We Love the Internet 2021/30: The Why are you asking me this edition

The next edition will be in three weeks.

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Instagram Has Become SkyMall
• What newsrooms still don’t understand about the internet
• Netflix Enters Middle Age. Brace for Speed Bumps.
• The Inevitable Weaponization of App Data Is Here
• Meet China’s new gaming underclass
• The Day the Good Internet Died

Reference points:

• Here’s The Most ‘Unforgettable Reddit Posts That Everyone Needs To Read’ As Voted By Users
• How to jump on TikTok trends

Longer reads:

• No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world
• Concern trolls and power grabs: Inside Big Tech’s angry, geeky, often petty war for your privacy
• Can Silicon Valley Find God?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• YouTube culture and trends report
• How TikTok’s Algorithm Figures You Out

Things to look at/read:

• Why are you asking me this?
• Those Were the Days of Our Lives
• Shein is the future of fast fashion. Is that a good thing?

Animal corner:

• When a MANTIS SHRIMP PUNCHES A HUMAN
• Imagine getting slept by a fish
• Cat games
• My dog got pricked by a cactus
• Animals being jerks
• Cat fight

Tweets of the week:

• Mathematics be like
• Fred Durst deleted all his insta posts and is rebranding!
• This image looks like the front cover on the box of a Sims game where they’re trying to show off how many different characters you can create
• so Beyond Meat sausages are growers not showers?
• That went downhill rapidly…
• I can tell you what happened here
• I love that NZ is small enough that I see the PM at least once a month.

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Sucks to be him! How Henry the vacuum cleaner became an accidental design icon
• How AstraZeneca threw away its shot
• The Untold Stories of Wes Studi
• The rise and fall of an American tech giant

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We Love the Internet 2021/29: The Who owns the teen girl aesthetic edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Who Owns the Teen Girl Aesthetic?
• TikTok made me buy it
• How Vlogging Is Empowering a New Generation of Stutterers
• Are We in the Metaverse Yet?
• Gen Z Thinks It’s Cringey When Millennials Say “Sheesh”
• Sorry publishers, but your digital products suck
• How the streaming wars are changing what you watch

Reference points:

• What Is Actually Cool to Buy in 2021?

Longer reads:

• How K-pop conquered the universe
• Why won’t American radio play more K-pop?

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• I pretended to be an NYC tourist and this is what happened
• Why are Deli Subs better than homemade ones?
• Fragile steel bars/Tofu-dreg project in China/Shaky building/Collapsing buildings/Poor quality
• Woman Takes A Pipe Coaster Down A Mountain, And It’s One Exhilarating Ride

Things to look at/read:

• Why Do So Few Men Understand That Addiction Is a Spectrum?
• Why Nicolas Cage endures

Animal corner:

• They do be throwing stuff at kevin
• He knows they won’t get a treat until they both sit
• Secrets first flower!
• My dog very much is a big movie guy
• What do you do for barks?
• oh, to be a piglet floating in a sink…
• please just look at him

Tweets of the week:

• Southern Joker
• Google when you sign into your email from another device
• LeBron got the Lobos tucked under the seat?! They let this man get away with anything
• And what baby needs, baby gets.
• The heat was so much last night I got out my bed and stood there with my hands on my hips
• they have to say human because of scrooge mcduck
• The entirety of Human existence, on repeat.
• So close to getting through to the next round of Britain’s Got Toilets

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?
• The toppling of Saddam’s statue: how the US military made a myth

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We Love the Internet 2021/28: The Bloody bubble edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The great American cool
• The Rise of Elevated Stupidity
• How should an influencer sound?
• The Chinese content farms behind Factory TikTok
• Hollywood is Disguising the Results of Its TV Shows and Movies
• What Does Gen Z Have Against Question Marks
• Inside Facebook’s Data Wars

Reference points:

• The 19 best virtual museum tours in the world

Longer reads:

• The Bloody Bubble
• The Sound of My Inbox
• Why Can’t We Be Friends
• The Internet Is Rotting
• A Unified Theory Of Online Anger

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Magically Turning Into Random Objects
• Musical chair game in high school
• best interview ever

Things to look at/read:

• The Scream Gap by Celia Mattison
• Introducing Bistro Vibes, the Throwback Lifestyle for the Happily Washed
• Inside MSCHF’s Bold, Brilliant, Slightly Unhinged Plan to Shake Up Streetwear
• Great Jones cookware and the illusion of the millennial aesthetic
• 18 Forbidden Places You Can’t Visit
• Shannon Lee: Does Quentin Tarantino Hate Bruce Lee? Or Does It Just Help Sell Books?

