I'm going to post on my personal website like it's 1995.
March 26th, 2025
Saratoga Water
If you've been on Twitter the last few days you've probably seen this video of fitness influencer Ashton Hall performing his absurd "morning routine."
Maybe it's just because I used to have a job tracking product placement but I immediately clocked this as a paid ad. I assumed the rest of the Internet would notice this too and get mad that a brand forced a meme on them, but mostly they did not. It seems extremely obvious since the guy has a bottle of Saratoga water in every shot with the label clearly visible and pointing at the camera. It's depressing to watch seemingly intelligent people refuse to believe that they've been fooled into engaging with an advertisement, but that's the whole point of the video. Videos of people doing absurd things that keep getting more and more ridiculous as the video progresses are classic engagement bait. It's a smart person deliberately doing something stupid so that you will reply to them and say, "wow, that is stupid!" You get to feel smart for identifying something stupid, and the video gets pushed to more people because the algorithm sees people engaging with the post. Everybody wins. Engagement bait allows us to feel like we're in control while being led around by the nose, a form of reflexive control.
This is the first time I've seen engagement bait seamlessly integrated into an advertisement. It's really a brilliant campaign, it blew up so fast on Twitter that I'm pretty sure a lot of the big accounts making fun of him were probably paid to do so. It just seems a little too coincidental that all these accounts I don't follow but who I see all the time because they're algorithmically favored for whatever reason all had their perfectly timed take where they're "ironically" purchasing Saratoga water. This inspires other accounts to get in on the meme and now it's impossible to tell who is shilling water and who is just Having Fun Online.
Commenters say it can't possibly be an ad campaign, because it doesn't use an #ad hashtag or flag itself as having paid product placement. Can you believe that? Someone not following the rules on the Internet? I'm sure down at the FTC crime lab they have their best detectives working in shifts to crack this case wide open. Some people even said the Saratoga "social media intern" really dropped the ball by not capitalizing on this viral moment (that was entirely engineered by them). Incredible stuff.
Twitter has gradually been becoming more racist and stupid for a while now, so it's a bit embarassing to say that this silly ad might be the final straw for me, but I really don't enjoy the platform much anymore. Ironically, one of the few people to call this ad for what it is was comedian/performance artist Dan Hentschel. His work explores similar themes to the ones I've been thinking about here, the Internet merging with "IRL," how we perform our identies in public, and how this changes our perception of reality. At least I think that's what he's trying to get at. Dan is pretty much always performing a bizarre skit in character but this ad campaign was enough to make him break kayfabe to go Naomi Klein for a minute. I suppose since engagement bait is the canvas he paints upon he might be offended by brands sullying the medium. I'm kind of surprised it took them this long. I'm curious what William Banks thinks about all this.
March 21st, 2025
Where's George?
In a fit of synchronicity, shortly after I restarted my personal website in 90s mode I stumbled upon a relic of the early web - a dollar bill I received as change that was marked with a stamp from wheresgeorge.com.
For those who are unfamiliar, wheresgeorge.com is a website where you can track dollar bills as they travel across the country. You buy a stamp from them and stamp the bills with a message telling people to visit the website, and the idea is that people will enter serial numbers of bills they find and you can track their movement. They've been doing this for a long time, since 1998 according to wikipedia.
Wikipedia also says the guy who runs the site is from Brookline, Massachusetts. What wikipedia doesn't tell you is another guy from Massachusetts (me) had the very same idea in May of 1997. Here's a screenshot from the archived version of my old website on archive.org.
The Internet was pretty small back then and there wasn't much to look at so I wouldn't be surprised at all if the wheresgeorge.com guy stumbled on my website through some local webring. Webrings were an early version of a discovery algorithm where you'd link to someone else's website and make it easier to endlessly scroll the web before the concept of the infinite scroll existed. I think there's a pretty good chance that this guy borrowed the idea of online currency tracking from me. He did a much better job and he's still at it 27 years later so I'll let it slide. I overestimated how many people would actually visit my website after finding the dollar, and I only tried it with two dollars so it never actually worked. I just entered the serial number from the bill I found this week into wheresgeorge.com, I was the first person to report it since it was launched from Claremont, CA nine months ago. It has traveled forty miles so far. If wheresgeorge.com really was inspired by me it's pretty cool that something I did online in 1997 is still bouncing around IRL and ending up in my wallet as change.
