Social media

The theme of this month’s edition is technology. The advancement of space exploration, defense technologies, artificial intelligence and the like should excite us. Yet the geopolitical issues they present are great and Western governments seem ill-prepared to grapple with them. Watch any congressional hearing where a crusty congressman tries to keep pace with Silicon Valley’s top autists if you need further evidence — and read Spencer A. Klavan’s analysis of the high-skill but low-status rejects uniting into a formidable social class on p.12. The Silent Generation and boomers simply cannot keep up. The Space Race is back on, as tycoons seek to cash in on the final frontier.

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.

In the sinister annals of the men's rights activist internet back in 2017, an alt-right personality called Matt Forney popularized the term, or depending on your outlook, slur, “tradthot.” According to Forney, a “tradthot” (a portmanteau of “tradwife” and “thot”) was a woman who entered the alt-right pretending to believe in traditional gender roles but, in reality, wanted to exploit a male-dominated audience by catering to their fantasies.  Forney, although not well-known for his charitable views about women at the time — he's since repented, naturally — may have been onto something.

Last Wednesday, the House overwhelming passed HR-7521 — Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a bipartisan vote of 352-65.  With more than two-thirds of the House coming together to support this bill, the Senate must bring it to a vote this week. President Joe Biden has already signaled he will sign the bill if the Senate passes it. If signed into law, the legislation would require Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest in the platform within six months, or face being shut down in the United States.

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.