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I am writing to you from the tail end of a rare, kid-free, 48 hour work bender, that I relegated myself to after looking at a few impossible deadlines and realizing there was absolutely no way I could go to my cabin (without internet) this weekend and avoid a career beheading. So shrimp posture it is, and has been, as I hunch over my computer and dedicate myself to much keyboard smashing as the rest of my family swims at the lake.

On Trying Too Hard But Not Too Much

In other regrettable news, I have managed to go viral this week on TikTok, which sounds like a flex but is actually fairly unpleasant, and one day when I have more mental bandwidth I’d love to write about what a curse it is to hit big waves on the algorithms. I think we’re past the era where execs laud virality as the ultimate goal (thank God!), but I do believe most people still think of it in a positive light even if they don’t want to admit it. My own personal experience has been that virality suddenly, often overnight, exposes you to audience demographics you don’t normally interact with online (read: not your intended ones), and the result is a comment thread and inbox filled with vitriol.

The video in question deals with effort, specifically “witnessed effort,” which I suggest is more or less the 2026 definition of cringe, and how taboo it’s become in the influencer sphere. My theory is that influencers are rarely allowed to show how much effort goes into their empires without audience attrition, because it deviates from the effortless fantasy they’re supposed to sell.

(For added context, what pushed it into viral territory is the fact that I used Alix Earle — the wildly famous blond-haired, blue-eyed TikToker with over 8 million followers — as an example).

Some early commenters disagreed with my thesis, suggesting that effort and struggle can be grounds for trust building in parasocial relationships, and while I don’t think that argument is incorrect for some, the more I think about it the more I disagree with the disagreers! Effort exerted, past tense, tends to be tolerated in small amounts on social media, but trying, which I’m going to define as the present manifestation of effort, is much harder to portray without exposing cracks in the shiny influencer veneer. And those cracks often cause problems.

In Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s recent article in The Cut — Social Media’s Last Taboo — and then again in her recent Galaxy Brain podcast episode (she is currently promoting her new book about how social media has shifted our perception of self), she affirms these theories of mine, noting that stories of growth and learnings, or journeys through hardship, are fine, so long as they are conveyed after the struggle has been resolved. KJM reminds us that “flat stories” without triumph or Big Lessons that can be conveyed back to the viewer don’t tend to perform well.

And here’s the thing — you don’t have to care about influencers (I’m thinking of my dad reading this right now) for this to be interesting, because it’s not really about them. It’s about what’s gradually becoming, because of algorithmic sorting, unacceptable behaviour, and the concerning fact that what happens on social media platforms absolutely bleeds out into “real life,” impacting new cultural norms and mores. I’m increasingly convinced that opting out from these apps may be possible on an individual level, but you’ll still have to live in a society shaped by tech giants, and right now that is one where effort is highly scrutinized.

I tend to think of my own efforts as a rebellion against this influencer paradox. Every week I work on my newsletter and research my theories and write my little scripts and film my silly little videos and toil away editing alone in my office at night so that I can continue to post on social media. The hope is to create content that performs well enough, develop a critical body of work, and open up unconventional opportunities. It is a ton of work that requires massive effort with considerable sacrifice of my time, and I hope it remains evident just how hard I’m trying.

An Uncompromising Belgian Novelist’s Afterlife as a BookTok Star, Katy Waldman

I can’t claim to be cool or original in discovering Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, which first appeared in English in 1997 but then got catapulted into viral growth more recently due to BookTok creators and algorithmic tides. I read it despite the fact that I have been let down many a time by TikTok book recommendations, and thoroughly enjoyed the singular, eerie, dystopian tale of a once imprisoned woman exploring a barren world.

When I came across an article about Harpman in August’s New Yorker, I eagerly tuned in, not expecting it to impact me so deeply, causing one of those sit-immobile-in-my-office-afterwards spells, as I reviewed the final few lines.

I’ll be honest that the article has spoilers, so don’t read it if you haven’t read the book and are planning to, but what hit me so hard was the reflection about loneliness — experienced by both the main character in IWHNKM and many users of social media — and how it’s alleviated not just by connection with others, but by witnessing the culture we as humans create together. I’ve long theorized that shared culture is slipping away as personalized algorithms and internet echo chambers ascend, so it tracks that social media connects us to others, technically speaking, while robbing us of co-created meaning.

What a punch to the gut.

I Deleted My Second Brain, Joan Westenberg

My favourite read of the week goes to this mind-expanding essay by Joan Westenberg from 2025, about…well, exactly what the title says.

I have been second brain-curious for years now, which, to my understanding, is a digital system you maintain and prune to keep all your writing and ideas accounted for but also searchable. Obsidian is a popular tool for this, but I know people also use Notion, and I suppose at the most rudimentary levels, their native Notes app.

She talks about how, ultimately, the sheer volume of everything she had stored started to feel like a burden, but moreover, that true memory isn’t a carefully organized vault, but something that shifts, expands, contracts, accommodates new information, and can be provoked by experiences in the moment. In short, it doesn’t easily lend itself to cloud storage infrastructure.

There were so many banger quotes in this article, so here are a couple of my favourites:

“In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I certainly never interrogated them.”

“This is productivity as performance. It is a symptom of modern intellectual insecurity: the fear of losing track, of forgetting, of not being caught up. But caught up to what? The feed? The discourse? The meme cycle? There is no finish line in the pursuit of knowing. Only presence.”

I can’t say I’m ready to delete all my apple notes, but suddenly it feels like the goal.

I Asked 28 Creatives One Question,

My internet pal Kel recently put together an incredible collection of creative counsel and asked me to participate! I shared my thoughts on “how to stay creative” and feel lucky to rub shoulders with so many other smart, wonderful Substackers. Go read the whole thing!

I’m Begging You, Never Write With AI, Bret Stephens

Guys, it’s bad, it’s really really bad out there. Everyone is using AI to write (everything from emails to sexts to award winning fiction novels to obituaries) and as a surprise to no one, it’s eroding our brain matter.

Writing helps us think and reflect, it forces us to slow down and process, and if we stop doing all that we are going to become dumb dumbs without the capacity for understanding. Understanding what? There are no bounds! Books certainly, but also each other, how to govern fairly, the meaning of life, etc.

On the atrophying nature of it, Stephens writes:

“The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.”

I agree and want you to be careful. I actually think that using AI tools to code and outsource menial workflows is great, especially for non-technical folks, and I’m not anti-AI, but, as Sam Kriss once said, If You Let AI Do Your Writing, I Will Come To Your House And Kill You. (Please know that I mean that only metaphorically.)

Human typography

A woman created typography by contorting her body into different shapes. Her sister turned it into an interactive font. Play around with it here! More about the process here.

Athenaeum Book Club

This is the exactly the way I’d always hoped (and still hope) the internet can be used for great things. The Athenaeum Book Club is a hugely successful Substack, but more than that it’s a group that aims to “resist cultural death”. Carmen’s translation: they’ll help you read and move meaningfully through intimidating books.

In their own words:

We are slowly reading through the greatest works of the Western canon — works that take real effort to read, and even more to read well. That’s what we’re doing here, slowly, in dialogue with each other.

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I have some really good videos for you this week 😏:

Hot Tip: Don’t mug middle-aged women, @momcomnyc

Every video from this creator makes me snort laughing. I don’t know if I have enough peri-menopausal women in my readership, but hopefully this still lands.

The kind of music my husband plays when I’m already overstimulated, @jaeger.haus

This is me and my life to a T. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the verge of a mental breakdown with kids screaming in the back while my husband plays some dude screaming “Invoke the siren's song and sign the death warrant!”

Nothing’s gonna stop us now, @tonyandthekiki

These guys are musicians who make original music but regularly do these incredible covers and if you need a hit of dopamine, here it is.

POV: The bartender is a little much, @jacemungai

I’ve watched this four times now and it’s made me literally laugh out loud every single time. The pouring part is always where I break 😅. So dumb, but so good.

The Post-It note method, @sarahsidequests

I’m not usually one to encourage consumption, but after I watched this video I RAN to order Post-it notes and a “ticket stabber”. I’m someone who has to do a combo of digital + analog to dos because I often find the act of writing helps me remember things better. Anyways, something about this scratches an itch deep inside my brain and I can’t wait to start spiking notes.

And lastly, a collection of recent screen caps:

A mean comment I got recently!

A nice comment I got recently!

Something that made me scared!

Something that made me laugh!

Thanks for reading this week and always.

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First, some thoughts on sniffing out AI writing…

In 1935, succumbing to lobbying from Australian cane sugar farmers whose crops were being ravaged by beetles, an entomologist named Reginald Mungomery travelled to Hawaii to capture and return home with several specimens of cane toad. The cane toads would eat the cane beetles, they theorized, and the precious sugar crops would be restored to their profitable grandeur.

But the toads ignored the beetles (who lived much further up the stalks than the toads could access), bred explosively, were highly toxic, and killed significant portions of the native predators (goannas, quolls, snakes, crocodiles) who dared to eat them. The classic “fight fire with fire” strategy created an entirely new problem, and if you’re curious, the cane toad population in Australia is still spreading, uncontained, some 90 years later.

This phenomenon is known as biological control gone wrong, and I bring it up because this week Substack unveiled their new partnership with Pangram — the leading AI detection software — to a mixed-but-unimpressed-leaning reception. I immediately thought of cane toads, and “wrong sides of the witch hunt” (like suggested) that writers might find themselves in. One of the more scathing deep dives is this one below, which goes into excellent detail about how Pangram actually works. A less salacious take is here, in which the author goes to great lengths to test Pangram’s models on pre-internet era literature.

What’s interesting is that in the same week Substack announced its new integration with Pangram, their competitor Patreon also made an important announcement of their own — they’re now working with the internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare to block AI crawlers’ access to their platform. The move will ensure that art and content on Patreon will not be available for ingestion by bots in the service of “training models”. And sure, these two partnerships serve different purposes, but a common thread is clear: let’s demonstrate that we give a shit about our human users.

I’m not here to skewer imperfect effort, and you can expect no hot takes ahead, but it’s not hard to understand why Substack users are unnerved by entrusting artificial intelligence to gauge their humanity. People continue to be wary of AI, we know this to be statistically true, and distilling this determination into a product feature feels eerie and ill-advised. At the same time, I imagine that all social media-esque companies are sweating right now, as they scramble to figure out how to prevent their ecosystems from slipping into slopfests. My initial reaction to Chris Best’s post wasn’t horror, but my media-trained brain knew it would be a field day. I wonder how this feature will evolve, or what the adoption rate will be in the months to come.

False positives from Pangram have the potential to incite all sorts of downstream issues and “poison bigger mammals in the food chain,” but I think the most profound problem here isn’t Substack’s miss, it’s the fact that no better solve exists. We’re already bearing witness to AI-generated writing clogging up the internet, winning literary prizes right under the judges’ noses, causing cognitive debt, and creating massive trust issues, but now we have to reconcile another grim reality — our only option for verifying human-written essays is a Silicon Valley-born, technological “solution”. And the people aren’t having it.

The goal on any platform with followers and subscribers has always been exponential growth. To increase followers, and reach, and impressions on the path to total algorithmic domination, and the scary truth is that no entity is a more successful influencer than slop. Slop is an unthinking, unfeeling workhorse, capable of breeding more rapidly than even a toxic cane toad population, resistant to the earthly solutions we hurl in its direction.

On Not Keeping A Notebook,

This was the best essay I read all week, sliding in at the eleventh hour (this morning)! I’ve subscribed to ’s Substack, Maybe Baby, since 2020 and if I could only read one newsletter for the rest of my life, it would be hers. She is such an excellent writer, and often proves my theory that the topic of your writing (or “content”) doesn’t matter so long as the execution and delivery are great.

