GAAAH I can’t help myself, I’m just going to say it: Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. It’s about the ways that technology changes how we see ourselves. It’s something I’ve been exploring for years now, both in my reporting, and in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital. What does it mean when we so often see ourselves through the lens of our phones or computers? What if the way we look in the real world somehow feels less real or doesn’t live up to the image we have of ourselves in our digital life? Here’s the talk, which gets at these questions.
Category: Tech
Alternate Realities
“This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. ” —Charlie Warzel, in The Atlantic
Reprinting here what I put out to my Substack newsletter, Hu’s Letter, this morning.
This edition is gonna be a little different from the usual fare, given we’re headed into another four years of a Trump administration! I am not going to share poetry because all the poetry being passed around in the wake of the decisive re-election of criminal/con man/rapist/racist/dumb dumb Donald J. Trump has somehow made processing the grim reality we’re in harder for me. Instead, this particular TikTok worked better on me, h/t Friend Doree:
Speaking of TikTok… imho the single most important thing to understand about this election is a tech/culture story. It’s the complete realignment of cultural power away from “trad media” and toward right-leaning or extreme right podcasters and influencers. The story of the 2024 election is that of political technology.
Heather Cox Richardson sets it up this way, emphasis mine:
[Racism and sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office…
We all ignore Joe Rogan and the manosphere to our peril. When I say manosphere, I mean the algorithmic amplification/reinforcement of a right wing fictional universe (via small batch Substacks and Rumble, up through podcasters and YouTubers, OANN, Fox News). It is a mirror industry of social media platforms built specifically to amplify right wing voices and cannot be ignored, because it lures in apolitical/typically fence-sitting participants, notably any man under 30 who has a hobby:
I want to point you to a few useful follows and pieces that are clarifying. Because yes white dudes broke for Trump (as they have before). But Kamala Harris also underperformed with almost every kind of young person: young white women, young Black voters, and young Latinos. And Democrats will never claw their way back to power without understanding how a powerful disinformation infrastructure works to advantage billionaires and what they want. Links and follows:
- Follow Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic, and researcher Renee DiResta, on Threads:
- Why Democrats are Losing the Culture War, in The Atlantic:
The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shapes consumers’ worldviews. This proposition called for conservatives to build a shadow Hollywood that tells conservative stories and raises up conservative stars (Duck Dynasty’s un-P.C. patriarch, Phil Robertson, won an award named for Breitbart in 2015). In the long run, though, the doctrine’s biggest impact has been encouraging the right to get creative with online culture.
They instead built that “shadow Hollywood” where it really matters: not in film and TV, but online.
- How Trump Won the First Influencer Election, from The Hollywood Reporter.
- Also, Taylor Lorenz at User Mag has been writing really helpful guides to the frontier of this cultural battle and why you can’t just build a “liberal Joe Rogan:
“This imbalance when it comes to online influence is no accident. It is the result of massive structural disadvantages in funding, promotion, and institutional support. And understanding why Democrats can’t (or really won’t) cultivate an equivalent independent media ecosystem that rivals what the right has built is crucial for anyone who hopes to ever see the Democrats back into power…
Leftist channels do not receive widespread financial backing from billionaires or large institutional donors, primarily because leftist content creators support policies that are completely at odds with what billionaires want.
Left leaning influencers argue for things like higher taxes on the rich, regulations on corporations, and policies that curb the power of elites. Wealthy mega donors aren’t going to start pouring money into a media ecosystem that directly contradicts their own financial interests.”
- Wired has this visual guide to the influencers who shaped the election.
tl;dr I think it is futile to analyze any of the 17,000 campaign tactics or strategies or decisions that could have gone differently. The key factor in 2024 was the strength of a fictional cinematic universe that holds extreme sway among young people and men in America (and frankly, more and more in other parts of the world as well).
Now What?
The Washington Post has this great long read from 2023 on responding to the “crisis of masculinity,” writing:
If the right has overcorrected to an old-fashioned (and somewhat hostile) vision of masculinity, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they can be.
