ReportWire

Tag: dial up

  • How to Give Neurotic Losers the Main Character Treatment

    How to Give Neurotic Losers the Main Character Treatment

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    It’s really no wonder that there has been this scattering to the winds of people on social media now, as if they didn’t need another reason to migrate to other platforms. I remember that moment when there was Threads, Bluesky, Twitter, Mastodon, and some other ones—and I’m like, this is the fucking War of the Roses.

    I dunk on Twitter constantly—I am never calling it X—but can’t seem to quit. It’s still important and useful for many reasons.

    From my vantage point, the utility to the writer is it provides a buffet of freak behavior that you would never have access to otherwise.

    All the trolls.

    Well, you get examples of pathologies that you wouldn’t come across in your ordinary life, but on the other hand, it also has stretched everybody’s imagination of what kind of people are out there. This becomes even more interesting and complicated when you contemplate that people are not really being themselves online either. A reader picking up a book now is going to be, I think, less skeptical about extremes of behavior in a character that’s on the internet, which gives you a lot more latitude to be absurdist in a way that doesn’t skirt realism.

    Why was the, quote-unquote, loser or reject such an enticing figure to pursue in this project?

    The obvious answer—it’s what’s on my mind. Being somebody who has gone through a lot of rejection, and not really finding a ton of books, to my mind, that engaged centrally about that subject, or books that went beyond treating it as a brief plot point, was the drive for it.

    What themes felt important to unpack?

    As far as how I connected it to the internet, one, it’s where people go for answers very often, especially answers to questions that are too shameful to ask in real life. They seek out people who’ve been through the same things. This used to be the primary task of literature.

    The other thing is, when you’re lonely, especially when you’re lonely in a kind of wounded way, it is extremely enticing to be on a medium that can’t reject you. The internet is never off. Unless you are somewhere without access, there is never a point where you are denied from using it. It creates a zero-calorie form of socialization that will soothe lonely people, at least temporarily. When writing about contemporary life, it’s hard to avoid.

    Is loneliness one of the defining symptoms of this current era?

    No, loneliness has always existed. In a strange way, our access to witness loneliness has radically increased. There is something to the fact that the availability of a substitute for socialization, rather than in-person meeting, has contributed to that a little bit. Social media being solely responsible for having generated it, is a little bit of a moral panic.

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    Jason Parham

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  • Social Media Swallowed Gen Z. This Film Shows Exactly How

    Social Media Swallowed Gen Z. This Film Shows Exactly How

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    Twenty years ago, MySpace and Facebook ushered in an inspired age of social media. Today, the sticky parables of online life are inescapable: Connection is a convenience as much as it is a curse. A lot’s changed since those early years. In June, the US surgeon general, Vivek H. Murthy, called for a warning label on social platforms that have played a part in the mental health crisis among young people, of which “social media has emerged as an important contributor.” Social Studies, the new FX docuseries from documentarian Lauren Greenfield, bring the unsettling effects of that crisis into startling view.

    The thesis was simple. Greenfield set out to catalog the first generation for which social media was an omnipresent, preordained reality. From August 2021 to the summer of 2022, she embedded with a group of teens at several Los Angeles–area high schools for the entire school year (the majority of the students attend Palisades Charter), as they obsessed over crushes, applied to college, attended prom, and pursued their passions.

    “It was an unusual documentary for me,” Greenfield, a veteran filmmaker of cultural surveys like The Queen of Versailles and Generation Wealth, says of how the series came together. “The kids were co-investigators on this journey.” Along with the 1,200 hours of principal photography Greenfield and her team captured, students were also asked to save screen recordings of their daily phone usage, which amounted to another 2,000 hours of footage. Stitched together, the documentary illuminates the tangled and unrelenting experiences of teens as they deal with body dysmorphia, bullying, social acceptance, and suicidal ideation. “That’s the part that is the most groundbreaking of this project, because we haven’t really seen that before.”

    The depth of the five-episode series benefits from Greenfield’s encyclopedic approach. The result is perhaps the most accurate and comprehensive portrait of Gen Z’s relationship to social media. With the release of the final episode this week (you can stream it on Hulu), I spoke with Greenfield over Zoom about the sometimes cruel, seemingly infinite experience of being a teenager online today.

