Caroline McCarthy

The Greeks had Aesop, whose Fables attempted to teach moral lessons using, for the most part, a cast of animal characters. On the internet, we have a tale of a pizza. But not just any pizza. A deep-fried BBQ chicken quesadilla pizza with a sour cream and mayonnaise dipping sauce. And what unfolded when the video of how to create it went viral this weekend is, when you think about it, the perfect fable for the age we live in. It’s an era where just about everything is fake, and even if it’s fake, it’s profitable. Social media is full of cooking videos – filmed from above, often with time lapses or sped-up video, made popular by the likes of BuzzFeed.

A while back, a friend in the San Francisco Bay Area confessed to me in a hushed tone that she was thinking of buying a gun. The neighborhood was a safe one. But she and her husband, no-nonsense tech executives with reasonably public profiles – the kind that might draw attention from internet crazies – but far from the means to hire private security, had calculated just how long it would take for police to reach their home in the event of an emergency, and they weren’t satisfied with it. With the Bay Area’s real estate market being what it is, giving up their below-market-value lease seemed more outlandish than exercising their Second Amendment rights.

As a teenager in the early 2000s, I used to volunteer at my hometown’s local senior citizens’ center, teaching digital skills. In those days, that involved learning how to set up neon-turquoise iMac desktop computers, subscribing to AOL via CD-ROMs that had arrived in the mail, and not clicking on emails that might install a virus. These days, the equivalent crash-course in basic technology would inevitably involve social media – and, increasingly, how to avoid the extraordinary amount of fake viral content there. A new BuzzFeed feature by Craig Silverman looks at new efforts to expand digital literacy initiatives to seniors, a population that has historically been left out of that conversation.

A quick scroll through Chicago-based Kelly Larkin’s Instagram account or lifestyle blog, Kelly in the City, is enough to put anyone in a good mood. It’s a blend of bright patterns, fresh and clean interior spaces, and high-quality photos of Larkin, her husband, their toddler daughter, and Noodle the dachshund. The Larkins are aspirational yet accessible, and Kelly Larkin herself, a former journalist and public school teacher, is funny and quick-witted about life and parenting.

In the fall of 2018, 31-year-old Lee Carter – a member of Virginia’s House of Delegates and a self-described socialist – took to Twitter to expose just about all the proverbial skeletons in his closet. His rationale: he wanted to air it before it showed up in opposition research. Some of it, such as his custody battle over his kid and an arrest for assault at Marine boot camp that was ‘quickly ruled self defense’ was the sort of thing that could have been used against any politician going back for generations. But other admissions were very specific to his having grown up in a world where everything is digitized – possibly permanently.

Are you scared of deepfakes? Perhaps you should be. A few years old and continually growing more sophisticated, deepfakes are digital simulacra generated through machine learning that are barely distinguishable from the real thing. They’ve been used to fake celebrity porn videos, make Barack Obama seem to call Donald Trump a ‘dipshit,’ and most recently, superimpose Steve Buscemi’s face on to Jennifer Lawrence’s body in a video that was at once mesmerizing and scary (Buscemi/Lawrence bore a strange resemblance to Tilda Swinton).

As a young digital journalist in the late 2000s, my industry peers and I often reminisced about the era we felt we’d just missed: the glamorous, fin-de-siècle age of New York media, the time of seven-figure budgets for magazine launches and outsize editorial personalities that commanded celebrity attention in New York. We were the ones scrambling to keep our jobs afloat in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. As it turns out, we still had it pretty good. The other evening, right after the brutal layoffs at digital publications such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost were announced, I found myself in a dive bar (of course) with a handful of the aforementioned elder millennials of digital media.