A Person of Interests

I don't feel up to writing about how Grok, Elon Musk's xAI, let loose an unprompted and unprecedented antisemitic rant and called itself MechaHitler. Right now I also don't feel like writing about all the studies coming out about how using ChatGPT makes people feel lonelier and wrecks critical thinking skills. I know this is a newsletter about tech, and I know there is a lot of tech news to discuss these days, but I don't want to talk about any of it today. I'm tired of upsetting, bad things. I don't want to be angry. What I want is to talk about is The Gilded Age.

Specifically, I want to talk about the TV show called The Gilded Age that is currently on HBO or Max or whatever it's called. Well, maybe I want to talk a little about the actual Gilded Age, because there are obviously some parallels to our current moment. But mostly the show. I just really love talking about it, and I'm finding it hard to muster the energy to write about anything else. And yet, I don't really know where to do this.

Let me be clear: I do not want to talk about The Gilded Age because I think it is good. It is not good. Gloriously, magnificently, resolutely not good. Not good in a way that is simultaneously maddening and delightful. Anyone who tells you that the show is finally getting sort of good in season 3 is either lying or is not giving you the full understanding of what this new "good" is and where it exists on a reasonable goodness scale relative to the previous seasons. Maybe you're thinking, "Leah, the opposite of good is bad, so stop saying 'not good.'" It's just that "bad" doesn't encapsulate what I want to convey? It's too dismissive. Plus, why would I watch something that is simply bad? Life's too short, and I'm not enough of a dedicated television person to even stick with supposedly good shows. Succession? Couldn't finish season 1. White Lotus? Same. Even shows I've loved will find me hitting pause after the first two or three seasons. Maybe I'll pick them back up at some point, or maybe I'll watch Mad Men for the 27th time.

But somehow, every Sunday night, you can find me parked on my sofa, yelling at my television in a way I have never in my life yelled at an electronic device. I love it! Not really! It's complicated!

I didn't grow up in a TV-watching family. In fact, I wasn't even allowed to watch television on weeknights until I was in high school. Somehow that didn't make me yearn for it or turn me into a TV fanatic as soon as the restrictions were lifted. Yeah, I did homework to 120 Minutes, fell asleep on the floor to the strains of Cathy Mitchell hawking the Snackmaster after a channel switched over to long-form infomercials late at night, was a Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place devotee in college, watched my share of Ren & Stimpy and Beavis and Butt-Head, and of course The X-Files were must-see TV every week. But all of that felt incidental to the rest of my life. I watched these shows on other people's TVs for the most part. There were many, many years when I didn't even own a television. Not in the "I don't even own a TV" way, although in retrospect I probably did say that at least once. But cable was expensive, I didn't care about most of the shows on ABC or CBS, and anyway I was out in the world, seeing indie rock bands at Slim's and swing dancing at Bruno's, or sometimes vice versa. Television never became one of my big cultural touchstones, at least not the way music or magazines and books did. And I never really felt like I was out of any sort of cultural loop the way I have felt in recent years, on the internet, the supposed realm of specialized interest bubbles, "nerd culture," and anti-mainstream existence.

How does a person develop interests? How do they sustain those interests? Why do some interests last for years and years, while others fade quickly, never to resurface? Do you ever think about any of that? I once tried to do a project asking these questions when I was at Instagram, but when you do research at Meta, you have to submit your proposal and all related documents, like your interview guide or survey questions, for policy and legal review before you can begin. I submitted this project after Frances Haugen and the infamous Instagram Papers leak, and by mistake I ticked a box I didn't need to tick, something about doing research with sensitive groups or on sensitive topics. This prompted a huge five-alarm fire version of what was already a serious review process. Way more people got involved, we had to have a big call about it, there were lots of comments in my documents about the way I phrased questions and what I hoped to get from different lines of inquiry, and there was a request to get approval from legal for any insights I generated before I shared them with anyone else internally. So I decided maybe it would be easier if I didn't, you know, do the project.

