back from vacation, back from federal holidays, back in action:

*a quick promise to you: our newsletter will always only ever be written by humans and never by robots. we wish we could say that this is out of love & respect for writing & the environment, and while those are both true, it’s mostly that we really tried a couple years ago for months on end to get the robots to write in this very weird (but always hilarious, obvi) tone and it just…has not delivered. easier AND funnier to keep it highly manual and we are very okay with that. thank you for your understanding.

while normally how a mansplainer gets his water, “well, actually” will explore the different angles of an argument or conversation & favor celebrating nuance & complexity over the short-term satisfaction of “hot take culture”.

Look, I’m gone in Europe and trying to be offline for three weeks and what happens while I’m gone? A Cherry Pepsi Culture War broke out and I wasn’t even here to cover it in real time.

You would be forgiven for not knowing what the fuck I’m talking about because it was short-lived and I think probably stayed within the confines of the Chronically Online demographic, but according to many people, Cherry Pepsi made a rape joke online. Also (and you probably saw this one coming) according to many people, Cherry Pepsi did not make a rape joke online.¹ 

The battle ensued.

To its credit (?), Cherry Pepsi removed the tweet that offended many, made an apology, promised to, idk, LiStEn and dO bEtTeR or whatever else you’re supposed to do when a large swath of Chronically Online people get angry because they misunderstood a joke in the annals of canon of Chronically-er Online-er people. The hostility waged for like, a week, and then I think we all moved on to something else (like, idk, whether eating Pop Tarts is homophobic or something²).

I’m not here reporting from the battlefield³ because I think that Cherry Pepsi was a cultural watershed moment; I’m bringing it up because, between that and a post I saw in my Threads feed about Taylor Swift, I’ve got some overlapping observations about the lies we tell ourselves about the internet. The thesis is honestly so simple: What you see online is not actually the same as what everyone else sees online, and I thought we all understood this. Put even more simply: YOUR world is not THE world.

Now, it seems like I could stop there because I honestly don’t think that anyone would disagree with me on these statements, at least not empirically. It’s a really easy thesis to embrace and understand when we are on the side that has or knows of different experiences that run counter to the broad strokes statements that are made. But it seems like it’s less easy to understand (or maybe remember?) when we agree with the broad strokes statement, when it’s reflective of our experience or of knowledge that we recently acquired or was bestowed upon us.

Too easily, we buy into the idea that, because we see something, understand something, recently learned something, that means that EVERYONE sees, understands, or knows this thing…and if they DON’T see it, understand it, know it…well why the fuck not??? WE DO! WHAT’S STOPPING YOU? We repeat things we’ve learned and when people ask us to back it up or cite our sources, we tell them to “google it.” We say things like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” We cannot possibly understand how someone could be receiving information that is different from ours because this post has 1 MILLION LIKES on it, what do you MEAN you haven’t seen it? And if you haven’t, WHY ON EARTH HAVEN’T YOU SOUGHT IT OUT?

Often, when I go to a museum or to a new city, I see options for guided tours. In a museum, this might be an audio guide that you can pick up before you walk in. It could be a tour of a particular exhibit led by a museum docent, who trained in how to guide attendees through the exhibit. In a city, it might be a walking tour led by a city guide, a private company guide or a city-sponsored tour. 

Now, I personally don’t mind an occasional, robust guided tour. But most of the time, I prefer to explore at my own pace, stopping at the things I think are interesting, sitting when I want to, doing more research where I want to, or taking a break to get a lil snack when I’m hungry and not when the tour guide has it scheduled. That’s me, personally. The downside to exploring of one’s own volition is that I might miss some cool things I didn’t know about, some food I didn’t get to try, some fun tidbit about this painter or that sculptor or this artifact that I would find interesting. The upside is that I’m never bored because I’m running my own tour of things that will keep me engaged. There is absolutely a trade-off, I acknowledge that.

But can you imagine yelling at someone or calling them a name because they didn’t use the audio guide at the museum exhibit and therefore didn’t learn that Albania’s former Communist dictator was born in Gjirokaster and built over 750,000 concrete military bunkers throughout the country because he was so paranoid about enemy attacks that he wanted to be sure that, no matter where he was in the country, he could spirit away to a bunker and be safe? I MEAN HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THAT.⁴

Now imagine that you signed up for a tour at a plantation or on the National Mall in DC or of the concentration camps in Poland. And imagine that you read reviews of the guided tour before you got there and they were GLOWING. All of them talked about how much they learned that they hadn’t learned in school, how much they didn’t previously know, how it completely changed their perspective and their whole life on everything. And you’re like HELL YEAH I LOVE LEARNING THINGS so you sign up, and you go on the tour of the plantation/National Mall/concentration camp.

The tour starts interestingly enough: You get some really interesting information about who the major players were, some gossip about their secret foibles, the architecture or design, etc. But then it starts getting…kind of weird. Your plantation tour guide starts talking about how the Confederacy wasn’t formed over slavery, but over states’ rights, and that many slaves “willingly” joined up to defend the Confederacy because they believed in states’ rights, too. Your National Mall tour guide takes you to the site where Hillary Clinton “murdered” Vince Foster, or speaks about the “heroes” who staged a protest on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Your concentration camp tour guide starts offering “alternative explanations” to what the camps were used for and drops a little, “You know, not many people know this, but there were hardly any Jews actually murdered by the Nazis in these camps–the numbers have been greatly exaggerated, and it’s good to understand the truth.”

