TOK Friends

poptimism has intertwined with a variety of cultural omnivorism that encourages people to embrace the most popular fare from all genres. And this is where the algorithm comes in: it feeds people a steady drip of the most popular things and assures you you’re good for enjoying a diverse array of sameness.

But, and this is important, taste distinctions still matter. Social rank demands fealty to certain ideals of taste, even if artistry isn’t the taste that matters. “Omnivorism, for all of its rejections of ‘taste,’ still presupposes that cultural choice can change society,” Marx writes. “Consumerism can support allies, shame enemies, and deny prestige and financial support to oppressors.”

In the modern cultural landscape, “the hipster” has been replaced by what might be called “der kommisar,” and der kommisar has a few general rules for how to appreciate culture:

1.     Artists should create content that promotes progressive political views and reveals unconscious biases against oppressed groups.2.  Gatekeepers should work to represent minority voices by elevating minority artists.3.     Consumers should only buy artworks and goods with progressive values that are created by upright individuals.4.     Majority groups should never profit on styles or stories that originate within minority groups.5.     Critics should decanonize antiprogressive artists and their works, and question aesthetics associated with high-status distinction.*

“art should avoid being for art’s sake when social equity is at stake.” The quality of artistry matters less than supporting artists who think the right things and say the right things

I don’t think you can really understand much of the last decade or so of cultural writing—or, for that matter, cultural production—if you don’t understand this dynamic and how poptimism, omnivorism, and identity politics have all spun together to change, at the very least, how people talk publicly about the art they consume

Red Army memorials are just some of the divisive symbols that persist in Germany long after the political systems and social mores that sustained them have vanished, a reckoning with parallels in the United States and elsewhere.

Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.

This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.

Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.

“Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”

In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.

“This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”

No, says the other camp, led by Jonathan Haidt; the kids are not all right, their devices are partly to blame, and here are the studies showing why.

we should not wait for the replication crisis in the social sciences to resolve itself before we consider the question of whether the naysayers are on to something. And normal powers of observation and imagination should be sufficient to make us at least wary of smartphones.

These powerful instruments represent a technological advance on par with that of the power loom or the automobile

The achievement can be difficult to properly appreciate because instead of exerting power over physical processes and raw materials, they operate on social processes and the human psyche: They are designed to maximize attention, to make it as difficult as possible to look away.

they have transformed the qualitative experience of existing in the world. They give a person’s sociality the appearance and feeling of a theoretically endless open network, while in reality, algorithms quietly sort users into ideological, aesthetic, memetic cattle chutes of content.

Importantly, the process by which smartphones change us requires no agency or judgment on the part of a teen user, and yet that process is designed to provide what feels like a perfectly natural, inevitable, and complete experience of the world.

Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave

One reason commonly offered for maintaining our socio-technological status quo is that nothing really has changed with the advent of the internet, of Instagram, of Tiktok and Youtube and 4Chan

It is instead a complete shadow world of endless images; disembodied, manipulable personas; and the ever-present gaze of others. It lives in your pocket and in your mind.

The price you pay for its availability—and the engine of its functioning—is that you are always available to it, as well. Unless you have a strength of will that eludes most adults, its emissaries can find you at any hour and in any place to issue your summons to the grim pleasure palace.

the self-restraint and self-discipline required to use a smartphone well—that is, to treat it purely as an occasional tool rather than as a totalizing way of life—are unreasonable things to demand of teenagers

these are unreasonable things to demand of me, a fully adult woman

To enjoy the conveniences that a smartphone offers, I must struggle against the lure of the permanent scroll, the notification, the urge to fix my eyes on the circle of light and keep them fixed. I must resist the default pseudo-activity the smartphone always calls its user back to, if I want to have any hope of filling the moments of my day with the real activity I believe is actually valuable.

for a child or teen still learning the rudiments of self-control, still learning what is valuable and fulfilling, still learning how to prioritize what is good over the impulse of the moment, it is an absurd bar to be asked to clear

The expectation that children and adolescents will navigate new technologies with fully formed and muscular capacities for reason and responsibility often seems to go along with a larger abdication of responsibility on the part of the adults involved.

adults have frequently given in to a Faustian temptation: offering up their children’s generation to be used as guinea pigs in a mass longitudinal study in exchange for a bit more room to breathe in their own undeniably difficult roles as educators, caretakers, and parents.

