Good morning. Hello. How are you? #500
Tom and Jerry's is open again, Instagram Reels, Facebook Whistleblower and Facebook's slow demise, 1921 Chatham County Lynching, maybe when you give a Kidney away you do get to own it?
Good morning! Hi there! How is your fine day going thus far? I hope ‘tis swell. Mine seems okay so far. It is issue number 500 of GMHHAY. That is nuts. 500 issues, still in a pandemic. Been more or less quarantining for 576 days now, which means I wrote a GMHHAY on 86% of those days. I should do some big celebration for issue 500, but joke’s on you because I overslept by about 20 minutes and really have barely any time at all to do something for this momentus occasion, just like I totally slacked off on episode 100 of my podcast. For a man that is an executive at a company that trades in anniversaries and remembering important dates, you’d think I’d be better about this but nope.
Last night a bunch of my friends in New York went to Tom and Jerry’s, my favorite bar, now that it is open again. I am very jealous, but also very happy Bryan is working again, and happy the place made it through the pandemic. I’ve been dreaming more and more of a quick trip to New York in December, there is a week-long span there where the concerts are just ridiculous: Hold Steady, Yo La Tengo, Genesis, LCD Soundsystem and Wet Leg, all in the span of a week. And now Tom and Jerrys is back open. I don’t know what kind of post-pandemic life you New Yorkers are living it sounds like paradise.
I got a screenshot of the ridiculousness that is my suggestions from Instagram for their Reels product. Emma said “gee that’s funny mine are all cats” and it annoyed me even more. Like yes, I follow one or two models on the main timeline for various reasons, and maybe the algorithm is picking up on that, but that doesn’t mean I am looking for an endless stream of big bootied dance videos and in any case I also follow some cats and a shit ton of architecture, photography and music accounts. Emma insisted that if I went into the product and told it a little bit about what I like, maybe it would stop. So I went into “Reels,” a place I have never been, and resent its existence because they put the button for it right exactly where the “new post” button used to be and moved the “new post” button to somewhere super annoying. So actually come to think of it I guess I have been in there, accidentally, for a few seconds. In the “…” menu I found a “not interesting” option and started watching Tik Toks — er, I mean reels — and literally the first twenty were all dancing women. I clicked on “not interesting” on each and every one of them. I went through maybe a hundred reels, most of them dancing women, until it started trying to show me dogs and I was like “nope no dogs” and eventually, after maybe 200 reels, it got to be a decent mix of cats, kangaroos, and cooking. Not that I ever wanted to go in there in the first place, and Instagram will now chalk up that 20 minutes of me saying “no no no” as engagement, super cool.
Read a few of the Facebook Whistleblower’s complaints to the SEC. I had to work so I did not get to watch her testimony yesterday, but I followed along from the live tweeting. The SEC complaints are a bit of a quirk, it’s one prong of her very smart multi-pronged attack against Facebook. She has filed numerous individual, separate complaints to the SEC under the Whistleblower act. Most of them align exactly with the individual Wall Street Journal stories: one about how they secretly knew that Instagram was a humiliating, demeaning death trap, one about how they were aiding and abetting human trafficking and slavery and didn’t do anything about it, NBD, one about how they only remove 2-5% of the hate speech on the platform, awesome, and one about how they helped radicalize people:
The filing quotes an internal Facebook study that found that new test accounts, created by Facebook, which followed "verified/high quality conservative pages", including the official pages of Fox News, Donald Trump, and Melania Trump, took one day to devolve towards recommending polarizing content. The same Facebook study said, "Page recommendations began to include conspiracy recommendations after only 2 days."
CBS news has an overview of all the complaints, as well as links to each PDF, here.
The one that was new, though, is a clever one, perhaps the most relevant to fall under the SEC’s domain, which was one about how Facebook routinely inflates its user numbers, fails to account for duplicate accounts, and goes to very large extents to hide its declining usage, mostly among young adults and teens — who have essentially completely abandoned the platform — but also among its core constituency, us Gen Xers and olds. And I think this correllates with what we all can intuitively feel, that people don’t use Facebook like they used to. More and more of our friends are off of the platform completely and those of us who are still on it are all trying to use it less and less. Far fewer people write posts, and most of Facebook’s usage now happens in the comments to the fewer posts that exist, or in groups. This certainly checks out with my experience. I copy/paste this newsletter into FB every morning, and then what little time I spend on Facebook I spend in the comments, mostly with people who I do not see post original posts very often.
Facebook, of course, wants to hide the fact that fewer and fewer people use Facebook anymore, that its core product is dying. And Facebook, of course, makes money off of its users through advertising. There is a tool when you buy ads on Facebook that tells you how big of an audience you’re going to reach. That tool basically lies. Now, compared to, you know, overthrowing the government or something, this might seem like less of a big deal, but it is a more actionable deal for the SEC, and in theory advertisers could complain. They could file a class action lawsuit and ask for billions of billions of dollars back. And there’s a good chance they will! But, I mean, save SEC action, that won’t do anything, they’ll still be addicted to Facebook ads, and they will probably accept rebates as payment, so, you know, whatever.
In some ways, though, it does sort of signify the writing on the wall for Facebook. Its core product is dying. It offset that by buying the kids with Instagram, then it bought a VPN product supposedly to ensure your privacy but, whoops, instead invaded your privacy with it and used that to see which apps people were using and rip them off or buy them (it’s my personal belief that this is what inspired them to make Memories, to thwart Timehop, but who knows). And through that they ended up buying What’s App.
