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By now you of course know that my primary irritation with modernity is the expectation that technology will solve for human connection and turn it into a seamless experience, despite catastrophic evidence to the contrary. This is the throughline I’m sensing in just about every consumer tech story (but also in every story that involves fame and celebrity, now that virality and mastering a persona online are proven, over and over again, to be pitiful embodiments of any kind of communal-belonging-validating feeling we might expect. Every time! Every time! It’s not working!!! Hmm!). Here are three recent faves: 

• The launch of that atrocious AI wearable “Friend” campaign at the end of July is the most concise metaphor for this tension, and I enjoyed reading Kate Lindsay’s concise analysis of its particular fuckedupness against the broader backdrop of tech trends: 

Even our digital interactions become more distant. Instead of having a direct conversation with the few friends who post a comment to, say, ask what makeup product we’re wearing in a picture, we broadcast the answer on Instagram Stories: “People have been asking! Here’s what it is!” And maybe we include an affiliate link. The friends who reach out for connection are relegated to spectators. We end up not really talking to them at all.

• Rob Horning also got a solid blog off the Friend-related horreur and the announcement of Meta’s AI Studio: “Consumerism is loneliness; it figures other people as a form of inconvenience and individualized consumption as the height of self-realization” is just an incredible general thesis to start parroting around on the reg. Also this:

The bots could systematically train us to respond to responsiveness, to be so engrossed with the simple fact of it that it wouldn’t require any reciprocal content. One could gradually become acclimated to separate “being attended to” from the requirement of there being another consciousness doing the attending — companionship without companions. To demand that someone literally be with you for you not to feel alone would then seem like a failure of imagination … the point is that friendship doesn’t require friends; it only requires our imagination and some material that it can productively go to work on.

^This gave me the mental image of all of us as weird lonely kids, stuck inventing and talking to our imaginary friends, whom no one else can see. 

• And finally, amid from the slew of general dating-apps-suck coverage, Sarah Thankam Mathews penned a thoughtful standout. Trust STM to turn it into a meditation on desire and choice and the “inefficiencies” of both, as well as a way to understand something like the act of setting your pals up as a “non-capitalist community response.” Mmm. Maybe that reads a bit Brooklynese to you, but I like the mental challenge of considering, now that everything is supposedly available with the touch of an app, that any action against that impulse reads as something radical.

Movies In Place of Therapy Corner

What kind of issues are we working with here? If it’s mommy issues, you should go watch Didi and revel in the realism of being a Myspace-era teen. If it’s of the daddy ilk, I just saw Train to Busan for the first time and staggered out of the theater, equally thrilled and hysterical. Pick your poison! Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Wow remember how Crooked Media was getting some heat from their own employees about not living up to its progressive ideals? Well their union just ratified a deal that involves a PTO policy with a minimum 49 guaranteed days off. I had to check like 5 different tweets and sources to make sure that was not a typo. 49!!!!!! 49???????? 49!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s two months off a year. As they should. As should we all. Amen.

“Abject Naturalism,” by Sarah Braunstein, is the first New Yorker short story I’ve liked in a while. Kids can render as such tricky characters—one has to strike a balance between precocious and believable, and this one’s lovely. 

TikTok Corner:

• Tied for best “Apple dance” vids: the Irish version and the Amish version
  

• Why are the Teletubbies on TikTok like this. Who is it for??
  

• This one’s just so silly but I’ve shown it to people IRL like 3x and every time, we start snort-laughing. Bananas are such vehicles of physical comedy.
  

• Why haven’t personal vertical pools taken off actually??
  

• How do you get poultry to like you like this (probably by not referring to them as that I guess)
  

• The Dare, Self Aware

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