Daily-Dose

Contents

From New Yorker

From Vox

href=“https://twitter.com/hashtag/%E6%8B%85%E5%BD%93%E8%80%85%E6%92%AE%E5%BD%B1?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#担当者撮影 pic.twitter.com/V90WnUhT8z

— 旭川市旭山動物園［公式］ (@asahiyamazoo1) May 15, 2022

11:00 am

It’s time to record [the podcast, Chapo Trap House]. We use Zencastr because a few of us are still in New York and some are here in LA. While we record, I watch muted videos of animals or cars that I’d be too embarrassed to actually drive. Sometimes I just want to know what the dashboard of a Range Rover looks like.

Toward the end I grab my phone and check my message requests. I don’t know what I expect, but I think anyone in the professional media or entertainment world does have the delusional asshole part of their brain. Sometimes you check your message requests and it’s a legitimately famous person saying, “I love your podcast,” which is insane. A lot of it is just annoying questions that you’ve already answered, but people sometimes tell me interesting things that I wouldn’t have known.

Today a guy tells me that there’s a video game that Hezbollah made, and I’m very curious to figure out how to play it. Apparently you play as a Hezbollah guy fighting an IDF guy. I like video games that are made by outsiders, like made in a country that is experiencing a brutal sanction regime and probably doesn’t have access to a lot of tools that someone making a game in France or Canada has.

Unfortunately, one or two times a day there are people in my Twitter messages who are experiencing psychotic episodes where they think they’re being targeted. It definitely freaked the shit out of me in the first few years of being a public figure, but now that’s just a fact of any kind of public internet life that you cannot take personally. I don’t know if there’s something about me that particularly upsets people, maybe it’s the shape of my face, but I live with it and hope that it never crosses over.

2:00 pm

After recording the podcast and a long phone call, I go to the gym. If I’m lifting, I’m on my phone a lot. You feel like an asshole if you’re just standing there in between sets, so you need something to look busy. If I make a particularly gross body horror or upsetting joke that loses followers, this is usually where I do it.

My goal is for my followers to yell at me and tell me they hate it. The real victory is when people with their full name and profession quote-tweet me and are like, “What the fuck is this? This is disgusting.” That’s the stuff I find funniest. It’s just purely for me, and that’s where I’m at my most authentic self.

I’m just running today, so I take advantage of YouTube Premium’s audio-only feature and listen to Dark Souls lore videos. Neither aspect of this is defensible; I am paying for the privilege of listening to a 17-minute narrated essay about a dragon named Kalameet.

4:00 pm

I’m done with everything I absolutely have to do at this point. I do have some logistic payroll shit that isn’t especially demanding or urgent. I go in and out of doing that for the next few hours. It’s a dance of looking at automated accounts called, like, Every Image Of Martens, or the group DMs that have a .09 percent variation in members, and going back to my spreadsheet bullshit.

At some point I see something about the baby formula shortage that makes me badly want a public execution of the people responsible. I really do feel that in my heart, but of course, I’m just staring at my phone with the blankest expression in recorded human history. Minutes later I’m just looking at posts about the crypto crash. I think the schadenfreude with this particular thing is sort of forced and blinkered, but I’m not exactly looking at this like a first responder surveying a disaster. I’m sure some obnoxious shitty people lost money but considering how many people in this country are just two left turns away from complete financial ruin, it’s really hard for me to feel happy about it. Everyone between, like, 22 and 40 right now thought this was going to be for them what buying a house was for their Boomer parents. A lot of desperate people got screwed.

Many would have you believe that cryptocurrency is collapsing, but those who have closely studied the history of these markets have seen this before – and they know that earnings are poised to shoot through the roof. Here’s what’s really going on. pic.twitter.com/nxqbx5VNQL

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) May 10, 2022

This is just the other type of thing you do when you’re looking at your phone, which is enjoying the drama of something bad happening, but without the pain of it happening to you or the feeling that you need a clear moral opinion on it. I don’t think that’s really unique to the internet. People have always kind of liked hearing about a coworker’s horrifying divorce if they don’t really talk to them. Everyone does it to some extent, but so many different groups of people being in one place makes it absurdly easy to access now. It is pretty horrifying to think what instant feedback reactions to headlines and ready-made arguments are doing to us.

