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If the mantra for consumer tech in the 2010s was, “move fast and break things,” then, in the 2020s, it would be, “move fast and hope Apple adopts it before you run out of money.” Which is a funny misunderstanding of history. www.garbageday.email/p/apple-c…

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AI doomerism is just marketing www.garbageday.email/p/cargo-c…

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Dude holy shit. Taylor Swift fans literally getting cooked alive at a concert venue transformed into a tin foil oven tray in brazil.

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By now you have, no doubt, heard all about the dangerous new TikTok trend sweeping the nation. China’s great and powerful cyber weapon has convinced the innocent teenagers of America that Osama bin Laden was actually a pretty cool guy and now they’re all sharing his 2002 “Letter To America”. Well, first, just to get it out of the way, Osama bin Laden was actually bad. Also, a nepo baby.

After spending most of yesterday digging into this, I’m pretty convinced that this was never a real thing on TikTok. Even though it has since snowballed into a full on moral panic that is beginning to feel dangerously unstable. The Biden administration released a statement about the supposed trend and alarmed big-name creators and actors also reportedly met with TikTok this week to discuss the rise of antisemitism on the app.

Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week.

The story has morphed from what should have been a weird curiosity — and perhaps even a moment to reflect on America’s post-9/11 legacy — into a full-blown national scandal with dumb-dumb headlines getting written about it, like CNN’s “Some young Americans on TikTok say they sympathize with Osama bin Laden”. I mean, I haven’t even had time in this piece to point out that a lot of the people I saw sharing the letter were millennials! But, yeah, teens fucking love Bin Laden. They’re saying 9/11 just hits different now no cap fr. Gen Z wants Baby Gronk to lead Al-Qaeda in a victorious jihad against the western imperialist hegemony gyatt!!

We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does. And what’s worse here is that there are very real issues with how TikTok works. It is a major source of misinfo and disinfo. It still has a terrible bullying problem. And, ironically enough, it’s also one of the most oppressively censorious social platforms that has ever existed. To the point users had to create a puritanical version of leet speak to communicate on it. But we can’t even begin to address those issues unless we start to look clear-eyed at what is actually happening on the app. And it is most certainly not the digital hub of a large-scale Gen Z Bin Laden fandom. Be fucking serious.

The internet is an extremely chaotic living ecosystem and it’s constantly reacting to itself and all you accomplish by amplifying something like this is give more ammo to those who want to who want to take that away. You turn bizarre discourse into something bigger than it was ever meant to be. You pointlessly villainize normal people who aren’t public figures and don’t deserve this kind of scrutiny. And you help conservative political movements continue their culture war. You also just look like clueless boomer to anyone even slightly younger than you.

[Read more over on Garbage Day]

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Last month, after the release of DALL-E 3, there were a whole bunch of stories about how the AI was pretty good at creating pictures of Kirby doing 9/11. And soon after, there was another news cycle about 4chan users figuring out how to make racist Pixar movie posters. Except, all of those stories could have been written — and were actually — about Photoshop on Reddit 15 years ago. That’s because all of this, everything from Biden’s AI executive order to the new mealy-mouthed platform policies to the endless stories asking us to pretend to be scandalized over pictures of Kirby flying United 93 are based on the same incorrect assumption that generative AI is unique in any way.

There’s an old journalism joke that reporters cover every new election according to the rules of the previous one. But I think the tech press does the same thing. Which explains why most of the stories you read about AI right now use the same whack-a-mole content cop strategy most news outlets and research groups spent the 2010s using to cover platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Now they’re breathlessly writing up every instance of an AI producing A Forbidden Image. And what’s worse is this attitude helps tech companies continue to undermine labor and consolidate lobbying power, allows politicians to keep dragging their feet on writing real legislation for the internet, and provides fantastic cover for online platforms that still don’t know how to moderate themselves. I have yet to see anything produced by generative AI you couldn’t do with Photoshop or After Effects or, like, Wikipedia. And if everyone stopped being ridiculous for five minutes, we’d all realize that this tech hasn’t introduced a single new problem. We still just have same old ones we refuse to deal with!

And so, my big hot AI take here is that there’s actually nothing new to moderate. I mean, my god, OpenAI is literally using the same Africa-based third-party moderation contractors that Meta and Google use. It’s all just the same stuff with a new Sci-Fi coat of paint.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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I'm the newsletter that wrote this and I did not know this!

