Don't Feed the Ducks

Don’t Feed the Ducks! A Zany Animation Predicts the Absurd Outcomes of Ignoring the Rules (Vimeo)

How many people actually heed the warnings about not feeding ducks waddling around public parks? If you’ve taken a flippant approach to these guidelines in the past, we recommend you watch AJ Jeffries’ new animation, “DUCKS.” What opens as an innocuous jaunt around a pond quickly turns into a dark comedy full of strange contortions and feathered villains sure to pop into your head the next time you throw a chunk of bread.

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AI Infiltration in Media and Business

[ed. A few links.]

Roughly one-third of new websites are generated by AI, as are 40 percent of podcasts. It’s probably not even possible to quantify the other AI miscellanea you encounter every day: in Yelp reviews, in Instagram captions, in newsletters, in stories by the New York Times’ obscenely well-compensated Canada bureau chief, for chrissake, in messages from your coworkers.

I am coming around to the conclusion that AI writing has saturated not only most of the capital-c content I consume, but also many of my interpersonal communications. And on multiple levels, I’m increasingly unsure what to do with that information. There is a part of me that feels ridiculous to be a writer in this particular moment, but also ridiculous to be a person? — like if we’re outsourcing Mother’s Day cards to AI now, truly what is the point of existence? [Wired, Bloomberg, User Mag, Karyn Pugliese, 404 Media, Futurism]

A network of 17 shady, AI-generated local news sites is actually the work of a reputation-management firm that helps disgraced executives get their good names (or at least, their good Google results) back after prison. [The Florida Trib]

“Output-competence decoupling” is a term for a very modern and maddening phenomenon: the quality of someone’s work is no longer a reliable signal of their competence. People who can barely string three words together can spin up entire local “news” ventures. People who don’t know the first thing about programming vibe code entire apps. The problem is that the process of acquiring competence is also the process of acquiring judgment and common sense.

I’m reminded of that immortal Ira Glass quote addressed to beginners at the start of their careers: “It is only by going through a volume of work that … your work will be as good as your ambitions.” [No One’s Happy]

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Jumping Jacks For Clicks

There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy. [...]

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

by Battery Operated Orchestra and Brigitte Rose, Bandmade |  Read more:

Images: uncredited/YouTube 

[ed. Works for some, not for others. Which, I guess is the point. The algorithm is selecting for a certain type of musician, not necessarily the best. That YouTube email really says everything you need to know about their business model, doesn't it?]

Adventures With Words

Typos are good now?

“Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them.” (“The Typo Vibe Shift,” by Michael Waters for The Atlantic; gift link)

That one baby name

The fastest-rising baby name of the year in the U.S. for two consecutive years is … Ailany? News to me, but three of the experts I follow were on it: Laura Wattenberg (Namerology), Hannah Emery, PhD (Janus Name Journeys), and Clare Green (Nameberry). Green writes: “Fun, bright, and melodic, Ailany is a modern Hispanic name with multicultural influences. It broke into the US top 1000 for the first time in 2023 and by 2024, it had risen over 750 places to sit just outside the Top 100.” [...]

Tolkien vs. the tech right

“J.R.R. Tolkien was famously anti-tech and anti-government … If he were alive in the age of Palantir, he might not be thrilled that a tech company with lucrative government contracts is name-checking his creations.” And it’s not just Palantir, notorious for its alliance with ICE: Tech companies called Mithril, Anduril, Erebor, and Narya all took their names from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. (Benjamin Stephen for Vox video, via Kottke.org, which offers some additional data points)

Enduring coolth

Why “cool” is still cool. “Most slang words come and go, but there’s one undisputed king that’s over 100 years old and still as relevant as ever.” (Laughing Squid)

by Nancy Friedman, Fritinancy | Read more:

[ed. Ailany... um, ok.]

How to Find YouTube Success With Music Theory

[ed. As Ted Gioia writes:

"I’d never seen Rick Beato’s breakout video before—where he tests his young son’s musical ear. But he included highlights in his latest YouTube upload, and it is worth watching, especially if you know anything about music theory.

People need to see this if they think there are no objective standards in music, and everything is just opinion and personal preference.

The reality is that you can actually measure a person’s musical aptitude, and those who have this demonstrable gift possess a huge advantage in making music. Some people are so creative that they can thrive despite this gap, but the gap exists nonetheless."

[ed. Beato is of course, ten years later, one of YouTube's most successful personalities in the category of 'all things Music'.] 

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn

The internet is abuzz with talk of male yearning. Of course, there’s no reason the phrase should mean anything to you unless you’re chronically online. But as a woman born in 1997—right on the cusp of the Millennial/Zoomer generational divide—who writes about culture for a living, I’ve not been able to overlook the latest cultural trend: men who yearn.

 

I started noticing this increasingly often in the last couple of years. According to Google Trends analytics, I’m not the only one. In 2023, a post on X by an account with very few followers garnered 3.5 million views. It read: “What makes a man attractive is not his stupid face but his stupendous yearning and agonizing longing for one woman and one woman alone.” Searches for “male yearning” and similar terms first spiked at the end of 2024 and have been growing consistently since. Last year, many mainstream magazines with a predominantly female readership put out articles on the topic. On TikTok, the most popular social media platform among Gen Z and younger millennials, videos about #menwhoyearn consistently get hundreds of thousands of likes.

For a generation that is marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?

As I wrote for Public Discourse recently, many young women have turned to “romantasy,” a literary genre blending fantasy settings with romantic plots, as a way to express their desire for marriage. While some novels in the genre are relatively harmless, many teach women to confuse abuse with love, often romanticizing forced marriage, as well as suggesting that male violence is evidence of commitment. This is hardly surprising, since so many of us zoomers and younger millennials are children of divorce and have grown up without a model of a healthy marriage. Many of these novels also feature very graphic sex scenes; but again, this is largely unsurprising given that we live in a pornographic culture and that women largely favor written over visual forms of pornography.

The “male yearning” trend is different, so much so that it took me by surprise. It’s somehow more wholesome. The fictional male characters most often referenced in TikTok videos about male yearning may be tall, dark, and handsome, like romantasy protagonists, but unlike in the romantasy storylines they tend to exercise restraint in their longing for the female protagonist. Where male desire in romantasy is about quick consummation, this kind of “male yearning” tends to be about acts of service, patience, and a slow-burn romance instead.