George Conway, writing in The Atlantic, says our one hope is Trump’s incompetence:
He represents everything we should aspire not to be, and everything we should teach our children not to emulate. The only hope is that he’s utterly incompetent, and even that is a double-edged sword, because his incompetence often can do as much as harm as his malevolence. His government will be filled with corrupt grifters, spiteful maniacs, and morally bankrupt sycophants, who will follow in his example and carry his directives out, because that’s who they are and want to be.
Okay, before the next Trump administration starts, Brian Beutler, writing in Off Message, offers another glimmer.
“Is there any reason not to despair entirely?
One source of hope is that the future is unwritten.”
Finally, paraphrasing Elizabeth Warren here: On the road ahead, there will still be opportunities to fight back. We might not win most of them. But when we arrive at each of those moments, we will have a choice to give up or fight forward. Extremists are counting on us to point fingers at each other and lose trust in our ability to make change. We will continue to fight for each other.
We will return to regular newsletter programming next time.
I Watched 252 TED Talks This Year And Answered Your Questions About ‘Em
Watching TED Talks is my day job, so I did a quick tally and it turns out I watched at least 252 TED Talks this year. They covered topics far and wide, and come from the main TED stage, TEDx stages around the world and other TED programs, like TED Salon and TED-Ed.
I have such breadth of random knowledge now that it’s a shame there are no parties anymore, because I keep thinking I will be amazing at cocktail chatter.
On my Instagram Stories, I asked y’all to ask me anything about my TED-viewing experience. Since InstaStories don’t last — they disappear after 24 hours — here’s how I answered:
Top 5?
In no particular order…
Sarah Kay‘s original ‘If I Had a Daughter’
Brene Brown‘s breakout TEDx
George Monbiot
Suleika Jaouad
James Howard Kunstler
What was your favorite celebrity TED talk?
I consider psychotherapist Esther Perel a pretty big celebrity these days, so if you haven’t watched her original TED talk, its central ideas will make you think.
The most surprisingly practical TED Talk?
I loved and laughed with Brian Little, on personality.
What was the most valuable thing you learned among the TED Talks you watched?
Actually just last week I watched Lori Gottlieb’s talk from TEDxDupont 2019. She makes a point that will stay with me: That most of our life struggles boil down to two themes — freedom or change. But something we neglect to think through in our quest for change is that it requires an unshedding, an unbecoming — that to grow and change, we must also experience some loss and grief.
The most applicable TED talk?
In 2020, anything about getting better sleep helps. Sleep researcher Matt Walker breaks down some basics.
What’s a talk you wish teenagers would watch?
Tristan Harris, who presents an important intro to the attention economy and the danger of all our social platforms.
What’s a good entry point?
Sir Ken Robinson’s is one of the most popular talks from all time. It’s delightful, thought-provoking and well worth your time.
Which one made you want to drink?
Online School For Small Children, A Poem
To the parent or guardian of
Student
Know this address, as it serves as the gateway to Schoology
Google Apps
Edgenuity
Benchmark
Zoom
And other tools used by your child’s school
Activate and access accounts to ensure readiness when learning begins
The PIN will be mailed to you in a separate letter in the coming days
The class code is incorrect
Choose an account
627dyze
It wont let me do it
Whenever you sign into Google classroom you have to log in as her mymail credentials
This page isn’t working
accounts.google.com redirected you too many times
Reload
During these unprecedented times
Wishing you a successful school year
Sometimes I Respond To Email
Because I lack discipline and any real “life structure,” my email habits are rather capricious. I either respond RIGHT AWAY or I phantom respond. That is, I will BELIEVE I responded but what really happened was I wrote a response in my head but never actually committed it to something anyone could receive. BTW does everyone talk to themselves a lot? I feel like I talk to myself as much as John Nash as depicted by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind, like when he was becoming full-on schizophrenic.