    JASON PARHAM: In one episode, a student says, “I think you can’t log in to TikTok and be safe.” Having spent the previous three years fully immersed in this world, I’m curious if you think social media is bad?

    LAUREN GREENFIELD: I don’t think it’s a binary question. I really went into this as a social experiment. This is the first generation that has never grown up without it. So even though social media has been around for a while, they are the first generation of digital natives. I thought it was the right time to look at how it was impacting childhood. It’s the biggest cultural influence of this generation’s growing up, bigger than parents, peers, or school, especially coming out of Covid, which was when we started filming. You know, I didn’t go into filming with a point of view or an activist agenda, but I certainly was moved by what the teenagers said to me and what they showed in their lives, which is that it’s a pretty dire situation.

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    Jason Parham

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  • The Black List Upended the Film Industry. The Book World Is Next

    The Black List Upended the Film Industry. The Book World Is Next

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    Fifty-four Academy Awards and 267 nominations. That’s the sort of concrete impact the Black List has had since launching in 2005 as Hollywood insiders’ go-to index of emerging screenwriters. The Social Network, Edge of Tomorrow, Selma, Don’t Worry Darling—each one started as a submission on the Black List.

    “I knew there were great writers and great scripts that existed outside of the Hollywood ecosystem,” its founder Franklin Leonard says. “I wanted to find a way for that to benefit everybody.”

    With success came growth, and growth brought opportunity. Established as a website in 2012, the Black List has since proved itself a fundamental resource for agents, producers, and studios in search of their next hit. Across its nearly 20 years, it has platformed thousands of screenplays and television pilots. Today it boasts some 7,000 entertainment professionals.

    In September, Leonard took another leap—expanding into the world of books. The Black List now hosts fiction manuscripts. To help navigate the unfamiliar meadows of publishing, he brought on board Randy Winston, the former director of writing programs at New York’s Center for Fiction and a kingmaker in his own right.

    As for how it works: Interested writers create a profile (free), upload their novel-length manuscripts of any genre ($30 a month), and, if they so choose, can pay for expert feedback from literary professionals via the site ($150). Like the annual Black List, the best manuscripts are featured in Leonard’s subscriber newsletter and guaranteed to land in the inbox of publishing industry power players.

    Curious about the expansion, I phoned Franklin to hear how he again plans to capture lightning in a bottle.

    JASON PARHAM: There’s no nice way to ask this, so I’ll just ask it. What makes you think you can pull this off again?

    FRANKLIN LEONARD: It’s a fair question [laughs]. And I’ll be honest, I was loath to jump into it. It’s not a great look to be like, “I’m from Hollywood and I’m here to save you.”

    Yes, I know the Hollywood savior complex well.

    And that was the last thing I wanted to do. I built this thing specifically to solve the problem and a system that I saw in Hollywood. I didn’t work in books, so I didn’t want to be presumptuous and assume that you just take that and apply it. So last year, Allie Sanders, a book agent at Anonymous Content, set up a series of meetings for me. She said, “You tell people how you plan to do this, and ask them to tell you where you are wrong.” I was very happy to discover that people were like, there’s a need for this. The question became, how does this model need to be shifted so that it can be successful?

    There’s an obvious need for it, as you said, but only because of very obvious problems endemic to institutions like Hollywood and publishing. Why are they so reluctant to change?

    There’s a lot of reasons. The most material one is actually just a practical one: There is a superabundance of material. There are more screenplays written every year than any one person could read, or any small group of people could read. There are more novels written every year than any editorial staff of a publishing house could read.

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    Jason Parham

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  • Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will

    Chat Podcasts Rule the Market—and Always Will

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    Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows (8 percent year-over-year), it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes quite unserious splendor—that continually draws people in.

    The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that have become fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare like I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more on that one later) have also found tremendous followings. Other chat-casts, like Club Shay Shay, seem to court controversy with every release. “Katt Williams, please close the portal,” @nuffsaidny recently joked on X, alluding to the comedian’s guest appearance from January when he prophetically proclaimed of 2024: “All lies will be exposed.”

    “That appointment—that relationship—is everything,” Eric Eddings, vice president of audio at Kevin Hart’s media company Hartbeat, says of the bond chat-casts are able to establish with listeners.