I have never been much of a journaler, though I do always keep a notebook (my favourites are the grid ones from Leuchtterm) where I write to-dos on the left-hand page, and ideas on the right-hand, so it acts as a record of my thoughts, albeit less diaristic. I relate to her anxiety around not doing it despite wanting to on some level, but tend to treat journalling the same way I treat taking pictures at a concert—I’d rather just take it in and know that I enjoyed it in the moment. She, of course, sums it up more eloquently than me:

“And so abstaining from documenting, or at least occasionally resisting it, can become, for the neurotic, a kind of wellness exercise—a sacrifice of preservation made for the sake of presence.”

Raising Children Is Not An Individual Responsibility, Anne Helen Petersen

I’m fresh off a solo-parenting week that was fine, all things considered, but did require me to pull a lot of early mornings and late nights to squeeze in all the work. I was called a “poo-poo head” just once, and somehow managed to avoid ordering takeout every night, though transparently that’s because Uber overwhelms me and I only ever add things to my cart before giving up and cooking another dinner of pasta and butter. Don’t ask me to report on our vegetable intake in the past seven days.

For obvious reasons I thought a lot about caregiving this past week, and re-read this old interview did with back in 2022 that felt radical to me at the time, but shouldn’t be. Garbes is the author of Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, and blew my mind with the simple assertion that:

“Investing in children and families and mothering is a long-term investment in public health, our nation’s emotional well-being, a safer and more compassionate society. It ensures the success—however you define that—and existence of our future.”

Can Patreon Fight Fire with Social Media Fire? The Decoder

Speaking of Patreon, Jack Conte recently joined on The Decoder podcast to talk about what he/Patreon is doing differently, but also how they’ve shifted their outlook on certain features, like a discoverability layer complete with an algorithm. I enjoy listening to Conte talk about social media, because he does a great job of articulating thoughts and stark realities you haven’t quite crystallized yet. Plus, Nilay is such a strong interviewer who never lobs softballs.

The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are And How Old You Think You Are, Jennifer Senior (gift link!)

This is another older article (from 2023) that I was compelled to dig up because I suffer from always feeling a lot younger than my chronological age. Senior explains that this is common in people older than 25, but I was surprised (and fascinated!) to read about so many different internal ages that interviewees claimed to embody.

Even was quoted in the piece, and her answer made me feel less anxious about growing old:

At 53 you worry about being old compared to younger people. At 83 you enjoy the moment, and time travel here and there in the past 8 decades. You don’t fret about seeming old, because hey, you really are old! You and your friends make Old jokes. You have more fun than at 53, in some ways. Wait, you’ll see!

PS - This article sent me down a fruitful internet rabbit hole, and I ended up reading a second Jennifer Senior piece, an interview with Margaret Atwood, that centred on aging and befriending your enemies. If you’re curious, that’s here.

The Voice of Google, Claire Stapleton

A gripping essay, though technically it’s an excerpt from ’s forthcoming book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech. Stapleton chronicles her experience moving up through the ranks of Google’s internal comms team, during the company’s earlier years. The portrait she paints is very cultish.

There was so much that resonated with me in this article, especially the way that praise and positive feedback propelled Stapleton further and further into the core of the machine, and I could see how the systems designed to ensure employees hit their KPIs are also cause for tunnel vision.

I ultimately felt deeply for Stapleton, who was loyal to a company for over a decade, only to be escorted out the door when she no longer served their motives. A great, depressing read.

Tagline, Merriam Webster

I am not even going to attempt to explain the rules of play, but if you like crosswords and Wordle this will be right up your alley. I like that it’s not one puzzle, but also not limitless, and it doesn’t take very long to get the hang of.

Give it a whirl and tell me what you think.

Guy Who Took Delivery Of The Trojan Horse, @ajbrennan95 on Instagram

AJ is easily one of the funniest people on social media right now, and I genuinely cry-laugh at my phone when I watch his videos. This one is long but worth it — he is a comedic genius.

Lying About AI, @brunasoboslay on Instagram

This video is probably staged but I don’t care, it’s still funny. I know it’s bad to lie to your kids (I know!!), but I think if you’re doing it to fight consumerism it’s okay! Plus, it’s best to train them early that AI can be a big letdown.

I’m a Sloptomist!, Me on TikTok

@carmscrollsAre we entering the “Afterlife Era” of the internet? #deadinternettheory #aibots #socialmediastrategy #deadinternet #conspiracytheory

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Here’s my latest video essay up on TikTok (soon to be IG) where I covered The Dead Internet Theory. I feel slightly crazy admitting this — as someone who regularly makes critical content about digital culture and encourages others to be more discerning about what they consume online — but I still want to fight for a weird and wonderful internet, more than I want to burn it all down. Maybe it’s because I remember golden days of Google Reader and blogs, or because I’m addicted to social media. Perhaps there’s no noble reason at all. But yes, I consider myself a “sloptomist” because I want to contribute to a corner of the internet where humans still reside.

Two Substack notes that made me giggle:

And the best hate comment I received on my content all week:

Who hurt you, @landtastic???

Thank you for reading this week, I’ll see you in a fortnight.

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Hello again and welcome back. This is the 10th edition (!!) of Scroll Sick, meaning I have now stuck with this wee side project for longer than 89% of the people who start newsletters. I will be honest that even a bi-weekly commitment has been challenging over and above a full-time tech job, but it’s the sort of work I find “spiritually replenishing” and therefore un-chore-like. I appreciate each and every one of you following along!

If you’re feeling generous, forward this to someone smart with a note like “thought you’d like this newsletter from a weird woman who curates internet detritus worthy of your attention”. I’d be so grateful.

For the past week or so, I’ve been fixated on an increasingly bot-filled internet. In early June we officially crossed over from a predominantly human internet to a “dead internet”, meaning simply that there is now more traffic from bots than humans. Matthew Prince, CEO of the software company Cloudflare, tweeted, “Welp, that happened faster than I predicted,” and went on to produce vetted receipts showing agentic (bot/crawler/agent) traffic surpassing the 50% mark. Sit with that for a moment!

It’s important to note that not all bot/crawler traffic is nefarious, and obviously some of it is just “routine” crawling to ensure websites contain the info they claim they do. I get that. But we are also starting to see AI influencers, AI UGC, AI commenting, and AI clipping agencies/farms/startups/services multiplying at the rate of cell division, which is of course made possible by the relatively cheap (for the moment) AI models available to everyone right now. I spoke about stealth “clip farms” that operate out of Discord groups in this video last month, which amassed over 500k views across IG and TikTok. The comment thread was mostly speculation about which music artists and recent films used this promotional approach.

Then last week I dove into (yes I know “dove” is an LLMism, and no I didn’t use AI to write this) a new breed of tech startup that boasts the ability to scale promotional content about your brand or product using AI influencers. As it turns out, AI influencers can crank out content fast.

I recognize that all of this sounds pretty bleak, verging on grief-inducing because most of us are in complex, co-dependent relationships with the internet, but I came across a sharp, forward-thinking take from Deana Burke yesterday that reminded me just how malleable online culture is. Her nuanced argument is an interesting one, suggesting that attention will no longer be a sufficient currency now that bots are everywhere and they possess none of it. They don’t click, subscribe, or linger, and because of this Cloudflare (yes the same one!) is launching a “pay per use” model where websites/publishers can charge AI companies when their content is scraped and delivered in AI summaries or search. If this becomes widespread, Burke thinks we might move away from the clickbait tactics that fuel the attention economy, and towards something more value-centric.

What I’m interested in is where we go from here and what will define this next “Afterlife Era”, where trust is at an all-time low. The popular prediction and most common refrain on my content is something to the effect of, “Good, now we can all log off and touch grass,” and yet, I find that both unlikely and unsatisfying. By all means, commune with nature, but also consider that the internet is an ecosystem at large, worth preserving and fighting for. Retreating from it feels like the ultimate privilege, available only to a select few who might never need to navigate employment opportunities, community planning, media, entertainment, leisure, or self-promotion.

The bots are botting, the feeds are flooded, and I automatically assume every cute video of a cat to be AI, but I’m still here for the good parts. Hopefully Scroll Sick is one of them.

Make Something Heavy, Anu Atluru

This was the best Substack essay I read all week, an important meditation on the light and heavy “things” we decide to fill our lives with (and the inevitable lightness of the online world). In many ways, its core thesis reminded me of ’s definition of friction, in so far as it suggests that “heavy” endeavours take massive effort and time, and it’s the depth of effort that makes them worthy.

Atluru suggests social media content, for the most part, is light, which made me reflect critically on the body of work I’ve built here. But she also offered the following, which I found hopeful:

So many creators start in the shallow pool of some algorithm’s grip until, inevitably, they go searching for something heavier.

Oof. Agreed.

Dinah’s Hat, Stephen King

If you can believe it, I have never read a Stephen King book, but I raced through this short story at my cabin last week, surrounded by the aptly spooky soundtrack of a stormy marsh.

I immediately liked the setting, I suppose because the American South is so exotic to me as a Canadian, and kept bracing myself for terrible things throughout. In the end, terrible things are only alluded to, not detailed, so I was spared the true horror.

Brands Have a Participation Problem, !

If you’ve ever felt annoyed or exasperated by the dogpiling onto trends by corporate entities, this post does a great job of articulating why it’s so desperate and sloppy.

I’ll be honest that I think brand social KPIs are at the helm of this kind of nose dive. The constant pressure to present expanding reach and impressions (to leadership) transforms social teams into circus acts, and in turn those circus acts influence the very fabric of platforms. In short, companies needing to “prove the impact of social” have incentivized the wrong metrics (impressions), to the detriment of quality, tact, and genuine value.

Everything In Capital Markets Is Downstream Of Algorithms, Invest Like The Best podcast

I don’t think (read: I know) I’m not the demographic for this podcast, but I found the conversation gripping and entirely relevant to the themes I tend to monitor (and content I tend to make). Jeremy Giffon, an investor who was once the first employee at a “Buffett-influenced holding company that acquires niche internet businesses”, talks about the new “priesthood” replacing the billionaire class.

In particular, the parts that touched on the power of “the timeline” and how the “poaster class” is rising, were fascinating. Despite my complicated feelings about this impending reality, I do believe that the best equity you can invest in right now is a personal brand — and obviously so much of the tech world is scrambling to see if cultural capital can be purchased with good ol’ economic capital. (In the case of Kylie Jenner, it certainly can!)

My favourite quote from Giffon in the interview:

“Probably the most enlightened way to consume this media is to not read it yourself and get the filtered takes from people around you, and let them expose themselves to the radiation.”

UTA Power Brokers on “The Influencer Cliff”, The Decoder podcast

I’m a huge fan of The Decoder podcast and have so much respect for Nilay Patel, who is a masterful interviewer — he asks sharp questions and lets guests squirm. So yesterday I was thrilled (wow, never thought I’d use that word outside of LinkedIn) to see my video/”influencer cliff” theory referenced in the latest episode. Tune in using the link above, for the entire episode. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector

The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector

This book is one I’ve had for a while but needed to muster some confidence to read, seeing as “Lispector does not lend herself to easy comparison, description, or digestion.” I’ll be honest, it was insane.

In a nutshell, it’s about a woman who suffers a mental breakdown after seeing a cockroach in her house, and takes us through an internal monologue about divinity, mortality, the nature of time, and several other tangents. I’ve been saying for a while now that I want to do more things that require my full attention, and reading this book required the coordination of my every last brain cell. Which is to say, mission accomplished.

If you want to take a crack at it, I recommend using this Reddit read-along guide, which helps to contextualize various sections.

Faces Everywhere

My friend John sees faces in everything, and I’m always keen to see the newest additions to his camera roll. When he came over for dinner last night I asked him to send me a few, knowing that I’d like to share them with you.

(My favourite is the “gargoyle” — I hope you know which one I’m referring to).

How AI Is Changing Social Media Forever, Messy Growth podcast

Speaking of podcasts, I was recently on Messy Growth to chat with Syed Asad about the curse of virality, how AI is fundamentally shifting the way social media operates, and the digital fatigue that we all seem to be battling.

