Tom Scocca
@tomscocca.bsky.social
Editor of Indignity.net. This Bluesky is about the Machines.
Periodic reminder that Didion just ripped off the Santa Ana bit from Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”
Matt Pearce from the top rope:
"The responsibility of the California writer is to regard our dear Didion as a sheer rock face to be respected but also avoided. One literary evocation of the Santa Anas is a description of nature; three is a sign of negligence."
"The responsibility of the California writer is to regard our dear Didion as a sheer rock face to be respected but also avoided. One literary evocation of the Santa Anas is a description of nature; three is a sign of negligence."
Nuzzi vs. Lizza vs. the group chat
mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-ecstas...
mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-ecstas...
November 24, 2025 at 10:44 PM
Periodic reminder that Didion just ripped off the Santa Ana bit from Raymond Chandler’s “Red Wind”
All I know for sure is that one of them got "defaced" way out of the way down the platform from the entrance to my relatively lightly trafficked local stop
But why should anyone even buy the story that they designed the ads to make people mad and then people got mad like they wanted? As opposed to just handing out Sharpies to employees of the marketing firm?
Ding ding ding ding ding bsky.app/profile/sara...
November 24, 2025 at 12:42 AM
All I know for sure is that one of them got "defaced" way out of the way down the platform from the entrance to my relatively lightly trafficked local stop
But why should anyone even buy the story that they designed the ads to make people mad and then people got mad like they wanted? As opposed to just handing out Sharpies to employees of the marketing firm?
Ding ding ding ding ding bsky.app/profile/sara...
Very rapidly swinging to the belief that getting the posters defaced is part of the marketing buy
November 24, 2025 at 12:39 AM
But why should anyone even buy the story that they designed the ads to make people mad and then people got mad like they wanted? As opposed to just handing out Sharpies to employees of the marketing firm?
Ding ding ding ding ding bsky.app/profile/sara...
Very rapidly swinging to the belief that getting the posters defaced is part of the marketing buy
Yesterday my partner and I counted all the ads along Chicago's Brown Line for "Friend," a company selling an AI chatbot pendant, and tallied how many of those ads were defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
November 24, 2025 at 12:37 AM
Ding ding ding ding ding bsky.app/profile/sara...
Why would people choose to be madder at this apparently cruddy intrusive unnecessary AI device and its presumptuous slogans than at every other apparently cruddy intrusive unnecessary AI product out there?
Very rapidly swinging to the belief that getting the posters defaced is part of the marketing buy
Yesterday my partner and I counted all the ads along Chicago's Brown Line for "Friend," a company selling an AI chatbot pendant, and tallied how many of those ads were defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
November 24, 2025 at 12:36 AM
Why would people choose to be madder at this apparently cruddy intrusive unnecessary AI device and its presumptuous slogans than at every other apparently cruddy intrusive unnecessary AI product out there?
Very rapidly swinging to the belief that getting the posters defaced is part of the marketing buy
Yesterday my partner and I counted all the ads along Chicago's Brown Line for "Friend," a company selling an AI chatbot pendant, and tallied how many of those ads were defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
Still working on a longer piece on this, but here's the quick and dirty: we counted 104 "Friend" ads total, 42 defaced.
November 24, 2025 at 12:33 AM
Very rapidly swinging to the belief that getting the posters defaced is part of the marketing buy
Anyway this is an even-more-unearned reboot of the "actually, Johnny Cash was cool" blog
Also maybe this guy's parents had him young but the boomers weren't the uncool parents of '80s teens, they were the tryhard yuppies in between
As someone who is this guy's age I can tell you 100% that if you were into Pixies, Nirvana, 120 Minutes stuff, etc. but didn't like the Beatles you had to have worked hard to contort yourself into that special little box. Your enemy, if you absolutely needed one, was hair metal. GTFO here with this.
November 23, 2025 at 5:53 PM
Anyway this is an even-more-unearned reboot of the "actually, Johnny Cash was cool" blog
Also maybe this guy's parents had him young but the boomers weren't the uncool parents of '80s teens, they were the tryhard yuppies in between
As someone who is this guy's age I can tell you 100% that if you were into Pixies, Nirvana, 120 Minutes stuff, etc. but didn't like the Beatles you had to have worked hard to contort yourself into that special little box. Your enemy, if you absolutely needed one, was hair metal. GTFO here with this.