It is not a particular activity that you start and stop and resume, and it is not a social scene that you might abandon when it suits you.

And this we must do without waiting for social science to hand us a comprehensive mandate it is fundamentally unable to provide; without cowering in panic over moral panics

The pre-internet advertising world was vicious, to be sure, but when the “pre-” came off, its vices were moved into a compound interest account. In the world of online advertising, at any moment, in any place, a user engaged in an infinite scroll might be presented with native content about how one Instagram model learned to accept her chunky (size 4) thighs, while in the next clip, another model relates how a local dermatologist saved her from becoming an unlovable crone at the age of 25

developing pathological interests and capacities used to take a lot more work than it does now

You had to seek it out, as you once had to seek out pornography and look someone in the eye while paying for it. You were not funneled into it by an omnipresent stream of algorithmically curated content—the ambience of digital life, so easily mistaken by the person experiencing it as fundamentally similar to the non-purposive ambience of the natural world.

And when interpersonal relations between teens become sour, nasty, or abusive, as they often do and always have, the unbalancing effects of transposing social life to the internet become quite clear

For both young men and young women, the pornographic scenario—dominance and degradation, exposure and monetization—creates an experiential framework for desires that they are barely experienced enough to understand.

This is not a world I want to live in. I think it hurts everyone; but I especially think it hurts those young enough to receive it as a natural state of affairs rather than as a profound innovation.

so I am baffled by the most routine objection to any blaming of smartphones for our society-wide implosion of teenagers’ mental health,

In short, and inevitably, today’s teenagers are suffering from capitalism—specifically “late capitalism,

what shocks me about this rhetorical approach is the rush to play defense for Apple and its peers, the impulse to wield the abstract concept of capitalism as a shield for actually existing, extremely powerful, demonstrably ruthless capitalist actors.

This motley alliance of left-coded theory about the evils of business and right-coded praxis in defense of a particular evil business can be explained, I think, by a deeper desire than overthrowing capitalism. It is the desire not to be a prude or hysteric of bumpkin

No one wants to come down on the side of tamping off pleasures and suppressing teen activity.

No one wants to be the shrill or leaden antagonist of a thousand beloved movies, inciting moral panics, scheming about how to stop the youths from dancing on Sunday.

But commercial pioneers are only just beginning to explore new frontiers in the profit-driven, smartphone-enabled weaponization of our own pleasures against us

To limit your moral imagination to the archetypes of the fun-loving rebel versus the stodgy enforcers in response to this emerging reality is to choose to navigate it with blinders on, to be a useful idiot for the robber barons of online life rather than a challenger to the corrupt order they maintain.

The very basic question that needs to be asked with every product rollout and implementation is what technologies enable a good human life?

this question is not, ultimately, the province of social scientists, notwithstanding how useful their work may be on the narrower questions involved. It is the free privilege, it is the heavy burden, for all of us, to think—to deliberate and make judgments about human good, about what kind of world we want to live in, and to take action according to that thought.

I am not sure how to build a world in which childrens and adolescents, at least, do not feel they need to live their whole lives online.

whatever particular solutions emerge from our negotiations with each other and our reckonings with the force of cultural momentum, they will remain unavailable until we give ourselves permission to set the terms of our common life.

But the environments in which humans find themselves vary significantly, and in ways that have equally significant downstream effects on the particular expression of human nature in that context.

most of all, without affording Apple, Facebook, Google, and their ilk the defensive allegiance we should reserve for each other.

It is easy to understand the appeal of such one-sided tales. As human beings, we seem to prefer to impose clear and linear narratives on a chaotic and unpredictable reality; ambiguity and contradiction are much harder to live with.

To truly grasp the complex nature of our current time, we need first of all to embrace its most terrifying aspect: its fundamental open-endedness. It is precisely this radical uncertainty — not knowing where we are and what lies ahead — that gives rise to such existential anxiety.

Anthropologists have a name for this disturbing type of experience: liminality

liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between

We are ourselves in the midst of a painful transition, a sort of interregnum, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci famously called it, between an old world that is dying and a new one that is struggling to be born. Such epochal shifts are inevitably fraught with danger

the great upheavals in world history can equally be seen “as genuine signs of vitality” that “clear the ground” of discredited ideas and decaying institutions. “The crisis,” he wrote, “is to be regarded as a new nexus of growth.”

