digital culture – The News Desk

AI-Generated Spoofs of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Are Flooding Instagram and TikTok

3Apr

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Technology

AI-Generated Spoofs of ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ Are Flooding Instagram and TikTok

The blending of the real and unreal could explain why some faux-Drag Race followers get so passionate about what they’re seeing on their feeds. Michael says he “lives for the overreactions of fans” who believe his creations are real people. He says people often ask him for a queen’s actual Instagram handle.“I also get the occasional hate comment from someone saying I’m taking away jobs from real drag queens,” he says. As an illustrator himself, Michael says he’s aware “that AI is coming for my job,” but doesn’t believe his Instagram passion project is taking money away from humans. “If someone isn’t going to the club and tipping a real drag queen because they saw AI Drag Race, that’s a problem with the person and not my Drag Race,” he says.Fantasy Drag Race’s Más says she’s gotten into sc...

The Internet Isn’t Dead. It’s ‘Saturday Night Live’

24Dec

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Technology

The Internet Isn’t Dead. It’s ‘Saturday Night Live’

The internet sucks now. Once a playground fueled by experimentation and freedom and connection, it’s a flimsy husk of what it was, all merriment and serendipity leached from our screens by vile capitalist forces. Everything is too commercialized. We commodified the self, then we commodified robots to impersonate the self, and now they’re taking our damn jobs. We live in diminished and degrading times. I miss when memes were funny. I miss Vine. I miss Gawker. I miss old Twitter. Blogs—those were the days!Stop me if these gripes sound familiar. In 2023, the idea that the internet isn’t fun anymore is conventional wisdom. This year, after Elon Musk renamed Twitter “X” and instituted a series of berserk changes that made it substantially less functional, complaints about the demise of the goo...

Matthew Perry Deserved Better Than #DiedSuddenly

30Oct

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Matthew Perry Deserved Better Than #DiedSuddenly

It didn’t take long for news of actor Matthew Perry’s death to go public. TMZ broke the story so early that paparazzi had already camped out to photograph the Friends star’s grieving parents as they arrived on the scene.The vulturous routines of the celebrity death news complex are, at this point, predictable. Tabloids compete for 911 call recordings, statements from famous friends, autopsy reports, even glimpses of remains; the cause of death, if unclear, is fervently debated. It is a tough business, brazen and disrespectful, but one that looks wholly quaint next to a newer post-death ritual that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic.In the past few years, anti-vaccine activists have latched onto tragedies by insinuating or flat-out stating that unexpected deaths of all kinds were caused ...

The Real Reason You (Still) Watch Reality TV

29Oct

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The Real Reason You (Still) Watch Reality TV

On day one of shooting season five of Love Is Blind, a junior staffer walked into the control room and told executive producers Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson, who oversee every aspect of the popular Netflix dating series, that there was a problem. “There’s two people who know each other and appear to have had a relationship of some sort,” the staffer said to them. In the show’s short but relatively iconic run, this was a first.Coelen and Simpson’s initial instinct was to send the participants home. “We said, look, the essence of the experiment is that you get to know someone without knowing anything about them in the material world,” Coelen told them. “We don’t know how we can keep you here.” The show, which attempts to pair 30 men and women together over the course of seven weeks, testin...

The 7 Best Conspiracies About Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

26Sep

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The 7 Best Conspiracies About Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

First thing’s first: Misinformation and disinformation are bad. False tweets that go viral, government conspiracy theories, lies about vaccines—these are all huge problems online, and they’re poised to get worse thanks to generative AI. There are a few exceptions, though. The best of these came to light over the weekend when Taylor Swift showed up at a Kansas City Chiefs game. Sports internet and Swiftie internet promptly collided—and collapsed into chaos.Some background: Swift is, for all intents and purposes, at the height of her career. Her Eras Tour, from which she’s currently taking a break, has been a juggernaut of ticket sales and a boon to local economies. (Her Los Angeles stint reportedly raised the city’s GDP by $320 million.) On the Kansas City stop of this tour, Chiefs tight e...

The Next Meme Stock? Owning a Slice of Your Favorite Song

26Sep

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The Next Meme Stock? Owning a Slice of Your Favorite Song

The music business is booming. Streaming revenue is up. Vinyl sales are up. CD sales are, somehow, also up. All of this is fueled by fans spending money. Now, startups are making a calculated pitch in this flush moment: Why don’t these fans get in on the action, and quite literally invest in their favorite songs?Imagine a retirement portfolio stocked with Rihanna hits, or a college fund fueled by Taylor Swift’s 1989. In a post-GameStop, post-NFT-mania world, it sounds plausible enough. Wholesome, even.A new music royalties marketplace, Jkbx (pronounced “jukebox”), launched this month and plans to officially open for trading later this year. It has filed an application with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is waiting for notice that the SEC has qualified its offerings. As long...

Quan Millz Was the Biggest Mystery on TikTok. Until Now

13Sep

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Quan Millz Was the Biggest Mystery on TikTok. Until Now

Reaction videos started flooding TikTok this summer, all of them with the same question: Who is Quan Millz? The answer varied depending on the person, but each new response carried with it some variation of curiosity, shock, and excitement. “If you enjoy watching shows like Paternity Court,” one TikTok user commented, “or old school Maury Povich, if you’re old enough to remember Jenny Jones and Ricki Lake, you too might enjoy this reading experience.” Read another caption: “Quan Millz is so unhinged we must protect him at all costs.” There seemed to be no corner of the internet Millz had not reached. On the podcast Sleeping In Mom’s Bed, rapper Danny Brown recited some of his favorite books to host Christina B. “I want to collect every book this motherfucker got,” he said, laughing, as th...

Donald Trumpbests Mug Shot Will Be His Most Enduring Meme

29Aug

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Technology

Donald Trumpbests Mug Shot Will Be His Most Enduring Meme

The first time I encountered Donald Trump was on my TV screen. It was 1994, and it happened in an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith’s popular coming-of-age sitcom about class assimilation that ran on NBC for six seasons. There was nothing particularly memorable about the episode or Trump’s appearance in it—he played a relatively tame version of himself—but for much of my early life this was how I made sense of him. As a real estate dealmaker. As a reality TV star. And eventually as 45th president of the United States. Then and now, Trump best communicates through the medium of images.The latest transmission from his visual onslaught began making rounds on the internet last Thursday, just past the 8 pm Eastern primetime hour, when Georgia’s Fulton County Jail released his ...

10Aug

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Technology

The Newest Threat to Your Attention Span? TikTok ‘Dual’ Videos

Makieda Mckenzie was scrolling through TikTok when it first dawned on her: People in the internet age are like sharks. Not in the colloquial sense where we might label an especially cunning colleague in the corporate world a shark, but much more literally. Our attentions are captured through bright colors, iridescence, and thrashing. And everyone feels like they must keep swimming.What inspired this thought for Mckenzie wasn’t a TikTok video about sharks, or even a reel dissecting attention spans. Instead, it was a three-minute clip of Greta Gerwig’s Little Women presented side-by-side with a screen recording of a content creator rolling various glass bottles down a flight of stairs to see which would shatter most quickly.“When I was watching it I could literally feel the dopamine rush,” ...