Weekly Scroll: DoorDash Discourse
Plus: Kate has cancer, Reddit's Big Pop, and the EU still can't tech
You survived another week on the internet. You’re not just surviving, you’re thriving. The firehose of social media bullshit can’t get you down.
Meanwhile, the Infinite Scroll classic post Ugh, Capitalism was republished in a slightly different format at American Purpose magazine!
Onto the week’s nonsense:
Kate Got Cancer
About a week ago we discussed the unfathomable PR disaster that was Kate Middleton’s disappearance from public life for several months. To recap:
Kate was last seen on Christmas Day 2023, then had a ‘planned surgery’ that seems pretty unplanned
Nobody saw her for the better part of three months, during which time speculation started to run wild
The palace decided the best response to all of this was to release an obviously photoshopped picture of her, which caused speculation to shift from ‘Haha This Is Funny’ to ‘Wait Is She Actually Dead’
Well Kate finally made a public video statement, and the news is that she has cancer.
I certainly hope she has a quick recovery, because I am firmly anti-suffering and nobody deserves cancer. But what I find odd is the royal supporters/fans who are now crowing “I bet all you people with your conspiracy theories feel like shit, huh? You monsters harassed a woman with CANCER! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”
No! I reject that accusation because there was in fact a conspiracy. People on the internet noticed that things seemed off with Kate’s disappearance, and noticed that the palace was being weird, and they were right! The royals were hiding something! They did mislead us and manipulate photos! I don’t feel like a bad person for theorizing something was going on, because something was in fact going on.
Assuming Kate does get better and live many more healthy years, this will all blow over with time. But given that ‘Conventionally Attractive Young Mother Gets Cancer’ is the most sympathetic story imaginable, I’m once again wondering how they screwed up the PR on this so badly. Nobody made them talk about how Kate was just ‘at home working on a project’. Nobody forced them to release amateur Photoshop jobs.1
King Charles also has cancer. In response, his team told us about it, said they weren’t going to comment further than the basic details, did a short photo-op of him leaving the hospital… and everything was fine. Everyone was very sympathetic and there were no conspiracy theories. Why didn’t they just do that with Kate?2
Anyways! Get better Kate, cancer sucks, and for the love of god hire a better PR team.3
DoorDash Discourse and Failure to Cope
Over the last week, we saw the return of DoorDash discourse. I tried to document some of the takes in threads here and here. This is one of the more insane discourses we see pop up semi-regularly on Twitter/X, and it genuinely says a lot about our political and cultural landscape right now.
Details after the paywall - DoorDash and failure to cope, plus Reddit’s monster IPO pop, the EU’s continued social media fails, hard stats on Twitter’s decline, and much more.
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