From Erewhon smoothies to Gigi Hadid’s spicy vodka pasta recipe to a near-endless stream of “TikTok made me try it” foods (if you haven’t been paying attention this summer, you’ve missed dot cakes, espresso lemonade, soft serve margaritas, the chip bag sandwich, Kool-Aid pineapple, coconut water coffee, butter ice cream, and blueberry baked brie), our culinary experiences are increasingly mediated by celebrity brand campaigns, influencer-driven viral moments, and “reservation wars,” as food journalist Bettina Makalintal put it in Eater this July.

Researching, discussing, or even just consuming food outside of the Instagram world is difficult. Heavy Digestations, describing themselves as “a collaborative persona that acts as a digital and in-person avatar,” is trying. Through “diagrammatic poetry,” photography, performance, experimental writing, sketches, and most recently, a webpage poetry pamphlet titled “Hello World,” they explore everything from surveillance to food reviewing culture to the history of food imagery.

I asked Heavy Digestations about the pamphlet, which is influenced by early webzines and computing motifs like skeuomorphic design and blue hyperlinks, their other works, and how technology and food are intertwined.

Here’s our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for clarity (British spellings are kept!).

PHONE TIME: How would you describe the Heavy Digestations project (if that’s how you’d describe it)?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: Heavy Digestations is a collaborative persona that acts as a digital and in-person avatar. Because we are working with subjects of surveillance, censorship, performance of the self online, and consumption, we choose to work behind this constructed identity and see it as an extension of our art practice, another performance. As transdisciplinary artists, we traverse through mediums, bounce between fiction and reality, and work within the digital and physical.

We like the quote, “culino-philisophico-autobiographical,” and regularly borrow it to describe our practice. It’s from the book “The Debt to Pleasure” by John Lanchester, which we haven’t finished reading but felt like that bit properly encapsulated our motives and modes of research, and we like the way it sounds.

PHONE TIME: Your first (currently viewable) post on Instagram was in November 2022, captioned “Seafood boil.” How has the project evolved since this moment (especially from the photos of food to your more recent diagrammatic poetry, although you of course work across many formats)?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: When we started collaborating, our Instagram handle was Heavy (slang for very good) Scrans (slang for food or eating). It was a virtual performance that was carried out for about a year. We were using our genuine interest in how the internet is shaping our appetite and our roles as hospitality workers to create a food influencer avatar. It was part performance, part research project. The food influencer sphere was ripe for case studies about work culture, food systems, class, fetish, technology. We often provide ourselves with very specific and rigid structures to work within as we enjoy how they force creativity.

Without announcing the existence or end of a performance project, we silently archived the reviews or changed their captions to vague photo descriptions, as like, echos of a previous state which we suppose are an early foray into an exploration of peripherals. These transitory and liminal states of being are thereby treated as works in themselves, like how the decision to archive the project by stripping the material of its context while self-censoring by using Instagram’s archive function experiments with Instagram as an exhibition and temporal space.

With consumption in the context of social media at the centre of our work, whether that’s through research or using it as a medium, plus working within art organisations and kitchens, we became morbidly fascinated with the deterioration and reinvention of everyday communication. Looking at relationships with AI chat bots, work culture, bureaucratic and corporate systems at work within interpersonal relationships, and parasociality. Diagrams became a desirable form of communication that could condense, link, and visualise these ideas or concerns.

PHONE TIME: You published the “Hello World” poetry pamphlet this spring and describe learning internet fundamentals like HTML and JavaScript for it. I’d love to hear a bit about what that process of learning was like. Why do you think it was important for the pamphlet to be in this format?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: It has been nearly a decade that one half of us has been making work about the internet, using Instagram to publish a research paper and as an exhibition/residency platform, creating digital collage and video with screenshots and free apps, and writing about how the internet affects our relationships with others and ourselves. Last year we applied for a research and development bursary to pay for access to FACT Liverpool’s Studio/Lab where we’d have access to software and technologies and a community of creatives working at the intersection of art and technology.

There was always this struggle between our attachment to writing as a medium and our desire to create visual art that never seemed to align in a way that was satisfactory, only coming together in glitchy and low-culture video. When learning about poetry, we enjoyed the similarities between poetic form and the medium being the message and in HTML, similarities between poetry and code, so it felt that writing the poetry pamphlet into existence via web development languages would work to deepen its meaning. The pamphlet is, boiled down, about the collapsing space between man and machine, the physical world and the digital. The pamphlet being half-code, half-human language felt like the optimal form to illustrate the content of the poems.

But we have not taken to HTML, CSS, and JS like a duck to water, that’s for sure. We barely passed Maths in high school so that aspect of coding humbles us regularly. It is very rewarding though, when you fix something that wasn’t working—the tinkering, the building—it’s really satisfying. We are starting from the bottom and only five months in so we look forward to seeing what kind of code we are writing or websites we are building in a year or five.

PHONE TIME: How did you think about blending the poetry (and text, more generally) with the visual elements? How did you choose the images, colors, and fonts you did?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: We were really interested in other examples of websites like the project we set out to make. So, when we went looking for some, we learned of early fanzines being pulpy science fiction and the early webzines like “monochrom” publishing work about art and technology. The history of zines informed our decision to make the website free to view. Thanks to hours of scrolling Neocities and exploring strangers’ websites, where we’d always come back to the sites that lean utterly into the fanzine approach, we adopted their approach to visualising an obsession in an obsessive manner. So we identified motifs and images in the poems and computing in general, and used them to build the website.

We leaned heavily into HTML’s default settings, skeuomorphisms, and generic indications of computing, such as using navy blue as a nod to hyperlinks, writing in Cascadia Code, using emojicombos.com for dinkus, turning the code for a horizontal rule written in Microsoft Word art into the hover cursor as an indicator of a page turn on a static page. The poems are positioned in the space where the physical and digital overlap, so we draw on some liminal spaces such as the server room as a backdrop, and poems with buttons made from found images of other liminal spaces like empty offices and computer screensavers. Using outdated mediums as tools within the pamphlet references digital sovereignty, nostalgia, and hauntology.

PHONE TIME: The experience of clicking through the pamphlet site is quite dynamic. I’m particularly interested in the words you chose to link out to other places on the web (“glocal” links to the Wikipedia page for glocalization, “Fantasy” links to the Britney Spears perfume, “glambot” links to a YouTube Shorts clip with Sydney Sweeney as the cover). Did you choose to link these out of utility (ie. to explain these terms to a reader) or for other Reasons?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: Our practice is research-based, which previously, for us, meant discovery through reading about history, literature, social sciences, technology, etc. It was gathering information about all the things that interest us, finding links, and weaving them together with our work. At some point, when learning about code, we realised we don’t want to only use it as a tool but to integrate it into the work, which has carried over to other pieces such as using footnotes to continue poems, orating code during performance work, allowing the rigid structures of code or social media platforms to intervene or shape the work, and using diagrams as visual poetry.

When learning about HTML, we learned of the ways information could be written into code that wouldn’t show on the website unless someone looked at the backend. We did want to write poems into the code so they could only be read this way, to discuss access and legibility by making some content, mainly poems about our interior worlds, available to few. Instead we went in the opposite direction, kind of inspired by our peers in intergenerational writing groups we attend, whose older members tended to ask about terms they aren’t familiar with. So it was a bit about making some of the work more accessible but also an opportunity to make the pamphlet more connected to the wider internet, offer context or alternative meaning, and to be silly.

PHONE TIME: In your post “Auntie Maureen’s Tomato Gravy,” you write the subheadline: “Let’s start with the recipe so you don’t have to scroll to the bottom should you attempt to follow it. I will share personal anecdotes about this family recipe afterward.” The format of a cooking blog with a recipe intro’d by an author’s personal stories has become something of a meme, and is perhaps just one way that the internet has shaped the way we write and document food. You’ve also written about food influencers, and “Hello World” explores this realm in poems like “For Hera” and “Phone Eats First.” Since starting the Heavy Digestations project, what do you think have been the most notable shifts in how we use technology to interact with food? What shifts do you think are underway, or will happen in the future?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: We did a lot of research into 17th-century Dutch still-life painting at the transitional period between our food review performance and the poetics of eating. We were fascinated by the evolution of food imagery, like how still-life paintings displayed wealth and abundance by showing elaborate tables of expensive food and comparing that to what we think is the current iteration of this, the snackplate—a plate of various fine and colourful ingredients that do not mix. We found this simple comparison and new way of food-based image-making to be reflective of our current relationship with food and eating. Like, it’s probably gauche to not show restraint, instead of being well-fed, discipline is now a trait that is valued which also requires restraint. Wealth can be displayed not just monetarily but by worldliness and cultural capital via ingredients that are not easily accessible or divert from the culture the eater and most of their viewers belong to.

It’s evidence of a disembodied, de-eroticised, and individualistic society where feasts are confined to a single plate, cultural dishes are stripped of history and renamed to insist newness so it can become a trend, and food reviews are made in favour of the restaurant rather than the consumer. It also tells us of the impact our digital avatars are having on our relationship with our physical bodies through preoccupations with gut health, protein, and weight loss content. At the same time, mukbangs are getting more pornographic, and restaurants are using mukbang content as the format for their marketing by sloshing thick sauces over everything.

[PHONE TIME interjection: I’m reminded of the “cheese pull.” It’s not new to the social media era (In 2016, Sarah Jampel wrote in 2016 about the cheese pull in food styling and photography), but has become hallmark of 2020s content such as TikTok food reviews. “Cheese pull” now has entries on both Wikipedia and Merriam-Webster. Chain restaurants like Chili’s have embraced the cheese pull as a way to boost sales, Jaclyn Diaz and Alana Wise reported for NPR last year.]

Even when we act in defiance of this, try to build community, and project authenticity, the curation and construction of identity cannot be escaped. We saw a restaurant post a photo of text written in Sharpie on a metal kitchen bench that said something about not wanting to post Reels because for them it’s about the food. It’s like how photo dumps were supposed to display a disinterest in the overly curated landscape of Instagram but are in themselves curated to be signals of a self they wish to project. We would be glad to see the end of restaurants creating skits or using their minimum wage staff to star in their content, but that text post just felt like another stop on the infinite loop of what is IN and what is OUT. Online it’s a bit more about cool factor than affluence, so if enough people partake, there will be a revolt against it, and a new thing set to go out of style.

PHONE TIME: You also write about diagrammatic poetry: “Diagrams are esoteric. To the unscientific and unmathematic, the diagram is magic...Diagrams are mundane. Sometimes they are impenetrable, read by darting eyes scanning the screen bottom to top, right to left, rather than up and down.” What does the diagrammatic format offer that a traditional poem doesn’t? How do you think about legibility in your work (is it a consideration, especially as the format of a social media post can tend to flatten artistic work and complexity)?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: The diagrammatic format in our work is an evolution of our research and interest in peripherals. When thinking about merging our research with our output, our writing with our visual work, we started borrowing shapes and structures from computing, memes, and alchemy and mysticism to communicate links we have discovered between our current digital world with our physical and spiritual past.

Layering them with ASCII and old graphics we would’ve used on our Piczo site or Myspace profile sourced from sites like glitter-graphics.com allows us to use symbolism but also context to apply meaning to the words that name pretty abstract ideas or concepts alone. The poems are able to exist between different mediums—digital, drawing, writing, research—which is incredibly satisfying as interdisciplinary artists.

Dualism is a through line in our practice—man and machine, earnestness and irony, good and evil, erotic and pornographic—so we create these speculative sacred objects that evolved from spiritual and religious applications of tech, divine machinery, AI and the sublime, and reading “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace” by Margaret Wertheim. It got us thinking about medieval ideology, eschatology, and a possibly pending dark age.

We like to layer up meaning wherever possible, whether it’s through word play or reappropriation. On the surface, we know our diagrammatic poetry is convoluted and the meaning not always immediately accessible. But we feel it’s important to create work that requires the audience to spend time with it, to read and reread it, for it to be something they can return to and find new meaning in. Even posting it on Instagram works against that way of consuming art.

PHONE TIME: Anything you want to share about future directions, either with “Hello World” or the project as a whole?

HEAVY DIGESTATIONS: We are in the process of collaborating with a writer on their debut poetry pamphlet, creating the website based on the content of her writing. Collaboration with other writers will be the continuation of this poetry pamphlet project, which was always intended to become a digital press for experimental writing by marginalised writers.

As for Heavy Digestations, we are working on in-person performance work and video, using mask-making as IRL avatar-building. This is, as of now, an exploration of fursuits as anti-surveillance tools, eroticism, and censorship. We are interested in creating work about the internet that cannot be viewed on certain platforms due to community guidelines and toying with those tensions.

Being on R&D this year means we have space and resources for experimentation, so we expect to dabble in other mediums such as game design, virtual reality, and 3D computer graphics while developing our coding skills to create more dynamic and layered diagrammatic poetry.

[This piece is about process and touches on AI, so I’ll share that I added a few lines to the section of my about page where I describe my reporting and writing processes (which don’t involve AI) and philosophy.]

Along with Substack’s integrated Pangram AI scanning feature, the platform also launched a “How I make this” feature. It’s a “transparency note” you can add that will come up when people scan your work for AI text.

I think a lot about how to make things. In other words: process. I’ve interviewed probably in the hundreds of people who make creative work, and although I describe myself as an internet culture writer or tech reporter, I find a main driver of my work is actually trying to understand peoples’ processes.

