The Internet – Spectre Collie

31 Days of Scrollitude

Or, Nosferatu Was An Incel. Reporting on my month-long social media hiatus

(featured image is from Steve Purcell’s Toybox comic)

When I decided to try going a month without social media (of the infinite-scrolling variety, i.e. Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky), I expected that worst case, I’d break down at the halfway point. Best case, I’d end the month like someone who’d been crawling through the desert and had suddenly found a refreshing spring full of life-giving water, and I’d go right back to obsessively spending hours on the apps.

As it turns out, it’s been more like walking leisurely through the desert and happening upon a can of lukewarm LaCroix. I’ve done my best to respond to the comments people have made to my auto-posts over the past month, but I’m not feeling super compelled to resume my old bad habits.

I’m going to try and avoid veering into an evangelist-vegan attitude and tell everybody that they should do it too because I mean to each their own but we all know that my newfound lifestyle of moderate restraint is kind of, you know, better than yours. But for me, at least, it’s been a complete success.

I went back on Instagram, and I don’t miss it. I just feel bad for the dozens of young single women who have spent a month wondering why I haven’t accepted their follow requests.

Over the past month alone, I’ve read more than I did all last year. I’ve finally watched some movies that have been on my to-watch list for years. I get to dinner time without feeling like my brain is too full for anything more substantial than YouTube videos. We finally started watching Severance! (Yes it’s very good and no spoilers please).

One downside to only having this blog as my outlet is that I have been missing the conversations from those auto-posts. Also, microblogging formats are an encouragement to be more concise. It was only after reading a comment about Nosferatu from my friend Rose that I realized I could have condensed paragraphs of what I’d written into the simple observation that “Count Orlok is an incel.”

So my current plan is to keep it up as best I can. Maybe not maintaining the artificial vow of silence, but using social media for conversations instead of time-killers. Avoid installing the apps and just using the web apps. (Except for Instagram unfortunately, since they’ve deliberately hobbled the functionality of the web interface, almost as if they’re a company that has poured tons of money into ensuring app engagement).

And if I’m ever looking for a distraction, open up a book instead of a “quick scroll” through the apps. The new Reeder has been an excellent way to feel less post-apocalyptic, reassured that people are still out there posting away and I’m reading stuff that was written within the past month.

I’d been hoping that a break would help with whatever mental block is keeping me from being able to do any game development after hours, but not yet. At least it’s paved the way, and I can dive back in as long as I keep up the social media abstinence.

I Was Wrong About the New Reeder

Silvio Rizzi’s redesign of his excellent RSS reader into a unified hub for the internet makes RSS feel relevant again

Earlier I mentioned that I was looking to the venerable RSS feed as a way to keep up with the internet without all the negatives of social media apps.

For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of Silvio Rizzi’s Reeder app for the iPhone and especially the iPad. It’s so thoughtfully and artfully designed, with lots of attention devoted to choosing exactly the right colors and typography, that it actually seemed to elevate everything I read on it.¹

The original Reeder app has been rebranded as Reeder Classic, while the new version has been dramatically redesigned to support a much wider variety of feeds. In addition to the sites you follow via RSS, you can also add YouTube, Podcasts, Flickr photos, comic strips, and even Bluesky or Mastodon if that’s your thing.

I tried the new version and quickly bounced off of it. It (wisely) didn’t mess with anything that made the original so great for RSS, and I didn’t see the value of adding podcasts or YouTube, which I’m always going to prefer having in a dedicated app. I was happy to go back to the classic app — which is still a one-time charge, somehow — and read the web as Al Gore intended.

Since my current social media vacation has left me occasionally jonesing for an infinitely-scrolling list of new content to look at, I decided to try the new version of Reeder again and give it another chance to win me over.

1
Rizzi’s Mela app brings the same excellent design to a recipe manager.

Like the Before Times

My month-long experiment with a social media-free life

For the month of March, I’m trying an experiment where I’ve deleted all of the social media apps from my phone, and I’m pledging to stay off of them for the duration. (I have auto-posting set up from my blog to Mastodon and Bluesky, so that I don’t completely disappear from consciousness).

That means staying away from any platform I don’t “own”and treating the internet like it was 2006. I deactivated my Facebook account a while ago. So that left me with having to swear off Instagram, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Unlike 2006, I no longer use Flickr, and I don’t have the Straight Dope Message Board as an outlet, so the recreation of my pre-Twitter internet footprint won’t be entirely accurate. But I’m hoping it will be healthier.