I never edit my own videos with this kind of Vox-esque drama, so it was fun to see my meanderings set against a backdrop of climactic sfx. Thanks Syed!

Eating Pastry With Powdered Sugar, @wangko.jpg on Instagram

This is the funniest video I watched all week.

Daisy Jones in British Vogue, shot by Szilveszter Makó

In no universe am I a fashionable woman even though I sometimes aspire to be, but this recent photoshoot with Daisy Jones in British Vogue stopped me in my tracks. When I began researching the photographer behind the dreamy photos, I learned that Szilveszter Makó is known for “a devotion to handcrafted materiality combined with an insistence on authorship in an era of algorithmic sameness.” Which is to say, this guy is speaking my language!

Check out this recent feature on him in artmag, if you want to better understand his creative process.

Harry Styles Weeping, Wembley Stadium

@shelbs0oNOO crying. #harrystyles #togethertogether #togethertour

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He’s really crying — the first time I’ve seen an artist break down on stage and really believed it.

Thanks for reading this week, and if you’re feeling brave, tell me the last book you read that made you feel dumb. DNF are fair game too!

Scroll Sick is a newsletter I send out every two weeks with cherry-picked (human) suggestions about where to devote your attention. A quick note to say this edition might be riddled with more typos (signs of life) than normal. I drove to a town near my cabin to get enough bars of internet. Apologies!

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Something I’ve wanted to do with Scroll Sick since the beginning is periodically send out themed editions. It’s probably the strategist in me building on a tendency to track patterns across various forms of media and digital culture, and while this still remains a lofty goal of mine, I will be honest that ye ole full time job affects my bandwidth to regularly deliver.

But! As fate would have it, your extremely online author just arrived at her cabin for the week, and is ready to jump on a rare window of opportunity. That opportunity is of course time and mental capacity, but also the positive downstream effects of a rural, completely dog shit internet connection.

I read on a dock today, in the late afternoon sun, one leg dipped into the lake while the little waves reflected dancing light on the pages. It would have been borderline spiritual had my neighbour not been going to town with a weed whacker (not nearly as annoying as his usual chainsaw habit), but I still had a very nice time. I decided then and there that this summery edition of the newsletter would be about reading, or rather, relearning to read, which I think we all have to force ourselves to do every so often in an age of unending internet temptations.

If you’re in a reading rut, haven’t polished off a book in a while, or feel embarrassed to admit how hard it’s become to sit down and read, uninterrupted, this one’s for you. I believe we all have to hit a reset button once in a while, and I hope some of the resources I’m sharing today can be just that.

First, a small bit of context before we dive into some great essays and videos.

My dad taught philosophy and literature before he “kind of” retired a while ago, which meant reading was big in our house. My dad always read. My mom read a lot too, though entirely different books than my dad, and my siblings and I were all decently prolific readers. I think I am the only one in my family who hasn’t read David Foster Wallace’s mammoth Infinite Jest, which my brother read and then forced everyone else to as well. On the eve of my sister’s eleventh birthday she packed her bags and prepared for Hagrid’s arrival, believing that her entry into Hogwarts was imminent. The entire downstairs of my parents’ house is referred to simply as “the library” because it contains floor to ceiling shelves, packed 3 layers deep, with you guessed it — books. And when I was in elementary school and started going to friends houses I always thought to myself, “Where’s your library?”.

With all of the above as a solid foundation, I still fall into periods where barely any reading takes place (my first post-partum year was one) and periods where I plow through impressive stacks (living in Mexico at 23 with no internet connection led to my most prolific reading season yet). Sometimes the conditions align, sometimes they don’t. I resist the urge to make quotas.

If I had to distill my reading tips into easily-digestible bullet points, I’d say:

1. Carry a book or magazine with you everywhere as a default, instead of a phone. I used to wear my phone on me at all times, but now I just try to leave it beside my desk. I am not precious about my books, so I write in them and mark them up and I like to think it helps me retain their contents more. I’m at peace with the fact that most of what I read is done in spurts of 5-15 pages rather than marathon page-turning sessions. The tiny efforts add up.

2. Read what you want, not what you think you should. I’m not into dragon smut but many people are, and that’s cool! I read literary fiction mostly, but I also devour any article that touches on algorithms, the creator economy, and critiques of social media. So I follow what interests me and keep a daily habit alive.

3. Find other people who like talking about reading. The internet (and Scroll Sick!) can be good for recommendations, but I think it’s invaluable to have real human beings who help to disrupt your usual picks and preferences.

4. Once in a while go rogue and read something entirely outside your usual go-to’s. My dad has always been pretty anti-sci-fi but as an adult I’m exercising my free-will and dabbling in it. A couple years ago I started reading non-fiction for the first time and have enjoyed it.

5. I don’t know how to encapsulate this last point into tip format, but it’s something like: believe wholeheartedly that reading is important, and then reaffirm that belief regularly. The act of doing it is the goal, not the pursuit of knowledge, necessarily. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” wrote Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

Alright, let’s get into it. Today I’m sharing a smattering of essays that helped rekindle my love of reading in times when the spark was faint. I hope they incite something in you too.

Reading Is Important To Me And I Will Prove It,

Anne Helen Petersen is one of my favourite writers of all time, and her weekly newsletters — formerly on Substack like this archived one, but now on Patreon — have been an important mainstay throughout the past ~5 years of my life.

In this particular essay, she talks about her strong relationship to reading throughout her early life, an eventual falling out during Covid burnout, and how she slowly crawled back to an earnest daily practice.

It’s from December 2022, but I still distinctly remember reading it and feeling both relieved that others experienced droughts and permission to begin again. I had just survived my first year as a mom of two, reading had taken a back seat in my day-to-day, and I felt like a failure in more ways than one. Then I read Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen in two evenings and thought, we are so back!

How I Learned To Read Way, Way More,

At 2.2k likes and 436 restacks on Substack, this essay isn’t a “hidden gem” but I did find it to be a satisfying guide. The author starts off by stating there are no easy tricks (I have more dignity than to recommend an essay with ‘hacks’!), and reading requires effort, but that there are “weak points” through which you can find a way in.

What he reveals is that the “weak point” of entry is your own curiosity, and the friction (more on that below) you come up against when reading is not so much an attention span problem as a curiosity problem. I like this reframing! He then encourages readers to follow their curiosity, which I took to mean “don’t read what you think you should, just read what you want”.

(Side note: I do think it’s important to force yourself to read hard things you don’t want to sometimes but today we aren’t tackling that.)

In a lot of ways this is not an essay about “how to read way, way more”, but rather a meditation on the interconnected nature of attention and appetite, and how friction can be alleviated when you’re pursuing the object of your curiosity.

Attention is only a resource. A precious one, but a resource. Curiosity is your very spirit. Its corruption for profit might be the worse sin. Reading, the nurturing of curiosity, is the opposite of that abuse.

When Brammer describes the winding path of his own curiosity, from Barthelme to Pynchon to Lispector, what he’s really recounting is a rabbit hole of interest, and any tourist of the internet can relate to the appeal of a good rabbit hole. Ultimately, I went into this thinking “okay what is your secret?!” and left with a reinforced sense that there is no secret, just whims and intrigue we can choose to feed.

In 2026, We Are Frictionmaxxing,

Most of you will probably recall this viral essay from last year that catapulted “frictionmaxxing” into our vocabulary. I loved its encouragement to welcome more inconvenience back into our lives, but it was actually the part about her kids learning to read that stuck with me the most.

In it Jezer-Morton recounts how her sons, via a friction-maxxed road trip in a rickety van, discover the joy of reading due to a lack of any other available options and I think we can all learn something from that. (Sometimes you really do have to remove access to abundance to get back into reading).

By the time we arrived at our destination, my husband’s and my nerves were shot to absolute smithereens. And the kids? They had learned that reading can be a precious form of escape.

How To Read More — A Lot More,

I’m laughing because some of these titles are so similar to each other, which of course they are this is the internet and we are vying for attenuated attention spans after all! But still, what the hell.

Anyways, this one I came across on LinkedIn of all places, and it hit me at exactly the right time. It has a slightly more aggressive tone (read more, or else!) than the others I’ve included here which I actually appreciate. Reading is important, and gentle reminders may not be enough!

I don’t know that much about Holiday, though I did enjoy his episode on Colin and Samir, so I can’t vouch for him being an upstanding citizen — but I agree (mostly) with his opinions on reading. His argument here (“[reading is] not just for fun”), is actually a deviation from Brammer’s, but he does go on to add that it’s also “not just raw knowledge…it helps you find meaning, understand yourself, and make your life better.”

Holiday’s essay is the most motivating and pragmatic of the bunch, and has the effect of lighting a fire under your ass, if that’s what you need right now.

Somebody Told Me These Would Be Good

I am not an organizational guru, but I have a system of screencapping that works for me. Anytime I see a writer, influential figure, or friend post about a good book, I take a picture and file it away.

So here are a collection of those recent screenshots, and I haven’t read any of these yet, but I plan to. I thought it might be fun to pass on some vetted recs.

In order, if you want the links:

Discipline, Larissa Pham

On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia

The Story Of Your Life, Kathryn Jezer-Morton

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Don’t Step Into My Office, David Fishkind

The Children, Melissa Albert

Please Report Your Bug Here, Josh Riedel

Picnic At Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

And now for some other book related links:

By The Book, NYT

I was reading this interview with the award winning author Ruth Ozeki recently, and loved the answer she gave to “Describe your ideal reading experience”.

The fact that she cites “the internet is down” as part of the puzzle is so relatable.

Litterature, @litteraturetime

This guy talks about reading the Classics while picking up garbage, and I love it. Social media can’t be all bad when accounts like this exist.

Our Favorite Books Of 2025, @pagesapart

@pages_apartHere are our favorite books of 2025! #5starreads #2025readingwrapup #readingwrapup #booktok #bestbooks2025

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I love this couple and the honest kind of content they make. Every video they post is excellent.

The Wildest, Most Mind-Bending Books,

@lawrence.debbsThree wild, mind-bending and fun novels from Amos Tutuola, Leonora Carrington, and Ishmael Reed. Please share your favourites (please not House of Leaves). Shoutout to the great booktokers @mahi and @thebooktrain for somehow reading Carrington at the same time. Great minds think alike! #booktok #books

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Lawrence is fellow Torontonian, and I love the un-formulaic videos he makes over on BookTok. A real gem to binge.

One last thing — After writing about an un-optimized summer in the last Scroll Sick, I decided to distill my thoughts into a video for social. You can watch it here, the comments are pretty funny right now.

Thanks so much for reading this wek, let me know if any of these links inspire you to hit the pages.

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At any given time I tend to have one topic that I obsess over and track via trend signals and currently that is Summer 2026. In recent years we’ve had “hot girl summer”, “brat summer”, “tomato girl summer”, and then something with butter yellow or lemoncello vibes that I felt Rhode jumped on well. But I think we’re all with it enough to recognize that the conditions this year aren’t ushering us toward a definitive colour or fruit or fizzy cocktail. There’s been too much societal disruption, mass layoffs, political collapse, exponential AI growth, and war to declare a mélange of hard liquor and juice as our emblem of the season.

I have a wee theory, and maybe I’m out to lunch, that the analog trend every forecast mentioned late last year wasn’t off the mark so much as early, and it took us absolutely botching it in the first half of this year to make way for what might be a genuine cultural movement this summer. The thing about forecasting that people don’t always understand (because it can be next to impossible to quantify), is that forecasts aren’t standalone predictions that exist in vacuums — they’re hypothetical versions of the future, of which there are many. And these hypothetical versions of the future can then influence the future, especially if they’re published in widely circulated reports or social media videos that get propelled by algorithmic waves that amass millions of views and then catch the eye of journalists and get featured in legacy media outlets.

