Greg's Newsletter

Welcome to Greg’s Newsletter NUMBER 99. I’ll be checking in next edition with a look back at some hits and misses since launching this in January of 2015 (!!!!). And there will be an announcement as well. Stay tuned.

But for this issue, I want to talk about The Blog Era. It’s a new podcast series by my buds Jeff and Eric Rosenthal, of hip-hop sketch comedy/podcast ItsTheReal fame and Pharell’s OTHERtone production company. You can find it on your preferred podcast platform.

It’s a history of an upstart group of hip-hop bloggers (Nah Right, 2DopeBoyz, etc) who bypassed and outran traditional music media gatekeepers and created a new music ecosystem, in turn launching the careers of rap’s future superstars (Drake, J. Cole, Wiz Khalifa, Kid Cudi etc.). As up-and-comers, those artists eschewed the major label route and went direct to the bloggers. The years 2008-2012 were the sweet spot—it was a very specific time, with technology, communication, and cultural forces combining and I’m so glad the story is being told.

And while The Blog Era covers the more mainstream side of the hip-hop internet (if you could even call it that at the time), there were other corners of the internet a part of this, too. Sites and bloggers giving voice and shine to the underground, the emergent, the left field, connecting artists and audiences from Europe to Asia, to the US. Sites like MOOVMT, 92 BPM, Classic Drug References, Renaissance Soul, and Fresh Selects. An absolutely essential crew to my musical knowledge and taste, to this day.

Back to The Blog Era. The podcast has brought back a lot of memories for me. I started following the ItsTheReal guys in 2007-2008, on Tumblr (which absolutely needs its own retrospective!!). I reposted their sketch comedy stuff and chatted with Jeff on GChat (to this day, one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, who is somehow—despite EVERYTHING he and his bro are doing—will be down for an hour long Facetime sesh whenever).

I also got to witness, firsthand and up close, as Chicago’s Andrew Barber and FakeShoreDrive went from covering and championing the culture to truly being a part of and helping shape the culture from within in the late 2000s (Episode 4 gets into FSD in more detail).

So, yeah, it’s been a little bit fun to reminisce. But also: projects like The Blog Era are so, so important. As our lives have become ever digitized over the years, so too has art, culture, and consumption. There are “Blog Eras” to be told about internet subcultures big-and-small.

We tend to assume that all things digital are preserved, and that’s just not the case. Sites go offline. Chat histories are erased. Videos and songs are taken down. And I’m not advocating that everything should be tracked and documented all the time online—not at all!—but rather that it’s important when people thoughtfully tell these histories.

There are specific periods in my life that crossed over to the online that I would love to go back and document. The online Nike scene in the pre-Niketalk, 1990s era. Early Tumblr. Google Reader and sharebr0 culture of the late 2000s/early 2010s.

There’s something interesting about The Blog Era being released as some of the tentpoles of 2010s media—Buzzfeed News, VICE—are literally dying. We’re in a creator-led world of media and maybe socio-economic forces could have given us the foresight to say “yeah, duh, that was inevitable.” I don’t know.

But a lot of this played out organically, sometimes in reaction to the digital media world and its gatekeepers. The Buzzfeeds and VICE’s of the world, well, they were launched to much fanfare with VC backing and splashy CEOs and executives claiming they were building the future of media.

Turns out, they weren’t building the future of media. It was never going to be a VC-backed, top-down industry. (And despite that, people are still trying.) Simply having a shiny new media entity with some new formats doesn’t solve the intractable demise of traditional media and journalism in the face of broader economic, political, and local trends. And, unfortunately, the amazing editors and journalists—the people who do the really good, important work—end up paying the cost in the end.

That’s why histories like The Blog Era become so important. They’re telling a story of a of a particular convergence of technological change, communication, and culture. Because so often it’s not that people with unlimited resources who change the game, like the VC-backed media of the last decade. Not every new hip-hop blogger set out to “fundamentally change the music industry” like the folks behind the media industry constantly claimed they would do with news.

No, these bloggers—and the artists they were inextricably linked to—had new tools, new ways of creating and consuming and sharing and talking about art. And fostered thriving communities surrounding it all.

It was organic and, like, yeah, of course at some point (as you’ll hear in the podcast) they knew they were fundamentally changing the music industry. But it started with people, and new ways of doing things, and communities.

And however big or small those little communities and corners of the internet are, they all have histories worth telling.

Episode 7 of The Blog Era drops tomorrow (Wednesday, May 24). Go dig in!

Welcome to edition #98. So glad to have you. The last several newsletters have been moderate-to—lengthy essay type-things, so let’s make this one a links issue.

To the internet we go!

First, from CNBC: Amazon, TikTok and YouTube are investing in Shopping Network-like capabilities, hoping to capture the livestream wave that’s blown up in China. Some stats + context:

“Of Chinese consumers surveyed by Coresight Research, 74% said they had bought products through a shoppable livestream in 2022. In the U.S., 78% said they’d never even watched one.”

“People want to buy products with meaning or products that they can’t get anywhere else. And that’s really what’s the underpinning of live shopping in the U.S. That’s very different than in China, which is all about just a mass population,” said analyst Quyng Mai.

The CNBC story dropped just about the same time that Meta announced it was leaving the livestream shopping business on Instagram. So, still a long ways to go in the U.S., if it catches on at all. I’m curious if some other live + commerce + social thing takes off here.

Next, from VICE: perhaps unsurprisingly, some people are believing everything they see on TikTok. Not dissimilar to the experiences of older generations on Facebook. We’ve learned nothing!