Although there have long been online communities and forums for people who make things, I think short-form video is unique in how it encourages people to share their processes towards not just other hobbyists or makers in the same field, but anyone who happens to stumble upon their TikTok or Reel. While creative process has of course been a key cornerstone of what arts and culture journalists (and many other writers, biographers, and documentarians) sink their teeth into, I think interest in process has become only more explicit this year with arts magazine Totei (“It’s a magazine about the creative process behind the work that we feel is compelling across disciplines, mediums, generations,” editorial director Puja Patel told Semafor) and short-form-driven show “WHAT’S YOUR PROCESS?”

Journalists themselves are thinking more about their own processes, which have often been opaque to audiences. This, I think, is driven in part by the diverse variety of formats for information delivery and presentation that social platforms offer (this is a bit of a simplified analysis). It’s also driven by declining trust in news organizations and an increasing number of people getting news from creators and influencers.

There are a lot of things that make me anxious about the journalism industry, but I’ve found comfort in one thing: the work will never run out. The problem is never that there’s not enough to cover. There are always more people to interview, more events to go to, unexplored angles of a past story.

The limiting factors are time and resources. This means that you are always making tradeoffs. If I cover this event, I’ll miss the other one at the same time. This is true on both an individual and organizational level. Even resourced organizations can’t cover everything.

If you’re dedicating more time to one aspect of the process, other elements or your output in general might suffer (“Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy,” reminds the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. Even if a story is factually accurate, more context and detail is often a tradeoff for speed.). If I spend time and energy writing one big story, that’s ten small ones I could be writing instead. And people often underestimate how much production goes into multimedia (whether it’s a TikTok or full narrative podcast) for a relatively small chunk of actual reporting.

I’m frequently reminded by X posts and Instagram comment sections how much of the journalistic process is not widely understood (this isn’t to say that there are not legitimate, informed critiques of specific stories, the way reporting is usually conducted, or the institution as a whole). There are some hints of the lengths a journalist has gone to in their reporting or writing process (“X did not respond after multiple requests for comment”), but even these are easy to miss. Sometimes you’ll interview ten people for a story and end up quoting none of them, which can be frustrating to those sources who were involved in a small slice of your process. Several months ago I came across a post on X from an academic, frustrated that they had given their time to a journalist only to not be included in the final piece. I’m sympathetic to this, as someone who has reached out to academics on tight deadlines for pieces that were ultimately edited down, published in a different format, or even killed for whatever reason. But the process of finding out information can be winding and the obligation is ultimately to write the best story you can, even if that means it turns out different (even much different) than how you imagined when you set out.

The lack of insight readers often have into how piece was reported and written (either or both because of a lack of news literacy or because a news organization has made their process opaque) has, I think, become an increasing problem for news institutions. (At the risk of adding another disclaimer: Journalism has always grappled with a lack of trust from the public.) Traditional practices meant to establish trust (intentionally not putting yourself or your beliefs into your work, waiting until you have the full facts to publish a story) have actually eroded it, as news consumers turn towards creators with both personality and an abundance of hot takes.

I’ve had multiple conversations with journalist friends where we ask some version of the question, “How worth it is putting all this effort into writing crisp, stylistically interesting copy?” Or the more depressing, “Is anyone even reading this?” Aren’t people just going to get this information from a creator, who may or may not be repackaging the work of a journalist via a TikTok green screen video, or an AI summary anyways?

This leads to a lot of cynicism about not only the journalism industry, but the way people consume news. We find comfort in the fact that at least we know that we’re doing the hard work of original reporting that the aggregation and commentary depends on, even if the people consuming that content don’t know or simply don’t care. (This isn’t to say that aggregation or commentary doesn’t have merit. It is just much cheaper to produce.)

But at some point, our job is to inform the public. If what we’re doing now isn’t working, then we should probably try something different. And a lot of journalists are, even with limited resources. You can usually fit a lot less context and information into an Instagram Reel version of a reported story, but the format allows journalists to not only meet news consumers where they are but also give audiences an insight into their process. (Granted, every hour a star reporter gets pulled into to do a short-form video at an institution like The New York Times is probably an hour they would otherwise be making phone calls).

Lots of journalists, especially early career ones, are making content sharing not only their reporting, but their process: what goes into a video shoot, how they get story ideas, how a live broadcast works. This adds more work for the journalists but can help build audience relationships and trust, which can benefit the reporting process down the line.

I’ll wrap up my journalism thoughts by saying that I think the tension between process and product is more evident with journalistic work than other creative outputs. I’ll try to illustrate with a personal example. When I do non-journalism creative work (writing, projects, memes!) I connect deeply with the way artists usually speak about why they make things. Generalizing here, it’s about enjoying the process of making, not about whether what they made is useful to an audience, if they show other people at all. But when I’m doing reporting work, I put more thought into the product. Will people get value out of this? Am I helping people be more informed? I’m a huge fan of journalism formats beyond the traditional lede-nutgraf structure. Even ones that are experimental or just weird. But I think in a mainstream journalism context, non-conventional formats need to do more work to justify themselves.

A few final thoughts…

To return to the “How I make this feature”…it’s something I feel generally positive about. Not only because of the AI factor but because you can learn a lot from other people’s creative processes.

I will note that I think this emphasis on process can be picked up and leveraged by brands in the same way that words like “taste,” “analog,” and “community” have been. I actually see this in how brands use memes. The Dr. Pepper Instagram is a great example.

Making memes is a collaborative process. Image macros often deteriorate and look glitchy over time because people are screenshotting, saving, cropping, and reposting them across platforms. People will often scribble over words to modify a meme rather than remaking the whole thing. When you look at a meme, you can often see multiple layers of additions as the meme has circulated.

Brand memes often look too professional. Even when brands recreate popular templates, they’ll do so with crisply calculated colors, images, and fonts. I think some are beginning to get smart to the inauthenticity of this look. So Dr. Pepper, for example, is experimenting with some of the messier, even uglier aesthetics in an effort to replicate the meme-making process markers that are crystallized in static images. But because we know that these messy elements aren’t rooted in collaborative making over time, as they are for most memes, I think this ends up coming across as tryhard.

I hope this was informative even if you aren’t in journalism, writing, or meme-making! Creativity is in everything. I’d love to hear what you think about creative process.

A non-exhaustive collection of things people have told me about process

“I probably avoided writing a lot of it for a long time, because again I find the process can be so painful. But that’s something I’m trying to work on every day.

Because I don’t know, I get anxious!—I don’t know about you, please tell me if you do too as well—about whether writing is a viable thing to do anymore. I was joking about how sometimes I feel like the only things people read nowadays are captions, memes, or user reviews. And so I get discouraged a lot about writing in general, but I’m kind of coming to a point where I feel like [writing] is such an important practice to me, in terms of reflecting and thinking. The joy of being able to think deeply about something I love is something that can only sometimes happen for me through writing.”

Stefan Chua ơn his review-based project “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada)

“But something I’m thinking about with this project is that I kind of like to deliberately do the hard and arduous things. For this project, I had to really think through every frame, print it out, go through every step myself—bring my body to the Risograph studio to print and scan it and fix all the mistakes. In some ways, I’m trying to celebrate the opposite of vibe coding. Bringing yourself to do the hard work and finding some pleasure in doing that.

With this piece, the theme of shame, it’s not an easy process. You have to go through the difficult feelings to get to the other side.”

Jackie Liu on her browser-based interactive project “i feel so much shame”

“When I’m making a track, I can’t work with the goal in mind. I have to get into the process and let things unfold for a couple of hours. That aspect is something that I learned with music. With a lot of creativity-based things, you can’t force that output, right? You have to sit, let it stew, and let it wash over you.

It’s a very unforgiving process at times, because you never know when inspiration will strike. I think the whole idea is that if you surround yourself in things that you like, the inspiration will start growing.

A lot of it also comes from gaming. I like certain games where you’re not given a tutorial. You just start off and explore through play. It’s the same intention that I want to convey.”

Developer Ajay Menon on how music influences his design process

“I’ll come up with a list of ideas, and then I don’t know how to judge things right after I write them. So I usually wait a few months, and then I come back and look at the ideas that I’ve written and see if any of them seem not corny. Because sometimes I’ll write something and I’m like ‘Whoa.’ And then I’m like, ‘Every person on Earth has had this thought.’ Not that I think I’m particularly innovative—I feel like some of my most successful pieces are just because everyone feels that but hasn’t articulated it quite the same way.

I make a regular habit of going thrifting to find fabric. I also draw a lot from my camera roll. I’ll go back through my camera roll all the time, and I’ll make folders of potential background imagery for a tapestry. It’s a lot of piecing together. I look at my phone all the time—really my art practice is like 50% me looking through my phone and just looking at different files and being like, ‘How could all this work together?’”

Textile artist Lucia Gallipoli on where she gets ideas

“A lot of it comes from recognizing patterns in my own internet habits. I used to spend a lot of time on Wikipedia on my phone trying to fall asleep, because you can just click a link and they’ll send you to a random article.

Over time, I realized I was bookmarking more and more lists that were kind of nonsensical. Wikipedia users seem to really like list pages, but the editors think they’re not informative enough. So people will make list pages, and then the editors will take them back down, and they go up and down, up and down.”

Zinemaker Amy Burek on where she gets ideas

On my phone

I’ve been making Instagram collage posts about early tech memories I have. I’ve posted a few on Substack here too. I hope you enjoy! I’d love to hear what your earliest tech memories are!

I post memes everyday on Instagram.

When I visited “Recalculating route…” at All Street Gallery in May, one of the first works I encountered invited me to, in fact, get out of the gallery.

Inspired by Félix González-Torres’ candy works, Spencer Chang’s “on our way (home)” invited visitors to take a ticket from an overflowing pile. On each ticket was a QR code enabling you to download an app. Upon returning home from the exhibition, participants were prompted to grant location access. The trail they took was then added to a display screen that was part of the installation. (I tested it out prior to the exhibition’s opening reception by walking around the block and then returning.)

“Recalculating route…,” curated by Queenie Wu and held at All Street Gallery from May 7 to 11, included works by six artists, including Chang and Wu. As the show description puts it, the exhibition “reimagines top-down, satellite-view maps as bottom-up acts of storytelling, resisting surveillance and control.”

Such is the case with Chang’s installation, which works at the “murky middle” of sharing locative or other data: in between sharing it with friends and its collection by governments and institutions.

“I hoped to trigger a mix of conflicting emotions: anxiety and intimacy, fear and hope, skepticism and wonder,” Chang says. “I wanted to play with the scales of technology in our culture: how it can simultaneously represent an oppressive institutional force and a bunch of small human-scale actions.”

In curating the exhibition, Wu drew from her own practice of creative cartography. While there’s often a high barrier to entry in mapmaking, she aims to make work that is “more playful and collective,” she says.

Wu gave the artists the constraint of not including a traditional map visual in each of their works. Her own piece, titled “Find My Friend,” consists of a pair of compass devices that navigate toward each other.

In ideating the work, Wu began thinking about how the potential for virality within today’s social media landscape can actually end up flattening our relationship with place. “A lot of times when things go viral, it goes viral for its visual elements and how much of a spectacle it is,” she says.

(The New York City “long line” has become a trend story genre of its own, with lines for everything from frozen yogurt to brand pop-ups to the viral “dot cakes” sold at Butterfield Market.)

In making “Find My Friend,” Wu thought about moving “towards what’s already close to us and also the people that matter to us and things that truly mean a lot.” Best friend necklaces were one reference point.

Also included in Wu’s installation was a video display of the compass pair in action. Wu used it to find Ashton Reeder, another exhibiting artist.

Before the exhibition’s opening reception, I stepped outside of the gallery walls again to walk with Reeder as he set up his work, “Geospatial Encryption.” Inspired by the hyperlocal internet, the work uses four touch points enabled by NFC, or near-field communication, technology. Participants had to first tap their phone on a tag within the gallery. They were then shown a puzzle to complete by going on a walk around the block (the gallery is on 119 Hester St.), during which they had to find and tap on four tags in the correct order.

Once they did that, they would unlock a poem. But that poem was hidden at first, filling in two letters at a time as more people found the tags. 120 visits would be required to completely reveal the poem.

In working on the piece, Reeder pondered the question, “How can we make people get up, participate to build a web?” He was also inspired by his experience of digital platforms growing up, which involved forums and other platforms that had fewer algorithms and were more community-driven.

The participatory element, requiring effort from the community, Reeder sees as “the essence of what a digital platform should be,” he says.

Other works similarly engaged with the space around the All Street Gallery. Elizabeth Kezia Widjaja’s “Streets (New York City)” guided viewers through 360-degree photography on the block, while Owen Trueblood created a 3D scan of the block, captured by rollerblading with a lidar system mounted onto a helmet, for “Active Scan.”

April Soetarman’s work “PUSH TO BE,” on the other hand, brought an artifact typically passed, and perhaps overlooked, outside by pedestrians inside the gallery space: crosswalk intersection buttons. On one side of the pole, “PUSH TO BE LOVED.” On the other: “PUSH TO BE UNDERSTOOD.”

Soetarman has guerilla-installed “PUSH” iterations in public spaces since 2015, as documented on “Weird Side Projects” on Tumblr and Instagram. “PUSH TO REMEMBER” and “PUSH TO FORGET” are another pair. But this was the first installation within a gallery.

There were actually counters in each button to keep a tally. (“A lot of people have very strong opinions one way or the other,” Soetarman says. And sometimes people will stand in front of the provocations hesitating on a choice.)

The work is part of Soetarman’s larger piece, the “Department of Emotional Labor,” which explores the theme of emotions as infrastructure, systems, or relationships, using the language of bureaucracy. (“Just like the real-world Department of Labor does not directly provide physical labor, the Department of Emotional Labor does not directly provide emotional labor. Rather, it exists to facilitate communication and clarity between people, and provide the appropriate resources and structure to do so,” the Department describes.)