I don’t think we’re gearing up for an “analog summer” per se, but I do sense we might be moving towards something analog-adjacent, that denounces productivity hacks, 9-9-6 culture, and mind/body optimization. Sacrificing all your time to be heads down in the present only works when the promise of tomorrow is more prosperous, and from where we stand right now, the future looks increasingly bleak.

I wouldn’t have guessed that Steven Bartlett’s complete inability to weather a light hangover would become the pivotal moment in rallying an anti-optimization-maxxing movement—but it fits. We are working harder than ever, for fewer opportunities, as our mouse strokes are tracked and our sleep scores plummet and you’re telling us that we can’t get tipsy on a patio? REVOLT! RESIST! RISE UP!

So what kind of summer do I think we’re in for this year? A hedonistic one. A take your PTO shame-free one. A cast aside your Oura ring and rid yourself of personal KPIs one. We have honed and curtailed and pruned ourselves into joyless oblivion, and it’s a relief that smart, outspoken people are finally begging us to reconsider the spiritual value of such. As astutely declared, “we’re entering a great unoptimizing”, which, thank God.

Last week when I conducted a highly unscientific poll across Threads and IG about what would define Summer 2026, the themes and predictions that came up multiple times were: no bras, full bush, cigarettes, analog, staycations, recession-core, de-optimization, and offline.

So on now, enjoy yourself! I’m cheering you on! And don’t you dare report back on the ROI.

Now let’s take a look at everything I read and saved for you:

The Old World Is Dying,

Reading about work and careers is becoming a theme for me lately, and this essay breaks through so much noise. It’s a meditation on navigating meaningful work in the age of AI, which of course is a source of anxiety and question marks for so many of us, and I appreciate the way that Sun neither sugar coats nor fear mongers. To me, it reads like a letter to a friend, with tenderness and frank honesty.

Sure, it’s easy to point to a wildly popular Substack essay and say, “here, read this it’s great” but let us not conflate internet popularity with a lack of substance! If anything, the fact that longform, thoughtful essays like this can still “go viral” on Substack, is testament to a functioning algorithm.

Among her most resonant tips are: build relationships, become more visible, get obsessed with one platform to share your work, and participate in the world around you.

My favourite quote deals with the empty allure of prestige as she notes:

“Prestige is a brain worm, and its shape changes all the time. Keep your identity small, and don’t fear starting over. The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next.”

Working Theories with Cris Címbora, in

I always enjoy the “Working Theories” interview series conducts with creative minds from creative fields, and this recent one with Cris Címbora of MANGO and was a treat.

I nodded along through Címbora’s suggestion that strategic foresight is a crucial piece of meaning-making, especially as we’re drowning in so much internet analysis. In her own words:

“Put in perspective, trend research without a futures dimension is just a very well-organized rearview mirror. We need to stay nosy about what’s going on, but also ask better questions. Bringing a future-oriented lens to research opens up not only what is emerging, but what it makes possible, what it displaces, where these tensions might lead, how they will affect us, and whether we can read them differently.”

The Wind That Lays Waste, Selva Almada

I picked up this slim novel in Lisbon, which is from an interesting Scottish publishing house called Charco Press, that “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.”

The story by Selva Almada (who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2024) follows a single day in the lives of four characters — a preacher, his daughter, a mechanic, and his son — as a storm approaches and they take cover in the mechanic’s shop. Almada has been compared to Carson McCullers, one of my favourite authors who I read voraciously in my 20s. Ultimately, it was nice to pick up and devour something that felt entirely external to the booktok realm.

The Income/Status Matrix,

Hannah Zhang is one of my favourite creators right now, and when she talks about navigating career decisions it’s clear that she’s exercising layers of pragmatism, discernment, and careful self-reflection.

This particular video is about the income/status matrix, and the interesting opportunities that are defined by low status but high earning potential. As someone who’s spent the past 15 years working in social media I know all about low status roles, and I’ll be honest that I rarely even considered high-status a possibility (or goal).

POV: You try to rob a mom

This is the funniest video I saw on social this week, and the execution is so good. Oh, so you want to threaten a parent? Think again, bucko.

A Real Life Magic Wand

Cash App launched an NFC-equipped magic wand so that people can make purchases just by tapping with their jewel-encrusted star. It lives on your key chain. It looks cute. It’s whimsical and probably makes you feel like spending more money. As far as creative marketing that also gets talked about on social, this one takes the cake for me.

A String Of Beautiful Days Calendar

I saw this beautiful calendar in an Instagram video (that I don’t think was sponsored but who can be sure these days), that is sewn with one continuous thread. Each day you pull the thread to gently unravel another day, and as a lady who loves to knit and sew this spoke to me. If I had one iota of personal bandwidth, I would probably attempt to DIY it.

“I’m really lazy”

Prolific author and relatable queen Ali Smith talks about being lazy, but also the value of “staring off into space” before real work can get done. I know this one made the rounds on social recently, but it’s for good reason. It’s nice to be reminded that procrastination isn’t some terrible character flaw, but a ubiquitous part of the human experience.

And finally, from :

Thanks for reading this week, and if you’re feeling brave, I’d love to know what kind of summer you’re gearing up for. See you in a fortnight!

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I’m not going to enlighten you with this fact, but winters in Canada, especially out east-ish here in Toronto, are rough. This most recent one was record breaking in all the worst ways (days without sun, snowstorms bad enough to cancel school, etc.), and we lived in a perpetual state of dirty slush sidewalks and air that hurt to inhale. So when Spring finally did arrive, like someone had suddenly flicked on a light switch last week, we were all ready to embrace it with open arms (and patio beers, and tears of joy).

On Tuesday when I drove my daughter home from rock climbing practice, the conditions were perfect. The temperature was warm enough to wear just a tee shirt, the late evening sky was all oranges and pinks, the traffic wasn’t bad, and I was acutely aware of my gratitude for the change of seasons. I looked back in the rear view mirror and glanced at my daughter’s face, her eyes closed, as she enjoyed the wind coming in through the windows and I could tell she was feeling what I was feeling. We drove most of the way in silence, and I felt buoyant — the lightness I attributed to dopamine, or seratonin, or some other brain chemical I don’t quite understand that takes over when you realize summer is close.

At the same time, in the upside down, made-up, online world, my video about “clipping farms” — in a nutshell, agencies that skirt FTC guidelines to flood social media feeds with undisclosed short form video ads — was going viral-ish on TikTok.

@carmscrollsWhat’s real on the internet in 2026????? #influencers #algorithm #clipfarming #socialmediamarketing #clipping

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It’s sitting at 280k views over there right now (plus a modest 60k on Instagram) because people are justifiably riled up about fake clips and comments clogging up their social media experience. It’s not to say that FYPs and explore feeds have ever been the portrait of authenticity, but something about the fact that the new influx of ads is undisclosed makes it all harder to reconcile. To me, it’s digital fatigue manifesting as distrust, which then leads to paranoia, liar’s dividend, and an overwhelming sense that everything online is an ad. As one commenter classically put it, “this is why we can’t have nice things.”

Beyond the issue of distrust, a point I was trying to make about clipping culture is that these videos are shrivelling our brains. They’re optimized for max attention and virality, taken out of context, and focused on moments of peak emotion or realization. By serving up the juiciest snippets without any struggle, rising action, or character development, they’re effectively TL;DR incarnate, and the result is viewers who are losing their ability to follow a complete narrative from beginning to end. Contrary to what the algorithm rewards, it’s not my ideal to live in an online world where every piece of content has been translated into an immediately enjoyable, bite-sized cake pop.

Unfortunately, on that recent drive home during the perfect Toronto evening, clip farms were also on my mind.

I thought about the instant gratification and immediacy of this surplussed format, how they isolate all the good parts for easy consumption. I thought of my feed jammed full of horny Off Campus clips, a show I’ve never watched but could accurately summarize for you, because of said clips. And I thought about how we haven’t just “lost the plot”, but are now free-falling through a post-plot era where rabid scrollers question the need for a plot, period. To many, it’s just deadweight.

But I also thought about gross, slush lined streets, and the struggle of shoving reluctant kids in snowsuits day in and day out. I thought about what a slog the darkest days of winter are, especially when you have to ensure little hands stay warm. I thought about how so much of the year is dark when I wake up, and dark by the time I leave my desk.

Not all clips are a plague, of course, and I enjoy quick hits of Love Is Blind as much as the next dumb dumb, but I tend to believe there’s a fragile equilibrium here that makes the enjoyment possible. You know, good ol’ suffering that breeds gratitude. Because if everyday was sunny and warm in Toronto, I know I wouldn’t feel the euphoria I did driving home this week, looking at the perfect curve of my kid’s rosy cheek in the rearview mirror, noticing small flutters of anticipation for the easier days of summer, and willing myself to commit the moment to the deepest recesses of my memory.

To get there, I had to be present from the very beginning, through all the most unclipworthy parts.

If you’re interested, the articles I referenced in the video are:

Fake Fans, by Eliza McLamb

The Clippening, by Mia Sato in The Verge

The Feed is Fake, by Lane Brown in Vulture

The ‘Creator Of Clipping’ Who Powers Crypto Gambling’s Viral Machine, by Boaz Sobrado in Forbes

Here’s the newest batch of recommendations from around the world wide web, that I consider worthy of your attention:

How To Enter Side Doors, on Substack

Okay, I found it. This is the best thing you’ll read all week and perhaps for a long time after that. I haven’t stopped thinking about it, and in the past few days I’ve referenced and recommended it to my husband, four(!!) friends, another mom at daycare drop-off, my colleague, and a relative stranger who I had coffee with (I have coffee chats with new people every week, so this part isn’t strange). The gist is that the author asks us to reframe what a job is (spoiler alert, it’s a problem that needs to be solved), and then talks about her own non-linear path shooting her shot and discovering “unsolved tensions”, complete with endearing receipts.

I find that many essays about work/career are often formatted like punchy LinkedIn posts and while those might still contain kernels of wisdom, I kind of hate reading that style of writing. Thankfully, this is not that. Maja’s prose is beautiful, delivered in actual paragraphs (crazy that this is a differentiator now), and communicated with the kind of self-awareness that makes her wisdom feel eye-opening rather than eye-rolly.

It broke my brain, made me feel hopeful, and tactfully refrained from veering into the kind of hustle culture that could have easily undermined the whole piece. If you’re feeling anxious about work (which, who isn’t??) and where to take your eclectic aggregation of skills in a world where stable futures are a myth, read this twice.

Hip Replacement w/ and

I had a great time chatting with Ben and Kyle on the Hip Replacement podcast this week! We talked about fake feeds, flamenco, why I think I should drink more, and discernment as the next intangible form of cultural capital for tech bros.

PS - I consider Kyle’s newsletter to be top tier and it was one of the earliest Substacks on my essentials list. If you’re looking for a good resource to keep you abreast of digital culture, like/subscribe/follow/pledge allegiance to him.

If You Let AI Do Your Writing, I Will Come To Your House And Kill You, on Substack

I hope one day I have enough of a spine to write like Sam Kriss does. Until that fictional, future date, I get to read his wonderful essays.

This particular wonderful essay has been restacked over 800 times on the morning that I’m writing this, which means it has struck an obvious chord with us denizens of the internet. In short, AI-generated writing is everywhere which is unsurprising (though annoying) on a caterer’s website, but deeply alarming when awarded with the Commonwealth Prize for short fiction.

The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip.

Other honourable mentions I read this week that touched on the same themes, albeit with less hilarious venom:

Your AI Use is Breaking My Brain, in 404 Media

The Feeling of Control Slipping Away, in The Atlantic

David Sedaris Has The Answer, Leah Abrams in Vogue

This short profile isn’t groundbreaking or anything, but I recently saw David Sedaris do a live reading here in Toronto and was struck by the realization that my husband (of going on 15 years) was not the first guy I’d brought to a Sedaris reading.

The first time I saw David Sedaris IRL was at UBC when I was a student there, which means it would be almost 20 years ago. It’s neither here nor there, but the ex I went with is the worst human and I’m so glad he’s no longer a part of my life!