The most cited examples of fictional “men who yearn” are not always obvious. Some fit the brooding stereotype that one also finds in romantasy. For example, TikTok is full of edits of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy—as played by Matthew MacFadyen in the 2005 film adaptation—“flexing” his hand in frustration as he silently yearns for Elizabeth Bennet. And of course, the internet went absolutely crazy last year over the character of Conrad Fisher when season three of the adaptation of Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty was released. Emotionally withdrawn in his longing, Conrad has often been described by fans of the show as the young adult novel version of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy. Yet other yearning men don’t brood. Loyal to a fault and notoriously good with kids, Steve “always the babysitter” Harrington from the popular sci-fi show Stranger Things has become the object of admiration in hundreds of thousands of videos and posts made by young women.

To be clear, I’m not praising women of my generation for publicly fawning over a man, real or fictional. Some of this content borders on objectification, the very objectification of which we so often—and rightly—accuse men. This phenomenon is, nonetheless, a sign of a much healthier kind of desire than what we find in the discourse around romantasy.

The common denominator among these male characters is their willingness to accept a life of service to their loved ones...

These men exercise selflessness. They serve without expecting anything in return. They embody a healthy version of masculinity in that they use their strength not to subdue, but to support those who are more vulnerable than they are.

But how can the smutty romantasy trend coexist with this ubiquitous desire for men who respect, provide, and protect? And secondly, if data show us that young people are getting married less, why are young women consuming fiction that shows marriage, kids, and commitment as goods rather than impediments?

The first question is perhaps easier to answer. While it is overwhelmingly obvious that women—rather than men—engage with both the romantasy trend and the men-who-yearn discourse, the age range of said women overlaps only partially. Generally speaking, Gen Zers prefer to see less sex depicted in fiction than do their millennial counterparts. Romantasy reading stats, as I discussed in my previous article, point to the fact that millennials are a substantial chunk of consumers, even though the themes and plotlines of romantasy novels ostensibly target young adults.

Since I wrote that article, for example, the gay hockey romance show Heated Rivalry (yes, I’m afraid that is the title) has skyrocketed to international success. I’m given to understand that it features prolonged sex scenes, and yet most viewers are women, with millennials being a high proportion. This may seem an anomaly at first. But the book by Rachel Reid on which the show is based was released in 2019, the same year that the extremely graphic, water-cooler show par excellence Game of Thrones came to an end. By that point, millennial women had been subjected to an entire decade of adulthood of explicit content in film and TV.

I am afraid women have become somewhat desensitized. Millennial and older Gen Z women especially have, for decades, been told that they should feel no moral qualms about being both consumers and products of explicit sexual content.

Yet younger zoomers are beginning to differ from their millennial counterparts. Anecdotally, as an older zoomer myself, I’ve seen the generational divide happen right in front of my eyes. My high school peers who were just one or two years older than I have a significantly different attitude toward, and experience of, sex and relationships than my sister-in-law who is only five years younger than I. What’s surprising is not that Gen Zers are consuming smut, but that they are not consuming it at higher rates than millennials, who, now in their thirties and forties, you may expect to have progressed to a more mature view of sex and marriage.

That simply hasn’t happened. I’m hardly the first to point out that millennials are a generation marked by arrested development. They are not getting married; they’re not having kids. Some of this is explained by factors outside their control (rising house prices, etc.), but some factors are cultural. Millennials grew up engaging fully in hookup culture. Their consumption of graphic fictional content is but a reflection of their consumerist attitude toward love and relationships.

Younger Gen Z women are also not getting married, but the difference is that they are, on average, more averse than millennials to both casual sex in their own lives and depictions of sexual activity on the screen. The Marriage Foundation has spoken of a “collapse” in early marriage, “with only 4% of women and 2% of men born in 1998 marrying before age 25, marking a historical low.” But this collapse is not due exclusively or even primarily to a preference for cohabitation. The Institute for Family Studies has recently reported that Gen Z is not only marrying later and less frequently: they are also cohabiting less and having less sex overall. Essentially, zoomer women are increasingly retreating from interaction of any kind with the opposite sex, a phenomenon that is now often described as involuntary celibacy.

As well as this, recent reports suggest that Gen Z men and women want to see less explicit sexual content in films and TV shows, preferring depictions of non-sexual intimacy, whether that is deep friendship or a romantic bond. Finally, an article by Wendy Wang, also for the Institute for Family Studies, argues that, while Gen Z women are generally more egalitarian than previous generations in their attitudes toward relationships between men and women, there is one role that they still want men to play: to protect.

by Beatrice Scudeler, Public Discourse | Read more:
Image: FlixPix/Alarmy

Mary Tyler Moore

There was a scene that Robert Redford wanted for “Ordinary People” in which Beth Jarrett, played by Mary Tyler Moore, takes a cake out of the refrigerator. The cake has a circle of cherries on top, and the only action in the scene is Beth, the cold, bereaved mother, looking at the cake, adjusting the cherries, then putting the cake back in the fridge. Moore was alone in the kitchen. Redford wanted to capture Beth in an unobserved moment — what was this woman really like? How was she coping with the accidental death of her older son and the recent suicide attempt of her younger son? Had she escaped into her fastidiousness and her uptightness?

He shot it once; no good. He shot it again; no good. She tried to bring a motivation to each take: Was this cake good enough? Or, Did the cake need more cherries? And each time he’d say: “No, no, clear your mind. Let’s go again.” Every time the kitchen was set up for another scene, Redford used the opportunity to try the shot again. Moore called it “the bane of the production.” He shot it over and over, 26 times in total in front of a “mystified” crew, she wrote in her memoir.

Redford knew the role was a change from Moore’s sunny appearances as Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Laura Petrie on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” so much so that he was initially worried to even approach her. But when he did, he told her that when he read the Judith Guest novel that he was adapting, he couldn’t stop picturing Moore as Beth. Redford had a home in Malibu, and sometimes he’d look out on the beach and see her taking walks. She seemed like a sad figure on those walks, so different from the spunky and triumphant walks she took in the opening credits of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He told her that it was the most important role in the film. He wanted someone to play her sympathetically. Moore agreed emphatically. Beth reminded Moore of her father. She also had a little of Beth in her herself — she would realize that eventually. She told Redford that she didn’t think of Beth as a villain but as just another victim in the story.

