Join Katherine and producer Taylor McMahon as they discuss Meta’s plans for AI-generated users. Gio returns next week for his regular hosting duties.

Read Katherine’s article on the same topic here.

00:00 Introduction and Greetings

00:39 Meta’s AI Generated Users

02:47 Implications of AI in Social Media

04:56 Human Element in Social Media

08:17 AI's Impact on Culture and Taste

21:39 Fictosexuality and Imaginary Relationships

24:27 The Influence of Environment on Human Behavior

26:01 The Future of AI and Human Intimacy

27:55 Emotional Attachment to Technology

31:50 The Intersection of Technology and Religion

36:29 The Era of Magic and AI

43:21 Human Connections and Missed Connections

Housekeeping:

* Remember to submit Missed Connections, advice questions, and everything else to [email protected] or by voice here. I’m also always looking for written submissions — send me stories, articles about Internet culture, and more.

* For paid subscribers, our next book club pick is Read Write Own by Chris Dixon for February and our next movie club pick is All About Lilly Chou Chou for January. Dates for both TBD this week.

* Also for paid subscribers, we’re rolling out Internet Studies classes! We’re running a second session of Internet Real Life and a course about everyone’s favorite fantasy series, The Gorean Saga.

Help me become the best known blog of this genre, lest I live out a sort of digital Sunset Boulevard. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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Leah Prime from our fantastic Art Bell episode and of the blog We Own the Night and I talked about my initial reaction to friend.com’s chatbot launch… and why I might be wrong about it after all.

This is an experimental format I’m releasing to paid subscribers only right now. Please share your feedback! It’s very likely that a more polished version will be un-paywalled later in the week… But I wanted to get a temperature check first. Do you guys like it? Should I do more?

Articles referenced:

Avi Schiffmann’s Tab AI necklace has raised $1.9 million to replace God

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Katherine talks to Sam L. Barker about the enduring legacy of pop-punk and emo, and crucially, about how it all coalesced online. You can also listen to this on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.Read Katherine’s article about blink-182’s unique brand of humor here.Subscribe to Sam’s Substack here.

A note from Sam:

Be My Escape is an essay and podcast project where I look over some of the most enduring emo (I use the term culturally and loosely) and pop-punk albums of the 00s. I want to give this selection of albums the same level of attention and analysis which more established and accepted alternative, indie, hip-hop, and electronic albums are granted. What makes them important, their cultural and personal background, and what lateral topics they uncover, be that gender, mental illness, terrorism, or sexuality.

This project can be seen as a response to what might be termed the great “Emo Revival.”

Since the reformation of My Chemical Romance in 2019 the genre has received a welcome critical and popular re-examination. The explosion of pure enthusiasm at the news led to an outpouring of emotions, articles and memes. Critically ignored in the 00s, and mostly forgotten in the 2010s broadsheet newspapers like The New York Times were now writing sympathetic pieces on albums like The Black Parade. Pitchfork, once happy awarding A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out a 1.5 got busy writing a series of revisionist reviews from young writers redressing the delta.

The When We Were Young festival has become a major yearly draw, pitched directly at Millennial nostalgia. Warped Tour’s coming back. Everyone can admit they like Emo now, it’s fine. But this isn’t intended to be a victory lap. Nostalgia can be fun, but it can also be a sugar rush. Some albums are bad, some albums have aged poorly, some deserve to be forgotten. The genre deserves critical analysis, but it can withstand it too. I’m not interested in MySpace photos of you with shitty straightened hair and a bootleg Senses Fail shirt. I want to know about the Fall Out Boy B-side you cried to. The Dashboard Confessional lyrics of your first tattoo. How a musical album about a goth Bonnie and Clyde got you through the worst times of your life, when everything else abandoned you.

You were embarrassed of it, now you’re not. Let’s talk about it.

Discounts are available for students, the elderly, military, people who work at the mall, service workers, fans and friends of Ron Paul, and true believers in Default Friend. Just email me and I’ll set you up (real btw). You can also just give me the $5:

And a final note from Katherine:

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Paid subscribers are receiving this a little bit earlier than free subscribers.

Katherine reads her Tablet article, “Adam Lanza Fan Art,” a deep dive into the elusive True Crime Community (TCC), a small fandom of mostly adolescents and young adults who treat school shooters and serial killers in the same way other fans might treat boyband members. After …

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In this episode of The Computer Room, Katherine and friends talk about Art Bell's legacy. We meet Leah Prime, who's writing a book about Art Bell, John Steiger who on a mission to hand transcribe every single episode of Coast to Coast AM, and Joseph Matheny, the mind behind Ong's Hat.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe

Katherine and Gio discuss “Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke,” a novella by Eric LaRocca about a complex BDSM relationship between two women that unfolds through emails, forum posts, and instant messages in 2000. They talk about what it meant to “log on” in 2000, lesbian media, and whether online relationships are uniquely suited to BDSM dynamics. Gio also reveals that, somehow, he didn’t know Katie Herzog of BARPod is a lesbian.

Help make “number go up” by subscribing:

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“The most un-American thing you can do is reject fame.”

In a recorded phone call, Katherine and Laura Albert, the writer best known for JT Leroy, explore the fuzzy boundaries of truth and fiction in our digital era. They discuss the telephone as a medium, catfishing, imagination, and lying as a form of storytelling.

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Katherine talks to a brony Zoomer about being online, mediated friendships, the fantastical world of My Little Pony, and the revival that the fandom is experiencing right now.

Buy your Mare Fair tickets here, read the infamous MLP fan fic “The Lunar Rebellion” here, and watch the first four seasons of MLP here.

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Kickstarter and Metalabel cofounder Yancey Strickler walks in on Gio and Katherine gossiping. Together, they talk about the meaning of gossip, the Internet as a source of power, and what happens when everything moves from main to the group chat.

Check out Metalabel.

Read Yancey's writing:The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet The Post-Individual

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Lauren and Grady are Chicago’s hottest couple. Katherine and Grady talk about playing a role that’s not yourself but based on yourself, their appearance on Help! I'm In a Secret Relationship, where all the weirdos have gone on the Internet, if those chamoy pickles were worth it, and his relationship with Lauren.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit default.blog/subscribe