RIP vanilla news. Now, we like it rough.

Software didn’t eat the world, porn did. It figured out the real trick to winning the attention economy: Go to extremes.

That approach has spread everywhere now. Politics feels like choking and the media feels like spitting. Headlines drip with pedos, sex trafficking, and secret conspiracies because clicks. Our debates mirror “line up and take your turn“ gangbangs. We want the deep state and we want it deeper. It’s like witnessing the stepsisterification of our entire society.

RIP vanilla news. Now, we like it rough.

🎶 Darling, I don't know why
I go to extremes
Too high or too low
There ain't no in-betweens 🎶
-Billy Joel

Superfreaks

The problem with “normal” is it doesn’t sell. It doesn’t spike dopamine. Freaky is what converts.

So we keep getting weirder. The “sane middle” is missionary with eye contact. Yawn. Objective reporting doesn’t turn us on anymore, we want to hear how Macron’s wife was born a man. Who wants Sam Harris’ meditative nuance when you can scroll Waffle House parking lot fight videos?

But ask any junkie how this works. You build a tolerance so it takes more to get that same high. Escalation is the only solution.

And that’s what’s happened to our media consumption. We drown in performative ideological kink that results in unrealistic expectations and desensitized minds. Everything has to keep getting more aggressive. The only sin left is being normal. Give us rage, fear, and schadenfreude instead.

We need news that goes there. We want troops in the streets, trans swimmers, viral debate dunks, Karen freakouts, and body cam chaos. Saying “Hitler was evil” is old hat — so go ahead and give airtime to the “historian” who says, “Well, actually...” Tucker Carlson is to legitimate journalism what an OnlyFans girl is to true love. She does WHAT with her toes?

Who’s to blame?

Blame the attention economy and its business model. As Gustavo Turner explains, boring merely delivers consumers, freakitude gets you customers.

A lot of people are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn. This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert.

Since fetish “converts,” it shifts what we perceive as normal. We wind up believing everyone’s a freak.

Henry Farrell

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The collective perspectives that emerge from social media - our understanding of what the public is and wants - are similarly shaped by algorithms that select on some aspects of the public, while sidelining others. The more important change is to our beliefs about what other people think, which we perpetually update based on social observation.

The result is a distorted sense of the public and ourselves. Ezra Klein:

Social media [makes] everybody think that everybody else’s tastes politically are more extreme than they are, that everybody else is obsessed with a United Kingdom gang-rape scandal from more than 10 years ago. And the effect is not just what it does to the public, but the way it warps particularly the understanding of politicians and media figures who are looking at social media as if it is the public.

And everything just keeps getting more obscene. It’s moral degradation across the board. Chris Hayes:

We have a category of words, going back to porn, like “titillating,” “prurient,” “lurid,” “obscene” — that describe the category of things that we know draw our attention but are morally dubious. And what happens in the sort of collective malformation around attention as the most signature value, as the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape, is a kind of moral degradation. Because it’s pulling us toward things that we know at some level aren’t that important or morally defensible — but do get our attention.

And that’s the problem. We can’t defend what we’re watching. On some level, we know it’s not real. Yet still, we can’t turn away.

“Titillating,” “prurient,” “lurid,” “obscene.” You know what that list reminds me of? The endless scroll of headlines where someone “eviscerates,” “destroys,” “obliterates,” or “crushes” the enemy.

They’re all variations on a theme: Screw context, reality, or nuance – just give us the money shot. And next time, go further.

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Word up

📕 You'd think empaths would do a better job realizing how much it creeps the rest of us out when they tell us they’re empaths.

📕 What intoxication means: Drinking is making yourself toxic.

📕 Trad is slang for Mormon.

📕 Fellas, a point of clarification: It’s not that women don’t want you to approach them, it’s that they don’t want you to assault them.

📕 Smartphones, eh? More like SLOP MACHINES. (Crazy that we named our phones after the 23rd most popular app on the device.)