But why TikTok? We’re consuming so much content, served at scale and personalized, and without any valuable kind of gatekeeping—we don’t have the added trust layer of media entities or journalists who have fact checked things. On TikTok, specifically, the For You page is meant to be an endless scroll without user scrutiny of the content.

I think context collapse—where several “different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one finds its way to another” thereby eliciting a completely different response—has a big part to do with it, too. This happens on Twitter all the time. But a joke-y TikTok meant for one audience can go viral, garner huge engagement to give it some semblance of credibility, only to find its way to another audience who views it with seriousness or shock and as truth.

Finally, I’ve been keeping on the “Do Not Disturb” train for several years. My specific use case had to do with the completely overwhelming notification system I had set up on my iPhone—at times, getting pings from hundreds of Twitter and Instagram accounts. (In hindsight, setting up notifications when any of a list of 300+ people tweeted was pretty twisted s**t.)

I figured out it was better for my well-being to set my phone to DND so that I could open my notifications when I wanted, rather than glancing at the phone every time it dinged. If that meant replying a little late to some texts or group chat messages, it was worth it. I’m reclaiming my time!

kate lindsay at Embedded covered the growing DND phenomenon as a positive reaction to the larger consumption environment we're in:

Society doesn’t actually just blindly follow the whims of technology. TikTok made everything short-form and threatened to “ruin” attention spans—and in response, people are actually leaning back into long-form content on YouTube. The constant texts, notifications, and other features on our phones that make us feel like we need to be overwhelmingly available at all times have instead led to people just … turning them off.

I think it was only recently that Apple showed a user if the person they were going to message had “Do Not Disturb” on. So, when it’s on, it does, by default, make it look like that person (me, I’m at the center of the world) doesn’t want to be messaged at all. My reality is just that I’d rather sometimes check my texts periodically rather than real-time. But have I been looking like an unreachable curmudgeon instead?

All that to say: keep texting me! Even if it takes me a bit to get back to you.

OK, that’s all for today! Love you!

Welp, at the end of last year, I was part of a large round of US layoffs at my agency. Even if they tell you it’s strictly financial and nothing related to performance, it’s still takes a hit to the ego.

Rather than grind myself to a pulp finding the next gig during the holidays, I took the opportunity to slow down, pause, and enjoy the time off. It was a godsend. I did have some conversations with various recruiters and agencies, but I didn’t really hit it hard. (I am now actively looking for my next gig in the advertising/creative/PR/social agency world as a Strategy Director IN CASE YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEBODY).

As a result, I’m spending more time on LinkedIn. Networking, sourcing opportunities, etc. It’s entirely possible to spend whole-ass days on LinkedIn, messaging, connecting, applying. Rinsing and repeating. Because it’s true, you never know where your next opportunity might come from. So many people have been genuinely helpful in this process! Building and strengthening your network is most likely to yield a positive outcome versus straight cold applying to things.

I review every LinkedIn connection request. I’m not interesting enough or important enough to be inundated with connections—and I haven’t tried to be a LinkedInFluencer (yuck!)—so it’s relatively easy.

Enter: Phil Bell.

What might have been an innocuous connection request from someone I didn’t recognize turned into an investigation that had the potential to unearth the underbelly of our geopolitical order.

Let’s dig in.

The first curiosity: Phil’s company

This man named Phil Bell, who sent the connection request, identified himself as employee of a company called “Host Marriott Corp.” Right off the bat, I wasn’t familiar with Host Marriott Corp. but it sounded legit. Maybe the holding company or corporate parent for all of the Marriott hotels? Was this someone from the hotel giant wanting to hire me? Is it even worth looking into it—randos send LinkedIn requests all the time, after all.

Like, this was the moment: right here. I can just ignore it and move on.

But I couldn’t brush aside the curiosity.

So, I went to Google for verification: let’s make sure the company is real.

The first result is a press release from Marriott International, Inc. about the resolution of litigation involving Host Marriott Corp. So, OK, that’s kind of legit, insofar as Host Marriott Corp. is or was a real entity.

But wait! It’s from February of 2000. TWO THOUSAND! Looking at the date of the stories/results on the first page, you see: 1995, 2002, 1995, 2005, 2008, 2006. In other words, whatever this entity is hasn’t been active lately, if it exists at all anymore.

My mind raced. My first thought, naturally was: is Phil Bell a member of Obama/Biden’s Deep State trying to keep tabs on me? A Russian influence campaign? China’s next American surveillance effort? Hell, maybe I’m thinking too small-time here: this could be the tip of the iceberg of a 3-way collab between the Democratic party, Russia, and China designed to keep Trump out of the White House in 2024. But wait: wouldn’t Russia rather have Trump in office? This is some 5D chess. But what do these global and domestic powers, as a unified front, want?

Everything seemed on the table.

What about that profile photo?

Phil’s profile photo seemed so generic that it was borderline parody.

I uploaded Phil Bell’s incredibly generic profile photo and did a reverse image search and nothing of value came up, except that Google suggested that the photo might be related to Gareth Southgate, coach of England’s soccer team. But I mean, look at him. A generic, Anglo white dude you could possibly create. Garth Southgate was born in Watford, Hertfordshire and attended school in Cowplain, Hampshire and then went to Hazelwick School in Crawley, West Sussex. That could just as easily have been Phil, from the looks of him.