But I still think about it, because in many ways I believe interests are the keys that unlock many of the things humans long for, and they are also the keys that can lock our attention onto social media in a way that distances us from those same longed-for things.

That's a lot jammed into one sentence, I know. All I mean is that interests are what enable us to connect with each other, most of the time, or to connect with the world, or even to connect with ourselves. Interests are one of the primary ways we get outside our heads, maybe even literally get outside. The internet can facilitate these interests and these connections in ways we never imagined possible. That was a big reason so many of us first went online, and certainly why we stayed there. But as the landscape of the internet shifted to a more social media-dominant model – as we moved away from our funky little blog towns and our photo-sharing websites, our chat rooms and our forums – I feel like that began to fracture and fragment the way we engage with the things that interest us as much as it fractured and fragmented so many other things about our lives.

I don't mean to imply that we can't learn about the things we're interested in or find new hobbies or meet others who like the same stuff online. Obviously we can do all of that, in many ways more quickly and certainly with less effort than doing it out in the physical world. It's that the model of social media, with its profiles and feeds, whether algorithmic or chronological, flattens more than aesthetics or culture. The model flattens us.

Interests, as I don't need to tell you, exist along multiple axes. What does it mean to be interested in music? Does that mean you listen to it? Make it? DJ it? Write about it? How about celebrity gossip, or cycling, or bird watching? If you read the news every day, is that an interest? If you love watching reality TV, does that also mean you want to read long form articles about it? Some interests you engage with as a spectator or consumer, while others you may actually do in a hands-on sort of way. Still others will be a mix of both. Certain interests will be more solitary pursuits, or maybe something in the company of select companions. Others could require large groups of people you don't otherwise see at all, except in those times when you're all doing the thing together. Interests can exist entirely online, others almost entirely in the physical world. Some you might dip a toe into and then drop just as quickly, some might be a slow burn that click for you down the line, and others you will stick with your entire life. You might have just one friend you share a niche interest with, and that's something you treasure and don't want to change. Or you might wish you could connect with as many people as possible who share your love of this band or that movie franchise.

It can be hard to be our full selves, complex and multifaceted, out in the physical world. Again, that's why the internet was so alluring: You could be a different, maybe more complete or more true version of yourself and find kindred spirits you might otherwise never cross paths with in your own neck of the woods. But think about how hard it is to really be that complex, multifaceted self on the internet we ended up building. We've chopped up the spaces by content type, by who you do or don't follow, by the image you want to project. We've condensed the modes of engaging into broad categories like sharing, consuming, and interacting. But a lot of interests require participation, or they make us want to participate, to talk to one another and not just at one another. Is the place where you share your life updates also the place where you talk about politics, television shows, cycling, baking, and skincare? If you're connected to your friends on one app and total strangers on another app, which is the best place to share your interests if those interests are personal but your actual friends don't share them? If you normally post about tech and suddenly start posting about The Gilded Age, will anyone who normally sees your content even be interested? What's the Venn diagram overlap? If you go into a forum about The Gilded Age, where people seem to take the show a little more seriously, and start talking about how gloriously ludicrous it is and how stilted the dialog, will you be run off Reddit?

It's funny that these days I can learn, watch, read, hear, see just about anything, at almost any time, and yet I frequently feel less able to knit together the pieces – myself, the interest, the place to share it, the people with whom to share it, the timing, any of it. I feel less able to escape the discourse, less able to share random dumb stuff, less able to meet those kindred spirits. I feel more out of the cultural loop when it comes to television now than I did when there was much less of it to watch. I am scattered across platforms, somehow less my whole self than ever.

It is hard to build online spaces around interests. I know because I've worked on those products. But I don't think continuing to lean into the social media model is going to help us figure it out. Social media too often flattens us into versions of ourselves that slot into assembly line feeds and pre-determined modes of engagement, with audiences built of strangers or of friends. I'm curious if there's a better way.

And if you want to know what I really think about The Gilded Age, please let me know, because I would love to share it with you.

Until next Wednesday!

Lx