My Internet: Shaad D’Souza
The Shaad Magazine writer says he was banned from Depop in 2020.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
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 Shaad D’Souza, the editor of Shaad Magazine on Instagram and writer for The New York Times, The Guardian, Vogue, GQ, Pitchfork, and New York. Shaad enjoys keeping up with the ridiculous gamified nature of American politics, never made a Substack because he hates the idea of preaching to the converted, and prays for God to take away all his opinions. —Nick
EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?
SHAAD D’SOUZA:
EMBEDDED: Do you tweet? Why?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I have a secret account on X that my friends know about. I think X was better than ever in the early days of the Elon takeover, if only because all the most annoying posters left, leaving behind the most deranged gay guys and shitposters. It was so ridiculously funny and avant-garde for a while. Lately it just feels like engagement bait/AI stuff, which is boring.
EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Kind of everything? About a year ago I turned my personal Instagram into a text-based magazine called Shaad Magazine, but I still occasionally post photo dumps and my stories are exactly the same, which I have to start thinking about more—when I started SM I had like 5,000 followers and now there’s like 20,000 more, and so when I post dumb shit on my stories I get all these weird message requests. But I also use it to message people, make friends, contact people for stories, all that stuff.
EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Lots of cooking videos, movie trailers, stuff from WSJ/Business Insider about business trends, that kind of thing. YouTube Premium is my favourite streaming service, and I probably spend more time on YouTube than any other app. YouTube Shorts has my favourite shortform algorithm by far. I like watching these cooking videos by this couple who always seem totally drunk and are cooking the craziest things, and I’m often the only person who likes their videos, and also the skits of this MAGA-ish bartender from North Carolina.
EMBEDDED: What do you like about TikTok? What do you dislike?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I don’t use it. I have it, but I don’t use it. The algorithm changes too fast—if I spend even a moment too long on a video, that’s all I’ll see. And it feels too fast-paced and trend-driven.
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?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I think if you trust a private corporation, especially a social media company, to ever be making any decisions in the public interest you’re a rube. If you’re using these services, you’re already subject to all kinds of covert censorship and algorithm rigging. So, not really—especially because Larry Ellison’s primary interests are already very aligned with those of the social media companies.
EMBEDDED: Do you watch Twitch, Kick, or any other livestreaming services? If so, which streamers?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: No. I need some kind of narrative and dynamism—there’s no storytelling to streaming, just a guy basically saying and doing nothing for six hours.
EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: The Guardian, but I also keep tabs on The New York Times and I’ll occasionally read Australian outlets to see what’s going on back home. (Answer often is: Nothing good!) I read a lot of New York magazine’s political and cultural analysis—I think Intelligencer is really great, and I enjoy keeping up with the ridiculous gamified nature of American politics.
EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Not particularly important. I’ll have a handle on what’s happening on Twitter, which tends to give me a good idea of how people are responding/relating to music and pop culture, which is important for what I write about mostly, but I find that a lot of the “discourse” that sparks from other places, like TikTok or whatever, is so braindead that I’m rarely ever forced to have an opinion. The discourse I want to engage with is usually more localised.
EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Like, pick one! I pray for God to take away all my opinions. I guess I feel like everything this year has been even more literal than before. Like, The Invite could have been freaky and laden with emotion and tension, but instead the movie has to stop so the characters can all verbalise their problems.
EMBEDDED: What’s a popular misconception that you see repeated online?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: People who talk the loudest about music generally have no idea how charts, label budgets, contracts, etc. work. I also get annoyed by how stupid a lot of people sound when they try to sound even vaguely smart—misuse of historic vs historical, for example, or fact vs factoid. I am, my friend Jackson tells me, a quintessential “well actually” guy, which I think is better than sounding like a fucking idiot.
EMBEDDED: What words, phrases, and/or people do you have muted?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: None! I find it generative for my blood to boil, truthfully
EMBEDDED: What are your favorite newsletters?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Yasi Salek, Laura Snapes, Ben Lippett, Joel Golby just started a great one, Larry Fitzmaurice, Popbitch, Alyssa Vingan, but my number one is Zoe Latta’s Rotting On The Vine.
EMBEDDED: How do you think Substack has changed media, if at all?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: There’s a lot more low-quality writing on the internet now, because a lot of writers who think they don’t need an editor ABSOLUTELY DO!
EMBEDDED: How would you describe the culture of Substack, in terms of the types of writing and thinking that it has encouraged?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I find that it’s lot of people tossing off uninterrogated ideas into an echo chamber. Because you build your own audience, it’s a lot of dumb bitches telling each other exactlyyyyyyy. I’ve never made a Substack letter because I hate the idea of preaching to the converted—I don’t really see it as a hugely generative place, even if there’s also a lot of amazing writing on there.
