everyone’s coyposting

Also, can you be homesick for an older internet?

If you’re in NY next week, I’m doing a McNally Jackson panel with Kevin Nguyen and Cora Lewis about being journalists who also write novels on Aug. 5 if some heavy shop talk is your thing. There are a few tickets left!

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Even the social hires are going indie: WaPo’s longtime TikTok guy, Dave Jorgenson, is leaving his certified yikes-magnet employer in order to launch a personal YouTube channel called “Local News International.” He’s taking two of WP/BezosFeed’s top video talent with him, but I’m curious if Jorgenson will also be building out his own research/reporting team in the style of traditional news-comedy shows (RIP Colbert), and if Jorgenson finds that having a big ol’ newsroom to draw on was ever actually as much of a boon as it was supposed to be. Why conduct any original research/reporting if you’re a good enough talking head? (As we’re seeing with this recent plagiarism scandal on Substack, there’s quite a market opportunity for converting others’ work into your own viral TikTok video…)

Yesterday, I also noticed the Substack debut of Zaria Parvez, AKA Duolingo’s global senior social media manager, who promises to share her career insights and marketing expertise in her newsletter. (She appears to be staying in her role at Duolingo though, fwiw.) In my opinion, it always makes sense when the folks behind viral corporate accounts want a piece of the action for themselves—or at least, a bit of name recognition. At the end of the day, the only brand you can ever really trust is your own…

(Meanwhile, Planet Money’s best boy Jack Corbett still appears to be working at NPR as a “visual host.” Good for him! Good for everyone!)

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Reading a piece from Town & Country (who has been doing a run of interesting coverage on online etiquette and mannerisms) on “proximity posting” (i.e. conveniently IG-ing just the tip of your gondola whilst in Venice for a certain wedding) alongside Kyle’s latest on posting ennui (i.e. why does it not feel fun anymore, part 2987353) made me realize that we’re essentially in the era of coyposting on Instagram.

Think about it: When’s the last time you read an earnest, non-referential IG caption? The practice of sharing the very best images from our lives on the platform has become such an ingrained yet cognitively dissonant custom that we’ve all adopted a certain default embarrassment with it, which we then paper over with timely meme references as captions, self-abnegation (“hot selfie for the algorithm + link to donate to mutual aid”) and the HEIC equivalent of a sideways glance. Being direct about how photogenic one’s life is, we can all agree, gauche. Better to affect a little modesty and restraint, both for the algo and for your rep in the group chats…

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A really great companion piece to the links dropped last week re: Tea, surveillance, and heterofatalism (FWIW, I am informed that my wayward selfie has cracked neither the Top 50 nor the Bottom 50 following the 4channers rating the leaked selfies……..which, okay, a fair price to pay for some infosec dipshittery on my part) from Kate Wagner at Lux on erotic privacy, and how diametrically opposed the nature of desire and the “new puritanism” as goaded on by the internet are:

The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.

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File this under Stories of Goodness, which feel so rare and delicate to do in an era when everyone’s skeletons get dug up eventually: Joshua Rothman profiled his pediatrician for The New Yorker, which TBH would not have flown under the Missouri School of Journalism’s requirements for writer-subject objectivity, but I think we’re better for it.

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Finally, TikTok recently sussed out the exact cross section of late 2000s + early 2010s emo/pop-punk music that defined my teenage years, and I’ve been hurtling down a rabbithole of music video clips of Cartel, Relient K, Jack’s Mannequin, etc. ever since. A lot of footage is stuff I’d never seen, which made for a highly potent FOMO + nostalgia combo (CYDMO: Confirmation that You Definitely Missed Out?) but even once-familiar music videos, with their distinctly dated aesthetic that once seemed like the embodiment of COOL as glimpsed from viewing YouTube on the family computer, generated such an achey, wistful sensation.

I read a comment that said these videos made them “homesick,” and that feels right. If the internet was indeed a place where one grew up, revisiting it increasingly requires a bit of Narnia-like luck more so than, say, booking a literal flight home. Entry points still abound, but they’re not forever, either.