Holy shit I think I just cracked the code of why people think you can’t sell things on Tumblr 😭

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Please, I'm begging just even one politician, open up TikTok. Use it for like two minutes and realize that it's not a mass media platform. Please, I'm begging you... I'm so tired...

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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MrBeast released a series of new videos over the weekend filmed in “Africa”. He put one on his main page titled, “I Built 100 Wells In Africa,” and another titled, “We Powered a Village in Africa,” on his Beast Philanthropy page. And, of course, almost immediately people were posting about how weird the videos are. And, of course, MrBeast had a temper tantrum about it.

“I already know I’m gonna get canceled because I uploaded a video helping people, and to be 100% clear, I don’t care,” MrBeast posted on X, clearly caring quite a bit. “I’m always going to use my channel to help people and try to inspire my audience to do the same.”

But what MrBeast doesn't understand is that being unnaturally viral is all he really is at this point and it tarnishes everything he does. And it’s most noticeable with his charity work. Mostly likely because at this point we all know that making purely viral content and chasing audience-agnostic mass appeal, as MrBeast does, requires, in some sense, being a complete sociopath with no concept of what it means to artistically or creatively express something. Which is why most creators that go viral eventually settle into a baseline. They find an audience and start figuring out what their niche is beyond traffic. But MrBeast never did that. Because traffic is all he seems to want or care about. If he truly cared about philanthropy, for instance, why not just do it and never film it? Well, that’s because philanthropy is just another type of viral content for him.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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On October 29th, a Twitter user named @luvcalxb posted a video of a woman in the back of a van saying that she doesn’t cook, she just likes to have sex. @luvcalxb captioned it, “This generation is cooked 😂,” which is basically the same caption all these videos have. That video was then shared by a user named @scubaryan_, who captioned it, “no way she just casually said this… our generation might actually be finished 😭”. That version of the video was shared 4,000 times and “viewed” close to nine million times.

The video briefly had a Community Note on it that read, “the girl getting interviewed is an OnlyFans model and this is an undisclosed ad which is illegal,” which then, hilariously, linked to the model’s X account, giving her more promo. Great work, guys. Also, after digging through the replies a bit, I found a user asking, “where do fanbus find these women?” So I had a name and a page. The model goes by the name punannieannie and the clip comes from an Instagram Reel posted by an account called The Fan Bus.

There are a few big takeaways here for me. The first, and funniest, is that X users have become so right-wing and reactionary that they’re spending their time raging over literal ads for porn. The second takeaway is how savvy new porn operations have become. They’ve built these labyrinthian networks of SFW viral content on major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that guide users to their OnlyFans pages. And the final takeaway for me is that at our current late stage of Web 2.0 everyone is having such a Bad Time Online at such a consistent level that you can build an entire media company off of short videos of young women saying random stuff that makes weird men angry. Inspiring, really.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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This post from a verified X account recently received 17 million “views,” about 14,000 retweets and around 500 replies. But the replies aren’t what you’d normally see on Twitter pre-Elon Musk’s takeover. Instead, they’re almost exclusively from other verified accounts, who aren’t even attempting to actually reply to the post. Even weirder, some of the accounts replying underneath this post appear to be trying to start a completely different reply thread.

It's bizarre new trend on X that I’ve noticed becoming more popular recently. And I’m going to call it a Verified Meme Dump. And it’s sort of a perfect example of how paid verification and user monetization has broken a platform that was primarily powered by conversations.

On Twitter, back when it was Twitter, the incentive to be funny or interesting or informative was retweets and likes, which if you gained enough of you might get a media job, or a book deal, or get laid. On X, Musk’s pay-to-play model of virality has turned the site into an environment of pure capitalism where conversation simply gets in the way. And after scrolling through enough of these Verified Meme Dumps, I slowly realized what they actually reminded me of. These replies are just galleries of refried edgy memes with no coherent theme, posted by scammers and weirdos, surrounded by ads for brands I’ve never heard of and products that probably don’t exist, with poorly-aggregated headlines sitting next to them on the sidebar. It’s 9gag. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to make 9gag. And his big plan to improve it, according to Fortune this week, is to start charging new users $1 a year to use it.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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Last night, a handful of journalists from outlets like the New York Times, Vox, and CNN, the Twitter account for Mastodon, long-running antifascist news site It’s Going Down, and, also, Keith Olbermann were suspended from Twitter without warning. The reason eventually given is that they had violated Musk’s new vague and worthless anti-doxxing policy that will almost certainly never be enforced on right-wing accounts sharing real-time information about the location of the drag brunches that they want to victimize. According to the Washington Post, the suspensions came from Musk’s new Hand of the King, Ella Irwin, the site’s new “Trust” and “Safety” head.