Was this an AI-generated profile photo, a la thispersondoesnotexist.com? I downloaded Phil’s profile photo and studied the headshot really closely. I did this while sitting at a coffee shop, so I looked kind of creepy. Just a man, sipping a cappuccino, hunched over a computer screen with his face two inches from this Phil’s zoomed-in profile photo. Not open in any image editing software. A human deeply staring at another’s photo, in a crowded room.

But anyways, AI has gotten really good. It’s pretty plausible that my naked eye couldn’t spot it. And the tools of AI have been democratized—ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc. Everyone from the Chinese military to the person sitting next to you in a cafe could weaponize it.

Real world experience

Then I read the “Experience” listed in Phil’s profile. He’s a “Senior Speaking Director” but the description used doesn’t match the responsibilities of someone who does “speaking” as a profession.

It lists “investment management” and “macroeconomic analysis” and “portfolio management.” All hallmarks of someone broadly in finance or investing. And come to think of it: what the hell is a “Senior Speaking Director?”

To Google, once again. The first result? Not a resource about “Speaking Directors” or Google’s suggestion of the best answer, as you might get if you asked “what is a Marketing Manager.”

The first result was another LinkedIn profile: for a “Gianna Stephanie.” More on that in a minute.

Wait, what school?

OK, so this guy Phil apparently earned his degree from MIT’s Sloan business school. That’s pretty amazing on the face of it. Top-tier program, and all that.

But it’s kind of weird—the school’s logo doesn’t show up on his profile. And wait, isn’t it technically called MIT Sloan School of Management? Like if I were a proud graduate of one of the premier graduate programs in the world, I would for sure have that name locked-and-loaded on my profile down to the “T.” (I always thought the “T” in MIT stood for “Theatre,” but later learned it’s “Technology!” Wow!)

When you click on “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)” (aka the wrong way to present the school) LinkedIn doesn’t direct you to an actual school page. Rather, it just functions as a generic search within LinkedIn, and pulls in various people and posts who have mentioned “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” on the platform.

But, if you just search “MIT Sloan School of Management, the legit page —with the logo and 437K followers—shows right up.

Phil probably didn’t go to Sloan.

So what the heck was going on? There’s no chance that Phil is real, right? Or was my initial suspicion that a new Axis of Evil (Democrats, Russia, China, maybe George Santos and/or Anthony Devolder) was trying to reshape the world order still the most plausible explanation? And what did the Axis of Evil want with me, anyways?

There’s another Phil

OK, back to me Googling “Speaking Director.” Not only were there effectively zero sources or definitions of it on the internet, the very first result was another LInkedIn profile! How curious!

“Gianna Stephanie,” it turns out, has the same exact profile vibe as my man Phil. Generic profile photo. Vague experience that doesn’t really align with the state job titles. Listing a prestigious school but with slight modifications to the actual name. And, of course, there’s no actual page for said school.

Then I noticed that both of these profiles listed “LION” in their brief headlines underneath their names. There is no description of what “LION” is or means. So I did some digging and found a resource from an email marketing company that wrote an article on LION: it stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. People—especially salespeople looking for lead gen opportunities—add that to their bios to try to grow their network and accept requests from anyone.

I looked at Gianna’s profile photo and this one seemed very AI generated.

Let’s dig in. The first flag is that she’s only wearing one earring. In fact it actually looks like Evander Holyfield got to her right ear. The background was off too. The background on one side is a soft white/very light grey, while the other side’s has some green splotches.

After digging into Gianna’s profile, I realized I hadn’t done the baseline thing I should have with the basic information that Phil (or “Phil”) had in the profile: Google his name + the school or the company.

Nada for Phil Bell + “host marriott” and nothing close to information about Phil Bell + MIT—there’s an AI Engineer in the UK and a professor in the US with the name but neither have ties to the school. (And a note to the engineer and professor: I’m sorry if this newsletter pops into your Google Alert or on the first page of search results for your name and also I hope you’re doing well! Engineering and academia are noble pursuits! Coffee on me if we’re ever in the same neck of the woods!)

A potential explanation

I was a little creeped out by this whole thing.

And look: internet scams are as old as the internet itself. Social media scams are as old as social media itself. But there’s something oddly nefarious about it happening on LinkedIn—of any of the big social networks, this one is so tightly wound up with peoples’ real identities. You basically have to have verifiable proof that you went to a certain school and worked places. You have references, work samples, etc. etc.

Whoever was behind this—again, maybe the Biden administration, or maybe a consortium of Big Tech trying to bring down the common man, or a troll farm in Saskatchewan—was preying on the norms of the platform to try to do… something.

But what was it?

Digging further, I came across an NPR story from last year that featured Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She was messaged by a “Keenan Ramsey” on LinkedIn who had some of the same profile characteristics as Phil Bell—the overly generic headshot, suspect school and business credentials, no other relevant identifiable information.

NPR was able to actually reach out and contact the business and schools listed in this suspect profile (unfortunately, Greg’s Newsletter has neither the resources nor the relationships to carry out real journalism) to confirm that there are no records of the person with the name in question at either entity.

But what’s the purpose of these accounts? Some type of phishing scam? Or my initial and very plausible hunch: a wild coordinated campaign carried out by the new Axis of Evil, the likes of which our geopolitical order has never seen?

Welp, NPR found that these profiles often have a less nefarious (but also super annoying) aim:

…many of the LinkedIn profiles seem to have a far more mundane purpose: drumming up sales for companies big and small. Accounts like Keenan Ramsey's send messages to potential customers. Anyone who takes the bait gets connected to a real salesperson who tries to close the deal. Think telemarketing for the digital age.

