Scooters, Satire, and Straight-up Sorcery
You know those scooters in San Francisco and other major cities that we’ve talked about previously? Taylor Lorenz in The Atlantic wrote a fascinating piece on how those same scooters are whisked away and powered up at night by contract workers scouring the streets for a cash money “bounty.” Some of the chargers feel like they’re doing a public service (for a fee), rescuing lost or rudely abandoned scooters, charging them, and neatly putting them out the next morning. But like many things related to tech, there’s a burgeoning underbelly of hierarchy, chop shops, depreciating assets and fake identities.
Over at The New York Times, Nellie Bowles - one of my favorite culture writers ever, period - wrote a profile on Jordan Peterson, Canadian author and patron intellectual saint of the online men’s rights movement. She spent a few days with the “Custodian of the Patriarchy”, quoting his answers on the redistribution of the sexual economy, “enforced monogamy,” and actual real-life witches, which I guess exist or something? Obviously, I loved the profile and think it is critical that we understand those who extol the absolute importance of a return to traditional gender roles to their millions of online followers. But not everyone cares for Bowles’s take, with conservative thinkers like Ben Shapiro calling her out for “her sneering condescension.”
And finally, for that really strange Venn diagram of those of us following the awfulness of online misogynist communities, and those of us who LOVE T.S. Eliot and may have performed an original continuation of the Love Song for her Grade 12 AP Lit final project, McSweeney’s gives you The Incel Song of J. Alfred Prufock. Well fucking done Juliana Gray, well fucking done (ht David.)
Default to kind, my darlings.
Amy