Moore called “Ordinary People” the “holy grail” of her career, not just because it had a remarkable script and production, or because of the Oscar nomination that she earned from it, but because it saved her from eternal typecasting just when she needed it. She had been so good in sitcoms. But what now? She was only in her early 40s, and it seemed as if she was sentenced to a life of short-lived series and celebrity guest appearances on sitcoms and game shows. Depth and mood and range weren’t things people associated with her.

When “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted in 1970, no one could have predicted how iconic it would become for the way it portrayed women’s experiences in the workplace, and for the way its heroine, Mary Richards, remained plucky in the face of discrimination, both passive and aggressive. That was back when plucky seemed like a good solution to the constant insults of merely trying to function while female, when smiling with moxie at all the crap thrown in your direction seemed like the best way to survive and advance.

Mary Richards struck an exact balance of wit and intelligence with a kind of wise understanding of people’s natures. She was a perfect guide for navigating the a-wokening of the corporate American man (a project that is still ongoing, to say the least). The show’s cultural impact over its seven years was monumental. Mary Richards allowed women to ask themselves questions out loud about what exactly they were hoping for in life, why it was so important for them to marry and how the families we build for ourselves can be as important and sustaining as the families we’re born into.

Mary Richards was a hero for all she represented. But Moore wasn’t Mary Richards. She didn’t have her ease or confidence. She grew up in a house with distant parents; her mother was an alcoholic. Moore lived between her parents’ house and her grandmother and aunt’s house. When she was at her parents’ house, she slept on the couch, because there were only two bedrooms and she felt uncomfortable sleeping in the same room with her brother. She grew up to struggle with diabetes, with rejection, with alcoholism, with divorce, with another divorce, with the death of a grown, only child, with forgiveness. She left her second husband, Grant Tinker, with whom she had so little intimacy that they never undressed in front of each other except during actual sex. She moved to New York, away from him. At night, in her apartment, she made margaritas in her blender that were one-quarter drink mix, one-quarter ice and one-half tequila, so that they had the consistency of a milkshake. She got into her bed at night, next to the air-conditioner, and built a kind of fort around herself with pillows and drank until those margaritas began their work. (She would eventually marry a third time.)

People still mistook Moore for Richards, though. In 1980, Gloria Steinem asked Moore to speak at an Equal Rights Amendment rally in Washington. Moore said yes, but when the time came, she lied and said she had an ear infection and couldn’t fly. Steinem suggested she take a train instead. She told Moore that Tip O’Neill, the speaker of the House, had agreed to meet with Steinem’s group — Bella Abzug, Gloria Allred, etc. — only if Moore was in attendance. So Moore took the train, begrudgingly, now roped into a four-hour trip instead of an hourlong flight. She showed up to the meeting and submitted to the “big hug” that O’Neill demanded of her. (“Where’s that little cutie?” she remembered him saying.) But it was a waste of time. The amendment stalled, and she found the women rallying for equal rights well intentioned and intelligent but off-putting, with their shouting, like “angry children.” This, she believed, was one reason the amendment ultimately failed to become law. Yes, she saw the paradox in all this. Yes, she loved Mary Richards, too. But didn’t all the women in America know by now how exhausting it was to aspire to be Mary Richards?

So there she was, a few years after her show went off the air. She told people she ended it so that they could go out on top, but the real reason was that the producers, the writers and Tinker, who co-founded their production company, MTM Enterprises, saw so much potential in spinoffs — “Rhoda,” “Lou Grant” and others — that it seemed like the smart move. Great for the bottom line, yes, but what about Moore? She had these Maryisms, she called them — referring to the movements and speech patterns that she had absorbed into her own manner after so many years of playing Mary Richards.

She did some theater, including playing a quadriplegic who wants to end her own life, in “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?” for which she won raves and a special Tony. Then came Redford’s offer. But it wasn’t really an offer, in the end. After they spoke that first time, he took three months to consider if she was right for the role, auditioning just about every actress in town, from what Moore heard.

When he finally returned to her, saying, Yes, please, come be my Beth Jarrett, she nearly fell over with relief. Now she could show something of herself to as big an audience as she’d always had. She had been so afraid that people would find out that she wasn’t Mary Richards. But in the time she waited for Redford’s offer, she realized she was more afraid that they wouldn’t; she was more afraid that she’d never be seen or known or loved for who she was.

Redford continued to try to get the shot of Beth and the cake, but it was never to be. It appears nowhere in the movie. Moore said later that she believed that Redford had been looking for Beth’s soul. But Beth wasn’t the kind of person to reveal her soul. Beth was the kind of person who would rather give you a cake and a smile. She could mourn by overcoming sadness in a lifelong pursuit for perfectionism. Beth’s soul was the act of not showing her soul. How did Redford not see that? How did Redford not see that Beth’s soul was right in front of him the entire time?

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Philippe Halsman

[ed. From the series The Lives They Lived. See also: Delia Graff Fara.]

Hollywood Sausage Factory

Quentin Tarantino has criticised contemporary Hollywood, calling it “a flavourless sausage factory”.

Writing in Sight and Sound magazine, Tarantino said that “since the pandemic … it seems almost impossible for a new movie to come out that I don’t pick to death”. He added: “Flaws, implausibilities, audience pandering, miscast performers or just plain stupid shit usually torpedoes every new movie coming out of the flavourless sausage factory that used to call itself Hollywood.” [...]

In his article, Tarantino dwelled at length on one current film he enjoyed – The Rip, directed by Joe Carnahan, currently on Netflix – and mentioned Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and the Kevin Costner-directed Horizon: An American Saga Chapters 1 and 2 as recent films he liked. He went on to say that he had seen “nothing that really held me in its grip and swept me away to the magical land of enjoyment that I used to visit regularly and was the reason I loved movies above all other art forms. These days I’d rather read a book.”

by Andrew Pulver, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Noam Galai/Getty Images

[ed. Can't disagree. He's also known to have other strong opinions:]

The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer

Facts are funny things. It was a fact, for instance, that in the spring of 2024 I won $132,000 playing trivia. That May, I’d flown from Oxford, where I was a graduate student, across the Atlantic to a soundstage in Los Angeles, and played for eight good days on Jeopardy!

