Tag: Big Ideas

A Former Blab User’s Observations For Tik-Tok


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The video conferencing service Blab may one day be looked back upon as the Amiga of such things. It was way ahead of its time and it definitely gave a sense of the community building potential of video conferencing when combined with discovery.

On paper, at least, Blab was a multi-functional platform that could have been used for everything from a “video Reddit” to online dating to a robust podcasting platform, to you name it.

But the very thing that made it so great — it’s very cool discovery feature — was ultimately its downfall (in a sense.) Once hateful trolls got a hang of the service — and were willing to be on camera — that was the end of Blab at least from the community standpoint.

I use Tik-Tok a lot these days and occasionally — when I’m not worried the service is, like, fucking reading my mind — I wonder if they could somehow crib the best bits of Blab and give Facebook a run for its money.

The answer is I don’t know.

The reason is, Tik-Tok is a handful as it is. Throwing in four way video conferencing with discovery would face the exact same problems that Blab had. So, on paper, yes, adding Blab features to Tik-Tok would probably take it to the next level and make it potentially a Facebook killer.

But, in reality, you would have to be a lot and I mean A LOT smarter than me to figure out how to cherry pick Blab’s best bits without it slamming into the bonkers troll problem that Blab experienced. So, in the abstract, yes, it would be great for Tik-Tok to bring the Blab experience to the masses but it would be seriously playing with fire on a practical level.

So, I don’t know. I do think there is a way that Tik-Tok could grow as huge as Facebook under the right conditions — Facebook is a utility that is hated by a huge swath of if its user based. Whenever we move from Web 3.0 to Web 4.0 everything will be “disrupted” again and new titans will arise. It may be that we skip the video and VR phases altogether and go directly to MindCaps.

Or something.

Anyway, I miss old Blab. We hardly knew yuh.

Tay-Tay, Girl, You Need To Grow Up


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m going through a Taylor Swift phase again via my Spotify account and I’m struck by sensitive she is. This is a good thing when it comes to her writing and having an emotional connection to her mostly female audience. And, yet, it seems she’s hurting her career by in album after album pumping out fan service.

She has a great voice. She’s a great performer — Swift can dance 10 times better than Dua Lipa. And she seems pretty self-aware (at times.) She’s dabbled in more adult, mainstream pop — to great success — so it’s not like she can’t do it. But come on, lady, you’re not 22 anymore. You’re a grown ass woman.

You need to be a little bit more edgy. Female rappers are do a lot of creative, interesting things. It wouldn’t hurt Tay-Tay to swerve into some of the conspicuous raunchiness of the rap world. I mean, Ariana Grande has made a whole career in adult contemporary music telling me in excruciating detail how horny she is.

Now, I don’t honestly expect her to do this. No matter how old she — or her fanbase — gets. At the moment, there’s a lot of alluded to sexuality in her lyrics and a lot of “tee-hee I like to drink” references here and there. But Swift would have to produce a “missing link” album for her to be able to do a colab with one of the very talented, interesting female rappers out there. If she made a clean break from her training bra music oeuvre a lot of girls and young women would be heart broken and burst into tears. Not Tay-Tay!

What’s most likely to happen is Swift is going to be a huge, huge star for decades and then at some point in her mid-40s, she will come out with a really provocative album that gets a lot of buzz outside of her core group of fans…and then she turns around and goes back to doing exactly what she’s been doing for decades.

All of this raises the question — am I asking Swift to sell out? I don’t think so. I’m asking her to grow up and challenge her audience and fan base — and maybe herself. I’m still not 100% sure she’s not a virgin. Though she occasionally shoots out a sexxy music video, in general, she’s every white parent’s ideal new member of the family. There’s a reason why Swift had to go way out of her way to say, “I am not a white nationalist.”

And, yet, the case could be made that she serves a purpose in our culture — she’s the exact center of pop culture. She has enough talent not to be boring, but she’s always going to circle the exact center of the pop music world.

Anyway. No one listens to me.

Minority MAGA Republican Rule (Or A Civil War) Is Now Inevitable


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Traditional American liberal democracy is beyond saving. All the pieces are in place for an autocrat to be elected by hook or by crook in 2024. Since form follows function, within a few years there will be a Constitutional Convention, the media will be purged, the existing ICE infrastructure will be weaponized and I will be pushed out a window.

Or we have a civil war.

