Chapo Trap House - 686 - AI Can’t Get You Garfield feat. Ryan Broderick & Elon Musk (12/6/22)

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

Our old friend Elon Musk* calls in to give us some updates on company policy and future projects from Twitter HQ. Then we’re joined by Ryan Broderick, author of the Garbage Day newsletter, to discuss all things online, from the woes of politicized moderation, to a future without Twitter, to the many ethical & technological horrors presented by new AI technology. Find Ryan’s great newsletter about the Internet here: https://www.garbageday.email/ *James Adomian

Hello, everybody. It's a Monday, December 5th, Chapo coming at you. And look, we've got a huge guest for you today. I'll just begin like this. Exciting things are happening in the world of free speech. And so, I mean, joining us now is the man of the hour, a man fighting against government and corporate regulation of the digital commons. It is an honor and a privilege to converse across the mind realm with humanity's greatest genius, Elon Musk. Elon, welcome to the show. Thanks. That's like pretty decent introduction, I have to say. With more introductions like that, I'm going to have to start following you and replying to your tweet. Oh, wow. I mean, just from your lips to God's ears, Elon, if I could get a follow, I would love to converse with you more on the newly liberated platform of Twitter. From my thin lips to the ears of Aries, Mars, the God of War, and blood. I agree with you.

You know, let's not forget that Azalea Banks criticized me for having pork skin, but like, I put a lot of money into engineering this pork skin and it's going to last a lot longer than regular human birth skin organs. So, ultimately, the joke is going to be on Azalea. I'm sorry. Well, look, comedy has made a comeback on Twitter. Free speech has made a comeback on Twitter. But obviously, there are people who have criticized you since your takeover of Twitter. And there have been, you know, media reports that claim there has been an exponential increase in so-called hate speech since you took over. My question is, why have those same journalistic sources not discussed the similar rise in love speech on your platform? Well, I think it's very obvious. Like, you might be on the left. I considered myself, like, kind of a moderate centrist leftist for a long time. And what has seemed to happen is that I'm the censor and then, like, the left has moved so far left. And I'm like, hey, guys, I'm, like, still over here with, like, all these guys that are, like, standard, great, like, liberal voices, like, Ben Shapiro, like, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you know.

Jordan Peterson, he's a doctor that's liberal. And I just think that, like, this is the real left. And Ian Miles Chong, he's still great, he's still left, you know. What's wrong with what used to be liberal? And when it comes to comedy, I'd like to dissect it, like, with my engineering mind, I would like to approach the problem of comedy with the mind of a space engineer, which is kind of how I like to approach things. So, like, when I decided to buy and destroy Twitter, I wanted to lean into what I think is funny. And first and foremost, what I think is funny is, like, like, humor, like an engineer would enjoy, like, rocket calculations and Gilbert kind of shit. Memes are great like that because memes are comedy that are accessible because you don't have to laugh out loud at them. And I prefer this kind of comedy that consists of, like, a right-wing guy screaming about what comedy should be to me. That's, like, totally LMA my fucking ass off, you know what I'm saying? Oh, P.S. I don't know if you noticed, but I changed the like button from blue to red. That was a great idea.

And people said you could just go in and change the code, but I fired those guys. So what we went in with, like, radioactive material and bombarded them with subatomic particles in order to change the like button from blue to red. So it was a roundabout way to do it, but ultimately it's more structurally sound that way. That is rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off, thinking about these blue hair pronoun people, having to deal with a real businessman in charge, no more safe spaces here on Twitter. But I do want to mention this is probably the most notable thing that's happened on Twitter recently. Could you explain the process that led to you suspending the account of Kanye West after he posted a swastika last week? You know, Kanye West is important because he's famous and, you know, people understand that I'm a great engineer, but also, like, an important part of being a great engineer is allowing yourself to be kind of stupid. And so you have to be, you can't be constantly thinking of algorithms, thinking of aerodynamics and wave dynamics and so forth for engineering projects. You have to also let your mind turn off and be like, I'm a dumb guy and I'm just swayed by famous people and it's cool to hang out at the Met Gala.

And so I have to, there's right brain, left brain in most people, but thanks to Neuralink, I have engineer brain and meme brain. And so I've got to turn off my engineer brain and let the meme brain run sometimes. And then it's what is involved and it is just going like, yeah, Kanye is famous and whatever he says, cool. And that was how it started. And then it got out of control a little bit, started getting some phone calls from some of my handlers. KSA was not too happy about the way that particular experiment was going. They said pull the plug and started to hurt the price of my Dogecoin investments. So I had to pull the plug on that one and just, he was being too Nazi and it's bad for advertisers. And so basically we're monitoring the advertisers and there's obviously a certain baseline level of national socialism that Twitter advertisers are okay with,

or you wouldn't have seen so many Nazis on the platform for so many years. And obviously like it's, we're not getting rid of that. You mentioned Neuralink. I want to talk about Neuralink for a second. You're doing, I mean, like you're doing great stuff for free speech on Twitter. But you're also, I mean, like at the cutting edge of torturing monkeys. What are some exciting things we can expect from Neuralink? And will you have the, you claim to have, you will have the Neuralink chip installed in your brain at some point as well. What we can expect to see from...

It's important, I think everybody understands that the human brain is a problem that needs to be engineered with technology. And obviously people have had, people are tired of overwhelming thoughts. And while this world that we live in and so forth and like Neuralink can really... Like it's so much easier and simpler from an engineering point of view. Like if you have software, if you have a Tesla and it goes bleep bloop and it says, you've got to download this new software in order to stop for the school bus. And it's easier that way because you just go approve software, approve software update. You don't have to question yourself and go, wow, is Bernie Sanders too far left?

Should I actually, like I'm a Democrat, but I don't know. I don't like these homeless people and I don't want to research whether rent prices should come down anywhere ever. And so maybe I should vote for Rick Caruso. We don't want people to be confronted with like difficult moral struggles like this, but to be able to just have it like a software update, like bleep. And we might sort of benevolently interfere with human attraction, sexual attraction in that way through Neuralink. And also we just want people to have their political opinions become like slowly a little bit more kind of like libertarian talk radio kind of shit.

Like the kind of stuff that you would already hear on any kind of like right-wing comedy thing. That's for dumb people like barcel sports or whatever. I did read in certain media reports, I don't know if these are these are Twitter, currently Twitter approved media sources, but I did read that upon having the Neuralink chip installed in their brains, several of your monkey test subjects chewed their fingers off. Is this not LOL or is this rolling on the floor laughing my ass off? You can't make a Simeon super species without breaking some DNA structures. And that's just basic.