 

It was also a fact—one I liked to tastefully overlook when asked at holidays or on trips home—that I was unemployed, that I’d gone to Oxford for a master’s degree in large part to escape further unemployment. But I had been decent on Jeopardy!, and I knew that decent trivia players were often invited back for a second chance at more money. Returning to the show, however—for something like the Tournament of Champions or the Jeopardy! Invitational—meant facing tougher questions against better players. And it was a fact that, to prepare for this possibility, I would need to throw myself into the world of competitive trivia, or quiz.

Quiz is many things to the disciple. It is not simply trivia. It is not simply a hobby. It verges, for the believer, on a way of life. Originating out of Depression-era American radio quiz shows and really taking root in the UK in the 1970s, quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure. Elite quizzers are known to prep for, at minimum, two or three hours a day, thumbing through hundreds of thousands of flashcards at rapid-fire pace. They participate in four or five leagues a week. This can be all-consuming, but it can also vault the elite quizzer into a rarefied echelon of erudition. These players have spent decades in the ceaseless memorization of facts and are nearer, maybe than anyone else in history, to the sum total of human knowledge.

Each year, the greatest quizzers from around the globe assemble at the International Quizzing Championships (IQC) to vie for glory. IQC is perhaps the most prestigious—and difficult—trivia tournament in the world. It features a battery of individual competitions, testing general and specialized knowledge, as well as an Olympic-style contest for national teams. The weekend-long event culminates with the Individual Quiz and Nations Cup finals, but also includes specialist quizzes (designed to test aptitude in specific subjects) and an Aspirational Cup (for those teams which didn’t make playoffs, but one day, perhaps, might). IQC might function as a social mecca for the obsessively curious, but it’s also armed with a caliber of brainpower that’d outgun much of the Ivy League. I wanted to meet these elite quizzers, to learn from them. And deep down, I wanted to win.

by Drew Basile, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © Arnaud Aubry

“My Weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago

[ed. Mental Awareness Day. Pretty dope.] 

The Most 2020s Art Ever Made

Five years ago, Bo Burnham released Inside on Netflix to near-universal acclaim. Inside is a fantastically rich comedy special and probably the single best piece of content made about the COVID-19 pandemic in any medium.

But looking back at it five years later, Inside feels like more than just a very good comedy set, more than just a statement about the pandemic. It feels, if you’ll forgive the pun, special.

It’s always a risk to call a race before we’ve reached the finish line, but with some trepidation, I’ll take that chance: Even though the decade isn’t over yet, the 2020s already have their definitive piece of art. And we got it in 2021.

A definitive piece of art needs to embody the main trends of its time. Its strengths and flaws should be the quintessential strengths and flaws of its era. It should ideally anticipate the trajectory society is headed in. And it hopefully has something meaningful to say about the technological, social, and cultural currents people are navigating.

Inside does all of these things better than anything else produced this decade. [...]

Inside Bo Burnham

Bo Burnham catapulted to fame the way everyone catapults to fame these days: social media. In 2006, he was one of YouTube’s earliest viral creators, and his trajectory from awkward internet teen to global comedy star was essentially a straight line upward.

Hailed as a comedy prodigy, he toured internationally, appeared on Comedy Central, and released an EP all before turning 18. At 23, he released his second comedy special/album what. as an hour-long Netflix feature to widespread acclaim, then at age 25, released his third special Make Happy to even more widespread, near-universal critical praise.

But at the height of his success, Burnham began to have panic attacks on stage and for several years stopped performing live altogether.

During this time, he experimented with other work, acting in Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and directing his own film Eighth Grade. After the pandemic began in 2020, Burnham decided to work around his anxiety by upending the traditional live comedy format and creating a “comedy special” that was filmed in a single room with no audience.

Like so much art in the digital age, it’s difficult to perfectly categorize Inside. It’s a comedy special and it’s an album. It’s fictional, autobiographical, and autofictional all at once.

At times, Inside has the feel of a documentary or a behind-the-scenes making-of featurette. It was made for Netflix, but it was also clearly built for the social internet, designed to be chopped up for consumption on YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, and other platforms.

Like much of today’s independent media, Inside is an auteur production where Burnham acts as the writer, director, editor, and performer all at the same time. It’s a shapeshifting, genre-bending work that challenges your expectations for what a comedy special can be.

Inside is framed around Burnham’s experiences during the COVID pandemic, the single most important event of the long 2020s. While Inside never once explicitly mentions the pandemic, it’s a film about all the ways COVID transformed our relationship with technology and one another.

Burnham is uniquely well suited to diagnose the ways in which the internet has changed us all, as someone who was raised online and whose stardom was born there. The opening number is deliberately grating as Burnham croons about “content”:

Look I made you some content
Daddy made you your favorite, open wide
Here comes the content
It’s a beautiful day to stay inside

Burnham mocks the online world where every attempt at art, commentary, humor, and dialogue is flattened into the grotesque “content,” but he also helped create that world and now finds himself trapped in it.

The word “content” appears frequently throughout the special, acting as a kind of brain-rotted leitmotif. In one unsettling interlude, Burnham appears as a YouTuber, saying “Thank you for watching my content!” while cheerily wielding a knife. “Keep watching, ‘cause there’s a lot more content where that came from.” he chirps, waving the knife at me through the screen, part promise, part threat.

The special’s first half is full of these little vivisections of online culture.

“FaceTime with My Mom (Tonight)” highlights the banal frustrations of trying to communicate with older relatives who are not digital natives.

“Sexting” captures the anxieties of someone who is stuck inside, who is still horny, and who desperately wants to be sexy through their phone, but is pathetically unable to actually make it happen.

“White Woman’s Instagram” skewers the performative femininity of female influencers, with Burnham re-creating dozens of popular Instagram shots.

“Welcome to the Internet” may be the single best encapsulation of what it’s like to exist online ever made, with its demented, demonic narrator tempting you with “A little bit of everything, all of the time.” Burnham’s internet is one where the banal is juxtaposed with the horrible — “Which Power Ranger are you? Take this quirky quiz! Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids.”

