Dicks, Bunkers, and the K-Pop Machine
The best piece of writing I read this week was Megan Farokhmanesh’s quiet obituary for Chatroulette in The Verge. You remember Chatroulette—that brief, delirious moment around 2010 when webcam owners worldwide got randomly connected to each other, and the result was genuinely, stupidly joyful. Strangers playing piano. People in elaborate costumes. The occasional surreal exchange that felt like finding a message in a bottle. It lasted maybe eighteen months before the dicks arrived in such overwhelming numbers that the whole thing collapsed into unusability. Farokhmanesh writes about what remains of it now, which is mostly a quiet monument to what happens when you build something open and then discover that openness has consequences.
It’s hard not to read that story as a parable for the whole internet. Something starts porous and full of possibility, and then a specific subset of its users ruins it for everyone else, and then you spend the next decade designing around that fact. K-Pop, of all things, offers a different version of the same anxiety. Aja Romano’s piece in Vox on how Korean pop conquered the global charts is partly a music story and partly a story about what happens when you industrialize desire so completely that the seams become part of the product. BTS and their contemporaries are not trying to hide the machinery. The training programs, the synchronized choreography, the parasocial fan architectures—all of it is visible, intentional, and apparently irresistible. Romano asks what that says about the audience, and the answer is uncomfortable and worth sitting with.
Nona Willis Aronowitz wrote for The New York Times about the feminist pursuit of good sex, which is a piece that will annoy different readers in different ways depending on exactly where they sit on the current spectrum of gender politics. It’s about the genuine tension between wanting to be dominated and wanting to be equal, between fantasy and ideology, between what happens in bed and what you believe in the daylight. She doesn’t resolve it, which is the right call. The unresolved tension is the point. Related, and just as honest: a piece circulating this week about how women across generations actually talk about men when no one is performing for an audience. The conclusions are neither flattering nor unfair. They are just specific, which is worse than either.
And then there are the Silicon Valley billionaires buying land in New Zealand, documented by Mark O’Connell in The Guardian, spending significant portions of their fortunes on bunkers and escape routes in case civilization comes apart at the seams. These are men who built the platforms currently eating democracy and social cohesion from the inside, and their response to the accelerating chaos is not to moderate their platforms or pay taxes at a rate commensurate with their influence but to quietly acquire a bolt-hole on the other side of the planet. O’Connell does not judge them so much as observe them with the steady gaze of someone trying to understand an alien species. The piece is funny and deeply upsetting and I thought about it for the rest of the week.
Reading all of it in the same few days gives you a feeling somewhere between vertigo and grim recognition. The dicks took Chatroulette. K-Pop turned desire into logistics. Sex and politics are inextricable no matter how much anyone wishes otherwise. And the architects of our digital world are quietly packing go-bags. I don’t know what to do with any of that. I know I can’t stop reading.