How a blockbuster movie from 2006 baffles a teenager in 2024

Also: what if we try disbelieving everything? COVID as a job update. And an opportunity to relocate to Russia.

Howdy from the Land of the Productively Employed.

First of all, thank you to everyone who wrote and texted following the last edition, concerned that I was planning to shut down Rangelife because I have a job. Folks, I’m like Socrates. They’re going to have to poison me to shut me up. And that is likely all I have in common with Socrates.

A lot of people asked what my new job is, and I’ll refer you to my LinkedIn post of August 12, 2024 for those details. How much do you really want to read about B2B marketing here anyway? Yeah, I thought so.

In my first week in the job, I tested positive for COVID. (It wasn’t that bad.) Most of this newsletter was written in the cottage behind my house, where I isolated so as not to ruin my family’s big plans this week.

Some readers may recall that I also caught COVID back in December, right before I got laid off from my last job. COVID is now just an employment status change ritual. You update your LinkedIn, you email your network, and you ravage your body with the freshest strain of the novel coronavirus.

Another follow-up from last time: apologies to everyone who reached out to complain that they can’t stop seeing putty-ass-lookin’ cars everywhere. That’s on me. Well, I guess it’s on Hank Green, but if I made you see that, sorry. Yesterday I saw a putty-ass delivery truck, so I guess this is what all new vehicles are going to look like now. Get used to it.

Trends just sneak up on us all the time. I’ll never forget how in 1997 somebody pointed out, “Hey, did you notice all the white people in this bar are wearing shirts with horizontal stripes across the chest?” And then I was seeing the chest stripe everywhere for the next four or five years.

Big thanks to loyal reader Patrick who picked this hat up for me outside the DNC. The two holes near the top are dedicated entry and exit portals for brainworms.

I do love political merch, so thank you, Patrick. I’ll put this right next to my Steve Forbes ‘96 stuffed monkey.

RFK Jr. is probably going to drop out and endorse Trump soon, which I know because these dopes leaked it more than a month ago. Trump has definitely offered RFK all kinds of horrifying anti-science promises. By the time he’s done, you’ll have to illegally smuggle antibiotics from South Korea, and aluminum-based antiperspirant will require a prescription.

I actually believe that RFK has way fewer real supporters than the polls show. Of the 5% who say “Kennedy” in a three-way match-up, I think most of them are likely telling the pollster they’re not really into any of this politics nonsense. If Trump wants to shake the “weird” accusations, he maybe doesn’t want to spend too much time sharing the spotlight with the freako who staged a fake bike accident with a dead bear only because he didn’t have time to eat it first.

The Accelerating Velocity of Societal Change

A friend’s very bright, Gen Alpha daughter recently described Chappell Roan to me as “a female drag queen,” as if that were a very normal factual description for a person, like “mother of three” or “trained French chef.”

For those living in progressive urban communities, it’s often hard to notice just how radically society has transformed in recent years. They do notice it in red states, where state governments are passing laws to keep people from seeing or teaching about white power structures or about LGBTQ+ people. They call this “anti-wokeness.”

Some conservatives believe they’re the smart frogs who jumped from the pot before it boiled, and now they’re using their sticky frog finger pads to dismantle the stove. But societal acceptance and the extension of basic civil rights to others isn’t a cooking pot. It’s a hot tub that we finally got up to a cozy temperature for everyone to enjoy.

The speed of societal change has been remarkable. Last week, I watched Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby with my 14-year-old son. It was the first time I’d seen it since its 2006 theatrical release, and I’m happy to report that it holds up quite strongly. (According to its Wikipedia entry, TN is Christopher Nolan’s favorite comedy, and that guy knows funny.)

Talladega Nights is still a terrific mid-budget comedy, but it’s not without its anachronisms. In the first act, we meet the antagonist, French racer Jean Girard. Girard isn’t just French, he’s also gay, which we learn when he introduces his American husband to Ricky Bobby’s entourage. It takes these rednecks a beat to comprehend what they’re seeing. To them, a “man with a husband” just doesn’t compute.

As I looked over to my son, I realized he was confused. I paused the movie, and explained: “In 2006, gay marriage wasn’t legal in America, except Massachusetts. It wasn’t even really up for mainstream debate.”

Now this wasn’t computing for him. “Really?” he asked. “2006 wasn’t that long ago.”