Burnham believes we’re all trapped in a hellscape of our own making precisely because it’s so difficult to segment the useful ways of being online from the poisonous parts that are tearing apart society.

Inside’s commentary is especially pointed when it comes to the people and corporations manipulating the online world. While the flashy songs about Jeff Bezos get more attention, Burnham’s sketch about cynical, socially aware brand consultants is far more cutting:

There’s no sugarcoating it. The world is… fucked up. And you’ve got a choice as a brand. You can hide and bury your head in the sand and hope it fixes itself, or you can roll up your sleeves and get to work… and sell Butterfingers.

The special also takes time to satirize the worst, laziest types of online content like self-indulgent reaction videos, monotone gaming livestreams, and influencer culture. Even the cut-for-time sketches that only made it on the extended version of Inside are sharp.

In one, Burnham mocks vapid celebrity interview practices designed to create social media clips. In another — and it is practically criminal that this sketch was left out of the completed special — he goes after the absurdity of Joe Rogan’s podcast, showcasing two comedians who insist that they are being canceled by PC culture, that the things they say are just jokes, but also, that they are modern-day philosophers and artists, while “This episode is sponsored by Manstuff’s Dick SprayTM” scrolls along the bottom.

The best parodies work because the author has a deep connection to and appreciation for the subject being parodied. Burnham’s status as a digital native is what makes the social media commentary so sharp. The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme once described Burnham as one of the “leading auteurs of the mediated mind,” an expert on the consequences of perceiving the world (and being perceived) through a black screen.

There’s a psychic cost to being so online, and Burnham has certainly paid it. That makes Inside feel less like an outsider’s rant and more like an insider’s dispatch.

by Jeremiah Johnson, The Argument |  Read more:

Image: Netflix/Instagram

[ed. Well... now I'm intrigued. Never heard of this so will have to check it out. Update: It's great! Burnham's a smart and funny guy.]

Bye, Bye SI

On Friday, several of Sports Illustrated’s best and brightest writers, or what remains of them, announced they’d been laid off.

Jeff Pearlman, who made his bones as a journalist for SI when it was one of the world’s most prominent sports magazines, had his heart broken all over again.

Among those who said on social media that they’d been laid off were Stephanie Apstein, Tyler Lauletta, Kyle Koster, and Mike McDaniel. Meanwhile, Front Office Sports reported that several longtime writers — including Greg Bishop and Michael Rosenberg — were laid off as part of the latest round of cuts at SI.

This is, of course, just the latest in a long series of cuts and reorganizations for the once-proud sports media brand that now trades on its reputation to create merchandise, resorts, and mostly mediocre editorial content, sometimes aided by AI.

“As a guy who wrote for Sports Illustrated for a long time and a guy who loves Sports Illustrated, like loves, loves, loves… this stuff carves me up,” Pearlman said in a TikTok video. “And it’s one thing that they get rid of writers, they lay people off. What I hate the most is that these corporate douchebags who have taken over the magazine view it just as a name now.

“That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn. It’s something to put on whatever you can shove that thing on. That’s what it is now. Sports Illustrated has become nothing more than a way to attract people… It’s just so disturbing.”

Pearlman then ran down the who’s-who list of prominent sports writers who once graced the magazine’s pages. [...]

Pearlman, who left SI in 2002, says he could see the writing on the wall even back then.

“I started knowing SI was in trouble, I would say, for me, a couple of things,” Pearlman said. “Number one, when they f*cked up adjusting to the internet. Big time screw-up. Number two, when they laid off all of their photographers, considering it’s literally Sports Illustrated. Number three, when they just decided to destroy their library. Like, literally take the SI library, which was awesome, and just give it away.

“And now here we sit. The last of their name writers gone. Now, basically an empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports. It sucks. It’s a dark day in sports.”

by Sean Keeley, Awful Announcing|  Read more:

Image: Sports Illustrated Resorts, Jeff Pearlman

[ed. Rolling Stone business model.]

Hug of Death

Will Japan's content industries survive the government's efforts to promote them?

You can be loved or you can be feared.

In a January interview, the White House’s chief of staff declared that we live in a world “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” signaling America’s choice to take the latter path.

Japan, on the other hand, seems dedicated to the former. In February, Japanese government officials announced a plan to expand the size of the nation’s content production industry, meaning its books, manga, anime, games, movies, and more, to $130 billion USD by 2033, with an eye towards making pop culture a pillar of the economy.

Is this a realistic goal? That’s another story, one I tackled last month. But let’s put the punditry aside and say they succeed – that the Japanese government manages to create the world’s first true fantasy-industrial complex, a government and private industry working together to harness content production and export as an economic engine. (What about Korea, you might ask? They are a pop-cultural powerhouse, but the nation’s fortunes still rest upon the physical products it produces — content currently only accounts for 2% of their economy.) The question then becomes: what are the broader implications of linking a nation’s economic well-being to its entertainment industry? In other words, what happens when a country doesn’t simply promote its pop culture but comes to depend on it?

I’ve written for years about how Japan’s network of cultural producers has won hearts and minds around the globe – how their efforts have contributed to Japan’s considerable soft power. But that was an organic development, entirely grass roots, the product of countless creators and consumers collaborating over many years to build one of the most vibrant environments for pop culture on the planet. The government is well aware of its nation’s reputation as a pop superpower, but it played little role in making it so.

What about the Cool Japan fund? Notoriously ineffective. Critics (who include the fund’s own CEO) frame this as a bad thing. But I think otherwise. The scandals, the questionable investments (Cars? Refrigerators!?), and general ineptitude are a blessing in disguise. I say this with no schadenfreude. The Cool Japan bureaucrats I’ve met all seem like good folks. I say it because a government getting involved in the production of fantasies has huge implications for societies. And to be frank, I don’t think any of the architects behind Japan’s big push have really thought them through. [...]

Freedom of expression is a good thing, most of us will agree. But free speech is where the problems will begin, and compound, for the Japanese government. If the authorities are really going to take an active stand in promoting everything, without interfering in those creative works, they’re going to find themselves associated with things that get, well, creative with social norms. More than that, things that anger and disgust.