Animal corner:

• By far my best drunk shopping purchase to date
• I guess they didn’t see that comin
• My god she’s good.
• In Finland they paint deers’ antlers with reflective paint to prevent cars from hitting them and this will be my album cover if I ever do a solo project
• In case you ever wanted to know what happens when a dog gets hold of a box of Sugar Puffs.
• Come back with a warrant

Tweets of the week:

• this guy on tiktok rated emergency alarm sounds from different countries and there’s no reason it should be this funny
• Laughing but also crying at this
• Guys I found it
• We all have our role models.
• Good luck sitting next to him on the subway in 20 years ladies
• literally congrats everybody
• At last, a new Pope.
• Actual war crime

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The Subversive Joy of Lil Nas X’s Gay Pop Stardom
• He Thought He Could Outfox the Gig Economy. He Was Wrong
• The fall of the billionaire Gucci master
• ‘It Wouldn’t Have Been Done By Anyone in Their Right Mind’ – The Oral History of ATP
• The secret history of Gavin McInnes

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We Love the Internet 2021/27: The Instagram’s evolution edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• My Life as a Meme: ‘I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This’ Revisited
• Everyone’s thirsty for friends
• The Next Chapter
• The TV hit isn’t just dying — it may already be dead

Reference points:

• Who is winning the platform wars?

Longer reads:

• Instagram’s Evolution
• The Amazon That Customers Don’t See
• What robots can – and can’t – do for the lonely

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Hidden Patterns Inside Tropical Fruit
• Apple’s AirTag Saved My Bike
• Showing Some Secrets Of The Magnificent Airbus 350
• This entrance from Joey Chestnut is wildly incredible

Things to look at/read:

• The Economics of Dining as a Couple
• Tallest stack of M&M’s record broken by 23-year-old Brit
• The thriving business of ‘Ikea hacking’
• The biggest problem with eating insects isn’t the “ew” factor
• On me head, son: the secret economics of footballers’ hair

Animal corner:

• The longer you watch the better it gets
• I would shit myself
• Good form, running start, nice distance!
• i’m secretly a gassy cow
• 💙🧡

Tweets of the week:

• Veteran internet users may enjoy this graphic from the Daily Telegraph
• this lassie has the exact same delivery as charlie kelly in always sunny and it’s blowing my mind
• LOOOOOOOOOL WTF
• I mean fair play because this somehow manages to be both the best and worst TikTok MUA transformation I’ve ever seen
• this first sentence is why it should be mandatory for every living human to keep a diary in 8th grade
• “24 visitors are looking at this product right now”
• I’M CRYINGGG
• french is such a beautiful language

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Towards a Unified Theory of Peloton
• XOXO, Tavi
• Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare
• The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

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We Love the Internet 2021/26: The Joy generator edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• You Can’t Escape the Attention Economy
• The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five
• The Lightness of Windows
• The pop star versus the playlist
• The Arrowverse is struggling. Can its creators rebuild?

Reference points:

• Joy generator
• Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works
• Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today
• How Software Is Eating the Car

Longer reads:

• LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
• Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• its not every day that the greatest shot in disc golf history happens
• Delighted to be dubbing Alan Partridge into French, Spanish, Italian and Greek, for wholly legitimate and authentic reasons
• new favorite song just dropped

Things to look at/read:

• We Did Some Math On The Tesla Roadster’s Claimed 1.1 Second 0-60 Time
• These Are The Definitive Rules For Airplane Armrest Allocation
• I’m Not Rich Enough for K-Pop Fandom

Animal corner:

• Max plump jump
• Excuse me sir
• Oh

Tweets of the week:

• I was led to believe this would play a FAR greater role in my life than it has done.
• .
• Christ it’s only football
• watching F9
• “And Maguire’s going up for this corner”
• he’s speaking italian so damn hard
• ‘it was only a kiss, how did it end up like this?’
• if *I* were a baby with no appointments or responsibilities, I would simply not wake up at 5.45am

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• 6 months inside one of America’s most dangerous industries
• The Tin Man Gets His Heart: An Oral History of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’

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We Love the Internet 2021/25: The Farewell, millennial lifestyle subsidy edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy
• I’m Scared of the Person TikTok Thinks I Am
• Twitch Turns 10, and the Creator Economy Is in Its Debt

Reference points:

• A Brief History of Netflix Personalization
• The 25 Most Influential Movie Scenes of the Past 25 Years

