Weekly Scroll: A Swift Backlash
Weekly Scroll: A Swift Backlash
Plus! TikTok ban advances, Musk needs money, and Sexy Sexy Zuck
The Predictable Taylor Swift Backlash
Last week we had a fun viral moment centered around mean critical reviews, including the all-time line of “Oyler clearly wishes to be a person who says brilliant things—the Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot”. If you were hankering for more brutal reviews, buckle up baby - a new Taylor Swift album just dropped and The Critics are not pleased.
Taylor Swift released The Tortured Poets Department last week as a 31-song double album extravaganza, and the critical reception has been a collective “31 songs! Wow! Did we, uh, really need 31 songs?” The New York Times calls The Tortured Poets Department a ‘self indulgent’ and ‘superfluous’ album that generates ‘diminishing returns’ and ‘could use an editor’. The New Yorker calls the lyrics incoherent and bewildering and the album’s visual aesthetic ‘cringe’.
There are more examples, but perhaps the best written is from Paste Magazine, who released their album without author attribution because the last time they review Swift the writer got death threats.1 I know you’re just reading for the quotes at this point, and the opening sentence is a doozy:
Sylvia Plath did not stick her head in an oven for this!
It somehow gets worse2 from there:
The Tortured Poets Department, too, is going to set the art of poetry back another decade—as Swift’s naive call-to-arms of her own milky-white sorrow rings in like some quintessential “I am going to take pictures of a typewriter on my desk and have a Pinterest mood-board of Courier New font” iPhone fodder.
Oh wow
2013 called and it wants its capricious, suburban girl-who-is-taking-a-gap-year wig back! Soaking our book reports in coffee or having our moms burn the edges with a kitchen lighter cannot come back into fashion
Oh man
Between producer Jack Antonoff’s atrocious backing instrumental and the Y2K-era, teen dramedy echo chamber of a vocal harmony provided by out-of-place guest performer Post Malone, “Fortnight” chokes on the vomit of its own opaqueness.
oh mannnnn
This is your songwriter of the century? Open the schools.
Look, on some level these kinds of reviews are just chasing engagement and clout - there’s great status to be gained by doing a witty dunk in essay form. But beyond the obvious, we can learn things from the particular forms these essays take. Last week the overarching theme of the Oyler takedown was come-uppance: that the reviewer who lives by the Mean Spirited Takedown will eventually die by the Mean Spirited Takedown. But this week I find myself thinking that for Taylor Swift specifically, this was inevitable due to who she is.
Ever since Swift announced her album at the Grammys, I’ve been expecting a lukewarm-at-best response. It’s not because Swift is incapable of creating good music - she obviously is - but rather because Taylor Swift might be more overexposed than any celebrity has been in a generation.
Take a look at her output. Swift has released five original albums since 2019, while also releasing four re-recordings of her previous albums. She’s acted in two feature length films, appeared multiple times on SNL, and released four concert movies. She’s gone on arguably the largest, most publicized tour of all of time. Her breakup with Joe Alwyn and subsequent relationships with Matty Healy and Travis Kelce received breathless, round-the-clock coverage from mainstream press. She has been everywhere. She is firmly positioned as the single biggest star in the world and the most powerful musician in a generation.
All that sets you up for a downfall, PR-wise. No person, no matter how beloved, can dominate the discourse so continuously without people eventually turning on you. Swift is a billionaire now. She’s the biggest artist in the world and she’s still making albums about how she’s a smol-bean-tortured-poet, about how mean people are to lil’ ol’ underdog Taylor. Of course people were going to turn on her! Frankly I’m a little surprised this didn’t happen sooner.
I’m assuming Taylor reads this newsletter, so my first piece of advice is to retire to a private island and enjoy your billion dollars. But assuming she doesn’t want to retire and wants to keep being in the public eye with huge new projects every single year, I’ll repeat what I’ve been saying for several years now: The next logical turn for Swift is to turn heel. The next album has to go full villain. And not just ‘Wear dark eyeliner and do a goth looking photoshoot’ while you still make the same songs complaining about ex-boyfriends. Full villain. Make real enemies. Piss off your own fans. This, ironically, is probably the single most interesting thing Swift could do. I think it’d lead to a paradoxical surge in interest and affinity. Pop culture fandom is often just professional wrestling, but centered around diva pop stars instead of sweaty muscular men. And if wrestling can teach us anything, it’s that people love a good Heel Turn.3
Artistically, the worst thing a performer can become is overexposed and boring. Far better for the public to dislike you for a time, than allowing them to get bored of you.
Posting is Praxis
Bearded Mark Zuckerberg became a viral meme this week, with people commenting on how much hotter he would look with a beard. And I mean… yeah. Yeah.
People had all sorts of fun spinning it around before people moved on to other stuff. But what’s insane about this very short meme cycle is that Zuck noticed:
Posting is praxis. We will post our Sexy Bearded Zuck memes until they become reality.
TikTok on the edge
It’s been a very bad week for TikTok. First, ex-employees claimed that TikTok’s supposed independence from China was a lie - one employee claimed they had a US-based manager on paper while actually reporting to a ByteDance manager in Beijing. Who they regularly had to send data about US users. If even a fraction of that report is true, it means TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew badly perjured himself in his testimony before Congress.
Meanwhile, the House of Representative finally passed a huge foreign aid package that has been delayed for months with a side package attached to the bill that includes a TikTok ban.4 This ban is virtually identical to the one that passed in March, but the difference is that this one’s attached to a must-pass package of bills that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The Senate isn’t required to pass the whole package together, but it will be under heavy pressure to do so for simplicity’s sake and to get the foreign aid done fast.
