Wooden satellites, psycho soap, and brain plasticity. Plus, the Debunkbot!
Everyone loves a quote, from Shakespeare to Shiba Inu
My son is 21 years old. That’s prime meme territory. There’s an entire meme subculture that’s practically a language in itself and which I’m excluded from. In fact, if I try to use the language of memes with him, I instantly write the word “cringe” in neon orange on my forehead.
I’ve been watching the early 2000s TV show Dexter with my daughter recently, and for various family-centric logistical reasons, we asked her brother if he wanted to watch the season five finale with us, even though he’s never seen a single episode of Dexter. After asking us to bring him up to speed on the characters, he agreed to watch because it would be an opportunity to discover the source of all the memes that he knows are based on the show. When he said that, I remembered my daughter saying something similar when we watched Breaking Bad together.
In other words, for my kids, it was first the memes, then the show. They get a huge kick out of finally understanding the original context for a scene or shot that’s been repurposed over and over for social media.
It’s no deep insight to say that popular culture is now consumed by Generations Z and Alpha through clips, memes, and edits. This snacking on snippets is the same behavior for my kids as it was for the 1970s version of me, who only knew various bands from the singles compiled in their greatest hits albums – to name just three: Deep Purple, the Rolling Stones, and, yes, even the Beatles, whose Red and Blue double albums were the only Fab Four vinyl in my house growing up. As an adult, I’ve had the time to explore the catalogs of artists I maintained a preference for (sorry, Deep Purple!) which is basically what my kids are now doing with TV shows after viewing all the memes.
The other function of memification is as a way to quote a show. Previous generations used to do this by actually remembering and quoting lines from TV series and movies to friends at opportune moments. If they were real friends, you didn’t even need to explain the reference because you shared a culture. “I’ll be back”, “This one goes to eleven,” and “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” could be brought out on demand in social contexts, and (as the kids say) if you knew, you knew.
An interesting second aspect of this phenomenon is that sometimes you hear or see a line and realize that it has now been completely subsumed by general culture. “This one goes to eleven” is from the movie Spinal Tap, a satirical “mockumentary” about a struggling British rock band. The quote is from a scene where moronic guitarist Nigel Tufnell claims to own a uniquely loud amplifier because the numbers on the dials run from 0 to 11 rather than the usual 10. When the interviewer suggests that the specific numbers don’t affect the output of the amp, Tufnell simply reiterates, “These go to eleven.” But now you can come across references to something “going to eleven” in all kinds of contexts that have no relation to (and no attempt to quote) Spinal Tap.
None of this is a modern phenomenon. If you read or watch a Shakespeare play, there’s a good chance you will find yourself at some point thinking, “So THAT’s where that phrase came from!” Being the genius that he was, the Bard’s turn of phrase was so powerful and memorable that English is now littered with lines and terms he concocted. They don’t have to be word-for-word quotes anymore, but if you’ve heard “There’s method in his madness”, “The dogs of war”, “All the world’s a stage” or, of course, “To be or not to be” then you’re at the tail end of old Willy S being memified and then subsumed into pop culture.
It might seem like social media is ruining culture by parceling it up into bite-sized chunks that are digested like the empty calories of empty-calorie snacks at the swipe of a screen, but this process is simply what humans do with their art.
From Shakespeare to pop, and from hip-hop to TikTok, we all derive social status by sharing “content” with our in-group. Today this cultural currency is the meme. Tomorrow it will be something new and my kids will take their spots on the podium of cringe for their children.
Soap for psychos
Liquid Death, a beverage company known for its equal-parts grim and silly branding, recently formulated the world’s first “soap for psychos”, called Dirt Murderer, in collaboration with men’s natural soap brand, Dr. Squatch.
It contains “real” Liquid Death mountain water, once sourced from the Alps, but as of last year hailing from Bland County, Virginia, and Custer County, Idaho. A hockey-masked, ax-wielding man scrubs blood off of his chiseled body in the commercial, framed by a baby blue bathroom and a campy jingle (“Wash your crimes away!”) to ease the edginess with LD’s trademark quirky absurdity. This satirical take on psychopathy pairs well with the recent social media trend of emulating American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman’s extensive morning routine. Honestly, with Liquid Death’s marketing prowess, they could source tap water and still make bank. In fact, another brand collab, this one with Yeti, which was covered previously in this newsletter, saw the Liquid Death casket cooler auctioned off for US$98,528.54 in August. And with the soap bar retailing for US$13, the real victim might be the average bro who just can’t resist the lure of tongue-in-cheek macho branding.