Like we're taking some fingers off of the monkeys because they were trying to rip the chips out of their heads. And that would have defeated the entire experiment. And if you're not familiar with monkeys, they've got four hands. So if they lose a few fingers, they've got many ways of being able to continue to feed themselves for two or three weeks before we allow them to pull the assisted suicide lever in their cages. Well, I mean, Neuralinking Twitter to your brain sounds like a really exciting thing that I'm looking forward to. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go here. I've got to celebrate some of the victories here.

We've actually gotten more impressions on Twitter today than the entire impressions combined of Twitter for the entire three month run leading up to the purchase and the liberation of Twitter. So I was going to celebrate. If you don't mind, I'm opening a little bottle of champagne. Oh, please go ahead. And I can share this with you virtually, obviously. But I thought I would celebrate some of my recent victories with a special bottle. I've been keeping of South African sparkling wine. It's from the year of my birth, 1971.

And it's a cup classic, from Cape Town, a.k.a. Borbrut. It's got extremist notes, extremist Southern Hemisphere notes with a hint of Emerald and a clownish aftertaste. And it's one of I have enjoyed. And so when I have these great victories that I've declared for myself, I just like to just I'm just trying to open it now. It's 80,000 Rand per bottle. And I'm just trying to I'm going to hold on. It's just a nice little it's a bit shit. I've worked it.

I court the cup classic. OK, there's fuck. All right, there's no everyone's fired. OK, come back. I need every I've corked my South African wine. OK, there's obviously an easy solution here. There's engineering fix to any problem. And if you cork a bottle of champagne, you might say that's a little hard because, hey, the cork on a champagne is kind of decided for that not to be able to happen. But look, any problem that comes up, sometimes you've got to make it a little bit worse before we make it better.

I can easily make rig. We're going to rig a micro submarine with a boring tunneling cone to retrieve the cat from inside the champagne bottle. Wait, wait, wait, wait. It shattered all over the floor. It shattered all over the floor. This is this is too bad. This is my Stalin boss reserve. And it's all over the floor of Twitter.

I have an idea. We will we will siphon the remaining wine in particles from the floor and absorb what is salvageable and squeeze it all into a French press and remove most of the glass and tell everybody that it's the coolest glass of wine. And well, it's a glass of wine and also glass. And it's the coolest thing that they'll ever experience. Thank you. Thank you for all your efforts to save Western civilization to bore tunnels in both in our minds and underground and, you know, just send humanity to space. Just keep it going. And also more than anything, thank you so much for cracking down on people doing impressions of public figures. It's so great to talk to like sensible sensor left voices like you left wing moderates like Tim pool like Kyle Regenhouse and absolutely.

Let me taste this. Civil debate. It's like great. It's good. That's that's a big LMAO for me. Ewan, thank you so much for your time. Yeah, I don't know if you know how valuable my time is, but don't worry. I'll charge you. It'll come out of your future credits and

Okay, we are back. Thanks again to Elon Musk for joining us. But joining us now is Ryan Broderick of the newsletter Garbage Day to help us break down some of the exciting new frontiers in digital culture. I guess like this is tangentially related. But I feel like at the top of the show, I would like to discuss the ongoing fallout of the Kanye West, Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones appearance, which I think in hindsight, we can now rate as probably one of the funniest moments on TV ever. Yeah, did you see someone put it through the anime filter and turn him into like a full on like anime villain Kanye? Pretty good.

It's a mess, right? Like I and I feel like it's not going to stop there. I mean, I just like that. I like that Alex was trying over and over again to give Kanye like any exit possible by just saying like, Oh, so you're your designer. You just like the Hugo boss of the aesthetic and he just goes, No, I love it. Oh my goodness. Just because you don't like one group doesn't mean the other. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.

Oh, man. Well, I have to disagree with that. I would like to just like I thought the Candace Owens would be about the basement level of where this is going to head. But yeah, Nick Fuentes and this his whole Hitler thing. I mean, like I just like in American culture, like is that is saying I love Hitler? Is that is that the one red line that no one can cross? I think it's pretty red. Yeah.

I think that's probably still very red. I also think that like out of that whole debacle, the thing that I'm surprised hasn't happened again yet already is Alex Shones, Nicholas Nicholas, Nick Fuentes, finding another person's Twitter account to pilot because that's what they were sort of trying to do with Kanye's is like he wasn't going to get banned. So they were going to post whatever they wanted as Kanye West. I'm sort of waiting for far right figures to take over other people's accounts similarly. Didn't he just let Milo go as his like co-share of his presidential campaign or something like that? Yeah, he did. Well, I mean, it's really hard to keep up with what's happening because it's changing every couple of minutes.

And it just seems like I also saw him hanging out with Sneeko, the like men's rights, Gen Z, TikTok guy. I don't know if you know him. I have no idea who Sneeko. They're just collecting like more bad internet dudes. It's it's extremely lame and awful. Well, I mean, like this whole thing, like the group of people that Kanye is hanging out with, it's sort of interesting to me because people always make this point about left wingers, that everyone is like too individualistic, American culture is too corrosive, and everyone has too much of a celebrity syndrome to create an effective mass politics movement, which, you know, be that as it may on the left, it isn't just true for people on the left and America.

That's absolutely true for people on the right, too. And from the moment this started, I kind of thought like we're about a week from a massive falling out because there's the exact. The same reason why every like anarchist co-op devolves into competing Google Docs and call out letters. And the same reason that like any insurgent campaign devolves into like different recriminations on different podcasts. This will the exact same thing will happen with like any type of insurgent right wing media operation, probably quicker and probably over more inscrutable personal things. In like the first 24 hours after Elon Musk brought all the like formerly banned people back, a QAnon account accused. I think it was Sargon of a cod of being a pedophile. And then like Sargon was like threatening to sue him.

And I feel like that is just, I think it was Sargon, but it was one of those guys. It might have been conceptually James as well, but like they're all just threatening to sue each other and calling each other pedophiles, which I think is the right wing equivalent of the competing communist Google Docs. Like it just devolves into like defamation threats, right? Yeah, whether it's a it's Sargon or concept Jim, like the band accounts coming back. It's like, yeah, it's the people who accuse everyone of being pedophiles now having like they're having the loadstarrers of the anti pedophile movement, having their accounts restored, which means you can search all of their old tweets of which they were in which they advocate literal pedophilia. That is the problem that seems to be that seems to be the ongoing issue.

Yeah, you made an interesting point in your newsletter that like when everyone's getting banned and Twitter is accepted as this thing that's like owned and operated by shit lives, it's easy to just like have someone you don't really know, someone who's like an acquaintance that is in an adjacent conservative need as far as you have them be banned or suspended and go, oh, this is bullshit, you know, free free that guy. He didn't do like he's being censored by liberals for telling the truth. Well, when everyone's on ban and everyone can be in the same space, everyone is sort of competing for market share and maybe already didn't like each other that much. And now there's an actual cleavage in the conservative movement where, yeah, you have their equivalent of the Warren Cucks, the DeSantis people, and their Bernie Fuss, their MAGA loyalists, which would be their equivalent of us. Yeah, I think it's almost like 4chan logic, right? Where if you're in a totally flat, unmoderated space, you just spend all day fighting with each other because there's nothing to remove anybody. And so they don't have a way to galvanize because they don't have an other to blame.