This morning a self-described tech industry exec wrote to say he mentioned me in his blog post, and was that okay? It turns out we had an email exchange back in 2014 when I was covering the tech and culture beat. The topic was the lack of diversity and women in computer engineering. (I had been writing a lot back then about the alarming gender and racial disparities in tech.) He had emailed me to say that the engineering team at his company was overwhelmingly white male but the problem was “nearly impossible” to change. I don’t remember what I wrote back but he did.
I know this because of the SHOCKINGLY FLATTERING post he wrote about it. I mean, seriously, I could not have made this up because if I were to make up a situation in which I helped someone out, I wouldn’t make is sound this nice because it wouldn’t be believable.
“I have not always been the greatest advocate for women, but I am learning. In 2014 a reporter from NPR, Elise Hu, had written a series about a lack of diversity in tech. At the same time I was actively hiring and trying to fill the role with women. That said, I had gotten resumes from something like 50 candidates and roughly 47 of them were white men. What was I supposed to do? How could this be my fault? How could I be accountable? I reached out to Elise and pointed this out to her, thinking it was definitive proof that myself and people like me were off the hook.
She wrote back in a little over an hour. She said many smart things, but asked me simply who had taught me to program? The answer was my uncle. She then carefully explained to me that white men were often teaching other white men to program and there in lies the problem. They were sparking interest in computers in young white men, and doing nothing to spark an interest in more diverse populations. The cause of the pipeline problem was outside of academics.
This resonated with me because it is my belief that while you can learn a lot about technology in academics, applying that knowledge successfully often requires direct one on one mentorship. The pipeline is our responsibility because we have the knowledge and even though we might not be academics we can still spend our time mentoring and sparking the interest in more diverse populations. The problem is not caused intentionally, but simply based on normative behavior and pre-existing relationships.
We are accountable. Until that moment, I thought the best thing I could do was simply stand out of the way and avoid being biased as much as possible. Essentially be passive. It was again a strong and intelligent woman who changed my thinking, and taught me that it is everyone’s responsibility to play an active role in change.”
First, GO STEPHEN!
Second, the lesson of this is that sometimes the exchanges with strangers who write you can seem really mundane and perfunctory. But if you can offer your time or thoughts, they could potentially make an impact or have quite a ripple effect.
OK Computer at 20
Though Yorke insists that “OK Computer” was inspired by the dislocation and paranoia of non-stop travel, it’s now largely understood as a record about how unchecked consumerism and an overreliance on technology can lead to automation and, eventually, alienation (from ourselves; from one another).
–Amanda Petrusich, in The New Yorker
I Had A Really Weird Weekend In Nashville
I lost. In my increasingly tech-dependent existence, this was the weekend I completely disconnected from the physical world. It caused me great stress and a Saturday I’ll never get back. Here’s what happened:
I went to Nashville Friday night to give a Saturday morning training session for the Society of Professional Journalists, a swell group that I’m always happy to help out. I do a flying short course on the latest digital tools I like and use to make my journo-life easier, and it’s always fun to meet new people or go somewhere I haven’t gone before. Plus, Nashville is supposed to be a lot like Austin and my friend Val is down there, so off I went.
Things started out smoothly. Friday night, Val and I caught up over pork ribs and catfish and sweet tea before proceeding to a really swank bar next to a Sherwin Williams paint store. As it turns out, Sherwin Williams was a real theme of the weekend, since we meeting-goers were put up at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which is the size of a planet, and so self-contained with plants, restaurants, bars and other amenities that you really could just live there — for years — and sustain yourself without ever leaving the premises. It’s like a cruise ship on land. Or a dystopian biosphere. And that’s where Sherwin Williams sales guys hold their big annual convention, so I had to walk over a fake bridge (is anything “real” at a Gaylord property?) of about 600 men in order to reach the path to my room. And there were many turns and escalators and gaudy CONCOURSES I had to get through before I actually FOUND my room, which really was like searching for a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
So the completely artificial lodging didn’t help in keeping me grounded to reality. (The training session did go well and was a highlight of my time there, as I loved the engaged participants.)