Once we embrace this Janus-faced nature of our times, at once frightening yet generative, a very different vision of the future emerges.

we see phases of relative calm punctuated every so often by periods of great upheaval. These crises can be devastating, but they are also the drivers of history.

even the collapse of modern civilization — but it may also open up possibilities for transformative change

Social-media platforms are “preying on your insecurities; they’re preying on your temptations,” Jenn explained to me in an interview that shifted our parasocial connection, at least for an hour, to a mere relationship. “And, you know, I do play a role in this.” Jenn makes money through aspirational advertising, after all—a familiar part of any influencer’s job.

She’s pro–parasocial relationships, she explains to the camera, but only if we remain aware that we’re in one. “This relationship does not replace existing friendships, existing relationships,” she emphasizes. “This is all supplementary. Like, it should be in addition to your life, not a replacement.” I sat there watching her talk about parasocial relationships while absorbing the irony of being in one with her.

The open acknowledgment of social media’s inner workings, with content creators exposing the foundations of their content within the content itself, is what Alice Marwick, an associate communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described to me as “meta-content.”

Meta-content can be overt, such as the vlogger Casey Neistat wondering, in a vlog, if vlogging your life prevents you from being fully present in it;

But meta-content can also be subtle: a vlogger walking across the frame before running back to get the camera. Or influencers vlogging themselves editing the very video you’re watching, in a moment of space-time distortion.

Viewers don’t seem to care. We keep watching, fully accepting the performance. Perhaps that’s because the rise of meta-content promises a way to grasp authenticity by acknowledging artifice; especially in a moment when artifice is easier to create than ever before, audiences want to know what’s “real” and what isn’

“The idea of a space where you can trust no sources, there’s no place to sort of land, everything is put into question, is a very unsettling, unsatisfying way to live.

So we continue to search for, as Murray observes, the “agreed-upon things, our basic understandings of what’s real, what’s true.” But when the content we watch becomes self-aware and even self-critical, it raises the question of whether we can truly escape the machinations of social media. Maybe when we stare directly into the abyss, we begin to enjoy its company.

“The difference between BeReal and the social-media giants isn’t the former’s relationship to truth but the size and scale of its deceptions.” BeReal users still angle their camera and wait to take their daily photo at an aesthetic time of day. The snapshots merely remind us how impossible it is to stop performing online.

Jenn’s concern over the future of the internet stems, in part, from motherhood. She recently had a son, Lennon (whose first birthday party I watched on YouTube), and worries about the digital world he’s going to inherit.

Back in the age of MySpace, she had her own internet friends and would sneak out to parking lots at 1 a.m. to meet them in real life: “I think this was when technology was really used as a tool to connect us.” Now, she explained, it’s beginning to ensnare us. Posting content online is no longer a means to an end so much as the end itself.

We used to view influencers’ lives as aspirational, a reality that we could reach toward. Now both sides acknowledge that they’re part of a perfect product that the viewer understands is unattainable and the influencer acknowledges is not fully real.

“I forgot to say this to her in the interview, but I truly think that my videos are less about me and more of a reflection of where you are currently … You are kind of reflecting on your own life and seeing what resonates [with] you, and you’re discarding what doesn’t. And I think that’s what’s beautiful about it.”

meta-content is fundamentally a compromise. Recognizing the delusion of the internet doesn’t alter our course within it so much as remind us how trapped we truly are—and how we wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Samsung threat represented the first potential crack in Google’s seemingly impregnable search business, which was worth $162 billion last year.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new A.I. technology in phones and homes all over the world.

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up that is working with Microsoft, demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November. About two weeks later, Google created a task force in its search division to start building A.I. products,

Google has been doing A.I. research for years. Its DeepMind lab in London is considered one of the best A.I. research centers in the world, and the company has been a pioneer with A.I. projects, such as self-driving cars and the so-called large language models that are used in the development of chatbots. In recent years, Google has used large language models to improve the quality of its search results, but held off on fully adopting A.I. because it has been prone to generating false and biased statements.