    In 2014, along with Brittany Luse, Eddings launched For Colored Nerds, a weekly gabfest about pop culture, race, and current events (full disclosure: I appeared on an episode in 2017). After Nerds, Eddings went to Gimlet Media, where he co-anchored The Nod (also with Luse) and produced for the shows Undone and Habitat, before moving to SiriusXM. Today, Eddings steers podcast development for Hartbeat. What was true of the medium when he started out, he tells me, is still true today. In a recent video call, we discussed the state of the industry and its sometimes complicated evolutions.

    JASON PARHAM: Why have chat-casts gotten so popular?

    ERIC EDDINGS: There are a few reasons. Just to be straight up, a lot of the companies wanted to figure out ways to invest less in programming. Narrative podcasts are very expensive to make. They require a large upfront investment, and then you try to figure out how to make them as successful as possible if they resonate with audiences. And a lot of companies have had difficulty bringing those types of projects to market given the struggles of the entertainment media industry.

    So it’s a money issue?

    Podcasts with chat as a focus are a little bit easier to test out, put in the market, and to create each week. You’ve seen a lot of a turn towards that. Those are the macro influences. But that also short changes a little bit of the conversation.

    How so?

    Even though podcasting has been out for a while, you’ve also seen a lot more groups of people come to podcasts in new ways. There’s more familiarity with the medium. You’ve seen comedians, you’ve seen influencers. There was a trend early in the pandemic where folks were like, “Ah, we’ve got to start a podcast.” Whereas now I think people are having ideas or finding people they want to collaborate with and see podcasting as the place to explore that. It’s a really flexible medium. Collaboration allows for experimentation. And that type of experimentation is so much easier in a chat context because the conversation is the point.

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    Jason Parham

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  • The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

    The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

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    Angie Nwandu launched The Shade Room in 2014 as a side hustle. Today, that side hustle—which grew from an Instagram-only celebrity tabloid into a media company with a 40-person staff—reaches 29 million social media obsessives by tapping into their wolfish appetite for drama.

    The Shade Room pioneered a unique, if somewhat innovative, brand of digital media, merging elements of fan culture around the machine of celebrity news (Shade Room regulars are called Roomies). More than your run-of-the-mill gossip rag or news aggregator, TSR evolved into an information hub for “the culture,” Nwandu says, “but also a reflection of it and voice for it. We’re known as a megaphone.”

    The primary focus of the platform is the fragile world of Black celebrity. Want to know who NFL quarterback Jalen Hurts got engaged to or why Naomi Campbell has beef with Rihanna? Maybe you are wondering why a Louisville woman claims Kanye West “telegraphically” told her to allegedly steal a vehicle with a child inside? TSR has you covered.

    I recently phoned Nwandu to chat about the controversial influence of The Shade Room and the legacy she wants to leave behind. The platform has slowly branched into different coverage areas—politics, investigative reporting, spirituality—and she says that’s all part of a larger plan to eventually move beyond celebrity gossip, which she describes as “tiring.”

    Nwandu hasn’t gotten there yet. The week we spoke, music mogul Diddy was arrested after a grand jury indicted him on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy (he pleaded not guilty), so we also talked about that—and Nwandu was an open book.

    JASON PARHAM: The Shade Room was a pioneer of social-media-centric celebrity news on Instagram. Today there are hundreds of accounts that do what you do. How does that feel?

    ANGIE NWANDU: Nobody ever gives this nod to The Shade Room but we served up a blueprint that was able to be replicated. I’m friends with Shawn McKenzie [founder of The Spiritual Word] and Jason Lee [founder of Hollywood Unlocked], and we’ve had conversations. I had talks with both of them where I shared tips and advice. I’m happy to see that our blueprint was able to inspire other Black media companies who are thriving in their own right. To see the success of all these platforms is amazing to me. I’m actually really proud of that because who doesn’t want to start something that creates a ripple effect?

    The Shade Room has never shied away from controversy but I imagine there are editorial guidelines that you follow. What won’t you post?

    If I say which stories, it would defeat the purpose now. I will say, what we don’t do is out people. A lot of people send us very salacious stories where they are outing people. That’s something that we stay away from. In the beginning we were kinda wild, but generally that is something we have avoided. I’ve seen the damage in what it does to people who are not ready to step out in that way. We have tried to move away from invasion of privacy in certain areas.

    But is it not called The Shade Room for a reason?

