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A Very On Line Newsletter
This newsletter has the juice!
In Season
September is here. Summer is winding down. We have just a few more weeks to enjoy in-season summer fruits and vegetables. I’ve been trying to cook more with tomatoes myself since we all know they are the food that swings most dramatically from “amazing in-season” to “how is this even a food” the rest of the year. Over on TikTok, they’ve been celebrating another great summer produce selection: corn.
For real though, I’m obsessed with the “It’s Corn” song on TikTok. It’s got a lovely vintage Autotune the News quality to it. Big 2010 energy off of the whole trend in the best ways possible.
Platform Updates
Instagram Launches New Tools to Help Refine Content Recommendations (because they realized their algorithm has no clue what most of us want to see)
The Rest of Meta
YouTube
Twitch
Snap
Culture Movers
Music
On Line
Behold! The ad for The Line, Saudi Arabia’s latest mega project annoying the internet.
In case you can’t tell from the video, the Line is not a video game or a metaverse project but a proposed “city” that would be just one long building spanning over 100 miles of the Saudi desert. It’s also a very stupid idea. It looks like someone tried to design a Nuzlocke run for City Skylines. Half of the critical technology for the design doesn’t seem to exist yet. But this isn’t an architecture or city planning newsletter; here we rant about ads and the internet. So I’d like to talk about that trailer and what I’m gonna call “The Aesthetic of Hype.”
Where else have I recently seen ads with people floating through a city liberated by the promise of technology? Oh yeah, the crypto Superbowl ads. And none of this is that far from the VR surfing that real human CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off in the Metaverse pitch video. Or the Metaverse’s weird shopping mall garden. The uncanny valley plant life. Floating through space untethered by “old technology.” The third choice after typing in “uplifting” into a stock music library soundtracks. There’s a distinct aesthetic language to today’s tech companies showing off their not exactly here yet futures. All hype but little to no substance.
Trying to sell consumers on an idea of the future that isn’t here yet is nothing new. Go back and watch Disney’s original plan for EPCOT. We don’t know what the future of urban planning will look like, but I feel confident assuming I won’t be floating through the air in a Saudi megacity any time soon. And the oddly cheap looking trailers for this kind of future really aren’t selling me on it.
Tin Foil Hat
Some internet conspiracy theories are extremely dangerous and can lead to real-world violence. Others are hilarious. Birds aren’t real. Avril Levigne is actually a body double. Lea Michele can’t read is one of my personal favorites. As part of her work promoting her run in Funny Girl on Broadway (we could do a whole newsletter on the lead-up to her getting that role TBD), she addressed the “rumor” in an interview with the New York Times.
I went to ‘Glee’ every single day; I knew my lines. Then there’s a rumor online that I can’t read or write? It’s sad. It really is.
Notice how she cleverly does not deny anything. Very funny if you ask me.