My Mastodon account isn’t owned by evil people (as far as I’m aware), and I’ve also curated my Bluesky Feed to the point that it’s about as benign as I can get it. But I’ve become increasingly convinced that “Stop doomscrolling” isn’t enough. I feel like the whole Twitter model is toxic. At least for me; your mileage may vary.

In my experience, any app that presents an infinite list of updated content is inherently built around the idea of engagement, not information/enlightenment/social interaction. Even if there’s not an algorithm pushing users in ways that benefit the platform instead of the users themselves, it’s still at its core taking away from our ability to be present.

Years ago, I could already tell that my brain had been rewired into the Twitter mindset, since I had been almost subconsciously re-formatting my idle thoughts to be suitable for that audience. And my most toxic relationship with social media has probably been with Instagram, if I’m being honest. It’s great that it’s encouraged me to take more photos to remember important moments. It’s not great that I’m often not present in those moments, because I’m already thinking of how I’m going to caption them to present them to other people.

I’ve noticed that even this blog has altered the way that I experience things. I started using the “One Thing I Like” format in an effort to get me to focus, to write shorter posts, and to acknowledge that art is complex and open to multiple interpretations. But now it’s backfired somewhat, since I go into a movie or TV show looking for the one thing I’m going to call out.

Even without any higher-minded goals of changing how I interact with art and entertainment, I’m simply hoping that the experiment gives me more free time. I often find myself complaining that I don’t have time for anything anymore, even while I’m well aware of losing 30 minutes to an hour here and there, just idly scrolling through feeds.

The other thing I’m trying to address is the feeling that my brain stopped working correctly at some point in the last two years, feeling as if the gears have gotten gunked up and slowly ground to a halt. It’s been difficult to concentrate on anything, and I’ve missed the self-imposed deadline on my Playdate game by over a year.

One of the things I’ve started doing to re-frame and re-focus my idle time is to get back on AMC’s “A-List” subscription program. I’ve tried it before and failed to get my money’s worth, but at this point, individual tickets have gotten so expensive that a single IMAX screening is the cost of a month’s subscription. It makes sense in the weird dream logic of late-stage capitalism, I guess?

In any case, the appeal of going to movies more often isn’t simply that it’s a reminder of the Before Times, when I felt more cultured. It’s also simply to force me out of the house and force me to focus on something other than my phone for at least an hour and a half.

The other big resolution is to focus on more constructive reading. Always have at least one book in progress, and any time I would’ve been scrolling through the apps, read a few chapters of a book instead. I’ve invested in a Kobo ereader in the hopes I can get more literate without giving any more money to Jeff Bezos.

It’s also a great opportunity to get back into RSS feeds. I haven’t been able to get comfortable with the new version of the Reeder app, but the previous is still available as “Reeder Classic,” and it’s excellent. More people are getting back to blogging on their own sites, and I’m pledging to try harder to be part of a community, promoting blogs I find interesting.

One more weird thing I’m trying: writing these blog posts longhand on the aforementioned iPad mini. The idea here is, again, to be more present — slowing down to think about what I’m writing, instead of letting my fingers type so fast that I’m well into a paragraph before realizing I’ve lost my train of thought. Plus it feels more like keeping a journal than writing articles for an audience. (Sometimes I read posts from several years ago and I have absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about, because I was either trying to be circumspect or I was actively avoiding spoilers, as if I had a huge audience).

That experiment is ongoing; my first couple of attempts with Apple Notes had all kinds of difficulty converting to text, and they also burned up half the iPad’s battery for some reason. This post is my first attempt using Goodnotes, so if it’s even more filled with gibberish than my usual, that’s my excuse.

If nothing else, it lets me enjoy the romantic image of a man writing thoughtfully into his cherished, time-worn notebook. Suck it, Atrus!

Overall, I think my problems with social media platforms stem from assuming that we were all observing the same social contract. Yes, they tend to be exploitative, and they have customers generating content that profits the
companies with little compensation for the customers themselves. But I always felt that that was built into the figurative contract that you sign onto when you start using these platforms. Acknowledge that they’re extracting time and attention and effort from you, but also acknowledge how you benefit from it. And the moment it ever gets to the point where you feel like the platform isn’t benefitting you any more, hit the bricks!

What’s happened to me is that I’ve let myself get so dependent on them as social and creative outlets (and, let’s be honest, easy ways to procrastinate) that by the time I noticed that the terms of the “contract” had changed, and I was no longer getting enough value from them to be worth the psychic damage, it was already too late.

