Meatspace is Sarah and Lora’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
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Dear friends,
When those who are not extremely online saw the superbowl commercial in which Zoe Kravitz sips a beer whilst whispering, we assume many of them had only one question: “Why.” The answer is that Michelob, a beer company, was following the burgeoning brand tradition of commodifying an internet subculture, and then sexualizing it! ICYMI whispering is one thing that triggers “autonomous sensory meridian response,” or ASMR, an experience that makes some people tingle and relax when they hear teeny sounds! Other people feel nothing at all, as is our modern condition!
The Kravitz ad is the latest sign that ASMR is slowly getting mainstreamified (though maybe//hopefully it’s hit its apex after this cringe ASMR ball-shaving commercial(!!!)), but many people have been making and listening to the approximately 45 million ASMR vids on Youtube (like “lava moving” or “fake trip to the hairdresser for the snip snip sounds” or simply “hand moving and quiet whispering”) for like a decade!
And some of its creators have only been alive a lil more than a decade. Like Makenna Kelly!! She is one of Teen Vogue’s 21 under 21 (*does calm breathing exercise*) and the subject of this Wired profile on the ASMRtist teens of youtube, along with a five-year-old ASMR toddler, Aoki Hunnicutt. In her vids, posted on the account Life with MaK, Makenna sucks on honeycomb and does “mouth sounds.” Aoki chews gum and rummages through her mom’s makeup. “IT’S NOT CWEEPY!” she yells. (Ok every part of this Wired piece is honestly perfect please read it. Ty Beau D for the link. Also yes they are called ASMRtists we did not coin that phrase.)
Those who don’t get ASMR, tho, might find it creepy -- the Chinese government banned the genre in 2018 because of its “pornographic” potential (tho the chinese government has also banned a lot of other internet things, so...); and PayPal allegedly stopped letting ASMRtists collect money for custom vids (but according to the Wired story, Paypal denied having an anti-ASMR policy). But, as this recent NYTimes piece argues, even tho some do describe ASMR as a “brain orgasm,” the vids are no more inherently sexual than watching a yoga class. You went there!
Alas, people go there. And thus, tho these kids/teens all make a ton of money and get to live their dream etc (apparently 75 percent of teens in a survey of 1,000 want to be Youtubers when they grow up?!) they also open themselves up to the gross terror of the internet.
(For more on the gross terror/beauty of the internet, please read Patricia Lockwood’s fantastic LRB essay. We digress..)
Speaking of the youths, Atlantic staff writer Taylor Lorenz is renowned for getting ahead of -- and educating the un-teen masses such as ourselves about -- trends in teen internet culture! Just this week for example she wrote a great story about how teens googling themselves has become a part of growing up, especially for young people whose parents have recorded every part of their kids lives online since the literal womb.
And we are so thrilled to be interviewing Taylor for week’s Meatspace!! She is a rockstar of tech writing, and a trusted voice on web culture -- re Gen Z, and beyond! More on that below:
MEATSPACE: How many Insta DMs do you normally get in a day?
TAYLOR LORENZ: About 500,000? No but really I get so many it's overwhelming. 90% of them are spam. Adam Mosseri (Instagram's CEO) followed me back a while ago (brag) and so the vast majority of people who message me are asking for an intro to him or have some dumb Instagram support issue that I can't help them with. I try to read every DM though since I get a lot of story ideas that way. Lots of people also just send me good memes, which I appreciate.
You’re known for picking up on crazy trends, especially ones big with teens, early on. How do you find the teens? Do you reach out to them? Or do they find you?
I almost never seek out teens! I'm interested in emergent user behaviors on platforms and how people find new ways to communicate and connect online. So I always start with the weird account or trend first then reach out to people who are participating in it, or are part of that community or whatever. It sort of just ends up that it's mostly teens who are using platforms in new and creative ways. But some of my favorite stories are actually about other non-teen groups! For example, last year I wrote a feature on how Twitter became the #1 platform for nudists. It was really interesting to examine the roll different ToS plays in shaping the community and culture of a platform.
What kind of internet user were you as a teen? What do you think you would be like today?
I was sort of a terrible person when I was a teen, like really terrible. I was obsessed with seeming "cool" and being popular, and I thought the internet was for dorks and losers. I had Facebook in college, but aside from AIM I never really went online growing up. I didn't really discover the internet until 2009 ish when a friend introduced me to Tumblr, then I went all in. If I was a teen today I'd probably go hard into Instagram. I'd try to set up some sort of mini empire there and make bank so I could skip college.
What’s an internet trend everyone should know about?
I can't think of a trend!? There's always something new lol. One thing that's not a trend but something I think about a lot is anxiety around unfollowing people. I follow way too many people but I can almost never unfollow. I feel guilty. I don't want anyone to take it personally!? I wish that every follower I have could realize I'm following them back in my heart and I love them for subscribing to my content. Anyway, I need to do a major purge soon so just wanted to put that out there.
You’ve dealt with harassment on platforms like twitter, and written about the rampant harassment happening on instagram. What are some simple things social media companies should be doing to make the experience of being online better for women/POC/anyone who experiences targeted attacks?