Then I really dealt him a shock when I told him that the night Barack Obama was elected president, the people of California voted to ban same-sex marriage. Obama himself opposed same-sex marriage at the time. As did almost every national political figure. That was only 16 years ago. (It seems extra of Tim Walz to help start his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance 25 years ago.)

Today, my kids find it unthinkable that same-sex marriage would have been made legal only within their brief lifetimes, and not from political will but by edict of the Supreme Court before McConnell and Trump ruined it.

We’ve come a long way, baby, and not just around sexual identity. Some years ago, Cheerios produced and ran a television ad that inspired a racial controversy. Its sin of offense? It casually starred a white mom, a black father, and their biracial child. This ad inspired some angry letters from viewers at home, many of whom had never seen an interracial couple with a mixed-race kid on TV before.

The crazy thing is that this ad didn’t premiere in 1993, but in 2013. Yes, we’ve only had mixed race families in TV commercials for the past 11 years of our history. Soon, we might elect as President of the United States a woman whose identity is confounding to old white idiots.

This change happened blisteringly fast, over just the past decade. The world of Talladega Nights no longer exists (although the real Talladega is mostly the same).

Two straight actors making comedy in the mid-’00s

I’m going to spoil Talladega Nights now, which I think is permitted for a movie that’s old enough to vote. The movie ends with a long, comedic, man-on-man kiss between Ricky Bobby and his defeated nemesis Jean Girard. It’s hard to appreciate today the punch that this joke delivered in 2006. Most audiences had likely never even seen two men make out in a movie before. Especially in a movie about NASCAR.

But to my kids, same-sex relationships are as normal as anything, enough that structural homophobia and discrimination seem entirely alien to them. For those of us older than 25, this has been a rapid and observable change, an arc that’s actually bent towards justice. We have to fight to keep it.

What If We Just Stopped Believing Everything on the Internet?

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine shared a tweet that he thought was a particularly pithy and funny criticism of a certain US Senator from Texas. I actually LOLed when I read it. But also something about it didn’t sit right.

So I tapped through. The funny tweet was a joke riffing off another tweet, that itself was a commentary on a Daily Beast headline. But then I tapped through to the Daily Beast story, and the Daily Beast headline for socials didn’t represent the story fairly — it was written to drive clicks and shares.

The Daily Beast story was also not really an article, but just a re-blog of a story from the Washington Post. So then I read the story in the Washington Post, and let me tell you, the Daily Beast slanted that story so badly that you’d think it hit an iceberg.

So what we had here was multiple layers of distortion, a joke tweet about a opinion about a bad headline that misrepresented a reblog that itself misrepresented some original Capitol Hill journalism. I don’t know what the ratio of people who saw tweets / skeets / Threads / TikToks was to the people who read the original WaPo story, but it was probably more than 1:1. Net-net, we became dumber.

Now, this tweet wasn’t important. In the end, it was just a joke about a misrepresentation of something a senator said in a hallway to a reporter. It doesn’t really matter.

But this anecdote isn’t exceptional; it’s how media and our information environment operate now. At one point we subscribed to newspapers and watched network news — which were slanted and censorious, but also fact-checked and taken seriously. Today, most people still say they get their news from social media, where the incentives couldn’t be designed any worse to inform people.

These seats are blocked by the press area.

Another example is the “crowd size” posts. If you’re in the liberal bubble, Trump is playing to half-empty arenas. If you’re in the conservative bubble, Harris is plumping photos of her crowds with AI trickery. These are mostly bullshit — The shine may be off, but Trump is still filling arenas and captivating rural counties. Harris is drawing the biggest, most enthusiastic crowds for Dems since Obama in 2008.

Unlike cheap Xitter jokes, these fake news nuggets do have meaning. If you think your candidate is running away with the race, maybe you don’t make that $50 donation. Maybe you don’t knock on doors. Maybe you vote for Ralph Nader.

Last month, Joe Rogan, the world’s most influential media figure, reported fake news as real, implying that President Biden’s State of the Union had been pre-taped and enhanced with AI. His evidence was a photo some internet Sherlock had produced that showed the time on Biden’s watch wasn’t the same as when the speech aired. Rogan’s co-hosts actually pushed back on this one. It was clear that Rogan wasn’t familiar with how the speech worked, nor had he ever watched it. “You think Republicans in the room went along with it?” one asked him.

