Throughout this year I’ve been thinking more and more about what discovery looks like in a post-search era. One of the most interesting things, for me, about the rise of newsletters is that we’re back to an era reminiscent of Justin’s Links from the Underground.

We’re relying on human curators again, who do the active work of exploration and sharing what they find. So, I’ve decided to talk to a bunch of my favourite newsletter writers and wranglers about their journeys, the work of curation, and what it means for the future of the web. I’ll send these out on Tuesdays, so you can expect your usual LEGO update on Fridays.

I’m really excited that Cates agreed to go first!

Yesterday Spotify Wrapped dropped, and with it a new round of engagement bait as they included your “listening age”. Dunc getting a listening age of 55 prompted a full ten minutes of outrage in our team. I’m apparently 19.

Even as we complain that the Wrapped concept is washed, there’s still something we love about getting this glimpse into our own behaviour. We know it’s marketing, based entirely on storing data about us, but we still share and talk about the results.

This got me thinking about the kinds of online tracking we find fun and the kinds we find creepy. I’m nowhere near the privacy advocate I should be, because I understand all the horrors of surveillance capitalism, and yet I’m lazy and love convenience so when my AirNZ app detects I’m in the lounge and offers me my last coffee order to place again, I’m delighted. I know that I’m in a position of privilege where I can care a little less about being tracked, even if I shouldn’t.

Look, I’ll confess, I’ve never been a General Admission girlie. I can understand the thrill of being as close as possible to your fave, but when I go to a concert I like to be able to go to the bar, or the bathroom, and come back to my spot. I say now that it’s because I’m old, but I’ve pretty much always been that way. I think the last time I really tried to get to the front of a concert was Michael Jackson’s History tour, which shows just how old I am. If I buy GA tickets for a smaller venue, I’m at the back dancing by the sound desk, wine safely in hand.

But I get it — for some fans, being “at barricade” (i.e. pressed as close to the stage as it’s possible to be) is the pinnacle of a live concert experience. And to secure that spot, you need to be first in line.

Over the years when I’ve talked about fans I’ve always made sure to point out that it’s not just teen girls who like to queue. Sneakerheads do it. Apple fanboys do it (or did it, before the queue moved online).

OK we’re a day late this week because jet lag knocked me on my ass, but I’m old, so that’s what happens now.

While travelling I’ve been thinking about two loosely-connected stories about sports fans. Last week Sky Sports in the UK launched a new TikTok channel called Halo, described as (I kid you not) the “lil sis” of Sky Sports. Within three days, after a post that plastered “How the matcha + hot girl walk hits” in pink font over Erling Haaland sprinting towards goal, they’d wiped almost everything, posted an apology, and shut the whole thing down. Halo lived fast, died young, and leaves behind a very pink corpse.

Now the episode has become LinkedIn chum, with marketing “experts” trying to outpost each other moralising about what went wrong. You don’t need me to tell you the obvious bits. Womens’ sport is at its most watched right now. The WNBA delivered 54m unique viewers last season. You can see why the Linkedinfluencers love talking about this.

Well, I made it to London but my suitcase did not. Between trips to Uniqlo to buy pajamas and underwear, I did manage to make my Order an Object appointment at the V&A East Storehouse.

I’ve written about the Storehouse before, but when I was here a couple of months ago I didn’t book my appointment in time, so my objects have been sitting in my cart waiting for the next opportunity. The size of the collection is SO overwhelming that when you sit down to try and pick five things to see up close, it’s impossible to work out where to even start. My friend Carl gave me invaluable advice, saying you need to pick a theme for yourself and then choose your objects to fit the theme, so naturally I chose fandom.

First up, this is a souvenir brooch that was made for the play The Blue Bird, which opened at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket in December 1909, and was apparently a smash hit.

This newsletter is coming to you from the incredibly pink confines of the nhow hotel in Berlin, where I’ve just spoken at beyond tellerrand.

I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to come to an event like this because it seems like, post-covid, they’re increasingly rare. In Aotearoa, we used to have an annual calendar of great events like Webstock, Gather, KiwiFOO, Codemania, Refactor and more. They were a chance to get together with friends in the sector regularly, but they were also a chance to make new connections, hear new ideas, and be inspired by the future of the web and what we were able to make online.

