Weekend Reads (Apr 27): TikTok, AI Priests, “The Blair Witch Project,” Post-Rock, Washington Humor
Recommended weekend reading for April 27, 2024.
Opus has had over 9,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days. That’s pretty cool and humbling, but here’s the rub: if even just 1% of those readers subscribed, that would be an absolute game-changer for the site. I know there are many worthy sites and newsletters seeking subscribers these days, so I’ll just say this: Opus has been highlighting good, beautiful, and noteworthy pop culture for almost 30 years now, and subscriptions help ensure that it’ll do so for another 30.
Now… on to this week’s links.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Even as it faces a potential ban in the U.S., it’s hard to deny that TikTok has changed American culture in many ways, from Hollywood marketing and conspiracy theories to national security and mental health.
The surge of content about mental health has meant that young people are more likely to self-diagnose before seeing a clinician, psychiatrists report. Diagnoses for ADHD and anxiety disorders shot up during the pandemic years, especially among young people.
Some researchers have expressed concern about how profit motives may feed into these trends, since platforms often feature advertising from app-based mental health services, and influencers have sponsorship deals with such companies.
Via Techmeme.
The aforementioned ban is one step closer to becoming a reality; earlier this week, the Senate voted in favor of the ban and it was signed into law by President Biden shortly after. TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, now has nine months to sell off the popular service or face a complete ban in the States. The law’s meant to address security concerns over ByteDance, a Chinese company, being compelled by the Chinese government to turn over American users’ data or influence TikTok’s algorithm.
I don’t use TikTok myself, so I’m ambivalent to the ban; security concerns are important, but it also seems like there are far more important things that Congress could be focusing on. Interestingly, Biden’s campaign will keep using TikTok despite the president signing the ban into law — and other politicians have done likewise.
Related: TikTok will almost certainly challenge the newly signed law as unconstitutional, but they might have avoided this situation if they hadn’t shot themselves in the foot, politically speaking. While TikTok was “buoyed by confidence in its runaway commercial success and vast user base,” its leaders “failed to recognize that TikTok’s links to China made it more vulnerable than rival tech platforms like Meta, which had gone through the Washington wringer with barely a scratch.”
Also related: The EU is currently investigating TikTok Lite over concerns that the app “could negatively impact the mental health of young users by ‘stimulating addictive behavior.’” Via TLDR Design.
Ed Zitron offers a scathing assessment of Prabhakar Raghavan, aka, “the man who killed Google search.”
These emails are a stark example of the monstrous growth-at-all-costs mindset that dominates the tech ecosystem, and if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I want it to be the name Prabhakar Raghavan, and an understanding that there are people responsible for the current state of technology.
These emails… tell a dramatic story about how Google’s finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.
Related: Back in January, a team of German researchers claimed that Google’s search results are, indeed, being harmed by SEO spam.
Tim O’Reilly argues that Google and Amazon — once pioneering consumer-focused companies — have actually made their services worse for users in response to changing economics, plateaued user rates, and simple greed.
Google and Amazon were still atop their respective hills of web search and ecommerce in 2010, and Meta’s growth was still accelerating, but it was hard to miss that internet growth had begun to slow. The market was maturing. From 2000 to 2011, the percentage of US adults using the internet had grown from about 60% to nearly 80%. By the end of 2012, it was up to 82%. But in 2013 and 2014, it remained stuck at 83%, and while in the ten years since, it has reached 95%, it had become clear that the easy money that came from acquiring more users was ending. Penetration in Europe, the other lucrative market, was on a similar track to the US, and while there was lots of user growth still to be found in the rest of the world, the revenue per user was much lower. What are now-gigantic companies to do when their immense market capitalization depends on rapid growth and the expectation of growing profits to match
These companies did continue to innovate. Some of those innovations, like Amazon’s cloud computing business, represented enormous new markets and a new business model. But the internet giants also came to focus on extracting more usage and time spent, and thus more revenue, from a relatively stable base of existing customers. Often this was done by making their products more addictive, getting more out of their users by nefarious means. Cory Doctorow calls this the “enshittification” of Big Tech platforms.
Via Jeffrey Zeldman.
Catholic Answers — an organization focused on apologetics and evangelism — recently came under fire for releasing an AI-powered priest character named Father Justin to help with search queries.
Depicted wearing a black cassock sitting among chirping birds, the bearded AI “priest” appeared oblivious to the cascade of criticism that erupted on social media after Catholic Answers debuted the character Tuesday at midnight.
Some found him creepy. Some didn’t like his voice. Some worried about replacing actual human beings. Some didn’t like his character being a priest.
“I say this with nothing but respect for you guys and your work, but ... this should’ve just been a plain search engine,” said Father Mike Palmer, a member of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, on the social-media platform widely known as Twitter (but formally called X). “Dressing it up as a soulless AI avatar of a priest does absolutely nothing except cause confusion and invite mockery of your otherwise excellent work.”
When it was released in 1999, the original Blair Witch Project became a smash hit with its found footage approach to horror filmmaking. A lot of its success stemmed from its viral marketing campaign, which presented the film’s cast as real people who actually got lost in a Maryland forest. (I can still remember all of the buzz and mystery surrounding the film’s purportedly true story, and the fate of its “characters.”) But now, the cast is seeking residual payments, claiming the studio has ignored them for 25 years.