    We’re trying to change what we post and move towards positivity. We used to post clapbacks all day long and we have eased off of that. It’s been hard because our name is The Shade Room—like, if Diddy goes to jail, we have to get that up. But there’s a lot we won’t post. It’s been a dance, for sure.

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    Jason Parham

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  • This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over

    This Digital Archivist Believes Hollywood’s ‘Competition Era’ Is Over

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    On the subject of money and ownership. Earlier this year, following the cancellation of several Black TV shows, you wrote, “studios and streamers no longer care about loyalty or enduring legacy.” Why does Hollywood, in 2024, still have such a difficult time aligning its legacy with its business?

    Well, here’s the thing, the legacy business, they feel as if that work is behind them.

    But isn’t that what Hollywood is built on?

    Yes, but to create new legacy and new inroads, to them, that is less important than extracting every possible dollar from existing IP. It’s more expensive, quote-unquote, to create something than it is to rest on existing laurels. The beginning of the end of this, to me, was when Warner Brothers and UPN merged into The CW. Now, 20 years later, the CW is a shell of itself. In mergers, you’re no longer competing with someone to make the best content. With the merger of Warner Brothers and Discovery, they own, what, one fourth of TV? That competition era of television—it’s over.

    Which has a direct impact on the creative side.

    The legacy-driven model only happens now in vanity. So a lot of stars are using their own distribution or first-look deals to produce things. And these are the majority of people who are allowed to create. So what does Hollywood mean when the only people who are given freedom are people who have already done the taxing work—if they have at all—to become stars? Hollywood is not in the business of guarantee. Everything must be proven before it’s even created.

    And if that’s the case, so many people get left out.

    The fight for nostalgia as currency comes in a moment where some of the highest rated things are non-white. That’s not an accident. It’s as if television, media, and filmmaking are becoming manifest destiny in the wrong ways. And there’s nothing sadder.

    Perhaps we need better frameworks.

    People have upended industries to chase Netflix. And no one has caught up. Everything has fallen in this chase. What’s happening now is, people are only duplicating the best and the most watched. There is no diversity in how things are being delivered.

    You once described “post-2020 Black media as akin to a modern day blaxploitation boom.” It got me thinking about platforms like Tubi and AllBlk, which are sometimes mocked as being a kind of streaming ghetto, but those same streamers have also given opportunities to young creators.

    Blaxploitation, as I was saying, makes way for Spike Lee, it makes way for the ‘80s independent Black movement that, of course, shapes everything we know about modern Black film and modern Black media. At every valley, there is a peak. It’s the nature of life. So what do I think is a head? We should be thinking about independent models that have existed before our current era. There are many ways to make media. With pilot season essentially dying, as the studios have announced, what are some ways that Black creators can forge together to make what they desire?

    I mean, I don’t know if I have the answers, but I do have the curiosity. And oftentimes curiosity and care—and leading with them—can transform how we understand history and the future.

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    Jason Parham

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  • The Creators of ‘Industry’ Know Banking Is a Rigged Game

    The Creators of ‘Industry’ Know Banking Is a Rigged Game

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    Ambition is a curse in the arena of high finance. At the prestigious London investment bank Pierpoint, which doubles as the backdrop for the Gen Z banking drama Industry, a cohort of university graduates vie for money and power. Harper (Myha’la), Yasmin (Marisa Abela), and Rob (Harry Lawtey) are desperate to prove they belong, that they’ve got the mettle to survive the battleground of the trading floor, but Pierpoint is a special kind of hell: Ambition is only as useful as your will to lie, cheat, and outmaneuver your way to the top. As easily as it opens doors, it just as easily gets you stabbed in the back.

    “When you go down the laundry list of what they’ve done and what they did to get there,” cocreator Mickey Down says of his beloved characters, “they can be considered pretty heinous individuals.” But their savory deceit is why we watch. It’s why Industry has become The Show of the Season, the internet’s new meme-machine, drawing expected-but-flawed comparisons to Succession, another HBO supernova. Industry is a beast all its own.

    Now in its third season, its most audacious and anxiety-riddled, Industry occupies the esteemed Sunday night 9 pm slot that Games of Thrones and The Sopornos made famous. The show is still the show many of us fell in love with when it debuted in 2020: all ego and heart and reckless ambition. Only, Down and cocreator Konrad Kay have upped the stakes even more this time around, illustrating how sinister and deep relationships run across media, politics, and finance for London’s privileged class.