Here’s to authors that act as a constant in your life even when shitty boyfriends do not.

I Went On A 45 Minute Walk And Only Made It To The Letter “P”, in Open In a New Tab

One of the best, unintended side effects of being a Person Who Posts Online is that you make friends with other folks doing similarly uncharted work. is a fellow employee of the internet, a pal, and a totally singular voice in the feeds. Go follow her everywhere.

Something she is masterful at is luring you into her world, and stirring forgotten curiosity. I loved her recent essay about going on an “alphabet walk” where you attempt to notice letters in the world around you — effectively carrying out a mindfulness exercise (physical and mental).

I’m dying to try this and will diligently report back.

NFC Nails, on TikTok

@janeyparkxyzI’m literally just a girl who loves beauty, fashion tech, ai and stands on business. NFC Chips in my nails have been the way to network efficiently and a fun party trick. #nfcchip #nails💅 #networking #beautytech #womenintech

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Networking at conferences can be painful, which is why I thought Janey Park’s NFC nails (leading to her Substack and LinkedIn profile) were novel and smart. I posted about it over on my LinkedIn and no less than 7 women DM’d me to say they’d be testing it out at Cannes. Buckle up if you’re headed to the south of France in June!

Happy 80th birthday Cher! I loved this compilation of her best lewks.

Same, girl.

This woman snapped a pic every time her boyfriend left his crumpled up pants discarded on the floor and then turned the whole thing into an art exhibition. I want to be her friend.

Give it up for a wrinkly forehead! I got bangs to cover mine in lieu of botox, but tbh I support you no matter what you want to inject in your face.

I thoroughly enjoy this account that breaks down the meaning behind famous paintings. It’s exactly the kind of weird and wonderful I want the internet to be.

And finally, a woman punked her entire fitness class into doing the Macarena (disguised as breathwork). It made me squirm and laugh.

Thanks for reading and diving into rabbit holes with me. See you in a fortnight!

Thanks for reading! Scroll Sick is a bi-weekly newsletter with cherry-picked (human) suggestions about where to devote your attention.

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Happy Sunday party people,

I had a rare, slow day yesterday that, for boring-to-explain reasons, was just me and my 4 year old taking on the world. We went to the library, serendipitously caught a story hour with a stuffed racoon character that jumped out of a sparkly garbage can, took a nap, played at a couple parks, and because I am self-righteous about not being on my phone at the park (I consider it so tacky, I said what I said!), I was forced to just…think.

Later in the day as the sun was going down my daughter ran to me in a frenzy and said I had to rush to take a look at something. I bounded up the stairs and followed her into my bedroom where she pointed to the late evening sun shining in through the window and said “Look, isn’t the light so beautiful?”. And I don’t want to be too heavy handed in doling out the life lessons here, but, thank god for tuning into other people’s perspectives. I honestly can’t remember the last time I stopped to appreciate light.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about: the fragility of parasocial relationships (I made a video based on those thoughts that racked up just under 800K views across Instagram and TikTok), the tensions between economic and cultural capital inherent in influencer growth trajectories, a theory that social media platforms act as central banks and juice reach when they need to encourage participation, and my spidey-sense hunch that “discernment” will soon replace taste as an intangible signifier of status among the social elite. I’m starting to see that word emerge with increasingly regularity (including from the Pope!), and my guess is we’re mere weeks away from Greg Brockman tweeting about it being a “new core skill”.

Today’s recs are a mix of AI gloom (at least I’m consistent!), a profile of Gen Alpha that made me feel hopeful about my kids’ futures, a couple essays on finding meaning within work, intelligent cringe criticism, and a smattering of top saves from my feeds.

The Feed Is Fake, Lane Brown in Vulture

Of everything I read in the past couple of weeks, this is the article that truly rattled me.

The gist of it is that most of what you see on social feeds at this point is likely paid for —either through legally disclosed sponsorships or, increasingly, stealth clipping campaigns that circumvent FTC guidelines— to engineer virality. And you might argue that all virality is engineered, because algorithms are clearly not unbiased up and down-voting engines, but there was a time when viral movements genuinely mirrored mass interest/appeal/curiosity.

On many levels I already know all of this to be true because I work in social and I study algorithms like a maniac, but there was something about seeing it articulated by someone else that made it easier to stop gaslighting myself.

And if you’re like, “social media is dumb that’s why I don’t have it!” I want to remind you that the media you consume outside of feeds is influenced by suggested content and trend currents, because:

“Reporters and editors who get their ideas from their social-media feeds — which is most of them, most of the time — can mistake a paid simulation of public interest for the real thing and make it real by covering it.”

I think many of us would argue that reporters don’t get their ideas from social “most of the time”, but reporters do reach out to me on an almost weekly basis, and it’s clear that their pieces are being shaped by these doctored feeds. The repercussions this could have on culture as we know it are truly mind-melting.

For those wondering what the hell clipping is, here’s a quick explainer, a fascinating profile on the 23 year old Anthony Fujiwara who runs a “clipping farm”, and tech journalist Mia Sato’s most recent piece entitled The Clippening, which investigates the utility of the long part of long-to-short-form funnel. (Apologies, at least 2 out of 3 of those are paywalled but there are free trials).

My thoughts on clipping can be summed up by my recent Substack note, and yes, I’ll develop it into a more cohesive video for TikTok and Instagram soon (so that I can tango with the internet trolls).

Tokenmaxxing, Promomaxxing, and Misaligned Incentives in Tech, Engineer’s Codex

I went 37 years of my life without reading anything written by computer engineers, and then I started working in tech and suddenly I’m consuming their perspectives more and more. One of the few reasons I miss working in office is that I got to regularly have lunch with one of our SRE engineers at the time, which of course never happens now that I work remote.

Anyways, this quick essay was such an interesting read, and I found myself coming up with several examples of Goodhart’s Law —which is the central thesis is based on— in the days after encountering it. In short, work is often rife with misaligned incentives (think individual quotas and KPIs that don’t necessarily serve the greater collective), and I believe more managers should force themselves to reassess the nature of their incentive structures at regular intervals.

Be forewarned if the title didn’t make it clear, this one is very much about AI.

The Life and Times of An American Tween, Anna Wiener in The New Yorker

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a little publication called The New Yorker, but they post excellent essays! This recent depiction of tween life and female friendships was totally delightful, not because it made any one single profound argument, but because it was a total joy to read, start to finish.

As the mom to two Gen Alpha girls, I appreciated the following reminder:

“It would be easy, having made it safely past the shores of puberty, to make light of these rituals and ablutions. But the rituals are very important—in fact, they’re everything. They’re experiments with externalizing private self-perceptions, and dalliances with potential selves.”

Can’t recommend this one highly enough.

How I Bet On Clay (And It Bet On Me), Mishti Sharma in First Round Review

Sometimes I discover great pieces of writing in the most unlikely places, and last week I added “an editorial publication from a venture capital firm” to that list. First Round Review backs the company the author of this piece works for, so all of that has to be understood before diving in, but I’ll argue that it also doesn’t erode what makes this essay good.

Mishti Sharma holds one of those esoteric tech job titles —Head of Narratives at the software startup Clay— and she is very clearly someone who could have thrived in many different industries, so it’s noteworthy (to the reader and herself!) that she ended up in tech.

The short essay reads as an honest manifesto about seeking meaningful work, what happens when our identity gets wrapped up in what we do for a living, and ultimately how we’re forced to reassess when what we do changes.

Sharma’s career trajectory is certainly not conventional or linear (amen), and I so appreciated the way she spoke about weighing income and integrity in her decisions. I was also surprised by the parts that paint Clay’s founders critically, though they earned my trust, and touched by her willingness to address internal tensions head-on If only all teams could operate with the level of honesty she describes.

It obviously reveals something about me that I was so affected by her words —I think about work constantly— but if this endorsement is valuable, I sat motionless in my office for several minutes after finishing the essay and contemplated writing Sharma a letter of thanks.

Mediated Cringe, and Cringe as Affective Charge, Lara Williams in Dirt

There’s a way that “cringe” is spoken about on platforms like LinkedIn that lacks important nuance (and kind of misses the point). The oft-used phrase “to be cringe is to be free” is well-meaning and supportive in theory, but the reality is that platitude doesn’t magically absolve us from embodying cringe in real and damaging ways.

I’ll be honest that I had to read this article twice to really absorb everything Williams articulates, but it gets at a sticky subject that I sense a lot of people aren’t equipped to navigate on social media. Because there is cringe as a tool and cringe as an identity, and the latter results in the same kind of “pained performativity that was initially rallied against.”

Cringe is complex, and I appreciate somebody finally calling out the BS cringe culture that masquerades as vulnerability.

Revision of the Dead Internet Theory, Aidan Walker on TikTok

@aidanetceteraa revision of #deadinternettheory to meet the moment of #algorithm and #ai

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The best video I saw in my social feeds recently was this one, a totally pitch perfect take from the mastermind of meme culture that is Aidan Walker.

I didn’t see this until after watching the vid and commenting “This is perfect” myself, but it’s one hell of an endorsement to have call you a genius:

@itsnorthofsunset’s hilarious antics, Instagram

I don’t know enough about this guy to give you a full rundown, but the short story here is he puts random food items on the roof of his car as he drives around a grocery store parking lot and films all the reactions. Is it subversive? No. Does it reframe the world for me? No. But it’s really really funny, and has nothing to do with bots. In other words, unfettered perfection.

Open Light Media, various platforms

This newish Catholic nun podcast is taking Instagram by storm, and I’ve already seen the references and parodies start rolling in. My ardent hope (prayer? 😜) is that they never take a brand deal for ethical reasons, and keep doing what they do best: giggling and spreading positivity.

I’m not religious, and I’ll probably never listen to a full episode, but these nuns have my heart (and attention).

PS - If I find out this is AI I’m going to retire from the internet.

RIP everything

An important reminder from Kermit:

Katy Perry’s 6 finger glove at The Met Gala

I don’t consider Katy Perry to be a particularly interesting character (though the Trudeau storyline does kick things up a notch) but I actually thought her 6 finger glove at The Met Gala was pretty funny. Not haha, but lol — well played.

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Hello, happy Sunday once again.

The past couple weeks have been an intense sprint of long days and late nights spent working on a variety of projects, and I’ve found the narrowing of leisure time has made me obsessed with reading about 3 topics: creativity, time, and slop. Every recommendation below touches on one of them.

My feeds have been overrun by the last one, slop content, but not necessarily the kind you’re thinking. I’d like to believe I’m adept at pruning an algorithm, which means my suggested content has been relatively void of genAI brainrot (except for on X, where regrettably, I’ve been spending more time in the name of research), but much of the analysis I’ve encountered recently has centred on slop as a cultural signal/symbol/harbinger.

wrote about a hypothetical Slop Tax to fund the very cultural infrastructure AI is dismantling. Hank Green spoke about slop as an indirect conduit for hope. declared “Slop Cannons” one of four remaining career trajectories in a near future built by AI (another is “The Grown Up In The Room” if that sounds closer to your skillset). Cody Luongo warned readers about the perils of “Thought Leaderslop” in his recent Forbes piece (linked again below because I’m quoted!), and Emily Segal set out to define “Tasteslop” in her essay here, which I now consider required reading for anyone with a brain.

Whatever that is — slop analysis, slop discourse (slopcourse?), investigations into the slopverse — is actually quite welcome in my media diet. In many ways, it’s really anti-slop, which is the goal of this wee newsletter!

Let’s dive into today’s recommendations worthy of your attention.

Tasteslop, Emily Segal on X

I need to properly highlight this essay, because it contains so many important explorations of cultural vs. economic capital, discernment, and unspoken social hierarchies.