But the events industry in general is doing it so tough, corporates don’t want to sponsor anything, people don’t buy tickets in advance, and gradually these little bright lights wink out.

As you know, I've been waiting on House of Dynamite to drop for months now, ever since I finished Nuclear War: A Scenario. Now I’ve watched it, and I want to talk to you about it, but specifically I want to talk about the ending, so I won’t (yet) but it got me thinking this week about spoiler warnings and ROT13.

If you are not, like me, a decrepit old lady of the internet, you might not be familiar with the Caesar cypher that was my first experience with spoiler warnings. A Caesar cypher (also called a substitution cypher) is one of the oldest forms of encryption, where you shift the letters of the alphabet a known number of places.

This is now the stuff of kid’s decoder rings, rather than serious encryption for military secrets, but it got a fabulous second life on the early internet. In usenet forums this cypher (specifically ROT13 — or “rotation 13” — moving the letters 13 places) was used to obscure the punchlines of jokes and spoilers.

We talk a lot about how broken the internet is for all of us as individuals. Doomscrolling, algorithmic feeds, overall exhaustion at The Horrors. But this week I’ve been thinking more about how it’s also really broken for groups.

Whenever I see small communities trying to form, whether it’s fan subcultures, neighbourhood initiatives, volunteer teams, parents wrangling kids’ sports, they hit the same wall: there’s no good online infrastructure for intentional groups. We make do with whatever’s available: WhatsApp chats, private Slacks, Discord servers, Facebook Groups, Substack comments. They all kind of work, but not for long. Because these are not tools for communities. They’re tools for communication, and that’s not the same thing.

Think about the last time you joined (or were forced to join) a new online group. It probably started with a burst of energy — intros, memes, emoji reactions. Then, within weeks, it had either gone completely silent, or become so noisy you muted it forever.

A few weeks ago, we talked about what it’s like to be young and online at the moment, in light of the introduction of age-verification laws in the UK and some US states. But given the increasing sweep of these measures, and the sort of shrug most people give them, I want to go a bit deeper on it. If you feel like you know all this already, skip to the end where I hit the new things I’ve been thinking about on the topic this week.

When I talk about what’s wrong with the current attention economy, people often raise the suggestion of social media bans for young people as a possible solution. If the internet was a nightclub, we’ll all be queuing at the door soon, fumbling for our wallets, trying to prove our age before we can get in.

In the UK, the Online Safety Act came into force this July, giving Ofcom sweeping powers to require “robust age checks” for websites that host porn or other content considered “harmful to children.” Services that don’t comply face fines of up to 10% of global revenue. In practice, this means that sites from Reddit to Steam are rolling out new age-verification systems, often using third-party vendors, who ask users to upload an ID document or a selfie for facial recognition. Wired calls it “the age-checked internet”.

And the UK isn’t alone. The EU is tightening rules. Australia is trialling an “age assurance” framework. More than a dozen US states, from Utah to Louisiana, have introduced or passed laws requiring users to verify their age before accessing social media or adult sites. You can almost feel the global policy mood shifting: after two decades of anything goes, governments are trying to retrofit an age gate onto the open web.

This week I finally got around to watching Netflix’s Popstar Academy: Katseye (you’d be forgiven for thinking this means there’s more than one Popstar Academy, but I think the title just reflects a desire to cash in on the name of the eventual group). This show’s a year old, but I’m delivering this ice-cold take because Katseye are finally starting to enjoy mainstream attention, appearing at Lollapalooza, the VMAs and in a brand new GAP campaign. And because last month a sequel was announced. Check them out:

Popstar Academy is a documentary series that was filmed over two years while 20 young women from all over the world went through an intense bootcamp based on the K-pop idol training methodology, brought to the US for the first time by HYBE (the company behind BTS and a string of other successes) and Universal’s Geffen Records.