Well for starters they could start taking it seriously. Jack Dorsey continues to show that he doesn't give a fuck what happens to marginalized groups on his platform. Mark Zuckerberg and pretty much all of Facebook leadership is delusional about how people use their own product. Same goes for YouTube which has, for years, facilitated the spread of dangerous conspiracy theories. All of these companies regularly buy into bad faith attacks from hard right conservatives and radical groups. They court and cater to extremists. So yeah, step one take it seriously and recognize that harassment is a huge problem to begin with. Step two is to work with members of these oppressed groups to build better solutions. They also need more diversity internally. Leadership at these tech giants is overwhelmingly white and male and that needs to change.
Wow! Thank you so much, Taylor!!! Follow her on Insta (and Twitter, but especially Insta for MEMES etc).
BLOOD...SUCKERS!
Okay we are persistently obsessed with Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced founder of theranos. Turns out, she is now living large with her fiancé after attempting to commit fraud on a massive scale with no regard to the lives she literally destroyed along the way…. :D
She also got a dog who she claims is part wolf and named him Balto. Yes this is fraught with symbolism.
Also, wtf is this google slideshow of her “story.” We like how the sources are like “Holmes charged with fraud!” and the captions are like “genius female founder xo.”
Also on the Big Pharma beat: Looks like medical sponcon is a thing! Was only a matter of time.
MEAT-HATERS
OK yes we must talk about fake meat, again. While we personally love to microwave ourselves lil Morning Star Chick’n patties (not sponsored), cattle ranchers are displeased with the $1.5 billion fake meat market. “The word meat, to me, should mean a product from a live animal,” the president of the Independent Cattlemen of Nebraska told the NYT. J’adore:
Nothing worse than a wolf-dog in sheep’s clothing! Or should we say -- a bean in beef’s clothing. But cattle ranchers can honestly prob chill! For now. While the Impossible Burger makers want to switch 92 percent of the meat-eating population to meat alternatives, according to NBC, “in 2017, Americans [still] consumed about 12 million metric tons (26 billion pounds) of beef.”
Also, according to one study, fake meat is not actually better for the environment -- and could be WORSE, because of the CO2 that lab-grown meat labs emit! But wait -- writes Sigal Samuel in Vox, the study was built on a highly speculative model of 1,000 years. Labs might be greener by then! Fingies crossed.
And ty Ben M for this revealing read about meat and masculinity — real men eat beefs not veggies, okay??
And, speaking of FAKE stuff, here is a website that just keeps showing u deepfakes. Find ur doppelganger.
MEATLOVERS PIZZA
Apparently Dominos now gives u a free pizza if u scan 6 random pizzas in their app.
At first, this struck us 1 as a weird business move that perhaps had a catch and 2 as Extremely reminiscent of Hot Dog not hotdog, jianyu’s app on HBO Silicon Valley, which scans objects and tells you whether they are a hot dog or in fact not a hotdog (the show then made a real, downloadable iOS app that uses “bespoke neural architecture” to do this in meatspace).
We downloaded the Dominos app to investigate. It looks like the pizza isn’t quite free! You are encouraged to fill out an elaborate survey after every slice you photograph. Voluntarily relinquished personal info, in this case in the form of valuable pizza consumption habits, is the greatest payment of all!!
Perhaps there were more caveats embedded in the terms and conditions on this app - we wouldn’t know because we don’t understand anything privacy policies state! In our defense, Motherboard confirms that most terms and conditions are “incomprehensible” to most adults, and the New York Times editorial board, in an op-ed about how no one reads them, cites this 2012 stat from Alexis Madrigal that you would need to spend 76 working days to read all the terms and conditions you agree to on the web!!
Also, Chuck e cheese does NOT recycle pizza slices lol, in spite of what Redditers might have you think.
To this we also say.... “ugh yes”
FREE KESHA
This header is a stretch reference to Kesha’s hit song TIK TOK which is also the name of the APP OF THE CENTURY.
To come full circle, teens love tiktok. We don’t use it because we are not hip twelve year olds and/or this man announcing his divorce to a heartbreaking soundtrack. But apparently large swaths of young people use it to view and share short vids! And marketers are looking to swoop in and make money off them! Tiktok is working on adding biddable ads to the platform.
Lipsync vids are big on the platform, but apparently artists don’t really make money when their songs go viral. But JLo, apparently, really does.
TASTY BITES
Plz read this primer on Huawei’s theft of Tappy the robot from T Mobile and look forward to a DEEPER DIVE next week (h/t Andrew H) (NPR)
Our friend Emma Goldberg wrote an amazing piece on how women built the tech industry and then were pushed out (Washington Post)
And the Times also did a big good piece on the history of women coders! (NYTimes)
Harley Davidson is retaining the services of some influencers to try to sell their hogs to the next gen (Quartz)
Meet the Reply Guys, the guys that consistently reply to your tweets. If you have any good reply guy stories, reply to us, guys!! (Mashable)
Google didn’t mention hidden mics oops! (NYMag)
To spark joy, unfollow people (not us tho pls!) (The Verge)
In the spirit of living a tee / nage dream - wanted to take a moment to offer our congratulations to the newly affianced Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry. We leave you with Naomi Fry’s 2016, non-tech-related but ultimately elegant meditation on Orlando in the nude.
Yours in joy-sparking,
Sarah and Lora