What am I Doing? š¤·š»āāļø
Internet culture and technology is boring and marvelous.
I enjoy dozens of Substacks (see below for my favorites), but I havenāt found one that feels like a singular capsule of all the weird shit I like to read. Thatās part of the fun, of course, but I canāt resist attempting to curate something that I love, which might also find a niche with others.
So, every week, I will be sending some links, a few ideas, and probably a bunch of other stuff that ends up open in my tabs. Maybe Iāll find the opportunity to write longer, more thoughtful pieces as well.
Shaking, Pausing
TikTok might be problematic, but its value as a cultural and ethnographic research tool is unsurpassed. Back in August 2022, Kate Lindsey wrote about āMillennial Pauseā - the odd sort of āis this thing on?ā moment that many millennial tiktok users take after hitting record. She explained:
Millennialsāand their mannerismsādefined the online ecosystem that has ruled for a decade plus, treating sites such as MySpace, Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter as the jungle gyms in their internet playground. But now that weāre well into the TikTok era, the cracks are starting to show. Instagram and Facebook, while still popular, are attempting to capture the magic of TikTok by pivoting to videos and other ultra-sharable content that doesnāt come quite as naturally to Millennials.
Once youāve noticed it, it becomes an indicator of so many other things. Kate updated her very good Substack Embedded recently to discuss āGen Z Shakeā which is equally unimportant but nevertheless incredibly interesting. I highly recommend digging in.
Like the millennial pause, the Gen Z shake does not āmatter.ā
What is the Gen X Version?
Within the world of TikTok, Iām not sure I can pinpoint anything about Gen X content that feels like the Shake or the Pause. Itās probably just not a thing. There are definitely lots of us on TikTok (though Boomers surely outnumber us), but I donāt think I can point out anything so precise, so definitive, as Shake and Pause.
One reason might be that Gen X covers such a wide, weird era. Right now, it includes me (43) and people who are 53. This just feels like such a huge gap ā¦ and not because I think Iām much younger or consider people in their 50s to be so much older. But so many things happened in the 90s, at times it feels strange that weāre part of the same group.
Chuck Klostermanās The Ninetines: A Book is a great primer on this way of thinking:
āThe texture is what mattered. The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time.It is not the thinking now.
Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.ā
The things that best define Gen X arenāt captured anywhere watchable.