quietly on the rise for the last couple years. In April 2024, Dove pledged to never use AI to represent “real women” in its advertising, branding the technology as “a threat to women’s wellbeing.” That year, Discover released a series of ads with Jennifer Coolidge in which at least one emphasized that Discover lets you talk to a human on the phone.

I don’t think a major credit card company has any real moral compass when it comes to AI. Instead, the challenge for these entities is to figure out how many of their customers do. A potential customer’s stance on generative AI is now valuable personal data: while Coke is correct that I’ll still keep helplessly slurping my fridge cigarettes no matter how much AI they use in their ads, Le Creuset was also wise to assume that people who see the value of expensive cookware probably also see the value of making things.

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Every other week we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome Kat Rosenfield, a culture writer at The Free Press and cohost of the podcast . Her new novel, How to Survive in the Woods, is out now. Kat thinks that some younger Millennials and Gen Zers dismiss nuanced or otherwise complicated ideas as “engagement slop” and says that every time she see some girl filming a crying confessional into her front-facing camera she feels like she’s witnessing the death of human dignity in real time. —Nick

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EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

KAT ROSENFIELD: This very serviceable “Strait of Hormuz” joke rendered transcendent by the impeccable deployment of the Despairing Salieri meme.

EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Not as much as I used to, and I aggressively curate my experience on the site, but yes. I’m a writer, I want a text-based platform! I want to keep an eye on the discourse, make jokes, bat ideas around—and I want to do that with smart and literate people, which pretty much narrows the options to Twitter/X or Substack Notes. (I do use the latter, too, but it’s not robust enough to replace Twitter and it has its own share of obnoxious personalities and behaviors.)

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Book promotion, mostly. I’ve been trying to get better at Instagram but I don’t really understand or like it, and the commenting culture there is… I’m trying to think of a nicer word than “illiterate,” but that’s really it.

EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I am full-on “old man yells at cloud” when it comes to TikTok specifically and short form video generally. Every time I see some girl filming a crying confessional into her front-facing camera I feel like I’m witnessing the death of human dignity in real time.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

KAT ROSENFIELD: By reading my friends’ work, mostly. Also Facebook community groups for local news, and the Pirate Wires and New York Times morning newsletters for national. Also also, because my husband is a spiritual boomer, CNN is on in my house in the morning and I sometimes can’t help looking at it.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I have a curated list of maybe 30 Twitter accounts that is my primary point of engagement with the site, people who are smart and thoughtful and all over the map ideologically. That list is how I keep tabs on the discourse in various spaces (also doubles as a news source). I’m not obsessive about it, but it’s obviously central to the sort of work I do; if you’re writing about culture, then understanding how people are interpreting and responding to events is important, maybe even more so than the events themselves.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?

KAT ROSENFIELD: The John Davidson/ Tourette’s controversy at the BAFTAs really got to me. I wrote about it twice, I’m still thinking about it a lot.

EMBEDDED: How do you think Substack has changed media, if at all?

KAT ROSENFIELD: As someone who was around to witness the dawn of blogging in the early 2000s, and the cults of personality that coalesced around it, I think of Substack as a sort of monetized second coming of that medium—one that arrived just as many of the previous professional pathways for writers were disappearing. There’s obviously more to it than that, a lot of moving parts here, but basically, whoever the millennial Joan Didion and Pauline Kael are? They’re probably on Substack.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I guess I think that “bad” probably isn’t the most useful yardstick for considering the impact of this technology. It’s here, it has completely transformed our lives, and some of that is for the better and some is for the worse, but it’s not going back in the bag; I don’t think it’s something we can really legislate. But we can be conscious of the tradeoffs; we can ask ourselves how we want to live, and the best case scenario is that we rediscover the value of friction and embodied experience and collectively choose to be intentional about how and when we incorporate technology into our lives. (The worst case, or at least most cynical, is that smartphones are a sort of Darwinian deus ex machina designed to eliminate the people who can’t do this from the gene pool. Would make a good sci-fi novel.)

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I think of it less as “I want to limit my phone use” and more as “I don’t want to be rude.” It’s bad manners to pay attention to the phone instead of the people around you, so the phone stays in my bag. The only downside to this is that I frequently come back from some really fun event and realize that I haven’t taken a single photo because I was phoneless all night.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

KAT ROSENFIELD: There’s a thing with younger Millennials and Gen Z where they dismiss nuanced or otherwise complicated ideas as “engagement slop”—like having to think for more than a second about anything must be some kind of scam. I get why this happens; I also hate it.

EMBEDDED: How do you find recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Almost always from a fellow human being whose taste I trust; almost never via the algorithm.

EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Many times and for all kinds of reasons. It’s amazing what a big deal it feels like when it’s happening—like, one time in 2020 I tweeted something about cancel culture and social trust that went viral, and then Nikole Hannah-Jones took really bizarre offense to it (she had never heard of “social trust” as a concept) and when I saw that she’d quote tweeted me, I was like, “Well, that’s it, game over, time to delete my account and throw my phone in the river and go live the rest of my days inside a burlap sack deep in the forest.” But of course I didn’t, and after a day everything was quiet again. That’s the thing about going viral; it’s rarely pleasant, and invariably meaningless.

EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?

KAT ROSENFIELD: , who is my dear friend and podcast co-host and a criminally underrated Substack humorist.

EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?

KAT ROSENFIELD: None of them! I don’t follow celebrities online and to be honest, I don’t really like that they’re on here; I yearn to return to the days when famous people were like distant aliens whose interior lives were unknowable and inaccessible to us. There was a magic to it.

EMBEDDED: Have you ever been heavily into Snapchat? Do you miss it?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I thank the deities every day that I am too old to have ever Snapchatted.

EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I use a different one pretty much every time, to try to make the game more interesting. It doesn’t usually work, but this one time I got it in 2 guesses and the grid said JUICY FRUIT, and hoo boy have I been chasing that high ever since.

EMBEDDED: What’s your go-to emoji, and what does it mean to you?

KAT ROSENFIELD: The one in the Groucho Marx glasses/mustache. I have no idea what it means, and nobody else does either, which makes it perfect.

EMBEDDED: Do you text people voice notes? If not, how do you feel about getting them?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Probably controversial, but I think voice notes are not just annoying but symptomatic of something wildly dysfunctional in the culture, i.e. that we have somehow come to a place where we recognize the practical utility of an answering machine but also live in utter terror of the specific social activity (talking on the phone) for which answering machines were invented. I’m actually kind of obsessed with it—this anti-social conveniencemaxxing impulse dressed up as something analog and romantic is like a George Costanza Seinfeld sideplot come to life, which I find very funny but also very bad. And if you’re ever thinking of sending me a voice memo you should just call me!

EMBEDDED: Do you pay for a music streaming service, and if so, which one? What’s a playlist, song, album, or style of music you’ve listened to a lot lately?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I have Spotify premium. I initially subscribed to it because it’s a good way to build and maintain the playlists I use for teaching yoga classes, but lately I like using it to a) listen to albums all the way through the way I did in high school, b) listen to audiobooks while paddleboarding, and c) create vibe-based radio stations as a soundtrack for different activities. My favorite right now is a jivey 60s playlist based on Mel Tormé’s “Comin’ Home Baby” that my husband and I dance to while we cook dinner.

EMBEDDED: If you could only keep one streaming service for TV and/or movies, which would it be, and why? What’s a show that you’re really into right now?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Probably HBO (or whatever it’s calling itself nowadays). They have a nice rotating database of classic films via their partnership with TCM, plus their limited-series scripted dramas are still excellent. And I’m really enjoying the second season of The Pitt right now, although I’ve learned my lesson about not trying to watch it while eating, because it is medically accurate in extremely gory ways.

EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?

KAT ROSENFIELD: This word game called Addagrams that my brother made. It’s like a smarter, more creative version of Wordle.

EMBEDDED: What’s the most basic internet thing that you love?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Absurdist Twitter humor.

EMBEDDED: Is there any content you want but can’t seem to find anywhere online?

KAT ROSENFIELD: A complete encyclopedia of everyone who got cancelled during the long 2010s for whatever frivolous reason, and what happened, and what they’re doing now. In some ways it may be for the best that this doesn’t exist, but I’m shocked by how completely some of this stuff has been memory-holed.

EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Poshmark and eBay, mainly for finding dupes of clothes that I love but that have gotten stained or torn or, occasionally, purged from my closet in a state of Kondo-induced mania that I later regretted—like this BB Dakota party dress that I should never have gotten rid of and was thrilled to find again.

EMBEDDED: Do you consume any content about fitness, diet, or other types of “wellness”? What creators or sites do you find most useful?

KAT ROSENFIELD: Yeah, this is how the Instagram algorithm gets me: videos of adult ballet dancers or 40+ year old women doing pull-ups are absolute catnip to me. But having worked in fitness for 10 years, I’m mostly just skeeved out by how much that world in particular has been totally overtaken by AI-generated slop. Ironically, the most useful fitness tool I have is probably ChatGPT; I use it to track my macros, strategize workouts, etc.

EMBEDDED: Have you recently read an article, book, or social media post about the internet that you’ve found particularly insightful?

KAT ROSENFIELD: This deep dive on the cultural implications of the circa 2011 Gossip Girl: Psycho Killer reboot.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

KAT ROSENFIELD: I’m on book tour right now, and every day I’m getting messages from people who I’ve only ever interacted with online, telling me they’re coming to an event to say hi in person—and then they do! My worlds are colliding and it’s beautiful.

Thanks Kat! Buy her book, listen to her podcast, and follow her on X.

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