Longer reads:

• The empty office: what we lose when we work from home
• Caught in the Study Web
• What the Silicon Valley idealists got wrong

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• GET OVER HERE! Scorpion/Mortal Kombat Rope Dart Trick Shots
• 7620 meter jump. With no parachute. World record by Luke Aikins. Not kidding

Things to look at/read:

• Why it’s so satisfying to root for Disney villains
• How the World Ran Out of Everything

Animal corner:

• Benji Is One Down Dog
• this sent me into a coughing fit
• i left my humidifier on all day and now my cat looks raggedy asf
• got any soup

Tweets of the week:

• When someone turns the light on in your room in the morning
• Next thing you know, I’m missing for 5 and 1/2 years
• Highlight of the Euros so far
• Well done, @NYTScience. Absolute A+++ take the rest of the month off
• Great, more unrealistic beauty standards for men
• Weird way to do subtitles for the Formula 1 race
• Every Irish fella when they finish a joke in a pub
• It’s called the baby yoda

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball
• The Rise and Fall of Planet Hollywood
• Why Is Everyone So Mad At Gabbie Hanna?
• The Rise of the $10 Million Disc Golf Celebrity

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We Love the Internet 2021/23: The How Hermés invented hype edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The perfect number of hours to work every day? Five

Reference points:

• Data-driven prioritization of content acquisitions
• The greatest achievements in dumb internet video

Longer reads:

• A mystery cube, a secret identity, and a puzzle solved after 15 years
• Inside The ‘World’s Largest’ Video Game Cheating Empire
• Left alone, together

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• An escalator made of cardboard

Things to look at/read:

• How Hermès Invented Hype
• ‘Keeping Up With the Kardashians’ Held an Unflattering Mirror Up to America

Animal corner:

• My own riff
• Two Dogs Have Dramatically Different Reactions To Being Roommates
• Catahoula Helps Stop Golden’s Seizures
• For all the “I’m living my best life” lads. The bar has been raised by this fella
• Bought a triple cat bowl holder so when they’re eating the mogs can line up perfe ,,, Oh never mind.
• gato dwayne johnson

Tweets of the week:

• me tryna cut a tiger loaf
• My doctors office really just screenshotted an insta ass pic, didn’t remove the tag button, blew it up, and hung it on the wall…
• Meanwhile Spider-Man is up for anything
• Game development in action
• Brid
• Coleen Rooney in 2019
• this is a car chase waiting to happen
• The security guard at Tesco making sure you’ve used the hand sanitizer before you do the big shop.

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• ‘We are democratising the right to laziness’: the rise of on-demand grocery deliveries
• Young, Male and Anti-Feminist – The Gen Z Boys Who Hate Women
• ‘The Silicon Valley of turf’: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football

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We Love the Internet 2021/22: The Greatest achievements in dumb internet video edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Tone of voice: A very important waste of time
• How Snapchat became the forgotten social platform
• Khaby Lame, the Everyman of the Internet
• The Rise Of The Appuccino: How TikTok Is Changing Starbucks
• My Quest to Make My Dog Internet Famous
• Google is reinventing Docs to fight a two-front war
• Integrated Apple and App Store Risk

Reference points:

• The greatest achievements in dumb internet video
• River runner
• A Guide to the Rap Social Media Universe

Longer reads:

• The human factor — why data is not enough to understand the world
• How SoundScan Changed Everything We Knew About Popular Music
• The Curious Rise of Twitter Power Broker Yashar Ali

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Explosively hydroforming a steel sphere
• Most Expensive Construction Mistakes in the World
• Axe Type Boomerang
• Guy smokes a pickle

Things to look at/read:

• Confessions of an Overnight Millionaire
• This Is The Story of the World’s Greatest Soccer Team
• What makes a beautiful word?
• Here’s How People Tried To Buy Happiness During The Pandemic

Animal corner:

• The Long, Strange Life of the World’s Oldest Naked Mole Rat
• Reporter Busts Accused Dognapper on Live TV
• Backyard Squirrel Maze 2.0- The Walnut Heist
• murphy ate our buns
• A Journalist adopted innocent abandoned puppy
• Weird name for a cat but I’ll take it
• Yeah, I was classically educated

Tweets of the week:

• There is so much I want to ask Conditioned Les.
• Cuatro leches?! En este economia?!
• Bought a BBQ from Tesco today. Only a quid.
• This sign knows it has lost.
• My thic journey
• Post Malones moustache looks like 2 Capybaras kissing
• Me enjoying my Twitter friends I’ve never met in real life for over 10+ years
• a decision was made here