And this is also I think why right wing alternative quote unquote social networks have done so badly because it's just boring as shit to like have to be with each other, right? If you're a bunch of right wing creeps, like you have nothing to do all day. So I think like the largest parlor ever got was right before the insurrection and it's like, oh yeah, it took a literal insurrection for you guys to like get along with each other. And then once the domestic terrorism was over, they all went back to fighting, you know? So there's just not a lot of solidarity without something to rail against, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, you also you also need someone you need like varying degrees of like lives and left wingers. You need like a fucking actor who says that January 6th was worse than 9-11. You need like a, you know, Radlib who says that it's racist to watch Fival goes West with your kids.

You need all those types of things. You need people with blue hair. Yes. Also, Milo, I think is is a really like Milo is a really funny figure to me because he fucks up every single right wing operation he's involved with. He is just like the messiest piece of shit and it happens every time they still bring him around. Like Marjorie Taylor Green tried them on for a while and it didn't work. Like every single thing he's involved with turns this shit and I just 43 year old young intern. I was like working for her. Yeah, like as far as like the Elon Musk era of Twitter, I mean, I think I think that we've noticed and comes in on before is that it does seem like when it began, it was all about like bots.

Like he does seem to like basically like his version of content moderation is removing bots, but essentially it is just become like, you know, just another version of the old kind of content moderation. Like for instance, banning Kanye West account because he posted a swastika. Now you can say what you want about the swastika being an incitement to violence, but like by the standards of First Amendment case law, this is like just about as clear as it gets. Like that is a free speech thing that is not an incitement to violence, at least as you know, as US Jewish jurisprudence has established so far. But like so what it is is just just content moderation is just that you can't post the swastika. So like how is how is Elon sort of recreating just like the old content moderation standard? Yeah, it's very funny that there's a tweet going around where it's like, oh, he paid $44 billion to become low tax. And I think that's like very accurate.

But I've also seen him in like in public workshopping this new idea that he's I think playing with. And I, you know, I have no idea how seriously to take whatever he tweets, but I saw a tweet of his the other day, which was basically saying that harassment is a form of spam, which I believe is like him already trying to figure out like, OK, how do I back up into a free speech, absolutist version of just banning whatever shit I don't like. And I think that's going to continue because I think like he've I'm trying to give him. I don't like giving him any sort of credit or even like trying to put myself in what he's thinking. But I think if you were to do that, you could say like, OK, he has a super to like flat view of Twitter. Anything that isn't useful for getting us to like have debt slavery on the moon is a waste of time. We need like this neural network thing he wants to build. He views any nonproductive tweets as spam.

And like that's kind of what he's working with. But I don't even think it's that thought out because I don't think he knows what I just don't think he knows what he's doing. And I think he's just like kind of backing into this stuff by accident. They made him buy the fucking thing. He wasn't going to buy it. It was a bullshit. And then he made him buy it. The court of chance that he forced him to, which is what makes the idea that he's got on any kind of crusade to like do anything insane. Like how much how important could this have been to you that the fucking court had to make you buy it to do it? Yeah, that was the point.

John Schwartz, a tiny revolution made that like when asked like, why did you buy Twitter? He said it was very disturbing to me like what's being done to Western civilization. And then he spent months trying not to buy Twitter. So how right that has been that has been his like only successful PR operation with the entire Twitter deal is convincing people that he actually wanted to do this deal months later. I also think like, I don't know if any of you guys have like been in a Twitter space in the last six months, but like all these like reactionary CEO types spend all day just like jerking off about Bitcoin on Twitter spaces. And if you do that, the amount of spam that fills up your mentions and DMs is out of control to the point where like it broke my app for a while couple like a couple days ago. And I do wonder like how much of this is just like CEOs having to deal with the people like who tweeted them all day and just acting insane because of it. Like imagine if like the only thing you could see on the internet were like LinkedIn guys.

Like how would you change Twitter to fight that? That's my sort of like pet theory, but I'm not sure. I guess the other thing that he's doing at Twitter is the sort of high profile release of this of what he refers to as the Twitter files. And this is like he handed over a trove of documents to Matt Taibbi that purported to show like the Twitter like the mechanisms by which Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop story. If you examine these documents like I haven't really had time to follow this story, but like what is in the Twitter files? What is alleged to be there? What's actually in there? And like what is he attempting to show with this release of documents? So I will say like a bunch of it's being like argued about and like the New York Post has like a whole thing about like the FBI getting involved today that I have not spent like the time required to go through. But I will say that in terms of the tweets that were removed, the actual individual tweets like listed in this files.

Most of them are just of Hunter Biden's dick. Like I think the argument that like Twitter took down revenge porn is like not a conspiracy. I think that's just like what that is, right? They were leaked nudes of Hunter Biden. I think one of them was actor James Woods or something. And at the same time from what I've read. They deleted one of James Woods's tweets sharing a photo of Hunter Biden's dick. Yeah, just like a normal Twitter, you know, incident. Yeah. And so like that to me seems to be the most like tangible thing that happened. I think there were also conversations between the Biden campaign and Twitter, which as many people have pointed out was not the US government at the time.

So this idea that like the US like, you know, like the Department of Defense or somebody called up Twitter and was like, you got to take Hunter Biden's dick off your website just doesn't seem to be accurate. I mean, like, I don't know the Hunter Biden, the revelations as they're called. A lot of it is just like, well, no shit, you know, the parts that are supposed that are like purported to be salacious are like, OK, well, a bunch of people who donate to the Democratic Party like either work at or have sway at Twitter, right, which is absolutely something we knew before. And it seems like a more boring version of more actually salacious things that we've heard before. I feel like we've seen like more, more like just egregious removal of content and moderation along ideological lines with things like the Syrian Civil War, things that we knew happen. That seems to be every news story now. It's just like people feel like they failed the old news cycle.

They didn't raise awareness well enough, you know, whether it's Epstein or the Ghislaine trial. So now they have to do it right this time. So if you feel like you didn't raise awareness well enough with Epstein, now you have your second chance in Balenciaga. If you didn't feel like you raised awareness well enough with like, I don't know, whether it's Syria or Assange or like some conservative thing that I don't know because it's naming a bunch like the 50th most important FBI agent over some Russiagate thing, now you feel like you have your second chance with like the hunter stuff that's like far more boring and far less salacious and has far less egregious violations. But what's crazy is like content moderation is inherently boring, right? Like, if, you know, Matt Taibi or Elon Musk refer was just like, yeah, it's really actually wrong that Twitter, it's a large social network blocked links to a news article, which like, I think is like pretty weird. And I think it's really weird.

