Web feels off; so I’ll be watching TV and listening to music

The Vibes Are Off

Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick had two great pieces this week two recent “people jumping to conclusions online” incidents that share some underlying DNA. The first piece is on the speculation leading up to Kate Middleton’s cancer announcment. The second was on all of the unqualified guys on X claiming they know why the Francis Scott Key Bridge REALLY collapsed. 

Both are great pieces and helpful for triangulation why the web vibes feel so off right now. A global pandemic slammed on the accelerator, moving more and more of our lives online. At the same time we’re seeing the generalized enshittification of large platforms buckling under the weight of endless growth expectations. Twitter, once a small but culturally important platform, is speedrunning a self-destruct sequence. Low-quality AI-generated stuff is clogging up both our feeds and media incentive structures.

I don’t have a concrete solution yet, but I’ve got a feeling the vibe remedy starts with acknowledging the beautiful, seamless, connected, inspiridng sci-fi future vision we had for how all this tech and these companies would fit in our lives isn’t working right now. Then maybe we can start fixing it.

Platform Updates

Instagram & Threads

• Threads Adds Native GIF Search and Posting on the Web 

• Meta’s new opt-out setting limits visibility of politics on Instagram and Threads

• Threads is adding live scores for sports games, starting with the NBA

• Threads Users Can Now Enable Fediverse Sharing

The Rest of Meta 

• Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal (adding this to my “we need general privacy and data protection laws in the US” file) 

• Anti-trans hate is ‘widespread’ on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, report warns (bookmarking to revisit in June)  

• Meta is adding AI to its Ray-Ban smart glasses next month 

TikTok

• TikTok’s troubles just got worse: The FTC could sue them, too 

YouTube

• YouTube now lets creators share exclusive Shorts with their paying subscribers 

Google 

• Google will soon roll out on-device AI-powered features on Pixel 8 

Apple

• Apple’s antitrust fight begins 

LinkedIn 

• LinkedIn Adds Dynamic UTM Parameters to Campaign Tracking

• LinkedIn’s Rolling out Company Page Messaging to All Brands

Snap 

• Snap Launches Sponsored AR Filters as New Ad Option

Twitter, Sorry X

The Dumpster Fire

• A judge just killed Elon Musk’s lawsuit against an anti-hate research org

Bobku 

Subtitles

Being very dyslexic, I’m not good at watching subtitled films and TV. It’s hard for me to keep up the focus needed to read at someone else’s pace and absorb the rest of what’s happening on screen for very long. That said, I’ve got two TV shows to recommend this week that heavily feature subtitled scenes. 

Hulu/FX’s Shōgun is a political drama set in Japan during the Sengoku period. It follows an English sailor, a Japanese feudal lord, and a Japanese woman who learned Portuguese after converting to Christianity, acting as their translator. Who is speaking which language, when and how they are being translated is a central part of the plot. In the main cut of the show, all of the Japanese is spoken in Japanese, and all of the Portuguese is spoken in English. But there’s also a Dub that keeps these languages for any multi-lingual scene and adds dubbing to the Japanese-only scenes. It sounds a little odd and first, but it works perfectly.

Over on Netflix, I’ve been watching their new 3 Body Problem, an adaptation of a Chinese sci-fi novel. Here, they’ve kept the core plot points of the novel but shuffled around the characters to create more of a core cast and add complexity to their character development. Many of the scenes, especially in early episodes, are still set in China with actors speaking Mandarin, but others are moved to London with most scenes in English. 

Anyway, this loose insight into my own attention span benefiting from alternating subtitled and English audio scenes is just a rough way for me to tell you both shows are good and worth checking out.

Culture Movers 

Pipes & Tubes 

• Ron DeSantis signs bill requiring parental consent for kids under 16 to hold social media accounts

Film & TV

• Disney Plus has a new Hulu-ified logo (I don’t love it)  

Music 

• Spotify tests video courses to teach everything from music production to Excel 

Publishing 

• Instagram co-founders’ AI-powered news app Artifact may not be shutting down after all (I love Artifact, and I’m glad to see it’s not as doomed as it seemed)  

Creator Economy 

• A quarter of YouTube’s paid creators are earning money with Shorts 

AI 

• Elvis Act Signed Into Tennessee Law to Protect Musicians From AI Deepfakes

• Adobe introduces structure reference for Firefly AI and GenStudio for brands 

• AI already uses as much energy as a small country. It’s only the beginning.

Scams

• The SEC can sue Coinbase for offering unregistered securities, judge rules

• Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years for FTX fraud

Dune Memes Continue 

I honestly love watching so many people make and get jokes about this trippy sci-fi noble. We need a word for enjoying the opposite of gatekeeping. What’s German for “joy from other people joining your fandom?”

Programming Note

I’m taking next week off due to my work travel schedule. I’ll be back with a new Kinda Brief on April 12. 

PS

I scheduled this on Thursday night before Cowboy Carter dropped. Past Cameron’s best guess is that if you need Present Cameron today, don’t bother, he’ll be listening to Beyoncé. 

*I’m very dyslexic, and this is a largely free project/hobby. I do not set aside the same time for proofreading that I do for other professional work. If you spot a typo that would cause a communication error, please reach out to gently let me know.