For Wu, there was pleasant surprise in how people interacted with the works both inside and outside of the gallery space. She hopes that participants, in addition to finding joy in the works themselves, are also able to think critically about how map technologies can simultaneously bring convenience as well as surveillance and institutional control.

Chang’s work similarly explores both institutional structures as well as how people, both collectively and as individuals, can create alternative paths. Other works, “we were browsing” and “we were online,” create portraits of browsing activity.

“With all of these works, I’m really interested in how I can create work that not only highlights contemporary issues but also provides some meaningful action or path towards an alternative human-centered future. They rely on believing in each other to pull us out of systemic problems we face.”

Wu spoke to the exhibition’s dialogue with the current moment, in which our relationships to place are shaped both by ultra-convenient map technologies and social media platforms like TikTok.

“…Virality is what I consider the most contemporary form of cartography,” Wu describes. “When something blows up on TikTok or Instagram, a lot of people use the term, ‘Oh, you’re putting this restaurant on the map.’” But when places get visitors who aren’t connected to their context or surrounding community, it can change a neighborhood’s fabric.

On the other hand, there’s now a more intentional movement embracing “walking and exploring as a process,” parts of which are actually documented on social media as well. Wu points to Spot Next Door, an Instagram page that documents going to the spot next to the one with the long line, and the walk-based work of Alex Wolfe, as examples of “experiments in subverting place as a predetermined destination.”

Wu envisions continuing to explore the themes explored in the exhibit. “I don’t think the artistic expression here is ending anytime soon,” she says. “I will always be thinking about place, movement, belonging, and seeing yourself in a larger picture.”

More about places, online and off

When Instagram released its “Instants” feature last month, I had one major thought: this looks familiar.

Instants, available both within Instagram and as a standalone app, lets you take quick photos throughout the day to send to your friends. You can see a library of your own Instants, but once you view others’ Instants, they are gone. The app’s been compared to BeReal and Snapchat, but I think it’s the most similar to Locket, with the exception that Locket lets you continue to view others’ photos.

I’d put Instants in the category of what I’ve started calling feature alphabet soup. Alternatively, throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Back in December, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri shared a carousel post detailing his thoughts on authenticity and the future of Instagram. From my newsletter on the post:

“‘Unless you are under 25, you probably think of Instagram as feed of square photos: polished makeup, skin smoothing, and beautiful landscapes. That feed is dead. People stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,’” Mosseri continues. In my experience as someone under 25, this is largely correct but also depends on whether someone uses the platform in connection with their work or larger personal brand. Some of my creator friends post Reels or on the feed nearly every day; many of the people I grew up with post on feed once a year or not at all. For the first group, personal and professional moments are all mixed together in one soup. And while it is true that the hyper-filtered, meticulously color-schemed feeds of years past are gone, new aesthetic languages associated with being hot, cool, and well-read have taken their place.”

As Instagram has embraced video, produced content rather than impromptu moments, algorithmic curation, and monetization, the app is also facing scrutiny from users who feel alienated. The result? It’s dug itself into a bit of a hole.

I think this tends to happen with apps that have grown beyond their original vision but in a kind of awkward way. What we tend to get is a miscellaneous soup: throw in a video feature here, an AI feature here, something alluding to “authentic moments” and “friends” here.

To me, the problem with Instants is that within the Instagram landscape itself, there’s already features that enable both ephemeral posting (Stories) and more tailored sharing (Close Friends). Many people also just create second accounts for photography, food, or more personal moments (and there’s even been a resurgence in celeb “finsta” accounts that really function as another channel for promotion).

Sure, Instants emphasizes in-the-moment sharing through a camera-forward interface, but as a feature within the Instagram universe, it’s not compelling enough to me to demand attention or implement a new habit.

Instagram also partnered with Old Friend Photo Booth, which has previously gotten a lot of press coverage relating to analog and physical media trends, for the launch of Instants. Partiful, Co-Star, and Pinterest have done similar “offline” projects and I think we’ll continue to see social media platforms experiment here. (Of course, I’m always skeptical of “offline,” “analog,” and “IRL” experiences that are then served right back up as online content.)

This month, Instagram also launched the ability to reorder your grid. I wrote last summer about the evolution of the Instagram grid over the years, especially as the change to the aspect ratio (from 1:1 to 4:5) in 2025 made it so that less of your content was actually visible upon looking at someone’s profilee. Social media manager Bonnie Azoulay told me via email that she thought “aesthetics will always matter to an extent on Instagram.” More from that issue:

“Azoulay added that a nice-looking grid helps attract users who come across your account on Instagram’s Explore page, creating a good first impression. ‘You need a pretty grid or at least something that matches your brand identity (colors, fonts, etc.) when you’re trying to grow an audience,’ she said. ‘Those that have grown a following already don’t have to continue sticking to the grid aesthetic.’

She also drew a distinction between personal and brand accounts: ‘Personal brands and influencers can get away with not being aesthetically pleasing, whereas brands should stick to a brand identity with their grid.’”

And while the embrace of short-form video has encouraged creators to put out more content, often with less concern about how their grid actually looks, the grid is indeed still important. Maybe not just as a way to aesthetically document your nights out or Sunday brunches, but to build a creative or professional portfolio. From the @creators announcement:

“Your grid is often the first thing people see. Now you can curate it to reflect who you are right now, whether you’re setting the tone for your creative work, putting your top products on display or just making your profile feel more you.”

Maybe it’s my journalist brain speaking here (I often take advantage of Instagram’s default reverse chronological grid for research or to locate a specific piece of content), but I don’t love this change and think it interrupts a logic that’s been integral to the app for years (although to be certain, that central logic’s been eroding for a while).

And I almost forgot about Instagram Plus, a subscription-based “optional upgrade for people who want more,” also launched this month. The subscription includes features like the ability to preview stories, set your story to 48 hours, and post directly to your profile without it appearing on the feed. While I’m probably as close to an Instagram power user as there is and can actually see some utility in these features, I think these are mostly attempts to try and solve problems that Instagram’s own platform changes caused in the first place. For example, users’ desire to post directly to the grid is a response to the app’s increasing professionalization and emphasis on aesthetics rather than in-the-moment captures.

As the vision of apps like Instagram, X, and even Substack (Substack TV, anyone?) become muddled by additional features, I think there’s more room for apps with more clearly defined boundaries. I’m a huge fan of constraints, like Vine’s six-second limit, and think they are often more conducive to creativity than the ability to do anything, which can quickly become overwhelming and confusing. (Of course, these apps will likely also feel the tension between that vision and growth, as BeReal did.) When I interviewed Locket founder Matt Moss last year, we discussed this emergence of possibilities for new social platforms.

As for Instagram, the app is throwing things into the pit it’s desperately trying to dig itself out of.

As always, let me know if you have thoughts! Or if you think there’s something PHONE TIME should cover.

More on Instagram

At the end of last month, Instagram announced it was updating its “original content guidelines.”

“The same protections we introduced to reels [in 2024] are now expanding to photos and carousels,” Instagram described in a post. “This means accounts that primarily re-upload others’ work without adding meaningful creative input will no longer be eligible for recommendations across Instagram.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about originality online recently. Back in November, I wrote about what I had seen referred to as the “Meme Page Apocalypse.” Meme pages had gotten notifications that their accounts weren’t in line with recommendations guidelines and wouldn’t be shown in places like Explore and Search. People freaked out. Ultimately, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said in his weekly “ask me anything” that a specific change to recommendations affecting meme accounts would be rolled back.

Researcher Geremia Trinchese interviewed me in March about original content online for his series “BEING A ___ ONLINE,” and I got to elaborate on some of my thoughts in my previous post. I am a journalist but also a meme maker, and the two knowledge practices have starkly different definitions of what “original content” is. (I’ve included my definitions below in response to Geremia’s question.)

Geremia

Being an Original Content Online

At this point of maxxximum intersection of meme and reality, where Instagram meme pages start Substack newsletters and become media brands, is there even a difference between telling a story and making a meme? And if memes are built on remix, anonymity, and speed, what does it even mean to make original content online…

Read more

4 months ago · 6 likes · Geremia

What is an ‘original content online’? In our algorithmical age, what does it even mean?

Yeah, the word “original” I think is similar to “authentic” in that what we mean by it is often kind of fuzzy. I think there are probably people in academia or the art world who have thought about this in a lot more depth, but I kind of return to how it’s used in both journalism and meme making. I think it’s also okay for it to be defined differently across different making and knowledge practices.

In journalism, the gold standard is “original reporting.” So getting someone on the phone, doing an in-person interview, or otherwise getting information that other people don’t have, maybe by obtaining a government record or an internal company email. That’s not to say that everything is original reporting (even flagship newsrooms publish a ton of aggregated or listicle-type content), but publications (and individual journalists) live and die by their original reporting. Also, even though criticism usually doesn’t include interviews, a good piece of critical writing produces fresh perspectives because of the authority and knowledge the critic has built up over time.

In meme-making, sometimes people will write something like “all oc” in their bio, meaning original content. What that means exactly might vary to different people. I understand it as the main blocks or elements (text and images) of the meme were added by the poster, even if they’re using a previous template or drawing from other sources. Instagram has guidelines on “original content,” but it’s still kind of fuzzy where memes fit in.

Because the updated guidelines do affect photos and carousels, rather than just Reels, I immediately started thinking about how memes and meme creators might be affected. Defining “originality” in the meme space is particularly challenging, as memes themselves are based on remixing others’ content.

Instagram puts memes in the category of “content you materially edited” (“photos and videos you took” and “content you designed” are two other provided examples of original content). “We understand that defining content you materially edited can especially be complex for meme, fan, and other commentary accounts that regularly use content created by others to add to the cultural conversation on Instagram,” states an Instagram blog post.

Here is what the post specifically said about memes:

“For example, an original meme transforms another creator’s photo or video. When meme creators add humor, social commentary, cultural references, or a relatable take by incorporating elements such as unique text, creative edits, and voiceover on a photo or video, they’re producing something original. The best meme creators take third-party content and make it unmistakably theirs by layering in a perspective, joke, or context that wasn't there before. This is the kind of creativity we want to continue rewarding.”

Out of all the possible meme examples, I got a kick out of the one chosen: the distracted boyfriend meme. The blog post gives “unique overlaid text,” “relevant captions that include new, material information,” and “voiceover along with the photo when it’s meaningful commentary” as examples of qualifying as “original content.”

Over Instagram direct message, I asked some fellow meme creators their thoughts on both the updated original content guidelines and how they think about originality in general. A common theme amongst those I talked to was a feeling of lack of transparency and clarity from Instagram. It’s a common sentiment whenever Instagram announces changes, one I also saw a lot after Instagram changed the grid aspect ratio last year. Many also had experiences with their memes going viral when they were reposted by bigger accounts, which often didn’t tag or credit them.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Sasha Pohorelov @pysznestopy.pl & @pohorelov

PHONE TIME: Can you describe your meme making process? Where do you get ideas, inspiration, photos, etc. from?

POHORELOV: Amazingly, I manage to keep a pretty pedantic routine when it comes to meme making for my page. For the past three years, I’ve kept a single note on my phone where I write down everything that I believe is/might be funny or at least witty, and once a week (usually on Wednesdays) I sit down at my laptop and go through it. I think an important part of this is that I somehow manage to avoid the Twitter posting black hole, so I don’t feel the urge to post a joke the second it comes to mind. One of the only aspects of my life, when my dopamine mechanisms are actually well-functioning lol. I maintain a pathologically social lifestyle, so my main source of inspiration will always be activities that fall under the umbrella of “European summer core.” On top of that, I feel like my brain has basically become a mini library (or maybe even a midi one) of every possible meme template available, which helps me instantly connect a funny observation that comes up in a conversation with a friend to a specific meme convention. Monkey sees–monkey does–monkey laughs.

PHONE TIME: How do you think about originality in meme making (or more generally in the world of posting)? How important is “originality” (however you define it) to you?

POHORELOV: It’s a tricky question, because I think meme culture is perhaps the most recycled—and I mean that as a compliment—branch of contemporary culture. That “recycling” ranges from translating foreign jokes to completely recontextualizing cultural elements used in such images. Long story short, striving for total originality (no matter how you define it) in memes kind of denies the very foundation of how they function. On my meme page, I make a point of only posting images that I “created” myself, but it would be an insane claim to say that every joke or template is completely original. A few times, I realized that an image I thought I had invented myself was actually suspiciously similar to a tweet I’d seen a few days before posting and then forgotten about. So some people could definitely accuse me of plagiarism and I would agree with them. I wish I remembered more Twitter or Instagram handles of people who made me laugh.

One thing I do still consider important is crediting the author if a) it’s fully known to you, and b) the author themselves asks for it. What I like doing is mentioning a person who inspired me to create an image in the Instagram post caption, because I feel that it is so unfair that we as a society agreed that citing academic sources is based, but citing your friends is optional. Every thought I’ve ever had has been made possible by people who were willing (hopefully) to hear it.

I can’t say that the fact I make all my memes myself comes from some unshakable respect for originality in itself—I simply enjoy dissociating while staring at a blank Canva screen and thinking of the most niche possible way to make fun of the local art scene and my friends’ annoying partners.

PHONE TIME: How do you think about how the meme landscape has changed over time, especially given recent updates from IG on original content?

