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  • Netflix Isn’t About Flicks Anymore

    Netflix Isn’t About Flicks Anymore

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    “Netflix” was always a bit of a misnomer. In a well-worn piece of Silicon Valley lore, cofounder Reed Hastings once said “there’s a reason we didn’t call the company DVD-by-Mail.com,” noting that the service was always meant to evolve into a streaming platform. In choosing that moniker—rather than, say, Netshowz—the company positioned itself as a place for movies. Flicks, though, have never been its strongest suit.

    Not to say that Netflix doesn’t have good movies—each year they pull out at least one or two Oscar contenders—but its series will always be what keeps its 260 million-plus subscribers coming back. Even when their shows get canceled after two seasons. Its first big hits were House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black and if there’s anything on the service making waves right now, it’s the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Ripley (as in the Talented Mr.) or (somewhat controversially) Baby Reindeer. This week, when WIRED went about compiling our list of movies to watch on the service, the pickin’s were slim.

    It’s not just Netflix. Right now the best things to watch on almost any streaming service are shows. Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max, despite being the reincarnation of something once called Home Box Office and having a back catalog full of Warner Bros. films, has people frothing over its upcoming seasons of House of the Dragon and The Last of Us. Sure, it has the Dune films, but it’s possible people will keep coming back for its Bene Gesserit spinoff series, Dune: Prophecy.

    Disney+ similarly has the entire back catalogs of Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars, but staked a claim when it launched by offering original series like Andor and Loki. This week, Disney CEO Bob Iger conceded the company “tried to tell too many stories” in the beginning, but that doesn’t mean X-Men ‘97 isn’t one of the most talked about things on the platform right now. Or, consider this, Disney+’s most-watched movie in 2023 was Moana, with nearly 12 billion minutes viewed, according to Nielsen. Bluey more than triples that total with 44 billion minutes viewed. Yes, Bluey is the number one show parents love to play on a loop, but The Mandalorian also beat Moana for minutes viewed.

    Netflix, much like Amazon, started from a different place than Warner Bros. Discovery and Disney, because it didn’t, and doesn’t, have a decades-old vault of content. But if the last few years have demonstrated anything, it’s that streaming services want to replace television networks—or turn into them—and that means shows. If anything, streamers’ reimagined made-for-TV movies are a special treat, not the main course. Prime Video’s two-hour feature Road House is alright, but the eight-episode show Fallout is keeping the streamer in the conversation right now.

    Nowhere has this been more evident than this week’s upfronts. An annual bonanza during which television networks convince advertisers their airtime is the best airtime (if you think it’s painful to watch Ryan Reynolds try to land a Deadpool joke in a room full of suits, it is), the entire dog-and-pony show has gone through a couple changes in recent years. Last year, as HBO Max was mutating into Max, the events got picketed by striking members of the Writers Guild of America. Netflix canceled its in-person event and went virtual. This year, Netflix, Amazon, and even YouTube showed up. Their arrival was so feared/lauded that The Hollywood Reporter ran a piece about how “an asteroid is about to hit upfronts.”

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  • Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery Just Reinvented Cable

    Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery Just Reinvented Cable

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    Said it before, will say it again: Streaming is just cable TV now. So much so that the services created to give cord-cutters the content they want have now resorted to reinventing the wheel. To wit: On Wednesday, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announced a new partnership, one that will bundle Disney+, Hulu, and Max into one service. For those keeping track, it’ll theoretically put HBO, HGTV, Hulu, ABC, FX, CNN, Disney (so, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, etc.), and the DC Extended Universe into one pile, just like the cable packages of yore.

    The new service is set to launch in the summer. Specifics like pricing and whether or not it’ll be a stand-alone app with its own name (might we suggest DisneyMax±?) have yet to be announced, but there will be ad-free and ad-supported tiers. If it is a stand-alone, one can only imagine what wild color scheme it will have, but if it’s a combo of purple and that new sea-green that the Disney+/Hulu service has, I’ll scream.

    In addition to making things difficult for those of us who make all those what-to-watch guides Jack Dorsey likes to tweet about, the new bundle also sets up a face-off between streaming’s old guard and new. In a weird reversal, the old guard in this case are services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, the ones who got everyone to cut the cord in the first place. The newcomers are the legacy media companies that created their own streamers to try to keep up. After a shaky start, Disney finally showed signs of turning a streaming profit in its quarterly earnings report this week. Max, meanwhile, has been making money for Warner Bros. Discovery for a while, even when it loses subscribers. (Ads, baby!)

