Weekly Scroll: A Juiceless World

Trad Wives, GOP trolls, and AI bots? All juiceless

No Juice Conservatives

We’ve had more politics than normal in last few updates, but hey, politics has dominated the last few weeks of news. Donald Trump nearly got assassinated. Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee. And as Kamala Harris is now the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, Republicans have scrambled to adjust their campaign strategies.

The playbook against Joe Biden was very simple. Point at the old guy who is visibly deteriorating¹, shake your head, and say ‘get a load of this guy’. That worked really well! But that won’t work with Kamala, and what’s been surprising is how badly the GOP is doing at finding anything at all to attack her on.

The primary lines of attack on Harris have been

• She is a DEI hire.

• As a woman who has dated people, she slept her way to being Vice President.

• She has no children and therefore is a Disney villain.

• She laughs weird.

They’re scrambling and none of this stuff sticks. I’m no fan of DEI programs, but normal people don’t like anyone who brings up DEI - the leftist grifters who insist white people atone for their sins or the rightist grifters who shriek about how DEI will turn your kids trans. But without the easy win of going against Sleepy Joe, conservatives don’t know what else to do other than their typical culture war stuff.

The amount of scrambling is unbelievable. Elon posted more than 150 times the day Biden stepped down. White male conservatives have been caught impersonating black people again. They’re deploying AI reply bots and getting caught. They’re indulging in conspiracies that Biden is dead. JD Vance was caught insulting ‘childless cat ladies’ and apologized to the cats but not the women. None of their actual strategies have any juice, so they’re turning to desperate nonsense. The GOP has gone from riding high on Biden’s weakness to full juicelessness.

Meanwhile Democrats are essentially just pointing at the mess and saying ‘God those guys are weird’. The political attack that landed hardest in the past week was a made up story that JD Vance had sex with a couch - not because it’s true, but because Vance is so viscerally weird that it feels true. And he does have a history of searching for explicit dolphin related content, a story that I cannot believe is somehow real.

It’s too early to know for sure what all this means, but Harris is easily outperforming Biden in polls and fundraising right now. The next four months will be interesting.

First on Infinite Scroll

Long time readers will know there’s an ironclad rule here: It’s always on Infinite Scroll first.

In the midst of liberal excitement about Kamala Harris, there have been a lot of memes about Harris’s campaign. After Harris became the nominee, every newsroom in America grabbed a 26 year old staffer and made them write a Meme Explainer. NBC is covering the Kamala memes. So is Vox, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times again, The Guardian, etc.

But you know who ran the Kamala meme story before Biden had even dropped out? Last week’s paywalled post.

If you want to read Vox and the NYTimes trend pieces a week ahead of time, remember: it’s always, always on Infinite Scroll first.

Juiceless AI

Also in the juiceless category this week: the entire field of AI.

I’ve written before that LLMs are in a very strange place where they’re capable of things that are absolutely remarkable, but at the same time seem to have few practical applications. And on the back of that argument comes news: OpenAI may lose five billion dollars this year, with more losses expected next year.

The simple insight here is that it’s very, very expensive to run AI companies. You need to pay eye-watering salaries to get top level AI talent, but that’s probably the smallest factor. More important is the massive electricity and server costs just to keep ChatGPT running - reportedly more than four billion this year. But the biggest cost is model creation. GPT-3 was estimated to cost around $5-10 million to train. Sam Altman has hinted that GPT-4 cost more than $100 million to train. And experts think the next generation of cutting edge models could cost more than a billion to train, with the generation after that approaching ten billion.

There are a number of worrying trends here:

• Each generation of models is exponentially more expensive to train than the next

• Despite that, performance is stagnating. Meta’s Llama is roughly as good as GPT-4 despite coming out a year and half later. It’s getting harder for LLMs to get much better, they’re all topping out at around the same level.

• There’s a lack of new data - each next gen model requires an even bigger pile of data to train on, but there’s literally not enough data on the internet to satisfy next gen model needs.

• At the same time, access to that data is becoming more expensive. Firms are blocking AI scrapers, or forcing them to pay, or threatening them with lawsuits.

• Despite the enormous costs, and despite how undeniably cool and impressive LLMs can be, there still aren’t many serious use cases. Most AI stuff can be recreated easily with a ‘dumb’ search or process.

All these things together present a pretty powerful bear case in the medium term for generative AI. It will continue to do very cool, even astonishing things. But those things will be cool in a ‘hah, look at that’ kind of way, not in a ‘this is worth a large amount of money to consumers or businesses’ way. There is no killer app and these models are still prone to frequent hallucinations. That makes the economic case for building ever-larger LLMs fairly shaky - at some point they’re going to need to shift into a different architecture paradigm or get crushed by current trends.

Juiceless Trad Wives

One of the wildest discourses of the last week concerned Hannah Neeleman, aka Ballerina Farm, and a deeply weird profile of her Trad Wife lifestyle.

