Social Deskilling and Performative Offlineness
monday looooong read!
Welcome back to After School Monday Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. 🫶
In today’s issue:
Enshittification hits food delivery
Deliveroo-ing a shag
The 401(k) mullet
Grindr’s $6,000/year tier
Dior Sauvage as a red flag
1,000 applications, three interviews, zero jobs
Kids stage AI intervention
Conformity as self-expression
Abercrombie renaissance over?
Competing beauty girl ski lodge trips
“Counter-wellness” skincare launches
And so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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This week, Vogue wrote about Brick, a $60 magnetic device created by two Gen Z entrepreneurs that physically locks you out of social media apps and is currently going viral on the very platforms it’s designed to block. “Before Bricking, it was in the nine to 12 hour range with three or more hours a day on TikTok (which almost feels embarrassing to admit),” one content creator told the magazine. “But two weeks in, [my] overall screen time dropped to an average of four hours with 15 to 30 minutes a day on TikTok.” Another devotee said she “immediately felt a sense of relief” after getting one. The product has gotten big enough to inspire its own lingo; users say they’re “bricked up” when their phones are locked.
Slate’s ICYMI podcast devoted an episode this week to whether tools like Brick represent an actual behavioral shift or just “performative offlineness,” i.e. posting about not being online while very much being online. Writer Alex Kirschner argued that Brick and its competitors are merely “a momentum trade.” People aren’t leaving the internet because a plastic block told them to; they’re leaving because the internet has gotten so bad. The content is more disturbing, more algorithmically aggressive, more lowest-common-denominator. As he put it, would he have needed a Brick during 2015 Twitter? Probably not.