Weekend Scroll: The Inevitability of Takes
Why we can't shut up about anything. Plus! Line-stepping streamers and anxious kids
There’s Always a Take
One of the defining features of the social internet is hot takes. There’s a sense in which hot takes are the purpose for these sites. If a man can’t spout uninformed nonsense like “Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon should have been nominated for an Oscar!!!”, why should social media even exist?1
This is most obviously true in politics. Any time anything happens even vaguely related to the political sphere, there are takes. There are so, so many takes. Everyone has to have an opinion because it’s boring to just say nothing, and Posting Is The Most Powerful Force In The Universe. A month after COVID hit, suddenly everyone was an epidemiologist. In 2021, everyone was suddenly an expert on vaccine science. A terror attack happens and every poster becomes an expert on counter-terrorism tactics. It’s dumb, but at least predictable and understandable.
What’s much stupider is what happened in the wake of a container ship hitting the Francis Scott Key bridge.
This, to be clear, is not a political event in any way. A ship’s power failed, and they hit a bridge. It should not even be possible to have a take on this, other than Damn, That Sucks. And yet! Prominent commentators indulge in conspiracy theories that it was an intentional act. I’ve seen people blaming both Hamas and the IDF. Socialists say it was really capitalism that did it. Right wingers blame DEI. Liberals blame lack of investment. Podcast bros who were vaccine experts two years ago are now posing as infrastructure construction experts.
Can any of y’all, even for just one second, shut the fuck up? Please?
You want less DEI? Good for you, you’re a special boy, but that’s unrelated. You want to end capitalism? Bro I’m pretty sure there would still be ships and bridges under socialism. You want more investment in infrastructure? Me too, but ‘more investment’ will not help the bridge stay up when a one hundred thousand ton ship barrels into it.
There is no ideology, no way to organize society, no amount of funding that can stop ‘bridge falls over when rammed by small floating mountain’ or ‘complex systems sometimes lose power for a few minutes’. Sometimes accidents just happen, and it sucks. Our posting instinct these days is to inject our favorite boogeyman (Israel! Capitalism! Wokes! DEI!) into every single political event, but now we’re injecting them into places where by definition there can be no politics. Pretty soon someone famous is going to get hit by lightning, and we’ll see posts about how it’s because of Imperialism or Trans Bathrooms. Please, please just shut up with the takes.
Ruby Franke Update
There’s an odd dynamic that pops up every now and then on this blog. I’m not a conservative. In most ways I’m pretty libertine, pretty socially liberal. But because I spend a lot of time trawling through the furthest reaches of the internet, looking at the most most extreme and bizarre stuff that people get up to, and then analyzing it here… I end up sounding pretty damn conservative on certain topics. One of those topics is when influencers use their kids to get famous. Longtime readers will know that I think there’s essentially no way to be an ethical ‘Momfluencer’.
That piece was centered around Ruby Franke, a prominent momfluencer who ended up arrested for severely abusing her kids. She was sentenced to 4-30 years in prison recently, and new details have been released showing exactly how abusive she was. Unfortunately here’s nothing fun here. This is very grim stuff - detailed descriptions of child abuse in the quotes
In another entry, Ruby purportedly began by stating that it was a “big day for evil.” The entry reads, “R was told to stand in the sun w/his sun hat… He is defiant... R, or I should say his demon, stays in the shade. I push R into the sun. R comes back. I come back with a cactus poker. When I poke his back to get in the sun R doesn't even flinch. I poke him on the neck. He is in a trance & doesn't appear to feel anything. Jodi taps him on the cheeks to wake him up. The devil doesn't like when you get your subject to agree to truth.
It continues:
At the time, it was reported that the little boy was “emaciated and malnourished, with open wounds and duct tape around the extremities,” when he approached a neighbor for help…
When the neighbor asks what’s going on, Ruby’s son states that it’s “personal business.” The neighbor goes on to question the child further about his well-being, later noting that he could smell the flesh from his wounds. The child also had no shoes on, and purportedly wore a ragged top that had bloodstains on it.
It’s not just her. Remember the famous ‘Honey Boo Boo’ girl from reality TV? She’s essentially been working since she was in elementary school, and it turns out her mom stole most of her money and spent it on drugs. The Duggar kids and Gosselin2 kids were early adopters here in a sense. They were forced to work for their parents’ reality TV dreams for years, and not compensated for it.
Reality TV and social media share the same DNA - constant filming, little privacy, no ability to ‘switch off’. Children working more formally in film and TV are still sometimes mistreated, but they have laws that protect them, that regulate working hours and that mandate a portion of their earnings go into protected accounts. Those protections don’t extend to children working in reality TV or who star on social media. They really should, and until they do we’re going to keep hearing stories about social media kids being horribly mistreated.
