Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 3/28/25

One Gets What One Pays For edition

We’d like to start this weekly update with a heartfelt and sincere apology to everyone who was affected by the unintentional leak of classified information here at the bunker. We’d especially like to apologize to the accounting department for not being invited to the surprise party; we’d like to apologize to the head of the Division of Media Review for spoiling your surprise party by texting the secret invitation directly to you, using commercial, easily manipulable direct messaging software, and we’d finally like to just state for the record that the party still happened, and accounting did get some cake, so you really can’t continue to be mad at us for doing something nice, you dirty red Commie, and why do you hate freedom, and if you think you’re so smart, try living outside the bunker perimeter for a few days and see if you aren’t a little more grateful for all that we do here.

In the spirit of transparency, reconciliation, and wanting this to be gone from the news cycle, we have decided that the accounting department does not have to chip in for their share of the party food that they ate back at their desks. Also, we fired two people in other disparate parts of the bunker, so, problem solved! No more leaks. Let’s get back to business, shall we?

Proof of Life, 3/28/25

Social Media Sucks

Can we all just agree out loud that “social media” has run its course, and moreover, that it was a bad idea, poorly executed, and has overall been a complete failure in its stated goals and objectives?

I think it was Cory Doctrow that first floated the idea that if the cost is free, then you are the product. I don’t know if he pre-supposed that there was a bait-and-switch on the horizon or if he figured it out after the fact, when Facebook first started to suck, nearly 10 years ago now. But he was right. Oh boy, was he spot on with that observation.

There are a ton of memes that illustrate this idea of incremental horribleness increasing drop by drop, degree by degree, until the frog boils, so I won’t bother with it. All I know is that I am constantly in a state of low-grade frustration and the things everyone said would make my life better have, in fact, not. Nor, I suspect, have any of you had any better luck.

If we’re going point by point, then sure, Facebook has had its moments. Coming off of MySpace and at the end of the City of Heroes MMORPG getting mothballed, some of the first people I reached out to were folks I played online with. I got people I’ve only known online that I consider friends, good friends, at that, and it likely wouldn’t have happened without Facebook. I’m talking real Facebook, old school...like 2009, 2010, you know, vintage FB.

I never liked Twitter. I saw what it was, right away; the digital equivalent of tearing a corner off of your paper and writing a quick note to your friend in English class. Only your friend is everyone following you, and English class is the World According to the Twitter-Mob.

Spot on, as per usual

Granted, some folks used Twitter to organize and connect with like-minded social and political activists. Got it. Twitter was also used to organize and connect with like-minded shitheads for nefarious purposes. The only people who managed to do anything profound with twitter were all of the comedians and writers who used it to vet new material, to offer up quick puns and jokes, and occasionally word play. Someone rewrote Dracula into a series of pithy tweets and then posted a tweet a day until the book was done. That’s brilliant, and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see more of on Twitter.

I was never that kind of funny. I’m at my best with situational humor, and I’m also pretty good at writing with intention, which usually takes time for me. If I’m not firing from the hip, I’m hunkered down, taking aim and waiting for my shot. Twitter, then, worked best for the folks who were always online, commenting nearly in real-time, and with brevity.

Unfortunately, it turned into a killing floor. Twitter became the place for take-downs, not build ups. You can’t do a funny accent on Twitter. Not without getting canceled. And oh god, the pretension! The condescension! The finger-wagging, the admonishments to “do better,” the dog piles on people accused of a thing, and then when it’s been decided they didn’t do the thing after all, the stunning silence and lack of contrition. Hashtag activism. Bumper Sticker wisdom. Twitter made unpleasant people truly horrible.

Instagram was probably the easiest of the bunch; it’s just pictures, with comments. Landscapes, food, pets, artificially filtered cleavage, sunsets, really shitty, badly spelled aphorisms and platitudes...but so what? It’s just digital snow for your eyes and brain. I have an Instagram account, and I post on it maybe four or five times a year, two or three photos that I thought were of middling competency. The only real problem there are the swarms of bots, spiders, trolls, Russions, Chinese, et.al, trying to get me to click through to a webcam while they run a train on my bank account. Nice folks.

And then there’s TickTock, or, as I like to think of it, Vine 2.0. It feels to me like TickTock is the result of looking at all of the data collected from other social media platforms and using those bits of information to weaponize people who like to do choreographed dances or pretend to sing a cappella while using autotune.

I mean, YouTube was bad enough. Remember when the only thing on YouTube was tutorial videos on how to repair a toilet or how to use the Masking feature in Photoshop? I miss those days. And I say this unironically, as I have many friends with YouTube channels in some state of thriving right now. Podcasters, too! This isn’t a “baby with the bathwater” situation here, but something in the formula changed when people started making serious money. Well, what changed was that Instagram rejiggered the rules so they would get more of it, by incentivizing you, the content creator, to quit your job and become a dancing monkey, full time instead of on the weekends.

Maybe that’s where it all breaks down: money. That “get something for nothing” mentality, or more in line with our own myths and legends, the “get rich quick” scheme, the ones we’re always hearing about after someone pulled it off. After that comes the bottom feeders, the fish who suck up the rocks and grit looking for morsels of food and spitting out what they can’t swallow. You know who I mean. Those people with channels that tell you how to make SO MUCH MONEY by making adult coloring books for Kindle. Some of them even offer a class you can purchase that will tell you everything you want to know. I’m reminded of those old comic book ads that sold X-Ray Specs and “valuable” stamps and coins—from Nicaragua and Papua New Guinea.

