Weekly Scroll: A pile of nonsense
Smartphones are still terrible, Kate's still missing, and Elon's still doing Elon things
Congrats on making it through another week, internet gremlins. This week I’m on vacation in London, so the Weekly Scroll will be a bit all over the place. Read it in a British accent for the full effect.
It’s Always Smartphones
Don’t you love when you publish an essay, and the next few weeks are filled with mainstream publications jumping on the bandwagon and proving you correct? In the wake of last month’s It’s Always Smartphones we have a quite a lot of people jumping on the bandwagon. Remember - it’s always on Infinite Scroll first.
First up is the Atlantic, who published a good Jonathan Haidt piece titled End the Phone Based Childhood Now. Haidt’s piece is more thoroughly researched than mine and you should definitely check it out. Meanwhile a Pew survey finds that teens feel more happy and more peaceful when they don’t have their phones. Phones and social media, causing anxiety for teens? Who could have predicted such a shocking result? Everyone? Oh.
If you want to be really horrified and - I don’t use this word lightly - disturbed, check out this piece from Slate about parents and phones in classrooms. To give you a taste:
“When my dad texts and asks me how I am,” another ninth grader said, “he gets worried if I don’t message back immediately.” Her friend said: “My mom expects a text each class period so she knows what I’m doing.”
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A few months ago, one of my students sneakily took a picture of a spelling quiz and sent it to his mother. Ten minutes later—students were still taking the quiz—I received an email from her asking why I had given it and if he could, instead, take it the next day “so he can review more.”
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I made no headway with this mother. I told her we have a cellphone policy and explained that phones take away from our classroom community. “Community?” she asked, then, before I could answer, told me it was “perfectly fine” for her to be in contact with her daughter throughout the day “because she needs me.”
I’m pretty live and let live in a lot of ways. While I’m not a libertarian, I do have libertarian instincts towards many areas of policy. But almost nothing makes me go BAN BAN BAN BAN BAN faster than phones in schools. It’s insane how clearly this is negatively impacting kids’ lives. And we can’t just fall back on ‘parental responsibility’ because the parents are clingy awful dipshits too. Get the phones out of schools now.
Reddit IPO
Who has one kidney and is signed up to own Reddit stock? This guy.
I’m mostly doing this for the memes, and to report about the process along the way. The process itself has been drama free, and fairly easy to walk through. That’s a relief for me as an ‘investor’, but a bit disappointing from the content side. I was kind of hoping there’d be some gigantic fuck-up and I could gleefully provide you all with the first hand account. But no, things are mostly smooth.
Media on Reddit’s IPO continues to be mostly negative - chatter on Reddit itself is that the stock will tank hours after IPO, and publications like the FT are talking about the ‘reduced hopes’ of the IPO. These might be right! Not stock advice! But I do think it’s worth making the very basic case for why Reddit is considered a multi-billion dollar company despite never turning a profit:
The graph above shows the basic case. Reddit has bee able to grow revenue pretty consistently since 2021, and it jumped more than 20% in 2023. Crucially, that revenue growth has outpaced their ‘cost of revenue’ expenses. Their cost of revenue growth is on a downward trajectory and is now flat or negative, while revenue keeps increasing. They lost 90M in 2023, but that was sharply down from 158M in 2022. It’s very easy to see how this pathway could lead to a profitable business.
Will Reddit’s stock go up? I dunno, I’m not a stock picker and neither are you. Neither of us has that kind of expertise. None of this is financial advice. But I think Reddit’s resilience post-Blackout has been underrated - despite the reputational hit from the 2023 user revolt, Reddit’s financials and userbase is as strong as ever.
Kate Middleton still on Holiday
The latest news in the Kate Middleton saga is a revelation that even her senior staffers haven’t seen her in months? Apparently senior members of her entourage/team were blindsided by the surprise surgery announcement and haven’t seen her since that was announced. All very normal stuff for one of the world’s most visible people.
Rumors are swirling that a ‘significant announcement’ may take place as early as today from the royal family, but so far this is just social media noise and a few extremely sketchy international websites. No major press outlets have verified anything like that. But as I said last week:
Scientists say nature abhors a vacuum - when vacuums occur, devoid of anything inside them, matter rushes and fights to fill that empty space. Social media is much the same way - in the absence of explanation or evidence, conspiracy theories and wild speculation will naturally rush to fill the void.
It’s no surprise that absent any appearances, rumors abound. The most surprising part of all this is just how easy it would be to make it all go away. One very short public appearance would end 99% of the speculation. One ten-second video posted to Instagram could disprove dozens of conspiracy theories.