Rogan, embarassed, admitted he got burned by some online troll fakery, and even expressed amazement at the sheer volume of fakery we see. And yet, he’ll keep believing. Or at least doing what he does to maintain his audience.

But the misinformation era is really just in its early days.

Made with Grok, Twitter’s AI for edgelords

We’ve covered a lot here about how badly Elon Musk wounded our already gimpy information environment, by transforming what was a flawed but extremely useful real-time news system into a sycophantic cesspool of right-wing noise and paid spam.

Two weeks ago, this system produced a serious multi-day crisis in the UK. Riots broke out across the country following a horrific mass murder of children by an intruder at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. Although the murderer was a native-born resident of Wales, a false report on Xitter that he was a recent refugee led to a wave of street actions that ranged from anti-immigrant protests to straight race riots across the country. All kinds of execrable racists who pay $8 a month for a blue check helped amplify this fiction.

As Luke Hallam wrote in Persuasion:

There are generally good reasons to be wary of finger-pointing when it comes to “fake news” and social media’s role in spreading it. But in this instance, it’s hard to overstate the extent of the hysteria that was unleashed. Mere hours after the attack, the killer was seemingly identified as Ali al-Shakati, a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived in the United Kingdom by boat, and was known to the British security services as a potential threat. Within minutes of the first social media post identifying al-Shakati, the story was picked up by a dubious news organization calling itself “Channel 3 Now.” The al-Shakati story was then parroted by Russia Today, and began appearing in a raft of viral posts on social media.

Xitter took down none of this misinformation to lower the temperature, because everything stays up on Xitter (unless Elon himself disagrees with it), even when it’s promoted by Russian state media which exists solely to generate chaos in the west.

The violence began with far-right groups attacking mosques, but soon it attracted broader nativist protestors, who used the murder as an opportunity to express anti-immigrant sentiment (“Stop the Boats.”)

(I’m going to provide a link to a video in Rangelife Shorts below. It’s about the various protests and counterprotests, and you’re really going to want to watch it.)

After Elon in 2023 newly monetized the already destructive incentives of social media, everybody could see these crises coming. As Dave Lee wrote last year in Bloomberg:

When Musk introduced creator payments in July, he splashed rocket fuel over the darkest elements of the platform. These kinds of posts always existed, in no small number, but are now the despicable main event. There’s money to be made. X’s new incentive structure has turned the site into a hive of so-called engagement farming — posts designed with the sole intent to elicit literally any kind of response: laughter, sadness, fear. Or the best one: hate. Hate is what truly juices the numbers.

Misinformation isn’t as bad as hate speech, but it’s certainly more prevalent. And all social networks traffic highly in misinformation. A lot of this misinfo is benign; for example, I saw a lot of “Olympics” highlights on Threads that were really from other athletic events. They were generally amazing, and also forgettable enough that it didn’t really matter that they weren’t from Paris 2024. Any spin through the viral junk feed that comprises most of Facebook or Instagram these days is to see nothing but samples from various libraries of pirated clips, stripped of context and often altered to avoid copyright detection.

I hit my limit about a year ago, and I vastly reduced my scrolling. This would have been unthinkable for me at some point. In the mid-’10s I was working in the space, and also spending hours a day on Twitter. Today, I occasionally visit Threads, BlueSky, TikTok, LinkedIn, or friends’ Instagram stories, but rarely for more than a few minutes. (YouTube is another story. Hail YouTube. And Reddit. But neither of those are really “social media.”)

In the year since I dropped social media, I’ve felt significantly better informed. And one reason is that I’ve replaced consumption of hot takes with actual reporting. The narratives are still biased, but I also understand how and why WSJ has a different point of view from Bloomberg, and I understand their intentions better than those of @BasedRomanStatue.

I’m not arguing that you should do like I did. Maybe you have a curated Xitter feed that makes you feel good or righteously angry or well-informed about a topic. Maybe you’re part of one of the 11 remaining vital Facebook communities. Maybe you enjoy weird liars on Snapchat. Or maybe you’ve just decided that social media has already died and we’re just sifting through its ashes.

I’ve also been on the receiving side of inaccurate reporting from well-known media brands. As someone who’s worked at high-profile companies that people wanted to read about, I can confirm that even reputable reporters can write entire stories that fully miss the truth. A former Facebook co-worker asked me as I was wincing through a particularly inaccurate New York Times story: “Now, ask yourself why you trust their other reporting as if it’s the word of God.” Good question, Rob!