March 14th, 2025
What Happens When A Frail Human Becomes A Ferocious Beast?
Why does this channel of weird AI generated episodes of America's Got Talent have 564,000 subscribers? Is this a for bots by bots kind of situation? Why does it use a weird remix of Cha Cha Slide as the music? Do people think this is real? Do they like watching this or are the other viewers just really confused like I am?
This video of a guy playing the speedbag to Kendrick Lamar on the other hand - this is cinema. If it's slop, it's handcrafted artisanal slop and I celebrate it.
March 11th, 2025
Daily Life Hacks
I'm not planning to put advertisements on this site but I saw this one yesterday and I liked it so much I decided to give them a free one. Even though putting bananas in your garden won't do anything, it would be a pretty cool thing to watch. Now we finally have an answer to the question - what if there were clickbait that you couldn't click?
March 6th, 2025
Does anyone remember laughter?
A lot of people are sick of being dependent on other people's platforms, myself included. It feels bad when you just want to create and share with other people but you're beholden to the whims of a tech billionaire and his algorithm. The Internet wasn't always like this though, it used to be fun! So I decided to start posting on my personal website again like it's 1995.
One of the first websites I can remember using was Matthew and Jake's Adventures. They were two MIT students who had a silly blog, although they weren't called blogs yet. It's funny to see their exaggerated use of hyperlinks to tell their stories. Back then people thought "hypertext" was one of the most interesting things about the web. The footnotes in Infinite Jest are a similar relic of this time. The algorithm hates hyperlinks now, because if you leave the portion of the Internet I'm monetizing then someone else will get to sell the advertising you see. No one really cares about hypertext anymore but I'm glad Matthew & Jake's website is still up to show people what the early web was like.
Reproduced from the Feb. 7, 1995 NYT without permission
Back then the default background was grey. Even being able to use crappy MS Paint graphics on the web was a big deal. The first web browser I used that could display graphics was called SlipKnot. I didn't even have a TCP/IP connection yet, our local ISP only offered Unix shell accounts. SlipKnot was integrated with Lynx (a text only web browser) and it would download graphics in the background for you and crudely add them to the website. I think I only had this setup for a few months before I got a real TCP/IP connection using Winsock.
Of course I was inspired to create my own website and had some sort of web presence for years after that, but after the Internet moved to the walled gardens of The Platforms it became less interesting to me and I became more and of a passive consumer, a lurker. The Internet was our fun secret club. Then it became someone else’s club and the drinks got more expensive. Now there is no club, everyone is online all the time even if they aren’t trying to be.
This recent meme made me feel particularly old. I can generally understand all kinds of obscure internet humor even if I might not laugh at it, but this video is literally just a college kid drinking beer somewhat awkwardly at a party. I guess it's a little weird to chew gum and drink beer at the same time but aside from that it’s probably one of the most normal things that has ever happened - barely worth documenting, let alone worthy of going viral. This meme has legs though, I keep seeing it pop up in different contexts. Memes are now big business too, with ads and brand deals running right next to reposts of this person who never signed a release to consent to any of this exposure. You no longer have the option of lurking. He should probably resign himself to the emergent panopticon we've created and start the Awkward Beer Guy podcast and lean in to the moment.
Back in the 90s, many people’s personal websites were basically public diary entries. No one thought anyone they knew in real life would actually read them. Now everyone is fully aware of the audience at all times. Except for the Awkward Beer Guy. I guess that’s why he went viral.
March 2nd, 2025
I forgot the Oscars were today.
I don't know why it's a surprise to me every year but the streets were blocked off today for the Oscars.
