Outrage Machines and Attention Span Rehabs

"it’s just really cute, because she’s a millennial"

Addison Rae may be coming to a stage near you; Rolling Stone calls Sydney Sweeney’s new movie Echo Valley “the trashiest A-list Lifetime movie you’ve ever seen”; Adults star Jack Innanen is campaigning to be, as GQ puts it, “white boy of the month”; and Pop Mart's CEO is now China's 10th richest person thanks to Labubu

INSTAGRAM WANTS GEN Z. WHAT DOES GEN Z WANT FROM INSTAGRAM?, nyt
Instagram just launched its most expensive campaign yet in an effort to win back Gen Z, but a Tyler, The Creator cosign won’t change the fact that younger users aren’t using the app the way Meta intended. According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, Gen Z barely posts to the main feed, instead favoring Stories and DMs; “most of my friends have, like, maybe one post,” one 15-year-old girl told reporter Callie Holtermann. Despite being the third most-used app among teens, nearly half now say TikTok is their favorite platform, per Piper Sandler. This quote took me out:

“It’s just a lot less pressure posting on TikTok,” said Sheen Zutshi, 21, a college student in New York. She uses Instagram to send direct messages to her friends, but sees it as a more curated option — the sort of place where someone might earnestly post a photo of the night sky, like her older cousin did recently. “It’s just really cute, because she’s a millennial,” she said.

YAHOO MAIL UNVEILS AI MOBILE APP FEATURE AND COLLABS WITH ANTI SOCIAL SOCIAL CLUB, wwd
Back in January, I mentioned that ahead of its 30th anniversary, Yahoo had been on a “nostalgia-washing blitz, making memes about AIM and using dial-up-internet sounds and Microsoft WordArt in unhinged posts on Instagram and TikTok.” Through this campaign, Yahoo was hoping to reach younger people “who knew little of a time when interactions online were more fleeting, anonymous, and, frankly, more fun.” Now, it’s doubling down on those efforts to reach Gen Z with a new AI-powered “Catch Up” feature designed to tame the inbox chaos and a streetwear collab with Anti Social Social Club. That they think anyone would spend $99 on a Yahoo!-branded sweatshirt reading “Anti Email Email Club” shows just how out of touch this tech company remains...

HOW I’M FIXING MY BROKEN ATTENTION SPAN, vulture
As someone with a pretty decimated attention span, I really appreciated Rebecca Jennings’s exploration of the modern attention crisis and her personal attempts to repair it, including co-founding a “Difficult Book Book Club” as a form of screen-free intellectual engagement. She cites studies showing average screen focus has dropped from 2.5 minutes in the early 2000s to just 47 seconds, and gets into how Gen Z is responding with their own countermeasures: painting “zentangle” designs on TikTok, tracking brain activity with EEGs, and creating digital wikis to slow down their consumption. While some experts argue we need rewiring, others say this isn’t a problem per se, but rather a shift in where and how attention is being spent. This take, from Northwestern University professor Daniel Immerwahr, made me feel (slightly) better about my own habits:

“Everyone says that the internet is polarizing our politics and shredding our attention, but actually it can’t be both,” he says. Rather, we’re in an age of “obsessional politics,” where people are factious and often misinformed but not apathetic. They’re watching multi-hour livestreams and plunging down rabbit holes and “doing their own research” — all activities that require massive amounts of sustained attention. And in doing so, they’re finding community.

HOW THE OUTRAGE MACHINE CONSUMED CHRISTINA FORMELLA, thecut
In late March, a 30-year-old Illinois teacher was arrested and charged with the alleged criminal sexual assault of a 15-year-old student after explicit texts and a “memoir” about their relationship were discovered. What began as a local criminal case has exploded into a TikTok-fueled media frenzy, transforming Formella into a viral symbol of cultural archetypes: the predatory teacher, the villainous wife, the fallen Christian athlete. Gen Z’s obsession with true crime and digital sleuthing has amplified the story, with some creators amassing millions of views as they dissect every detail. Meanwhile, her husband remains by her side, sparking a bizarre secondary wave of internet fandom. (This case certainly will not help my own “modern attention crisis.”)

One last thought:

@catdookieOne like = one prayer lmao ✌🏼 #brainrot #cooked #smoothbrain #funny #relatable #chaoticgood

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