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• On Finishing Finnegans Wake
• The strange story of “Dagobert”, the Ducktales bandit
• Travis Barker Isn’t Afraid of Dying

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We Love the Internet 2021/21: The 25 edits that define the modern internet video edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• The Real Story Behind Netflix’s Top 10 Lists
• Elon Musk: Memelord or Meme Lifter?
• Online shopping changed, and we barely noticed

Reference points:

• 25 Edits That Define the Modern Internet Video
• 16 Podcasters on the Hardest Episodes They Have Ever Produced

Longer reads:

• The Anxiety of Influencers
• The day Dawson cried

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• This Grandma in Bolton Cooked & Sold Me Breakfast from her HOUSE
• Here’s The Confused Reaction Germans Have When They Shop In The US
• 8÷2(2+2) = ? Mathematician Explains The Correct Answer
• Meteorologist multiplies on screen during graphics glitch
• Bird’s eye view of juggling.

Things to look at/read:

• The Jean War between millennials and Gen Z cannot be won
• 11 Things Quarantine Killed Off That We Hope Never Come Back
• Cruella de Vil Is Wicked—But Tallulah Bankhead Was Even Wilder

Animal corner:

• The first howls of a wolf pup in the Northwoods of Minnesota
• Pig, annoyed by vacuum, keeps unplugging it
• Dog is CRAZY for his new toy
• Stopped watching him for two seconds and he picked a new family
• Size of that dandelion
• i am absolutely losing my mind over this like what is going on
• When your dog defaults to 320×240 resolution

Tweets of the week:

• Babe are you okay? You’ve hardly touched your mental health awareness ravioli…
• guyysss I found where that legendary meme came from
• You looked well happier in the before picture mate
• Twitter in a nutshell
• I wonder how many times this happened before they decided to make a sign.
• how the fuck is this haircut work appropriate???
• pov you are a couple potato chips
• well what the fuck did i just eat

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• The gatekeepers who get to decide which food is “disgusting”
• America Has a Drinking Problem
• Escape to glory: the intoxicating myth of boxing as ‘a way out’
• Robinhood’s big gamble
• Nicholas Braun on Zola, Succession rumours and, yep, those Crocs

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We Love the Internet 2021/20: The 100 visions of motherhood edition

Part 1: For the day job

Things to think about:

• Welcome to the Space Jam, Again
• The bubblegum misogyny of 2000s pop culture
• The Rise Of The Appuccino: How TikTok Is Changing Starbucks
• LadBaby and the wild rise of the Facebook Famous

Reference points:

• Chart of the week

Longer reads:

• The politics of recognition in the age of social media
• Tech vs journalism

Part 2: For the lunch-break

Things to play with/watch/listen to:

• Abandoned Store Left in 1963
• Debunking Exploding Egg Hacks & blowtorching chocolate
• How An Infinite Hotel Ran Out Of Room
• Millennial Home Buyer

Things to look at/read:

• 100 Visions of Motherhood
• What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale
• I’m So Trans When I Turn On My Lamp

Animal corner:

• Boxer Bedtime Argument
• Dogs: husky vs border collie agility
• Baby Cockatoo Freaks Out When Daddy Comes Home
• My dog figured out that I’ve been hiding an allergy pill in his breakfast, and leaves it defiantly on the floor. So I started hiding TWO pills in there. He only ever finds the one. HAHAHA YOU GOT PLAYED MY MAN enjoy not having allergies lol
• obsessed with this guy who just uploads videos of him playing classic rock riffs while his birb freestyles vocals
• Well, that’s it for humanity. We’ve had a decent run but if bees have mastered the screw-top lid I think this is the beginning of the end.
• This is the lad you want in a stag party hostel. Already back from a walk by the time you get up, brought everyone a can of Coke

Tweets of the week:

• sex ed implies the existence of sex edd and sex eddy
• Me 30 seconds after joining a Zoom when no one else has joined
• The Jetsons takes place in 2062, and George Jetson is 40 years old, which means that somewhere right now George Jetson is being conceived.
• Honestly pooh was so brave during this
• This is the worst acronym I’ve ever seen in my life. I laugh at a different bit every time
• getting in shape for my italy trip
• man look at what people are doing from their homes
• this is an uncomfortably specific number of horses

Part 3: For the weekend

Longer reads:

• Kathryn Hahn All Along
• Sinead O’Connor Remembers Things Differently

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