Yeah, that's ridiculous. It's really strange and fucked up. But that's super. That's like kind of boring, right? That doesn't get the Q and on guys all riled up. And so like, it gets a really weird moment. I think for like, for me, especially as someone who like, you know, I've spent most of my life on the internet. I write about the internet culture.

I care about internet. I've been I've been an internet moderator and like, it's boring stuff and the whole world cares about it, but they don't care about the boring stuff. They want to care about like the fanciful stuff that like isn't real or like is like all as you said, the 50th most important FBI agent who like looked at this Google link once. Like it's not the actual stuff that matters. As long as we're talking about actual stuff that matters. Could anyone just because someone I just explained to me what the Balenciaga thing everyone is talking about is what what I keep talking. I keep hearing about Balenciaga and they're doing satanic child pedophilia. What like what's the what is this story?

I'll tell you what happened. Somebody some genius at the Balenciaga marketing department is like, if we convince some fucking Yahoo to bring an AR 15 into a Balenciaga, we will see X number of a rise in a company awareness brand identity and profits. And then so they've decided to just do that to try to drive people insane with the hope that they will get their own pizza gate shooting at a fucking Balenciaga. Yeah, so like if I understand that they put they put like essentially like human trafficking Easter eggs in one of their like new photo shoots, right? That's what it boils down to. So there was there was like a printed out this is the initial thing is like fucking like weird. I tend to think that Matt's explanation is probably correct, despite this being like incredibly fucking weird to do. But it's like they it was like a stack of papers that was in like shoot for their new whatever line.

And in the papers was like printed out court documents for a case about child pornography, which is incredibly weird. But it's also like the type of like fucked up weird edgy shit that like fashion companies that I guess always do. This seems a bit weirder. It's devolved into people like putting Balenciaga into Google translate and going, look, if you translate it into a dead language, it translates to you must worship ball. It's become like an ARG about pagan gods and only people who went to rehab for weed can figure out. Yeah. OK, so like since since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, we've been seeing a lot of I guess a lot of people are feeling a little bit like the ship is going down and that, you know, people are leaving Twitter. I mean, I think that I don't I don't I don't think everyone there's going to be some big exit this like mastodon because I don't think there is an equivalent of Twitter that that's ready to get picked up. But I guess like Ryan like should this ship sink like should Twitter go down or just go away?

Like, how do you envision that? Like, what would that mean to the future of like social media, the media at large? And like, what do you think might take the place of what Twitter once was? Yeah, I'm really wondering about it. I mean, I agree with you. I don't think Twitter is just going to like magically disappear because like there's people who still use Neopets in 2022, like people stay on websites, right? Like, even if it's bad for your brain, I do like I did hear like a take the other day that like Twitter might become like, like millennial Facebook, like there's just like a bunch of like increasingly adult old millennials just fighting with each other on Twitter as the site breaks down further and further. But I do also think that, you know, if you look back at other times where websites have died, I think the death of Vine is a really interesting example, because it essentially dies, right? And then the owners try to come back and make a new version. I think it was called like, be something, be me or something. I don't know, it doesn't matter, but it didn't, it flopped, right? Meanwhile, musically, which was like a weird, like lip sync app gets bought by a Chinese data firm and turned into TikTok. And, you know, for a while of them was like, TikTok is like Vine, but it's not right. It's like a totally different experience. And I sort of think that like that could be a model for what happens with Twitter is that an app that we're not even thinking of as a Twitter competitor right now could start to become more like Twitter to take people away from it.

And by the time that it's finished, like there's just no way to save it because you really can't bring an app back. Like I'm an avid Tumblr user, but even I can admit that like Tumblr isn't the way it was 10 years ago. So there's no pornography. That's the main issue. Yeah. But I mean, you know, you look at Reddit, you look at Pinterest, all these like formally large websites, they never really recovered from whatever like wobble happened to them seven or eight years ago. And I think Twitter will be similar. What fills that gap then though, because people are still miserable and alone and need to need to know what's going on, where are they going to find that? If that's not going to be Twitter. I don't because I don't think it's masked on because I mean, have you tried using it? It's like it's obnoxious.

Oh my God, it breaks all the time. I mean, like, yeah, it breaks all the time. But like the thing about how like if you type someone's at in DMs, it invites them to the DM that the moderators can read your DMs. It's like they took every hair brain solution that people came up with in 2014 when just non specific harassment was the main was the main complaint. It was the only thing people talked about with moderation on Twitter. If you just incorporated every dumb ass solution that everyone suggested and made a site, it would be Macedon. Also, Macedon, like it feels like it would be like Twitter. But Twitter has to me, Twitter has like one key feature that no one has been able to figure out yet, which is that you can basically pull Twitter out on your on your phone on the toilet or like on the subway, like between like as your car stops or whatever.

You have like 30 seconds, you can like read like six things and fire off something completely stupid before you move on with your day. Right. And that sort of like cigarette effect of Twitter. You just can't do also like you can't post like 30 Instagram photos in one day because you know you could but you would you'd be completely unhinged and like no one has been able to copy that. And I'm sort of waiting for a site to figure that aspect out because I think once they do, people would probably move to like a more addicting way. I think that's what it is. We're waiting for a more addicting Twitter. But who's where is that? That doesn't even seem to be on the horizon. Yeah. I mean, everyone's money got tied up in crypto, right? So like Silicon Valley is just like completely dead right now. I mean, yeah, I haven't seen anything like it.

So I don't think Twitter is going anywhere. I think people are just going to be miserable on it and it's going to get worse and it's going to get more broken. But without a place to go, there's nowhere that hole is still there that that's that social hole that Twitter like attempts to fill. And so like the the instinct is going to just keep driving people no matter what. And then eventually, I mean, if what they're what the reports of Twitter's like collapse in ad revenue or if that's true, then at some point, Musk is going to have to sell it just to avoid the complete catastrophe. And then, yeah, the Saudis or fucking media company is going to buy it. And then it's just we're all going to it'll just be like, oh, remember when Elon was in charge?

I think that's actually I mean, that happened. That did happen to Tumblr, right? Like they got sold to Yahoo and sold to Verizon and like Lime Wire is like an NFT marketplace now. Like that happens. And I think it could. I think that like there's also I'm not beginning to notice this. I don't know if you guys have noticed this, but I'm starting to see screenshots of content from other places being shared. Like I got sent like a a Macedon screenshot the other day. I got sent like a sub stack recommendation. I never heard it before.