📕 depression - felt deleted might cute later

📕 hatfishing - when a man wears a hat in order to cover up his baldness

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🔌 Sharing is caring…

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Technically speaking

📡 Need Mr. Beast to do a video where he just gifts AirPods to everyone on the subway playing music aloud on their phones.

📡 Eventually they're gonna put noise back into electric vehicles for safety the same way they put odor into natural gas.

📡 My fave thing about your dog’s Instagram account is the lack of latté art.

📡 We’re overdue to start roasting introverts and morning people. We gave 'em a social media megaphone and they drowned the rest of the world out. And that made being an interesting, social person who frolics at night seem inferior to a mundane life of gaming, morning pages, and cold plunges. Lame.

📡 IDEA: "It's a Wonderful Life" style flashback movie featuring a wealthy Libertarian VC who founded a unicorn startup. We go back in his life and take out all the ways the government actually helped him become who he is. Slowly, he realizes he didn't actually do it all on his own.

📡 The internet keeps making us trade narrow/deep for shallow/wide.

📡 "This is the news I desire. I want this to be true because it confirms what I already believe." Whenever you feel that way, beware. Pretty good chance you’re being played.

📡 We need a special category for self-diagnosed disorders. Like, do you have OCD OCD or do you have TikTok OCD?

“I usually crouch in fear on my own, but sure we can collab on it.”

📡 The algorithm is funny because if you buy something it just assumes you want 40 more of that thing. IG: I bought one hawaiian shirt, that doesn't mean I've decided to become HAWAIIAN SHIRT GUY.

📡 Desperately seeking an audience willing to capture me.

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Bros

🏴‍☠️ So much of my timeline is just dudes gossiping about sports and comedy. Bros obsessed with being “alpha” are out here acting cattier than any show on Bravo.

🏴‍☠️ There is nothing more beta than being a fan of alphas.

🏴‍☠️ Bringing bro confidence to headlines…

nymag

A post shared by @nymag

🏴‍☠️ The left needs to start seducing bros.

The language of “toxic masculinity,” “patriarchy” and “mansplaining” from the political left has not been greatly appealing to men who are struggling to find their feet in the economy. Perhaps this should not be a huge surprise. As Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, writes, “No one wants to be a part of a movement that ignores or even denigrates them.”

It’s like that Groucho joke in reverse. 🥸

🏴‍☠️ Men are all about variance – higher highs and lower lows. We never got female Mozarts for the same reason there were no female Jack the Rippers. There was no female Einstein because there was no female Mussolini. Men: We are the best of times and the worst of times.

🏴‍☠️ Blaming the Jews is “mercury in retrograde” for guys who don’t believe in astrology.

People turn to Jew-hatred because they actually hate themselves for creating the unsatisfying lives that they have. Instead of accepting responsibility for their own realities and striving for self-improvement, they choose to obsess over centuries-old conspiracies about how 15.7 million nefarious people have orchestrated an elaborate scheme to sabotage them. Happy people, content with their lives and confident in themselves, do not need to find some external group to blame for their struggles.

🏴‍☠️ I get all the talk about "privilege" because it's how I feel about tall guys who get laid a lot and think they earned it.

🏴‍☠️ The biggest difference between hipsters then and now is the mustaches used to be ironic.

🏴‍☠️ Incels must view poly guys the way other fruits view cranberries. Pineapple: “I’m happy for you, Cran. I am. You got cran-apple, cran-grape, cran-orange…Kudos. But, like, what about the rest of us? We out here too, my guy. Let me wet my beak a little too.”

🏴‍☠️ The amount of targeted ads I get from Hims makes me feel like I've actually been targeted by death.

🏴‍☠️ Never get art recs from jocks. When all the NFL players on Hard Knocks really loved "Back to the Future: The Musical" is when I decided I never wanna see it.

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Funny How

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-Matt