Sarah Welch-Larson feels ambivalent about war movies.
On paper, I should like war movies more than I do. At their best, they're about big ideas of nationhood, alongside the on-the-ground perspective of foot soldiers fighting in the mud. But I can't get past the war-is-hell imagery, nor the paradox of the war movie glorifying war. I like action when it has no real-world consequences, which is to say, I prefer the pretty lie of the American action movie, with beautiful individuals sweating their way through fight scene after fight scene, no ideology at play except their own.
The gang over at Treble sure loves making lists, and this time, they’ve compiled a list of the 50 best post-rock albums.
Defining post-rock is perhaps the most complicated part of understanding it, a phrase that’s been crowdsourced and studied, loved and loathed in equal measure. It implies the next stage in an evolution, and that’s true in a sense — what most post-rock artists share in common is a tendency to look past the conventional songwriting tropes of rock music, as well as its approach to instrumentation and arrangements. Sometimes post-rock sounds like rock (Explosions in the Sky), sometimes it doesn’t (Tortoise), but it often favors studio experimentation, is informed by electronic and jazz music as much as progressive icons like Can and King Crimson, and offers something that often seems to aim for the cerebral and the emotional all at once.
Lots of great artists and albums in this list, including such Opus faves as Labradford, Hood, Seefeel, Mogwai, and Bark Psychosis, among many others.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine reflects on this year’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class, which includes Dave Matthews Band, Peter Frampton, and Foreigner.
As an institution the Hall still does plenty of good work and the board does usher worthy acts into the “Influence” and “Excellence” sections, as in this year’s inductions of Big Mama Thornton and the sublime Norman Whitfield. These inclusions don’t offset the creeping drabness of the collective class. Maybe one of the problems is that the ballot is overloaded with dutiful lifers, the kind of acts that earned their due by never going away. Dave Matthews Band hit cruising altitude late in the 1990s and continues to glide through amphitheaters to this day, nearly thirty years after their debut album Under the Table and Dreaming. Frampton faced his share of stumbles but he kept working, engendering goodwill within the industry by taking such supporting gigs as playing guitar with his old pal David Bowie in 1987. Again, Foreigner have proven that they don’t even need an original member to pull crowds decades after they ruled the FM airwaves, proof positive that a brand can survive the disappearance of the musicians who made and recorded the music.
Another significant figure in the history of indie/alternative Christian music has passed: critic and journalist Brian Quincy Newcomb died earlier this month at the age of 67 after a lengthy battle with cancer.
Newcomb’s name was known to almost anyone following Christian rock closely in the 1980s and ’90s. He founded and edited the monthly publication Harvest Rock Syndicate, which was considered pivotal in shaping tastes for the Christian alternative subgenre at the time. But his greater renown came as the most recognized (and sometimes most controversial) byline in CCM magazine, the so-called bible of the genre. He wrote close to 500 features or reviews for CCM over a 23-year period between 1985 and 2008, when the glossy’s monthly print edition shut down.
Steve Taylor, who was arguably the most important figure doing alternative rock for Christian labels as a solo artist in the 1980s and ’90s, tells Variety: “Brian was the first writer in the genre who called ‘em like he heard ‘em, making him both loved and feared. I think the dread of getting a bad review from BQN actually helped us all aim higher.”
Jeff Nussbaum laments the current state of events like the White House Correspondents Dinner, where people from different sides of the political spectrum have traditionally gathered to give each other a good-natured ribbing.
As someone who has attended dozens of these dinners (and has written jokes for dozens more), there will be plenty of laughs from the well-dressed and well-lubricated audience. But the laughs this year — as they have been throughout the last couple of silly seasons — will be less har de har and more cri de coeur.
That’s because if tragedy plus time equals comedy, as Steve Allen famously postulated, speakers and attendees at these dinners are struggling to figure out how and if we can laugh when it feels as if the ties that bind us are dissolving, and the masters of the universe in attendance are powerless to stop it.
If you want to feel nostalgic for the way things used to be, just watch Mitt Romney and Barack Obama yuck it up with class at the 2012 Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner.
From the Blog
I was pretty sick earlier this month, and found myself seeking solace in some long-time favorites on my bookshelf: Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga.
This is the sort of high fantasy storytelling that feels rather old-fashioned nowadays. It has none of Tolkien’s mythopoeia to give it a timeless or elegiac quality. That, and Feist’s shameless culture-mashing (e.g., the Tsurani) would no doubt be flagged as problematic by modern readers. And yet, these novels are the very definition of literary “comfort food” for me, the sort of stuff that I can still enjoy even in the midst of a high fever as I re-read favorite passages for the umpteenth time.
I’m under no illusions that Feist’s novels are great fantasy; with all of their tropes, it’s pretty obvious that they emerged from a D&D-like role-playing game that he developed with his friends in the early ’80s. And yet, I’ve read them more often than most of the other books in my collection simply because I find them really comfortable and enjoyable — which is no mean thing.
Related: Back in 2023, I wrote an in-depth piece about David Zindell’s epic, philosophical space opera.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.