So stay tuned for updates on my progress, likely in the form of a lot of barely-intelligible blog posts!

Fourth Estate Sale

Democracy Dies In Disappointment

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The Audacity of Cringe

Giving up smoking and other bad habits, and rebuilding a better outlook based on The New Honesty, Good Vibes, and Trust

I mentioned that I started using social media apps again once I noticed that the Kamala Harris campaign’s account had started firing on all cylinders, making politics fun and engaging instead of anxious and dreadful.

But what I hadn’t considered was that I’d also quit smoking around the same time. In retrospect, I was just trading one previously-reliable dopamine-hit distraction for another. And once I made that connection, it also helps explain so much of everything I’ve been turning over in my mind, trying to make sense of things that refuse to make sense, and wondering how we all ended up in this state.

There are several eerie parallels between addiction and this whole social/political dystopia we’ve made for ourselves in 2024:

The distraction becomes the focus. For me, the “quick smoke break to clear my head” gradually turned into “I’ve got to finish this so I can have another cigarette.” This doesn’t feel that different from watching the glut of political media put all of their focus on the politicians and their campaigns, instead of the real-world problems that they were trying to address. People have been pointing out for years that the emperor has no clothes, which the political media has taken as a cue for incessant discussions about The Power and Significance of Nudity In America’s Fast-Changing Political Climate.
It rejects the idea of ever having enough. In the 80s, it was 24-hour news channels. Now, it’s having to fill every pixel of every screen, and every nanosecond of the day, with content. Old-fashioned notions of relevance and newsworthiness were discarded long ago, because there always has to be something to focus on, something we can make seem important, even if it isn’t.
It feeds off of self-awareness. I always felt like being aware of how much I was smoking was the same thing as being in control over it, but for me, it wasn’t.¹ With media — traditional or social media — and politics, self-awareness is never used towards changing behavior, but reinforcing behavior. People on Twitter came up with the ostensibly ironic term “doomscrolling,” and then dove back even deeper into their phones and their imaginary, perpetually angry and miserable communities. And one of JD Vance’s least-harmful bits of weird behavior was saying that he had a Diet Mountain Dew and “people will probably say that’s racist.” The GOP is perfectly aware that they’re (with good reason) perceived as racist, but instead of engaging in any actual introspection, they’ve simply decided that the accusation is meaningless.
It reinforces the same patterns over and over again, until it loses any resemblance to the original. It’s been over a decade since I actually enjoyed a cigarette; by the end, it became more of a burdensome obligation than anything pleasurable. I’m reminded of that when I see how political media took the necessity of fact-checking and turned it from actual journalism into the performative ritual that it is now, giving nonsensical rebuttals to obviously true statements, presumably just because they have to write something. So now, instead of being a reliable source of truth, they just reinforce the (false) notion that everyone is always lying to some degree or another.

1
Respect to people who’ve been able to quit with willpower alone, but I never have been able to without chemical help.

Hillbilly L-Shaped Sectional

An obvious, absurd, and harmless lie is the best way to show contempt for someone without ruining the mood

I hate it when people over-explain jokes. And I really hate how modern media has so much space and time to fill up with “content” that it’s resulted in a surfeit of professional and amateur pundits generating so many unnecessary essays and opinion pieces and think pieces about every inconsequential thing.¹

But this is bugging me. In this Presidential campaign, there’s one scandalous rumor that seems to have spread like crazy and really resonated with people. It’s based on a shitposting tweet from someone claiming that VP candidate JD Vance, in his memoir, describes having sex with a couch.²

There has already been a ton written about this phenomenon, ranging in tone from angry, to humorless, to scolding, to earnestly over-explaining. Some of them, like Charlotte Clymer’s post calling out the hectoring scolds in media for paying attention to the wrong things, are good. Others, like a post on Platformer making a false equivalence between an obvious, harmless lie and deliberately inflammatory misinformation, are so off-base they make me angry. But I have yet to read one that I think gets at the core of it.

The point isn’t to make anybody believe it, since it’s too absurd to believe. And it’s not to trick Vance into having to deny it, since it would be a waste of time. And it’s not really meant to put them on the defensive by humiliating them, since, like saying Trump has small hands, it would be a stupid thing to get defensive about. Even if it were true, it’s harmless. Weird, but harmless. Especially when compared to the dozens of legitimately offensive stuff that we know to be true about him. It’s just a bafflingly dumb insult.³

Which is the whole point, and I think it really is that simple. The reason it feels like a fever has broken in the United States is that people are tired of being angry and worried and miserable all the time, and we’re ready for some happiness and some reckless optimism. This dumb thing lets us show contempt for the contemptible without having to think about how terrible they really are.