By using fake profiles, companies can cast a wide net online without beefing up their own sales staff or hitting LinkedIn's limits on messages. Demand for online sales leads exploded during the pandemic as it became hard for sales teams to pitch their products in person.

There’s another more serious set of scams going around on LinkedIn, where people searching for a job end up applying and then send personal information and money! as part being “hired” at fake front for a real company.

I didn’t know what to think of Phil. Like, at the end of the day, that’s it? He’s just the (computer generated) face of a scammy marketing company trying to generate leads? Or an (AI) photo that represents a new version of the Nigerian prince scam—i.e. give us your information or front us money, and we promise to deliver you something of higher value (like a job)? Maybe “Phil” is just part of some bot farm thing, the purpose of which I’ll never know.

Learning that the more mundane explanations were actually the most likely was both heartening and disappointing. On the one hand, these profiles are somewhere on the spectrum of unethical/obnoxious to predatory/criminal. But as a LinkedIn user, you can pretty easily safeguard yourself: you can ignore suspect incoming connection or message requests, not reply to messages, block accounts, report suspicious profiles, etc.

On the other hand, I had already started building my backyard bunker in prep for whatever this Axis of Evil influence/misinformation/psyop campaign was going to inevitably incite after I pulled back the curtain—Jan. 6, but worse. And my back hurt from the shoveling and my lawn was in shambles—all because some random company was taking advantage of LinkedIn’s set of formal and informal norms to, most likely, carry out the modern equivalent of telemarketing.

In conclusion

I’m back on the hunt for my next job and hitting LinkedIn pretty hard each day. If you or anyone you know is hiring for a brand/social/media strategist, I would love to talk.

Phil still hasn’t messaged me. I’m not sure why. By now, I would have expected some quasi-salesy message to try to bait me. So I proactively messaged him and hope to hear back so that I can ask some clarifying questions.

He didn’t reply right away. As my focus turned back to my job search, I went back to that “networking” mindset: you never know where your next opportunity is going to come from.

So I sent Phil one additional message.

Might as well shoot my shot. Fingers crossed!

I’ve tried my absolute best to avoid writing about Twitter, in part because I don’t want to give myself whiplash because I paid attention to the day-to-day tomfoolery happening on the platform. And because everybody now has an opinion on Twitter. It’s amazing. A rich guy buys it and now people who’ve never used it are espousing thoughts on what it means for free speech and being concerned about bots.

To that I say: no thanks! I’d rather go listen to my favorite podcast that reviews chain restaurants or the new one my friends Jeff and Eric (aka ItsTheReal) started about air travel, airports, and airlines.

But Elon buying Twitter is important. And I do have some opinions. I’ll keep them at a higher altitude instead of covering:

* How the platform is now devoid of misinformation experts, anti-propaganda teams, engineering talent, and employees who criticize him

* Elon’s strange, continued sharing of imagery from the very, very bad guys from 20th century world wars

* Elon re-platforming tens of thousands of QAnon, conspiracy theory, and right wing accounts that were banned after Jan. 6

* China state-sponsored porn-sharing spam bots overwhelming the legit conversations/info about the recent anti-lockdown protests

* The fact that Twitter is an advertising platform, making 90% of its revenue through ad sales, which are now absolutely cratering

* The new Twitter owner (sorry, I have to try some new ways to say “Elon”) trying to bully advertisers into spending money on the platform, a tactic that’s notoriously successful

* That the famous entrepreneur and now head of Twitter (again, gotta switch up the name) just loves to welcome Nazis to participate in the conversation. Oh, wait, looks like if you’re effusive and public enough in your praise of Hitler, the bossman will step in after all.

So: in some other instance of a platform takeover like this, you might be able to divorce the public actions of its leader from what could happen with the platform itself. Like, hey, the CEO is saying some wild ass things but the developers, engineering and decision making talent will actually be driving the evolution of the platform. But that’s not what this is. This is Elon’s show, company, and it’s how he wants it.

But anyways. My point of view is this: what happens in the end and what ends up being successful is in how you define success. My view of Twitter’s “success” is quantitative and qualitative. Here are some of the questions I would ask to figure that out, with the starting point being this year, when the takeover happened:

* Has the platform fostered a more open space for conversation?

* To the first question, has the platform improved mechanisms to prevent mis/disinformation, coordinated attacks and inauthentic activity, spam, scams, bullying, harassment?

* Has the platform enabled a better flow of quality information?

* Is the platform growing—in conversation volume, active users, and revenue—sustainably?

Those questions seem reasonable to me. More business-minded folks might go right to the heart of whether it makes more money and continues to do that. I would argue that the questions I highlighted above would be great indicators of a financially successful platform.

Now, when social platforms go public, they’re all of a sudden beholden to a different set of standards set by boards and shareholders. They need to make more money and acquire more users, quarter-over-quarter. And so they optimize their platforms to deliver on that. In an attention economy, that means creating mechanisms to keep people refreshing, sharing and resharing content, and consuming more.

That dynamic has created some pretty perverse incentives, where inflammatory content and extremism ultimately generate those results. People get mad online and let others know about it. But at least we get some peek behind the curtain when the platforms do their public quarterly earnings reports. We learn of daily active users, time spent on the platform, revenue, etc.

In theory, taking Twitter private could reset some of those out-of-whack incentives. But my fear is that Twitter’s privatization—and the person who now controls it—will make information about the platform more opaque. Elon doesn’t have to report anything! And can spin things much more than a public company could! So communicating the true “health” of the platform will be in his hands, and his hands alone.