The dark matter of Japan’s pop-cultural industry is huge amounts of edgy content. Some of it is quite disturbing. (Don’t worry, that isn’t a risky click: it’s a link to the time I got “lolicon” into The New Yorker.) I’m not a fan of this material, but I’ve always believed the freedom Japanese artists feel to go places that polite society doesn’t, is part of what gives the content industry such vitality here. I mean, even if you aren’t producing crazy stuff, the knowledge that nothing’s off limits has to unshackle imaginations. Or shackle them. I don’t judge.

Anyway, promoting the industry as a whole doesn’t equal endorsement of any given content, right? The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers, blah blah blah, right? Right. But also wrong. Because once you’ve made Content with a capital C the foundation of your nation’s economy, it becomes your official face to the world. That includes all of the skeevy stuff that freaks people out, in Japan and elsewhere. And the implications of that are downright existential, as in “can a nation really exist on pop culture alone?”

by Matt Alt, Pure Invention |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Voice Hero: The Inventor of Karaoke Speaks

It’s one a.m. The bar is closing but the night isn’t over yet. While milling about on the sidewalk, a friend suggests, ‘Karaoke?’ And suddenly the night gets a lot brighter—and a little more embarrassing.

It’s safe to say that at no point in human history have there been as many people singing the songs of themselves, uncaring that their song was first sung by Gloria Gaynor, Frank Sinatra, or Bruce Springsteen. Karaoke has become inescapable, taking over bars from Manila to Manchester. Passions run high. In the Philippines, anger over off-key renditions of ‘My Way’ have left at least six dead. That statistic hides, however, the countless renditions of the Sinatra anthem that leave people smiling—or at least just wincing. The sing-along music machine terrifies the truly introverted, but it is a hero to countless closet extroverts, letting them reveal their private musical joy. Literally, karaoke is the combination of two Japanese words, ‘empty,’ and ‘orchestra’—but we might also lovingly translate it as ‘awkward delight.’

Yet for all karaoke’s fame, the name of its Dr. Frankenstein is less known, perhaps because he never took a patent out on the device and only copyrighted its name in the U.S. in 2009. His name is Daisuke Inoue, a Japanese businessman and inventor born in Osaka in 1940. In 2004 he was honored with an Ig Nobel Prize, given for unusual inventions or research.

In 2005, he shared the story of his life leading up to the Ig Nobel in an interview with Robert Scott Field for Topic Magazine. No longer in print, Topic was one of The Appendix’s inspirations (along with StoryCorps) for its celebration of the everyday and undersung heroes of our world. As a history of another sort of invention, Mr. Inoue’s interview was particularly memorable and deserves to be more widely available. With the permission of both Topic and Mr. Inoue, we are pleased to re-present his delightfully inspiring account of his life and work.

We hope you sing along.

***

Last year I received a fax from Harvard University. I don’t really speak English, but lucky for me, my wife does. She figured out the letter was about the Ig Nobel Prizes, awards that Harvard presents for inventions that make people laugh—and then make them think. I was nominated for an Ig Nobel Peace Prize as the inventor of karaoke, which teaches people to bear the awful singing of ordinary citizens, and enjoy it anyway. That is “genuine peace,” they told me.

Before I tell you about my hilarious adventures at the prize ceremony, though, you need to know how I came to invent the first karaoke machine. I was born in May 1940, in a small town called Juso, in Osaka, Japan. My father owned a small pool hall. When I was three and a half years old, I fell from the second floor and hit my head. I was unconscious for two weeks. The doctors told my parents that if I lived, I would probably have brain damage. A Buddhist priest visited me, blessed me and replaced my birth name, Yusuke, with a new name: Daisuke, which means, in the written characters of kanji, “Big Help.” I needed it. Later I learned that the same Buddhist priest had commented that the name would also lead me to help others.

by Daisuke Inoue and Robert Scott, The Appendix | Read more:
Image: courtesy Daisuke Inoue

[ed. I've been going through the archives lately, in this case 'Music'. Lots of great stuff there. Check it out.]

Around the World on a Dark Desert Highway

"Usually, the songs that pounded out of the bars and jukeboxes were the latest Top 40 smashes—“Material Girl” and “Smooth Operator” and “Time After Time.” There was also a steady supply of All-American favorites like “Country Roads” and “Hotel California,” and nobody seemed to think it strange that Filipinos should be singing, “Take me home, country roads, to the land that I adore, West Virginia…” I felt as if I were living inside a Top 40 radio station."

—Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu

***

Whenever I hear Neil Young sing about a “town in north Ontario” where there’s “memory to spare,” I’m transported back to a hillside in northern California in the early 1970s. I’m twelve and sitting with a friend the same age. We’re at summer camp and he’s teaching me the simple chord changes to “Helpless,” which is about to become the first song I can play on guitar.

Music does for me what biting into a madeleine did for that character in Proust’s novel: it sends me hurtling through time and space to a specific moment in the past. I’m sure this is true for many other people as well. And they, too, surely often end up in places far removed from the settings mentioned in the songs that set them in memory-fueled motion.

This is why, ever since reading Video Night in Kathmandu, with its wonderful evocation of mid-1980s Manila, where “music buzzed through the streets” from “dawn to midnight,” I’ve wanted to ask Pico Iyer a question: “When Don Henley begins crooning about a ‘dark desert highway’ in California, are you suddenly back in Manila and in your late twenties again?” (...)

What then of “Hotel California”? Whenever I hear Don Felder’s distinctive guitar opening now, I’m instantly in a New Delhi café in a supremely jet-lagged, disoriented state. I’d been in India less than 24 hours when that song from my teenage years in California became the first one I ever heard in India.

The mechanism of this musical memory must be somewhat different from the one that sends me to China whenever John Denver waxes nostalgic about the Shenandoah Valley. For while I had heard “Country Roads” plenty of times before going to Shanghai, I had never thought much about it, nor did I associate it with any special setting or moment. The Eagles, by contrast, were a group I listened to—and thought about—a lot while growing up in California, dreaming of a career as a singer-songwriter. And long before “Hotel California” began evoking an Indian café on my first visit to the country in 2010, it made me think of a very different time, place, and companion.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, whenever I heard “Hotel California,” I would be transported back to an afternoon in the 1970s in the west LA home of close family friends, soon after the album Hotel California was released. The house was one I hung out at a lot in those days. I was close to two of the three brothers in the family, Danny and David.