I’m tired of news and social media presenting a never-ending succession of unforgivably awful things that Trump has said or done, milking yet another cycle of outrage for everything it’s worth, tricking some of us into believing oh this time, for sure, he’s gone too far! and then going on with no consequences. And seemingly no memory, as they set us up for the next one. It’s more fun to say he has tiny hands than to say he’s a racist, misogynist, narcissistic, incompetent grifter. The “tiny hands” thing isn’t true, but it lets me express my utter contempt without feeling like his virulent hate has infected me.

Vance is a reprehensible person. It’s a good thing he’s such a laughably terrible candidate, because hearing his beliefs from a more competent person would be alarmingly repulsive. I don’t want us all to keep wasting our lives fighting battles of attrition against regressive people who have nothing of value to contribute to society.

In fact, I don’t want to think about that couch-molesting dipshit at all. I’d rather be happy.

1
In my defense: posts on this blog aren’t meant to persuade or really even inform, but are just me trying to sort out how I think about a topic. You get what you pay for!
2
The tweet expertly cites page numbers in the book, and independent of anything else, is just a masterfully-executed shitpost.
3
Completely unlike actual disinformation, and anyone with any sense should be able to tell the difference.

Happily Outside the Room Where It Happens

What happens when an already-dysfunctional political system comes into contact with ten million experts

Previously on Spectre Collie, I presented my grand theory on the state of American politics in 2024, which is that nobody actually understands what the hell is going on. And more importantly: the more confidently somebody asserts that they do understand what’s going on, the more suspect they are.

With a few notable exceptions. After the past few weeks, the only people that seem trustworthy to me and insightful enough to say what’s actually going on are Harris, Walz, and Buttigieg.¹ In other words: I’ve become the guy smitten with politicians and extremely distrustful of the “mainstream media,” the New York Times in particular.

In other words: what the f@$#?!²

I think the short answer is that everything has been allowed to get so weird and nonsensical that it requires a full reboot. I already thought that we were seeing a reboot of the Democratic party, but it looks like it’s turning into a total turn-the-entire-system-off-wait-30-seconds-and-turn-it-back-on-again to reset everything to the center.

And yes, obviously, it is the center. Maybe slightly left; it’s hard to tell anymore when they’re on stage at a Democratic rally saying how much they respect the Second Amendment. Everything in the Harris/Walz platform is just widely popular common sense. The only reason it’s ever interpreted anywhere as “dangerously leftist,” or even “boldly progressive,” is because corporate journalism and social media have failed us.

1
And a smattering of independent journalists
2
Reminder: I promised my mother I’d stop using the f-word online.

Do Not Cite the Deep Magic To Me

A simple and hopefully obvious reminder that if we try to learn everything from history, we are doomed to repeat it.

First I have to acknowledge that this post is entirely the result of my being too online over the past couple of weeks. I have been back on the centralized social media apps, and they are bad places that do bad things to people.¹ Everybody got such a rush from so much news happening so fast, some people are now displaying withdrawal symptoms from having to wait for Kamala Harris to announce a VP pick.

Again, and I can’t stress this enough: always-on news channels and infinite social media feeds are a blight on humanity.

But since there are going to be tons of self-proclaimed political science and policy experts going online to offer their opinions, and since I’m apparently helpless to resist going back to read everything they have to say, I’ve just got one simple request: let’s stop acting like things are still the same as they were even four years ago, much less back in 2008.

What prompted this: reading multiple predictions about who was going to be chosen as Harris’s VP, which all sounded identical to conversations that have been happening for as long as I’ve been following politics.² “It has to be Shapiro, because they have to do well in Pennsylvania,” or “they need someone who will go against Trump’s energy,” or “America’s not ready for a gay Vice President,” etc. etc. It’s all so outdated and irrelevant that they might as well be talking about star signs or bodily humours.

It really stood out to me because I was guilty of it myself. When all the “elite” Democrats were going through contractions trying to squeeze out Joe Biden, my biggest concern was that there’d be no one to replace him, forcing the Democrats into reliving the contentious “Hillary vs Bernie” infighting that helped make me disgusted with the party. I have to admit that I’d immediately discounted Kamala Harris, because I immediately assumed that she was too “risky” and would never get the nomination.