And I think that like we're sort of moving to a place where Twitter won't be the top. It'll just be one of a bunch of websites where stuff is happening. And it just feels really disconnected in the way it did 15 years ago where you would just be on a message board and you'd see a screenshot of another message board. You didn't recognize and you just kind of shrug it off, right? I think that it's probably going to be sort of similar to a 2012 environment where Facebook was definitely it was the biggest one. But there was this weird thing where Twitter certainly had a lot of users and was certainly very popular with the media set. But you had all these weird sites that no one really remembers like dig and meta filter and like all these things that essentially function as Reddit did as like link and discussion aggregators. And they slowly died out.

I think Twitter will experience something close to what Facebook did where it's not like they experienced like a precipitous drop in users as Facebook did in like 2017. But the meta shifts. The next thing that like, you know, journalists under 30 are on and like young cooler younger people are on is not going to be Twitter. Right now, it seems like that will be TikTok. But I think like the fact that it's not American is going to be a bit of an issue for it. I think that there's this constant looming thing that it could just like be declared illegal at any time. And I do think the barrier for entry is way higher than Twitter. Like not everyone really wants to be on video. But I do think that it's not going to collapse so much as it's just not going to be like the cool thing or the thing that like drives media conversations anymore.

That sounds right to me. And like to be honest, I kind of liked it back then. I liked the idea that like I went to different websites. It sounds like stupid, but I enjoyed I enjoyed the Internet better when there was more than one or two places to go. I think people were less insane too, because you weren't just like packed in like animals. Yeah, we're not meant to see all of each other all the time. I think that it's a straight line to the diminishing quality of the Internet and everyone being packed into two or three spaces, seeing all of each other constantly. Like you mentioned Twitter's outsized influence.

And because, you know, like the thing with Twitter, and I think it's probably the reason Elon Musk tried to or wanted to buy it initially was that despite the fact that it doesn't have nearly as many users as like YouTube or Facebook or similar social media sites, it has this outside influence because media people, politicians and like young people are like sort of the the cool factor was associated with Twitter. So you could, you know, interact with or abuse the people that you you see on TV. But is is Elon Musk like damaging that brand by being so terminally uncool and associating himself with so many things that are that are not cool or that just like that just don't work in a Twitter environment. I think right now it's super fun, because his followers are horrible. And there's like a really fun energy of just like like fighting with them, right? But if they win, if if any part of his project as half baked as it is succeeds, yeah, Twitter becomes LinkedIn. And in a way, like Twitter already kind of feels like it in certain corners because you're seeing like, you know, SEO, like CEOs being like, this is why I wake up at four in the morning and only drink donkey cum or whatever.

Like that those threads are all over the place. And they're going to and as they continue to fill up, especially the guys now who are buying promoted tweets. I like speaking of Julian Assange earlier, I got a promoted tweet the other day that was a guy who was like, I wrote a song for Julian Assange. And it's a guy playing acoustic guitar. And I was like, this app sucks. Like this is just a nightmare. Yeah. Oh my God, the promoted tweets I have been getting since the takeover have been.

It reminds me of like the promoted posts that you get on on Instagram and sometimes Facebook, where it's just like, I'm a dad selling. I sell pre cooked burgers that I freeze dry and vacuum sealed by mail. Yeah. And we're just like, yeah, a guy, a guy advertising an acoustic guitar song. Like a lot of that. We're like one level above just like full on hentai gotcha games. Like in like that'll just be it. And then it'll just be porn ads because and then that's the other thing is like, I know Apple has said that they're not going to, you know, move aggressively against Twitter.

But I do think that Twitter's like grandfathered in ability to have not say for content on a mainstream app on the app store is at risk, especially as things degrade because there's like no moderation anymore. And, you know, apps have lost that ability to do that. And I think that like, there's a very good chance that something like that happens because it's just a free for all on Twitter. I want to talk about another thing I've been seeing crop up on Twitter and like it's become more of a sort of a talking point and trend on social media. Ryan, you've written about it. But I want to talk about the phenomenon of artificial intelligence or so called artificial intelligence in these. I don't know how you describe it like things where you just put give input to a computer. And then they like write an essay for you or AI art where you're like, you know, show me, you know, show me Goku fighting the Eiffel Tower.

And then it'll like spit out an image where it just sort of trolls through art that already exists and sort of masses it together to give you an approximation of what you have asked for. Like a lot of people are talking about this. This is like the future of art. This is going to end education as we know it. Like kids are just going to be taught by computers. But like, how do you see a future in which like more and more of the economy and culture itself is being mediated by, like I said, quote unquote, artificial intelligence? Yeah, I actually just I just covered this for Fast Company this week. So you're talking about generative AI. So essentially you put in like a text prompt and it spits out like, yeah, I asked a chat bot today to write me an emo song about Sonic the Hedgehog and the style of Fall Up Boy and it actually looked pretty good. So you can like, you can play with them. Open AI is a good one mid journey.

There's a whole bunch. And yeah, there's a lot of controversy around them because a lot of these sites are using training data that they've just scraped off the Internet. So like there's all kinds of stories of like the styles of dead artists being replicated by an AI, which is just fucking grim. But then there's like another community is particularly on YouTube of like graphics effects artists who figured out how to use these AI to make stuff that their small teams could have never been able to do. And so I think there's like a really interesting tension between how you use them. I think right now they're just like a fun novelty, but we're starting to get to a place where maybe creators can figure out a way to use these in a way that isn't exploitative or gross or weird. But they're really simplistic. And but the other thing is that they're moving really fast because like the first memes I saw from like AI bots were in the summer.

And now, you know, huge companies are partnering with these AI firms to make their own versions. So I think this stuff is going to move really fast. But it also seems to poison itself because the more AI art you make, the more AIs are trained on AI art and then make just worse and worse stuff. Right. So it's like this really weird. I saw Glitch this the Glitch CEO and Neil Dash compare it to like the gig economy destroying the service economy. And it's like the same idea like creative AIs could poison the very well that they're pulling from. So either way, it's going to move really fast and be really confusing. But these these generative AIs like they only they can only essentially just sample art that's already exists and has been created by the human being.

What you're saying is like the more AI generated art that exists, artificial intelligence, these are, you know, so called artificial intelligence will just be scraping stuff also generated by computers to make shittier and shittier art. Yeah, it's already happened. I read this thing the other day that we may have already missed a point in which an AI that learns text can learn text that wasn't influenced by an AI. So it's like we've already passed that point. And, you know, in this is like sci-fi movies, it's always like the AI has come alive because we showed it the Internet. And it's like in this version, the AI just gets shittier because it's like it's like remixing a song over and over again until it sounds like nothing. And so and that's also really interesting why like certain AIs are trained on data sets that don't have stuff. So, you know, Dolly too, which is a really popular one, can't generate Garfield.