And yet they’re not doing that! That for me is the most worrying sign that something is actually going on behind the scenes. It would be so, so simple to end the whole drama and they aren’t taking that option. Is it any surprise that people are wondering why?
Oh, Elon
A sentence nobody should ever have to write (or read): cannibalism video shared by Elon Musk taken down by his own site’s content moderation team. In other news, Twitter is also banning people who mention the name of Nazi cartoonist Hans Kristian Graebener, who writes the wildly racist and bigoted webtoon StoneToss. Musk is a noted free speech absolutist though, which is why he has to censor anyone from trying to uncover who the anonymous Nazi cartoonist is. Also in free speech absolutism - Musk canceled Don Lemon’s show on X after Lemon asked him interview questions he didn’t like.
You’d think at some point we could go a month without Musk making the news, but nope. This is how things are now.
TikTok Ban
The TikTok divestment/ban bill has passed the House overwhelmingly, 352-65. It now moves on the Senate, where the bill may face more skepticism. It’s unlikely the Senate will simply pass the House’s legislation verbatim, as the Senate is filled with Very Special Boys who need nothing more in life than to have their chance to talk in front of cameras as well. But with such an overwhelming passage in the House and with President Biden urging it along, the Senate won’t be able to just kill or ignore the legislation. My money is on them writing their own version of the bill that isn’t all that different but gives everyone on every side a chance to make Very Senatorial Speeches.
Meanwhile, reports are leaking out that TikTok has been blindsided by the whole affair, not expecting things to move this quickly. And it’s increasingly obvious that ByteDance would refuse to sell, namely because the CCP wouldn’t let them. The CCP doesn’t give a damn about ByteDance’s profitability, they prefer to have an easy propaganda win from TikTok being banned. It’s 100% the CCP in charge in this scenario, which validates much of the reasoning for the ban in the first place.
As someone who leans toward being pro-ban, it’s been interesting to watch commentary on this. Virtually all of the DC commentary from politicians, think tanks and serious policy professionals has leaned in favor of the ban. But virtually all the ‘internet cultural commentators’ I follow like Garbage Day, Today in Tabs, 404 Media, etc, are against the ban.
Some of this is purely reflexive ‘I like TikTok and use it for trend reporting and therefore oppose you banning my source of content’ stuff, from a crowd that really does rely on it. But I think there’s also a sort of reflexive America-Bad-ism inherent to the left-leaning cultural critic worldview, and you’re seeing it here. These folks are so used to being critical of the US government and so unused to thinking about the CCP that they just don’t believe the CCP is a bad actor - or at least, they don’t take the possibility seriously enough to warrant action. That’s a mistake. You can criticize the US all you want, but there’s no comparison to the level of corruption, authoritarianism and lawless criminality of the Chinese state. But to a certain kind of extremely Brooklyn-brained culture writer, the US is worse - or at least close enough that any anti-CCP action is suspect.
In case you think I’m exaggerating, this video was shared positively on Garbage Day:
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Links
More in the pattern of “It’s always on Infinite Scroll first”: Cosmopolitan talks about the harms of family influencers on kids (see No Ethical Momfluencers)
Who exactly is making all the AI spam videos that threaten to overwhelm short form video social media? Apparently these guys.
We’ve talked before about China’s very dumb nationalist social media crusades. The latest instance is a Chinese beverage company whose sales have dropped 32% due to a boycott, because Chinese netizens think their bottles look too Japanese.
Professional douchegoblin and streamer Adin Ross may have caused his buddy Andrew Tate to get arrested, by discussing on his livestream that Tate was planning to flee Romania. A real worst person you know moment.
Workers are using fake Zoom calls to get their coworkers to leave them alone
A fascinating thinkpiece - Is the MrBeast Era of YouTube ending?
Half of Gen Alpha watch streaming video daily, including the youngest age group, 0-4
Posts
Standard disclaimer that all stories on Reddit are creative writing, but holy shit at this UK workplace story.
Nobody does insults like middle schoolers
That’s the newsletter for this week. I’m off to enjoy London, try not to burn the site down while I’m gone.
My theory about the "pro-Tiktok progressives" is it stems from their very intense desire to align themselves with young people.
That's also why they tend to be anti- "it's the phones", because that implicitly blames young people for using their phones rather than society for failing them. Instead, they talk a lot about walkability, third places, etc.
It's fascinating to see people take the pro-TikTok position because in general it's often them just taking another unrelated position they have and grafting "this is the real reason they want to ban TikTok" onto it. Which means that if you bring up that we began the investigation and evaluation of TikTok two plus years ago before there was a Middle East catastrophe they just graft on another reason.