Friday Reading S14E19

A weekly round-up of what I’ve read and enjoyed from around the web.

I’m interested in journalism, media, technology, and nerdy things found down the back of the world wide web’s sofa. Most weeks I publish a handful of things that caught my eye – regardless of what the algorithms were pushing at me. You can subscribe to get it by email here. And if you read something odd and wonderful you think I’d enjoy, feel free to send it my way.

“Here is where the boundary between pr0n and politics goes from blurry to non-existent. No longer are people just applying a politicised narrative to their pr0n, the political narrative itself has become the pr0n. What becomes apparent is that essentially every foundational narrative for the modern right is part of this pr0n ecosystem.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have found this piece funny, but the idea that there is something billed as a “36-minute read” by Cameron Cummins-Smith called The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything was irresistible to me.

And it is so quotable and made me feel better about my conviction that nearly everything wrong with politics in the UK can be boiled down to either the Thatcher government or right-wingers realising #GamerGate was going to work as a playbook on a lot more flood-the-zone topics.

That quote, by the way, was about a graph of population demographics overlaid with some anime-style cartoon “hottie”. See also “Amelia”.

[Right-wing obsession with racial purity and hot anime chicks]

Having laughed at all of that, there is something horribly disquieting about this interview by Amelia Gentleman with an OnlyFans star who has essentially been an on-camera “child influencer” their entire life:

“The story of her self-monetisation is also the strange story of a teenager who has spent most of her life being filmed. She thinks there has barely been a day since she was seven – when she inherited her mother’s old iPhone – that she hasn’t filmed herself and uploaded content. She has thought more than most people about the merits or otherwise of exposing children to smartphones and social media. She would avoid letting her own children have smartphones too early, she says, and discourage them from posting about their lives on the internet.”

Read more here: Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian – The strange surveilled life of Piper Rockelle: why did a former child influencer decide to go on OnlyFans?

The phrase “AI-generated time-travellers vlogging from history” had me retching, but there is at least one historian in this piece by Priya Bharadia trying to convince me that, actually, it is a great learning tool and A GOOD THING™.

“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more, we can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.’”

US students on why they booed their pro-AI graduation speakers.

Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem writes on how Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made abuse of detained Palestinians something of a macabre calling card, celebrating cruelty publicly and often on video. These people don’t care if you don’t watch Eurovision.

This week’s Guardian Thursday news quiz: A shooting pooch, avatar anger and a collective noun for ‘Derren Brown’.

Enjoying Friday Reading by email? Feel free to forward it to a friend – they can sign up here. And if you’ve recently read something you think I would enjoy, do send it my way.

Nat Guest absolutely skewers – see what I did there? – what she calls ‘the worst variety of social event’, the great British garden BBQ.

“There’s something appallingly physical about the language that’s used to describe the radical changes that are affecting every aspect of our culture. AI slop. Enshittification. It’s all rather revolting. From our perspective, the acts of making music and writing about it are in fine fettle, but the systems that support and nourish them are in danger of being broken on a wheel. AI is at the root of this crisis.”

The Quietus is offering discounted subscriptions to “Fight the AI-pocalypse”

Paul Hanford spends time at a 30-hour music/arts festival in Berlin that comes complete with beds.

From the insane but intriguing files: a film about Hitler but it is entirely shot by a dog, coining the phrase “cinemadographer” along the way.

Part of the problem, of course, is internet fandom, which wants everything to be bold, fresh, new, exciting, and more of exactly the same of what they remember from when they were a kid.

“Is Star Wars now the impossible franchise, at least on the big screen? Because actually, Jon Favreau’s film is perfectly fine. Without giving too much away, there are callbacks to villains from decent TV episodes, Mando processes hapless stormtroopers into white-armoured landfill more efficiently than ever, and Grogu shimmies down all-new rabbit holes of cuteness. So what is the problem?”

I found it a perfectly fine way to pass the time, but Ben Child suggests that with The Mandalorian and Grogu Star Wars has shown it is a cursed franchise

I treated Alan Davies playing Jonathan Creek in the 90s as surrogate Earthbound Doctor Who while the latter was (mostly) off air [See point 2 in the six sentences I hate writing about Doctor Who]. Davies is very candid about the trauma in his life in this interview by Sam Wollaston.

This is going to be the last episode of this season of Friday Reading. I’ve really enjoyed bringing it back for the first time since 2022, and you’ve probably seen over the course of these last couple of months how it has changed and adapted as I’ve got more newsletter experience now. But I’ve got a new shift pattern coming up, and with the prospect of having to watch seventy-one billion group stage matches in the World Cup, I thought I would rest it over the summer and bring it back in the autumn. Thank you for reading!

Friday Reading is a (usually) weekly series of recommended reads from Martin Belam, covering journalism, media and technology, and other interesting nerdy things found on the internet. It is now in its fourteenth season. Sign up here to receive it by email.