An anti-Valentine's Day weekend roundup
The ghosting of dating apps, opting out of the news doomscroll, trading smartphones for sketchbooks, embracing physical media, and more
Good morning, stalwart buckers of the attention economy, and welcome to the glitter-spackled circus of mass consumption, shame and guilt that is Valentine’s Day Weekend. Here in Lisbon, it’s a non-event, which is both disorienting and a salve to this scarred and battered heart.
I’m trying something a little different with this post: a roundup of shorter items instead of a single lengthy essay on one topic.
In my writing at Hard Refresh, I try to explore the rapidly shifting zeitgeist around smartphones, social media, algorithmic control, and our extremely online lives. With just about every installment up to now, I’ve elected to dig deep into a single topic with a long-form essay on something elementally related to the tipping point society has (I maintain) reached with regards to digital saturation and what the other side of that Rubicon looks like for us.
Because this stuff can feel very existentially serious and, all too often, like a Big Fat Downer, I try to leaven it with a judicious helping of wit, or something resembling it, and assorted pinches of mischief and general irreverence (if irreverence + wit + mischief = snark that’s not my fault).
But diving into a single topic at considerable length takes a long time to write and research, and even though that shit is my jam, baby (former journalist here), I recognize that a) it asks a lot of you, dear reader, and b) it means I am passing up a great deal of other relevant, compelling news and developments that deserve to be plugged or otherwise sent up the flagpole.
As it happens, my current backlog of such goodies is about to burst its buttons with all kinds of interesting tidbits I’ve been wanting to noodle over here. So instead of a 4,000-word doorstopper filled with hyperlinks and extended chin stroking, today I’m prototyping something more of the roundup variety.
Kindly let me know what you think in the comments. Reader, I didn’t start writing this newsletter because I wanted readers but because I want to build a community around this movement. Let’s commune.
Dating Apps are getting ghosted
With the Valentine’s Day and consumer-romance industry juggernaut love-bombing its way into our hearts and wallets this week month, Wired aims a gimlet eye at what’s happening in the Dating App space. A recent Forbes poll showed that, on average, we spend roughly half as much time today on dating apps (51 minutes per day) as we did 10 years ago, and a staggering 79% of young singles report dating app burnout. It’s all part of what’s been called a great “dating app exodus,” as users — especially those of the Gen Z persuasion — are now seeking more authentic “real-world” connections. At the same time, growth in the number of users opting to plunk down actual cash money for “premium” dating app features is fizzling fast. Meanwhile, apps stores are filling up with gamified dating “simulators” meant to provide an outlet for frustrated would-be love interests.
It’s unlikely that dating apps as we know them are going anywhere, but I’m sure seeing a lot more ads for in-person and off-app singles events. Not far in the future, I’m guessing: the rise of in-person flirting coaches for socially anxious Zoomers (oh wait, they’re already here.)
With news, the only winning move is not to play
In my most recent post I dug into another exodus, that of people (not just Democrats!) fleeing news burnout and the proliferating news-catastrophization industrial complex in service of self care and mental health. Recently, Janus Rose, writing at 404 Media, observed that the cynical strategy of authoritarians and tech CEOs now appears to be keeping us locked in an eternal doomscroll of ineffective outrage, wasting all our energy on gotcha posts and bug-eyed apoplectica. She suggests that our time may be better spent not rage-reading about every new horror and pounding the panic button, but, yes, in logging off.
This tracks perfectly with my earlier point: by engaging with each eyeball-grabbing headline and tracking every new stomach-turning pronouncement from Team Trump, all we’re doing is oxygenating the ecosystem of attention they crave and which perpetuates their hold over us. Refusing to engage with the news is a balm for our mental health and a principled declaration of objection to this craven ecosystem, and it starves the machine of the fuel that elevates and rewards such cynical gamification.
“The marriage of big tech and Trumpworld should make clear that Silicon Valley and authoritarians share the same goal: to crush dissent by keeping their would-be opponents spinning on an endless hamster wheel of reactive anger. And just like in the classic 1983 thriller WarGames, the only winning move is not to play … The internet has conditioned us to constantly seek new information, as if becoming a sponge of bad news will eventually yield the final piece of a puzzle. But there is also such a thing as having enough information.”
The consummation of enshittification
“Enshittification,” the sensationally sibilant word coined by SciFi author and activist Cory Doctorow to describe, in the era of growth-at-all-costs surveillance capitalism, the decay of social platforms into nightmarish digital parasites that eat their hosts’ brains and shit out the indigestible parts as popular culture, continues its charm tour of the popular parlance. After the Macquarie Dictionary named it their own word of the year, enshittification now seems to be everywhere, capturing as it does our growing discontent with how almost everything about the internet seems to be getting categorically crappier.
On Feb. 5, Ars Technica published an enshittification Hall of Shame, embiggening the category beyond just online platforms. Among their worst offenders: Smart TVs, Google’s voice assistant, PDFs, televised sports, Google search (obvs), and email AI ‘assistants.’
Has something been enshittified near to the point of unusability in your online world? Let us know, and perhaps we’ll create our own Hall of Shame.