November 23, 2025 at 5:49 PM
Also maybe this guy's parents had him young but the boomers weren't the uncool parents of '80s teens, they were the tryhard yuppies in between
Reposted by Tom Scocca
As someone who is this guy's age I can tell you 100% that if you were into Pixies, Nirvana, 120 Minutes stuff, etc. but didn't like the Beatles you had to have worked hard to contort yourself into that special little box. Your enemy, if you absolutely needed one, was hair metal. GTFO here with this.
November 23, 2025 at 1:27 PM
As someone who is this guy's age I can tell you 100% that if you were into Pixies, Nirvana, 120 Minutes stuff, etc. but didn't like the Beatles you had to have worked hard to contort yourself into that special little box. Your enemy, if you absolutely needed one, was hair metal. GTFO here with this.
Mainly though if you didn't want your users to freak out over rumors that you're secretly stealing and misusing their personal data, your entire sector should have played the past two years and also the past two decades differently
I do want Google computers to read my email and skim out the obvious spam; I didn't need Google computers reading my email to spam me with Google's own redundant and/or out-of-date alerts about package deliveries on top of the emails that already told me that information
Seems like that Gmail thing isn't true but maybe there's a lesson here about what happens when you keep turning new features on by default and you make it difficult or impossible to turn them off, and also what happens when you lump useful machine learning in with forced slop under the "AI" label
November 22, 2025 at 3:39 PM
Mainly though if you didn't want your users to freak out over rumors that you're secretly stealing and misusing their personal data, your entire sector should have played the past two years and also the past two decades differently
I do want Google computers to read my email and skim out the obvious spam; I didn't need Google computers reading my email to spam me with Google's own redundant and/or out-of-date alerts about package deliveries on top of the emails that already told me that information
Seems like that Gmail thing isn't true but maybe there's a lesson here about what happens when you keep turning new features on by default and you make it difficult or impossible to turn them off, and also what happens when you lump useful machine learning in with forced slop under the "AI" label
November 22, 2025 at 3:29 PM
I do want Google computers to read my email and skim out the obvious spam; I didn't need Google computers reading my email to spam me with Google's own redundant and/or out-of-date alerts about package deliveries on top of the emails that already told me that information
Seems like that Gmail thing isn't true but maybe there's a lesson here about what happens when you keep turning new features on by default and you make it difficult or impossible to turn them off, and also what happens when you lump useful machine learning in with forced slop under the "AI" label
November 22, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Seems like that Gmail thing isn't true but maybe there's a lesson here about what happens when you keep turning new features on by default and you make it difficult or impossible to turn them off, and also what happens when you lump useful machine learning in with forced slop under the "AI" label
Reposted by Tom Scocca
Indignity presents THE STAIRS, a serialized novel by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/tag/the-stai...
THE STAIRS - INDIGNITY
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, and events is entirely coincidental, with the exception of the events in Chapters One and Two, which happened more or less as writt...
www.indignity.net
November 21, 2025 at 11:38 PM
Indignity presents THE STAIRS, a serialized novel by @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/tag/the-stai...
If someone handed me a column draft this week about how Jeffrey Epstein was not symptomatic or representative of a broader elite class, and that column did not contain the name "Summers" (or "Harvard") I would hand back the draft and ask for some revisions
November 21, 2025 at 11:50 PM
If someone handed me a column draft this week about how Jeffrey Epstein was not symptomatic or representative of a broader elite class, and that column did not contain the name "Summers" (or "Harvard") I would hand back the draft and ask for some revisions
Big difference between sounding wised up and being wised up
Shaping up as the biggest W for the Philistines since Goliath of Gath was on his undefeated streak
It's unsophisticated to assume that the writer who went and put the details in a story is too dumb to know what's going on but it's a different kind of unsophisticated to assume that the writer sincerely shares the moral and cultural values that they would seem to be subtly signaling
November 18, 2025 at 2:37 AM
Big difference between sounding wised up and being wised up
Shaping up as the biggest W for the Philistines since Goliath of Gath was on his undefeated streak
It's unsophisticated to assume that the writer who went and put the details in a story is too dumb to know what's going on but it's a different kind of unsophisticated to assume that the writer sincerely shares the moral and cultural values that they would seem to be subtly signaling
Looks like it's time for a cycle on top of a cycle about the pros and cons of writing a feature story that skewers its subject with pointed observation of details rather than having the writer blatantly declare their position and well one model story that did that was New York Mag's RFK Jr. profile
November 18, 2025 at 2:25 AM
Shaping up as the biggest W for the Philistines since Goliath of Gath was on his undefeated streak
Also the whole thing is a 360-degree dunk on her device of just calling him "the Politician"
Functionally, the wandering self-indulgence of the bamboo section does a good job of lulling the reader into not being ready for the relentlessly focused intensity of the finale
November 18, 2025 at 2:24 AM
Also the whole thing is a 360-degree dunk on her device of just calling him "the Politician"
GAWKER! thou shouldst be living at this hour
November 18, 2025 at 1:52 AM
GAWKER! thou shouldst be living at this hour
Reposted by Tom Scocca
We’re looking for a news reporter interested in writing about weather science and weather history for a social platform. This is a really great team and you should join us careers.wbd.com/global/en/jo...
