The Wild Wild West of The Group Chat
They're everywhere and they're distressingly consequential!
Featuring oak-based names, insomnia, and the nebulous nature of new Hollywood.
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Literally Just Something I Think Is Funny/Generations
I know I said I was leaving the generation wars behind, but I’ve come across two funny/interesting pieces about generational trends I’m feeling an urge to highlight.
Starting off light, apparently new parents are getting into “oak-based names.” What do we mean by that? It’s much simpler than you might have guessed: any name that starts with the word Oak - we’re talking Oakley, Oaklee, and Oakleigh. Yes, like the sunglasses! The most interesting part of this is that apparently American name trends these days usually start in Utah in the Mormon community. There are a lot of Mormon social media influencers, and a lot of Mormon kids generally, so we can also thank them for the popularity of names like Jaden and Kaden!
Next, we have a thoughtful piece from Slate about how we ended up in a trend of naming generations as they are born (e.g. the newly-minted and unfortunately-named Gen Beta) instead of how it used to be: by the events that defined a generation (e.g. the Lost Generation). It turns out that one Australian guy named Mark McCrindle, who also happens to own a generation-specialty marketing insights firm, is the reason for this new trend of generational naming conventions. And more than anything, this new way of thinking about generations is about creating marketing cohorts, focused on what people buy and consume, instead of the sociological concept it started out as. The whole article is worth a read, offering a very interesting history of the phrase “Gen X” and how it was co-opted by marketers after first making its debut in a novel meant to gesture toward the “undefinable” nature of that post-boomer generation.
The X was meant to represent the undefinable identity of Coupland’s generation. Instead, it offered a handy label for marketers and media personalities to set about defining them. In a 1992 ABC News special, Barbara Walters described Generation X as just looking to “cope,” rather than pursue money or peace. In 1994, some 69,000 furniture executives discussed how they’d sell to Generation X at a conference, with La-Z-Boy deciding that they could reach the group by using distressed bomber-jacket leather on recliners, and Universal Furniture by hiring the same designer who styled Jason Priestley of Beverly Hills, 90210.
I won’t spoil it here, but I was very charmed by the punny final sentence of this article.
A Less Serious Item (On Insomnia)
I found this piece from Aeon about taking back your insomnia, soaking in the sleepless 4ams of your nights to not just try to sleep but to be awake, refreshing. The author Annabel Abbs cites the fact that many women, especially, seem to suffer more from insomnia. This could be evolutionary, since women have often been the people in charge of night nursing children, but some studies suggest (!) women’s prefrontal cortexes are larger and more active in the night compared to men. Weaving a fun history of women through the centuries who have braved insomnia, Abbs finds solace in the company of fellow “night spinners,” and, eventually, through the embrace of her insomnia, more sleep.
P.S. I like to highlight when I cite news orgs I haven’t before: Aeon is a digital magazine based out of Australia that typically features essays about science, philosophy, and society, with a number of academics, journalists, and science writers contributing to their magazine over the years.
This Week’s Theme: The Dark Side of The Group Chat
This Semafor article on the influence of group chats on the ascendance of Trump in 2024 is a distressing look into how important “group chats”, on Signal and other chat-based apps, have become in the past ten years. This particular article is about a series of group chats titled “Chatham House” that were formed as a response to “woke” culture by public figures who felt they could no longer be honest about their “not woke” ideas on social media and in other spaces. Eye roll! So they receded into the annals of Signal, led by tech billionaire Marc Andreesen (also famous for having the world’s MOST egg-shaped head).
Andreessen has told friends he finds the medium [group chats] efficient — a way to keep in touch with three times the people in a third of the time. The fact that he and other billionaires spend so much time writing to group chats prompted participants to joke that the very pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is posting.
This information would be solely pathetic if these group chats weren’t apparently the place where Silicon Valley decided to forge an alliance with the right ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
…it’s hard to deny their power. The political journalist Mark Halperin, who now runs 2WAY and has a show on Megyn Kelly’s network, said it was remarkable that “the left seems largely unaware that some of the smartest and most sophisticated Trump supporters in the nation from coast to coast are part of an overlapping set of text chains that allow their members to share links, intel, tactics, strategy, and ad hoc assignments. Also: clever and invigorating jokes. And they do this (not kidding) like 20 hours a day, including on weekends.” He called their influence “substantial.”
Many of the group chatters celebrate their success in driving the ascendant politics of the Trump era, which they hope will bring back patriotic industry and traditional cultural norms. Some who have left or lurk consider it a sinister phenomenon in which Andreessen exerted unspoken gravitational pull, as one participant put it: “You’d see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power.”
In a separate yet spiritually similar vein, The Cut published coverage of a pay-to-play eating disorder group chat led by an “influencer” named Liv Schmidt, who allows women to pay to join group chats that are meant to “encourage” people in their weight loss journeys, but in practice are group chats where women try to one-up each other in terms of step count, calorie deprivation, and starvation symptoms like hair loss and dizziness.