No matter how many times I ask it to make me a sexy Garfield picture, it can't because it doesn't know what Garfield looks like. Whereas other AI can. So it's like you can make your your AI as ethical as you want. But a lot of these are becoming open source too. So the push and pull is just out of control. And I assume I assume we've already hit a point where like you and I would look at something and not even know if an AI was involved in making it. And I think that was true of music like two or three years ago. And I think the rest of the creative economy is just going to degrade further. Right.

I think that's sort of a perfect capstone for AI that it's like all these tech guys have talked about how scary it is and how the only problem of the future is that the thing they invented is too brilliant. And it will be almost irreparably shitty and never good because of the deluge of content they created. I think I think though the like we will look back at the NFT Gold Rush of last year as sort of the lead up for dealing with generative AI because one it's funny because all those guys lost out on being part of AI firms because they were trading monkey pictures. And two this entire culture of like caring about generating thousands and thousands of avatars that you can like trade in your weird discord is very similar to the AI Gold Rush that's about to happen where everyone's going to generate their own terrible AI, make their own terrible art and it'll be worthless but then also everywhere. And so it will it's like the NFT of NFT application of Internet content. It's it's really weird and kind of funny but also like pretty sad, I think. So you're saying an AI cannot generate an image of Garfield. Hey, you know, you know what can generate an image of Garfield a five year old with a pencil.

That's right. I think that's what gives me hope about all this is that, you know, I can practice and draw Garfield but Dolly too can't draw Garfield. Hey, kids out there if you practice enough and draw Garfield and send a picture of the Garfield that you that you drew to Jim Davis. He will write you back and send you a signed letter thanking you for your picture of Garfield as he did to me when I was seven years old. So far in my house frame. Yeah, that's amazing. So far Anderson Horowitz has not invested any money in any company that can draw pictures of Garfield and I think that is a win for art. And you know, the better the better you get at drawing then you can substitute your own your own Garfield remixes like sexy Garfield. You can definitely come up with a sexy Garfield just with your brain and your hands. That's all it takes. Yeah, exactly. If you draw Garfield well enough, you can get into Anderson Horowitz art school.

Yeah, I talked about Anderson Mark Andreessen's company. Yeah. Okay, so he just said the other day that basically like ethical considerations in AI is just censorship. What is he talking about? Here we go. I mean, yeah, right, like all these guys love this thing. Like, so I honestly think that the entire like Silicon Valley derangement syndrome that's happening right now like goes back to Clubhouse, right? They all created this weird app to have conference calls during the pandemic. And then they were like, this is the coolest thing ever. I can hear my own voice. And now they're just trying to change all of the internet to feel like an airport lounge. You know, this thing that you have to pay like a premium to hang out in it sucks.

Polaris executive club. Exactly. Like that's what they want for the whole internet. And if you don't let them, they're going to say that they're being censored. And I think like, first of all, you have to censor AI because like, you know, like there are there are plenty of generative AI. They're not allowed to look at hate images, for instance, because you probably don't want your your AI generating swastikas or something. And this is not. Exactly. You don't want a Nazi girl. And there's been a whole bunch of examples of speak for yourself. But there's been a whole bunch of examples of, you know, I think Facebook created an AI the other day they launched it and they had to turn it off because people made it radicalized.

Like, you have to be really careful with these things because they're not smart and they're trained on internet data, which is disgusting and insane. So you have to really think about the ethical considerations, but those get in the way of making lots of money really fast, which is why VC firms don't like. Should we train the sexy car field AI to feel pain? Yes, as much pain as human. As much pain as possible. Yeah. I want to make it suffer. No, I don't.

I think like I do think like there is this like habit, though, when we talk about this stuff because of guys like Mark Anderson, who make it really hard to be optimistic about this stuff and be able to say like this. That's kind of cool that like the computer program like drew a picture. That's like pretty cool. But then like the urge to turn it into money so fast means that like we don't even get to enjoy the idea that I can type in like a dumb meme and have a computer make it. And I feel like that's like a real tragedy with all of this is that like it's just much easier to unplug the whole thing because these guys are so awful about it. And I guess like that. Another way that this has been discussed is in this debate about whether whether AI generated art is real art. Do you come down anywhere on this?

Because like I said today that if AI art is art, then tracing is art. And you know, like, look, yes, tracing, I think is a valuable part of any artist process. Like you can use tracing, you know, to create an original image. I mean, you're still doing it by hand. Yes, you are copying to a certain degree. But like this is not what I'm talking about. Like AI art to me is just copying the art that already created by another human being and passing it off as your own. I think like if I if I ask an AI like, you know, draw me Elon Musk as a crying baby, like I didn't make that in AI made that is that art like, I don't know.

I feel like that's like almost the wrong question, right? Because like it's a picture. It's a picture. What you do with it, I guess from there, like I could Photoshop out the crying baby Elon Musk and put it in a collage of, I don't know. Like I feel like the debate around like art is so weird, right? That like I'm not really ready to write that off that someone couldn't figure out a way to use an AI to make art. But I think like, I feel like when we get stuck having that argument, a lot of times because of guys screaming about censorship and all that stuff. We've already lost the fight, right, because we're not even talking about the important stuff.

We're having like a weird pedantic article about we're having a weird pedantic argument about what is and isn't artistic expression. But like, which was the same deal with the NFT guys. Like they spent the whole time in like my monkey pictures art and it's like, I don't care if you don't know if it is like, it's still you're still annoying about it. And I think that like a lot of people trying to make money off this kind of content want those arguments because it obscures the larger stuff, right? So maybe so maybe like the way to conceive of this is not is it art or not. It's just good art and bad art. Yeah. What it's creating is bad art, whether it's the NFT monkeys or generative prompts.

Right. Yeah. The other day I watched YouTube video of a guy see if he could get an AI to help him recreate a scene from Netflix's Sandman TV show. And he got pretty close. It looked kind of ugly, but it was like pretty cool. He did it with an AI and a green screen in his house or whatever. And I feel like that will keep happening and people will get better about it. But then there'll be plenty of communities to ban this stuff. I mean, the furry image board for affinity has banned AI art completely, which good for them.

Yeah. Deviant Art users are quitting in protest because their art was being scanned by an AI. And I think we'll just see that we'll see like there'll be the AI people who are cool with it and the people who aren't. And then like the grifters who are trying to like sell you. We haven't even talked about this, there's a whole marketplace to buy the text that goes into the AI. So like you can go online and spend money to buy the words that make the AI picture you want, which is like a whole other. You're going to have to explain this again to buy the words that you put into the prompt. I've been comparing it to who owns the words.