Neeleman is a social media juggernaut and probably the biggest trad wife account on the internet, with more than 18 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. She has eight children, lives on a rustic farm, cooks all her family’s meals from scratch, and seems deeply miserable. Consider:

The piece is filled with extremely creepy vibes where Neeleman dutifully repeats whatever her husband says, when he’s in the room with her. When he’s not in the room, she admits to all kinds of transgressions - like getting an epidural for the one birth her husband missed. Social media users have also found evidence that the Ballerina Farm business entity is in his name only. Or consider this anecdote, which again only came when her husband left the room:

“I was a good ballerina” is an understatement - she was accepted to Juilliard! Juilliard accepts only 12 women a year into their dance program! And she left that world to go live out her husband’s farm fantasy. The author is pretty clearly dropping hints at a fucked up dynamic, like how her husband took her to live in Brazil for years where she didn’t speak the language, how she’s sometimes so exhausted she can’t leave bed for a week, or how everything seems to always come up his way:²

There’s a lot to say here, but a few classic trad themes are confirmed in this piece:

• The world of mommy bloggers, trad wives and family influencers is absolutely filled with Mormons. So, so many Mormons.

• Underlying a lot of these folks is generational wealth that’s only hinted at. It doesn’t matter that their farm isn’t a very productive farm, because the husband’s family founded JetBlue. The farm is an elaborate lifestyle choice, not a business that actually needs to make money.

• There’s also just a lot of lying. The family insists they do it all themselves, no nannies, no help, etc. But users on various snark subreddits have persistently speculated there’s evidence of an extensive staff used to build the illusion of a traditional farm. And really, the anecdotes don’t make sense otherwise. They run a farm full time with 8 children, and she cooks all meals from scratch, she runs multiple social accounts with millions of followers. But also, she’s frequently bedridden with exhaustion for weeks at a time. So who’s making all the handmade food that week, watching the kids, running the farm?

Ultimately what’s interesting here is how even ‘traditional lifestyles’ have become just another commodity to be produced in an assembly-line process and packaged for your eager social media consumption. Ballerina Farm have a staff that helps them produce daily content in the Trad aesthetic. That staff essentially runs the farm and does a great majority of the chores. They have sponsors. They sell merch.

Despite touting the traditional lifestyle, Neeleman is quite modern in many ways. She’s gotten extensive plastic surgery - no hate to plastic surgery, but it’s an odd choice for a traditionalist. She’s running a full time business - her social media career, not the farm. She’s seeking fame. She creates a fantasy product that millions of us are eager to consume, carefully cosplaying as a rural farm woman with a picturesque life. The public discourse around Ballerina Farm is so interesting because it revolves around two semi-contradictory ideas: that her husband is gaslighting/abusing her, and that she’s a cynical fraud who doesn’t actually embody the things she claims to.

Links

• A TikTok influencer is suing another influencer for ripping off her posts. Sydney Gifford is suing Alyssa Sheil for creating dozens of posts and videos that mimic her content - wearing the same outfits in the same locations with the same poses. It’s pretty indisputable that Sheil is indeed copycatting Gifford’s work. But social media posts don’t seem like a copyright protected medium? If you can be sued for making posts too similar to someone else’s posts, that seems like it would break the fundamentals of how the internet works.

• A massive piece of news that went mostly unnoticed this week - Google reversed course and will leave cookies operational in Chrome. There’s a constant push-and-pull dynamic online between user and regulatory demands for privacy, and the reality that cookie-tracked ads are wildly more profitable than untracked ads. For now, the internet’s base advertising model remains in place.

• A new randomized clinical trial shows that reducing screen time causes positive changes in childrens’ mental health. Remember: It’s always smartphones.

• Google, as part of their $60 million content deal with Reddit, is now the only search engine that works to search the site. I’m normally pretty laissez-faire in tech world, but this seems wildly anticompetitive to me.

• Roblox has a pedophile problem. Roblox, like everyone else on the internet, is in a tough spot here. They have 30 million daily users and reportedly 50,000 chat messages per second - no matter how well you monitor, predators will slip through the cracks. But since they’ve built the site explicitly for children, they have to do better than they’re doing now.

• It’s been a bad week for MrBeast, the world’s largest YouTuber. First his longtime friend and cast member Ava Tyson was revealed to have a long history of inappropriate interactions with minors, and MrBeast fired her.³ Then, some folks found old footage where MrBeast used racist, sexist and homophobic jokes. Not great, Jimmy.

• Are Gorillas addicted to screen time? They’re just like us.

Posts

• Troubling Hello Kitty content

• Bitch House

• The Onion Weigher

• Timing

• Extremely good jewelry

• Choosing a VP

1. Both candidates are wildly less sharp than they used to be, but Biden’s decline was particularly notable - Trump is a better confabulator and storyteller than he is.

2. Another wild anecdote - Hannah had been dropping hints for months that all she wanted for her birthday was a trip to Greece. Which they could easily afford, as JetBlue heirs. Instead he got her an apron, in one of the saddest videos you will ever see.

3. There’s also an ugly angle to this - it really isn’t great that one of the most prominent trans people in America ended up as a sexual predator. Much of the commentary about it has been what you’d expect.