    Combined, the offerings of these two companies might be tough to beat, a catalog to rival Netflix’s, which could cause a bit of hand-wringing at the streaming behemoth. (Apple TV+ and Amazon might care, but they both have other ways of making money, like shipping you stuff and selling you new iPads.)

    A recent Parrot Analytics report found that when the monthly cost of each streaming service is weighed against demand for its original shows and movies, Max and the Disney+/Hulu bundle are both in the bang-for-your-buck Top 3. Disney’s bundle is expensive, but it’s got a lot to offer; Max is $4 cheaper, but has less stuff. The other one? Netflix’s standard plan, which at $15.49 is 50 cents less than Max, but has more in-demand content. If the new DisneyMax± bundle (sorry, that’s its name now) is competitively priced, it could be a thorn in Netflix’s side, especially as the companies roll out the Star Wars series The Acolyte and new seasons of the hit shows House of the Dragon and The Bear.

    One thing mysteriously missing from the Disney-WBD announcement, though, is whether this new streaming bundle will offer live sports. Considering the companies are teaming up (heh) with Fox Corp. to offer a streaming sports bundle, odds are it likely won’t. But as the consolidation of streaming continues, there’s no guarantee a similar service that includes sports won’t come later,



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  • Jerry Seinfeld, ‘Hacks,’ and the Future of Comedy in a Digital World

    Jerry Seinfeld, ‘Hacks,’ and the Future of Comedy in a Digital World

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    Once upon a time in Hollywood, Jon Favreau wrote a movie. It was called Swingers. It was about a group of twentysomething white dudes—played by Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and Ron Livingston—trying to make it as actors. Toward the movie’s end, Favreau’s character, the affable Mike, is telling a woman he just met (played by Heather Graham) why he moved to Los Angeles: “When I lived in New York, they made it sound like they were giving sitcoms out to stand-ups at the airport here.”

    The joke was that, when the movie came out in 1996, shows led by comedians were everywhere: Seinfeld, Mad About You, Martin, Ellen. Getting on TV back then just seemed like a matter of being kind of funny and having a name that looked good on a title card.

    The irony, though, is that following Swingers, those actors did become incredibly famous. Favreau especially, though now he’s mostly producer-writer-director who holds the keys to Disney/Lucasfilm/Marvel in his hands, having worked on everything from Iron Man to The Lion King to The Mandalorian. Vaughn and Livingston both made it as actors. They became the people their characters were aspiring to be. Such things were possible then.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    They’re not now. Today, very few, if any, television sitcoms are based on stand-up acts. Network TV just doesn’t have time for that anymore. Streaming services may be lining up to run the next stand-up special from Dave Chappelle or Chris Rock, but shows starring stand-ups filled with jokes and plot lines loosely based on their acts feel like relics. All the funny people seem to have migrated to TikTok.

    If you ask Jerry Seinfeld, this is because “the extreme left and PC crap” ruined comedy. Or so he told The New Yorker over the weekend. Funny people are so worried about offending folks, Jerry says, they just don’t make jokes like they used to. Larry David, who created Seinfeld with Seinfeld and stars in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, is “grandfathered in.” Now, the comedian says, networks aren’t smart enough to figure out, “Do we take the heat or just not be funny?”

    One flaw with this logic: There is a comedy on HBO that actually manages to do both, and is smart enough: Hacks. The series, which launched its third season Thursday, follows a comedian from Seinfeld’s generation, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), who hires a young writer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), to collaborate on jokes. Ava, a quintessential lefty Gen Zer, calls Vance out on her occasionally uncool gags. They bicker; resolutions emerge. Criticizing the current friction in comedy over “how far is too far?” is the source of much of the comedy on Hacks. Perhaps these jokes live beyond the imaginations of comedians who don’t want to evolve.

    Broad City veterans Jen Statsky, Paul W. Downs, and Lucia Aniello created Hacks as, what they call, their “love letter to comedy.” The trio came up in the New York comedy scene, where, in a flip to the scene depicted in Swingers, comedians could work in improv for a while and then find work on a show like Broad City to make their break. Comedy Central doesn’t really do original scripted shows like that anymore, something Aniello recently told The Hollywood Reporter is “so bad” for the funny business. “There’s already a lack of young, cutting-edge comedy, because Comedy Central doesn’t exist anymore.”