The Anxious Generation
Elsewhere in ‘Jeremiah sounds like a Boomer’: I’m a firm proponent of the idea that smartphones are ruining a lot of things for young people (see It’s Always Smartphones). There’s simply too much evidence from too many sources about how smartphones/social media are hurting teens to ignore.
So I’m very excited for Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation. Haidt makes a detailed argument that phones and social media are really bad for kids, especially when paired with the removal of IRL freedom and physical spaces they need. It’s having a huge media moment right now, with thinkpieces everywhere. I’ll also be reviewing it very soon here on the blog. Without giving too much away, what I’ve read so far has been phenomenal. Really can’t wait to post about it here.
Is Substack’s ‘Follow’ Hurting Writers?
That’s the question asked by this article on The Wrap. Substack give you two ways to keep abreast of your favorite writers. You can become a subscriber, in which case you get emails delivered directly to your inbox - or you can be a follower, which is a more social media style feature that doesn’t automatically deliver each post.
The argument here is that in pushing more social-like ‘followers’, Substack is cannibalizing from users who otherwise would have been subscribers. And that’s bad for writers, because followers are far less connected and whether they see your posts or not is subject to the whims of the algorithm.
I’m of two minds here. Subscribers are better for me as a writer - if you’re just a follower, click the sub button below! My posts are great! I’ll even throw in the pleading emoji!
But also, I’ve seen a huge burst in ‘followers’ recently that can’t all be cannibalizing from subscribers. Subscribers are still growing at a steady clip, but followers are growing way faster than that. Growth has been pretty good here! I’m happy and you guys seem to be happy with the blog as well. I’m planning to do a longer post on my metrics when we hit the one year anniversary of the blog in May, but overall I think followers have likely been net positive for Infinite Scroll.
Twitch Streamers are still Habitual Line Stepping
I’ve talked several times in the past about how difficult, bordering on impossible, content moderation is for social media sites. I’ve also looked on in amusement as streaming giant Twitch struggles to define exactly what is allowable on their site. Quoting those pieces:
One dynamic I didn’t touch on in that post is habitual line-stepping. When you run a social media site, your users - to use a technical term - are horrible little bastards. You try to set a common-sense standard for behavior, and they will continually walk right up to the line of acceptability. And then cross it, but just a little bit. They’ll test you over and over to see what precisely is banned or not banned and give you a thousand headaches trying to deal with edge cases.
Live-streaming giant Twitch has had this headache for years as it pertains to nudity. Twitch doesn’t allow NSFW content for the most part. But a segment of mostly female streamers on Twitch were continually testing what exactly that meant. Was it ok to wear a bikini on stream? Exactly how skimpy could the bikini be? Lounging in a bikini became such a successful stream tactic it became known as the Hot Tub Meta. What about dancing - surely dancing is ok? But how salacious could the dancing be? Could you pole dance? Could you twerk 6 inches from your web cam? Could you do a yoga stream where certain body areas just happened to be front and center as you stretched?
This was a problem for Twitch last year as it pertained to the ‘Topless Meta’, where female streamers would stream topless but with the camera cutting off mid-chest to technically prevent nudity from being shown. Twitch eventually had to invent a new rule to specifically ban that.
Now the problem isn’t the Topless Meta. It’s the Butt Meta.
Some female streamers have taken to wearing green-screen booty shorts and streaming games directly on their ass. This is hilariously creative, and was obviously against the spirit of Twitch’s rules while apparently still being technically allowed. Once again, Twitch has had to issue a statement updating their rules, saying “content that focuses on intimate body parts for a prolonged period of time will not be allowed”.
I look forward to three months from now when the sexy streamers have figured out some new bizarre trend that Twitch will have to ban.
Links
Ron DeSantis signs a law banning kids younger than 14 from social media in Florida. I’d expect immediate court challenges. As much as I think social media is bad for teens, I think banning them from it entirely is some combination of unconstitutional and/or impossible.
Popular streamer Ninja faces cancer after finding a weird mole on his foot. Check your weird moles, people! See a dermatologist! Don’t wait!
Judge dismisses Elon Musk’s lawsuit against group that documented rising hate speech on Twitter/X. We all knew this was the likely outcome but it’s nice to see the ‘free speech absolutist’ lose when he tries to shut down other people’s speech.
An interesting look into how influencers routinely lie in their videos, in ways that are easily caught.3
Are dating apps exhausting? Meet the folks who will manage your dating profile for you.
An investigation into who is actually behind the ‘N U D E S I N B I O’ spammers
The most popular Redditor of all time is exactly the kind of person you’d think.
The NYTimes is now a gaming company.
Posts
Is ‘chat’ the first ever fourth-person pronoun?
This collaboration is real and it rules
It was actually nominated for three Oscars. Yes, really.
From the famous reality shows ‘Jon & Kate plus 8’ and ‘19 Kids and Counting’
Remember the ancient wisdom - You Can Lie, But Only A Little