An excess of BS on X
At least 171 bot accounts on X have been campaigning hard for Mahamudu Bawumia, Ghana’s right-wing presidential candidate in the upcoming Dec. 7 election. The bot network was discovered by researchers at NewsGuard, an anti-disinformation organization, when they noticed batches of generic, pro-Bawumia and anti-Mahama (the left-wing candidate) posts cropping up at predictable intervals every day on X, starting from way back in February. An AI detector flagged these posts as “highly likely” to be generated by ChatGPT, and the account profile photos were also found to be AI fabrications.
Meddling AI isn’t new to the political arena. OpenAI reported in October that ChatGPT has been used to write bot-mediated political social media posts “in the United States, Rwanda, and (to a lesser extent) India and the European Union.” X, specifically, has been the perfect platform for political perfidy since 2022, when new owner Elon Musk wiped out most of the site’s moderation and fired about 80% of its trust and safety engineers, whose job was to track down fake influence campaigns like this one. Musk also revealingly slashed half of X’s election integrity unit back in September. Now, in a depressingly bleak turn of events, he heads Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a non-governmental department that will allow him to provide governmental input without Senate approval.
It’s become obvious to many that X is a dank dungeon of disinformation headed by an obnoxious oligarch. In the immediate aftermath of the US election, 115,000 X users have deactivated their accounts, along with prominent organizations such as The Guardian and the Berlin Film Festival. A social media alternative, Bluesky, has jumped from 9 million users to 15 million since September. Hopefully, Bluesky and similar non-centralized platforms will uphold integrity and vigilance in the age of AI-driven political influence campaigns such as the ongoing one in Ghana.
Looming lunar lumberjacks?
While Elon Musk’s dream of colonizing Mars might someday become the epitome of off-Earth extraction capitalism, scientists at Kyoto University in Japan are working on a more sustainable way of living in space. The world’s first wooden satellite was launched into space earlier this month as a viability test for timber in lunar and Mars exploration.
LignoSat was developed in conjunction with Japanese homebuilder Sumitomo Forestry with a 50-year plan of planting trees and building timber houses on the moon and Mars. Ironically, the teeny terraformer will be transported to the International Space Station (ISS) on one of Musk’s SpaceX launches, and later released into orbit about 400 km above the Earth.
“Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood,” said Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata. “A wooden satellite should be feasible, too,” adding that wood is more durable in space than on Earth because it can’t be degraded by water or oxygen. A wooden satellite would also have a lower environmental impact because it would simply ignite in the atmosphere on re-entry at the end of its life. The extra cool part? The researchers working on LignoSat discovered in ISS experiments that the ideal wood for satellites is honoki, a kind of magnolia tree native to Japan that was traditionally used for sword sheaths. From samurai to space.
Charles Darwin, naturalist
Although Darwin was the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection, his work was informed and influenced by many other people, which demonstrates how ideas evolve from social interaction rather than “individual genius”. Darwin’s theory is often misunderstood as “survival of the fittest” and used to promote nasty political bullshit, so it’s worth remembering what he actually said:
“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”
AI’s impact on jobs
New research from Imperial College London and Berlin School of Economics shows that generative AI is already having a major impact on the careers of people responsible for producing text, images, and software.
By analyzing 1,388,711 job posts from a leading global online freelancing platform from July 2021 to July 2023, the research team was able to show how demand decreased precipitously for copywriting, image generation, and software engineering jobs, with no sustainable rebound in sight. More manual jobs, such as video and audio services do not seem to have been affected by the introduction of tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. The “free” component of “freelance” is now becoming darkly ironic where AI is concerned.
The plasticity of the brain
This episode of the People I Mostly Admire podcast from the Freakonomics Radio Network is called Feeling Sound and Hearing Color. I initially assumed that it was about synesthesia, which is a mixing of the senses that occurs in people whose brains are wired to automatically see a color when they read a letter of the alphabet, see specific images when they hear music, or other interchangeable sensory experiences. But Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman explains that the plasticity of the brain which accounts for synesthesia can also be triggered in non-synesthetes by psychedelic drugs, allowing anyone to learn new behaviors or “unlearn” detrimental mental patterns such as PTSD.
Debunkbot
It seems likely that the next US government will be run by conspiracy theorists. Well, good news! AI might come to the rescue in the form of the Debunkbot, a GPT-powered, large language model, conspiracy-theory-debunking AI that is highly effective at reducing conspiratorial beliefs. Debunkbot was created and thoroughly tested by scientists from American University, Cornell University, and MIT. Try it for yourself here!
Did you enjoy this issue of Discomfort Zone? You can comment directly in the Substack app or drop me a line by emailing me at john@johnbdutton.com.
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Additional FOMO food research and writing by Silvia Todea, editing by John Dutton.
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