POHORELOV: … I haven’t seen the notification myself [for the most recent update] and it hasn’t really entered local discourse [in the EU] … Corporations already do a questionable job of trying to control the internet, so even on a purely technical level it’s hard for me to imagine regulating meme pages that repost screen recordings of Ivy Wolk’s stories. Following the logic of banning any “unoriginal” content, they might as well start banning Pinterest, Tumblr, and every other image-sharing platform too. I’ve had my images “stolen” before and what I can say is that it would be nice to be able to somehow complain about that, maybe (?). But once again, I don’t think I would have moral rights to do so, [as] many of the images I use for memes are not technically mine. It creates an insanely complex technological and moral set of dilemmas that I think we’re all too employed to think about.

In a digital landscape where basically everyone at this point has already fallen for an AI-generated video at least once, waging war against meme pages feels dystopian. Like c’mon, is THIS really the problem? Do something about the deepfakes and maybe then come back to stuff like that. Don Quixote fighting windmills as always.

I think the effects of this change are yet to bear out. Mosseri did repond to a few user questions about meme pages on his Instagram story. “To make a piece of content original when you’re starting with someone else’s content, you have to put your own spin on it," he said. “So either green screen on top or your own text or your own story but some way to make it meaningfully different from the original piece of content in a way that you are adding something to say.”

I’ll keep tracking this and report back, so (as always) reach out to me if you have any thoughts.

And now, some memes

For writer and artist Stefan Chua, the user review is a container for writing that is not simply functional, but experimental, narrative, and often deeply personal. In his project “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada),” the review is a way “to document our relationships to places,” he says, “in a way that is diaristic, interpretive, and that diverges from quantitative 5-star metrics.”

The project contains 52 reviews of places in Toronto: the University of Toronto, an indoor climbing gym, a sushi place, galleries, a soft serve ice cream place, and a magazine shop, to name a few. Chua compiled the reviews in a digital zine where they are meant to be read in order, but he is also in the process of putting them on Google Maps reviews.

Everything in the project is true, drawing on Chua’s personal experiences, photography, and descriptive observations about the restaurants, parks, and other spaces he visited. The project becomes about more than the places Chua stops at, it’s about who he meets and who he becomes along the way.

When interviewing Chua about the project, I remarked to him that to me, it read almost as a form of narrative journalism. Through detailed observation, dialogue, and historical context, Chua takes the review as seriously as one can as a medium, while still finding the space to be playful.

While I usually write up interviews in a pretty traditional Q&A format, Chua and I ended up both sharing our thoughts about writing and the creative process. So I’ve left some of that in. Otherwise, this interview has been edited for clarity and length.

PHONE TIME: How would you describe “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada)”?

STEFAN CHUA: This project is just a collection of user reviews. It’s a collection of my experiences and reflections of my time living in Toronto, meeting different people and going through different things in my life, written all in the form of user reviews.

I really wanted to do something that interacted with the internet and that could live on the internet. With Craigslist missed connections, or those types of entries where anyone could find them on the internet and get this intense insight into somebody’s experience in their life day-to-day. I thought that was so compelling, and I wanted to play with that form. I really wanted to turn [the Google Maps review] into more of a diaristic, almost narrative, form of storytelling. So if you read through the whole thing, there is a narrative arc which is real. I did go through all these emotional things in my life, and I was changed by all these things. I like the idea of having these parts of me kind of scattered across the map for anyone to pick up and see.

PHONE TIME: “Local Guide” covers five to six years of your life. Did you write it along the way or was it written afterward?

CHUA: The project itself was written mostly after I moved away [back home to Vancouver]. There are some entries I had kind of started or drafted before that I wanted to include. But most of it is entirely right after, just upon reflection. I think I was ready to think about that time in my life and document it.

PHONE TIME: In the project, small themes intermix with bigger themes, like relationships in your life. How did you think about vulnerability and how much you were willing to reveal in the context of a review?

CHUA: I wanted different things to happen. I wanted some entries to be kind of jarring for someone to read as a user review. Like, they’re expecting a deep dive on a food dish or an entrée, and I’m telling them about how I fell in love with a girl or something like that. I thought that was interesting to have that kind of contrast. As well as just having it out there. It’s not anonymous, because my name is attached to it, but it felt a bit freeing to be vulnerable in these, just knowing anyone could read them.

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PHONE TIME: What was the actual process of writing like? Did you find it came easy to you? Or was it difficult?

CHUA: As a writer, I always make the joke that writing is like the most painful thing to do. Like, I hate doing it, but it’s so important to me to do. So the process was interesting from a project level, because I knew I wanted it to culminate in a certain feeling I had about my time there. I knew I wanted to incorporate different things: a few funny and lighthearted, but also some that were very serious and impactful to me. I probably avoided writing a lot of it for a long time, because again I find the process can be so painful. But that’s something I’m trying to work on every day.

Because I don’t know, I get anxious!—I don’t know about you, please tell me if you do too as well—about whether writing is a viable thing to do anymore. I was joking about how sometimes I feel like the only things people read nowadays are captions, memes, or user reviews. And so I get discouraged a lot about writing in general, but I’m kind of coming to a point where I feel like [writing] is such an important practice to me, in terms of reflecting and thinking. The joy of being able to think deeply about something I love is something that can only sometimes happen for me through writing. How do you feel about writing as a practice?

PHONE TIME: For me, it’s like if I get into it, then I can get into it. But probably like for the first 90% of my writing process, I kind of hate it. I’ve noticed this pattern with all of my projects where I’m like, “Why does it take me up until the last minute to be like, 'Oh, I kind of enjoy this?’”

CHUA: It’s the feeling of being like, “I hate this thing that I’m doing so much.” Even the product, honestly, right after I’ve written something, I like, almost never want to read it ever again, because I start to hate it. But it sounds like you come back to it at the end; you start to like it.

PHONE TIME: I think so. And it’s like, it makes you learn stuff about yourself that I think nothing else, for me, has been able to do. Actually, one of my favorite things is talking to people about their creative processes. That’s why I like asking people to do these interviews. Because I’m like, surely someone has to have figured this out. And I don’t think anyone I’ve talked to fully has! It’s just like a weird thing. But I think that’s part of making stuff and you just kind of keep doing it.

CHUA: That’s so comforting to hear to be honest, because I agree. I remember when I was younger, when I first started, I needed everything to be perfect, and nothing ever was. You start to learn that no one ever starts perfect, and everyone’s kind of figuring it out on their own. So it’s very comforting to learn.

PHONE TIME: Another question I have for you. How did you think about the layout and design of the digital zine?

CHUA: I’m not a designer, so when I look at it it feels pretty amateur to me. But I wanted it to look like an art project. So when people interacted with it in that format, they were ready to read it in a certain way. And I wanted to use photography—to give me a reason to take photos throughout the city before I left. I also wanted to include photos with the Google user reviews, because they improve your visibility on that platform.

PHONE TIME: Right, you’re also posting them on Google Maps reviews. How has that process been different?

CHUA: Because I do want it to live on the internet, the end goal was always to have it on these user review platforms. I’ve just been posting the entries on Google Maps reviews. It’s been interesting. I think I’m now a level five Local Guide. Some posts, I’ll get interactions. People will like the reviews, but I’ll have no idea who they are.

I just posted the one from Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament. I think they respond to every review, but it was really funny to me that they responded to my review [#38 in the zine]. My review was about a girl I had connected with, and I realized I had to move back so there’s only so much time we had together. And she had her birthday party at Medieval Times, which is a very cool thing to do I thought, and she got all dressed up. And my review’s about how much I loved—still kind of do, you know—this part of her that really enjoys this type of thing. And then Medieval Times was just like, “Thank you, good noble. Can’t wait to welcome you back.” I forgot what they used. They were speaking like a Medieval Times person.

Every now and then Google sends me an update on how my reviews are doing. One time I posted a photo, and for whatever reason they selected my photo as the main photo for the place. So I think it moves my review up. I like that people can randomly stumble onto this review and read this part of my life.

PHONE TIME: Outside of this project or your own work, how many reviews do you read on Google Maps or other platforms?

CHUA: I used to not read a ton. And then every time I went out with my friend, before we would go out to eat, they would look up the reviews and ratings for the place. I used to never do that. That’s when I learned that people do actually interact with these reviews quite often. I love when people send me a review that they read, or a Craigslist missed connection that they stumbled upon. One thing I really took away from living in the city, in Toronto, and this is going to sound so corny, but I really love people. And just how weird people can be, and how different people can be so fun and fascinating and special.

So I’m not spending hours. Maybe I should actually, like scrolling through different reviews. But I always love finding one that reveals something to me about someone as a person. It just shows that through all these layers on the internet and through all these platforms, there’s a part of you that still comes through.

You can read “Local Guide (Toronto, Canada)” here and Stefan Chua’s other work here and here.

At the beginning of March, an intriguing if slightly mysterious X post came up on my feed. “At Number Research Inc., we are attempting to find and document all* available numbers,” said the post. It invited users to volunteer for the project, which they could do by simply typing a number into a website.

“This is a volunteer-lead research position, where anyone is able to contribute. Simply type a number in, and we’ll check if we’ve got it. If we have, no worries, just try another. If it’s a new number, thank you for your hard work!” the site describes.

[An appendage describes: “*Currently, we are focusing our research on positive integers. Once this has been completed, then we will be able to look into negatives and decimals.” Something that, on first glance, I embarrassingly did not initially catch, will not be possible.]

Being a volunteer researcher can be somewhat frustrating. In my experience, thinking too hard or trying to be too clever (and inputting a number like 100,000 or 10,987,654,321) leads to numbers that have already been found. I’ve found a more fruitful approach is just to keysmash.

I spoke with Lowbie, the artist behind Number Research Inc. Lowbie describes himself as an “artist slash researcher slash archivist, and also, I guess, a vibe coder.” The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

PHONE TIME: Tell me a little bit about Number Research Inc.

LOWBIE: I wish I could remember how I had the idea. I’ve just been at home, and I was about to do one of my work calls where I interview artists. I’ve been unable to make visual art for a little bit because I just can’t find any inspiration in it. But I’ve been enjoying coding.

I was like, “It’d be funny to make something that’s like every number ever.” It’s this infinite project that’s really impossible to complete, which is really fun. I really like that aspect of it, that it’s this endless Sisyphean task.

When I put it out, a lot of people were annoyed because there’s a 10,000 digit cap. We gotta do the first 10,000 digits first, and then we can look at the rest, you know!

PHONE TIME: Did you expect the response that you’ve been getting?

LOWBIE: No, it’s really weird. I definitely think some of the website stuff I work on does want to tailor towards the viral aspects. I think this project wouldn’t be as interesting without that sort of response, because it’s been up like two days and we have a million numbers found [PHONE TIME note: At the time of writing, there have been 3,754,221 numbers found]. But I wasn’t expecting it. Like a week before, I made a ridiculous site called SubBoxd [currently clicking on it leads to a message that it is “temporarily paused”], which is a Letterboxd for YouTube. There was a meme that went viral that was like “Someone should make Letterboxd for YouTube,” and someone said that it’d be funny if I made that. So I did, and it got no response whatsoever.

So you can’t predict how these things will work, but I think Number Research kind of hit a really interesting niche between artists and tech people and statisticians.

PHONE TIME: Do you think people get it? Is there anyone who is just like, “What is this?”

LOWBIE: Yeah, I got some notifications that were like, “What’s the point in this? Because surely it’s infinite, right?” And I’m like, “Well, fucking yeah. Like obviously that’s the point.” So some people don’t get it. But most people seem to be very positive towards it, which I think I’m kind of surprised by.

PHONE TIME: Do you think you’ll go any other directions with it?

LOWBIE: Probably not. I built one for words, which I like, because it’s finite word research. And then once that’s done, I think I’ll be done with this. It was fun.

PHONE TIME: That reminds me a bit of The Library of Babel website created by Jonathan Basile.

Number Research is one of many “conceptual sites” you’ve made. “Record a Moment” is another one I think is kind of fun. [The site lets you click a button to add a recorded moment—which simply consists of the date, time, and time zone—to a list.]

Can you talk a little bit about conceptual sites and how you come up with ideas?

LOWBIE: I made “Record a Moment” a few months back because I was rereading a great book on conceptual art called “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972” by Lucy Lippard. It’s like a brilliant conceptual art piece in itself, a catalog of every single conceptual art piece that was made when the movement was at its height. And in it, there’s a piece by Christopher Cook called “A Book of Instants.” He wrote down random moments in history that already happened and were yet to happen, which I really liked.

I think there’s sort of a discrepancy between engineers, coders, developers and artists. A lot of the sites people call the “fun web,” I really see them in this lineage of conceptual artworks. I don’t know how much these people see them in the conceptual space; I think they just see them as fun websites. But to me, they’re very conceptual, and they’re beautiful.

PHONE TIME: Because you’re vibe coding, do you ever worry your ideas will get taken because of the lower barrier to making things?

LOWBIE: I think that is where the current discourse around taste probably comes in. I mean, someone could have made this website. I don’t know that they would—it feels very conceptually based and works around a bunch of stuff that I’m sort of thinking about.

I also think the way I’ve made it avoids a lot of the sort of tropes of a vibe-coded website: neon glow, rounded edges and whatnot. I think luckily it kind of avoids that, which is good.

I mean, idea is infinite. There’s no way that will ever run out. And I think if people do have ideas they want to front-run, I think that’s fine. I think the competition is fine. The reason I made the word one is because I had multiple people tell me they were going to do it. I was like, “Well, I’ll front-run you guys.”

I don’t think everyone’s gonna jump on it, and I think only actually very interesting ideas are gonna sustain themselves.

PHONE TIME: Where do you want to go next?

LOWBIE: I always get freaked out when I think it’s slightly viral, to be honest. Yeah, I want to chill out. I want to take a little step back from making sites for a minute, go do some painting, go do some visual work.