Some former members I spoke with said the women in their chat would regularly discuss experiencing dizziness, fatigue, and brain fog. Emma told me that people often talked about their periods becoming irregular or experiencing hair loss, two common side effects of disordered eating. “None of the members in the group said, ‘Maybe you should chill out,’” she said. “They just recommended hair vitamins to each other.” Another woman, who joined the Skinni Société to lose weight after giving birth, told me she saw some members eating less than 1,000 calories a day (going against Schmidt’s guidelines to not post meal plans less than 1,200 calories). I also saw women exchanging tips: One said she puts on mouth tape after dinner to deter nighttime snacking, while another said she used prunes as laxatives whenever she feels “heavy.” One woman posted a screenshot showing she’d taken 27,000 steps in one day. Five other members hearted it. “Congratulations,” one wrote alongside balloon and Champagne-bottle emoji.
Schmidt was kicked off for TikTok for encouraging disordered eating, but her shift to a pay-based group chat model could be netting her as much as $130k/mo from the 6,500 or so members who participate - yet another instance where saying the bad stuff in private pays off in nefarious ways!
Soft power has always been complicated, but the rise of the use of group chats, which started out as something fun and harmless, has really spiraled in a way that we have yet to quantify. It’s tough to prevent oligarchy when there are no rules saying that the Verizon CEO, the Comcast CEO, and the Optimum CEO can’t be in a group chat called “Wifi CEOs Wildin’ Out & Evading the FCC.” To say nothing of when that Atlantic editor got added to a DOD group chat for planning a drone attack.
Politics (Government Being Randomly Good)
You might remember that this newsletter started up 8 years ago (ish) because I basically wanted to be like: look! Good things are still happening despite T**** becoming president! Our entry for this section this week is in that exact spirit, as we turn to New York City proposing to set aside $30 million to fast track the purchases of vacant land to turn them into pocket parks. Civics at its best, people! If you live in a city, you know there are many vacant lots that are PERFECTLY SITUATED to become little parks, and it’s always like: huh, why can’t we do anything about that? Shout out to New York for at least proposing to do something about it. I’m praying and praying that Philadelphia will follow suit and finally liberate the Jesse G’s Crab Shack Vacant Triangular Lot.
A Celebrity Thinger (On The State of The Biz)
Vulture is doing a series on Hollywood herself, including this illuminating piece about all the ways in which Hollywood has left Los Angeles. It’s a well-investigated piece about how tax credits in many other cities have been pulling the movie and television business away from its epicenter for decades now, all starting with British Colombia’s introduction of a film tax credit in the 1990s. But with the strikes and the fires, LA has really become a ghost town. It’s too expensive to film there because California’s tax credits don’t measure up to other cities, and these speed bumps have further triggered in other locations. More than that, the industry is also leaving the States entirely in some ways - with the MCU shifting their filming hub from Atlanta to London.
Having film and TV productions literally everywhere with no central hub makes it much harder to build a reliable workforce. Sure, wealthy actors can technically afford to pop from LA to Sydney or New York to London and back for a shoot, but even well-off actors don’t really wanna deal with the time zone mania this requires. The big issue is that every other (largely middle class) person involved in a movie cannot live a normal life when they’re expected to ping pong across the globe for gigs all the time and not just on special occasions. Nobody wants to look for an apartment rental that much!
P.S. My favorite part of this article is that it’s anchored by quotes from Rob Lowe. It opens and closes with Rob Lowe. I love picturing the Vulture team declaring they’re finally ready to do their big “Hollywood leaves LA” piece because they’ve got Rob Lowe, star of 911: Lone Star, on the record.
Would You Rather?
Would you rather find love in an airport lounge or on a matchmaking platform (which btw is DIFFERENT from a dating app)?
A Recommendation
Piggybacking off of the Vulture Hollywood article, allow me to recommend HBO’s The Franchise, which was tragically cancelled after one season (what isn’t these days?), but features an incredible send up of moviemaking in the superhero franchise age. It follows a first assistant director (Himesh Patel) as he tries to corral the ego of his director, the neuroses of his star, and the gnawing feeling that he’s working on the biggest piece of shit movie of all time.
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Donation Corner!
Hello! Welcome Donation Corner of the Good Links! Which you are free to ignore or engage with as you please!
Here is your donation opportunity for the week:
Caring People Alliance - Caring People Alliance has multiple locations scattered throughout Philadelphia that provide programming for children, seniors, and families. There are a few different ways you can help out - including sponsoring a child for summer camp or a senior to have a membership at the Marconi Older Adult Center. The organization encourages everyone they work with to engage in community work like planting trees or creating art.
P.S. If you have an organization/mutual aid fund/individual in mind that you think would be good to highlight, feel free to email me directly with information about it!