Dumbphone Owners Have Lost Their Minds
+ Burnout feminism, slop surgery, sleepcations, serftok, Meta's celeb wrangler -> OpenAI, American Girl Ozempic, chatbot cafes, Tinder voting, 13 yr old skincare CEO, how crying girls will make u rich
Hi everyone, I was on vacation with my parents last week. Now I’m back and I have 2 new episodes for you guys below!
The Logging Off Movement Is a Scam
Over the past few years, a massive industry has emerged around dumb phones and the concept of logging off. From $400 minimalist dumb phones to influencers selling digital detox courses, logging off has become big business. Schools are banning phones. Politicians are blaming screen time. Media outlets are calling Gen Z “addicted.”
But is ditching your smartphone actually the answer? For my latest episode of Power User, I sat down with WIRED journalist Elana Klein to unpack the rise of the logging-off movement. We discuss how reasonable concerns over screen time have metastasized into a consumer movement selling $400 minimalist dumb phones for millions in profit.
We also dive deep into the anti-smartphone moral panic, which is heavily pushed by reactionary politicians and legacy media. We explore the history of our relationship with the internet, from the tech optimism of the early 2010s and the algorithmic shift in 2016 , to the dangerous reality of school phone bans that are leading to AI surveillance and increased police interactions for students.
We also talk about the concept of "smartphone addiction," what it really means, and why your issues with technology are often manifestations of much larger societal problems. WATCH NOW!!
MAGA’s War On Wine Moms
White women have long been a core voting bloc for conservatives, so why are right wing media figures suddenly obsessed with attacking them? I spoke to Hysteria’s Erin Ryan joins to break down the growing hatred towards white women in MAGA spaces and conservative media.
From the massive hate campaigns against Amber Heard and Blake Lively, to smearing women like Renee Good during ICE protests in Minneapolis, to so-called “Karens” and accusations of hysteria, to the idea of “toxic empathy,” we unpack why white women who step outside their assigned role have become such a powerful political target.
We discuss the demonization of “Wine Moms” and “Childless Cat Ladies” in relation to the rise of the trad-wife fantasy. We explore why conservative media is obsessed with controlling white women and why this demographic is trending away from the Republican party. We also examine how these narratives are used to justify regressive policies around reproduction, education, marriage, and bodily autonomy.
Scapegoating white women in particular is very politically effective, and we talk about why that is and what it reveals about a movement that needs the most privileged women to be silent and compliant. WATCH NOW!
What I’m reading
Handsome at Any Cost
Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, has emerged as a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men. He wants to take his fixation with “looksmaxxing” mainstream. - NY Times
Crypto-Funded Human Trafficking Is Exploding
The use of cryptocurrency in sales of human beings for prostitution and scam compounds nearly doubled in 2025, according to a conservative estimate. Many of the deals are happening in plain sight. - WIRED
There is no evidence that social media harms children’s mental health
The majority of studies have found either no relationship between social media usage and mental illness, or effects so small that they are practically meaningless. A Journal of Public Health study published just last month which examined 25,000 young people in the UK found no correlation between time spent on social media and worsening mental health. - Spectator
Diary of a 13-Year-Old Skin-Care CEO
Beauty routines are starting younger than ever. Yes Day’s Coco Granderson knows what girls are looking for. - The Cut
Prediction Markets Like Kalshi Are Attracting Billions. A New ‘Stock Market for Trends’ Could Mint Millionaires Fast
Noise users can bet on the popularity of everything from the Labubu craze to ChatGPT. It could be the first prediction market for the attention economy. - Inc. Magazine
“Crying girls will make you rich”: How marketers trick users with mass-produced “organic” content
Indicator analyzed UGC campaigns that generated over 2 billion TikTok views and found rampant violations of disclosure rules. - Indicator
Israel uses the dead to attack the living
In Gaza, Israel claimed it was taking truckloads of Palestinian corpses to perform DNA tests on them, to make sure none of them were Israeli. And then it kept them. - The Baffler
What Ozempic Taught Me About Style and Self-Worth
I have always loved clothes. Gaining 100 pounds robbed me of my sense of style, but not my interest in fashion. Nine months on GLP-1s and a diary changed everything all over again. - GQ
User Mag news rundown
Grindr is on Substack now.