What was that based on? Just years of seeing the Democrats be frightened of their own shadows, constantly playing to some mythical undecided strawman in Iowa that probably never actually existed, and always finding a way to be foiled despite being the most risk-averse people imaginable. Plus all the self-satisfied “social media leftists” in the Bay Area, who’d never shut up with the “Kamala is a cop” nonsense.

But we should all recognize that none of that applies anymore, assuming it ever actually did. Everything leading up to Harris’s nomination feels so unprecedented, it’s gotten to the point where it’s unnerving. When am I going to have to be cynical and disappointed again?! For now, though, it feels like we’ve got a candidate for President who’s actually someone who’d be great at the job. Who’s smart and capable, and personable. Not just an emergency fill-in, not just someone who was the safest of all available options, and not just someone who’d be good at getting votes.

It’s an exciting feeling, the thought of somebody getting into office because they’d be good at being President, not just good at strategizing through an election. And I’d hope that whoever is the VP candidate (and it goes without saying, but there are no outright bad options in the front runners), they’re chosen not just for strategy, but for personality, and the dynamic they’ll bring to the campaign.

And frankly, I’d hope that the campaign takes full advantage of their opponents absolutely shitting the bed, and of the Democratic establishment being too scared of the alternative for too much infighting, and continues running a campaign based on the right thing to do, instead of just the thing that “plays best in the flyover states” or “energizes the base.” Or whatever other nonsense the 24/7 political news cycle has poisoned us with. It feels like we’ve been given the chance to do a reboot, and we should take advantage of it.

1
Mastodon is still okay. It seems to be near-impossible to unintentionally “go viral,” and the lack of up-to-date topical news makes everything much calmer.
2
And then getting frustrated and disillusioned and ignoring all of it until the next major election.

Idiotic Design

The blissfully liberating chaos of not trusting anyone who claims to understand what’s going on

The featured image in this post is a screenshot from CNN’s YouTube channel, where the title of a video promised “What the data is saying about who Kamala Harris will likely choose as VP.” It includes headshots of the front-runners, with a precise percentage value under each one. When you watch the video, you see that the “data” is gathered not from polls, but from people betting on the outcome.

In other words: nobody knows shit. (And also: 24-hour news channels were a mistake).

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve broken all my pledges to be a mentally-healthier and better-functioning human, and I’ve gone right back to obsessively reading social media.¹ The reason is because Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign is nailing it.

They came out swinging with two “channels:” first there’s the campaign, which releases official statements in response to significant events, with thoughtful takes that stay true to the campaign’s message of freedom, unity, and moving forward. Second, there’s “Kamala HQ,” which calls itself the “rapid response” team, and posts memes directly responding to whatever is the hot topic of the moment. It’s legitimately funny and fun to read, building on the unfamiliar sense of optimism that came with Biden’s endorsement and the start of Harris’s campaign, and somehow against all odds making it actually enjoyable to follow a US presidential campaign.

The only reason I’m not even more impressed with Harris’s social media team is because 90% of the time, they just post completely unedited clips and statements from their opponents. Over the past three-and-a-half years of a mostly functioning government, I’d forgotten just how bad the Republicans are at everything, and how much Trump and Vance seem so eager to just completely shit all over themselves on camera.

But again, I think Harris’s campaign has come out strong. And it’s not just because they have a social media team that’s young enough never to have used dial-up internet. It feels like more than any other Democratic campaign in my lifetime, they understand what a Presidential campaign needs to do: tell us what we want to hear and also what we need to hear.

1
Threads, Bluesky, and Instagram, at least. Twitter is still inexcusable garbage and everyone should delete their account immediately.

People Are Saying

Idly wondering whether the basic rules of the internet will be forgotten as “generative AI” gets more ubiquitous

Last night, we watched the first episode of The Acolyte. I don’t yet have a strong opinion of the show, one way or the other, so this post isn’t about that. Instead, it’s about how I went to IMDB to look something up about the series, and I saw that it had been review-bombed. As I read through the surprisingly lengthy outraged 1-to-3-star reviews, a couple of trends emerged: apparently, it has the worst writing of any Star Wars project to date, Disney and Lucasfilms [sic] should be ashamed, and the existence of a fire in outer space was the last straw for many, many dedicated fans.

Earlier this week, XKCD ran a comic about the objective superiority of electric motors over internal combustion engines. Comments across social media platforms were full of disappointment in cartoonist Randall Munroe for ignoring the environmental hazards of mining rare earth materials for EV batteries, the obvious fact that electric vehicles only benefit the automotive industries and prevent adoption of better mass transit, and that gas engines are necessary in the desert and/or the event of an apocalypse.