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  • 1994 Was the Last Good Year—and It’s Still Going

    1994 Was the Last Good Year—and It’s Still Going

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    In 1994, everything was cool. Music, movies, TV—the cultural output felt alive. People were also very cool, or they were achieving cool by trying not to be. Anyway, 30 years ago I was not cool and didn’t have much to do on Friday nights. That’s why, on April 8, 1994, I was home, watching as Kurt Loder took over MTV to inform me, and everyone, that Kurt Cobain was gone.

    Reminiscing on the passing of Nirvana’s frontman might be a maudlin way to go about it, but it’s a wild reminder of just how many culture-shifting events took place in 1994. Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction. Nine Inch Nails released The Downward Spiral a month before Cobain committed suicide. Tori Amos dropped Under the Pink a few weeks before that. Above the Rim hit theaters that spring, and lived in car speakers through the summer since Warren G and Nate Dogg’s “Regulate” was on the soundtrack. Aaliyah released “Back & Forth”; Brandy wanted to be down; TLC chased “Waterfalls.” My So-Called Life premiered its one perfect, ill-fated season. Jim Carrey had three films in theaters, of varying quality: Dumb and Dumber, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and The Mask. Brad Pitt had three—two that matter: Legends of the Fall and Interview With the Vampire. Kevin Smith’s debut, Clerks, premiered at Sundance, got picked up by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, and was a cult hit before the year was out.

    These things were all anyone could talk about, culturally. That’s all there was to talk about.

    Except they weren’t. Above are just a few of the cultural moments that made nationwide, and worldwide, attention in 1994. It’s the stuff that hit the suburbs. Some of the year’s best art was slow-burn. As C. Brandon Ogbunu and Lupe Fiasco pointed out in their essay last week commemorating the 30th anniversary of Nas’ Illmatic, “the early ’90s had no hip-hop message boards. There was no social media. The legend of Illmatic was built from street corner to street corner, person to person, party to party.” Even still, Nas was on Yo! MTV Raps.

    Every so often some pundit emerges to scratch a chin and pontificate about whether or not monoculture is dead. The New York Times wonders if these are “post-water-cooler TV” times; Vox asks “Can monoculture survive the algorithm?” My colleague Kate Knibbs has already written about how lamenting the demise of the monoculture is all a bit ludicrous, and while it’s arguable there’s just more culture now—more TikToks, more Instagram videos reeling out of Coachella, more streaming shows—there are still common denominators: Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, hating Zack Snyder movies. Monoculture, I’d argue, never died; rather, it’s a zombie haunting everything. The ghost in the machine is an unspoken desire to share something collectively, even if only to tear it apart together. (See again: Taylor Swift.)

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.



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  • The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

    The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem

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    On Thursday, Taylor Swift did a very Taylor Swift thing: She posted an Instagram story with a link to buy “Fortnight,” the first single off of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. It was cute, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the world. She announced TTPD in February while accepting the Grammy for best pop vocal album for her last record, Midnights. Swift sold 19 million albums in the US alone last year; she doesn’t have to post IG stories about a new single. Yet there she was getting the internet all frothy like it was 1989.

    As she posted, though, something else was agitating her massive fan base: The Tortured Poets Department leaked, allegedly spreading thanks to a Google Drive link that made the rounds online. (Piracy is back, baby!) Almost immediately, there were two camps: One said true fans would wait until the album’s official release, Friday at midnight. The other couldn’t wait and pressed Play anyway. Among that latter group was a subcamp: people who thought the leak—or parts of it, at least—were the product of artificial intelligence.

    Claims of “gotta be AI” come from several corners, but many seem to stem from one particular line, in the album’s title track, in which (alleged) Swift sings, “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate/We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” (The rumor mill is speculating it’s a line about her ex, Matty Healy.) The audio has since been removed for copyright violation, but when an X user posted that snippet online, the suggestions that it was AI-generated quickly followed.

    Upon the album’s release, everyone learned that the song was, in fact, real. They also learned the tracks that had been circulating before the album’s release were only part of the package. Swift returned to Instagram at 2 am Friday to announce that it was actually a “secret DOUBLE album”—The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology—31 songs in total. But the “must be AI” reaction remains a complex one.

    Online life is awash in AI-generated fake-outs. Just a few years into the LLM revolution, the need to not believe your lying eyes is a given. Same goes for your lying ears. The bigger problem is that while skepticism and fact-checking are, generally, always a good idea when getting information online, AI has become so prevalent that it can also be a cop-out. Don’t like what your honest eyes see? Convince yourself it’s AI.

