Threads is the gas-leak social network

Plus: What's up with Miami? And is 'Oppenheimer' a super-hero movie?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter, three items:

• An examination of the Instagram clone Threads and its clear negative effects on cognitive abilities;

• an assessment of The Cut’s age-gap marriage essay and the intellectual scene from which it emerged; and

• I have finally seen Oppenheimer, several months after anyone would care to hear my opinion about it, and wish to share some thoughts on it.

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Threads: the gas-leak social network

“Is Threads the good place?” New York Times op-ed columnist Pamela Paul wonders, referencing the 2016-2020 NBC sitcom starring Kristen Bell. Paul decamped to the Instagram-affiliated Twitter clone last year because she’d been missing “that 2012 Twitter magic — the goofy memes, the insider riffing, the meeting of new online friends. A place where learnings and conversations were almost better than IRL engagement.” Sadly, after 10 months on the app, she has been left unimpressed by the learnings and conversations to be found. Threads, she writes, is

a full-on bizarro-world X, handcrafted for the left end of the political spectrum, complete with what one user astutely labeled “a cult type vibe.” If progressives and liberals were provoked by Trumpers and Breitbart types on Twitter, on Threads they have the opportunity to be wounded by their own kind.

Threads’ algorithm seems precision-tweaked to confront the user with posts devoted to whichever progressive position is slightly lefter-than-thou. It knows, for example, exactly where — on the left, bien sûr — you stand with regard to the Middle East, gender ideology, D.E.I., body positivity, neurodivergence, Covid and the creative industries and shows you posts screaming from whichever position is just far enough from your own to drive you out of your mind.

I have to say: This is not my experience with Threads. The main emotion I feel when I log on to the app is not anger but confusion; my FYP (“For You” page, i.e., the algorithmically curated feed served to me by Threads) is not “culty” or particularly left-wing. To me, the characteristic Threads post is not someone acting “lefter-than-thou” about “gender ideology.” It’s someone I don’t know telling a story I can’t follow for reasons I don’t understand.

Some friends and I have taken to calling Threads “the gas-leak social network” because that is the basic experience of using it: Everyone on the platform, including you, seems to be suffering some kind of minor brain damage. These are all screenshots from posts that appeared at or near the top of my feed when I signed in over the last few months:

Do you see what I mean?¹ I’m not outraged or incensed or anything. I just feel like I have Long COVID. Who are these people? What are they talking about? Are they responding to something that I missed? Why am I reading this? How did it get into my feed? How am I supposed to react?

It sometimes feels like Instagram designed Threads with “context collapse” as a goal to be met instead of a hazard to be avoided, but I’m not sure that’s quite right, since “context collapse” implies some prior state of “context.” Certainly, though, at no point was Threads designed to provide clear or transparent navigation: in keeping with Meta’s tradition of opacity, it’s often impossible to figure out who is replying to whom and where and why you’re seeing certain posts. They appear from nowhere and lead to nowhere: Is this a response to a controversy I missed somewhere? A reply to another user’s post? A private missive that has somehow found its way to me?

Where is the gas leak coming from? Threads was launched opportunistically, as a replacement for an endlessly deteriorating Twitter, but by a parent company that had absolutely no appetite for “news,” which was the nominal organizing principle around which Twitter had managed to build an enduring culture and set of expectations. Its audience growth was jump-started by attaching identities and social graphs to Instagram, which insistently pushes its users over to Threads, whose own app has a design and functionality familiar from Twitter, but aggressively restricted and with a heavy-handed sorting algorithm.

This is a platform designed around a purpose it cannot fulfill, on an app built to undermine it, with an audience transposed from another social network with a completely different purpose. To me, it is a miracle that anyone is using it at all, but one lesson of the internet is that you should never underestimate the power of a blank text box with a blinking cursor for compelling users to contribute. The result either way is jumble of strange and disconnected reports from the personal universes of its many users, arbitrarily sorted into the feeds of other users, because why not, if there’s no particular reason for the app to exist in the first place.²

(Another hypothesis I have about why the app feels so particularly bewildering is that it has a particularly high proportion of users born between 1965 and 1980, a birth cohort notorious for childhood exposure to lead.)

Look, I realize that I see a lot of these posts for the same reasons Pamela Paul is served “outrageous liberal content”: I can’t stop myself from lingering over “weird pointless stories told by/for people with minor cognitive malfunctions.” But I wouldn’t want anyone to get the wrong impression about Threads! It is absolutely not the “left-wing X.” It is the “gas-leak X.”

What’s going on in Miami?

Earlier this week the Cut published an essay called “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” which you can read here. The headline is something of a false advertisement: the man in question is only ten years older, which I’m not sure really qualifies as an “age gap,” besides which he’s French, which is its own weird perverted thing and not one in which the rules and conventions of American personal-essay and social-media relationship discourse apply. Nevertheless, confirming New York’s status as the only magazine people still talk about every week, the essay has successfully provoked a significant response on Twitter and Bluesky and various group chats, in part because of its retrograde gender politics and in part because its author, a woman named Grazie Sophia Christie, claims to play the lottery “rather badly,” which is not a way one can play the lottery.

