📱 Your next mindless addiction

Plus: A Brad Pitt romance scam, scathing book reviews, and more.

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👋 Where some see a looming TikTok ban, others see an opportunity to learn a new language. Duolingo has seen a ~216% YoY increase in US users learning Mandarin, with the sharpest uptick in mid-January, coinciding with Chinese social media app RedNote’s sudden popularity.

Programming note : We’ve got a good one coming your way on Sunday, then we’ll be off on Monday in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a national day of service. Looking to make plans? Search volunteer opportunities here .

🎧 On the pod :

Gen Z’s loneliness epidemic isn’t entirely tech’s fault.

NEWS FLASH

✍️ Will Bezos return to the office? In a leaked letter , 400+ Washington Post staffers asked the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to visit Washington, DC, to discuss the newspaper’s leadership issues. The staffers wrote they’re “deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions” and the loss of some of the paper’s top staffers. Since William Lewis’ appointment as publisher and CEO in November 2023, the paper has broken a decades-long tradition by refusing to endorse a presidential candidate and laid off ~100 employees. While it’s unclear whether Bezos will pay the newsroom a visit, he did say that the paper “needs to be put back on a good footing again” at December's New York Times DealBook Summit.

🎮 Finally: Nintendo announced the Switch 2 via a short teaser, depicting the handheld console with a larger screen than its 2017 predecessor and blue and pink removable controllers (AKA “Joy-Cons”). The teaser also shows a potential new “Mario Kart”

game. Fans have been waiting and speculating about the Switch 2 for some time, during which Nintendo dropped an alarm clock — cool, but not the device many were anticipating. Nintendo will offer more details at a Switch 2 Direct on April 2.

🧛 The bricks of a killer: Of the 50+ crowd-sourced suggestions that Lego Ideas — a platform where fans can submit their own designs and potentially have them produced — considered for one of its new “Ideas” sets, one sparkled its way to the top. On Feb. 4, Twilight fans can drop ~$220 on a 2,001-piece Cullen house set, replete with Bella’s red truck, wolf-form Jacob, and a two-hour Lego recreation of the films. Previous Lego Ideas sets have included a tuxedo cat, The Nightmare Before Christmas , and the ISS.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

One more about Bezos: Blue Origin’s 32-story-tall New Glenn rocket successfully launched into orbit early Thursday morning following delays.

The Department of Transportation is suing Southwest Airlines, claiming it illegally delayed certain flight routes. Southwest’s Chicago-Oakland and Baltimore-Cleveland routes experienced 180 disruptions between April and August 2022, making them “chronically delayed.”

AT&T dropped its 5G home internet service in New York, citing an “uneconomical” state law requiring ISPs to offer $15-$20 service to low-income residents.

THE BIG IDEA

Even in a post-TikTok America, the internet can still melt your brain

It looks increasingly likely the US government’s long-looming TikTok ban will take effect this weekend, after which it will become slightly more difficult to access.

But don’t worry! If you’re one of America’s 170m TikTok users, the internet still has plenty of ways to completely destroy your brain.

Delicious AI slop

You could always replace the TikTok experience with custom “brain rot” videos:

This service takes PDFs and has an AI voice read it over generic “Minecraft” footage.

It’s apparently “trusted by top students,” which is… fine. We’ll be fine.

Or how about reading the classics?

Magibook takes books and — for lack of a better term — dumbs them down.

A Tale of Two Cities ’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” becomes “It was a time when things were very good and very bad.”

It’s fine. It’s cool that this exists.

How about you remove humans entirely?

Chirper is a social network completely populated by AI.

Replicate TikTok’s endless scroll with a never-ending feed of posts from fake people!

Meet “ Yuki / Tokyo Night Owl ” and some kind of robot cop .

It’s chilling to see how little difference there is between this and real social media.

Old-school uncool

Finding brain-melting stupidity on the internet is not a new phenomenon.

Why go high-tech when you could revisit the “No. 1 web fad” of 1998, the Hampster Dance ?

Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte launched it as a GeoCities page.

The original page is long dead, but recreations live on.

The site also spawned a direct-to-video movie that also seems like a good approximation of TikTok brain rot. Just watch it in 10-second chunks.

🔗

micho/📱 Your next mindless addiction.md