The K-pop trainee model is both awe-inspiring and unsettling. Aspiring idols in South Korea can train for years — vocal lessons, dance drills, language study, media coaching, gym sessions, diet regimes — all before they ever set foot on a stage and most never do. The promise is clear: if you give everything, you might be chosen.

Some of you know that I work part-time with the team at Graze Social. It seems gauche to talk about a day job in your passion project newsletter, but in this case the two overlap wildly, and I want to talk about why. This week we rolled out a total visual rebrand for the site (and it looks gorgeous). Ellie wrote about the story behind this, the artist we chose to work with, and what the core illustration is saying about the current state of social media.

In the middle section, the little carrot guys are crossing a treacherous, precarious bridge, which is a visual metaphor for trying to post on legacy social media.

You make something you put your heart into and you want to share it with the people who actually care. And then you're just stuck on a rickety bridge, hoping your stuff makes it across and the algorithm doesn't decide your work isn't worth showing to people who explicitly asked to see it.

The cat represents the gatekeepers. It just sits there, controlling the bridge, mining everyone's attention while curators do all this precarious work building beautiful spaces and trying to reach their communities. They're so big they don't even have to try block the little carrot guys. Sitting there is enough to be in the way.

You should read the whole thing, it’s great.

This week if you’ve spent any time on socials you’ve probably encountered the idea that many US evangelical Christians had suddenly decided that the Rapture was occurring on Tuesday and/or Wednesday.

For those of you blissfully unaware (congratulations on your media diet), let me give you some quick background. The Rapture is a millennialist idea in protestant Christianity that at some point Jesus will return and “take up” believers, leaving everyone else behind to endure a great tribulation. The BBC has a simple explainer of these pretty complex ideas here. The important thing to note is that the rapture is not mentioned in the Bible, and that Christ is extremely clear that no-one knows when He is coming back. Matt 24:36 says:

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

Good news for friends and fam in the UK, I am coming back to speak at ffconf in Brighton in November! I’m really looking forward to heading there after Beyond Tellerrand and talking more about the Good Internet.

This week, I’m thinking about photos. When I wrote about my love for tiny things a while back, I wanted to talk about my sister’s “dolls house”. It wasn’t actually a house, it was an entire book case that she had turned into a house for her Barbie dolls, and she made furniture out of cardboard and boxes and scraps of cloth. I remember it being really incredible, and I wanted to find a photo of it to show you all.

I have our childhood photo albums at my house, because my mother (hi mum!) is the opposite of whatever a digital hoarder is. A digital minimalist, I guess. She deletes her emails rather than archiving them. She’s constantly erasing things she thinks are “taking up space” on her computer. She scanned our family photos and made gorgeous photobooks and then planned to get rid of the albums too. I had a pang of nostalgia and so they’re in a drawer downstairs.

But when I went looking for my sister’s dolls, there was nothing. The childhood photos were all of special occasions - dressed up for school prizegivings, the family grouped together at Christmas, or at the beach on holiday.

First up, welcome to all the new friends here from SYSCA, your comments have been delightful. For everyone else, I expanded on my thinking about expertise bias: AI is soooo good at everything - except MY job, of course x

This week I’ve been thinking about the book as an object.

I’ve been travelling for the last six weeks, and it’s always a situation where I want “real” books (my kindle rules, but there’s no replacement for a pile of well-thumbed paperbacks on vacay).

This week I’ve been thinking about poptimism. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s a debate that’s been going on for the last twenty years about whether or not we take pop music sufficiently seriously. Whether it’s as valid as rock music, which some see as having greater depth.

You’ll know if you’ve read anything I’ve ever written that I’m a “poptimist” to the core. I was revisiting the idea this week as I read this essay from 2018, which starts with an absolute nostalgia gut punch from 2001:

Almost 20 years ago, 2 Many DJs and Freelance Hellraiser each released too-clever mashups that laid R&B pop diva vocals over indie rock instrumentals, revealing that the paired songs had exactly the same compositional structure. The former’s “Smells Like Booty” put Destiny’s Child together with Nirvana, and the latter’s “A Stroke of Genius” combined Christina Aguilera with The Strokes. The mashups were clever because they flouted supposedly commonsense views that these these pairings shouldn’t work: how could something as superficial, formulaic, and, frankly, girly as Destiny’s Child and Aguilera have anything in common with something as serious and aggressive as Nirvana and The Strokes?