Now the priority is winning control of the industry’s next big thing. Last month, Google released its own chatbot, Bard, but the technology received mixed reviews.

The system would learn what users want to know based on what they’re searching when they begin using it. And it would offer lists of preselected options for objects to buy, information to research and other information. It would also be more conversational — a bit like chatting with a helpful person.

Magi would keep ads in the mix of search results. Search queries that could lead to a financial transaction, such as buying shoes or booking a flight, for example, would still feature ads on their results pages.

Last week, Google invited some employees to test Magi’s features, and it has encouraged them to ask the search engine follow-up questions to judge its ability to hold a conversation. Google is expected to release the tools to the public next month and add more features in the fall, according to the planning document.

The company plans to initially release the features to a maximum of one million people. That number should progressively increase to 30 million by the end of the year. The features will be available exclusively in the United States.

Google has also explored efforts to let people use Google Earth’s mapping technology with help from A.I. and search for music through a conversation with a chatbot

A tool called GIFI would use A.I. to generate images in Google Image results.

Tivoli Tutor, would teach users a new language through open-ended A.I. text conversations.

Yet another product, Searchalong, would let users ask a chatbot questions while surfing the web through Google’s Chrome browser. People might ask the chatbot for activities near an Airbnb rental, for example, and the A.I. would scan the page and the rest of the internet for a response.

“If we are the leading search engine and this is a new attribute, a new feature, a new characteristic of search engines, we want to make sure that we’re in this race as well,”

In every group chat, no matter the size, participants fall into informal roles. There is usually a leader—a person whose posting frequency drives the group or sets the agenda. Often, there are lurkers who rarely chime in

Larger group chats are not immune to the more toxic dynamics of social media, where competition for attention and herd behavior cause infighting, splintering, and back-channeling.

It’s enough to make one think, as the writer Max Read argued, that “venture-capitalist group chats are a threat to the global economy.” Now you might also say they are a threat to national security.

thanks to the private nature of the group chats, this information largely stayed out of the public eye. As Bloomberg reported, “By the time most people figured out that a bank run was a possibility … it was already well underway.”

The investor panic that led to the swift collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March was effectively caused by runaway group-chat dynamics. “It wasn’t phone calls; it wasn’t social media,” a start-up founder told Bloomberg in March. “It was private chat rooms and message groups.

Unlike traditional social media or even forums and message boards, group chats are nearly impossible to monitor.

as our digital social lives start to splinter off from feeds and large audiences and into siloed areas, a different kind of unpredictability and chaos awaits. Where social networks create a context collapse—a process by which information meant for one group moves into unfamiliar networks and is interpreted by outsiders—group chats seem to be context amplifiers

group chats provide strong relationship dynamics, and create in-jokes and lore. For decades, researchers have warned of the polarizing effects of echo chambers across social networks; group chats realize this dynamic fully.

Weird things happen in echo chambers. Constant reinforcement of beliefs or ideas might lead to group polarization or radicalization. It may trigger irrational herd behavior such as, say, attempting to purchase a copy of the Constitution through a decentralized autonomous organization

Obsession with in-group dynamics might cause people to lose touch with the reality outside the walls of a particular community; the private-seeming nature of a closed group might also lull participants into a false sense of security, as it did with Teixiera.

the age of the group chat appears to be at least as unpredictable, swapping a very public form of volatility for a more siloed, incalculable version

The corporate gig, as a social media director for a tech platform, was a revelation. “I could just show up to work and do work,” Ms. Tilghman said. After she was done, she could leave. She didn’t have to be a brand. There’s no comments section at an office job.

In 2019, a Morning Consult report found that 54 percent of Gen Z and millennial Americans were interested in becoming influencers. (Eighty-six percent said they would be willing to post sponsored content for money.)

If social media has made audiences anxious, it’s driving creators to the brink. In 2021, the TikTok breakout star Charli D’Amelio said she had “lost the passion” for posting videos. A few months later, Erin Kern announced to her 600,000 Instagram followers that she would be deactivating her account @cottonstem; she had been losing her hair, and her doctors blamed work-induced stress

Other influencers faded without fanfare — teens whose mental health had taken too much of a hit and amateur influencers who stopped posting after an algorithm tweak tanked their metrics. Some had been at this for a decade or more, starting at 12 or 14 or 19.