Let’s take a step back though. Ignore the questions of platform health and sustainable growth. Remember that Elon bought Twitter for $44 billion, a wildly inflated valuation that he admits was way too much. He wasn’t bidding against anybody! There was no competition that warranted a price like that!

And remember that he tried so damn hard to get out of the deal, which came across as a joke to begin with (buying it at a share price of $54.20 ha ha ha). And that he was eventually forced to buy it. And that Twitter is and advertising business, securing about 90% of its revenue from ads (and we’ve already covered how that appears to be cratering and brand advertisers are running, since his acquisition). And that Twitter users are the product and that it’s a communication platform rooted in human, social dynamics and not manufacturing solutions or engineering.

Does any of that scream “this will definitely work?”

Can someone point me to a B-school case study of an 11-figure acquisition where the buyer paid potentially double what a business was worth (for no sound reason), tried desperately to back out, then was forced to buy it, before turning it into a thriving success and ultimately a good investment?

I will happily eat my shirt if my prognosis is wrong and the best parts of Twitter continue to positively evolve and the worst parts get better; if, instead of going bankrupt, Twitter emerges as a financial powerhouse; if Twitter—for all of its faults, and there are a lot!—becomes a more important and vital part of society, current events, and our collective information ecosystem. (Sidenote: I don’t actually think it’s healthy for individual, centralized platforms to have that much importance but it’s the situation we’re in.)

Until then, however, my shirt will remain uneaten. I will try to avoid staring at the car crash for too long. I do wish my Twitter career had taken off though, given that I’ve spent 15 years—half my life! (don’t look it up)—on the platform.

Maybe I should double-down on Substack, which is surely above the fra—oh wait. Substack is trash, too? So the only way to safely be on a platform is to actually just own your platform?

Maybe the real solution is a news letter. Written on a typewriter. Delivered by your neighborhood mailperson. My version of “send tweet” is dropping envelopes into a mailbox. Every month, I’ll hit you with a DM—direct mail.

Let me know if you’re in.

Hi friends! Been pretty busy around these parts. I started a new job in February and, let’s see what else, oh right—I’m trying to keep two relatively new-ish humans alive. And, ideally, alive and possibly a little smarter each day. I’ve tried to not have my entire identity wrapped up in being a parent, but judging by my tweets from this year, it’s inescapable.

I promise we’ll get back to some of our regularly scheduled content about tech and culture and whatever, but I’ve been jotting down some thoughts that I just need to get out. So here goes!

* The twins have a vocabulary consisting of a bunch of words now. I’m getting one of them to say “meow” which is kind of hilarious. I’m holding out hope that “Gregory” happens soon.

* 97% of parents think they can write a children’s better than the one they just read to their kids.

* Babies are ecoterrorists, not in the climate change definition (although the world may require it!), but in that they are absolutely the worst possible things for the environment.

* There are 3 types of comments we get from strangers: “are they twins?” “looks like you have your hands full!” and “awww/twins.” We were at DFW earlier this year, and a Very Texan grandma came up to me and said "aww, well now, what blessings!" When we landed in Detroit I was expecting a Very Michigander grandma to say “ope aren’t those just the cutest” but it didn’t happen.

* I still haven’t followed TwinTok or Parent IG because for fear of ruining my algorithm, but I might create a burner and start following people in those communities because that seems to be what parents do.

* HOW IN THE HELL DID THROWUP END UP IN MY A—

* Can’t wait til we can just say “boys, go outside, we’re just gonna power-wash you.” And also: “please unload the dishwasher. And take out the trash. And do my laundry. And then yours, too.”

* I’m pretty lucky to have Rachel as my partner in this and we love the boys.

* It’s kind of tough to raise twins but then you realize that you spend like half of your time trying to make them laugh and when they laugh or smile you cannot do anything but do the same, regardless of the mood you’re in.

* I am f*****g mortified about the day that I’ll have to stop swearing around them.

* I’m glad to have this newsletter that one day, the twins will discover, and read through and (probably) find instances of me talking s**t about them. For the record: they’re also going to be way smarter than me. Cooler than me? TBD. OK, yeah.

* The Official Parent Handbook that all new parents receive at the beginning did not contain the chapter entitled “You’re Going To End Up With A Mountain of Plastic Syringes.”

* Weird to google “how to keep small humans from the litter box.” But that’s probably not even in the top 50% of weird things you get to google!

Thanks for checking in! Love you!

Greg

It’s been a minute and I wanted to come back with something light-hearted and fun. So, today, we’re going to talk about the Canadian conspiracist truck convoy, the impending U.S. version of this thing (that I hope I’m wrong about!), and how social media and influencers are helping drive it.

So, just a refresher: the Canadian “Freedom Convoy” consists of truckers and various support agents using their big rigs and pickups to physically block off the Ottawa capitol and key border crossings with the U.S. And I mean, you know that anytime the word “freedom” is attached to an event or “movement,” white grievances are about to get AIRED THE F**K OUT.

The “Freedom Convoy” is ostensibly protesting a new piece of Canadian legislation that requires unvaccinated Canadian truckers to isolate for 2 weeks upon returning from the U.S. Unvaccinated foreign truckers aren’t allowed in the country. There sure has been a lot of attention given to these anti-vax protesters while *checks notes* 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated.