Segal starts by defining Tasteslop, then outlines her definition of taste (this is a vulnerable act in 2026!), and references Bordieu and Sontag, which for me just reinforces the fact that these tensions aren’t new. Ultimately this is an essay about the anxiety and fear underpinning Silicon Valley’s preoccupation with taste and the forces that make it difficult to harvest.

A banger from it I screenshotted:

Of course those with proximity to economic capital do everything they can to usurp forms of cultural capital, but as Segal notes, “copying and pasting things that you think are tasteful is actually a hallmark of bad taste (which anyone with good taste knows).”

Just go read it.

The Laboratory and The Artist, Lucas Gelfond in The Cleveland Review of Books

Lucas Gelfond’s review of John Beck and Ryan Bishop’s Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde examines relationships between artists and engineers, plus an organization (Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T)) that brokered many of these pairings in the 1950’s as part of AT&T’s research wing. The topic suddenly feels relevant again in today’s tumultuous technological landscape.

The book investigates inherent tensions between art and science “practitioners”, but makes the important argument that both benefit from curiosity and self-directed work, and I’m not convinced we prioritize those pursuits in the modern workplace enough. (I do everything in my power, including forfeiting sleep and sanity, to “Make time for self-directed work” each week, so I love learning that it’s worth the sacrifices).

The Internet Needs Ecologists, By on

Matt is one of those people who genuinely adds value to TikTok, and his content always leaves me feeling curious rather than depleted. His recent piece in The Elysian falls into a broader category (according to my internal sorting systems) of writing about tech that likens it to nature. It reminded me of this essay in Noema Magazine about “rewilding” the internet, the practice of Digital Gardening, and Yancy Strickler’s now viral essay, Dark Forest Theory Of The Internet. And as Matt notes,

Despite its limitations, seeing the internet as an ecosystem is a starting point to engage with its complexity and realize the role of care in sustaining it.

The links in this section alone are enough to set you up for several weeks of fascinating rabbit holes.

Cat Gatekeeper, Chrome Extension

Scroll on social too much? Need something more than willpower to make you stop? How about a grumpy cat chrome extension that “sits” on top of your work? Love.

I Don’t Even Know What This Is, on Instagram

I’m pretty sure this is an account for a Dutch grocery store, but what’s great is that I can’t even be sure and I still love it. Part “cooking” video, part dance-off, entirely entertaining. This is me trying to meet my lighten-my-mood quota. You’re welcome.

@pages_apart, on TikTok

@pages_apartSomething way outside of our norm, our son pulled a #godpack today from #Pokemon and it was truly magical! #pokemoncards #ascendedheroes #pokemontcg

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This husband/wife duo creates content on TikTok about book recs and reading (they are amazing!), but this week they posted an off-brand video in which they captured their son opening his dream Pokémon card pack. The pure joy! The full family elation! Save this for when you really need a feed cleanser.

Now, a wee bit of self-promotion:

I was quoted in this Forbes piece about AI generated thought leadership.

I was recently on The Signal Room podcast alongside Akilah Hughes and Elosi Ikharo (and hosted by the very thoughtful Jemma Brown), talking about the intersection of social media and podcasting.

I was also on Talking Too Loud with Chris Savage and Sylvie Lubow breaking down the contentious topic of personal brands and algorithmic gladiator rings. (We laughed a ton!).

On the book front, I just cracked Jenny Odell’s Saving Time (I loved How To Do Nothing) and Ben Lerner’s Transcription, so I’ll report back on both of those in the next newsie.

Thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks, nerds.

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Hi, hello, happy Sunday. If you can believe it, it’s snowing while I write this. 🤦‍♀️

I was in New York for work this past week attending the Social Media Week conference where almost every conversation I had was about content, algorithms, influencers, or trends. Also AI, so much AI.

I oscillated between under-rested and severely over-caffeinated (‘merica has so many dessert-like coffee concoctions and triple-layer, foam-crested matchas that are hard to resist) which meant that I often felt like I was screaming despite my mouth being closed. There were a ton of internet pals I finally got to hug and chat with IRL for the first time, and on my final evening, at an after party in Chinatown, I met the , who I’ve loved/followed/stanned for probably a decade. She was very sweet and did not make me wary of meeting my heroes.

I was also reminded that a shit night of sleep (sans booze!) can still evoke all the trappings of a hangover at my age, which is pathetic but here we are. The sands of time do be falling through thy hourglass.

I’ll be honest that I considered scrapping the newsletter this week because my reading/scrolling time was almost entirely usurped by work and flights, but when I looked back at my highly sophisticated note-taking system (screenshots 😜) I still found a decent number of gems worthy of your attention. So let’s dive in.

I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread In America, Caity Weaver in The Atlantic

I won’t be the first person to recommend this to you, nor the last, but do not let the popularity of this essay scare you off! On the surface, yes, this is about hunting down good bread, and yes there are many architectural feats of gluten sampled within, but it also touches on celebrity and grief, while somehow managing to be hilarious. I laughed out loud twice!

I don’t even want to attempt to summarize it because I know I’ll do it a disservice, so I’m going to include a screen cap of other peoples’ recommendations instead:

FYI this is how Weaver references a crispy diet Coke:

As I challenge the elastic limits of my gastric wall, distending it with hundreds of dollars’ worth of fabulous things in rare shapes, and also rolls, I rely more and more on the chemical burn of Diet Coke to excoriate my palate between bites. Joël Robuchon’s Diet Coke is crisp and cold, and swims right up to the brim of the voluptuously curved glasses they serve it in; it devours my tongue like a cleansing fire.

I immediately want one.

The Last Honest Internet Sensation, Samir Chaudry on LinkedIn (!!)

I watched Bieber’s set at Coachella (#Bieberchella) along with the rest of the internet, through the livestream, but also across hundreds of on-the-ground clips (and reaction videos that just so happened to include our former Canadian Prime Minister) posted to TikTok and Instagram. For the very online among us, the Beliebers, and the millennials who grew up in the early days of Youtube, it was a performance where all roads led to hotly contended comment-thread discourse.

I’m going on the record to say I loved it. It’s really hard to watch yourself on video, but even harder to watch video clips of yourself as a young person uninitiated to the media, and then to do so live on stage in front of thousands of people (with perhaps hundreds of thousands more on the stream). He purposely played clips of himself falling off a stage, walking into glass doors, and famously, arguing with paparazzi in the futile “it’s not clocking to you” exchange, which felt like performance in the service of releasing shame — a group therapy session where you name your transgressions in order to loosen their icy death grip.

Of all the recaps and analysis of Bieberchella, I appreciated two the most: Samir Chaudry’s short article linked above (and published on LinkedIn of all places), and Ruby Justice Thelot’s video about “contemporary rituals of gathering” (I loved the part about “little screens bad and alienating, big screens good and communal”). Both are easy to absorb in under 5 minutes.

A final thought — while the debate generally centered on whether Bieber’s set was lazy or genius, I didn’t see anyone focusing on the thing I found most compelling, which is that livestreaming it made the performance accessible to the droves of fans who could never afford Coachella tickets. It’s well established that Coachella trips are now reserved for social elites, influencers, and generously funded marketing teams, so bypassing the dessert-tax read as subversive to me. In an era where we’re all increasingly operating in echo chambers of our own algorithmic making, it’s a radical, artistic feat to pull everyone into one communal [metaphorical] venue.

Marketing Is Being Rebranded For Boys, via @mirandadoesbrands

Miranda and I connected a while back over our common, masochistic undertaking of posting content on TikTok, and I consider her one of the most sober, strategic voices on the app. Recently, she’s had a small collection of videos go viral (I messaged her in hysterics after realizing that Taylor Lorenz had “retweeted” her video on X!) that hone in on the increasing prevalence of marketing roles with “engineer” in the title (GTM engineer, Growth Engineer, etc.).

As someone who’s worked with growth/demand gen teams over the past couple of years, I do think their work is technically different than, say, product or content marketers, but it was still funny to see some fragile egos in the comment threads.

The Undertow, Astrid on Substack

This is a fascinating essay that examines hobbies, but more specifically, the gendered observation that “women have been steered toward hobbies that happen when life allows them, while men get to pursue hobbies that require life to move aside.” The author goes on to draft a “Hobby Matrix” defined by two axes: the north-south being who the hobby serves (yourself vs. others) and the east-west being who adapts to whom (the hobby fits your life vs. your life fits the hobby).

Where men get to compartmentalize their time and carve out a clear delineation of “hobby time”, women can only do so when she can prove that she has fulfilled her responsibilities, and to not miss anything while she is gone, and to be ready to answer any questions even during her time off, and then to resume or even pick up the mess that was created while she was away.

Even though I’m not struggling with this double standard in my own relationship, I do often have to negotiate with myself re: making time for exercise, friends, etc. and reconcile my guilt around being away from the kids. Anecdotally, I also have a friend whose husband golfed a lot during her early postpartum days, and it was a palpable point of tension (spoiler alert: they are now divorced!).

I’m not particularly interested in ranking everyone’s pastimes in this matrix, but rather advocating for the fact that everyone deserves a sovereign hobby.

Sudoku Packing Method, @isismarianiedecken on TikTok

@isismarianiedeckenusing my love for sudoku in everyday life 🌝

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I experience an existential crisis every time I pack for a 3-7 day trip (often work related), and always hem and haw over whether I should check a bag. So when I stumbled across the “Sudoku Method” for tackling outfit planning with limited luggage space, it felt like a mini eureka moment.

Something about the visual, systematic approach really appeals to me and I will be putting this into practice on my next trip.

Reading Is Magic, via

I love essays that make you feel kind of guilty that you’re not reading enough. It’s the punishment we all deserve for peering into our screens a bit too much and deluding ourselves that there’s no time for actual books. So if you need a kick in the pants, this latest piece from Sam Kriss is great. Magic, even.

He makes the important case that literacy is a necessary precursor in imagining circumstances beyond the literal, which is crucial during times of political distress and societal oppression. Because reading doesn’t just introduce us to new hypothetical outcomes, it also expands our capacity to think and understand.

This was also the kind of essay that I try to animatedly relay to my partner before eventually giving up and telling him to “just read it”. In this case, the reading part is actually quite important.

TL;DR’s be damned!

A chill quote from it to chew on:

The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.

Bon appetite!

Bonus: footage of me citing this as “media that rewired my brain chemistry”.

Brand Social Trend Report: Q1 2026, Rachel Karten in Link In Bio

writes the wildly popular Substack, , all about brand social, and sends out a trend report every quarter with contributions from social media industry professionals all across tech, CPG, media, government, and beyond. This edition is extra special because my own Q1 trend observation — being “Performatively Offline” — was included.

My take, included here:

At the tail end of last year every trend report forecasted an analogue movement that would define 2026, and we bought it because we wanted to believe that a mass exodus from our screens was just a new year’s resolution away. Instead, we got “Performative Offlineness” in the form of aesthetically edited videos about what’s in my analogue bag, restorative digital detoxes, “raw-dogging for 1 hour”, and “how to be chronically offline”. Bricks quickly became a must-have item for the “aspirationally offline” among us, and while it’s true that the internet loves to lambaste imperfect effort, it appears that offline is not somewhere we’re willing to go, but rather, just another style of content we like to consume in FYPs.

My blurb references a few different TikTok creators (linked), plus the whip-smart writer/ICYMI podcast host who was first to report on the *Bricking craze* in SSENSE earlier this year.

Thanks for including me, Rachel!

PS - The two funniest videos I saw in the scroll this week:

This actually happened to my colleague, I would simply perish. Plus the story of my life when I think I’ll just open TikTok to grab a link.

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Hey festive folks,

Welcome to the third edition of Scroll Sick, and Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate chocolate bunnies. Today I plan to eat Mini Eggs until I’m sick, which shouldn’t be hard to do (I’m competitive).