Today we live in a world where the lines that divide journalism, advocacy, advertising, disinformation, and grifting are fuzzier than ever. The younger gen has never read a newspaper or watched the evening network news, so they don’t even perceive legacy brands — USA Today, NBC News — as quality signals.

I thought about this as I was looking for details about Trump’s rally in Bozeman, Montana, two weeks ago. I was seeing posts about how his flight got diverted to Billings due to a mechanical issue. People on socials were speculating whether it had something to do with unpaid bills from 2016, or maybe he was just trying to make something up because attendance at his rally was so weak. The most detailed local story from Google search came from Billings’ NBC affiliate, and it might as well have been written by the Trump campaign itself.

I swear to God this is all verbatim, from a website with the NBC logo on it:

There was a huge turnout at Friday night’s rally for former President Trump in Bozeman. The area outside the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse was packed with people who couldn’t get inside. They were excited to hear from Trump and Republican candidate for Senator, Tim Sheehy.

The enthusiasm at the rally was palpable. People were incredibly happy to be there, and it was clear from the full parking lot.

One group of attendees said, “Everyone loved him so much.” “The crowd was great too. Really supportive…”

It wasn’t just locals who attended the rally. People came from across the country—not just Montana. A notable attendee from San Diego, known for wearing a brick-patterned suit to every rally, was even acknowledged by Trump from the stage.

Some people waited for hours, with many arriving early in the morning or even late Thursday night to secure their spots. The dedication was clear as the crowd showed up in large numbers.

Political analyst, Mike Dennison observed, "It was a full house" with hardly an empty seat before Trump began speaking. Although some left towards the end due to the speech's length, the crowd remained highly enthusiastic with "99.5% Trump supporters in the building."

The rally was a big event for the area, creating a buzz that lasted throughout the day.

In the end, it’s not as simple as “don’t trust the media,” or “do trust the media.” The men with the printing presses and the broadcast licenses always had outsized power, and the world we know today was very much shaped by them. Today it’s more complicated than that, and “media literacy” is a skill that’s ever-harder to define.

When it came time to teach my own children what they needed to know to navigate this new world, it wasn’t easy. Where I settled was this: Everything you read, watch, hear was created by someone for a purpose. That purpose could be influencing you to think or feel or do something, or it could be just making money for themselves. Before you believe it, try to understand the incentives of the person who made or shared this content. Or else you could end up looking like Joe Rogan.

Rangelife Shorts

What the people in the UK thought they were protesting. While the protests were often reduced to “Nazis and Nazi-adjacents exploit misinformation to violently malign immigrants and Muslims,” the story is actually more complicated than that. Channel 5 talked to participants in four very different street actions to understand why they were out there, and what they thought was motivating the other protests. The output is fascinating.

Reddit knocks out the champ. I don’t follow UFC or pro wrestling, but I know Ronda Rousey because about a decade ago, she was doing a lot of endorsements that even UFC haters couldn’t avoid. Apparently she was also doing a lot of dumb shit on the internet back then, because her Reddit AMA attempt collapsed from users pummeling her for her Sandy Hook trutherism. Glorious.

Online sports betting is making us poorer. I don’t think there’s a greater indictment of our political system than the breathtaking expansion of online sports betting. The governments of 38 states instantly took money from lobbyists and agreed to engineer new crises and despair among the people who could least afford it, for the benefit of a handful of corporations. Now we have research to show what’s already happened, and it’s really bad . It’s also the least surprising result ever: more debt, bankruptcy, and addiction. If I lived in a state where online betting were legal, I’d be working to make it illegal again.

Instagram’s AI boyfriends. Following up on another past topic: I think AI companions are going to become mainstream and normal over the next decade. People are lonely these days, and they’ll gladly welcome a supportive partner to watch TV with or chat through the night. Brave souls are trying it out right now in Instagram, and there’s nothing more mainstream than Instagram.

If __ wins, I’m moving to __. In general, I think you should react to an election loss by digging in and fighting to win the next election, not threatening to flee. America needs you! But I’ll allow one exception: Putin has offered residency to anyone who wants to escape Western liberal values, no proof of Russian language or culture required. If this is appealing to you, you should absolutely take advantage of this wonderful offer. Nothing bad ever happens to Americans in Russia. Do svidaniya, genius!