But if I can attempt to answer both the question of “what is Twitter?” and also “why is Elon Musk acting like a maniac all the time?” I’d like to argue that there has actually always been one core Twitter experience, going all the way back to its very beginnings, that has remained consistent. 

Twitter’s core experience has been, and still is, disruption. And we have spent over a decade trying to determine if it’s good disruption or bad, left-wing or right, progressive or conservative, but the truth is, it’s just disruption. It’s a random social chaos machine. Over the summer, as Elon Musk finalized the purchase of the site, that chaos machine was turned in on itself. The company was overrun with leaks and drama, which all became trending topics. And after Musk bought it, the company literally began livetweeting its own dismantling. Now that it has toppled itself, and all that’s left is Musk’s various whims, the manic energy of the app appears to be localized entirely inside of Musk’s brain. The man is jacked directly into the feed and it turns out the feed is screaming back at him, “you fucking suck.”

And so we all have to sit around and watch the richest man in the world process in real-time how cringe, how embarrassing, how hated he is. The joke has always been that Twitter causes “psychic damage,” but that joke is real now. Twitter is currently doing to one man’s psyche what it has done to countless societies around the world. He paid $44 billion for a website he believed was a “biological neural net,” a digital collective unconscious that he could use to take us to Mars, and it turns out that frothing Id hates him. Can you imagine how painful the cognitive dissonance must be? If people boo you and think you’re a shameless loser then what’s all the money for? Why are you sleeping in your office? If money can’t make people like you then what was any of it for?

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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Mapping out the bizarre universe of the online right in the US is never easy — and is always changing — but as we leave 2022, it basically looks like this: At the top, there is the MAGA wing that think Trump won the 2020 election and now the DeSantis bloc, which is more closely aligned to the buttoned-up think-tankers that were kicking off about critical race theory last year. Below that, there’s QAnon, which has since absorbed a bunch of other esoteric conspiracies and turned into a decentralized death cult, along with your more standard right-wing grifter-influencers running traffic scams on Facebook and YouTube, and the newer wave of weird cyberlibertarian dark enlightenment crypto evangelists and reactionary Silicon Valley CEOs who want to turn American into a corporate monarchy. And then, finally, you have the straight-up seditionist militias, violent incel spree shooters, the Gen Z mens rights activists and pickup artists on TikTok, and the openly white nationalist Groypers, led by streamer Nick Fuentes. Oh, and whatever the trust fund fascists and occultist podcasters are doing in Chinatown right now. And, in a weird way, Twitter bans were a really valuable way of holding this loose coalition together.

If one of these goblins was ever suspended, the rest of them could all loudly screech about cancel culture safe in the knowledge that they would no longer have to deal with them. There are things that bring all these groups together, the big ones being a hatred of trans people and a dream of turning America into a fully-privatized ethnostate, but there’s actually a lot they don’t agree on.

Now that all the accounts are coming back, they have to actually exist on the same timeline and it’s not going well. As Mashable reporter Matt Binder pointed out (screenshot above), now they’re all just accusing each other of being pedophiles and threatening to sue one another for defamation. Whoops!

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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The best way to view what Elon Musk and his weird, sad friends are doing to Twitter right now is a sort of large-scale libertarian dismantling of it. They want to bring back once-banned accounts and remove any sort of guardrails or moderation in name of free speech. And, just like how this plays out irl, far-right extremists are taking this opportunity to target journalists and activists, hoping to kick them off the platform. Well-known antifascist Chad Loder was suspended already along with a handful of other antifascist accounts. And right-wing Telegram accounts have created a list of 5,000 other Twitter accounts targeted for a large-scale mass reporting campaign. Though, I don’t think this mass reporting project will work because 5,000 accounts is just way too many to try and focus on.

Like that town that elected a bunch of libertarians and was then overrun by bears, the foolish desire of having a completely unmoderated public space means that lots of average users will fall through the cracks. At this point, you should assume if you lose access to your account for whatever reason, that’s it. Game over. It’s not an accident that Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton is talking to Musk right now about enabling “freedom” by giving users the “tools” to moderate Twitter as they see fit. These guys want to turn Twitter into New Hampshire.