A major anti-AI protest and a shift to more intentional disconnection
This one dates back to December, but I think it’s worth exhuming: Clement Delangue, CEO of the $4.5 billion AI startup Hugging Face, notched several predictions for AI in 2025, one being that this year we’ll see the first major public protest related to AI. Honestly, he almost sounds like he’s looking forward to it. Hard to blame him; we’ve learned by now that all press is good press, and protests these days seem have all the efficacy of farting into a hurricane, so probably AI wins this one either way.
Meanwhile, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels acknowledged in his own 2025 forecast that a growing movement is emerging with a focus on intentional disconnection and mindful technology choices. He writes:
“A new wave of purpose-driven devices is emerging, designed to foster intentional use and encourage us to enter a state of flow—or “the zone”—rather than divert our attention. e-Readers, such as the Kindle, have long encouraged immersive reading without interruptions. Now, we are witnessing this trend on a much larger scale, with the emergence of minimalist phones that offer little more than call and text functions, cameras that emphasize the craft of taking a photograph not on sharing, and standalone music players that let us enjoy music without the constant barrage of messages and notifications.”
Put down that phone and pick up a sketchbook
On the topic of mindful technology choices, about four years ago, desperately seeking a way to reduce my screen time, I dove into Betty Edwards’ classic textbook, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. Reader, it was the best thing I read all pandemic. I discovered, among many other epiphanies, that drawing is 95% head and 5% hand. I quickly latched on to urban sketching — capturing the most ordinary of scenes and objects from the real world, both indoors and outdoors — because it seemed a simple and accessible way to forget my phone and focus all my attention on what was in front of me. With the world now awash in a flood tide of disposable and identical smartphone pics of every Instagrammable object on the planet, taking the time to truly see and capture a moment or a scene on paper feels like one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever given myself.
Last week The New York Times discovered urban sketching, too, weaving it in with the “slow travel” movement. More and more people, it observes, having tired of staring at screens and snapping instantly forgettable photos, are taking up drawing during their travels. “Sketching,” says one of the those interviewed, “is one of the few artistic fields in which we experience our subjects on location firsthand. The genuine is in demand.”
The return of physical media (and all that plastic, I guess)
, writing at Embedded last week, says she’s doubling down on physical media. We both get the sense she’s not alone.“I used to have a DVD collection and an entire book of CDs that I let slip away over time,” she writes. “Now I’m slowly starting to rebuild my physical media collection—and seeing many others do the same.”
One point she makes that grabbed me: streaming services elide huge swaths of a person’s personality that were previously visible and tangible. Browsing through someone’s music or film or book collection in their home is way more satisfying than grabbing their phone and swiping through their Spotify history. (We’re drawing the line at porn here, right?)
The money quote:
“With the election, I'm just so sick of giving my money to companies that are using it for bad. Why am I giving my money to Spotify? Or why am I giving my attention to Meta? These companies don't deserve it.”
Tell it, sister.
Up Next: Django Unchained on Broadway
At Sundance last week, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill auteur/Hollywood court jester Quentin Tarantino tore into streaming platforms and what the pivot to online and digital has done to the movie industry. The real excitement for artists like him now, he said, is no longer online but — wait for it — in live theater.
“In theater you pay a lot of money to get into that seat. But there’s no fucking taping, no fucking cellphones. You own the audience for that time. For that moment, they are all yours, they are in the palm of your hand. And it’s not just about doing art. It’s about wowing them; it’s about giving them a great night out that made it worth it for them. Now that to me is fucking exciting.”
I don’t really believe that Quentin Forking Tarantino or any other A-list Hollywood is going to be directing a live stage play this year. But I don’t not believe it.
Dammit, Reddit!
Writing at The Atlantic last week in an extended takedown of the AI-ification of Reddit, Matteo Wong puts a savage cherry on it:
“The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.”
Yahoo! re-emerges, blinking, into the sunlight of a new dawn
After many years in the wilderness, Yahoo! is suddenly cool again? Or — that may be stretching it — at least making an awkward Hail Mary at regaining the mojo it had lo these many years past. The internet’s original pioneer spent all of 2024 upgrading just about everything about its product portfolio, which I imagine is what walking into Sanford and Son’s garage must feel like. Now with a sleek new, blinged-out CEO, an Apple News competitor, a Fantasy app, and (obvs) a shmear of AI across pretty much everything.
But it seems the real wind in Yahoo!’s sails may be the current backlash against its competitors. As the social media landscape splinters, brain rot becomes the default online user experience, and the Tech Broligarchy recalibrates the vibe on their legacy platforms to further amplify and reward the Trumpian values of hate, division, disiniformation and cruelty, Yahoo! suddenly seems like the fresh-faced innocent in town. “As all these companies push for the future, Yahoo is marketing itself as a relic of a time when the internet was fun and full of opportunities for discovery.”
Man Walks Ahead
This guy gets it. We’re all just playing catch-up.
Keeping our cafes cozy and social
Finally, yes to a 2025 in which this trend catches fire in cafes, coffee shops & third places everywhere. (Spotted in Ericeira, Portugal.)
I'm enjoying these a great deal, friend. It's giving a bit of hope in this bleak time, and I'm into it.