I was living in Singapore in 2001, and those mash-ups were our absolute anthems. Little wonder the Guardian went on to call A Stroke of Genius the song of the decade.

One of the things that hit me as soon as I landed in the UK last month was that I could no longer access my Bluesky DMs.

This is a result of Bluesky complying with the new Online Safety Act in the UK, which requires platforms that allow adult content to verify their users’ ages. Depending on who you talk to, this is a ground-breaking step to protect children from the harms of online pornography, or a privacy disaster waiting to happen. For example, in the US, anonymous messaging app Tea’s poor security measures meant 70,000 users’ government IDs and identification verification selfies were leaked online.

Of course, no age verification measures really work. UK users quickly discovered that you could use selfie mode in video game Death Stranding to pass the age checks.

Two weeks ago, I linked to Anthony Oliveira’s article A Trick of the Light. It came to mind, as I said at the time, because of the horrifying spectacle of a CNN “interview” with an AI avatar of one of the victims of the Parkland shooting, Joaquin Oliver.

Oliveira wrote his piece six years ago in response to the announcement that a hologram of Whitney Houston would be going on tour, a concert experience that the Guardian referred to as a ghoulish cash-in. Oliveira asked:

What right, if any, does a person have to a 'Do Not Simulate' clause? To what extent, if any, can stipulation be made about what can and cannot be done with one’s image? What obligation, if any, do we have to the facts of history?

This week, I went to see ABBA Voyage. If you haven’t seen or heard of this, it’s a purpose-built arena in London where astounding digital “ABBAtars” perform a full concert. It was made with the full involvement and commitment of the legendary supergroup. Thousands of animators, together with the magicians at Industrial Light & Magic, brought to life motion capture filmed of Agnetha Faitskog, Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

This week I was on a bus behind a young couple and the guy was boring the girl to tears talking about the Very Exciting News that chatgpt-5 had been released.

Every time there’s a new model or hyped advance, I like to check back in on the LLM world and see if it’s hit the miraculous heights that zealots like to tell me will be arriving any day now. Surprise, surprise: even the zealots were largely disappointed.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Gell-Mann amnesia. This is a term coined by author Michael Crichton to describe what happens when you read a newspaper (remember those?) and a journalist has written an article about your personal area of expertise. It’s full of errors, you roll your eyes and move on, but you trust the rest of what’s written in the paper as accurate.

This week, along with 1.3m other people in the UK, I watched the finale of this season’s Love Island. If you’re about to close the email based on that alone, stick around.

When it comes to reality television, the shows I love best are ones where people get to demonstrate their expertise. I adore Project Runway and Bake Off. Keith Brymer Jones weeping over the beauty of the ceramics on The Great Pottery Throwdown. The incredible creations on Handmade: Britain’s Best Woodworker. I love these shows because I’m not really interested in drama for drama’s sake. The “I’m not here to make friends” vibe of most reality tv, particularly American, leaves me cold.

The other thing that ruins a compelling reality franchise is contestants who’ve watched multiple prior seasons and have come in with a playbook to win. The first season of The Traitors (UK) marked itself out with a cast of ordinary Brits who played the game straight because they’d never seen it before. The first season of the US version gave half the slots to former winners of other reality competitions — people who already knew how to scheme it up for the cameras. There’s a whole stretch of Survivor seasons that bore me senseless because it’s clear that the players determined to make it to the end have pre-planned every step in building their “resumé” for the eventual final vote. Look, it’s a game, I get it. It’s just not fun to watch.

Last week I finished Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. The book is a non-fiction account of the projected aftermath of a North Korean nuclear missile strike on the United States. Not gonna lie: it’s bleak.

Books like this were my catnip as a child of the Cold War. I grew up reading On the Beach, and watching The Day After. I got this book from the Scholastic book club, age 10:

To this day I remember it because I had to look up what lactated ringers were, not really knowledge a child needs. In Britain, people were being permanently mentally scarred watching Threads. The Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight.