Sunday Scroll: Cat cams, iPhone face, and hyper-individualism
Hello from Portland, Maine!
Hello from Portland, Maine, where I told myself I wouldn’t ruin my boyfriend’s birthday trip by constantly checking the security camera to make sure our two new kittens were okay back in Brooklyn, before immediately caving and turning on motion alerts. But imagine if I had missed this moment of them cuddling each other on the couch?
I have a complicated relationship with our cat cam because it became a bit of an obsession during the last few weeks of our previous cat’s life. TikTok recently taught me about compulsive “reassurance seeking,” and case in point: rather than convincing me that everything’s fine, digital tools like these live feeds tend to make my brain more likely to think everything’s not, simply because I have the ability to check over and over again.
As much as I’m sure you tuned in for updates on my cats and my mental health, let’s move on to some other things, like two pieces I wrote for GQ. I’d never really faced the possibility of a TikTok ban head-on because I don’t want to think about just how much it would screw up my literal livelihood, but I finally explored what a ban would mean for me, and our entire social media landscape, in this piece.
Also, building off of last week’s Scroll, I interviewed Ronald from Jury Duty, the show that blew up thanks to TikTok and, fingers crossed, will finally go mainstream now that all the episodes are out.
In IRL observations:
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