    What makes this all even trickier is that AI is progressing to the point where composing something like “The Tortured Poets Department” doesn’t seem too far out of its realm of possibility. An AI version of Johnny Cash has already covered Swift’s “Blank Space.” “Heart on My Sleeve,” an AI-generated song from 2023 that sounded shockingly similar to one actually made by Drake and the Weeknd, was close enough to the real deal that some folks thought it might be a promotional tactic.



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  • The More People Say ‘Megalopolis’ Is Unsellable, the More We Need to See It

    The More People Say ‘Megalopolis’ Is Unsellable, the More We Need to See It

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    Of all the utterly depressing things printed in the Hollywood trades on any given day, this has got to be among the worst: “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it … This is not how Coppola should end his directing career.”

    This was in response to an early screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, a $120 million sci-fi epic that the legendary Godfather director has been trying to make for roughly four decades. The quote, from an unnamed “studio head,” was published in a piece in The Hollywood Reporter positioning the film as the kind of movie no one in the business wants to funnel money into because it (allegedly) doesn’t have box office potential. While that quote was, in journalism parlance, the kicker, the real zinger came in the addendum at the end: “This story has been updated to include that Megalopolis will premiere in Cannes.”

    Shot. Chaser.

    THR’s piece doesn’t provide the gender of the studio exec quoted, but I’m going to go out on a limb: Sir, what the fuck are you talking about? Even if Megalopolis is two hours and 15 minutes of Adam Driver (yes, he stars) doing paper doll plays, Coppola has survived so much worse. This will not end his career. If anything, quotes like this signal an end of—or at least the massive need for a reboot of—Hollywood.

    Earlier this week, Bilge Ebiri wrote a full-throated plea in Vulture, declaring “Hollywood Is Doomed If There’s No Room for Megalopolises.” Matt Zoller Seitz took a slightly different tack, addressing France directly from his desk at RogerEbert.com and begging Cannes Film Festival participants to cheer the film and save the US from itself. Both pointed out that many of Coppola’s films—Bram Stoker’s Dracula, One from the Heart—didn’t fully connect with audiences or critics when they were first released. The latter nearly bankrupted him—right after he mortgaged everything he owned to finance Apocalypse Now, which currently sits, alongside other Coppola films, on the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of all time.

    I’d like to make an entreaty of a different kind: Nerds, assemble. We have a long history of crowdfunding and letter-writing to manifest the projects on which Hollywood has wobbled. Bjo Trimble saved Star Trek. Queer sci-fi, Veronica Mars, The People’s Joker—we’ve raised cash for all of it. Studios don’t think Megalopolis is bankable; it may not appease any streaming service’s algorithm. Who cares. An online petition with enough backing can provide a marketing campaign to rival the multimillion-dollar one Coppola has envisioned. It’s worth a shot,

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

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  • ‘The Matrix’ Is Getting a Fifth Movie—Without a Wachowski Directing

    ‘The Matrix’ Is Getting a Fifth Movie—Without a Wachowski Directing

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    Saying the quiet part out loud. Somehow, this has always felt like the bleeding heart of The Matrix movies. Under the simulation theory, cool bullet-dodging, and even cooler soundtracks, the movies are about pointing out the facades and fakery that surround us. Evil forces are trying to placate everyone and it’ll only stop if you talk about it. That is perhaps why so many people expressed relief when Lilly Wachowski, who wrote and directed the original Matrix trilogy with her sister Lana, seemingly confirmed that the series was, in some ways, a transgender narrative.

    Fans had been speculating about it for years, particularly after the Wachowskis came out as trans, but then one of them finally said it.

    Typically, saying the quiet part out loud means accidentally revealing a secret motive. In the case of The Matrix, the (not) hidden agenda is just about the importance of individualism. The red-pill-or-blue-pill of it all is whether you choose to accept reality. This is why, as my colleague Jason Kehe pointed out a few years ago, Matrix Resurrections put a mirror up to the self-hatred and nostalgia baked into its own audience. To love The Matrix is to love something perfectly comfortable with screaming its own intentions—and imperfections.

    Which is why, on this weird April day, I find myself asking: Why is Drew Goddard making the next Matrix movie? No offense to Goddard, but the man is nothing if not earnest. Painfully so. He made The Martian better, though far less wry, than the book. Alias, Cloverfield, Lost, Cabin in the Woods. He’s got the mystery box thing down. His projects, though, are rarely what one would call edgy. They’re crowd-pleasers. Matrix movies never felt crafted to please anyone. That’s what made them so much fun.