I’ve never really liked social media, because I don’t think I’m very good at it. And I really hate feeling obligated to navigate it. In the publishing industry, agents and what’s left of the large publishers still want to know how big your “platform” is and how many “followers” you have. They want a sure thing—who doesn’t?—but they also want to know if they can shunt off any of their job responsibilities to you. Can you do regular posts? Tweet constantly? Write engaging blog posts that not only entertain, instruct, and edify, but also promote the book you’re publishing? And then do that again for six weeks, and also, for the rest of your life?

No. I don’t want to do that. Not regularly, and not often. Writing ad copy and thinking about marketing and strategies and rollouts and branding and synergy gives me the shits. I use a different part of my brain than when I’m writing for fiction, or even non-fiction, and it’s hard for me to switch gears smoothly. Usually, I need to plan a day to do nothing but that. Like yard work. Just get it over with.

This puts me on the periphery, apart from most of my friends who are more successful at it—and I say this with no acrimony or malice—and it also fills me with a mixture of shame and envy, because I can’t/won’t be online all of the time. It’s antithetical to me to try and record actual conversations and human emotion while never going out in public and dealing with people. I don’t think you can do it.

But that’s the envelope of social media, isn’t it? Work up a little jealousy, feed the machine and get dopamine hits back, like the world’s worst Skinner box (at least the rats got cheese), and trade on the human need to belong, to fit in, and to always be making content for those sweet passive income bucks (hah! Nothing passive about it!)

The trend in True Crime documentaries these last few years have been centered around morally and/or ethically bereft people making a splash on TickTock or YouTube, only to be rocked by scandal, fraud, murder, drugs, criminal conspiracies, and all of the other fun, sociopathic behavior that you find in people who have given up principles and dignity for Likes and Follows and deceit.

Probably the single biggest contribution to American Life that social media delivered was the criminalization of these platforms. Whenever a new technology or medium for communication presents itself, the first two early adopting groups to make use (and always to misuse) it are the con artists and the pornographers. And boy did they set up shop early! I’ve been fighting porn spam for as long as I’ve been online, about 20 years now.

We all get online now, swaddled in security measures; we have to employ workarounds for every piece of technology that gives us access to The Internet. We don’t click on links. We use spam filters. We use VPNs. We encode everything, and then re-encode it when they figure out how to break through. We have to protect our online information. We don’t answer the phone anymore. At all.

Was this what they had in mind? The TechBros of the world? It’s entirely possible that some of these clowns never considered the ramifications of their actions; I can’t imagine these people being capable of an altruistic thought ever. On the other hand, it means that if this transactional set-up was their end goal all along, we’re in much worse shape than we thought. When is enough going to be enough?

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: HBO continues to undersell the adultness of The Righteous Gemstones, and now I’m thinking it’s intentional. They want the Christian Nationalists to find the show and blow up their social media feeds talking about how bad it is, how wrong it is, and how unfair they are being treated. That it hasn’t happened yet can only mean that HBO isn’t trying hard enough.

Ball’s in your court, guys.

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Laid (Netflix)

A thirtysomething party planner learns that her former romantic partners are all dying, in the order that she slept with them. Her best friend tries to help her figure out what’s going on and how to stop it.

Previous “Millennial-centric” shows that I’ve covered in the past have not fared well, as most of them have an X-Y grid for charting crisis porn and self-absorption, but Laid worked for me because the show doesn’t take itself very seriously. Wait, that’s not fair to say. When it’s serious, it’s not too serious, and most of the time, it’s acknowledging the self-involved angst of being adjacent to someone who has died, but not being that broken up about it. Laid is very funny and well-written in this respect, and I found that I liked the main characters, Ruby and AJ, almost right away. I suspect that alone was a step up from The White Lotus for me.

Laid is based on an Australian tv series, that I have not watched, and couldn’t/wouldn’t compare this show to, anyway, as that’s a fool’s errand. I’m assuming the same set-up is in effect; Ruby’s former lovers are dying in order of her take-downs, and AJ, who is obsessed with true crime and all of the trappings that go with it, makes a sex board with yarn and pictures on the timeline. There’s even an overlay—you know what, that’s all you need, methinks. The show doesn’t poke specific fun at the murder-obsessed, but these two women keep finding the funny with 75% less cringe-laughs, and some of the jokes would seem to have a point to them. Whether you feel poked or not is not for me to presume. Just know, sometimes, they are laughing at you.

But not often. I got invested in Ruby’s and AJ’s friendship, as well as Ruby’s emotional damage, which isn’t played for laughs, but it is responsible for so many of her bad decisions. If you’ve ever done a High Fidelity-style revisiting of your old partners, you’ll appreciate Laid for not being sentimental about reconnecting. In fact, those meetings are some of the funniest scenes.

There will be a second season, as the last episode is a cliffhanger. But the show is only 30 minutes, and there’s only eight of them. An easy watch for laundry day. There is also 95% less nudity, partial or otherwise, than The Righteous Gemstones. Just in case anyone is keeping score.

…I keep wanting to make a series of off-color jokes about “getting Laid” but I think we’re all better than that, aren’t we? Well, aren’t we?!

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”