In this moment, David keeps picking the needle up off the turntable and restarting the song after first twenty and then thirty and then forty seconds of it have played. He is determined, in a way that fascinates me because it seems to border on the obsessive, to figure out how to replicate exactly the song’s bass line. The intensity of his focus strikes me as special, because I can never get myself to work as hard as David on mastering a lick. (It isn’t until later that I realize he is equally bemused as a teenager by how long I can spend worrying over and reworking a lyric I’ve written, which already seems to work fine in terms of meter and rhyme.)

It took the strangeness of hearing the song right after arriving in India to break the memory hold of that west LA living room, but by the time that happened, I had already spent years thinking about the song’s peculiar global ubiquity. Seeing it mentioned in Video Nights in Katmandu was one thing that got me thinking about this topic, but so did noticing how often, from the mid-1990s on, I would hear the strains of the song at least once during my periodic return visits to China. I also began to notice how often I would see the song mentioned on Beijing-based blogs, often disparagingly.

by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Boom | Read more:
Image: Video via Boing Boing

Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated ‘Podcasts’ Featuring Chats Between Two Robot ‘Co-Hosts’

The podcast sector suddenly may have a big new player: Amazon‘s Alexa+ AI-powered voice assistant.

Alexa has been answering billions of users’ queries since it was first released in 2014. Now Amazon is positioning Alexa+’s extended answers on any number of different topics as “podcasts,” completely compiled using AI, the company announced Monday.

Seemingly to dispel the notion that these “podcasts” will be AI audio slop, Amazon emphasized that it has deals with major news organizations to ensure “accurate, real-time news and information.” Those include the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, Politico and USA Today; publications from Condé Nast, Hearst and Vox Media; and more than 200 local newspapers across the U.S.

In an example clip shared by Amazon of the new Alexa Podcasts feature, the two AI-generated hosts discuss “the latest music releases.” A male Alexa+ narrator says more than 50% of music listening now comes from unsigned artists. “The monoculture is just gone,” a female-voiced Alexa+ narrator chimes in. The male Alexa+ host says there has been “stoner metal,” indie pop and experimental hip-hop music “all dropping on the same Friday,” and adds, “That’s not chaos — that’s the healthiest the music ecosystem has ever been.” [...]

It’s not the first AI-generated podcast system out there: Google’s NotebookLM AI tool last year added the ability to autogenerate a podcast of sorts based on a collection of notes and information using a synthetic voice. That prompted a lawsuit from former NPR “Morning Edition” host David Greene, who alleged that Google copied his voice without permission.

To use Alexa Podcasts, users can simply tell Alexa what topic they’re curious about and “it does the rest in minutes.” Alexa+ will provide an overview of what it plans to cover, and let you adjust the length and direction before it generates the podcast. When your episode is ready, you’ll get a notification on your Echo Show device and the Alexa app.

Alexa Podcasts is available to Alexa+ customers in the U.S. Amazon said it is also “thinking about how you’ll be able to create different types of custom audio on demand, from personalized news briefings to content based on the information and documents you want to share. This is just the beginning of a whole new way to learn, stay informed, and consume content that fits into your life.”

by Todd Spangler, Variety |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Thank god. I can only imagine the world's been crying out for more podcasters; especially AI fake ones. This'll probably be a continuing trend: a new story every month with some new profession being threatened or replaced. Slow boiling for frogs.]

Is TikTok Art?

Short-form content gets a bad rap these days. TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube Shorts — all of it nothing but brainrot and digital dopamine, a modern “hypodermic needle,” in the words of Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke.

This is a moment of legal accountability for Big Social Media.

But this should also be a moment of cultural reckoning and artistic recognition. These companies have built their modern empires on an astronomical volume of short-form video content, mind-boggling in its multiplicity and universal popularity.

Kids don’t just spend time on social media because they are screen junkies who can’t read. That would be too easy. They spend time on social media, in large part, because social media has become brilliantly, absurdly, unprecedentedly, entertaining.

Even if you wish it weren’t, vertical 30-second video is the creative medium of our time. Taking seriously the merits of any new formal paradigm is in the spirit of how we have met every technological rupture in art history.

So here are several broad categories of short-form content that I think are worth appreciating on their own creative terms, beyond the addictive infrastructure and AI-generated slop they are embedded in.

1) The vocation vlogger

Why do any of us consume art? One reason (arguably the main reason) is the desire to escape into the lifeworlds of others. These worlds can be fictional, as in the case of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, or based in fact, like the hit reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

Vlogging taps into a similar vein of curiosity. Take the TikTok videos posted by flight attendant Maisha Prather. She documents her life working for Swiss International Airlines, like in this video of her long-haul flight from Zurich to Hong Kong, captioned “Work a night flight with me.”

Or this post by an ER nurse who brings viewers along for a 13-hour shift, featuring details about tracheostomy care and catheter placement. Or lawyer Carrie Jernigan, who has amassed over 1 million followers by sharing footage of her daily life as an attorney in Arkansas. I call these creators “vocation vloggers.”

Social media is often accused of promoting unrealistic lifestyle standards and glorifying the Kardashians of the world. But by sheer volume, even if not by algorithmic amplification, the normy masses make up a vast slice of today’s creator base, posting down-to-earth footage of the many forms that 21st-century existence can take.

This content is not valueless. The vibe of the vocation vlogger is a reality check, a window into the tough financial or emotional realities of professions that most of us will never work. The genre scratches the same itch as any good-old workplace drama, like The Pitt or The Bear or The West Wing, all TV shows that revolve around specific occupational settings.

As patients, customers, or passengers, we see only the public-facing performance. As content consumers, we are invited backstage. And following people into rooms we normally don’t have access to — crew sleep compartments or the Oval Office — is endlessly intriguing.

2) The craftsman

A close cousin of the vocational vlogger is the craftsman. This genre is all about watching people do things they are very good at. It complicates the straightforward depiction of social media content being nothing but a race to rock-bottom degeneracy. On this side of social media, it is competency and perfection that drive views.