    According to Jesse Ehrman, president of Warner Bros. Motion Pictures, Goddard got the gig because he came to the studio with “a new idea that we all believe would be an incredible way to continue the Matrix world.” I’m also compelled to note that Lana is executive producing, so it’s not that there is no Wachowski involvement here, but it’s unclear what anyone’s motive is for continuing a franchise that could’ve been left alone.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    Normally the answer to this question would be “money,” but the last Matrix—2021’s Resurrections—didn’t, relatively speaking, make a ton of it. Perhaps that’s what Goddard’s emplacement is an attempt to fix. Ever since the Warner Bros.–Discovery merger, the company has been focusing on surefire winners and sending movies like Batgirl to the dustbin. Maybe handing Goddard the keys to the Nebuchadnezzar provides an opportunity to make a Matrix with a little more mass appeal. Saying the quiet part out loud, maybe it’s a chance to make a less weird, bankable hit.

    Sigh.

    Admittedly, I’m wont to bristle at the idea of a Matrix reboot, even when the result turns out surprisingly well. There’s a chance The Matrix 5 (or The Matrix Rebrand, etc.) will be fantastic, even if it doesn’t come directly from the minds of the Wachowskis. But after watching The People’s Joker this week, it’s been hard not to ponder what happens when someone completely reimagines worlds everyone thought they knew. Director-star Vera Drew’s parody is unlike any Batman movie before it. The Joker serves as hero and Bruce Wayne is a media mogul. There’s no quiet part; it’s just loud. A template for the Matrices to come.

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  • Disney+ Has a New Look—Which Is No Look at All

    Disney+ Has a New Look—Which Is No Look at All

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    Are you one of those people who arranges your apps by color? Do you keep folders? Or are you, like me, a moron who just keeps a loose memory of what color any particular app is and swipes and scrolls until their eyes catch a familiar glimpse? If you are the latter, finding Disney+—and Hulu—might be getting a little harder.

    This week, Disney rolled out Hulu on Disney+ in the US. Ostensibly part of company CEO Bob Iger’s promise of a “one-app experience,” the launch basically just means that if you have one of the Disney “bundles” you can now watch Hulu stuff while you’re in Disney+. OK, cool. Along with the change, though, Disney+ got a new logo, one awash in what it is calling “aurora,” a swampy blue-green hue that looks like what would happen if the eyes of Tammy Faye were imprinted on your device’s screen like it was the Shroud of Turin.

    As with any minor change to their digital experience, internet people have noticed this shift. And commented. Some called it “bland,” while others called it “lifeless.” More nuanced and jugular-aiming takes went like this: “I mean, it’s Disney. Making new versions of stuff that’s worse than the original is what they do.” A hot take for a cool color.

    Courtesy of Disney+

    Disney’s shift here isn’t entirely insignificant. It involved modifying everything, from re-encoding Hulu’s video files to work on Disney+ to updating the metadata attached to shows and movies. The idea is that one day Disney will have “one master media library for the entire company,” Aaron LaBerge, president and CTO of Disney Entertainment and ESPN, told the Verge. It is, in other words, about making Disney+ a bigger trove of content than it already is.

    This is where, metaphorically, the Disney+ color change takes on a different tone. It serves as a reminder of the flattening of the streaming experience. In the app libraries of our minds, Netflix is red, Apple TV+ is black, Hulu is green, Paramount+ and Amazon Prime Video have a very similar blue hue, Peacock and Discovery+ have a rainbow-and-black thing going on. These visual signifiers indicate what kind of experience will emerge when clicked. (I don’t know about you, but I now associate perfectly zestless television with RGB 229 9 20, aka Netflix Red.)

    As the streamers have consolidated or changed their identities, they’ve muddied the nonverbal cues that have set our expectations around what they offer. Had HBO kept that old black-silver-blue look from the Go days, maybe, coupled with Apple TV+, black would be the official color of prestige television. But it’s not.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.



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  • Kate Middleton Conspiracists Are Recreating the Streisand Effect

    Kate Middleton Conspiracists Are Recreating the Streisand Effect

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    Group chats, including at least one of mine, can’t get enough. #KateGate—loosely, a collection of theories around the whereabouts and well-being of Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales—presently seems to be occupying more brain cells than oxygen.