To nobody’s surprise, the movement’s leaders and organizers are some combination of the following list: racists, xenophobes, conspiricists, QAnon believers, and more. They’re anti-labor and boyyyyy do they not believe in science. Or the government, obviously. And look: there may be some convoy sympathizers who have a simple, narrow desire to protest vaccine mandates—a position I largely disagree with but one that people can certainly voice their opposition to! But it’s pretty very clear that this movement was built opportunistically by its leaders, laundering far-right ideology into public debate about mandates. This is the right on-ramping sympathizers and adjacents to a bigger platform.

This truck blockade strategy is likely to be employed in the U.S. in the near future. At what scale or frequency remains to be seen. How DHS and other authorities preemptively plan for them will be interesting. But you know an American version has the potential to be even more stupid, more media-able and potentially dangerous than the Canadian variety. In practice, U.S convoys will look like a Trump 2024 x Let’s Go Brandon/Stop The Steal x QAnon x Conspirituality (see below) collaboration. The merch will absolutely suck. And while the venn diagram for those four groups isn’t a perfect concentric circle, there’s enough overlap and the possibility that these convoys make the circles tighter. Fun!

Again, I hope I’m wrong. I hope none of this comes to fruition.

Given my personal and professional interests, I’m looking at two things, specifically: how social media/platforms serve as key organizing spaces. And influencers. Not just far-right influencers who you’d obviously expect. I’m talking—takes deep breath, exhales—health and wellness influencers.

Turns out, a lot of them are very vocally supporting the convoy on social media. From Rolling Stone:

Influencers publicly supporting the convoy, which started in protest against trucker vaccine mandates and has left the country’s capitol city of Ottawa immobilized for the past 11 days, is the natural culmination of the wellness community’s increasing convergence with anti-vaccine or Covid-denying conspiracy theories, all in the name of supporting personal freedom and bodily autonomy. Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a gradual yet palpable shift in the wellness community toward conspirituality, a portmanteau of “conspiracy theories” and “spirituality” constituting a mélange of woo mysticism and distrust toward the mainstream medical establishment, with a healthy dose of libertarianism thrown in for good measure. This strain has infiltrated all corners of the wellness ecosystem, from natural childbirth influencers to yoga teachers on Instagram.

Back to these protests being literal vehicles for far-right ideology. In the U.S., you get the sense that the right is looking for a January 6, 2.0, the next wave of “action” and participation for a grieved movement, whether people are more “yes, let’s do an insurrection” or more “well, you know, they do make some interesting points and also I’m against the government.”

I hope to god a convoy—or whatever happens next—has less violence and vitriol, and that they don’t physically storm into federal or state buildings again, but that’s what these angry, privileged people love to do. With guns. Who knows if we’ll see one, big, massive convoy in LA or NYC or Dallas, or if this will be an aggregate thing with convoys all over.

Organizers in Canada have been painstakingly trying to frame the convoys as non-partisan and about peaceful action and, of course, freedom. They’re working on better PR after January 6th. They’ve taken learnings and applied them. That seems to be working to some degree in Canada and you can expect U.S. organizers to try to frame their convoys similarly.

It’s a “we the people versus the elites” kind of thing rather than a “we want to arrest members of the government” or “COVID was purposefully released from a Chinese lab reduce the population of white people” thing, even though that’s what several of the Canadian movement’s leaders are perpetuating.

And this is why white health and wellness influencers are so important here. They have massive, built-in, wildly loyal audiences that are willing to trust their every word. From the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, here’s Rachel Moran, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for an Informed Public, a research institute at the University of Washington that looks at mis- and disinformation:

Those kinds of accounts are the most nefarious in a way. They’re really good at building trust with people, especially these glamorous white women who fit what we deem to be attractive. Maybe you trust their advice about what workout gear you’re gonna wear, and you build this parasocial relationship with them, and then they’re suddenly sharing this information about vaccine misinformation. And you’re more inclined to believe it because you have trust in them.

So, as these stupid-but-very-real convoys potentially start to hit stateside, let’s see what kind of new (white) voices and new (also very white) audiences start yelling or tooting horns as they try to play prosecuted martyrs in a system literally designed and governed for them.

For more on the topic, check out this piece about the wellness-to-white supremacy pipeline.

Be back soon, maybe with something actually more light-hearted. But also maybe with thoughts about these dumb convoys.

(I hope I’m wrong about it all.)

That’s my goal in life: not to die.

- Norm Macdonald, Me Doing Stand-Up (2011)

Norm Macdonald was in the room when my mom died nearly 20 years ago.

It was January and she was in the hospital bed that she'd been in for months, in the living room at home. And one day at school, I all of a sudden violently threw up in math class and so went home. I had a wild stomach bug. Like, couldn't keep an ice chip down, kind of stomach bug. So I stayed home from school for a few days.

And on one of those days, my Dad and I were sitting by her and we had the TV on. A Saturday Night Live rerun was playing on Comedy Central which, for a long time, constituted like 50% of its programming, but it was good because it was all 80's and 90's golden years stuff. But anyways, it was "Weekend Update." Norm Macdonald was giving his usual wry takes on the news, probably. Commenting on some Very Nineteen-Nineties stuff.

And then that was it. Her heart finally stopped beating. Cancer, which she had fought valiantly against for almost my whole life, did what cancer often does. It took her life.

I don't look back at that moment—with Norm Macdonald yukking it up on TV—and feel some kind of kinship that one does when, say, they obsess over a band that got them through a breakup. Or towards an actor that plays the lead role in all of their comfort movies, there when they always need them.