She posted less, testing out new identities that she hoped wouldn’t touch off the same spiral that wellness had. There were dancing videos, dog photos, interior design. None of it stuck. (“You can change the niche, but you’re still going to be performing your life for content,” she explained over lunch.)

Ms. Tilghman’s problem — as the interest in the workshop, which she decided to cap at 15, demonstrated — is that she has an undeniable knack for this. In 2022, she started a Substack to continue writing, thinking of it as a calling card while she applied to editorial jobs; it soon amassed 20,000 subscribers. It once had a different name, but now it’s called “Offline Time.” The paid tier costs $5 a month.

Casey Lewis, who helms the After School newsletter about Gen Z consumer trends, predicts more pivots and exits. TikTok has elevated creators faster than other platforms and burned them out quicker, she said.

Ms. Lewis expects a swell of former influencers taking jobs with P.R. agencies, marketing firms and product development conglomerates. She pointed out that creators have experience not just in video and photo editing, but in image management, crisis communication and rapid response. “Those skills do transfer,” she said.

Before the introduction of Botox and hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in 2002 and 2003, respectively, aesthetic work was serious, expensive. Nose jobs and face lifts required general anesthesia, not insignificant recovery time, and cost thousands of dollars (in 2000, a facelift was $5,416 on average, and a rhinoplasty $4,109, around $9,400 and $7,000 adjusted).

In contrast, the average price of a syringe of hyaluronic acid filler today is $684, while treating, for example, the forehead and eyes with Botox will put you out anywhere from $300 to $600

We copied the beautiful and the rich, not in facsimile, but in homage.

In 2018, use of Botox and fillers was up 18% and 20% from five years prior. Philosophies of prejuvenation have made Botox use jump 22% among 22- to 37-year-olds in half a decade as well. By 2030, global noninvasive aesthetic treatments are predicted to triple.

The trouble is that a status symbol, without status, is common.

Beauty has always been exclusive. When someone strikes you as pretty, it means they are something that everyone else is not.

It’s a zero-sum game, as relative as our morals. Naturally, we hoard of beauty what we can. It’s why we call grooming tips “secrets.”

Largely the secrets started with the wealthy, who possess the requisite money and leisure to spare on their appearances

Botox and filler only accelerated a trend that began in the ’70s and ’80s and is just now reaching its saturation point.

we didn’t have the tools for anything more than emulation. Fake breasts and overdrawn lips only approximated real ones; a birthmark drawn with pencil would always be just that.

Instagram Face, on the other hand, distinguishes itself by its sheer reproducibility. Not only because of those new cosmetic technologies, which can truly reshape features, at reasonable cost and with little risk.

built in to the whole premise of reversible, low-stakes modification is an indefinite flux, and thus a lack of discretion.

Instagram Face has replicated outward, with trendsetters giving up competing with one another in favor of looking eerily alike. And obviously it has replicated down.

Eva looks like Eva. If she has procedures in common with Kim K, you couldn’t tell. “I look at my features and I think long and hard of how I can, without looking different and while keeping as natural as possible, make them look better and more proportional. I’m against everything that is too invasive. My problem with Instagram Face is that if you want to look like someone else, you should be in therapy.”

natural looks have always been, and still are, more valuable than artificial ones. Partly because of our urge to legitimize in any way we can the advantages we have over other people. Hotness is a class struggle.

As more and more women post videos of themselves eating, sleeping, dressing, dancing, and Only-Fanning online, in a logical bid for economic ascendance, the women who haven’t needed to do that gain a new status symbol.

Privacy. A life which is not a ticketed show. An intimacy that does not admit advertisers. A face that does not broadcast its insecurity, or the work undergone to correct it.

Upper class, private women get discrete work done. The differences aren’t in the procedures themselves—they’re the same—but in disposition

Eva, who lives between central London, Geneva, and the south of France, says: “I do stuff, but none of the stuff I do is at all in my head associated with Instagram Face. Essentially you do similar procedures, but the end goal is completely different. Because they are trying to get the result of looking like another human being, and I’m just beautifying myself.”

