Matt Yglesias’ in his substack just repeatedly giving sympathetic, even defensive analyses of what he sees as errors in media-political positioning and consistently illustrating them in unmentioned passing with David Roberts tweets is my favorite troll going
Zoomers all “oh, banning TikTok would be a blow against us” just now realizing what an unpaid sociopolitical debt they’ve run up with everyone else in America
So, a thing about Instagram is that it is, in fact, the official networking app of yuppie creatives. Go to a gallery opening and no one is asking you for your phone number or, heaven forbid, for your Facebook profile in order to get in touch with you. The messaging side of it does get used.
But that possibly useful contact you met at the gallery opening isn’t going to DM you if they never think about you, right? (You’re not actually “friends” after that guarded, surface-level three-minute conversation, just pretending to be by mutual agreement.) Which I assume is the logic behind why every single real-person Instagram post I see seems calibrated to achieve one specific effect: to remind you that the poster exists.
And this is what I mean by people acting like Brands, because this is the very essence of what Brands do. It’s the entire purpose of advertising. It’s the colonisation of mental real estate as, like, an end in itself. Just get people to think about you and maybe associate you with a few key positive adjectives and it’ll pay off later.
That’s what makes Instagram so distinct and horrible to me. People post on Tumblr for unrestrained fun and for the love of the Discourse; on Facebook to scream their incommunicable pain and terror out to an uncaring universe; on Twitter to engage in pulse-pounding gladiatorial combat… and on Instagram to advertise. That last one isn’t something people should be doing in their general capacity as human beings. I don’t like looking at it.
if 9/11 happened today someone would post “my plane just got hijacked lol” and it would be doing numbers on tiktok before the first plane even hit the tower
I think the internet is connecting us in ways we’re not ready for because the other night a guy I went to school with who I haven’t seen on facebook in about a year made a status at 2am that just said “sick of these nightmares…”. Who could have predicted this is where technology would lead us in 2016. Live reports on the anguish of people on the absolute periphery of our lives. Nobody saw this coming. There’s no Jetsons episode where George gets a holo-call from a guy he hasn’t even thought about in three years saying “hey, I had the dream about the blood again…” and George says “hmm” and hangs up.
Also if you hadn’t heard, TikTok has discovered a way to hotwire any Kia or Hyundai with just a screwdriver and a USB cord, so that’s going about how you’d expect