    This week’s upcoming episode—deliciously-titled “White Mischief”; fans of Uncut Gems rejoice, this one’s just for you—marks the season’s halfway point. Over Zoom from their respective residences in London, Down and Kay spoke with me about where the show has been and where it’s possibly headed next.

    JASON PARHAM: I read that the initial pitch for this season was “coke and boats.” What was HBO’s response?

    MICKEY DOWN: We had a 30,000-foot view of what the season was going to be in terms of the business story. And then we thought, look, we shouldn’t be scared to have a slight genre element to the show. We were already talking about Yasmin’s father, which we thought was one of the most interesting parts of the second season. We had the idea that her dad’s gone missing, and she’s been bearing the brunt of that in the media. We had all of that. We just hadn’t decided how to show it yet. So we said, what if we have a secondary timeline that has a bit of a mystery element to it? And what if we start the show from there? So we sent an email to HBO with the header “coke and boats” and said this is where we want to start the show.

    Incredible.

    MD: We told them that we want to dip back into this timeline when we feel like it’s good punctuation. We wanted to have this slow drip feel of what actually happened on the boat. And their response was very positive.

    The show is continually testing its limits. Erect penises. Cum scenes. Crazy yacht parties. All kinds of drugs. Did HBO ever ask you to reel it in?

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    Jason Parham

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  • Drew Afualo Will Never Stop Making Fun of Misogynist Men

    Drew Afualo Will Never Stop Making Fun of Misogynist Men

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    Drew Afualo is never at a loss for words. On the topic of idiot men who get a rise out of shaming women online—nitpicking them over their weight, their dress, or their body count (when it comes to sexual partners)—she, in fact, won’t shut up.

    It is why her fans, and detractors, keep coming back. In the years since Afualo first started blasting men for their shitty, anti-feminist behavior on TikTok in 2020, she has become a household name among Gen Z thanks to her high-caliber, laser-focused, near Shakespearean tongue-lashings.

    As host of The Comment Section podcast on Spotify, Afualo is adamant about where and with whom she stands. Her platform, she says, is one men do not have a seat on. “As someone who makes a living by fumigating the internet of these human roaches, I always say, I have the most aggressive form of job security there is,” she writes in her new memoir-manifesto Loud: Accepting Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve, out July 30, “because men will never stop being terrible, and I will never stop calling them out for it. I sleep soundly at night on a mattress that those bitches paid for.”

    The formula is working. Afualo is everywhere now—8 million followers on TikTok, 1 million on Instagram—and perhaps most proudly, living rent-free in the minds of Logan Paul-loving podcast bros who feel threatened by female empowerment. Over the phone from Los Angeles, we talked about the influence of family, how humor works, and why she’s not overly concerned about TikTok getting banned.

    JASON PARHAM: If it’s OK, let’s begin with the biggest news of the week. Vice President Kamala Harris announced her presidential run, and will be the likely Democratic nominee. How are you feeling about that?

    DREW AFUALO: Hopeful. I feel like any woman in a position of power is a win for women everywhere. It’s very exciting.

    I’ve heard a lot of Kamala can’t do it. She’s not ready. Why do you think it’s so hard for certain people to believe a woman can be president?

    Probably the same reason that, you know, the patriarchy has convinced most people that women can’t do anything without the help of a man. But if we were to trace all the world’s problems back to a source, it always comes from a man. I don’t know, you tell me, why do people think women are incapable when men have created all of the world’s problems?

    You engage similar topics in Loud. In one chapter, titled “It’s Okay to Be Mean,” you write, “Since the advent of social media, the internet has been a minefield for anyone who is not a cisgendered heterosexual white man.” I recently joked with a friend how I sometimes wonder if the first lie of social media was that everyone deserves a voice online. So many platforms have become a breeding ground for hate.

    The people that I stitch [on TikTok] are pretty indicative of “Well, maybe not.” For me, there is a beauty and a curse to the internet. It’s wonderful that so many people have found community and connections through the internet and been able to reach so many people, myself included.

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    Jason Parham

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  • Elon Musk Couldn’t Beat Him. AI Just Might

    Elon Musk Couldn’t Beat Him. AI Just Might

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    At times, the effects of it feel uncontainable.