But Norm was one of my family’s favorite comedians before that moment and up to this day. (Well, actually, ironically I'm not actually sure how my mom felt but it would be pretty funny if she hated him.) I get a kick out of how many people equate the Browns with Norm.

All of the clips that people have been sharing—all of them are as good as they're saying. It's the moth joke. It's his roast of Bob Saget. It's the Dirty Johnny joke. His stand-up specials. Weekend Update. It's his bit in Billy Madison or lead role in Dirty Work where the whole thing wasn't so much an acting job as Norm playing a bit where he's Norm (that makes sense, right).

That commitment to the bit is a defining quality and what made him god-tier in the eyes of so many.

There's no better way to kill humor than to explain it, but here goes. His bits weren't the tightest, necessarily, but they were special. He could kill with two audiences at once, because he would occasionally smirk or chuckle or pause in the middle of a bit and so you, as audience member, knew he was up to something. If you got the bit, then great. You were already hooked. But if you didn't get it, you got to laugh when he broke character for two seconds or maybe it clued you in to what humor he was actually conveying.

I think back to liking him as a kid, and wonder how I understood his humor. And I may not have understood all of it, in full, but he let me know that his jokes were funny when he cracked a smile or had to look away for a second to keep from cracking himself up. He let me know that they were worth laughing at. Not many comedians can be funny because they laugh at their own jokes.

After news of his passing broke this week and the tributes started coming in, a lot of people shared his jokes and bits on death and cancer. I didn't realize how often, especially later in his career, he focused on death and cancer and how he was dealing with his own mortality in classic Norm fashion, even pre-cancer. (But also maybe dying without the public knowing you're really dying was his ultimate bit. He was dying inside but played it straight on the outside. Pretty wild.)

He has a good one where he rails against the concept of "battling" or losing to cancer.

But I like this part:

If you die, the cancer also dies at exactly the same time. So that to me, is not a loss; it's a draw.

So, Norm had a tough week. He and cancer tied. And unbeknownst to him, he saw my mom and cancer duke it out twenty years before and, well, she tied, too. A split-decision. I dunno. That's kind of fun.

It's a bummer that he's gone but I guess I'll take away this: try to commit to the bit. Give the audience the occasional smirk or chuckle and let people in; you never know who's going to be watching. And when it all comes down to it—at worst—we’re all going to tie.

Welcome to Greg’s Newsletter. Great news! You can now listen to the audio version on Spotify, in addition to Apple Podcasts. Either click those links or search for “Greg’s Newsletter,” hit subscribe, and you should be golden.

I have a pretty bad memory. I could probably stand to actively combat that with, I don’t know, some Lumosity courses or some other miracle app. Instead, I’ll probably just continue to think about the future and reflect on the past, while misremembering specifics and largely forgetting the present.

(That sounded bleaker than it actually is. I like to think about how things are going to be. Does that make me an optimist? I have no idea.)

But: $37.89. I remember that number, that dollar amount. I can barely remember my own birthday, but I can rattle off $37.89 with the quickness.

It’s what Steve, my lawn guy, charges me everytime he and his crew come over. I’ve interacted him with him in person once, for about 3 minutes, and otherwise our relationship consists of him texting me (he’s “Steve Lawn” in my contacts) with “Planning to do yard tomorrow. OK?” to which I respond “yep. thanks” and then I send him $37.89 in a private transaction through Venmo.

This has emerged as just about the only thing I’ve used Venmo for since 2019, but each time I open the app, I’m both flabbergasted and appalled. Flabbergasted at how many people I “know” (more about that in a second) who are still posting public notes and transactions, and appalled at how Venmo so cleverly hijacked everybody’s social graph and contacts list.

I’m not sure if Venmo still does this—probably—but at least when I signed up however many years ago, I think it leveraged my Facebook account to find people I knew, which (for some godforsaken reason) I did and clearly so did a lot of other people I know. I recently started batch unfriending people and so what was a “friend” list of 500 has been reducing over time. (Really I should just nuke the account, start over, and then friend Steve Lawn and call it a day.)

But before I continue the unfriending, I want to document and share the transactions—and who those transactions are from—to illustrate how WILD it is that we all let a financial services app get access to our social graph AND THEN ALSO MAKE THE TRANSACTIONS PUBLIC, BY DEFAULT.

Here are some transactions posted in the past week:

* A friend of my younger brother who I haven’t seen or interacted with in 10 years charged somebody for “Excellent drinks” (this was a public transaction)

* The sister of a former colleague who I was barely friends with but I think one time we all hung out in a big group somewhere and became Facebook friends, and haven’t seen in 8 years paid somebody for wine (this was seen by friends only)

* The sister called out above paid her sister, the former colleague, for pizza (friends only)

* An acquaintance from high school who I don’t think I’ve seen since high school paid somebody for “Kids & Lease” (public)

* A former colleague’s mom gave her son money for his birthday (friends)

* A friend charged his wife of several years some dollar amount and used the house emoji (public)

* Someone who works in media sales in Detroit, who I worked on a project with once in 2014, paid somebody and used the heart emoji (public)

None of these transactions are weird, embarrassing, or egregious in any way. And this is not a value judgement on Venmo's role in peoples' lives. I get that it's made sending money to people easier and been a boon for various people and their businesses—like my guy Steve!

But I’m asking myself: why in the ever-loving hell do I need to see these transactions? I mean, there’s like 5% of me that wants to keep these folks as friends for some good old fashioned social media espionage purposes, but… nah. Too much.