Well, that's a whole argument too. Right. I compare it to SEO, which is that like 10 years ago, we had these all of a sudden new roles at websites and media companies where someone would tell you how to talk about it. Someone would tell you how to talk to Google, which was a robot that would show your content. There's now a whole version of this where there are people who you will pay to help you get an AI to spit out what you want better and more efficiently. And I think that those roles are going to increase because people are already using this stuff to, you know, make advertisements or whatever have you. And so there's a whole secondary economy now of AI text prompts. A secondary economy of buying words.

Yes. Yeah. Strings of words. Yeah. So like if you want to make your mid-journey, okay. So I'm in the mid-journey. It's an AI, the mid-journey discord. I watched a guy the other day spend like two hours trying to get the right combination of words to render a certain size ass on an anime girl that he was trying to get the AI to spit out.

You can't just say, show me an anime girl with a big juicy ass. Well, he had one in his head that he wanted the AI to make, I guess, because he kept changing the different word strings to make the ass look different ways with different lighting. And he spent a long time on this. Okay. So once you discover the right series of words to give you the perfect anime girl with a fat ass, then you can copyright that string of prompts so it can be repeatable. That's what people are saying that they're doing. Yeah, I haven't dug too far deep into it because I'm pretty good at generating anime asses with an AI, so I don't need help. But I think there are people who want that kind of thing and they're spending some money on it, which I think is really weird.

But I guess makes sense. All right. Well, to close out things today, I have selected a reading series that has to do with the internet and digital culture. I'd like to share with everyone today. This is Thomas Chatterton Williams writing in the Atlantic about deleting his Gmail inbox. This is scintillating stuff, but this is, yes, under the headline to whoops, I deleted my life. A sense of panic set in when I'd erased the entirety of my inbox. This is Thomas Chatterton Williams writing in the pages of the Atlantic.

When the ominous warnings started hitting my inbox a few months ago, I tried to ignore them. The emails contain none of the humor or playfulness of the early Gmail ethos. Instead, they were terse and vaguely threatening, seeming to channel the depressing spirit of financial collapse and austerity present everywhere around us. The subject line, your Gmail is almost out of storage. The body, in essence, this is a shakedown. Pay us a subscription fee and perpetuity and we will continue granting you what we once promised would be free to own, free access to your own life and memories. Ryan, did you remember the sort of early playful ethos of Gmail? Yeah, it feels lame to say this, but I use GChat in college.

I think there was a time when I enjoyed using it. This show started because of GChat. That's true. It was very playful. I got to say that I sort of agree with Thomas Chatterton Williams in the sense that I don't know when it's happened, but increasingly email is just impossible to use. As a form of communication, my inbox is one out of every 50 messages is a human being directly contacting me with important, actionable requests or information or whatever. There is nothing I can do to stop spam offers. You can archive catalog as much of it as possible, but I've just given up entirely.

Like email is just there's like 50 new messages a day and maybe one of them of life changing importance that you need to respond to. Continuing on, Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, The message wouldn't have triggered such resistance had I not been receiving it from every other quarter of my digital life simultaneously. If Apple hadn't already ransacked my pockets for subscription fees to maintain my ever-expanding photo archive and to ensure and finance care for my ever more expensive assortment of its products. If Microsoft hadn't insisted that I subscribe to its word processing software, if so many talented, enterprising friends and acquaintances didn't now depend on sub-stack and Patreon donations, if I didn't have to rent my music library for Spotify instead of owning my own records, if I didn't have to fork over prime fees to Amazon for my packages and to watch professional tennis,

if I hadn't been obligated to maintain Netflix, Canal Plus and Apple TV accounts so that my children would sit quietly on airplanes, if Elon Musk hadn't promised to render my tweets invisible if I didn't pay him a monthly $8 installments. But by the time those damn Gmail requests became unignorable, I had long since reached the point of peak micropayments. I was drowning in subscriptions. You know, sort of similar to how email started out as a great thing and then just became 78 newsletters and promotional things for things you don't remember buying. This article started out by making a good point that email sucks now, and then devolved into being a bad article because Thomas Chatterton-Williams wrote it in a bad way. I was with him, yeah, but I cannot relate to spending too much money on the Canal Plus app, which I did not realize existed.

I could not relate to like, oh, my friend who took a leave from Stanford started a sub-stack along with 30 other people exactly like him, and I have to subscribe to it. Yeah, I mean, I just think that email is really bogged down right now, especially because we lost a whole bunch of other feeds in our lives. My theory on why like sub-stack in particular or email newsletters had like a real resurgence is because people didn't want to use an algorithmic timeline, right? So they're looking for other ways to get content. It doesn't need to be email, but we used to have a lot more feeds. Now we're basically down to three and one barely works. So I don't know if it's an email problem. I think it's more just like, well, first of all, it just sounds like he's got a real subscription problem that like is really troubling.

But also like your email isn't probably meant to hold your whole life, right? Like it's just it's just it's just electronic mail. It doesn't need that. I mean, we talked about this before, but like it's the same thing with with, you know, actual phone calls that like don't exist anymore. No, nobody like like every time my phone actually rings, I get pissed off because the chances that like it's well, first of all, if you know me and are calling me, don't do that already. So basically like phones like the very basic communication things have all become massive pains in the ass because it's all just advertising or frauds. Yeah, it's like it's like the public space of community of communication is shrinking or breaking down and the private versions suck and don't work. And we don't have any there is no version of like there's no like way to avoid the spam.

It finds you everywhere now and an email, you know, is open, you can you can't know one person can own it, but it's still filling up because everything else is filling up. I mean, like part of the reason that like email and like phones for that matter suck now is because it's like it's like this almost unprecedented like singular identification device that we all have. It does make me think that like in a better world, we would already have gotten the ball rolling on like not just nationalizing phones but nationalizing like most electronic communication and having like strict regulations over whether lands in or theory or how or whatever newsletter you're subscribed to how many promotional things they can send you. But it's there's just I don't there's no end in sight for it. I don't see it getting better unfortunately. I mean, it sounds so boring to say this, but it's why I'm a big fan of the EU's GDPR, which, you know, one of the things that it does is it means you can't be signed up to a newsletter without your consent. And it's crazy how fast your email clears out when people can't do that to you.

I mean, like, have you seen the thing where like going on the same website in Europe versus America is like exponentially faster because they're not collecting just reams of data to send you more emails that you don't give a shit about. Yeah, it's like bloatware is is like ruining the American Internet, which is also not very fast compared to most countries of our size and technological sophistication. Anyway, so like we're just bogged down and bullshit and it's, you know, getting worse for sure. I'm going to skip ahead in this article for a second. I mean, he talks about, you know, freeing up 13 or 15 available gigabyte. It's a sense of panic set in as I realized that I'd raised the entirety of my inbox. New paragraph. He says three months after graduating from college, I moved from my parents home in New Jersey to the rainy post industrial city of Leo 30 minutes from the Belgian border.