But the more rapidly it replicates, and the clearer our manuals for quick imitation become, the closer we get to singularity—that moment Kim Kardashian fears unlike any other: the moment when it becomes unclear whether we’re copying her, or whether she is copying us.

what he restores is complicated and yet not complicated at all. It’s herself, the fingerprint of her features. Her aura, her presence and genealogy, her authenticity in space and time.

Dr. Taktouk’s approach is “not so formulaic.” He aims to give his patients the “better versions of themselves.” “It’s not about trying to be anyone else,” he says, “or creating a conveyor belt of patients. It’s about working with your best features, enhancing them, but still looking like you.”

“Vulgar” says that in pursuing indistinguishability, women have been duped into another punishing divide. “Vulgar” says that the subtlety of his work is what signals its special class—and that the women who’ve obtained Instagram Face for mobility’s sake have unwittingly shut themselves out of it.

While younger women are dissolving their gratuitous work, the 64-year-old Madonna appeared at the Grammy Awards in early February, looking so tragically unlike herself that the internet launched an immediate postmortem.

The folly of Instagram Face is that in pursuing a bionic ideal, it turns cosmetic technology away from not just the reality of class and power, but also the great, poignant, painful human project of trying to reverse time. It misses the point of what we find beautiful: that which is ephemeral, and can’t be reproduced

Age is just one of the hierarchies Instagram Face can’t topple, in the history of women striving versus the women already arrived. What exactly have they arrived at?

Youth, temporarily. Wealth. Emotional security. Privacy. Personal choices, like cosmetic decisions, which are not so public, and do not have to be defended as empowered, in the defeatist humiliation of our times

Maybe they’ve arrived at love, which for women has never been separate from the things I’ve already mentioned.

I can’t help but recall the time I was chatting with a plastic surgeon. I began to point to my features, my flaws. I asked her, “What would you do to me, if I were your patient?” I had many ideas. She gazed at me, and then noticed my ring. “Nothing,” she said. “You’re already married.”

The internet stripped institutions of their gatekeeping powers, thus making it possible for anyone to publish—and making it inevitable that many writers would create audiences independent of media institutions.

The internet destroyed the apprenticeship system that had dominated American journalism for generations. Under the old system, an aspiring writer took a low-level job at a media institution and worked her way up the ladder until she was trusted enough to write.

Under the new system, people started their careers writing outside of institutions—on personal blogs—and then were hired by institutions on the strength of their work.

In practice, these outsiders were primarily hired not on the merits of their work, but because of the size of their audience.

what it really did was transform the nature of audiences. Once the internet existed it became inevitable that institutions would see their power to hold audiences wane while individual writers would have their power to build personal audiences explode.

this meant that institutions would begin to hire based on the size of a writer’s audience. Which meant that writers’ overriding professional imperative was to build an audience, since that was the key to advancement.

Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”

If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.2

If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.

For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.

Everything we just talked about was driven by the advertising model of media, which prized pageviews and unique users above all else. About a decade ago, that model started to fray around the edges,3 which caused a shift to the subscription model.

Today, if you’re a subscription publication, what Twitter gives you is growth opportunity. Twitter’s not the only channel for growth—there are lots of others, from TikTok to LinkedIn to YouTube to podcasts to search. But it’s an important one.

Twitter’s attack on Substack was an attack on the subscription model of journalism itself.

since media has already seen the ad-based model fall apart, it’s not clear what the alternative will be if the subscription model dies, too.

All of which is why having a major social media platform run by a capricious bad actor is suboptimal.

And why I think anyone else who’s concerned about the future of media ought to start hedging against Twitter. None of the direct hedges—Post, Mastodon, etc.—are viable yet. But tech history shows that these shifts can happen fairly quickly.

While people praised Finland’s strong social safety net and spoke glowingly of the psychological benefits of nature and the personal joys of sports or music, they also talked about guilt, anxiety and loneliness. Rather than “happy,” they were more likely to characterize Finns as “quite gloomy,” “a little moody” or not given to unnecessary smiling

Many also shared concerns about threats to their way of life, including possible gains by a far-right party in the country’s elections in April, the war in Ukraine and a tense relationship with Russia, which could worsen now that Finland is set to join NATO.

It turns out even the happiest people in the world aren’t that happy. But they are something more like content.