On Thanksgiving, Musk tweeted that users should tweet at him personally if they see exploitative content involving minors on the site. Which is an outrageously stupid idea and one that could only come from a man so desperate to dogwhistle right-wingers obsessed with anti-LGBTQ “groomer” rhetoric right now that he forgot that child sexual exploitation material is basically the number one issue for user generated content platforms and it is assuredly increasing on Twitter right now. And, making things worse, Twitter is really the only mainstream social app left on the iOS App Store that’s allowed to have NSFW content on it. So if Musk keeps going, I think the first thing to happen is they lose that privilege. But I think it’s just as possible Apple decides it’s not worth all the drama and pulls the plug on the app entirely. Which is basically how all large-scale libertarian experiments on the internet tend to end, with some other authority stepping in to shut it down because the whole thing is filling up with nazis and pedophiles.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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The best way to view what Elon Musk and his weird, sad friends are doing to Twitter right now is a sort of large-scale libertarian dismantling of it. They want to bring back once-banned accounts and remove any sort of guardrails or moderation in name of free speech. And, just like how this plays out irl, far-right extremists are taking this opportunity to target journalists and activists, hoping to kick them off the platform. Well-known antifascist Chad Loder was suspended already along with a handful of other antifascist accounts. And right-wing Telegram accounts have created a list of 5,000 other Twitter accounts targeted for a large-scale mass reporting campaign. Though, I don’t think this mass reporting project will work because 5,000 accounts is just way too many to try and focus on.

Like that town that elected a bunch of libertarians and was then overrun by bears, the foolish desire of having a completely unmoderated public space means that lots of average users will fall through the cracks. At this point, you should assume if you lose access to your account for whatever reason, that’s it. Game over. It’s not an accident that Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton is talking to Musk right now about enabling “freedom” by giving users the “tools” to moderate Twitter as they see fit. These guys want to turn Twitter into New Hampshire.

On Thanksgiving, Musk tweeted that users should tweet at him personally if they see exploitative content involving minors on the site. Which is an outrageously stupid idea and one that could only come from a man so desperate to dogwhistle right-wingers obsessed with anti-LGBTQ “groomer” rhetoric right now that he forgot that child sexual exploitation material is basically the number one issue for user generated content platforms and it is assuredly increasing on Twitter right now. And, making things worse, Twitter is really the only mainstream social app left on the iOS App Store that’s allowed to have NSFW content on it. So if Musk keeps going, I think the first thing to happen is they lose that privilege. But I think it’s just as possible Apple decides it’s not worth all the drama and pulls the plug on the app entirely. Which is basically how all large-scale libertarian experiments on the internet tend to end, with some other authority stepping in to shut it down because the whole thing is filling up with nazis and pedophiles.

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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Sorry I'm late. But it was a good post!

"I saw a Blaze’d post this morning on my dash of Gandalf with a huge rack."

—From today's Garbage Day

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CEO of Alameda Research and the erstwhile girlfriend of FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison has been labeled a “Harry Potter fangirl” because of comments made on an alleged Tumblr and elsewhere, though that's not quite right. She loved Harry Potter, but the blog has a lot of posts specifically about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Yudkowsky’s infamous plodding rewrite of the series which launched the entire genre of rationalfic. The central hyper-competence fantasy of rationalfic is central to understanding Ellison’s apparent fannishness, which is in turn central to understanding her as a person. She actively oriented her life around becoming the type of protagonist who exists in these stories. There is, or was, a sort of LARP going on, which this Tumblr narrates.

The blog also includes lots of Taylor Swift, including an assertion that “if I were the sort of person who wrote such things I would definitely write Heloise and Abelard fanfic based on Cruel Summer.” Ellison also wrote wordy Goodreads reviews, including of books by Naomi Novik, a co-founder of Archive Of Our Own. There were also multiple posts on the Tumblr tagged with “#matt levine is my internet boyfriend” and, in the grand tradition of being on Tumblr to post about Tumblr, tagged long posts about internecine rationalist drama with “#this blue website.” 

[Read more at Garbage Day]

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If I already subscribe (and pay!) to this substack, what will following this new tumblr bring? Extra content? Personal anecdotes of interest? Stuff to small for the newsletter? Fun reblogs? Not sure yet?

Any way it goes, I’ll follow along for the ride!

I have no idea! I feel like the slow demise of Twitter gives me some time to really try stuff out and see what works. It's like I've just left a really toxic, but unfortunately stable long-term relationship and now I'm single and ready to mingle. So I'm just going to try posting stuff around the internet and see what happens.

I think Tumblr is probably a good fit for Garbage Day stuff, but I'm not sure! Thanks for following and let's see what happens.