I really want to refrain from dipping into cliches, but the past two weeks have been jam-packed, verging on nervous breakdown territory (notice I did not say “a blur” or “a whirlwind”!) so I’m really grateful for the long weekend up yonder here in Canada. I recently spoke on two podcasts, hosted a live event at work, attended two work/tech world events by myself (it’s okay, in 2026 we’re frictionmaxxing), and then went to a “performance essay” hosted by the lovely Matt Prebeg that had nothing to do with marketing and everything to do with philosophy. The latter fell on the first Spring-like evening we’ve had in Toronto and something about sitting in a dimly-lit room with friendly strangers, all of us engrossed in a narrative yarn spun up by the charismatic Prebeg, arrived as the much needed antidote to all the hustle-culture mocktails I’ve been chugging.

Today I’m sharing a few pieces of doom and gloom, though they’re topics we should absolutely have public knowledge and discourse about imo, plus a few bright spots of humour or tenderness that can serve as counter balances.

PS - I’ve been deep in research on the recent algorithm changes (spoiler alert: the major social media platforms are beginning to layer LLMs into their suggestion engines) and will be sending out a bonus essay very soon on my findings. Keep an eye out for that!

Now, to the recs.

Fake Fans, by Eliza McLamb

Eliza McLamb is an American indie rock musician, but I first discovered her as an incredible writer on Substack. Her recent investigation into Chaotic Good (a digital marketing agency that creates viral campaigns for recording artists via bot fan accounts, I’m not going to link them) and their impact on the music industry, was masterful. At the time that I’m writing this her essay has 1300 likes on Substack, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that number tripled or quadrupled by the end of next week. And the fact that agencies are engineering virality isn’t a huge surprise to me as someone who’s worked in social forever, but it’s obviously disheartening that algorithms have eroded fandom and the arts so dramatically. It also made me think about the impossible relationship we’re all expected to forge with these platforms today, where our depiction of the work or art — via engaging content — becomes a full-time commitment. (I’m someone who willingly shares my work online, but I empathize with those who aren’t comfortable, or simply don’t want to).

“My hands are on the fretboard. This is real. I run through the Badlands for the first time in my life, past the van, into the expanse. This is real. A sound escapes me and reaches you. This is real. This is real. This is real.”

I should also add that it wasn’t just eye-opening, it was also a beautifully written, earnest essay that I had to sit and digest in silence afterwards. Easily the most engrossing thing I read all week.

The Meta Win That Isn’t Really a Win, via Taylor Lorenz and The New Statesmen

I almost posted about this recent verdict against Meta (over on LinkedIn) and then stopped myself because I didn’t have a strong narrative to add, and if I’m being completely honest, realized that part of my motivation was to capitalize on the hype. Plus, the 6 million dollar verdict was so low it felt symbolic.

A day later technology journalist Taylor Lorenz came out with the criticism above, explaining that the trial is being used as a Trojan horse for mass surveillance and age verification laws (i.e. legislation that would allow the American government to drastically censor content they deem unsafe). In Lorenz’s words, it’s “moral panic slop that serves powerful, billionaire-backed interest groups’ political agenda.” Woof.

Over The Quantum Cliff, by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert on Pioneer Works

There are some clear, common threads that connect Lorenz’s criticisms to this article about the impending threat of “Y2Q” or a “quantum cliff” that would effectively “decrypt most of the documents and communications that have relied on encrypted security protocols for decades, including intimate chats, medical records, banking credentials, and state secrets.” In other words, it’s only a matter of time before your entire digital life will be exposed for all the internet to feast upon.

The kind of article you read if you want the truth, but also deal well with anxiety. At least I feel hopeful that Gen Alpha has a fighting chance.

A quote from it that made me pause:

“More broadly, we’ll need to psychologically distance our authentic selves from the digital puppets constructed from our data: our social media personas, our fitness-tracker profiles, even our bank balances and school grades.”

@yep4andy Eating At Grandma’s House, Instagram

Andy is a Ukrainian woman who ostensibly posts about what she eats in a day, but she is also obviously, often sharing what it’s like to live in a war. Sometimes she stops filming because she’s spooked by air raids. She only has electricity for a few hours each day. And even though this might sound bananas, her videos are hilarious. My favourite recurring series is about visiting her grandma, and everything that she’s fed while chilling with her grandma’s cat Leonard.

I never skip her videos and I love her voiceovers, editing style, and penchant for pickled foods (even though I still think pickled tomatoes sound gross) so much. Please go watch 10 of her videos right now and give her all the views, impressions, and likes.

11 Countries, Many Breakfasts, @natbco on TikTok

@natbco11 countries, many breakfasts (the best meal of the day). Sharing six highlights here, and more thoughts on my Substack. Comment with a newspaper emoji 🗞️ and I’ll send you the link 💫

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Speaking of what we’re eating…

Natalie Compton is a travel reporter at The Washington Post that I’ve followed for a long time now, and consider one of my first TikTok friends! Her content and perspective are really unique, and I love that her videos feel void of click baity, low attention span hacks — it’s just her, her travels, and a soothing voiceover. It’s often hard to sum up what makes a particular account or creator magnetic, but there’s something about her videos that I find so inviting and pared down.

I loved this recent one where she rated her breakfasts across Europe.

Heart The Lover, novel by Lily King

I had heard good things about this book from several trusted sources, but truthfully, didn’t entirely love the precursor — Writers and Lovers — by the author, so it sat on my shelf for a while. Then last week I picked it up as I started to give my youngest a bath, read it all throughout bath and bedtime, and then ended up lying on the floor reading beside my kid’s bed, the pages illuminated by a small headlamp. I finished around midnight and cried so much that I woke up the next day with puffy eyes and had to log onto my first meeting looking rough.

I could get critical about certain parts if you forced me to but in all honesty, it was stunning. A fast, gripping, emotional read that really tore me up for several days afterwards. I don’t generally reach for a page turner, but also won’t complain when they’re peppered into the mix.

Also, got this text a day after lending it to a dear friend:

Why Are Women Doing Their Husband’s Job Searching, Anne Helen Petersen

Anne Helen Petersen is easily one of my favourite writers in the entire universe and I have been a subscriber to her newsletter Culture Study for years, so prepare to see me recommend her work often.

This piece is an interesting one, that examines exactly what the title says, but also why women tend to have denser communities and social networks than men. Much has already been published about women adopting genAI at a much lower/slower rate than men, but it’s interesting to think about the implications of AI-induced job loss or displacement over the next few years and who will bear the burden of career and domestic pivots.

I appreciate the way that Petersen tends to ruminate on the issues she brings to life with you, as opposed to for you, and in this one there are many uncomfortable truths to co-navigate. In speaking about the work of Aliya Hamid Rao, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, she found that,

“…couples where the husband was unemployed prioritized his job search, protected his time from housework, and directed time, space, and money to facilitate the job search. By contrast, when the woman was unemployed, no corresponding allotments were made. As Rao concludes, “unemployment serves to consolidate traditional gender roles rather than disrupt them for these families.”

Judas Goes Live On Easter Sunday @ajbrennan95

This guy is the funniest person on the internet right now, and you can fight me on that. Everything he posts is pitch perfect, but I’ll leave you with this Easter-themed banger because I’m festive like that.

The Links, in order:

(for you, Pearo)

Frictionmaxxing, coined by Kathryn Jezer-Morton
Matt Prebeg, Artist, Designer, Researcher, Storyteller
Fake Fans essay by Eliza McLamb
Video about Meta’s recent court verdict, by Taylor Lorenz
Do not celebrate the social media “addiction” ruling, The New Statesman
Over The Quantum Cliff, by by Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert on Pioneer Works
@yep4andy
Natalie Compton’s European Breakfasts
Heart The Lover, novel by Lily King
Why Are Women Doing Their Husband’s Job Searching, by Anne Helen Petersen
Women Are Avoiding AI. Will Their Careers Suffer? in Working Knowledge from Harvard Business School
Aliya Hamid Rao, Sociologist
@ajbrennan95

And finally, Kim and serving up facts:

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Hello, happy Sunday folks.

I’ve been in a bit of a Work Vortex (classic Carmen move!) the past few weeks, which is a relatively boring update, but also a boring truth, and amongst flights, hotels, and then trying to maximize time with my kids, I haven’t felt like scrolling on social media much. Which I’ll be honest, is odd for me.

I also had a few tough days sprinkled in there, which combined with my tendency to perma-burn the candle at both ends, culminated in sobbing softly while watching Inside Out 2 with my youngest the other evening, her snuggled up against me, pressing her chubby, bouncy cheek against mine. Again, the relevant context here is that crying during movies is not something I tend to do (except for when I’m 9 months pregnant, in which case, expect a deluge), so I’m clearly feeling a little untethered.

It probably didn’t help that I read a fair amount of bleak shit throughout the past couple weeks, including the hefty, What’s the Worst That Could Happen piece by Josh Tyrangiel about the future of AI and work in The Atlantic, and Jason Koebler’s article about how AI is killing the “human internet”, in 404 Media. At times during both I felt my heart rate speeding up and had to stop for a breather and simply look out the window, I suppose to check if everything was still there. This week Charlie Warzel wrote about the overwhelming 2026 news cycle, and how difficult it is to stay focused on present turmoil when our brains are so preoccupied with and habituated to anticipate the next grievous headline, suggesting:

“This is how it is meant to work. These online products sustain themselves by making us dependent on the content that makes us feel powerless and miserable.”

And yet, continuing to read a little bit every day, regardless of the topic, finding rabbit holes to fall down, and following the threads (I don’t mean Meta’s Threads) that spark curiosity, is often the salve. And thankfully that has felt easy to do.

Today’s issue of Scroll Sick is theme-less, which to be honest, is a more accurate reflection of how I usually consume media, so expect no masterful through line aside from the obvious fact that everything below made an impression on me.

(As always, there are lots of links to get lost in 🐇).

AI;DR, David Minnigerode on Threads

In February a resignation letter from AI safety researcher Mrinank Sharma went viral on Threads, and in the comments a developer named David Minnigerode replied, “Sorry, that is definitely tl;dr. But also kinda ai;dr. Some of those sentences…yeesh.” In layman’s terms, this is AI slop and I don’t wanna read it.

Then the response to his response picked up speed, and before long there were articles coining AI;DR the new catch phrase of the anti-artificial intelligence movement. It’s emergence was summed it up concisely in Fast Company here, more broadly in Futurism here, and though I’ve only had to use it on LinkedIn since, I can confirm that deploying it unlocks a nice jolt of dopamine!

I keep on saying this, but it bears repeating — I’d rather read a poorly written, poorly structured essay from a real person, than polished genAI. The effort and intention is more important to me than the execution at this point, and now my bigger fear is that human writing will begin to mimick poor quality AI writing over time, as slop infiltrates more sources (like textbooks, articles, contracts, etc.) and gets absorbed, unconsciously.

Any Human Heart, Yiyun Li in The New Yorker

I decided to pick up an old issue of The New Yorker I had in my office, and ended up reading this story by Yiyun Li, which is loosely about two women who observe each other from afar and then share a meal together only once, in a polite but strained exchange. I first learned of Li on TikTok, then read and thoroughly enjoyed The Book of Goose (a novel that’s often described as “depicting complex female friendship” but I would also add, explores early female friendship, which is its own roller coaster).

One of the main characters in Any Human Heart reveals that she has lost two sons to suicide, which tragically is also true of Li herself — a topic she has explored in both a book (after her first son died), and an article (after her second son died). I read the article last year, but was struck by how much beauty and tenderness she was able to summon in the midst of unimaginable grief. Now, anytime I see her name, I immediately add her work to my TBR list.

Reflecting on Quitting My Full Time Job, Miriam Tinberg on TikTok

@miriam_tinnyI read this whole essay across like 10 vids last year. You can find them in my “quitting my FT job” playlist. I break down all the money I had saved and was making etc As I re-read this a year later, I am just struck by how resonant this still is for me. #job #jobs #career #quitting #writing

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Miriam is a bright light on social media, using TikTok and Instagram in subversive ways that actually strengthen community and connection. In this video she reads an essay about her decision to (as the name states) quit her job, but also find meaning and value beyond conventional careers. It’s hard to summarize her content and subsequent contributions to her audience (I think of her as vulnerability incarnate?), but I know that her curiosity and willingness to reconsider how we navigate ~existence~ acts as an invitation for other to do the same. If there is only one video you watch on TikTok this week, let it be this tender one.