I know one interpretation of what I just laid out could be “old man yells at cloud” and yeah, you know, you might be right. But I guess my main point is just how f*****g wild it is that Venmo bamboozled millions of people into syncing their phone books or Facebook accounts to a FINANCIAL SERVICES APP. A social network built around so many folks posting PUBLIC TRANSACTIONS when many won't even post stuff on Facebook or they keep their Instagram profiles locked down.

“Twitter? Ugh. Why would I want to share my thoughts in public” - probably 40% of people who are on Venmo, and who are sharing their transactions in public on Venmo. What a wild venn diagram that is.

Anyways! I'm just going to keep unfriending people and sending that $37.89 privately every week. And also please get off my lawn. Steve just cut it.

I've been thinking a lot about nostalgia lately. In music, in clothes and fashion. And in how different generations, cohorts, and demographics view nostalgia and what they're nostalgic for.

Svetlana Boym, the media artist, playwright, and novelist, defined two main types of nostalgia: the reflective and the restorative.

Restorative nostalgia stresses nóstos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the gray areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.

Reflective nostalgia is at the core of my version of nostalgia: there's undoubtedly a longing for something I used to have—material, emotional, psychological—when I'm spending hours at a time on eBay looking at Detroit sports t-shirts from the 80s. It's at the core of the current Gen Z/millennial obsession with it. It's not a view of nostalgia that says "things were better back then" or that "I want the world to exist exactly how it did 20 years ago."

Rather, there's irony embedded in it. There's general awareness and self-awareness. There's a tacit belief that some of the things we're nostalgic for were good and that so much of our own past was embedded in a world, institutions, and social order that were fundamentally wrong or bad. We created symbols of meaning, but those symbols sometimes have meaning despite all of the bad that was happening.

Restorative nostalgia, on the other hand, is dangerous. To further quote Boym:

Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols.

Republicans' current attempt (and success) at further restricting voting rights and access to non-white people is an extension of restorative nostalgia, in a sense. They're longing for—and trying to rewrite our current history to match—a time when only white people could vote, when minorities had even less access and rights than they do now. Of course it's all rooted in overtly racist, discriminatory, and fundamentally anti-democratic beliefs, as authoritarianism is.

Restorative nostalgia is seen in "Make America Great Again," and the rest of the terribly terrifying nationalist fervor rooted in white grievance, white rage. It's a core tenant of the right wing disinformation and propaganda machine that occupies cable channels and social media in the U.S., and in authoritarian states globally.

I'm looking forward to digging a little more into nostalgia with more of a critical eye. Both to reflect on my own interests and passions (I've made quite the t-shirt haul this year!) and the ongoing war on democracy, minorities, and progress. You know, the light stuff.

Anyways to close out today's newsletter, I have some news to share: the new Dean of LSU's School of Veterinary Medicine is named Oliver Garden. Dr. Oliver Garden. OLIVER GARDEN!

OK, that's it. Love you all.

I hope you're doing well. We're inching our way up to 100 editions of Greg's Newsletter. Today? It's just some thoughts, y'all. Some quick hitters.

* It's so fun to see the new generation of NBA stars start to take over. I'm sad that my (first born) son Luka Doncic and my Mavericks are out, after a very weird but exceedingly entertaining 7-game series with the Clippers. But to see his historical performance, alongside what Trae Young, Devin Booker, and the other under-25 kids are doing. It's so, so fun. (Related: the LA Clippers have to be the least fun team, featuring two future Hall of Famers, of all time.)

* After 15-ish months of an unprecedented global pandemic, it's time to sort of kind of maybe get back to normal? I worked a few hours yesterday from the coffee shop across the street, which was nice to do. As I walked back to my house, I started thinking about how having quarantine babies (and having TWO quarantine babies, in our case) makes this all the more weird and complicated. Twelve months ago, I was yearning for a "get-back-to-what-I-used-to-do" situation, whenever the pandemic ended. That doesn't exist for me and Rachel. Instead of trying to start doing 'normal' things again, we're in this brand new chapter of our lives. Which is good! But also "unprecedented," as they say. Like, I can't exactly go to any friends and be like "hey, so, remember that time a few years back when you successfully re-entered the world after a heartbreaking, painful pandemic, while also having your first children. What's your advice?" We don't have a precedent! I guess we'll figure it out, though!

* Really exciting news! I Think You Should Leave, the best sketch comedy show in recent memory, starring Michigan legend Tim Robinson, is coming back for a second season on Netflix on July 6. Yay! More memes!

* Pepper! Pepper rules! We've stayed cooking in our household, as we did before and during the pandemic. But I would guess my usage of pepper-as-seasoning has increased 400% over the past several months. Laying on the pepper—Fish! Chicken! Other meats!—is now just second nature. Perhaps it's because my hair is getting a little more salt-and-pepper. Not sure. Honestly, I would just rather my hair stayed pepper. Pure, unadulterated pepper.

* I love eBay. I cannot stress this enough. I would like to turn my love of eBay into full-time work. Give me a topic, subject, historical period, and I will spend hours in the rabbit hole. If you're in need of an eBay shopper, I am it. Hit me up.

* New-ish music to listen to:

* Mirror Gazer - Ordeal Erasure (bedroom Tame Impala)

* Mach Hommy - Pray for Haiti (immaculately crafted rap, over immaculately curated beats)

* Green-House - Music for Living Spaces (chill instrumentals to play for your plants but also for you)

Thanks for reading or listening today. I love you all and will be back soon!