    Gossip has been flying ever since January, when Middleton took a step back from public life for abdominal surgery. For a while it was just mindless chatter, but then Middleton posted a photo on social media, purportedly taken by her husband, Prince William, that news agencies determined had been manipulated. Then, speculation—that she’d Gone Girl’d, that the royal family was hiding something—turned fully conspiratorial, and turned the conspiracies into a cultural moment. (See also: crossover memes showing Middleton at the weird Willy Wonka experience in Glasgow.)

    It is as though, two decades later, the British royal family is just now learning about the Streisand effect. Back in 2003, Barbara Streisand sued a photographer for releasing a picture of her home that few people had seen. But the suit itself, which Streisand ultimately lost, led far more people to the photo than probably would have otherwise seen it, and now there’s a whole effect named after this incident. The royals released an altered photo and now it’s part of a “-gate”: #KateGate. By trying to relay that everything is fine, the photo lured even more people into questioning what was happening with Middleton.

    Bottom line: If you’re, say, a member of the monarchy, and you don’t want them thinking your “abdominal surgery” is code for getting a Brazilian butt lift, your best bet, in 2024, is transparency. Anyone with an internet connection now has the kind of bullshit detectorsthat Area 51 believers could’ve only dreamed of—or they act like they do—and they’re going to figure you out.

    Granted, they may not find the “right” answer or the “truth,” but they will know when someone is trying to pull a fast one. Thirty years ago, Buckingham Palace may have been able to throw snoopers off, but the internet of 2024 will investigate like no other. We got Taylor Swift conspiracies and QAnon. People wonder if most images are AI-generated for at least a second. Going onto X (formerly Twitter) now feels like stumbling into the writers room of a CSI spinoff—everyone thinks they’re a forensics expert. If anybody, including Middleton, thought no one would notice a doctored photo on Instagram, they were sorely mistaken.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    On Monday, TMZ and The Sun released a video showing the Princess of Wales out shopping with Prince William. She was seemingly alive and well. The Sun said it was releasing images of their stroll “in a bid to bring an end to what the Palace has called the ‘madness of social media.’” It did nothing of the sort. Interest in Middleton peaked the next day on Google Trends. #katemiddleton and #whereiskate now have millions of mentions across social media platforms. The madness has not calmed.



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  • No One Knows What TikTok Is

    No One Knows What TikTok Is

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    “Most of these push notifications went to minor children, and these minor children were flooding our offices with phone calls,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois told CBS News. “Basically they pick up the phone, call the office, and say, ‘What is a congressman? What is Congress?’ They had no idea what was going on.”

    Maybe TikTok won’t rapidly lose its relevance with young people after all.

    That’s not what Krishnamoorthi is worried about, but maybe he should be. Not because all of those Gen Zers will one day be able to vote, but because TikTok is their lifeline to the world, and they don’t know what a congressman is. TikTok is where a lot of young people have found their community, their voice, their income. Eradicating TikTok, like the killing off of Vine, rips up a piece of the social fabric.

    The Monitor is a weekly column devoted to everything happening in the WIRED world of culture, from movies to memes, TV to Twitter.

    Kayla Gratzer, a TikTok creator in Eugene, Oregon, who had a recent viral video about the mysterious pregnancy of Charlotte the stingray, noted that she would “hate to see the time, effort, and love gone into growing their platform be stripped away from them.” (Side note: Without TikTok, I may never know if, or when, Charlotte has her pups.)

    There is also something to the notion that some TikTokkers make a living while also being a part of the cultural discourse and zeitgeist. Alex Pearlman, known on the platform as @Pearlmania500, has built a large following thanks to his humorous TikTok rants. When I emailed him about the bill, he noted that, thanks to TikTok, he’d been able to launch a podcast, build a community, and book a nationwide comedy tour. It also provided the income he needed for the birth of his son in December.

    “If we had a functioning government,” he wrote. “I wouldn’t have had to yell on TikTok to be able to afford to start a family.”

    What happens next with the TikTok bill is something of a mystery. It needs to go to the US Senate, but the timing on that is uncertain. If it passes, President Joe Biden has said he’ll sign it. Steven Mnuchin, the former US treasury secretary, claims he’s assembling a group of investors to buy TikTok if the measure goes through.

    Watching all this unfold, I kept thinking about something Norman told me. As a biracial, bisexual person, she’s found a lot of her own corners of TikTok and remains unsure if she could just up and create that on another platform if the app gets blocked. Black people and queer people, she noted, already face censorship, so the question becomes, “Is there a future for me in America? That’s not really about how I am going to pivot on TikTok, but it’s more saying ‘Are there any areas in this country where I can exist?’”



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