I’m almost certainly not going to take any of this shit off my phone, though. I’m just going to feel it deep in my heart and not really do anything.

6:00 pm

It’s Elden Ring time. Let’s get this shit. I try soloing Malenia twice until I think better of it and do some catacombs. I’ve beaten her twice but I used the spirit summons. It’s really fucking hard.

9:00 pm

None of my friends are online playing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which is what I actually want to play. I think of CS:GO the way that other people think of golf or baseball: an unimpeachably great, fundamental game.

It’s a pretty dull Thursday, all told. I close out this day by watching YouTube videos about MLM-cult hybrids and crypto (I am desperately trying to understand the Luna implosion to uncertain success). I watch an amazing two-part documentary about LuLaRoe by Munecat and learn something interesting, which is that there are a lot of MLM scams in Utah not only because it’s a favorable business environment, but because the social cohesion and sense of community with Mormons is such that one Mormon is probably not going to think that another Mormon would be lying to them. Unfortunately it’s screwed a lot of Mormons out of money. Utah is one of the few states that has a white- collar criminal database registry, like a sex offender registry, just because there are so many people scamming their neighbors and friends and cousins and shit.

And that’s what I do as I drift off into sleep.

Total screen time:

8 hours, 53 minutes

This column was first published in The Goods newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one, plus get newsletter exclusives.

This year, the buzzy, VC-backed darling is BeReal, which is currently the second most-downloaded social networking app on the App Store, behind TikTok. It launched in December 2019, but nearly 75 percent, or 7.67 million, of BeReal downloads occurred this year, according to recent Apptopia data shared with TechCrunch. The app recently closed on a Series B funding round and is expected to quadruple its valuation to around $630 million, reported Business Insider in early May.

“We’re always looking to connect with friends in a casual way,” said Kristin Merrilees, 20, a junior at Barnard College and BeReal user, who also writes about culture and the internet. “I think Snapchat briefly was that space until my friends stopped using it. Now, it’s BeReal that lets you peek into people’s lives throughout the day.”

What is real, though, and what is fake when we spend so much of our time tethered to screens? In a commodified social media landscape, authenticity is as much of a marketing buzzword as it is an on-screen value, touted by people, brands, and, of course, apps. BeReal assumes that the authentic self can be divulged under the right conditions — that catching users off-guard will lead them to abandon all pretense. And so far, users seem to be buying into its pitch.

“It has the vintage feel of early Instagram,” said Sasha Khatami, 21, who works in digital marketing. “I think it’s an interesting shift for people like me, who are used to posting curated content for so long, now toward a reminder to post in the moment.”

BeReal’s unsubtle marketing strategy has led it to be a breakout hit among college students. The startup pays students to serve as campus ambassadors, refer friends, and host promotional events. Besides its trendiness, however, the app’s concept and key functions are anything but original. It’s a well-timed reinvention of FrontBack, an app that popularized the simultaneous selfie and back-camera photo before shuttering in 2015. Similarly, its unpredictable daily push alert mimics the engagement strategy of Minutiae, an anonymous daily photo-sharing app launched in 2017.

Still, BeReal is not much of a threat to the established hierarchy of social platforms that have built a decade-old fiefdom off our data and attention. BeReal is not intent on remaking the social internet. Instead, it operates on the sidelines of this seemingly unshakeable world order, and is backed by some of the same firms that funded Instagram and Twitter. (Venture capitalists are perpetually on the hunt for the next big social startup, despite its history of false starts.) Its goal, like that of most startups, is to become commercially viable, which means it eventually has to find ways to make money off of its users.

The app’s greatest appeal may be its current novelty and the fact that it isn’t Instagram or Snapchat. Still, BeReal can’t seem to escape the pall of the major social networks. Merrilees has noticed an uptick in people sharing their BeReals on Instagram. Some are even remixing them into TikToks, as a kind of memory reel. “A lot of people are migrating content across different platforms,” Khatami tells me. “It feels very natural to me. I started making TikToks of my BeReal photos after seeing people post theirs.”