There’s always more—I think the beauty is about, I have a lot of ideas and I can always eventually make them, and that’s part of the joy and the fun.

Did I miss one? Let me know, and I’ll add it here or include it in a future issue!

Digibouquet by Pauline Wee

Want to deliver flowers to a long-distance love or online friend? Digibouquet lets you select from 12 “blooms” (orchid, tulip, dahlia, anemone, carnation, zinnia, ranunculus, sunflower, lily, daisy, peony, rose) and three different greeneries to arrange a digital bouquet, which you can also add a letter to.

Ping by Kasturi Khanke

This one is for the techies. Send a simple card to an engineer, product manager, designer, even a “situationship in production.”

for my love by Emily Zhang

To celebrate both Valentine’s Day and Lunar New Year, Emily Zhang 3D-scanned three vessels of text. Choose from “handmade fortune cookie,” “shiny red packet,” and “tiny bamboo paper envelope,” and write messages inside them.

Link Bouquet by Danger Testing

Much more romantic than texting a link, Link Bouquet lets you collect a bouquet of chosen links—articles, videos, Substack posts—to send to a loved one. You can also change your flower choice and background color.

A Map of Us by Gabe Szeto

Similar to Queering the Map (see below), A Map of Us is a collective map of memories. “It’s a feelings journal, world guide, and letter to the world, all in one place. Leave a mou, read others nearby, and slowly stitch together A Map of Us,” the site describes.

From previously on PHONE TIME…

i feel so much shame by Jackie Liu

i feel so much shame is an interactive, browser-based project combining buttons, dropdown menus, hyperlinks, and Risograph printing. Through clicking, you’re taken on a journey, exploring shame, desire, self-doubt, confidence, and renewal.

“I thought that the Web 1.0 aesthetics—plain links, really basic forms—would fit into that constraint of keeping it simple. I just liked the idea of something raw and stripped down to the basics—working with subject matter that’s very personal and core, but also universal,” Liu told me.

Rithm by Tina Tarighian

“Other dating apps make you perform. Curate. Lie about loving hiking. Your algorithm already knows who you'd swipe right on.” That’s the sell of Rithm, which wants to help you find love through a screenshot of your Instagram Explore page, which Rithm calls a “scrollshot.” You’ll also get a “digital pheromone,” a description of the essences your scrollshot emanates.

say-one-more-thing.com by Tina Tarighian

Ever wanted to say one more thing to a past lover? This is your chance. Type whatever you want. There’s a one in a million chance your message will be delivered to the recipient within the next year.

Classics

The Unsent Project by Rora Blue

The Unsent Project, started in 2015, is described as a collection of “unsent text messages to first loves.” But that almost doesn’t do it justice. The project is an expression of deep vulnerability, of what ifs and right places wrong times. Look up your own name, and wonder who the intended recipients are, and if any might have been you.

See also: After the Beep

Also made by Rora Blue, After the Beep is a collection of submitted voicemails, organized by color (maroon, red, orange, light orange, tangerine, peach, tan, brown, yellow, light green, green, dark green, army green, turquoise, blue grey, pale blue, light blue, blue, dark blue, dark purple, purple, light purple, dull purple, pale purple, pale pink, light pink, pink, white, light grey, grey, black, and uncategorized). You can also read the transcriptions of the voicemails.

PostSecret by Frank Warren

While snail mail clubs have become a favorite way for people to connect offline, PostSecret has been a way for people to share bits of intimacy since 2004 via the simple postcard.

“I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena. But in some ways, the more of ourselves we share online through social media, the less value it has.” — Frank Warren in a 2015 interview with Ben Huberman, Longreads

See also: The PostSecret Valentine’s Exhibition

Queering the Map by Lucas LaRochelle

Queering the Map is a community map chronicling queer life and experience, “from park benches to the middle of the ocean,” the site describes. What stands out to me about Queering the Map is the amount of behind-the-scenes moderation work.

“Internet projects typically have short life spans, and Mx. LaRochelle has learned in the past six years how time-intensive and expensive it is to tend a continuously growing archive with a small team of stewards.” — Katherine Oung, “Just Made a Queer Memory? Drop a Pin,” The New York Times

There’s a lot of memes, but it’s also the best way to contact me if you have comments or questions, ideas for things I should cover, events I should go to, or if you just want to talk to me about anything internet, tech, or media-related. My turnaround will be a little slower for a while because of ... graduate school (I’m almost done!) and some pieces I still have in the queue (if you’re waiting on something from me, I promise I haven’t forgotten.) So if I don’t respond within a week or so, feel free to send another message.

I put this callout on my Instagram and X a while back and am always so happy to hear from people I haven’t spoken with before. I care a lot less about follower count or hype than I do curiosity, creativity, and thoughtfulness.

BTW: If you want to hear thoughts on media from someone ~at the intersection~ of journalism and meme making, I wrote about that.

Elsewhere online

• My friend (full disclosure) Bo Lau made an application that spams “Heated Rivalry” stills on your computer whenever you doomscroll. I’m always curious about how and why people make things. So I asked her how long it took to make and how she gets her ideas. It took half a day. She told me ideas usually just come to her, but that she’s been incorporating knowledge about pop culture and Gen Z trends from a class about writing the internet. This ultimately means reaching more people rather than only those in tech or interested in coding.

• Pop Base is taking applications for its “Ambassador Program,” specifically for “concert-goers who live for live shows and can capture moments that travel fast online.” The big questions asked in the Google form:

  • “What shows are you attending in the near future? Specify Artist/Tour & City”

  • “Tell us about yourself. What do you love about live shows? Why does this make sense for you?”

  • “Favorite Tour in the past 5 years?”

  • Plus: city you are based in, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

    A question I, and many commenters, have: Is this paid? The wording suggests participants will, at least, be responsible for covering the cost of their own tickets. And also: What exactly does the “Ambassador Program” entail? How will contributors be credited? What, if any, requirements or editorial guidelines will they have to follow? I’ve reached out for comment and will update if I hear back.

    There have been a lot of great pieces about how Pop Crave and Pop Base, “the internet’s wire service,” have changed the media landscape, covering not just celebrities but also politics. Journalistically, it gets tricky. As Christian Paz wrote for Vox in 2023, “Few of the people behind these accounts use their full names, and none of the outlets have mastheads. They rarely disclose clearly if a post is sponsored, opening them up to accusations of bias and favoritism—or misinformation.” Like other aggregators, they’re largely working from original reporting done by established outlets. But still, Pop Base and Pop Crave have carved out a distinct space within digital media—perhaps not in spite of a lack of traditional journalistic rigor and transparency, but because of it. Traditional outlets, on the other hand, are scrambling to keep up. The kicker from Charlotte Klein’s July 2025 New York Magazine piece about the media’s “traffic apocalypse,” quoting a Hearst staffer: “What do you have that can’t be delivered by Pop Crave? That, I think, is everyone’s question.” Both Pop Crave and Pop Base have done red carpet reporting, with the former producing a viral Nicole Kidman moment and the latter a series with New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. But quick hits and virality still reign supreme, if the wording of the Pop Base ambassador application is any indication: “moments that travel fast online.”

• It’s Valentine’s season, which means the college campus matchmaking platforms are back. At Cornell, there’s Perfect Match. Date Drop, which debuted on Stanford’s campus in the fall, has returned after being sent a cease-and-desist by established platform Marriage Pact, reported Yeva Allyn for The Stanford Daily. A comment on that article reads, “Everything old is new again! … I met my wife Blanche on Operation Match in 1966. We're still happily married.” Operation Match was created by Harvard students in 1965 (!!!). Patsy Tarr, the wife of one of Operation Match’s creators, Jeff Tarr, even published a book about it in 2024. From the Operation Match booklet:

  “OPERATION MATCH is a computer matching project—the only one of its kind. It’s the brainchild of several mixer-weary Harvard juniors who realized that most college students know what kind of people they enjoyed dating. Blind dates were fine up to a point, but there had to be a better way than the present haphazard system. Why not use a computer?”

  

  • I reported on Datamatch on Columbia’s campus back in 2023. It was created by Harvard students in 1994 and takes a fun, rather than serious, approach to pairing.

• Instagram hosted a pop-up for its latest “Close Friends Only” original series episode, which, funny enough, Pop Crave posted about. Merch included a black baseball cap with the words, “add me to your close friends.”

Lucia Gallipoli is a textile artist, writer, and poet based in New York. Her work touches on themes including girlhood, religion, digital culture, and ephemerality. It’s cozy, confessional, and inviting—but not at all frivolous. She completed a self-directed bachelor’s degree in love at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and is currently finishing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts.

“I exist both online and in my fantasy world where everything is soft and I hope my art relays where I live and who’s inside decorating,” Gallipoli describes in her artist statement.

She began working as an artist painting still lifes and then started painting textiles. “Because I work with basically only secondhand fabric, I feel like I get to play off of the patterns and motifs that are in fabrics that kind of come with their own baggage,” she told me. “It’s so warm on a tactile level, it’s really soft and gentle. I kind of want to subvert the aesthetic sweetness.”

She also looks to her own digital archive for ideas, frequently combing through her screenshots and the contents of her Notes app. Her work makes the often airy digital aether tangible. In one piece, “I Don’t Need God to Tell Me What’s Good (my lore is like the bible to me),” Gallipoli constructs a physical Bible using iron-on transfer photos of digital and physical ephemera, fabric, stickers, felt, and part of a MacBook case. The piece also includes an old Nokia phone and wooden gossip table.

Below follows my conversation with Gallipoli, edited for length and clarity.

PHONE TIME: How do you get an idea for a piece? What’s the process of making it come to life?

LUCIA GALLIPOLI: I honestly should figure out the answer because I’m like, “Oh my god, I would love to have another idea.” Currently, I’m out. But I have kind of a running list on my Notes app. I should be making time to sit down and write. I was writing poetry for a while—I’ve been published a few times—but I feel like I don’t have as much of a writing practice anymore in a strict or even regular way.

I’ll come up with a list of ideas, and then I don’t know how to judge things right after I write them. So I usually wait a few months, and then I come back and look at the ideas that I’ve written and see if any of them seem not corny. Because sometimes I’ll write something and I’m like “Whoa.” And then I’m like, “Every person on Earth has had this thought.” Not that I think I’m particularly innovative—I feel like some of my most successful pieces are just because everyone feels that but hasn’t articulated it quite the same way.

I make a regular habit of going thrifting to find fabric. I also draw a lot from my camera roll. I’ll go back through my camera roll all the time, and I’ll make folders of potential background imagery for a tapestry. It’s a lot of piecing together. I look at my phone all the time—really my art practice is like 50% me looking through my phone and just looking at different files and being like, “How could all this work together?”

PHONE TIME: I love that. I do the same thing! Because on your phone you have so many things that you kind of forget about. Then you come back, and they can be raw materials for a different idea. I loved the bible of your lore that you made. How did that come together? How did you think about incorporating textiles?

GALLIPOLI: This is another thing of me going through my camera roll. I happen to have kept all of my old iPhones. I was going through them, which was really exciting to me, because I reread my diaries all the time. And there’s nothing new, obviously, because it’s all old stuff. But I kind of like it as a way to research.

A lot of the time, if I’m feeling uninspired, I’ll try to revisit an emotion where I felt very strongly about something and then try to reconnect with that. Often it is a point when I felt heartbroken, just because it’s such a jarring and intense emotion to feel just so devastated for—by the way, over basically nothing in my case, largely.

I came up with the idea for the bible because an instructor at my school asked me if I was theological at all. In the way that he said it, I feel like he was testing whether or not I knew what that meant. I wanted to be like “I fucking know what that meant,” but I was like, “No, I’m not really religious at all.” And I started thinking about it, and it kind of annoyed me. I was walking around, as you do in New York, just speed walking down the sidewalk. I was like, “I don’t need God to tell me what’s good. My lore is like, the Bible to me.”

And I was like, “Oh, that’s an art piece. Now I have to find my lore. Because who’s to say what that is?” I made a Google Drive folder of just anything that could have been in the bible, and then I just narrowed it down. Some of it was also like, I wanted to overshare, but not in a way that was for shock value. I posted on finsta like three times a day for years, and to the point where I’m like, “I can’t believe I still have friends.” Because it would be like “This person isn’t texting me back,” and then 30 minutes later, “He texted me back. Oh my God.” I look back and they were engaging with me and supporting me in such a way; I’m so grateful. I did include some of that in the bible. But some of it I was like, this doesn’t need to be in it.

PHONE TIME: I do a lot of finsta posting myself! How do you think about sharing your work on social media? Does that change the way you make or perceive it?

GALLIPOLI: I grew up on Tumblr. I feel like a lot of people will describe confessional art as like “Tumblr art,” as if its a pejorative. And I want to be like, “No, I love Tumblr art. That shit’s awesome. It made me who I am.” I don’t mind if my art is a little internet-y. I try to lean into it a little bit, because I have a deep respect for art online, and in particular, the kind of art that resonates with teenage girls online, just because I feel like it impacted me so much growing up. When you’re 16, kind of around that age, at least for me, I felt very unseen by what I was seeing in my actual real life. But I feel like what I saw online made me feel less insane about things I was feeling and experiencing.

I know I have to engage with the algorithm in a certain way—it’s a humiliating kind of song and dance. Because if you use any hashtags at all, it’s like, well, you’re obviously trying to hit a certain way. So it’s kind of embarrassing to be seen trying. But I’m also like, this is social media. Unless you have a private account, you’re not posting just for you. You’re automatically wanting other people to see what you’re posting.

PHONE TIME: How has your practice changed or evolved over time?

