The Internet, Filtered

(via Post by @coreyatad.com — Bluesky)

Slop exists at scale.

Slop remixes culture without understanding it.

Slop has contempt for both creators and audiences.

Slop hides producers from consumers, and vice versa.

Slop exploits parasocial identification with right-wing power.

The best way to understand Dokoupil’s CBS Evening News is as an extension of Weiss’s media persona, which has been built around a peculiar sort of performance. She brands herself as a heterodox thinker, a champion of free speech, even someone who leans to the left, and then  adopts positions that flatter the reactionary oligarch class. She isn’t a conservative! She just independently thinks her way to conservative conclusions over and over again. If you’re a rich white man convinced that pronouns and trans athletes are the greatest threats facing America today, Weiss is there to assure you not just that you’re right, but also that your bile is proof of your intellectual fearlessness.

He starts the week as a stubborn stage resigned to polishing silverware, a task he sees as “punishment for being ancillary.”

...“They’re treating this like going into battle,” Russell adds. “And the battle is against everything that can go wrong.”

...“This is a time where he begins to take not just himself seriously, but he takes his life with his daughter seriously, he takes his job seriously,” Wehde says. “This is kind of the big pivot point.”

But as I spent a bit more time there, the sheer weight of it all began to hit me. The hundreds of pallets in that warehouse were just a portion of the thousands of pallets sitting in storage across the country, all containing stuff that consumers and stores didn’t want.

The problem is what all these companies are competing to do. The data we have, let alone the data I expect we’ll eventually have, indicates that the modern internet is addictive, makes us miserable, and perhaps makes us hate each other.

The more I thought about search engine optimization and how a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm — which, technically, constitutes many algorithms, but we think of as a single force — the more I looked forward to going to Florida for this alligator party. Maybe, I thought, I would get to see someone who made millions clogging the internet with bullshit get the ultimate comeuppance. Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn’t been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start.

...As a person who militantly unsubscribes to any and all marketing emails, I suddenly felt claustrophobic, surrounded by people who annoy the rest of us for a living. Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life?

Gary was a frequent poster in the forum and self-taught lepidopterist—even learning how to inflate a moth bladder during recreational moth genital dissection—who almost exclusively wore denim. Gary told Himmelman that all he wants out of life is "a warm summer night with a sheet, a mercury vapor light, a six-pack, some mosquito repellent, and my buddies Dave and Chris. Lots of stars. Some night birds. And every now and then a REALLY GOOD moth."