Quickies

🎯 Oddly, the most punk rock thing you can do now is support institutions.

🎯 I have a junk drawer, but it's in my mind.

🎯 Gold diggers are just extremely effective sex workers.

🎯 "You have a bad case of something called mimetic desire. If someone with higher status than you wants something, it means it's more likely you'll want it too."
-Ethan on White Lotus – or me explaining why so many famous women keep dating Pete Davidson

🎯 World Cup…
Typical Croatian player name: Kristijan Marcelo Brozovićjakivić
Typical Brazilian player name: Fred

🎯 I can’t talk to young people…
Nephew: My math teacher slaps.
Me: He hits you?
Nephew: No, he’s just got the drip.
Me: He’s got gonorrhea?
Nephew: That means he's cool.
Me: Oh. I guess having gonorrhea is kinda cool.

🎯 Was it really the best season of SNL or did it just air when you were 16?

🎯 Was recalling how strange it was when, at the start of pandemic, we made bouncers at bars do temperature checks, basically turning violence workers into healthcare workers – and then I realized that's what we do with cops all the time.

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Always enjoy this annual tradition where we all pretend Time magazine still exists

4:16 PM ∙ Dec 6, 2022

Middlebrow monoculture

It’s all the same.

Just a sea of monotony.

Blank coffee shops for blank minds.

It just needs to feel vaguely familiar – bingeable comfort food for our overwhelmed brains.

And so we get the same beats over and over again.

And now there’s AI that can write convincingly too. So get ready for more inoffensive, middle-of-the-road “content” that feeds the beast.We’re not reverting to the mean, we’re racing toward it. Before too long, we’ll all be franchised, templatized, and homogenized because it’s good for the economy.

Ben Recht, professor of computer science at Berkeley, on OpenAI and the predictability of the Internet:

These systems are a reflection of a collective Internet. People put their ass out there and this thing scours them in such a way that it returns the generic average. If I’m going to return the generic average of a murder mystery, it’s gonna be boring. How is it different than what people do already, where they do their analytics and produce some horrible Netflix series? The weird monoculture we’re in just loves to produce these, like, generic middlebrow things. I’m not sure if those things would be worse if GPT did it. I think it would be the same?

Should we worry that we’re going to drift into a weird, generic, middlebrow monoculture? Maybe we’re already there and too mindless to even notice.

Comedy

😈 I post clips of my standup at Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Check ‘em out/subscribe for more.

😈 Recent posts at my other newsletter “Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian”…

• The pros and cons of doing a character

• Should you worry about burning material?

• Chris Rock: A good comic never blames the audience

😈 New special “Substance” coming to YouTube soon too! Get ready to hear a bunch more about it shortly.

Elon gets the last lau– er, boo

Billionaires want you to think they're funny and comedians want you to take them seriously. Everybody wants to be everything.

And so we get Elon dropping in on a SF Chappelle show and getting booed fiercely. (My fave thing to happen in the news since those Jan. 6 cops’ families walked right past the GOP leaders and refused to shake their hands/take their medals.) Elon getting cheers online and then getting booed savagely in person is why I want every politician to do more town hall meetings. Lose the yes men, say it to our faces, and see how THAT goes down.

Maybe they were only booing because Elon didn't do his classic sink bit. It's like going to see Bruce and then he doesn't play “Born To Run.”

🅼🅰🆃🆃 💎 🆁🆄🅱🆈 @mattruby

Whoa, found Elon's set list

7:47 PM ∙ Dec 12, 2022

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In classic billionaire reframing, Elon blamed the negative reaction on “unhinged leftists.” Ah yes, the unhinged, easily-offended leftists who hate free speech and also pay $200 to see Dave Chappelle. It all adds up! Antifa ❤️ Chappelle.

Elon wants to be funny so badly. Why? As Patton Oswalt explains, boring money people are a snooze compared to funny folks.

So I think there’s just a lot of damaged people out there who become billionaires because they just focus on numbers and money and they can’t understand why people aren’t excited about that. Whereas I would way rather be with somebody who is funny and is fun to be with rather than, “Well, this person I’m hanging out with never says anything startling or funny or insightful, but they do have the most money, so I guess I should hang with them.” I’ve never understood that.