GALLIPOLI: I guess one way would be the actual use of textiles. For a while I was just painting the texture of them, and then I realized I could use them.

I kind of want my art to be navelgaze-y still, in like a confessional way. But I feel like I was putting a lot of emphasis on deifying past romantic partners. And then I was like, “Wait, that person was literally just like a normal person.” I made a piece, “I Used to Pray,” that reads “But God wouldn’t be 5’8".” I was realizing I was deifying this person. Then it hit me, the obvious realization—wait, that person wasn’t God. They were nose to nose to me. They were just in a human body. They have auto caps disabled on their phone.

So I’m also examining my relationship to religion slash lack thereof. I kind of want it to be an earnest inquiry. One of my instructors recently described it as earnest. I wanted to be like, “It has to be earnest. I don’t know anything about it. It just has to be.”

I’m kind of hoping to keep evolving thematically. I’ve made a lot of art about heartbreak. I feel like I’ll always return to that, just because I like consuming art about heartbreak. I’ve been in a relationship now for almost seven years. People also comment on my Instagram sometimes like, “You should just get a boyfriend.” I want to be like, “I have one. We live together. We have a cat. We’ve been dating for more than half a decade, I’m fine.”

PHONE TIME: What do you envision for the future of your work, in the short and long term?

GALLIPOLI: My short term goal is just to keep working. I also randomly want to learn how to sew clothing, because I’m kind of entirely self-taught. Right now I upcycle a lot of clothing, and I would say it looks pretty neat, but I know that I’m not doing everything totally correctly. I feel like learning how to sew better will make my art better, because everything will look neater.

I’m gonna get a studio, which is exciting because I have a studio at school right now, but I’m gonna need to get one for after. I live in a one bedroom, and especially because I work with textiles, our cat would just mangle everything.

My long term biggest dream would be—this is so boring and I guess pragmatic—but I would want to be a full time artist, like not having a different job. It would be nice to be supported by my art at some point. I just want to keep reaching people whether or not they like my art.

You can find Lucia Gallipoli’s work on Instagram and her website, where she also sells originals and prints of her work.

“Doing for AI what we did for the web,” boasts the 2025/26 State of Mozilla report out earlier this week. The report paints a picture of two separate futures—one in which AI companies use the tech to watch and surveil us and another where, aided by AI, “the web is alive again.” Last week, Mozilla Foundation also released a zine (if you have thoughts on what counts as a zine, so do I) called “Imagine Intel: Creative Purpose at the Dawn of AI.” The zine came together through “Imaginative Intelligences Assemblies,” sessions hosted by Mozilla Foundation and the Berggruen Institute during which creatives addressed their relationships with AI. The resulting zine consists of short essays on topics including slop, vibe coding, creativity, and the gig economy.

Mozilla Foundation and Rhizome are partnering for the Creative Futures: Counterstructures 2026 creative technologist residency. (Mozilla Foundation had previously partnered with tiat, which I’ve written about for PHONE TIME.) I’ve included a screenshot of the guiding principles, taken from the application, below.

“It’s time to change the narrative of what AI means for artists and creatives” sums up the thesis of the “Imagine Intel” zine, which wades into several popular conversations around AI, working with the terms “slop,” “vibes,” “taste,” and “friction.” One particularly insightful argument: “there’s something about the emergence of vibes as a social currency that feels particularly relevant to AI.” It also spotlights different projects that react to AI in some way—from Tega Brain’s “Slop Evader” (a browser extension only returning results from before the public release of ChatGPT) to fashion label Collina Strada’s collaboration with Baggu, which drew controversy for using AI-generated prints.

The zine concludes with a set of “Hollywood’s Eight Rules for AI” that emerged from the Assemblies, including “Keep Friction in the Creative Flow” and “Design for the Whole Creative Ecosystem.” Where I thought the zine—admittedly, not the best format for at-length digressions—could have elaborated was in how to actually get there. To include artists and creatives in designing technologies is better than completely ignoring them, but there’s a lack of detailed pathways in how to do that.

I appreciate that the zine isn’t prescriptive, is intentional, and offers a variety of possibilities, challenges, and questions. But I think we still need a more developed approach than “The train’s leaving anyways, might as well get on and hope for the best.”

Read more

Elsewhere online

• Marissa Memelink wrote last month about the Facebook Museum, a temporary museum created by the Dutch media art collective SETUP installed in Utrecht Central Station in the Netherlands during July 2025 (with plans to diversify and scale in 2026). Among the museum’s works included objects representing Facebook users’ experiences with the platform and a wall where visitors could share their own. — Institute of Network Cultures

• An article in Social Media + Society by Skyler Wang and Marco Dehnert argues how AI companion platforms create “on-demand intimacy — intimacy that can be acquired in a truly frictionless manner.” Obviously, the word “frictionless” stood out to me given current conversations about embracing challenge and inconvenience (see: friction-maxxing). “If dating apps once offered acceleration in the search for connection, AI companions promise emotional availability without negotiation,” Wang and Dehnert add. They predict that just as increasingly niche dating app options have proliferated, AI companions will become increasingly customized and personalized to our individual tastes.

• The Dartmouth, Dartmouth College’s independent student newspaper, reported that the school approached and paid a student to write an op-ed promoting Evergreen.AI, described as “an AI-powered student wellness platform built to help students thrive.” The newspaper didn’t know at the time that the student, Teddy Roberts, was being paid for the op-ed, which was written in November. In January, Roberts wrote a follow-up op-ed in The Dartmouth explaining what happened.

• xAI has a job listing for a “Writing Specialist.” The listing reads, “You will evaluate, refine, and create elite-level writing in a variety of genres and formats to advance Grok’s capabilities in one or more Writing Specialty areas.” Those specialty areas are creative writing, game writing, technical writing, nonfiction writing, copywriting, web writing, grant writing, legal writing, medical writing, academic writing, poetry writing, and journalism. This is obviously depressing, especially as the well of job opportunities in creative writing, media, and journalism dries up. But it also shows how human expertise, judgement, and writing are integral to the development of these AI models—whether tech CEOs want to admit it or not.

• The San Francisco Standard has an “Open Call for Creators” on its careers page, as of December. A few things stood out to me about the listing, particularly in how it courts those who may not have a traditional journalism background or experience in freelance reporting. For one, it aims to convince creators who may have their own platforms the value of having a newsroom stamp on one’s work. “This isn't just uploading to your YouTube channel—there are standards. But that's also why it matters more when it publishes,” the open call reads. It also emphasizes doing actual reporting. A line that made me laugh: they aren’t looking for “you reading articles that other people wrote”—a form of information curation and delivery that has become an increasingly popular way to receive news, thanks to TikTok and Instagram “green screen” features. As I’ve written about before, it isn’t only journalists becoming creators or influencers, but influencers and creators also doing acts of journalism. This creates opportunities for new kinds of storytelling and also a lot of potential pitfalls, particularly regarding ethics or conflicts of interest (The Standard’s ethics policy notes “rigorous conflict-of-interest rules” for journalists; this might get more complicated when working with creators who aren’t aware of or used to operating alongside this specific professional code.)

  Read more

• PBS SoCal is launching a three-year “Community Storyteller Initiative” ahed of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and Paralympics. “Each selected storyteller will receive a grant of up to $6500 to produce one short video (5–8 minutes) and a 60-second vertical video optimized for social media,” the application states.

• “Heated Rivalry” merch is getting out of control.

  

• UpScrolled is the latest alternative social media app to use “authenticity” as a selling point.

I’ve enjoyed playing this Sandwich Alignment Game made by Andrew Boylan. You can place 57 sandwiches (from rotatingsandwiches.com) on an axis of good, chaotic, evil, and lawful. I first got to try it back in September at the “NewGame+: Imagined Worlds from the School for Poetic Computation” exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image.

Some of the sandwiches are simple: a grilled cheese, eggplant parm, meatball sub. Others stretch the boundaries a bit: Neapolitan ice cream sandwich, Isapahan macaron.

Elsewhere online

• Creators will come to realize the value of journalistic principles, argues Josh Hersh in today’s episode of the Columbia Journalism Review podcast “The Kicker.”

  • From an early PHONE TIME issue:

    “Still, there is nothing necessarily preventing creators from doing their own reporting and rigorous research and analysis. More will likely start doing so. The access influencers have to certain spaces (like Fashion Week or brand events) can also facilitate this. Having large audiences can often encourage people to send tips or pass along the inside scoop.”

• “wired: LLMs for sexytime” — Reece Rogers reports for WIRED on the rise of the erotic chatbot. “Historically, porn and other adult content has influenced the trajectory of technology, leading to the proliferation of VHS, digital photographs, and streaming video. Generative AI is no different,” Rogers writes.

• Mike Wing made an Arcteryx beanie detector that makes you name five mountains.

• “No, we don’t want your robot manicures” — Ellen Atlanta, Dazed

  Atlanta writes on the rituals of care, self-expression, and community we stand to lose with 10Beauty’s robot manicure.

• It’s World Typing Day.

  • I learned how to type from Type to Learn 4 and Dance Mat Typing.

  • One of the most magical films about the internet I’ve seen is “Seeking Mavis Beacon” Jazmin Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross. The film begins as an DIY investigation to find the real Mavis Beacon from the touch typing program “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing,” but is also a weaving exploration of identity, privacy, artificial intelligence, autonomy, and how the tech industry treats Black women.

  • Good video:

• Someone wrote an Archive of Our Own fanfic of The New Yorker writer Isaac Chotiner interviewing the guy running the lottery in Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.”

  The same user has also recently written “Heated Rivalry” Hollanov fanfic.

• Do we really need an AI bartender? Or an AI microwave? Or an AI…everything?— Dominic Preston, The Verge

• I checked on the state of the Etsy spell small business industry. MysticManConjure is selling a red “Fuck Around & Find Out” three-candle ritual set for $90 (it’s 50% off for the next five days). “We accept no responsibility for any paranormal activity that may occur due to the use of our products or services,” they warn. According to one reviewer, “I have made multiple orders from this shop and everything has absolutely worked.” Another candle is meant to drive away your toxic and annoying neighbor.

• @wherethefuckdowego is the Corner app’s “magazine,” on Instagram. Corner describes itself as “Google Maps but with friends.” This account, which first started posting in October and now has over 30,000 followers, is positioned as a solution to influencers being paid for recommendations and publications that cover only a certain slice of shops and restaurants. The posts consist of simple carousels with recommendations, using photos from Corner users.

  

  • Today, SXSW and Corner also posted a guide to “Keeping Austin Weird” via Instagram carousel. I think Instagram’s carousel feature is instrumental in this kind of editorial. See also: Partiful’s Instagram.

• Strange.website is beautiful and indeed, strange.

• What I’ve been listening to lately when I work.

• People are taking it upon themselves to replace ChatGPT.

  

Instead of documenting life in photos, what if we documented it through our daily moods? That’s the pitch for Ambys, a social app based around bite-sized documentations of your feelings: grateful, hyper, pissed off, meh, shitty, joyful, romantic.

I had been seeing Ambys ads on Instagram and downloaded it. After a short onboarding process—the app is 18+ and requires you to put in your birthdate—you’re greeted by a homepage that is distinctively simple. You can scroll through and interact with users’ moods, which are visually displayed like sticky notes. You can also filter by mood.

The center “+” button allows you to easily publish a mood: a short note plus a feeling category. You can also add an image, thought bubble, or wish for 2026.

Ambys is one of several apps that have emerged as an alternative to Instagram and TikTok. It’s not surprising that Ambys boasts “no AI, no algorithms, no influencers,” attributes that have become increasingly appealing—or at least market well—as people become overwhelmed with the mainstream social media landscape.

Ambys also fits within a category of apps including 1 Second Everyday and even BeReal, which center around short bursts of daily interaction over weeks or months rather than endless scrolling.

Where I hesitate with Ambys is that all of the posts are public. Putting moderation aside (the app has a set of community guidelines which includes a process for reporting violations), I’m not sure how “sticky” a feed of strangers’ emotions will prove to be to users overtime (you can also add friends by username). I’d much rather use it to keep up with friends, maybe in the style of a home screen widget, like Locket.

The mola mola, or ocean sunfish, is no stranger to being the talk of the internet online. The large, flat fish, which can be spotted basking in the sun at the top of the sea, was the star of a 2017 Facebook rant by Scout Burns. That rant subsequently became a copypasta. I’ve linked a dramatic reading of it. Samantha Cole also wrote a great defense of the creature for VICE in 2017.

My first interaction with the mola mola was in seeing the “no stop he needs that” meme (using a photo from Richard Herrmann), which in turn surfaced an entirely new wave of hatred for the creature. My second interaction was seeing one while going whale watching in Southern California. My third interaction was seeing mola mola edits on TikTok and Instagram—which finally put the fish in a different light.

One edit of the sunfish, set to Radiohead’s “Creep,” has gotten over 18 million views on TikTok since October.

@soapjxeWhat am I ever posting.. ANYWAY stop the sunfish hate guys fr :( #sunfish #capcut #edit #idk #benice

Tiktok failed to load.

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Other edits on TikTok and Instagram similarly portray the mola mola as a misunderstood yet perseverant creature, deserving of respect despite its “uselessness.” As one commenter wrote, “If all god’s creatures will sing together at the end of the days, won’t the humble sunfish be also a part of the choir?”

In one of my first PHONE TIME issues, I wrote about the problem of unrelated (read: MAGA) posting in the Facebook group “Hot Dogs.” I decided to check back in on how things are going. Surprisingly, seemingly on-topic…for the most part.

Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri posted an Instagram carousel detailing his thoughts on the future of social media, given the rise of AI and shift away from institutions toward creators and personalities.