EMBEDDED: What’s one positive media trend? What’s one negative trend?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I think editors seem to be wanting to take bigger swings these days, in terms of both formats and ideas. I don’t mean to be fully down on Substack, but I think it’s encouraged a lot of terrible writers to write.
EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I dunno, maybe that ’20s beauty culture has been toxic and devastating for a lot of men too. Or that each new generation will always find a new way to justify using meth, and for this generation it’s just straight-up doing meth.
EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Think about how numbskulled and lame sportsbetting ads are and consider whether that’s a culture you want to align yourself with!
EMBEDDED: Have you found Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tools useful? How so?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I didn’t know how to even use ChatGPT for a long time, and I find it kind of stupid and counterintuitive. If you use AI, as a journalist, you’re a fucking loser, I don’t know what else to tell you—for me, what I like about both criticism and reporting is how it allows you to do a lot of weird, specific research, and I think I’d hate this job if an app was doing that research for me. The only time I’ve used ChatGPT was to ask it to write a review “in the style of Shaad D’Souza,” to see if I should be worried. It kind of basically got my tone correct, but it didn’t have any really interesting ideas, which put a lot of my fears to rest.
EMBEDDED: Do you believe that advances in AI will spawn a new “underclass,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested might happen?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Don’t we already have a permanent underclass? Seems like a lot of the professional managerial class, who never really seemed to care about the fact that a lot of people were basically kept unemployed/underemployed by various other evil systems, are now just terrified that they’ll soon become that DoorDash driver they so love to scream at and undertip. This isn’t an answer to your question because I don’t really think about AI all that much, truthfully.
EMBEDDED: Or do you believe that the AI bubble about to burst?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I basically think that all the things people really care about now are things that AI could never recreate—an AI film will never be bad in the specific way that Obsession is, where you actively want to talk to all your friends about it, and an AI will never be able to like, write a Babe dot net article about Aziz Ansari not letting you choose the colour of wine you wanted to drink, or whatever.
EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Woof—the secret third option of any ‘Would You Rather’ is always “k*ll yourself,” right? I don’t really know or care. Truthfully, I think I have a mostly healthy relationship with my phone—I am on it a lot, but I never feel like it’s taking up time that could be better used for other things. I mostly think people scared of phone addiction are thinking about it too much.
EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: No. I Bricked for 16 minutes once and found it annoying. Going on Do Not Disturb is the main thing for me, but again, phone is kind of an important tool for what I specifically do, and with an “everything is copy” mindset you can find ways to make phone work for you.
EMBEDDED: Have you had posts go viral? What is that experience like?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I’ve had a lot of reviews and articles go bad viral, which often results in something like this, which then results in thousands of teenagers posting photos of me calling me a fat disgusting curry muncher pig who deserves nothing less than a public suicide in front of my whole family. But you get used to it, truthfully.
EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Sky Ferreira.
EMBEDDED: Who’s someone more people should follow?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I think Straight Diva podcast is so funny, and their clips are actually contributing something to the world.
EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Madonna—crazy photos, crazy captions, weirdly poetic concepts.
EMBEDDED: Are you into any podcasts right now? How and when do you usually listen?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I listen to all the Puck podcasts and How Long Gone and Caleb Hearon’s podcast So True.
EMBEDDED: How would you describe Tumblr’s legacy?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Introduced me and a lot of people I know to parts of culture that we would never have found otherwise, but was also ground zero for a lot of the hatred and intense unwarranted scrutiny that’s taken over the internet, through blogs like Your Fave Is Problematic.
EMBEDDED: Do you use Slack or Teams for work? What’s the best thing about Slacking with your co-workers? What’s the worst thing?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: I’ve been trying to get a real job for about a decade now, but since I was laid off from Vice, age 19, about 9 years ago, I’ve only ever been offered permalance contracts. So no, I don’t “use Slack”
EMBEDDED: What is your Wordle starting word?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Boring to have a Wordle starting word! Live a little! Like, what if I want to use “COCKS” today? Or “FLINT”? Having a Wordle starting word shows a fundamental lack of joie de vivre.
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?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: There’s a chat called GGF, where we work out where we’re going to drink and party on Gay Guy Friday
EMBEDDED: What’s your favorite non-social media app?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: It kind of is social media, but Discogs.
EMBEDDED: Do you regularly use eBay, Depop, or other shopping platforms? What’s a recent thing you’ve bought or sold?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Sadly I was banned from Depop back in 2020
EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?
SHAAD D’SOUZA: Posting
Thanks Shaad! Follow his magazine.
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