@yuhswagdopeyuh

i love it @BeReal. #bereal

♬ original sound - kei

Since BeReal is so insular, usage is highly dependent on individual friend circles. Once people start to tire of it, chances are, their friends will too. There’s a FOMO-ish undercurrent to the hype. People download BeReal because they’re curious. They don’t want to miss out. It’s nostalgia bait, too, for those old enough to remember the ad- free days of Instagram. The Times’s John Herrman found it to be a “reproduction of the experience of joining one of the dominant social networks when they all still felt like toys.” BeReal’s daily reminder tries to enforce a reflexive instinct to post and use the app, similar to how Snapchat users feel beholden to maintain their streaks. These alerts, however, seem more contrived than spontaneous. They run counter to not only BeReal’s stated mission but to the psychological literature on authenticity and self-perception.

Authenticity is a fluid, ever-evolving social construct that cannot be clearly mediated, least of all through an app. In a critical examination of the concept, researchers Katrina Jongman-Sereno and Mark Leary argued that authenticity “may not be a viable scientific construct,” citing the varying definitions used by psychologists, sociologists, and behavioral researchers in their assessments. So, why does this concern over online authenticity seem so pervasive? The internet flattens any distinction between irony and sincerity, human and machine, real and fake. If it’s all artifice, why do we care?

Our fixation on authenticity-posting is perhaps a reflection of our anxieties about the internet and how it debilitates our modern sense of self. Authenticity is a metric to measure content and the celebrities, influencers, brands, and individuals behind the facade. “Lately, it feels like more people are noticing and calling out performance on social media, like how ‘casual Instagram’ was identified as a trend,” said Maya Man, a Los Angeles-based artist and programmer. The notion of authenticity mollifies the viewer, assuring them that there is some truth to what is seen online. For the poster, it’s an ego-driven ideal to aspire toward or embody — even with content they’re paid to promote.

BeReal’s attempt at curating an authentic space is far from perfect, but it gets at an unanswerable ontological question: Are we ever truly ourselves on the internet? “I view every single thing you post online as contributing to this distributed internet avatar that you’re performing,” Man said. “Performing isn’t a negative thing. It’s the fact that you have a mediated audience in mind, even if you’re posting on a private account.”

Users who started using the internet at an early age, or “digital natives,” might share Man’s gestalt theory, and are more accustomed to reconciling these varying personas. It’s why people have Twitter alts, finstas, and specific accounts dedicated to food, aesthetics, or memes. Some of these disaggregated identities might be perceived as more authentic than others. Since the online self is fractured across multiple platforms and mediums, authenticity matters in that it’s a coherent, ready-made identity for consumption by a public audience.

In a critique of BeReal, Real Life magazine editor Rob Horning posits: “An even more real version of BeReal would just give your friends access to your cameras and microphones without you knowing it, so they can peep in on you and see how you act when you think no one is watching. If the panoptic gaze is falsifying us, only voyeurism sets us free.”

These voyeuristic conditions were what Man sought to investigate in creating Glance Back, a Chrome extension that unpredictably snaps a webcam photo once a day when the user opens a new tab. “I was very unsettled by that feeling that someone is looking at you for a long time and you’re not looking back,” she told me. “That’s what my computer feels all day, and we don’t have a chance to engage with its view.”

Even under Glance Back’s unexpected voyeurism, what it captured didn’t feel any more or less authentic than BeReal’s self-directed gaze. Glance Back catches me in a distracted, bleary-eyed state, whereas I convey a more earnest, alert version of myself on BeReal. After a few weeks of observing my life’s repetitious contours through my browser and phone, it became apparent to me that authenticity is a facile concern, one that’s easier to grapple with than our constant state of surveillance. Rather than fret over our perceived authenticity, perhaps a better question is: Why are we so willing to document ourselves to prove what we already know?

From The Hindu: Sports

From The Hindu: National News

From BBC: Europe

From Ars Technica

From Jokes Subreddit