    This is the third election cycle in the US—2016, 2020, 2024—where social media is going to have played a really significant role in the election. The US still hasn’t gotten to grips with the fact that our democracy is becoming more and more precarious. It’s becoming more polarized, it’s becoming more hateful, it’s becoming less capable of consensus. With the 2020 election we saw that people no longer even accept elections are real. It’s important that we start to put into place the transparency and the accountability that’s required for these platforms that control the information ecosystem that has such an enormous impact on our electoral cycles.

    Why do you think it’s been so difficult to regulate social media and the harm it can cause?

    Countries around the world are doing it. The UK legislated the Online Safety Act. The EU legislated the Digital Services Act. Canada has legislated through C-63, and I’m going to give evidence in Ottawa at some point on that. In the US, we have seen social media companies put up their most aggressive defenses that they put up anywhere in the world. They’re spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying on the Hill, in supporting candidates, trying to stop the inevitable from happening.

    Something’s gotta work, no?

    Ironically, I think the thing that is most likely to eventually move lawmakers is parents, and parents in particular worrying about the impact of social media platforms on their kids’ mental health. And that’s the thing with social media, it affects everything. CCDH looks at the effects of social media, disregulation on our ability to deal with the climate crisis, on sexual and reproductive rights, on public health and vaccines during the pandemic, on identity-based hate and kids. It’s the kids’ thing—really, it just is such an unimpeachable case for change.

    My wife and I are having our first soon. I understand what you would do to defend your kids from being harmed. I think that when you’ve got platforms that are hurting our kids at such a scale, it is inevitable that change will come.

    The optimist in me hopes you are right. The next generation should inherit a better world, but so much is working against that.

    You know, one of the things that really scares me, we did some polling last year that showed that young people for the first time ever, 14- to 17-year-olds—the first generation who were raised on algorithmically ordered short-form video platforms—they are the most conspiracist generation and age cohort of any in America.

    Oh wow.

    Old people are slightly more likely to believe conspiracy theories. But it goes down as you get younger and then 14- to 17-year-olds, bam, the highest of all of them. We did that by testing across nine conspiracy theories: transphobic conspiracy theories, climate-denying conspiracy theories, racist conspiracy theories, antisemitic conspiracy theories, conspiracy theories about the deep state. And on every single one, young people were more likely to believe it. And it’s because we’ve created for them an information ecosystem that’s fundamentally chaotic.

    And is only getting more chaotic.

    Look, the way that tyrants retain power is not just by lying to people, it’s by making them unable to tell what truth is. And it creates apathy. Apathy is the tool of the tyrant. It was true with the Soviet Union. It was true with Afghanistan. There’s no secret to the fact that CCDH is senior leadership of people who come from places where we’ve seen this kind of destruction of the information ecosystem lead to tyrannical government. So, yeah, there is this awareness that things could get real bad real fast. And you’re right in saying that we worry about our kids, and we want to make our world better for them.

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    Jason Parham

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  • The Studio Executive Who Wants Hollywood to Get Real About Bad Storytelling

    The Studio Executive Who Wants Hollywood to Get Real About Bad Storytelling

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    That’s fair.

    When you think about building stories from multiple audiences, not just audiences of color, but also queer audiences, disabled audiences, female audiences, I mean, we’re seeing so much evidence at the box office lately suggesting how difficult it is to construct a hit that isn’t a hit with BIPOC and female audiences. Unfortunately, we don’t have as much data on queer and disabled audiences from a box office perspective, but everything that I’m reading tells me that as those audiences become more vocal it is impossible to build a hit without them.

    When we say we are trying to broaden the commercial appeal, it’s really trying to give you a lot of different entry points into different audiences from a more authentic point of view. So that when they see that character in the movie trailer, they feel as if real thought went into it as opposed to what feels like more surface-level or token representation that doesn’t really yield what you’re looking for.

    What would you say to someone who calls Story Spark another AI tool studios are forcing on an already fractured industry?

    There is no AI involved in Story Spark whatsoever. The only thing that is at work is your brain.

    The original AI.

    Right. Actual intelligence. One thing from my time in tech was learning how to build scalable solutions that people can use. You are not uploading a script. You are taking a script that you know well and you’re asking yourself a set of questions about it or you’re asking your creative collaborators a set of questions about it. To the idea of studios forcing things onto a fractured marketplace, I think that one of the lessons for me coming out of the strikes is that consumers are extremely discerning and part of the role studios play in a good partnership with a storyteller is finding those places of positive construction, debate, and dialogue. If the studio exec agrees with everything and has no notes, it’s probably not gonna be the best movie it could be. The same with storytellers—you don’t have to take every note, but you can’t take no notes.

