Internet

Comedian-turned-“right-wing Christian influencer" Russell Brand has discovered a new stream of income: hawking enchanted objects. Brand appeared in a recent TikTok ad for Aires Tech, claiming “airports are places full of WiFi and all sorts of evil energies,” and so everyone needs a “magical amulet from Aires Tech” to keep you safe from “all sorts of signals out there.” The amulet, or the “Lifetune Flex,” sells for $239.99 on their website. The gold encasing and green center make it look like something that belongs around Doctor Strange’s neck: very majestic, very wizardly. Criticism, understandably, abounds. “They are gutter-slime,” a video essayist tweeted, grouping Russell Brand with Jordan Peterson.

Each subsequent election seems to get more and more online. The Kamala Harris campaign, armed with a strategy devised by a few twenty-five-year-old women in a Bushwick coffee shop, thinks the election will be won by hiding the candidate away and replacing her with a string of memes and cringe slogans. Unfortunately, they may be right. When you have a candidate that has a problem stringing three unscripted sentences together into something coherent, you must find some other way to shove her across the finish line. That means spiriting her away from the press as much as possible, limiting speeches to only those with a teleprompter and changing your policy positions so many times that no one has any idea what you’re actually running on. Hey, it worked for Joe Biden.

Elon Musk’s X, the social media site once known as Twitter, is a wasteland. It consists of uncontrolled pornography, crypto spambots, broken “mentions,” unpaid invoices for subscriptions, a useless search algorithm and unverified accounts spreading baseless conspiracy theories and being financially rewarded for juicing controversial or untrue content. It has become practically unusable as a functioning social media platform. But old Twitter, after what it had become, had to be absolutely and unequivocally destroyed for the sake of the future of open online discourse. The Jack Dorsey-Parag Agrawal iteration of Twitter had become part of an intelligence and corporate media censorship apparatus, which would spring into action against any user it viewed as an ideological opponent.

There is a girl on TikTok, a bleached-blonde New York transplant who just passed a million followers, whose videos I cannot stop watching. The secret to her rise was “Get Ready with Me” storytimes in which she sat in front of the camera applying mascara and retelling — in painstaking detail — her lurid misadventures. Some highlights: throwing up on a guy’s bed after a wine-fueled hook-up and then realizing he had a girlfriend of two years, battling Montezuma’s revenge at a restaurant in Cabo, getting a UTI so bad she thought it was a kidney infection, inadvertently shipping a ton of “hot girl summer whore clothes” to a guy whose white sheets she bled all over after acquiring a polyp.

Between the deranged cancellations still roiling online life the Muskification of Twitter, and the undead nature of the Donald Trump-attention economy, there is no shortage of legitimate matters to depress someone like me who cohosts a podcast about internet bullshit. And yet for some reason, I’m fixated on an insignificant issue: LOLflation. The majority of you know what “LOL” stands for: “laughing out loud.” What it’s supposed to mean, when communicated via text or direct message or (less often) email, is: you just wrote something funny enough that I physically laughed. This is touching not just because it’s flattering to make someone laugh, but because it temporarily breaks the spell of the online world.

I’ve started and stopped three articles, written 1,500 words and hated every single one. This column was due days ago and I’ve been stuck. Completely blocked. I’m not sure if it’s one thing or many things — and sometimes the only way through writer’s block is to sit down and write all the jumbled, disconnected thoughts that are jamming me up. So I will start this piece and end this year with an apology to my editor and to you, dear reader. There is the thought that stands in the way of every other thought — and because I refuse to put horrifically graphic images in your head while you sip your coffee, I’ll let you fill in the blanks yourself. But the thought goes something like: “Hamas did X and Y and Z and I’m supposed to write or care about anything else?

The sun sets slowly over rural Indiana. In a quaint, sunlit kitchen, a concerned family gathers around a laptop. The pixelated face of a doctor fills the screen, her voice crackling with urgency. She’s discussing critical, life-saving interventions for the family’s patriarch, the victim of a recent, unexpected stroke. As she tries to explain the diagnosis, the video starts buffering, the voice breaks up and the screen freezes. Why was the internet struggling? Dissuaded by an onerous regulatory environment, investors wouldn’t take a risk on rural infrastructure projects. Lacking incentives to develop new technologies, the local providers fell behind the curve.

A post came across my social media feed last week that looked like half the posts in my social media feed: a smiling Caucasian couple at an outdoor restaurant table with palm trees in the background. But the caption was more unusual: “The world is suffering beyond measure — but we have to find moments to be grateful for good health, good food and nice weather. Hoping for good news every day. (Heart emoji).” On the one hand, this is very true: we do have to find moments to be grateful for good health, good food and nice weather. But why the first part? Is the world really suffering beyond measure? And if it is, why do you need to mention that in a post that features you and your spouse going out for what looks like a pleasant meal?

On Thursday, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced that the company is shuttering its news division. Starting in 2012 under the editorship of Ben Smith (then of Politico, now running Semafor), BuzzFeed News never made a profit — but it did win lots of journalism awards and became a large part of the digital journalism ecosystem. More people than I can count worked there at some point in the last twelve years. The writing had been on the wall for BF News for a while, but the speed with which its demise occurred is still sort of a shock to the system. Places don’t often just cease to exist. Rockets may experience "rapid unscheduled disassembly,” but newsrooms mostly don’t.

How will we know when we’ve reached “peak trans?” The term, which dates back almost a decade, refers to the point at which the number of people who consider themselves trans reaches its apex and starts to drop. A report from last year shows the number of people who identify as trans or nonbinary is declining. Researcher Eric Kaufmann, who conducted it, notes that in the last decade, there was a 1,000 percent increase in the share of American teenagers who identified as transgender.  What can account for that kind of increase? Visibility? Awareness? An evolving social landscape that de-emphasizes the differences between men and women? Maybe all of the above — but I think there’s a more persuasive argument: it was trending, and now it’s not.