Finns derive satisfaction from leading sustainable lives and perceive financial success as being able to identify and meet basic need

“In other words,” he wrote in an email, “when you know what is enough, you are happy.”

“‘Happiness,’ sometimes it’s a light word and used like it’s only a smile on a face,” Teemu Kiiski, the chief executive of Finnish Design Shop, said. “But I think that this Nordic happiness is something more foundational.”

e conventional wisdom is that it’s easier to be happy in a country like Finland where the government ensures a secure foundation on which to build a fulfilling life and a promising future. But that expectation can also create pressure to live up to the national reputation.

“We are very privileged and we know our privilege,” said Clara Paasimaki, 19, one of Ms. Hansen’s students in Kokkola, “so we are also scared to say that we are discontent with anything, because we know that we have it so much better than other people,” especially in non-Nordic countries.

“The fact that Finland has been ‘the happiest country on earth’ for six years in a row could start building pressure on people,” he wrote in an email. “If we Finns are all so happy, why am I not happy?

Since immigrating from Zimbabwe in 1992, Julia Wilson-Hangasmaa, 59, has come to appreciate the freedom Finland affords people to pursue their dreams without worrying about meeting basic needs

“Back in the day when it wasn’t that easy to survive the winter, people had to struggle, and then it’s kind of been passed along the generations,” said Ms. Paasimaki’s classmate Matias From, 18. “Our parents were this way. Our grandparents were this way. Tough and not worrying about everything. Just living life.”

The Finnish way of life is summed up in “sisu,” a trait said to be part of the national character. The word roughly translates to “grim determination in the face of hardships,” such as the country’s long winters: Even in adversity, a Finn is expected to persevere, without complaining.

When she returns to her home country, she is struck by the “good energy” that comes not from the satisfaction of sisu but from exuberant joy.

“What I miss the most, I realize when I enter Zimbabwe, are the smiles,” she said, among “those people who don’t have much, compared to Western standards, but who are rich in spirit.”

Many of our subjects cited the abundance of nature as crucial to Finnish happiness: Nearly 75 percent of Finland is covered by forest, and all of it is open to everyone thanks to a law known as “jokamiehen oikeudet,” or “everyman’s right,” that entitles people to roam freely throughout any natural areas, on public or privately owned land.

“I enjoy the peace and movement in nature,” said Helina Marjamaa, 66, a former track athlete who represented the country at the 1980 and 1984 Olympic Games. “That’s where I get strength. Birds are singing, snow is melting, and nature is coming to life. It’s just incredibly beautiful.”

“I am worried with this level of ignorance we have toward our own environment,” he said, citing endangered species and climate change. The threat, he said, “still doesn’t seem to shift the political thinking.”

Born 17 years after Finland won independence from Russia, Eeva Valtonen has watched her homeland transform: from the devastation of World War II through years of rebuilding to a nation held up as an exemplar to the world.

“My mother used to say, ‘Remember, the blessing in life is in work, and every work you do, do it well,’” Ms. Valtonen, 88, said. “I think Finnish people have been very much the same way. Everybody did everything together and helped each other.”

Maybe it isn’t that Finns are so much happier than everyone else. Maybe it’s that their expectations for contentment are more reasonable, and if they aren’t met, in the spirit of sisu, they persevere.

“We don’t whine,” Ms. Eerikainen said. “We just do.”

In the summer of 2020, “public-health experts” decided that racism is a public-health crisis comparable to the coronavirus pandemic. It was therefore, they claimed, within their purview to express public support for the Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd and to argue that the benefits of such protests outweighed the increased risk of spreading the disease. Those supposed experts actually knew nothing about the likely effects of the protests. They made no concrete predictions about whether they would in any way ameliorate racism in America, just as Nature can make no concrete predictions about whether its political endorsements will actually help a preferred candidate without jeopardizing its other important goals. The political action was expressive, not evidence-based...

as is often the case, a debate which appears to be about the neutrality of institutions is not really about neutrality at all... Rather, it is about whether there is any room left for soberly weighing our goals and values and thinking in a measured way about the consequences of our actions rather than simply reacting to situations in an impulsive and expressive manner, broadcasting our views to the world so that people know where we stand.

Our goals and values might not be “neutral” at all, but they might still be best served by procedures, institutions, and even individuals that follow neutral principles.