    Because if you don’t, what happens?

    In my opinion, there would be nothing worse than showing up on opening weekend and all of a sudden there are narratives connected to your movie that never came up in development. We want to take that off the table and front-load those conversations.

    Story Spark isn’t AI, but AI is coming for Hollywood regardless. OpenAI is courting many of the big studios with Sora, a text-driven video generator. Many filmmakers have strong reservations about the use of AI and its consequences. Would you say those reservations are justified?

    What has always happened as new technologies come online is that there is the immediate sort of, Oh my god, VCRs mean that no one’s ever gonna go to the movies again. And then we realized, no, we actually still like going out and doing those things. Streaming means albums will never be listened to again. And it’s like, no, actually, we still enjoy listening to an artist’s work from start to finish. That’s how I listened to Cowboy Carter and to Renaissance. While the fear is reasonable, I think that it will create really smart limits.

    How so?

    We as humans, but also as creatives, have always been able to navigate and to leverage to our benefit, whatever these different technologies are. I don’t see any evidence that AI will be significantly different from that in the long run. For people on the studio side and on the creative side—and anywhere in between—my invitation would be to think about how AI is a tool in the tool kit, but it never replaces the person holding the tool. Because we have knives, does it mean we are useless now? No. I can cut those things faster instead of having to rip the chicken apart. I’m still a chef.

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    Jason Parham

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  • The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers

    The Anderson Cooper of Black Twitter Believes Journalism Can Survive Influencers

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    Is that how you see yourself—as a newsfluencer?

    I’m a journalist first, but there are people who fall under that category. Influencers aren’t a bad thing, necessarily. I know there’s a lot of debate around it. But there are people who have leaned into the news as part of their brand and what they do. People thought that’s what I was. I actually found out that a lot of people didn’t even know that I was a journalist until relatively recently. They thought I was, and this is a quote, “Some dude sharing news stories online.”

    For the longest time I thought you were a bot.

    A lot of people thought I was a bot. Or that I was just scheduling posts. And now I feel I can’t change my profile picture. People might think I got hacked.

    Is the attention economy so fucked now beyond the point of saving that it’s impossible to break through the chatter in a meaningful way?

    When you think about it, we’re competing with Instagram aggregators, blogs, social media pages focused solely on news, podcasts—it’s all over the place. I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing. If it wasn’t for social media, I would not have been able to take the path I did. We are in a crisis of attention, but what I find more frightening is the rise of misinformation and disinformation. That’s more chilling to me than the amount of people who want to do the best work that they can, whether that’s on YouTube or TikTok. There’s more than enough happening out there for us all to get a piece or whatever.

    True.

    I’m more concerned about the bad actors who are going after people who may not be reading the link. They might just be reading the headline, right? They might just be looking at the post with the black font that says, hey, this is what’s happening on Instagram, and that’s it.

    Because the state of news media has gotten so splintered, is this why you do what you do?

    I want to be able to be a resource for people online as far as getting them the information that they need. I mean, I love when people come up to me and they’re like, “Hey, you know, I found out about this through you.” I love hearing that because I do think there’s so much out there that there’s an equal amount of things that are being missed or underreported or that maybe people aren’t paying attention to.

    The reach you have is pretty incredible.

    What I like most about whenever I’m sharing a story, I know that it’s not just readers who are at work who, you know, just opened up their phone and were like, “Oh wow, I found out about this story.” It’s also assignment editors who follow me. People at The New York Times, at CNN—

    —at BuzzFeed. I bet they regret rejecting you now [laughs].

    It’s funny because people will tell me, “Hey, we shared your tweet in our newsroom Slack channel. That’s how we found out about the story, and now we’re going to write about it.” So you don’t have to have millions of followers, but I have a reach that’s a little different. And that’s important to me.

    It should be.

    That’s not to say I always get everything right. I always tell people, journalists get things wrong. We issue corrections. We try our best to do what we can. But what’s most important to me is making sure that the stories that I think people need to know about or need to read about, I try to get them out there—and apparently my Twitter page is the best way to do it.

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    Jason Parham

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