Earlier this month, collectible toy retailer Super 7 posted a message on their Instagram in honor of Pride month, asserting that they’ve always promoted inclusion and diversity ever since the company’s founding in San Francisco. There were dozens of comments in response, calling them out for pandering and going woke, and informing them that they’d lost a loyal customer.

The one thing that all these comments have in common is that they’re garbage. Not just in the sense that they’re wrong, but in that they provide nothing of value and just weigh down the target with useless noise. As they’re most often intended to.

Anyone who’s been paying any attention at all knows that public comments sections and centralized social media — which already had a well-deserved reputation for being toxic waste — fell off a cliff in terms of usefulness around 2018-2019, when people with enough money finally recognized their value as tools for misinformation and disinformation. At least for me, that was the point that it all turned from “unreliable source” to “useless cesspit.”

I don’t even put in the effort to be discerning anymore. I used to look for stuff that seemed suspicious. But now, I just assume that everything posted online from any source I don’t recognize is being made in bad faith. Not even in the sense of not trusting the “wisdom of the crowd,” since there are always going to be cranks and fools out there; but in the sense that we can no longer assume that the crowd even exists at all.

This latest round of noise-to-signal stood out to me because of its predictability. Even though I don’t put any stock in the actual comments, I still just take it as a given that modern Star Wars, electric vehicles, and LGBT equality, are going to be treated as “controversial” topics on the internet. Even when we think we’re being discerning, we’ve already been “infected” by the torrent of garbage, conditioned to assume that there’s controversy where none actually exists.

Dead Meat and A Coward’s Guide to Horror Movies

Recommending an extremely popular YouTube channel that happens to be exactly what I’ve been looking for

It feels odd for me to be recommending a YouTube channel that has 6.5 million subscribers as if I were the first person to discover it. But it’s not the kind of thing that I’d normally recommend, and I only just found it recently, even though it’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.

The channel is called Dead Meat, and the bulk of the content is the “Kill Count” series, which gives a recap of a horror movie, calling out each time a character is killed, and then tallying them all up (with a pie chart!) at the end.

This is perfect for me, who’s got a fraught relationship with horror movies. I really, deeply want to love them. They’re interesting to pick apart, especially since all of the dynamics are often blatantly playing out across the surface, letting you find as much or as little depth as you want. At the same time, the entire genre is designed to refuse that kind of over-intellectualized analysis. They work best when they bypass all of the critical parts of your brain and go for an immediate reaction. As somebody who overthinks everything, I love watching something like Malignant or Orphan: First Kill, and not “turning off my brain,” but letting it target my brain directly and just enjoy it.

But that’s also why I can’t handle so many of them. I used to just say that I was a coward and leave it at that, but I think there’s actually more to it. When a horror movie clicks with me, I absolutely love it. But there’s a narrow window of tone, subject matter, violence, gore, performance, verisimilitude, and a dozen other aspects that, if a movie veers even a little bit out of the zone, it becomes completely intolerable for me.

Fun Fact: We Can Never Truly Know Anything

Thoughts about how easily-digestible information ends up in the same state as most things that’ve been digested

As the algorithms have spent time getting to know me, they’ve learned (at least) two things: 1) I’m a nerd who enjoys learning quick, easily-digestible pieces of information; and 2) I’m pretty shallow and will pay extra attention to anything presented by a young, handsome man with a beard. So YouTube must’ve understandably believed it’d hit the jackpot when it started recommending videos from the “magnify” channel.

And it was correct; it’s an interesting channel, mostly dedicated to short-form info, mostly related to language and the origins of words, with particular repeated emphasis on different aspects of Christianity and their roots in Judaism.

Coincidentally, in the middle of watching a ton of the short videos back to back, I checked into a forum on Discord and saw someone repeating the (certainly, patently false) etymology of the word “posh” as an acronym for “port out, starboard home.” The coincidence jumped out at me, because this was a recurring topic in the newspaper column The Straight Dope — or at least its online message boards — which I used to read with beyond-religious devotion in the days before social media took over everybody’s attention.

I should make it absolutely clear that the “magnify” channel is both entertaining and interesting, which is its only real obligation, and that it at least seems both convincing and motivated by a real desire to inform. I have yet to hear anything presented on it that fails to pass my bullshit test. I’m not trying to disparage or cast any doubt on the channel itself, or its content. Just its format, which is driven by the state of online media in 2024.