Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you try and survive literally the most unnecessarily stressful days in modern life.
PLATFORMS
Substack has, once again, stepped in it. Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie posted a real bad statement this week about the platform’s Nazi problem. Popehat has a good take on all of this, but here’s what I’ll say: I have given up trying to argue that moderation should matter and I am now just annoyed. Substack is, essentially, my primary business partner and their pathological need to virtue signal to the worst people in the world is exhausting. And I am, frankly, sick of waking up and having to deal with the fallout after they release a statement like this. So to put it in language they seem to value (more than moderation), they are, increasingly, making it harder to do business with them. If I had a chief technology officer who was constantly blogging about people’s right under the first amendment to sell Nazi memorabilia I would feel the same way. So I’m going to think on this a bit more over the holidays, but if this is truly the path Substack wants to go down, then I’ll have to find a new business partner.
CES has not actually partnered with X? They aren’t even paying for their verification lol.
Etsy is filling up with junk. I actually noticed this recently. For the Garbage Day live events, I use a couple programs running on MIDI to play videos, show slides, etc., and went over to Etsy to see if I could find a custom controller I could use on stage and was shocked with how it has basically just turned into a worse version of Amazon. I’m not actually sure how you fix this other than, of course, stricter moderation, which, you know, no company ever wants to invest it (see above). But even then, it seems tricky because you’d have to verify exactly where products are coming from. I think the bigger takeaway is that the internet is an ecosystem and you can’t really ever gate yourself off from the rest of it.
God, I hope the fediverse works. If you haven’t been following this, news reader app Flipboard is federating via ActivityPub and bringing along a whole bunch of news outlets with it. Threads is finally federating, as well. I have not seen a good articulation of why users would want this or care, but, at this point, it almost doesn’t even matter. Let’s federate as much as we can and figure out how to make it exciting for the average person later. I also think this could finally be the thing that makes Mastodon matter, less as a proper social network, which I still don’t think it’s very good at, and more as the most established client for ActivityPub.
WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE
I think Meta’s Ray Ban smart glasses are actually starting to blow up. Do I love that they’re made by Meta? No, not really. But this is the first real sign that consumers are ready for a new piece of hardware and I think we need it.
The Guardian’s Wilfred Chan became a DoorDash delivery driver to test out New York’s new minimum wage law. The good news is that, at least for now, yes, delivery workers are making more money and having to grind slightly less to get it.
OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS
Midjourney V6 is a significant upgrade, but the question is upgrade to what? You can check out a bunch of examples of what the new model is capable of here. It seems like the biggest change is in photorealism, which Midjourney has always been better than its competitors at. There’s also a lot more consistency between prompts. The question, which I asked at the top, is why? I’ve gotten over my initial “this is cool” reaction to this tech and now I just want to know what the intended use is.
Suno AI has emerged as easily the most sophisticated AI music generator. I asked it to make a hyperpop song about sending emails and it’s not, you know, a good song, but it sounds like a song. Here’s another example of what it can do.
Don’t want to pay for ChatGPT? Try using Chevrolet or Expedia’s new chatbot instead.
FANDOMS
Alternative Press has a great year-end list of new emo albums. I can’t recommended the new Teenage Halloween record enough.
War Thunder players leaked sensitive documents again. I basically had to stop covering this because it was happening so often, but it’s the end of the year, so what the heck. If you are unfamiliar with the War Thunder fandom, they play a hyperrealistic military combat simulator and they’re so intensely obsessed with it that they routinely leak classified material to win arguments about it on message boards. The most recent leak wasn’t classified, but was sensitive enough to get yanked down almost immediately.
Snyder Cut weirdos are absolutely astroturfing Rotten Tomatoes to support Zach Synder’s new big stinker, Rebel Moon. To come back to something I’ve argued a few times this year, I genuinely think that at a certain level of enshittification, leaderboard services like Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads just can’t exist anymore.
STREAMERS
Mark Wahlberg’s Apple TV+ movie is the platform’s most watched ever. And season two of Reacher is the most watched Amazon Prime show of the year. As writer Sonny Bunch posted, “America's Dads are the dark matter of the streaming wars.” Finding out a lot of normies like something is, of course, not new for Hollywood, but I do think it’s fascinating that streamers are getting more comfortable admitting this. I assume as long as the normie content being watched en masse is an original production, they’ll continue leaning into it and giving up on a lot of prestige products, just like every other form of digital media that gets big enough.
OnlyFans has apparently produced three seasons of a cooking show. The contestants are a mix of established pornstars and homegrown OnlyFans creators. I cannot imagine what kind of person is watching this, but I do think the business funnel for this is smart. Make SFW content that builds up parasocial relationships with creators and then send users down a monetized funnel to watch them have sex or whatever.
MEMES AND TRENDS
The guy who coined Godwin’s Law says it’s ok to compare Trump to Hitler. Godwin’s Law, created by Mike Godwin, states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” As Godwin wrote in his recent Washington Post piece, “We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.”
Guys, T-Pain’s new live performance is so good. Just watch it. It’s really good. I embedded it above. It’s great.
DRAMA
It’s all kicking off in the Trolls fandom. So, as I understand it, fans of the Trolls movies are fighting over whether or not it’s ok to make incest fanfic about a bunch of the trolls? I think that’s what’s going on here? The real internet is still out there if you know where to look, folks.
I agree with Semafor, the Republican primary should probably be covered by the media! Do I think the mainstream media is capable of responsibly covering and not just blindly platforming the dangerous whackos currently running for the Republican nomination? No, of course not. That’s not what corporate media and, especially, cable news, was designed to do. But I think they should try!
AROUND THE WORLD
Protests are erupting all over Argentina. The country’s new very deranged gamer president, Javier Milei, repealed a bunch of laws this week, essentially declaring open season on Argentina’s various institutions.
India is testing out AI tech for predicting extreme weather. Only half-related to this, but Apple’s show Extrapolations, which was like Black Mirror, but even more neoliberal and primarily about climate change, was one of the worst things I watched this year. BUT its fifth episode, “2059 Part II: Nightbirds,” which takes place in India, is one of the best hours of science fiction I’ve seen maybe ever.
SOME FUN STUFF
P.S. here’s deep fried ham bomb.
***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***
If you bail on Substack I will definitely follow.
Ryan: I fully support your (possible) decision to move off Substack and think it would send the proper message to the oblivious leaders of this cursed organization.