News Reporter, CNN Weather in Atlanta, Georgia, United States of America | Creative, Content & Editorial at CNN
Apply for News Reporter, CNN Weather job with CNN
careers.wbd.com
November 17, 2025 at 10:53 PM
We’re looking for a news reporter interested in writing about weather science and weather history for a social platform. This is a really great team and you should join us careers.wbd.com/global/en/jo...
"A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all" is to any reasonably informed reader self-evidently a savage burn on the Man Who Does His Own Research, AND YET
It's unsophisticated to assume that the writer who went and put the details in a story is too dumb to know what's going on but it's a different kind of unsophisticated to assume that the writer sincerely shares the moral and cultural values that they would seem to be subtly signaling
Looks like it's time for a cycle on top of a cycle about the pros and cons of writing a feature story that skewers its subject with pointed observation of details rather than having the writer blatantly declare their position and well one model story that did that was New York Mag's RFK Jr. profile
November 17, 2025 at 4:46 PM
"A doctor he trusted had reviewed the scans of his brain obtained by The New York Times, he said, and concluded that the shadowy figure was likely not a parasite at all" is to any reasonably informed reader self-evidently a savage burn on the Man Who Does His Own Research, AND YET
It's unsophisticated to assume that the writer who went and put the details in a story is too dumb to know what's going on but it's a different kind of unsophisticated to assume that the writer sincerely shares the moral and cultural values that they would seem to be subtly signaling
Looks like it's time for a cycle on top of a cycle about the pros and cons of writing a feature story that skewers its subject with pointed observation of details rather than having the writer blatantly declare their position and well one model story that did that was New York Mag's RFK Jr. profile
November 16, 2025 at 3:45 PM
It's unsophisticated to assume that the writer who went and put the details in a story is too dumb to know what's going on but it's a different kind of unsophisticated to assume that the writer sincerely shares the moral and cultural values that they would seem to be subtly signaling
Looks like it's time for a cycle on top of a cycle about the pros and cons of writing a feature story that skewers its subject with pointed observation of details rather than having the writer blatantly declare their position and well one model story that did that was New York Mag's RFK Jr. profile
November 16, 2025 at 3:40 PM
Looks like it's time for a cycle on top of a cycle about the pros and cons of writing a feature story that skewers its subject with pointed observation of details rather than having the writer blatantly declare their position and well one model story that did that was New York Mag's RFK Jr. profile
Enjoyed Highest 2 Lowest and Spike Lee's always-hyperreal and specific New York, but couldn't a person get out of a $17.5 million hole by selling just one Basquiat?
November 16, 2025 at 3:15 PM
Enjoyed Highest 2 Lowest and Spike Lee's always-hyperreal and specific New York, but couldn't a person get out of a $17.5 million hole by selling just one Basquiat?
We're talking here about the historic site d/b/a "James Madison's Montpelier"? The one with the bronze statue of James and Dolley Madison sitting outside?
Can anyone confirm Heritage’s strange claim that Montpelier has no exhibits on James Madison? And also, the Constitution protected the institution of slavery in several ways, an institution that made Madison’s entire economic existence possible. Madison owned ~100 people and freed none of them.
November 15, 2025 at 5:04 PM
We're talking here about the historic site d/b/a "James Madison's Montpelier"? The one with the bronze statue of James and Dolley Madison sitting outside?
Reposted by Tom Scocca
BUT ALSO THO AFTER AT THE BOTTOM SANDWICHES
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 198, FICTION DEP'T - Introducing a serialized work of fiction by @tomscocca.bsky.social: THE STAIRS, Chapter One www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-one/
The Stairs, Chapter One
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 198
www.indignity.net
November 15, 2025 at 2:41 AM
BUT ALSO THO AFTER AT THE BOTTOM SANDWICHES