The Weekly Roundup (Week of 5.6)
We're all living in our own little Truman shows now...
1. EVERYTHING IS BRAVO
But not even Lacan could have foreseen the way that being endlessly perceived and surveyed by our own technology would warp our understanding of our own identity. With these imaginary spectators hanging on our every word, our lives are reduced to performance, mining our realities for content in the same way a reality star curates their existence for our viewing pleasure.
This was an excellent article on SSENSE about the impact of the Bravo network on culture, society, self-expression, and the way we consume information. I wasn’t expecting such an existential banger from the same place where I spend 4 hours a day looking for a new pair of square-toe loafers, but here we are, they always manage to find a way to bring me back to the site.
The essay spends a lot of time giving us the necessary historical context of Bravo’s influence on reality television while connecting it back to the modern state of content creation and our relationship with social media. Reality television has become our regular reality… More than ever people are hyper-aware of how they’re being perceived and the performance of life has transformed into an act designed for the internet. “It’s now become hard to know where that performance ends and the real person begins, especially when your audience remains eternally present.” Read here.
2. This is what the internet looks like now
A few different readers sent me the above video this week. It’s a nonsensical recipe that uses an AI voice for narration and is currently stuck in everyone’s algorithm. It checks a lot of my boxes! It comes from a page called @SuperRecipess, which posted it to TikTok in March 2023. It currently has 24 million views on the app, with millions more on other platforms.
Alright I think we’ve all said it plenty of times but this AI shit is getting fucking crazyyyyyyyyy. I even saw the chef reaction guy react to an AI recipe! Earlier this week, you saw a Katy Perry image from the Met Gala go viral, even making it onto Instagram’s official account. That was also AI. This article from Ryan Broderick does a great job of explaining the growing concern about “dead internet theory,” basically bots and AI are generating more and more conversation and content on the internet.
3. Who is Shanin Blake, the E-girl alien conspiracist going viral?
This kind of brings us back to the part about Bravo reality TV having a major impact on content creators and society at large. This woman has captivated people for better or worse… I honestly find her whole shtick entertaining but mostly ridiculous. She’s an extreme caricature of hippie culture and someone deep in the woo-woo content creator space whose every act is some sort of radical attempt at healing and self-actualization. I fucking hate everything about it but I’m also fascinated at the same time, though honestly, some of her songs are catchy. 🎶 I am a vibration people can tune in 🧘♂️ 🎶 Read here.
4. The End of Social Media: An Interview With Jack Dorsey
This was a very interesting, wide-ranging interview with Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, about his departure from BlueSky.
Jack recently deleted his account on Bluesky, once pitched — by him — as social media’s decentralized solution to censorship, and left the company’s board. I reached out and asked him why, which is where our call began. In a rare, far-reaching interview, what follows is a missing chapter of internet history that sheds light not only on Bluesky, but Twitter, X, and the past five years of censorship and backlash. Because of vulnerabilities designed into the technology, social media, in its current, centralized form, can’t survive the global war on speech. The future will be decentralized, or it won’t be free.