“The key risk Instagram faces is that, as the world changes more quickly, the platform fails to keep up. Looking forward to 2026, one major shift: authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” he begins the post.

Comments on the post largely reflected the concerns creators have had for years: overwhelm with changing features, confusion about the algorithm, exhaustion with the pressure to post and keep up with trends. This past summer, in my piece titled “Does your Instagram grid still matter?” I wrote about the pile-up of new Instagram features that made it seem like the app was trying to dig itself out of a hole, rather rather than go ahead with a clear vision for the future.

“Unless you are under 25, you probably think of Instagram as feed of square photos: polished makeup, skin smoothing, and beautiful landscapes. That feed is dead. People stopped sharing personal moments to feed years ago,” Mosseri continues. In my experience as someone under 25, this is largely correct but also depends on whether someone uses the platform in connection with their work or larger personal brand. Some of my creator friends post Reels or on the feed nearly every day; many of the people I grew up with post on feed once a year or not at all. For the first group, personal and professional moments are all mixed together in one soup. And while it is true that the hyper-filtered, meticulously color-schemed feeds of years past are gone, new aesthetic languages associated with being hot, cool, and well-read have taken their place.

Here are a few of my annotations on some of Mosseri’s other points:

• “The primary way people share now is in DMs: blurry photos and shaky videos of daily experiences. Shoe shots and unflattering candids. This raw aesthetic has bled into public content and across artforms.” Direct messages and close friends stories offer more intimate, closed spaces to share images, life updates, and memes that people might feel uncomfortable sharing on the main grid. I know a lot of people who’ve started secondary accounts—for food and cooking photos, tracking gym progress, their photography, or even just to share snaps of their life with close friends who’ve opted in to more frequent sharing. The “raw aesthetic” Mosseri talks about here actually offers a lot of possibilities for media and even more traditional reporting-centered journalism, I think. For example, iPhone photography complements the voice-y writing of many Substacks in a way that more professionally packaged and produced stories might not. Reporters from all outlets can share detailed, on-the-ground coverage through Instagram stories, giving audiences the feel of actually being there.

• “The camera companies are betting on the wrong aesthetic. They’re competing to make everyone look like a pro photographer from 2015. But in a world where AI can generate flawless imagery, the professional look becomes the tell.” I’m not a photographer, but I think this undervalues the effort, skill, time, and dedication to craft that professional photographers use in their work. I saw a few comments from photographers disheartened by the platform’s changes over the years. “As a photographer, so much of what we create comes from time, experience, and the way we see the world—not just the final image,” commented Chris Ha.

• “Labeling is only part of the solution. We need to surface much more context about the accounts sharing content so people can make informed decisions. Who is behind the account?” I strongly agree with this and also think that Instagram’s shift towards more algorithmic curation is in direct contrast to this goal. When we receive content primarily from people we don’t know or aren’t following, we’re lacking significant context, especially when in an interface like Reels that encourages continuous scrolling without taking the time to stop and investigate something further. Information without context is a huge problem in terms of media literacy—I’ve written before about what can get lost when we get news and information downstream of the original source.

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Long live text!!!

In the most recent Galaxy Brain episode, Charlie Warzel describes a continuing decline of the significance of text in the media landscape, especially as LLMs flood the web with AI-generated text.

This shift to an increasingly visual internet is something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, especially when I was preparing for my talk on the feminist internet last month. I wrote about it here.

As someone who’s worked across a variety of forms—TikTok, Instagram, long-form print and digital—I think a lot about the opportunities and limitations of each format, especially when it comes to informing and storytelling. In my view, each medium adds different shades of color into a story. Stories and media packages that I’ve loved or resonated the most with often combine multiple media formats, not just for the sake of having clips to post on Instagram or TikTok, but to fully detail the different parts of a scene, character, or movement.

I still think text is vital and one of the best canvases to fully flesh out a story. If you watch marketers talk about upcoming trends using the TikTok green screen feature (or even reporters talking in front of screenshots of their own articles) or influencers going back and forth on podcasts, they’re often using text-based reporting and writing as foundational matter to build upon.

Mosseri talks about embracing the “raw aesthetic,” but I think his characterization limits this idea to just being willing to make an Instagram Reel with no makeup on or vlogging your bad rainy day. The two words I’m thinking about regarding all of this are embodiment and craft. Like Ha commented on Mosseri’s post, the work of a photographer isn’t just in the final image, it’s in how they see the world—something which, as anyone doing creative work knows, takes years and more years to develop.

Earlier this month, I went to the Columbia University School of the Arts Digital Storytelling Lab’s Fall Semester Student Showcase, which included works from the Digital Storytelling I, Digital Storytelling III, and New Media Art classes. Physical zines, browser-based games, and interactive exhibits were all part of the showcase, which took place at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center.

One corner of the showcase was full of “worldbuilding zines,” which were the projects of students in the Digital Storytelling 1: The Theory and History of Interactivity class, according to a description booklet. “Each zine includes five sections: Environment, Ritual, Inhabitants, System, and Place in the Universe,” the booklet stated.

There were also several virtual environments, which can be explored through New Art City. In “The Fallen Garden” by Nina Uesato, Patrixia Arbelàez, Shan Jiang, Shiny Lu, and Vicky Xie, you enter a rich lavender landscape, and can traverse the water to reach other elements like an island, flowers, clouds, a message in a bottle, and half-submerged house.

The work is based around the idea of the “dead internet” through a feminine lens, as “a strange afterlife—a garden of leftovers where feeds, glitches, and AI voices become material to be arranged.”

Inside the house is an installation called “damp girlhood,” which “recreates a teenage girl’s bedroom after the internet dies—a life that existed online now scattered into physical pieces,” its description reads. The room contains among its elements an abandoned flip phone, decorated walls, a used diary (which links to a Miro board with its entries), and furniture.

Vibe-coding was embraced in making many elements in the projects, including in “The Fallen Garden.”

I spoke with designer and technologist Alberto Cinco Jr. several weeks ago for another reporting project, and I also just had to ask him about his “my usb locket” project. The idea came upon seeing the USB Club project, a “social file exchange” which started in Brooklyn.

“When I saw a photo of someone wearing a USB as their necklace, I was like, “Can USBs be lockets in a way like that? That can hold memories,’” he said.

On the project, Cinco Jr. describes that email or USBs were the only practical way to share files, given the internet speeds in the Philippines.

“I feel like now that everyone that’s moving to cloud, moving to drive, having some sort of a physical drive again that can hold your memories, makes the memories feel more tangible and closer to your heart, literally.”

New York University’s ITP/IMA Winter Show 2025 was Dec. 14 and 15. Those acronyms stand for Interactive Telecommunications Program and Interactive Media Arts, graduate and undergraduate programs, respectively. The show spanned two floors of software, hardware, sound, projections, tactile experiences, living plants, and more. I’d previously gone to a show of ITP thesis projects at NYC Resistor earlier this year, but this was on an entirely different scale.

Tech can feel static, boring, and removed. That was not the case here. I got to use all my five senses—even taste! The installations were both technically impressive and conceptually expansive, touching on a variety of themes: growth, bodily autonomy, relationships, advertising, uncertainty, labor, craft, nature, authorship, and more.

One of my favorite works was “Nuzzlebot” by Shuoyue Wu and Yueyan Zhang. The pink furry robot is designed to behave like a real cat. Pet it softly and it would purr, poke it and it might get angry.

“Δrtificial Life” by Chuan Tsai was also quite fun to interact with. The work consists of physical 3D animal models, which you can throw into a miniature trash chute. When you do, a screen shows a corresponding digital model of the object falling into the growing pile. “In the digital age, we generate, discard, and update endlessly. Countless AI-generated images, models, and concepts are deemed useless or ‘not good enough,’ thrown instantly into the recycle bin or unseen depths of data storage,” Tsai’s description states.

Other works required you to move your body to interact with them. In At the Tip of Bloom by Crystal Zhao, flowers bloom as you move your hand in front of a webcam. In Pulse by Alyssa Li, a mirror with colored lights responds to your movements.

Kinetic Randomness Generator .5 by Cody Frost requires you to turn a wheel, causing small geometric figures to fall and reconnect with each other in endless combinations.

The projects encouraged participants to think about their relationship with technologies. They also used technologies to probe at our relationships with each other and ourselves, with our faith and the natural world. “Clarus,” by Jiyoon Lee and Jennifer Huang, consists of a chatbot interface and physical system of a wheel-gear, hand-pump, and pulley. You ask a question to the chatbot, but have to generate enough energy using the physical system before it will answer.

While the works interrogated much of the potential dangers of technologies, I think the most important part of the exhibition was the sense of hope it inspired. That when built carefully and intentionally, tech can still be creative, thought-provoking, and just really freaking cool.

Offline → online → offline → online → offline → online

This past April, I wrote about the surge in online content about being offline, based on a TikTok I had made in 2024 in response to the “no phone summer” trend. I made two points, which I’ll paste here.

1. Being offline has become an aesthetic language that, in turn, thrives online.

2. Getting offline is often facilitated by social media itself. IRL clubs rely on Instagram and TikTok to catch the attention of new members and keep existing ones informed.

Since I wrote that issue, content and discussion about being offline has only continued to proliferate, from “analog bags” to the movement to return to physical media starting today, Jan. 1. A woman in the United Kingdom named Ava (who declined to provide further identifying information to Newsweek) told the publication that she created the TikTok account @vioiliet_ to encourage others to return to older technologies and offline activities.

Snail mail and print clubs have also grown in part through Instagram and TikTok pages. Lots of this content is educational, where creators walk others step-by-step how they set up their clubs, how to make prints, etc. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing that content about going offline has become so popular online—as I mentioned in my April newsletter, it’s obviously something people are going to talk about in online forums. That said, it’s a starting point. The real work comes in being intentional, setting and sticking to goals, sitting with the boredom, all of which I’m trying to be better at too. For example, as an offline activity, I recently sat down, put on some music, and made Shrinky Dinks of the Twitter stickers that you can add to photos.

Read more:

Elsewhere online

• Ever fallen in love with an AI chatbot? Said “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT? Tina Tarighian (who I’ve previously interviewed for the newsletter) made an AI Purity Test, modeled after the infamous Rice Purity Test.

  

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Earlier this month, I fulfilled a dream childhood me couldn’t have imagined I’d have: I gave a talk on the history of the feminist internet, leading up to contemporary Instagram meme pages. My short talk was based on a thesis I wrote my last year of undergrad, which I’m still hoping to add to at some point. As I said there, it was maybe my first presentation since around 8th grade, so I appreciated everyone bearing with me through the nerves.

I was lucky enough to be in community with everyone at images consume me, an event hosted by Performance Space New York in partnership with Ester Freider’s everyone is a girl and @joan.of.arca, a.k.a. Sophie Browning (I interviewed Ester for PHONE TIME prior to the planning of this event, and Sophie is a mutual-turned-IRL friend! They are both doing brilliant work touching on girlhood online.)

Here are a few points I hoped to address:

• The feminist internet as an intellectual and creative lineage, which has become increasingly visual over time. I started by talking about the weblogs that emerged in the 1990s. Tracy L.M. Kennedy describes weblogs as having “evolved from early Web sites that functioned as early online journals or diaries, reporting and keeping running commentaries on people’s daily activities and interests.” Teen girls and young women built Tumblr “girl blogs” as a distinct tradition of online feminist writing, inspired by the older weblogs. And as feminist activity took root on Instagram, it became increasingly driven by visuals and aesthetics, while the platform itself was becoming more commercialized.

• The interplay between the offline and the online. A theme in a lot of my writing is that the offline and online are not two separate realms, but inform and shape each other. This is also true of the feminist internet. An example I brought up was the “Binders Full of Women” meme, which emerged after a comment then-Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney made during a debate. The phrase made its way into online memes (which were very 2012 stylistically, as I noted during my talk), but also offline, through performance and Halloween costumes.

  

  “Just as craft-cultures define a mode of cyberfeminist practice between online and offline spaces, embodying and sharing photos of the ‘Binders Full of Women’ meme also represent ways of doing feminism that break down on and offline distinction.”

  – Carrie A. Rentschler and Samantha C. Thrift

• Memes and the future of feminist media. The future of feminist media is uncertain, with many of the blogs of the 2000s and 2010s having shut down. In 2022, Bitch magazine, founded in 1996, stopped publishing. And in November, Condé Nast announced Teen Vogue would be folded back into Vogue. But there is hope! I’m really excited about the new publications and collectives that have arisen, many of which use memes and Instagram as a starting point, but also offer offline events, Substack newsletters, and print publications and zines. I used Daughter Zine, Material Grrrlz, and everyone is a girl itself as examples in my presentation, all of which I’ve previously reported on for PHONE TIME.

  “I think sort of the most exciting thing about being alive right now is getting to speak with images in a way that I don’t think has ever really been done before, as casually, and memes are a part of that. I mean, if you’re going to talk about the contemporary experience of girls, meme culture has to be a part of that.

  I think memes are beautiful. I love Sotce’s, particularly. I think what she’s done has kind of changed most of women’s interaction with this kind of media and putting themselves out there in this tweet format, but it’s paired with imagery.”

  – Grace Anne McKean, founder and editor in chief of Daughter Zine

  “As the memes were going on, I started talking about more of the political topics within fiber arts: sustainability, craft vs. fine art, things like that.

  Now, I schedule daily posts, and I have built out a broader community. But it did all start with the meme page, because I was looking to connect with other Gen Z girls in their 20-something era.”