Why I Left, Britta Hummel on Substack

Speaking of quitting, a former engineering leader at Meta just handed in her badge and wrote about why (we know why). Having also read most of Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (I couldn’t finish it but that’s a story for another day), I found this essay to be more measured and unadorned. Careless People was clearly a BIG release that came with significant promo and hype, so it was nice to read Hummel’s paired down perspective, which felt like a letter to herself as much as for a broader audience. She is so clearly a total Boss, adept at navigating the corporate structures that these types of tech behemoths demand, but as a wise friend once told me, “even golden handcuffs have locks that can be picked.” Amen.

Episode 227, Boys Club Podcast

I am not a big podcast gal, but I love everything about this one (the hosts, the topics, the tech themes, and the fact that they embrace being “the dumbest bitches in the room”, and especially enjoyed this recent episode where they interviewed the founder of Lore. The newish tech company is building a “rabbit-hole engine” that acts as a place to explore, log, and bask in niche fandoms, with it’s founder Zehra Naqvi claiming she wants to support “joy-spiralling” and lurking. I appreciate that it’s tech that has nothing to do with work.

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator, Norwegian Consumer Council

Enshittification comes up a lot in my content and life (the term is Cory Doctorow’s and refers to a specific kind of “platform decay” in tech, which acts to serve the needs of shareholders rather than users), and apparently Norwegian Consumer Council was so taken with this concept that they produced a parody video. Normally government-funded agencies don’t nail social media content, but this is perfection. The acting, the production, the satirical tone — they crushed.

How It Feels Being Alive RN, @loxsmith_ on TikTok

@loxsmith_I might as well be 80 years old

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Another pitch perfect video I encountered in my scroll this week, that had me lol-ing the whole way through. Never ending layers of logins and portals and passwords are the death of me, and I fear the day that I’ll need one of the above to open my own toilet seat. Bravo, 10/10, no notes.

I Know What You Think Of Me, Tim Krieder in The New York Times (from 2013!)

This essay holds a special place in my heart. In short, it’s written by a guy who’s just been included in an email with a bunch of his friends when he realizes that he’s not supposed to be cc’d. The email is criticizing him for a few recent big life decisions, and he’s forced to reckon with a very painful truth: people can be highly critical about you AND hold you in high-esteem at the same time.

I first read this back in 2013, a veritable lifetime ago now, but have thought about and referenced it so many times over the years. I ended up using Claude to help me track it down (I believe I was able to link a non-paywalled version) and was thrilled to be reunited with the seminal text. Read it, bookmark it, send it to friends. It pays dividends.

Honourable mentions:

This woman’s videos are SO damn funny and if you’ve ever rolled your eyes at conventional influencer GRWM’s, hers are the perfect antidote. I nodded along throughout Lucinda Bounsall’s entire interview with Eugene Healey, that focused on the oft misunderstood role of brand/social strategist. Nardos Mengesha’s We Are All Founders Now, about the rise of founders and their associated content as a form of “LinkedIn performance art”, which made me snort. A masterclass in social media from a random Toyota dealership, and this:

Enjoy the week ahead, and shoot me a link if you recently read or watched something and loved it.

First of all, a big thank you to everyone for subscribing to Scroll Sick and taking a chance on me as your human algorithm. I’ve had a mild but persistent feeling of nausea throughout the past few weeks as I prepared to announce and then launch this newsletter, which kind of took me back to final exam season in university. What a treat to feel youthful again!

I decided to start Scroll Sick for a lot of reasons — the overabundance of content online has never felt more formidable, and curating good things to read and watch is a satisfying counter attack to doomscrolling — but the simplest one is that it’s the newsletter I wish existed. I spend a lot of time on social media because it’s my job (and because I’m addicted), but I also read a lot, and I appreciate serendipitous recommendations from people I trust or admire so much more than the suggestions that surface in my various feeds. Which is not to say I’m above the fruits of the algorithm, just that I would rather smash my head against a wall than consume only the things that Zuckerberg’s finest engineers have determined I have a high probability of liking based on my age, browsing habits, purchase history, etc.

Scroll Sick is my attempt to gently grasp you by the shoulders, give you a firm but loving shake, and say “Here! These bits and bobs are worth your while and you don’t even have to sift through the detritus!”

So thank you for supporting this small brain venture.

To kick off my first edition, I want to delve into a rarely-explored topic for me: optimism.

Some of the most impressive content I’ve consumed over the past year, has made me feel optimistic or even hopeful about the future of the internet, which is obviously hard to do given my resting-bitch-outlook and the current state of the online world. But that also means I’m more likely to remember and savour these gems, and I’d love to share a small collection of “saves” with you.

Before I get into them, I want to say that something I consider to be a plague in public online spaces is the assumption that negative critiques = intellectual, therefore positive interpretations = pedestrian. This is a race to the bottom where everyone is a hater and the vulnerability required to consider opposing viewpoints atrophies from underutilization. I don’t want to inhabit this part of the internet, and I actively work to avoid comment threads and platforms where this kind of urgency to make declarations without reflection, is commonplace. There are enough alternative, cozy corners of the world wide web where I’d much rather reside.

So, in no particular order, here is content that made me feel a sense of optimism about the future of the internet, with some of my accompanying thoughts. Feel free to let the links take you down rabbit holes. 🐇

1. Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem, By Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and Jacob Mchangama, Noema Magazine

This co-authored article, published in May of last year, is basically an argument that the “need to redesign platforms that bridge divides has never been more urgent”, or rather, social media kinda sucks and destroys the core tenets of community, so we must try to engineer better variations.

It made me think about the architecture of these platforms, and opened my mind to the the fact that our current sub-par experience isn’t a given. It’s really easy to view social media as one giant mass of (attention, community, nuance, dopamine) destruction, and then to frame leaving it as the ultimate solution, but at some point we have to challenge ourselves to rewrite a new plan that isn’t simply abstaining or “going analog”. (This is something sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has expanded on throughout her career, the notion that changing consumer behaviour is not the fix when the issue is fundamentally structural.)

A quote that I screencapped from the article because I want to consider our “social fabric” more often:

“This makes today the most realistic moment since social media was born in the mid-2000s to make it the tool it always should have been — for it to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.”

2. A Manifesto to Build a Better Internet, Galaxy Brain Podcast on Youtube

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel speaks to Mike Masnick, Alex Komoroske, and Zoe Weinberg about the “Resonant Computing Manifesto” (this is worth a close reading) they helped to write — a framework for building technology that leaves people feeling nourished rather than hollow.

(The manifesto begins with, “We shape our environments, and thereafter they shape us.”)

The guests are passionate, reflective, and funny(!!), and they speak with a huge degree of self-awareness about demanding AI tools and digital spaces that “make us more human.”

I listened to it with my 9 year old in the car, and she didn’t ask me to switch it to Gracie Abrams, meaning she liked it too.

3. Alexander Zhou playing (and talking about playing) piano, on TikTok

@kaufmanmusiccenterAfter sharing Special Music School 4th grader Alexander Zhou’s Tiny Desk performance, we got a lot of questions about “light, crispy notes”! In Alexander’s own words: “I think of light and crispy notes as pearls or tiny ice cubes dropping on a jade plate.” We couldn’t agree more! #lightcrispynotes #pianistsoftiktok #nprmusic

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This tiny, 9 year old piano virtuoso is an utter delight to watch, and every time he pops up on my TikTok it’s the perfect feed cleanser. I’m in awe of his genius-level playing ability (along with the rest of the internet, clearly), but honestly even more than that, the lively adjectives he uses to describe music.

“I think of light and crispy notes as pearls or tiny ice cubes dropping on a jade plate.”

The fact that content like this can and does perform well on TikTok, signals to me that still have functioning brain cells and a capacity for wonder.

PS - My favourite comment on his videos is “I’m crying, he’s literally 3 apples tall.”

4. Kids Show Us What They’re Into, From Pokémon to Pop Stars, by Casey Lewis in Bloomberg

Casey Lewis writes about youth trends for a living on After School, and recently interviewed Gen Alpha kids about their lives. All the photos in the piece were taken by the kids themselves (some who are as young as 5!) with disposable cameras, and it was packed with wholesome, joyful accounts of simple pleasures and the sorts of infatuations that grip our primary years.

As a parent of two, I can attest to the fact that there is so much collective concern over Gen Alpha and the high-screen/low-attention span world they’re growing up in, but this piece did a great job of showcasing a generation steeped in curiosity and fascinations.

FYI, this one is paywalled.

5. A “Font Walk”, on TikTok

@meshtimeshelp me pick a font for my logo → #1 or #2?

highly underrated activity = going on a “font walk” in the city 💌

I used Claude to help me identify fonts, learn the backstory, and find affordable alternatives (girl math)

if you ever feel stuck on a project… go on a walk, fonts are everywhere! 

it’s funny how walking down a familiar street can make you notice things you’ve passed a hundred times before like a color palette, a serif curve, a font that somehow fits your new project ✐ᝰ.ᐟ

I ended up discovering a few through Taylor Penton’s library 

#ClaudePartner @Claude

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Marisa is a Product Designer who posts idiosyncratic videos across several platforms, with many of her recent projects being small, joyful vibe-coded apps (like an interactive, shareable advent calendar). What I find so resonant about her content and creative process is that she incorporates AI in ways that aren’t about streamlining/optimizing/saving time. This is rare!

Her video about going on a “font walk” to observe typology all around the city (and using Claude to catalogue what she found), lodged its way into my brain.

6. I Still <3 The Internet, by Delia Cai

is a media and culture newsletter I subscribe to, that recently put out a special 10 year anniversary edition. In it, Cai asks several of her writer/journalist friends to answer the same question: “Why do you still love the internet?”

The answers range from subreddits to fanfic, to OG elder millennial bloggers (“my longest internet relationship”). I enjoyed the range of perspectives and strange, personal anecdotes, but also the challenge of uncovering the good in a space that’s so easily vilified.

7. Scythe Man Also Likes To Quilt, @risolvestudio

@risolvestudioReplying to @HSalami special interest final boss

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It was hard to choose a single video from this husband/wife duo, though this was probably the one that hooked me into their account. You have to watch a few to a get a sense of them, but the back story is that they blew up after posting videos of the husband “mowing” their lawn with a scythe. People were understandably like…why? But as it turns out, they have a thoughtful, methodical approach to everything, including cleaning the bathroom (that’s an entire series!), quilting (this dude is a master!), and domestic work in general.

One of the subliminal things about the content that I appreciate, is that most of the videos are framed as a dialogue between husband and wife, and it feels like you’re sitting at the kitchen table with them at the end of the day, working through the events you’ve been saving up to discuss with one another.

The entire account is like a salve to the blight of modern hustle culture, but moreover, when I see that a video about creatively shovelling your driveway hit 3.2 million views in today’s internet climate, I take it as a sign that we are not totally cooked yet.

Have a great Sunday, and rest assured I’ll soon return to my regular programming of doom and gloom!

I think what we need now are great things to read and watch and share and discuss. Vetted recommendations, less volume and better quality content that comes from people we trust, with taste and opinions.

We’re tired of having our attention usurped, our time robbed, and fielding endless ads about diet tea. We want to be entertained! To learn new things! To find community! To inhabit cozy, welcoming corners of the internet!

I’m not an algorithm per se, but I think I can do better. I’ll curate videos and articles and books and opinions and internet detritus, and deliver it to your inbox with my own two cents on why it’s relevant or worthy of your attention.

So if you’re feeling Scroll Sick, hand me the keys and let me take the wheel.

I’m your gal.

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