But then came my flight home, for which I arrived at my gate 40 minutes before takeoff. Which meant I was at least 15 minutes from boarding. I sat at the gate next to mine (C13) under a TV monitor, keeping myself busy by tweeting, texting Sudeep about stocks and watching news of the Columbia Mall shooting while wondering why my flight wasn’t boarding yet. I got up to wander around a store (where I saw a Taylor Swift album cover blanket, true story) and got back to the gate to ask what happened with my flight.
“It’s probably over Raleigh by now, it took off ten minutes ago.”
I was aghast. It was the only direct flight from Nashville to DC, and I cut my presentation short 15 minutes early just to make it to the airport on time. What. The. Fuck. Happened. Tears started streaming down my face as I asked for options (this is futile), and the gate agent did walk down the jet bridge just to be sure the plane was gone (yes), but responded by saying, “I don’t know ma’am, everyone else seemed to make the flight just fine.”
My only theory is that I was so lost in my texting and tweeting that I separated from the physical world and missed the FLIGHT THAT WAS BOARDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I ended up having to wait another agonizing hour to get on a flight to Dallas — flying way west in order to connect to a flight back east — and not getting home until 11, missing my chance to see my darling daughter.
It is time to take a vacation from my devices.
We Sent Rebekah A Snapchat on Tuesday. It is Friday
When people my age use Snapchat:
Mr. Zuckerberg Goes To Washington
The bazillionaire founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, paid a visit to the Hill today to press lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to support some sort of immigration reform, which tech companies are interested in so they can get and keep high skilled, often Indian and Chinese labor. But Zuckerberg says his interest in the policy debate has extended to all 11 million estimated undocumented folks in the U.S.
As part of his visit, The Atlantic snagged him for a sit down interview in front of an invited audience. I went as press. The “#ThisTown” crowd attended, so David Gregory was there, all eight feet of him, and so were about 200 other interested Washingtonians.
Among the more interesting things Zuckeberg said was actually about his Mandarin, and how he set up a personal challenge to learn Mandarin and learned enough to communicate basics but found he had a hard time listening and understanding it when others spoke the language.
“I told my wife, I’m really bad at listening in Mandarin. She said, ‘You’re really bad at listening in English.'”
Oops, I Ran Over My Phone
I spent all day wondering what had happened to my iPhone. (It’s an iPhone 5, the model that is going to be discontinued when the 5c and 5s’s go on sale.) I remembered checking it sometime while I was in the car driving to work, and yet, when I got to work it was nowhere to be found. I’d called myself numerous times, and nothing. Eventually I used the ‘Find My iPhone’ tool, which indicated my phone was at home.
So after work, I drove home, eager to reunite with my device. Only, I couldn’t find my phone at home, either. I tried Find My iPhone again. I realized the thing I had “located” earlier in the day was actually my other Apple device — my iPad. The phone was showing itself in the vicinity of my office. So I returned to work and drove back to the parking spot where I parked. That’s when I saw something reddish on the cement. Upon closer inspection, I discovered it was my phone, face down in its red Speck case, with tire marks on it. Amazingly, it still works, though I feel like I’m cutting myself every time I try to type or tweet.
P.S. This is the first in an attempt to write a personal blog post each day this week. I’ve gotten away from keeping this blog up, so I’ve given myself a small, measurable goal of publishing an observation or an inane happening from each day this week. As I am writing this, it occurs to me I’d also like to pick out the best thing I read each day to share with you. Today’s favorite read is an excellent meditation on evil and the non-morality of Breaking Bad’s Walter White, by my colleague Linda Holmes at NPR’s Monkey See blog.
@elisewho Lost it, ran over it, found it, it still works. #metaphor
— Richard Callow (@publiceyestl) September 16, 2013