Charles Porch, VP of global partnerships for Meta, who is responsible for getting pretty much every celebrity onto IG, is going to OpenAI.
Side parts are making a comeback after nearly two decades of middle part supremacy.
More people are taking sleepcations, where they travel somewhere to effectively sleep all day.
The NYT did a gut wrenching piece on the 20 people who froze to death in NYC over the past 2 weeks.
They redesigned American Girl dolls to look like “they’re on Ozempic.”
There’s a multipart series unfolding on TikTok featuring of a group of seniors who are irate that their friend Barbara has been cheating at Mah Jong.
It turns out that the “ASU frat leader” who frame mogged Clavicular isn’t even in a frat.
Kick clippers are transforming internet language by making up increasingly absurd phrases like jester-gooning to go viral, leading to those words getting used.
Now you can take your AI chatbot on an actual date at NYC’s ‘world first’ companion cafe.
Israel has arrested several people for using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket.
From Heated Rivalry jersey numbers to Divergent faction logos, more people are getting fictional fandom tattoos.
JP Morgan (the bank) opened a bar, it’s such a hot spot that now even JP Morgan bankers can’t get in.
Violent Israeli settlers stealing land from Palestinians in the West Bank are trying to curry sympathy on social media by becoming pastoral tradwife influencers.
Billionaires low taxes are becoming a big problem for the economy.
Trump will kill Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. and help Paramount win, giving the president control of Fox, CBS, CNN, and TikTok.
Alpha School, an “AI-powered” private school that costs as much as $65k a year, is generating faulty lesson plans and stealing content from textbooks for training data.
There’s a TikTok livestreamer who’s built a career cosplaying as a 13th-century serf.
Night, a leading talent representative for creators like Kai Cenat, has raised $70 million to expand its business in gaming.
The Pentagon is feuding with Anthropic, calling their AI “woke.”
Meta has patented an AI that can keep a deceased person’s account active and running, posting, messaging, and video calling by replicating by using their behavior from past data.
Waymo hiring DoorDash drivers to close car doors in Atlanta.
A MAGA memecoin run by Steve Bannon went off the rails, with $2.7 million missing and investors’ money frozen.
ICE posed as a woman with a broken down vehicle, then detained people who came to her aid.
‘Burnout feminism’ has replaced the Girl Boss, Lean In era.
Jimmy Fallon killed a pasta sauce line over his collaborator’s Epstein ties.
The NBA is turning its All-Star Weekend into a content factory for more than 200 top creators in Los Angeles.
American farmers are getting old but their younger kids do not want to take over family farms.
The Social Security Admin has instructed its employees to tell callers struggling with losing benefits that suicide is an option.
Congressional candidates are using Tinder to try to win votes.
ICE is now utilizing advanced social media monitoring to perform “sentiment analysis.” By scraping TikTok and other platforms, they can monitor the emotional and political temperature of entire geographic areas, identifying resistance hot spots.
DOGE allegedly used ChatGPT to identify approx 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants the AI tool deemed as related to DEI, which were then terminated in April of last year, according to a new court filing released today.
The Winter Olympics are reportedly facing a condom shortage after athletes went through 10,000 in just 3 days.
Schools are cancelling Picture Day because of a wave of concerned parents who don’t trust the school photo company Lifetouch after they’ve been tied to Epstein via billionaire Leon Black.
The 21-year-old official behind a monthslong stream of white-nationalist posts from the Labor Dept. social media accounts has been promoted into the Department of Homeland Security.
ICE is arresting and charging suburban moms who protest or document ICE activity with felonies that carry up to 20 years in prison.
The FDA received unconfirmed reports of at least 100 malfunctions and adverse events after AI was added to a medical device used to treat chronic sinusitis, dubbed “slop surgery.” As AI enters the operating room, it’s already causing serious injuries, botched surgeries, misidentified body parts.
The Trump adm has launched a stealth attack on Obamacare that could result in millions more going uninsured.
Whatnot’s 2026 State of Live Selling Report is full of interesting insights into what’s happening in the livestreamed e-commerce world. Whatnot is a live selling platform and the share of women has doubled in the past year, with beauty live sales growing the fastest. (Not sponsored, just thought the report was interesting!!)
I love this IG trend of people doing IRL Reels scrolls.
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