We’re way pass the point of no return. The Republican Party has been completely consumed by the fascist MAGA faction to the point that we are left with no wiggle room. If the Republican Party at any point in the future has it within their power to negate a Democrat win, they will. This is now a law of political physics. An absolute.

And if that doesn’t happen, we have some sort of civil war and use WMD against our fellow Americans. Again, that’s the only option. I just don’t know when we’re presented with that particular choice.

Of course, the argument can be made that if MAGA belly flops in 2022 off-year elections then maybe, maybe they might not have absolute control of the Republican Party. But if you give that any thought, you realize there are two major problems with this wishful thinking. One, lulz. Two, even if Trump himself is seen as the loser he obviously is, there are a half dozen would-be autocrats waiting in the wings to do exactly the same thing he did only without him — Trumpism without Trump.

America is “about to go through some things” as they say. We’re fucked. On a macro political history level, we’re totally, utterly fucked. This is the end. I don’t have any easy answers as to what you can do to prepare. If I did, I’d be working for VOX or New York Magazine.

But we’re in for a very bumpy few years with no obvious endgame between the two existential choices of autocracy or civil war.

Let’s Unpack J.D. Vance’s Fears of ‘Cancel Culture’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh boy. There’s a lot to unpack with this Axios profile of J.D. Vance’s Senate campaign in Ohio. Here’s the part that sticks out for me:

Vance told me in a phone interview from Cincinnati that so-called cancel culture was a big part of conservatives’ conversations as he worked Fourth of July parades over the holiday weekend.

“People are terrified that if they speak their minds about what’s going on in the country, they’re going to lose their job,” he said. “‘If I say that I voted for Trump on Facebook, somebody’s going to try to get me fired.”

This abstract fear is something I hear a lot from my conservative relatives. Because MAGA has no policies that are popular outside their own bullshit echo chamber, they latch on to the vague unease that a lot of people feel about “cancel culture” (whatever the fuck that is.)

To me, the crazy thing about all of this everyone benefits by having a liberal democracy that has an ebb and flow to it. But that’s now how MAGA cocksuckers see things — they want to take power and never let go because they fear the browning of America, or women with economic and sexual agency, the list goes on.

So that abstract conservative fear that their life will be ruined for just being conservative is what MAGA has hung its entire political future on. MAGA talking points have now completely consumed the conservative to the point that my conservative-but-not-MAGA relatives pretty much echo all the major MAGA complaints without even realizing it.

One thing that I struggle with is — how real is, in practical terms, “cancel culture.” I have one conservative relative who can tick off half a dozen concrete examples of conservatives being canceled, and, yet, I also think his abstract fears of cancel culture are extremely recursive. In my center-Left experience, there are very few examples of honest-to-God average conservatives who have had their lives ruined “just for being conservative.”

The problem, of course, the divide between MAGA and everyone else has grown so enormous that we can’t even agree on what is acceptable public behavior. I mean, is it ok for a police official to donate $20 to the defense fund of a 17-year-old serial murder because they supported his political agenda? (The crybaby defense that it was “leaked” doesn’t hold much water since Republicans seem to get off on using leaked e-mails for political gain.)

The real problem is a massive difference in perception. Or, put another way, the media narrative of Trumplandia is so dramatically different from the media narrative of everyone else that it’s like talking to someone from a political Upside Down. Or, even more specifically, negative polarization is now so absolute that MAGA’s political foundations are now 100% recursive and abstract.

I Struggle With The End Of The Victoria’s Secret Show


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

When it comes to the demise of the annual Victoria’s Secret show I’m reminded of Oliva Wilde’s movie Booksmart. I fucking hated, hated HATED that fucking movie, but I also knew I wasn’t the audience. The audience was a GenZ bi-curious girl living in a purple suburb.

So, obviously not me.

And, in all honesty, it’s not like I actually sat down and watched the Victoria’s Secret show on TV. I was aware of it each year, saw clips on YouTube and that was it. But something about it becoming culturally untenable rubs me the wrong way.

I totally get that wealthy liberal women in metropolitan areas are now so woke that they now either spend money on a Peloton or, in general, just want lingerie that is more representative of how most women really look. Ok, I can accept that.

And, yet, it makes me sad that “lingerie needs to be more representative” is mutually exclusive with the glamor and allure of Victoria’s Secret. Why can’t all the various body types — including the traditionally hot ones — be celebrated? Why, by definition, is a stunning woman in lingerie a bad thing?