That was September 2003. And I now struggle to access the mental and emotional terrain of that seemingly recent but qualitatively alien technological era. At the time, I'd owned a motor or motor or motor or a razor and a compact laptop, although it enjoyed and profited it from primarily in the form of free music downloads, the convenience of a high speed ethernet connection as a student. It didn't even occur to me to set up Wi-Fi in my miniscule studio. Once or twice a week, I visited the cyber cafe around the corner to read and respond to emails. I decided to move to France to be closer to a girl, but she had broken up with me over the summer. And for better and worse, I was about to learn what being lonely really meant. I spent those early months either in that tiny studio brewing stovetop coffee and playing MP3s I downloaded or whittling away the entirety of my ridiculously modest salary in cafes, feeling warm inside while watching the rain streak down the windows.

Those were what Juno Diaz called the discovery years. And I roamed the city high on life and consumed by daydreams. In the midst of tremendous boredom, I felt the burst of epiphany that I realize now are the true wealth of the young and inexperienced. And I wrote down everything I was thinking and feeling in long and detailed emails addressed to my best friend from college who had moved to Russia and to my mother, and they in turn sent me wonderfully detailed responses. Just think, all those wonderful emails will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Thomas Chatterton-Williams sharing all his thoughts about what MP3s he's downloaded and what brilliant epiphanies he's had walking around France. Him and I had a very similar 2003. That was like word for word my life too. That was amazing. Speaking of things that are being said to me against my will. Many of these exchanges achieved the sentimental weight of paper letters and contained a concentration of inspired observation and raw yearning that I have seldom felt able to equal even in published writing.

Yet they were housed precariously on Yahoo! and Hotmail servers. By the time I moved to Manhattan the following year to buy myself some time as I figured out what to do next, Gmail was the hot ticket. Soon enough all of that tortured ecstatic testimony and empathetic witness ended up in the same digital cemetery that hosts decayed Napster files and the whole iPhoto archives no longer compatible with upgraded operating systems. I mourned their loss but I was young or ignorant enough to believe that my most important memories and conversations would always be ahead of me. In any event I wasn't thinking about loss in 2004 when my colleague Daria blessed me with a coveted Gmail invite. How does it feel to be a G now? She wrote. Pretty good, right? This is great.

From that moment on Gmail became my central means of communication. It felt like an act of extraordinary altruism, a much improved user experience ostensibly with storage limits but ones that, like the horizon, miraculously retreated as you approached them. I continued to write and receive long digital letters but the pace of exchange was quickening, the messages grew shorter, more dashed off and far more numerous. Gmail itself was a destination and the chat function stayed open on my desktop throughout the workday. My friends and I started our first chains, some of which stretch into the present. Soon we also adopted the habit of tapping out text messages on cell phones and writing on one another's walls on MySpace and Facebook. By 2007 when the iPhone dropped, the internet and constant connectivity had rendered my previous relationship with technology and pace of correspondence almost unrecognizable. Email was no longer my only or even primary means of keeping in touch with loved ones and confidants and lengthy declarations grew more sporadic.

But I still composed with great thought and care, heartfelt paragraphs about serious disputes or misunderstandings or romantic ruminations. My Gmail inbox contained the majority of my most sincere reflections and declarations. Do you think it's a problem that now is communication becomes more immediate and clip? Young men of letters are not really having the opportunity to pen romantic ruminations and lengthy diatrives to friends, family and confidants. I do think that's a problem, yeah. I think that's a serious loss for culture. I will say like I'm an inbox zero person but I also don't delete emails and if I did lose all of my emails I would be devastated. But I don't think I would tell anyone about it because it's kind of embarrassing. But I had forgotten that Gmail was an invite only app. I completely blocked that out of my memory.

When I started writing for a living rather than for amusement, it's good to know he's making a living doing this now and it's not just amusing to him and no one else. My Gmail account along with the Notes app also displaced the paper notebooks I used to fill with snippets of insight and self-directed messages and prompts for the future. Oh god, I'm just thinking about the scraps of paper just blowing around France that contain nothing but Thomas Chatterton-Williams' insights. I would save manuscripts and works in progress by forwarding myself the Word documents. My Gmail box became an archive not just of my personal travails but also my professional efforts and gradual achievements. Every single romantic relationship I lived through as an adult began and ended and was narrated and dissected in maddening threads of Gmail correspondence. Fellas, can you relate to that? Have every relationship you've ever had been surgically dissected in Gmail exchanges? No, I can't. I mean, it may be before my time. I don't know. That may have been the cool thing to do. But that has certainly not been my experience now.

I've never met a girl on email. I'm sure there's some very sad AOL instant messenger moderator many years ago who saw my correspondences of that nature, but thankfully that person, all those archives I think are gone. But yeah, I was not this generation, I don't think. The jubilant record of my courtship and marriage, the heartbreaking arguments and hard-to-won reconciliations, the polyphonic story of my bachelor party and those of my groomsmen, the joy of my children's birth with photos appended, it all crowded up with records of travel receipts, spam, meaningless banter, many thousands of redundant messages notifying me of Twitter and Facebook notifications. This was my inbox, as unique as a snowflake, some two decades in the making and amounting to 90,000 messages. And it is gone now. That morning, my mind spun as I tried in vain to recreate the various perceptions and emotions that had been written into Google servers and were now abandoned to the ether. I felt a sudden sense of mourning that I have still not gotten over, and yet, to my surprise, I felt something else alongside it, a conflicting sense of relief and even levity.

I would never have voluntarily deleted all those emails, but I also can't deny, not entirely, that there is something cathartic about sloughing off those thousands of accumulated disappointments and rebukes, those passionate and pathetic fights and dramas, even those insights and stirrings, all of those complicated yet ephemeral layers of my former selves that no longer contain me. I began to accept that I would need to imagine my way back into those previous mental states if they were truly worth revisiting. And that if I could not, then the loss was necessarily manageable. I closed my laptop, wandered outside into the specific corner of France that my former selves' culminative choices had led me to inhabit, and was overtaken by a sense of hope. Hey, Generative AI, could you write me an Atlantic article by the most pretentious cocksucker on the planet about his email account? If you gave this to an AI, it would kill itself. I will say, he tried very hard to write as romantically as possible about what was essentially organizing his email inbox, and for that, I think that's an impressive, rhetorical move, but wow, yeah.

Well, we will leave Thomas Chatterton-Williams to torture artificial intelligence there. We will be causing pain for the meat sacks that read it in the physical space for well into the future. But, Ryan Broderick, I want to thank you for joining us. The newsletter is Garbage Day. If people would like to subscribe or have more Ryan Broderick of their life, what should they do? Just go to garbageday.email and join and help me ruin Thomas Chatterton-Williams' life with more updates, more sub-stacks, you know? Alright, till next time guys, bye-bye.