  – Alexa Kari, founder of Material Grrrlz

  “To me, it’s like an art project. It’s a performance project. I don’t think I would call it research, I think I would have trouble using that word. But we kind of parody, with love, a lot of pseudo-academic themes and ideas. Like the idea of having a symposium or the idea of making a publication, where everybody has biographies. At the same time, we’re also parodying a meme page. But then it also becomes something else, because everything is so theoretically linked.”

  – Ester Freider, creator of everyone is a girl

You can’t see it in that picture, but I was wearing my new Derp and Derpina shirt which I love very much.

After we gave our talks, we made meme scrapbook pages. I’m very fascinated by bringing bits of the internet and online culture into the physical world, so this was so much fun for me.

Ester and Sophie did such an amazing job selecting memes as materials (there was also an abundance of Interview, Artforum, and other magazines). Sophie also scanned peoples’ scrapbook pages for an Instagram archive, and made an Are.na board with a plethora of readings on scrapbooking, collaging, and how we use ephemera to self-fashion.

If you haven’t learned enough about yourself from your Spotify Wrapped or Wikipedia Year in Review or Partiful After Party, you may be in luck. ChatGPT started rolling out a “Your Year with ChatGPT” feature that sums up your interactions. The recap, in the now-ubiquitous story format, takes you through your big themes, chat style, and gives you an “award” based on your chats.

A key difference between a recap of your Spotify activity and your ChatGPT interactions is just how comprehensive the latter has the potential to be. One year of a ChatGPT user’s chats might cover work, relationships, finances, health, creative projects, weird embarrassing questions, etc. While this year’s format was pretty surface-level and cheeky, I could imagine future versions with more depth and detail. The text also reminds me of New Computer’s Dot, now defunct, which responded in warm, creative language. I’ve written before about AI companies branding themselves as more personable and collaborative and think this recap is a step in that direction.

A team at the MIT Media Lab also launched an AI Wrapped as part of a research study. “Your data will be de-identified and you will be able to review your chats before analyses are run,” according to the site’s consent form.

Meme break

I don’t do a ton of longer critical writing. But I wrote this review of Radu Jude’s “Dracula” for a J-school class and think it fits here given the film’s heavy use of AI.

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Opening with AI-generated characters boasting, “My name is Vlad the Impaler Dracula and you can all suck my cock,” at least Radu Jude’s “Dracula” is upfront about what viewers are getting into. It’s probably needless to say that the film, which premiered in August at the Locarno Film Festival, takes more than a few creative liberties with the material of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel.

We’re soon introduced to a filmmaker (Adonis Tanța), addressing the audience in Romanian from a sparsely decorated bedroom. He is faced with a difficult task: to make a new movie about the count whose story has already been told countless times. Fortunately for him—and at times, unfortunately for the audience—he has at his fingertips a collaborator that will bring to life any idea he can think of.

Over the course of nearly three hours, the on-screen filmmaker uses an AI chatbot to spit out over a dozen different vignettes, the result of various permutations of source material and overarching themes like love, power, and sex. Romping through absurd storylines, the film teasingly pokes at what the filmmaker imagines are his audience’s delicate sensibilities through plenty of crude, laugh-out-loud moments. But for all its stabs at critiquing emerging technology, the commercialization of art, and overly sexed-up media, “Dracula” ultimately lacks any serious bite.

The first and central storyline, which is by far the most compelling of the entire film, centers around a washed-up actor, known as Uncle Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu), and a younger female counterpart, “Vampira” (Oana Maria Zaharia), enacting a sputtering performance as Dracula and Mina—the young woman who falls under the vampire’s curse—to a group of tourists visiting Transylvania. A sexual rendezvous with Sandu is auctioned off to a tourist, which comes to an abrupt end as his failure to perform is played for laughs.

Just as we’ve gotten acquainted with the charmingly pathetic pair, we’re jolted back to our filmmaker, who is not yet pleased with the output and continues to prompt. Over the course of the film, digressions take us to a secret anti-aging clinic for celebrities, Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace-turned-tourist trap, and the office of a video game company ruled by a tyrannical boss named Mr. Vlad.

At many points along the way, the film subjects viewers to what can only be described as sensory gore. In one vignette, a spin on the already kitschy 1992 film adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola, we’re served up a course of grotesque bodily mutations, complete with hyperrealistic AI-generated vulvar and phallic shapes. In later scenes, similarly generated, oversaturated images of wolves, cockroaches, and other pests are set to guttural howling and croaking sounds. The resulting effect is a goop of AI imagery, realistic character-driven scenes, and the blending of the two in moments of jarring glitch.

It is around two-thirds into the film that the endless audiovisual exorcisms have made the point not only clear, but belabored. Our chatbot-assisted filmmaker says that the capitalism-vampiricism metaphor is overdone but devotes an entire vignette to it anyway. And a particularly pornographic storyline toward the end of the film makes it clear that, yes, Jude—the director behind the absurd-embracing “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (2023) and “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” (2021)—is trying to have some fun with the audience, in case anyone had any doubts.

Throughout the film, the periodic returns to the odd performer couple are a welcome relief.

While the tourists are ordinarily granted wooden rods at the end of each performance to embark on a mock vampire chase, the performers find that they’ve grown tired of their situation, and decide to actually run away. Their boss implores the guests to catch them for real. Still in Draculanian garb, Vampira and Uncle Sandu hide out, the former taking salacious photos for her OnlyFans, while the vigilantes encroach upon them.

“Dracula” is a film that might have more potency if it was released a year or two ago. But over three years after the rollout of ChatGPT, the dialogue between the filmmaker and his AI chatbot proves predictable and tiring. While there are some funny quips about copyright issues and Elon Musk, watching the filmmaker fiddle about with his iPad chatbot becomes gimmicky, even if to flood the audience with a deluge of what’s been deemed AI “slop” is Jude’s intention. Given Robert Eggers’ recent haunting and innovative adaptation of “Nosferatu” (2024), the filmmaker’s whining about “everything having been done before” seems even more like a lazy excuse.

The vampiric subject matter is an obvious analogy to AI as a soul-sucker, and both the Romanian setting and Jude’s sardonic approach to modern curiosities make for an entertaining, if somewhat dragged out, viewing experience. But the unnamed filmmaker and the smattering of scene characters all prove easily forgettable, and “Dracula” ends up without much to say at all.

Elsewhere online

• Ian Charms collaborated with Pinterest Predicts to turn five aesthetics into jewelry pieces: Cool Blue, Extra Celestial, Mystic Outlands, Funhaus, and Poetcore. I came across the collab through sponsored Instagram stories, and I think an eclectic beaded jewelry piece is a good canvas for expressing the different Pinterest trends.

  

• ZINE NEWS!

  • 404 Media is making a print risograph zine about ICE surveillance tactics. There’s also been reporting about zine-making as resistance in The Guardian and Portland’s Willamette Week. I’ve written many times before about how divides between print and digital and offline and online are often imagined. There’s constant flow between the two in both traditional and social media—the current zine landscape is a great example of this. I think we’re going to see more digital outlets experiment with print projects in 2026.

Earlier this month, YouTube rolled out a new “Recap” feature, in a similar stories format as Spotify Wrapped.

“You’ll get a set of up to 12 different cards that spotlight your top channels, interests, and even the evolution of your viewing habits, or which personality type you fall into based on the videos you loved to watch!” product manager Manthra Panchapakesan wrote in a company blog post.

I clicked through mine. While I admittedly don’t care much about Spotify Wrapped or any of the other year-in-review knockoffs that have come out in the past few years, I thought my YouTube Recap fell particularly flat.

The recap starts with an overview of your top interests and channels. It then gives three summarizing adjectives based on your activity. Mine were “cultured,” “observant,” and “tech-savvy.” It then gives you a personality type—mine was “The Connector”—and a “YouTube award.”

Bored? I was too. The generic copy felt like a combination of LinkedIn buzzwords and horoscopes that make you think, “Yeah, I guess that sounds like me.” My watched content apparently shows “an interest in connecting with others,” which I’m not sure is a distinctive personality trait as much as a universal human desire.

YouTube also recently unlisted all of its past YouTube Rewind videos. You can still view them from the links, but they no longer appear in search results or on the YouTube channel. In a statement to Mashable, a spokesperson said “As our 20th birthday year comes to a close, we’ve decided to blow out our Rewind candles. It was a great tradition, but we have new ways to close out the year in style.” The statement linked to a 2021 post on YouTube’s X account, stating “We no longer feel that a single video YouTube creates can reflect the full breadth of our creator community” and adding that the baton would be passed to creators. It also linked to an end-of-year trend report.

The decision to unlist videos that were such key chroniclers of YouTube’s history, up until the poor reception of the 2018 and 2019 Rewinds, is confusing and even sad to me. The fact that the viewer-oriented Rewinds have been replaced with yearly trend reports tailored to marketers or for press coverage, rather than the larger YouTube community, is further salt in the wound.

As YouTube pointed to in the 2021 X post, it becomes harder to encapsulate a year on the platform as the community has grown overtime and fractured into endless communities, each with their own central characters and events. But the replacing of something that was, although imperfect, full of actual people, with an easily digestible but sterile recap is a reminder of how human expertise and craft—and all the resources and time that they require—have been boxed out in many internet spaces.

Elsewhere online

• I loved this obituary for Farmers’ Almanac by Greta Rainbow in Study Hall.

  “A reading experience defined by cramped serif text and a flip-flop between esoteric content and brick-and-mortar business ads is trippy compared to the reigning analytical prediction mode of the moment—that is, bot-generated feed waste,” Rainbow writes.

  • The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which is a different thing, is still going strong! Here’s what the website looked like in 1996.

  

• The Oscars will move to YouTube starting in 2029, which is news I will forget about for at least two and a half years.

• I’m always interested in tech companies’ investments into offline life (which then gets posted online). Earlier this month Partiful hosted a retro holiday photo session at The Flower Shop NYC. The event was to celebrate the launch of Cards, a feature for sending small digital cards.

Over the summer, I spoke with Ester Freider, a writer, curator, and a creator of everyone is a girl. First launched in December 2023, EIAG describes itself as a forum for “jagged and iridescent reflection on the ‘girl online,’ or rather, the necessity of being a girl online.” The multimedia project, informed by cyberfeminist tradition, spans print zines, digital publications, and events. In September, the collective hosted “PORNO CHIC: An interdisciplinary symposium on porn, sex work, art, and queerness,” and a recording of the event is available here.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

PHONE TIME: How did your work on girlhood and EIAG begin?

ESTER FREIDER: I went to Central Saint Martins, and then I went to University College London. In that time, I started doing a lot of independent projects and making events. I was really interested in posthumanism and stuff like that at the beginning. I was reading Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant. I started writing about the internet as well. I wrote my bachelor’s thesis about Tumblr. Then I found out from that, that there was actually a bunch of different people doing similar work and writing about being a girl online—Rayne Fisher-Quann, Mindy Seu, Legacy Russell.

When I also posted it on Are.na, it got a lot of traction, which was really cool. I started my master’s, which was not as much work as I thought it would be. So I had some time on my hands, and I wanted to make a book about this: a girl-internet book. It happened to also be when this was reaching a pinnacle on a broader cultural scale. Alex Quicho wrote her article, “Everyone Is A Girl Online,” in September 2023.

I got some designers, and we were like, “Let’s do it. But first, before we make a book, we have to make a platform, and get an audience. And if we want to apply to grants, we already have to have work to apply to the grants with.” And then we started doing stuff, and then we forgot about the book.

PHONE TIME: How would you describe the overall project of EIAG?

FREIDER: To me, it’s like an art project. It’s a performance project. I don’t think I would call it research, I think I would have trouble using that word. But we kind of parody, with love, a lot of pseudo-academic themes and ideas. Like the idea of having a symposium or the idea of making a publication, where everybody has biographies. At the same time, we’re also parodying a meme page. But then it also becomes something else, because everything is so theoretically linked.

PHONE TIME: Tell me a little about the EIAG zines—”Seduction” and “Fandom.”

FREIDER: “Seduction” we did in May 2024, and “Fandom” was in October 2024. We did an open call process for both of them. It was surprising how many people wanted to participate and how little of them were from London as well. We got a lot of international attention. The seduction thing, I feel like that really encompasses what Alex Quicho was talking about. It’s very much like the core idea. So it was really nice to start with that and just straight up turn her thesis into this sort of rhizomatic project with contributors.

“Fandom” was more like my pleasure, because it’s a little more indulgent. It was just playing on 2010s revival. I wanted at first to do Dan and Phil—literally just Dan and Phil. I was convinced out of that. It was a little bit more of like, now that we have all these people that we know and who like what we do—let’s do something that would be really fun and nostalgic for them.

PHONE TIME: How do you think about the design of the EIAG projects?

FREIDER: I think we were really thinking about early internet aesthetics. There’s a lot of ASCII and stuff, and also combining that with hyperfeminine energy. But at the same time, making it delicate and minimal.

On the first one, in the print edition, Jules Halasy actually made an embossment design. And we designed it so there’s a butterfly. We wanted it to feel fluffy. Basically as fluffy as a bunch of pieces of paper could feel fluffy and cake-like.

With “Fandom,” it was going toward a more journal-y vibe. It looked very back-to-school.

PHONE TIME: Why do you think EIAG has gotten such a response, both to your online and in-person projects?

FREIDER: I think it’s partially because of the way that the meme stuff I do works. Very deliberately from the beginning, I always would look through who follows us, and pull from their meme page or whatever was on their story. I was like, “You are now a part of this thing.” And I think people liked that. And because all these more famous writers, artists were posting the originals, to have that all collated in one place was really interesting for me. I honestly think the meme stuff is like the main draw.

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