Do you see where I’m going with this?

Your experience of the internet, from your Google searches to your social media scrolls, are all a guided tour. It used to be, when this all started, that you controlled the tour on some level: You essentially chose your “guide” and helped build your algorithm brick by brick with the content you engaged with. It was critical to these companies to use your behavior to build your algorithm, to keep you engaged at all costs, because it was the only way they could make money.⁵

But because it was so critical to keep you engaged, they had to up the ante a bit. As they collected more data on our movements: our scrolls, our likes or reactions, our comments and shares, they began to also understand that mis- and disinformation not only spreads faster than truth, but keeps people engaged at higher rates. Why? Because it feeds confirmation bias, AND/OR it makes you outraged (rage-bait). As time went on, the answer on the other side was very clear: Users don’t know what they want/need in order to stay on the app. WE know what keeps them there. 

Ever noticed how your feed isn’t even people you know or follow anymore? That it’s like, every third post is an ad and every fourth and fifth posts are “suggestions”? This is by design.

We have less control over our internet experience than ever before. Not even our searches on myriad search engines are immune. And what you see ISN’T what everyone else sees. You are on a completely different guided tour than the person next to you, no matter how close you are to that person. Every algorithm is different and uniquely designed to keep YOU engaged, even if that means pissing you off. It’s why the concept of “intellectual labor” is swiftly becoming outdated: “Google it” isn’t the intellectual flex you think it is, because the results it will turn up for the person you give the directive to will NOT be the results that turned up for you (to say nothing of how quickly we forget the people who did the intellectual labor to educate us, and then we refuse to pay forward.)

The lie we were sold is that simply having access to the information will be the solution for the problem. But information access and an information tour guide are not the same concepts, and we are fooling ourselves if we don’t think the vast majority of our internet experience lives in the latter. We treat them like the same thing to our own detriment. 

When we treat our feeds and our search results as the same feeds and search results most people experience, we very simply make OUR world THE world. We were supposed to have our worlds cracked wide open by access to information. Companies that designated themselves mandatory tour guides shrunk those worlds until they were individually us-sized, creating more myopia, more egocentrism, and more confirmation bias. They affirm what we believe and then they set us loose to rabidly defend it against others who have different lenses, different experiences, and altogether different tours they are being guided on.

And we don’t know if they got the Holocaust Denier Guided Tour Special or not. 

So what’s all this mean? It means that people who drink Cherry Pepsi are not rape apologists. It means that Taylor Swift isn’t the only female billionaire people complain about, even if it’s all you see from your tour guide. It means that we need to stop letting our Really Fucking Shitty Tour Guides run the show and do our thinking for us, and that we need to learn how to talk to each other like human beings again, because that’s what we are. We are human beings who are being manipulated over and over again for profit, and the manipulation is in telling us that the cell they’ve confined us to is actually the ONLY existence or experience that makes sense or is right.

Listen more. Be more curious about other people’s statements and perspectives. Avoid getting sucked into the passive scroll. Actively clock the messages you’re seeing over and over again vs what you’re NOT seeing, and then go in search of those messages to see what the other worlds look like. Learn how to separate fact from opinion and ask yourself always, “What does this person stand to gain from sharing this information?” NOT as a way to disprove them, but as a way to distance yourself enough from information that you don’t form identification or emotional ties to it. The algorithms will want to control our experience in seeking out that information but we DO have the keys. We must challenge ourselves to use them every day; that resistance will be our only protection in an increasingly technocratic society.

¹So…the tweet was not offensive, largely because it was making reference to a popular turn of phrase among (mostly white) women to “stop asking permission” for them to be their true selves. And if you want an actual fucking offensive rape insinuation from a brand, and the reason I said I’d never drink Belvedere ever again (which is now easy because vodka is terrible), you can see this one, but remember trigger warning

²I made this up but we should all make note just in case

³Yeah, I know, there are wars going on. I’m not responsible for them and using war metaphors in this moment is not making light of actual war, all of which I think is supremely fucking stupid and senseless, but rather to make a point about the degree to which we’ve made outrage over something like Cherry Pepsi into high-stakes life decisions and oh my god I cannot even believe I had to write a disclaimer like this

⁴If this seems silly, it’s designed to. And also it’s true

⁵You might be like, well wait - how are they making money? I don’t pay for it. To which I say, “yet” and also, “if you aren’t the customer, you’re the product being sold” - other people pay these companies for access TO you, so the companies need to keep you engaged to keep promising this access and getting paid for it.

full-time, part-time, contract, hybrid, remote, on-site: here are some of the opportunities we heard about this week.

what you had to say about our last poll

danielle has too many tabs open, but she swears they’re mostly interesting.

each week, we’ll end our newsletter with action item(s), or “what TF are you supposed to do about all this now?” we hope they help. 🤞🏻