Anyway, no one listens to me. But the people who want to “slay the patriarchy” are doing themselves no favors by “canceling” something as popular and easily-to-understand as the Victoria’s Secret show. While it might allow “woke” people to feel smug that another oppressive aspect of the patriarchy has been felled there are a lot of men — and women — who are like me.

How Tik-Tok Might End Facebook


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

A few years ago, I was really into a video service called Blab. It had a lot of technical problems and obviously was simply a vanity project for the guy who was funding it. It featured four live video boxes for a video conference experience and, most of all, it featured discovery. In hindsight, it’s discovery feature was both a boon and an existential bane.

The reason is — there came a point when the very thing that attracted me to it, the ability the randomly meet new people, was also it’s biggest flaw. The reason: trolls were using the discovery feature to randomly destroy things and make life hell for other users.

And, yet, looking back, it is becoming more and more apparent that the Blab project was far more prescient than one might otherwise imagine. With the rise of Tik-Tok among GenZ, it’s very easy to imagine a situation where Tik-Tok could crush Facebook if it added some sort of four-box social aspect to it, maybe even with discovery.

But Tik-Tok would have to be very, very careful about how they implemented this. It’s possible to do, but they would have to roll out the ability for four people to talk to each other live on video via a video conference very slowly and deliberately.

If you threw it some sort of discovery, there are a number of different ways Tik-Tok could destroy Facebook. One, people could make a lot of new friends via the discovery feature as random people appeared in one of the four video screens. You could have ad hoc dating services added. The list goes on.

And, yet, at the moment, this only works in the abstract. As my personal experience with Blab proves, people are assholes and in practice rolling out any Blab-like features would likely only destroy Tik-Tok.

It’s fun to think about, however.

Is Tik-Tok Reading Our Minds?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m going to keep writing these posts until someone, somewhere takes notice and decides to look into it for me — I’m so frustrated at this point I’ll even take a malignant ding-dong like Tucker Carlson doing it for me.

So, there I was just a moment ago, using Tik-Tok when I was pushed a video about a woman who asked a Tinder match what time he was born. This stopped me cold — I’ve been thinking about that specific thing for some time now because of the novel I’m working on.

I’ve been thinking about that literal thing — the idea that if you were into astrology you would ask someone what time of day they were born.

Now, before you think that Tik-Tok is monitoring my novel writing some way and that’s how it knew that I was interested in such things — I haven’t gotten to that part of the novel yet. I’ve just been thinking about it. I’ve not written anything anywhere — or even spoken about it to anyone. The only person who knows that I’m interested in that particular part of astrology is ME.

I have no proof — none — that Tik-Tok can read our minds. But I do know the technology to do so was patented by Facebook some time ago and, apparently, Facebook is on something of a quest to figure out how to do just that.

The point is — I really need someone at Vox, or Wired or, hell, even New York Magazine to explain to me what I’m seeing on such a personal, specific basis. What other option is there? Sure, you could say Tik-Tok’s algorithms are now so advanced, so powerful, that they have me specifically figured out. But how would such an algorithm be able to seemingly root around in my mind and push me a video about a specific concept that I’ve been thinking about a lot — but haven’t done anything at all outwardly to indicate this is happening?

How? How? How?

Taylor Swift Will Never Be A Movie Star


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Taylor Swift is one of the best entertainers of her generation. She has millions of rabid fans who analyze and debate her every statement and action. Swift has all that and will likely have it for the rest of her life. But there’s one thing she will never have: a movie career.

The reason for this is simple — Swift is never going to do a sex scene and she’s never going to show any T&A. Never. Never. Even in this post-#MeToo era that we live in where mainstream Hollywood movies seem more interested in screeching about lesbian sex positions than entertaining an audience, someone as drop dead gorgeous as Swift would inevitably have to drop trou to get the type of movie role she might want to start a serious Hollywood career.

Given what most of her fan base is made up of — liberal white girls and women — the idea that she would do something as out of character as do a sex scene in a movie to further her Hollywood career is just not applicable for Swift. I’m not saying this is a bad thing — you do you, Tay-Tay — but Swift definitely seems like the type of ambitious young woman who would otherwise have at least a chance of having a serious Hollywood career.

The only out for Swift on this front is when she is in her 40s and she’s had a 20 year residency in Vegas and even the youngest members of her fanbase are in their 30s, she probably could get away with a traditional Hollywood sex scene. Her fan base will be so jaded by this point that they, at last, won’t care. And Swift herself will be old enough that she will want to prove she’s still got the goods.