So, now, theoretically they’re not using the VPN app or something like that again to, you know, keep violating a consent decree (LOL yeah right), the kids are aging out of instagram, or rather, the next batch of kids are smart enough to avoid it, and the kid-friendly, post-Instagram startups such as Snap and Tik Tok have also been smart enough to avoid Facebook, so, as the years go on, it doesn’t seem inconceivable that Facebook, the company, might just start withering on its own. Says Kevin Roose: Facebook is weaker than we knew.
I mean, this is great but it’s not enough, the problem is there is still no real alternative for actual “staying connected with friends whoops no I mean your extended network of soft-of friends” which is still a very important thing, I still need to keep a tenuous touch to old coworkers and casual friends and I’m not gonna be in group chats with them or chatting with them on Signal. And Facebook, weakend or not, will just hog that market till the day it dies.
Ugh. I’m running out of time here man oversleeping by even 15 minutes can really screw with my schedule. Oh awesome and the internet just went out again. Emma spent, like, an hour on the phone with AT&T last night trying to convince them that our internet really was intermittently broken and it really was their doing now ours and she did eventually convince them. They did some fiddling on their end and said call us if it goes down again and we were optimistic but, alas, here it is, down again. And here I am writing in a browser-based editor. God. Stressful. Luckily it only goes down for a minute or two. It seems to have a knack for doing it whenever I’m on a Zoom call with work and speaking, which is just awesome, that has happened three times now.
Anyway, the other thing I wanted to tell you about today was the email I got from our county commission, which said, essentially: In 1921, there was a lynching in Chatham County, of a 16 year-old boy. We have some evidence that the jailer and a county commissioner were involved in helping the mob get the boy out of jail, whose crime was he tried to borrow some twine. I looked on Google Maps, this happened about thirteen miles from here. He was the last of six people to be lynched in Chatham County, and the only one in the 20th century.
This really upset me yesterday morning, I mean, I don’t know why I’m shocked, this place is so obviously the south. I think about and focus on it being a battleground state, that we have a Democratic governor now (the good kind, not the old racist southern kind), and it is turning more blue every year, but, god.
The dangling body becomes a tourist attraction for white residents and Monday, September 19, 1921, 1,000 people trekked to see it.
In the 1970s, the area was submerged with water from the creation of Jordan Lake.
Jesus.
I took the time to read the Bad Art Friend article on the internet yesterday, which is just such a lovely article of a set of Russian Nesting Dolls of the Blue/White Dress Controversy. The internet seems to be siding with the writer more, and though pretty much everyone in this article acted unpleasantly, I think I side more with the kidney donor? I mean, yes, maybe she was, you know, making us all uncomfortable with her huge, sweeping act of generosity and maybe she was a bit showy about it but you know what I think you get to brag a bit when you give a fucking kidney away we live in a society and shit? Like good on you? And yeah, I guess “the rules” of being a writer are you get to write about whatever you want, lol, no takebacks, but also the rules are that throughout history humans have been pissed at writers when they steal their stories. I am reminded of poor Richard Osborn, friend to Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, who exists these days mainly as a punchline to their jokes, that is what this human being is remembered for, even though he was, despite suffering from mental illness an aspiring artist, an accomplished lawyer, and subject of Brassai.
Though I have not successfully written much fiction because I am a bad writer of fiction, I really wanted to be a writer of fiction and spent, in my youth, so much time being and trying to be a writer of fiction. Since my life was somewhat interesting, I naturally explored the possibility of Roman a Clef and fiction inspired from my own life. I wrote a lot of it. I never shared any of it, because I precisely wrestled with this exact question. I spent years thinking about the ethics and morality of writing about the people around you. And yeah, you’re “allowed” to write about your “friends,” and you can even be mean about it, but that does not mean you have carte blanche and that doesn’t mean you get to get-off scott free from upsetting human beings. I will suffer for my art till the day I die. It is not other people’s problem and they don’t have to suffer for my art as well, even if they are an artist themselves.
When reading this article, I would be friends with the kidney donor. I would keep her at arms length, politely and blandly respond to her texts, knowing that I did not want her issues to seep into my life, but I would be there for her, and I would stick up for her. The rest of them? Celeste Ng and all those mean backstabbing writers pretending to be friends when they’re just talking shit about someone for doing a monumental good deed? Yeah, I would steer clear from them completely.
Also! Only around 5,000 people donated a kidney last year. The vast majority of those are to people they know. I can’t find the exact statistics, but let’s say 10% of those are blind donations. 500 people a year. How many of them are writers? The mean story woman is all like ‘she doesn’t get to own that topic.” And you know what? Unless you’re one of the, like, what, 1 or 2 other blind-kidney-donating writers in America? Yeah, I think she gets to own that topic. Jesus christ just change the whole thing to any other altruistic, over-generous act. Oh you can’t think of one? Hrm. Hrm.
(oh thank god the internet is back)
Here is a picture of Peter Hooks Prophet 5:
Let’s do a mix! I’m running out of time here and this mix was only half done so I did the rest real quick. But it feels good, this moody and quiet mix. I just discovered Geniuser, Mike Allen’s post-Wolfgang Press band, why did it never occur to me to look up what he was doing, what any of them were doing, after the Wolfgang Press broke up? I feel dumb about that. Welcome into my life, Geniuser. I’m very excited about the new Strand of Oaks, depressed dudes always need to hear the pain of other depressed dudes. And the new Advance Base is pretty exciting too. Owen Ashworth is a national treasure and the heir apparent to Dylan. Except he didn’t write this one but that’s okay Dylan did covers too.
Okay! Let’s go get my baby! I’m coming Jane! Let’s have breakfast! Bagels! MMMM.
Every time I see the 'From Facebook' load text on Instagram part of me dies.