This is gonna happen, folks. Here’s a prediction market for the TikTok ban passing both houses of Congress, with an incredible swing from near-zero to near-certain odds in the last week:
In related news - Apple was ordered by the CCP to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store across all of China.
Pay To Tweet
It was yet another eventful week for Elon Musk. In addition to his ongoing feud with Brazil’s Supreme Court, he once again signaled his intention to force new accounts to pay a ‘small fee’ before they’re allowed to post on Twitter. “This is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots”, said a man who hasn’t tried any other way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.
It’s a little sad but also a little funny how every time Elon rolls out some anti-consumer change to Twitter, he goes back to the same ‘BOTS!’ excuse. The excuse obviously fails on multiple levels. For one thing, Elon is the one who rather famously fired the teams responsible for combatting spam, leading to an explosion of bots on the platform. But an even more obvious rebuttal is that tons of bots already pay $8/month to get a blue check. A token payment when they sign up isn’t going to stop them!
The truth is that Musk’s version of Twitter continues to bleed revenue. Advertisers see Twitter as a site filled with Nazis and brand risks, and when they’ve gone to Musk with concerns he’s been volatile, untrustworthy, and antagonistic. Musk is desperate to raise revenue any way he can that doesn’t rely on advertisers, but there’s a reason virtually no social media app has ever done this at scale. Charging new users a fee to post is something that would genuinely kill the site in the long run.
Insult of the Week
Ryan Broderick, on the users of the new audio-based social app AirDrop:
I’ve seen people on Airchat already talking about flying out to San Francisco to meet all their new Airchat friends. Do not do this! You are you in an MLM for people who know what Github is, but don’t know how to use it. Get help!
That may be the most savage description of tech orbiters I’ve ever seen. AirDrop seems destined to join the likes of Clubhouse in ‘failed social apps that build a lot of buzz never truly go anywhere’. So many of these obviously VC-brained apps seem to me like the processed food version of the social experience - no fiber, all sugar, nothing substantial at all.
Links
Here’s a very weird effort from Instagram to create ‘AI influencer chatbots’ based on popular Instagram accounts. I guess the idea is that you love a certain influencer, and there’s a chatbot AI that mimics their voice… and you pretend you’re chatting with them directly? Maybe I’m just being an old man but that seems creepy as hell.
Also in deeply weird AI ventures - the Angry Girlfriend AI. Supposedly the idea is for guys who don’t know how to communicate to practice dealing with relationship problems? Again, this is bizarre. Begging these people to touch grass.
Twitch is finally attempting to improve their awful discoverability. It’s looks like they’re attempting to make a For You style page, but for livestreams? They definitely need something because their current setup is pretty bad.
A sign of the culture shift - ‘Dimension 20’, a Dungeons & Dragons show, just sold out Madison Square Garden for a live D&D event. And there’s so much demand that fans were seeing prices in the thousands for some tickets.
The New York Times with perhaps the slowest trend reporting I’ve ever seen.
Why are there so many AI-generated pictures of flight attendants worshipping Jesus?
John Deere is hiring someone for $200,000 to be their Chief Tractor Officer on TikTok.
RIP to Post News. I would say you’ll be missed, but you won’t be.
A very odd ‘WORK from HOME’ copypasta takes over LinkedIn.
Posts
This TikTok account is called ‘Boy Room’ and it’s just reviews of men’s sad living spaces in NYC.
Hardcore Swifties responded by yelling at random writers and threatening to burn down the Paste offices, proving the point.
better?
Which can be followed by a babyface redemption!
Technically a ‘forced divestment and ban if divestment is refused’, but in shorthand a ban.
Two things:
You're absolutely correct on both of those first two items and guys needing to touch grass...and then eventually, hopefully, dear God, someone willing of the opposite sex. I have a lot of sympathy for young guys who struggle with the opposite sex, as I was once one of them before I stumbled into my first relationship around 19 years old. It's hard! It's scary! These dudes would be better served getting a hobby, a haircut, and a gym membership than an AI girlfriend. I'm no fan of Jordan Peterson, but one thing that he does preach to guys like this is that you have to make yourself into someone that someone else would find attractive, but unfortunately a shit ton of these guys take that to mean "pseudo alpha male" instead of just a slightly more attractive person of their actually self.
The Dimension 20 thing is a good example of just how silo'ed pop culture has become. I'm a dork and listen to D20 from time to time, so this is in no way shocking to me, but some times you still get folks who are like, "Oh, you like D&D? That obscure nerd game?" And this swings the other way as well. I train at a BJJ gym in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and some local kid who looked like a younger Paul brother came in with a film crew to film something, and I'm sitting here like, oh, how lame, another kid grasping at internet fame. Turns out, this guy has 2.5 million followers on IG and like 5 million on YT! And I have literally never heard of him.
As usual I actually sort of see where Elon's decisions about spam are coming from. The pay for post model does work to prevent spam for some sites (SomethingAwful is the famous one). It is worth it for crypto/scam spammers to still evade but they have to give up more account info to do it, and that's more info you can use to ban them.
Of course where old Twitter would never actually execute on policies due to indecision, new Twitter won't execute on them because the bots are Elon's crypto fans or state-sponsored botnets for authoritarian governments he owes favors to or he's not willing to just wordfilter nudes in bio or whatever.