Re: the TWITTER FILES PART 879 (or whatever they’re up to), my big takeaway is it's the golden age of opinion pundits cosplaying investigative journalists in order to do PR for billionaires. These anti-MSM people love to dump on the NYT and WaPo, but is what we’re seeing in these drip-drip-drip posts really rigorous journalism? Also, it’s a demonstration of how awful Twitter threads are for mindfully consuming anything. Call me old fashioned, but I just don’t think real news comes with a 🧵 emoji.

But let’s say all the hysteria is justified. Then what? If Twitter is so influential it can sway elections, what can/can’t be published there shouldn’t be left up to unaccountable execs – and thus, for lack of a better solution, should probably be regulated by the government. If only there was some sort of national regulatory body, say, a commission, that ensured major communications platforms were operating fairly...y'know, like a Federal Communications Commission. Oh well, nice fantasy!

“Aren’t you a free speech guy?” Sure, but the game has changed and we need to recognize the way technology allows dangerous to speech to be amplified exponentially. I refer you to the Law of Chatroulette (which I just made up) that states: Any platform which provides anonymous, unrestricted free speech will eventually devolve into death threats, Klan plans, or guys showing their 🍆.

Btw, here’s Musk explaining why he’s dadda non grata with his daughter:

He blames the fact that his teenage daughter no longer wants to be associated with him on the supposed takeover of elite schools and universities by neo-Marxists. “It’s full-on communism . . . and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” says Musk. “It [the relationship] may change, but I have very good relationships with all the others [children]. Can’t win them all.”

Guess raising children is like doing comedy or running a profitable social media platform: Can’t win them all.

I’m a bestseller.

Eat your heart out, John Grisham.

The great thing about Substack is we get to ignore the algorithm. You either subscribe because you enjoy what I write, or you don’t. How refreshing.

Thanks to everyone who subscribes. Please consider a paid subscription if you’re on the free plan. If you can’t afford it, lemme know and we can work something out.

5-spotted

🗯 Frank Lloyd Wright once declared that “If the roof doesn’t leak the architect hasn’t been creative enough.”

To clients who complained about roof leaks, Frank Lloyd Wright’s stock response was, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.” The owner of (flat-roofed) Fallingwater used to refer to his house as “Rising Mildew” and a “seven-bucket building.” […] (“This is what happens,” sighed one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s clients, resigned to her leaking house, “when you leave a work of art out in the rain.”)

🗯 White Lotus recap: “Daphne could and should start a cult.”

I want to see her give spiritual advice to Oprah every week on Super Soul Sunday. She should wear flowy white gowns for healing retreats held in a field and black turtlenecks for corporate TED Talks. I want to read the book her ghostwriters put together after three stream-of-consciousness interviews over arugula salad. She should run for office. She should lead a country, for all I know! In saying goodbye to all of our guests, I’ll miss her most.

Spencer Althouse @SpencerAlthouse

Meghann Fahy is SUCH a good actor. these 30 seconds of Daphne processing her husband’s affair (and then calculating how she’s gonna get back at him) are perfection #TheWhiteLotus

3:40 AM ∙ Dec 12, 2022

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🗯 Speaking of White Lotus themes, should infidelity be a dealbreaker?

What her findings have uncovered is that infidelity isn't just about sex, but about something far more privately needy. "It's how much we can stand our partner's gaze drifting," O'Sullivan said. "It's this idea that your partner's attention, attraction and arousal aren't going to stray from you. It's that all encompassing idea of, 'It's you and only you, baby.' This is why porn is so discomfiting for so many, because that implicit contract is violated. It sounds irrational but deep down, that's what we expect. Of course few people really like to clarify these concepts."

🗯 “The Triggering of the Libs” has become an end in itself.

By now it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself. In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success…In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness.

This is why Must tweets stuff like “my pronouns are prosecute/Fauci” which is so hack/dumb yet antagonizes both trans supporters and pro-vaxx people so it’s a “victory” or something.

🗯 Fox Sports’ US World Cup coverage is an unmissable abomination.

Many have taken Fox to task for glossing over the rottenness at the heart of this tournament – its legacy of crass commercialization and death. But to be fair, this is not the first time that a group of Americans has blundered into a country in the Middle East without bothering to fully educate itself about the facts on the ground first. 

Perfect example from last US World Cup broadcast I saw (France was up 1-0): "The longer the game goes 1-0, the better it is for France.” Oh, you don’t say.

That’s it. Thanks for reading. I appreciate you.

-Matt