As an aside, I will note that Swift is in the exact middle of pop culture. She is the center of pop culture. She never went through any kind of wild, crazy period in her career where she came out as bi and dated a woman or a rapper or whatever. The thing about her music career that I have noticed is she apparently has decided to do exclusively fan service from here on out. She’s never going to challenge her fans, or change, or mature or anything. Another thing about Swift is she’s hot but not sexy. She’s about the most chaste pop star out there. She never, ever has ever had an accidently on purpose nip slip or flashed a bit of butt crack on Instagram.

She’s training bra music and will spend the rest of her life producing some variation of that theme.

Goddamn It, The United States Is A Fucking Liberal Democracy


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Just recently, I’ve encountered people who objected to calling the United States a “liberal democracy” for no other reason than they didn’t like the word “liberal.” It didn’t matter the context, it didn’t matter the meaning of the phrase, all that mattered was they hated liberals so fucking much that they could not distinguish between someone being a political liberal and the United States have a “liberal” form of government.

This is enraged me.

For most of my adult political life, I would casually mention in conversation that the United States was “liberal democracy” and it didn’t even register to anyone that it was something to object to. But, just in the last few years, not only are their people who hate the term “liberal” so much that they are stopped cold by any use of it, there are people who object to the idea that the United States is a democracy at all.

Neither one of these developments is a good sign for our, well, liberal democracy. The people who object to calling the United States a “democracy” are people who are tired of anti-MAGA people (like me) ranting about what a threat to our democracy Trump and his MAGA movement are. As such, by objecting to calling the United States a democracy in the first place, they hope to smugly nullify the argument.

“We’re not even a democracy!” they want to say, so they can move on to enjoying their huge plutocrat tax cut or young hack MAGA judges on the Federal bench. They also use this “we’re not a democracy” line of thought to rationalize out of existence the severe crisis the United State is in currently when it comes to MAGA’s efforts to limit voting as much as possible.

Now, the last time this type of “the United States is a republic not a democracy” bullshit was used was right before WW2. America First people who wanted to keep the United States out of a war that people hoped would make the world “safe for democracy” said, “Lulz, the United States isn’t a democracy.”

I take all this bullshit over the United States being — or not being — a “liberal democracy” as yet another sign that we’re careening towards an existential choice of autocracy or civil war. There’s going to come a point where when people like me are ranting about how we’re an autocracy and fucking cocksucker MAGA people will sip their Bud Light and say, “Boy, we never were a democracy. And I’d advise you to be quiet, ICE might hear you.”

The other option is, of course, that the only way to clear the air on this issue is to, well, fight a civil war over it. And if the Good Guys (that means, people like me) win that dumb war, then we can go back to everyone taking it for granted that the United States is, in fact, a “liberal democracy.”

The ‘Impossible’ Scenario, Redux


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

For about a decade now, I’ve weighed in my mind whenever I’m bored the conditions of what I’ve come to think of as the “impossible” scenario because it’s impossible to solve using the conditions of the scenario.

The scenario goes something like this — if extraterrestrials moved a huge number of humans to a new solar system, how would you organize the government of your new world? The reason why it’s impossible to solve is the earth, on a political basis, is actually several civilizations. If you factor in all competing goals and objectives of all the different types of countries in the world — and give them equal weight — it’s impossible to think up any way to have a “human government” on a planetary scale.

Just the United States would make it impossible to have a truly “human government” on the scale of an entire planet. The United States is so divided at the moment that half the electorate would probably rather end humanity, period, than risk any abridgement of their gun rights. I wish I was kidding.

I may have recently come up with a solution to this seemingly impossible scenario — either you have a global government that uses nations as little more than administrative districts or you do away with nation-states altogether and base your entire culture and system of government on the United States. I pick the United States not just because, duh, I’m American, but also the traditional concept of the United States is it’s an idea and not blood and soil.

As such, if humanity had aliens breathing down its neck to pick a uniform form of government, the United Sates is big enough population wise and based on an idea to the point that you could, in a sense, make all of humanity Americans. I’m not saying this would go over great with 95% of the world’s population, but if you were desperate, really desperate to unite all of humanity under one form of government on a global scale, you could do worse than basing your new new world’s culture and government on the United State’s.

Neither one of the solutions I’ve come up with fixes all of the problems of the scenario, but they come close enough to make me feel pretty good.