Take, for instance, Jungle Builder. The account posts videos of men building luxury constructions by hand in rural Cambodia. This video, captioned “You Won’t Believe How This 3-Story Bamboo Home Was Built” has over 4.6 million views on TikTok. The footage is disorienting. No further context about what purpose these elaborate structures serve is ever provided. (Aerial drone footage suggests that they actually serve absolutely none). But negative production externalities aside, the mass consumption of this content, however absurd, seems primarily to satisfy a fascination with human skill.

The popularity of Nonna Netta, a New Jersey-based grandmother who produces vast quantities of spaghetti and baked goods in her snug kitchen, points to this same appetite for skilled execution. Here she made 41 loaves of Crescia for Easter, seemingly without a recipe.

Also in this world of craftsmanship are accounts dedicated solely to meticulous pottery wheeling or immaculately detailed painting, like artist Werner Bronkhorst’s miniature illustrations.

Evaluating the artistic value of this content is complicated. The final physical product is typically impressive on its own — so much so that it is often tempting to skip to the end just to marvel at the end result.

And yet, I would argue that there is something more going on. I’m not sure I like Bronkhorst’s paintings all that much or actually find Nonna Netta’s meatballs that appetizing, but I do know that I find their TikToks entertaining to watch.

The skill that has won these accounts huge followings is only secondarily the skill being recorded on video. First and foremost, it is the skill of being a short-form video artist.

3) The comedian

A more straightforward example of people mastering the specific art of short-form video is skit comedy. This content ranges from the universally funny, like Senegalese Khabane Lame’s silent reaction videos, which have garnered him over 160 million followers, to highly select cultural references catering to niche audiences.

Last week, my teenage brother sent me an obscure Instagram Reel of an elderly German woman giving names to Lord of the Rings characters. Gandalf becomes Otto, Legolas becomes Eberhard, Lady Galadriel becomes Rotraud.

How to convey the comedic value of this strange little video? Both my brother and I have a particular fondness for the franchise, so that helps. We also have a German grandmother, which makes the whole set-up particularly comical. Whatever the reason, the reel felt as entertaining as any other form of conventional entertainment, say a stand-up set or an episode of South Park.

The true thrill of this humoristic content often comes down to relatability, to seemingly idiosyncratic experiences being revealed as much more ubiquitous.

As I was writing this piece, a friend of mine from Pune, India, sent me a video captioned “That one rich girl from Bombay.” For me to find it funny, he had to explain some references: like that “SoBo” stood for South Bombay and that “Cathedral” refers to a prestigious private school in the region.

It is an exciting thing to be allowed entry into a fictional world; it is even more exciting to be allowed entry into the real world of someone you care about. Often that happens by way of shared art or entertainment.

Critics of entertainment-driven social media have pointed out that there is nothing very social about these platforms anymore. Where once users logged onto Instagram to see pictures of their friends, they now consume Reels by content creators. A pro-social byproduct of this trend, however, has been the mass sharing of content between users.

I am not saying that sending videos back and forth is a replacement for genuine in-person socializing. Yet, it may be a meaningful complement. And it is certainly different from the kind of isolated online experience that tends to dominate public outrage about social media.

4) The aestheticist

Perhaps most mysterious, and most distinct from art that has come before, are the videos that draw you in for no reason other than downright wackiness. Some of this is really weird slop, like mass-produced videos of AI cats.

But some of it is very much a product of spunky human ingenuity. Adrian Patterson and RJ Chumbley, known on TikTok as TheGoddessBoys, are a content creator duo that make theatrical mixology videos. Glammed out in bangles and immaculate manicures, the two perform a kind of chaotic choreography that culminates in an extravagant creamy beverage. They have their routine perfected down to a T.

Similarly inexplicable is the pull of someone like Remygumbs, whose main schtick is high-energy content of her 12 guinea pigs. She calls them “the piggies” and hosts dance parties that involve her in a bathrobe and huge piles of lettuce.

The aestheticist is not trying to offer the world anything but wacky, visually appealing entertainment. Watching TheGoddessBoys mix a “lemon lime sweet and sour green grape rock sugar yuzu foam soda” is not like reading a novel, but, then again, neither is strolling through MOMA.

What is art?

New media always falls under scrutiny. There is no formal rupture in art history that has not been challenged by existing institutional voices.

When photography emerged in the 19th century, many were skeptical — particularly painters and illustrators, who feared the technology would put them out of business. Poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was also an outspoken opponent, in 1862 deriding the French public’s reception of photography in a letter: “And then they said to themselves: ‘Since photography provides us with every desirable guarantee of exactitude’ (they believe that, poor madmen!) ‘art is photography.’”

In the early 20th century, it was cinema’s turn, looked down upon as a lowbrow fairground attraction, not serious art like theater or literature. And this was well before the dawn of lightweight sitcoms, reality television, or music videos, which famously killed the radio star and marked an end to audio-only music.

Every formal rupture in art history is usually met by critique that accuses the new medium of being easier to produce and easier to consume, and thus less refined, less intellectual, and less valuable.

But the best TikToks are usually not easy to make. To make a single engaging video, one that actually is likely to go viral, requires an involved production process: scripting, lighting, editing, visual effects, and audio. And then do that enough times to actually build a following.

Content creator Zach King’s 15-second optical illusion videos take him and his staff about two weeks to make. That production time-to-runtime ratio easily surpasses the average Hollywood feature film. TikTok star Nara Smith has revealed that a single one of her from-scratch cooking videos takes up to seven hours.

The question of consumption poses a more serious challenge. This content rarely prompts profound introspection or moral grappling. And yet, brain friction is a disputed metric by which to delineate what is and is not art.

In his Critique of Judgement, Kant argued that aesthetic experience occupies a unique category irreducible to cognition, which engages the mind without producing knowledge. Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art?, defended the “activity of art” as simply the transmission of feeling, a definition capacious enough to include “jokes,” “home decorations,” and “church services” — and, I would argue, many short-form videos.

The image of the slack-jawed social media addict, desensitized and detached, does not actually capture a more complicated truth, which is that this content often evokes strong emotional responses: amusement, joy, sorrow — certainly as much as the last Rothko painting I saw.

by Maibritt Henkel, The Argument | Read more:
Image: Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. Lots of links. If you want something a little longer with a lovely Chinese woman and beautiful scenery (and crazy skills), see Liziqui (YouTube). Channel here.]

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images