I’m personally trying not to have a strong opinion about the essay because it mostly seems like “none of my business,” but I am always interested people who can successfully make themselves Main Characters. Where did they come from? What is their personal and professional network like? Do they have What It Takes to become long-lasting provocateurs and icons of discourse? Christie is “a writer living in Miami and London,” with recent bylines in the intermittently tendentious literary magazine The Point and the magnificently deranged right-wing website Tablet; she recently started her own literary magazine, The Miami Native, with another writer named Ginevra Lily Davis. Davis got her start at the infamous conservative campus publication Stanford Review, which was founded in the 1990s by the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois, who both own property and live in Miami part-time; now she writes for the Thiel-associated “post-liberal” policy magazine Palladium; the Thiel-funded, winkingly Trumpist journal American Affairs; and, of course, Tablet. (Both Christie and Davis have been approvingly cited by Times op-ed columnists: Christie’s Point essay on female friendship was linked to by Ross Douthat, while Davis’ essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” “won” one of David Brooks’ patented “Sidney Awards.”)

This is a heady intellectual brew, and gives me great hope that we will be hearing from Christie (and, though the age-gap essay has nothing to do with her, Davis) for a long time. It also speaks quite well for the continuing prominence of Miami, a beautiful, thriving, culturally rich global city, that is also the epicenter of almost everything bad³: Climate change! Crypto speculation! Tech reactionaries! OnlyFans scammers! Art dealers! The Miami Native certainly looks good--it’s designed by the Brooklyn-based “Asimov Studios,” who specialize in clients who are “building American dynamism”--and it devotes a page to reader-submitted gossip, which is the kind of Gawker-like feature that endears a publication to me. I wonder who funds it!

Oppenheimer as a super hero movie

I finally saw Oppenheimer--“parents style,” which is to say an hour at a time over the course of three nights. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of headlines that cast the movie as something like the revenge of the serious adult drama after a decade-plus of superhero movie dominance, helped along by Christopher Nolan and Robert Downey, Jr., the two people who were more responsible and have become more identified with the superhero boom than basically anyone else. But … Oppenheimer was, basically, a superhero movie, wasn’t it? I don’t mean this pejoratively--but it’s a three-hour event movie about a team of, let’s say, specially talented individuals--some of whom are beloved and familiar figures, others known only to real nerds, but all of whom have extensive and researchable backgrounds--being assembled to save the world in an impossibly destructive way, only to find themselves rejected and reviled by the people they were originally helping. I mean… ?

I don’t think it’s a surprise or anything that Oppenheimer bears a strong scent of superhero. I bet most big-budget movies for the next few years will apply a lot of the abstract “lessons” of the M.C.U.’s success--long running times, large casts, existential rumination, extra-textual “universes” to be mined by content producers--and will feel in one way or another like superhero movies. But Oppenheimer seems particularly noteworthy because the superhero comics of the postwar era, the ones on which so many recent movies have been based, were constantly grappling with nuclear power and destruction. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Marvel comic in particular that isn’t concerned in one way or another with radioactivity, mutation, cosmic rays, planetary destruction, political retribution and paranoia. What you get in Oppenheimer is a narrative framework and conventions designed for the metaphorical exploration of a particular subject suddenly applied to the real subject, which in some sense makes it the perfect movie to take Hollywood out of the comic-book movie era.

The other thing I want to note about Oppenheimer is that the whole sequence where he and Jean Tatlock initially get together--where he misquotes Marx, name-drops Lacan, and claims to be reading the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit--is almost unwatchable in its pitch-perfect recreation of what STEM guys who are trying to sound smart sound like.

1. I want to be clear here that I’m not saying these posts are “weird.” One of the stranger things about Threads is that it’s not even “weird” in the compelling way that “weird internet” stuff traditionally is. The app is never truly bizarre, or awkwardly funny, or suggestive of some hypnotically strange new future. There isn’t a new fringe political position you can reverse-engineer from the posts or a new Type of Guy for armchair sociologists to taxonomize. It’s just thousands upon thousands of banally confusing stories and images, sorted into your feed for obscure algorithmic reasons, to which all you can say is “what?”

2. One thing to note about Threads is that it’s sort of a TikTok of text--posts presented in an aggressively curated feed by a very pushy ranking algorithm with no lead-in, context, or connective tissue. Interestingly, or not, TikTok feels somewhat less disorienting to scroll through than Threads does, either because video is a more natural format for “completely passive and fully context-free channel-surfing” than text, or because the TikTok gas leak has spread so widely I can no longer smell the mercaptan and have simply accepted my diminished cognitive capacity.

3. I want to be clear, since I know Miamians are sensitive about their city, that I think the collection of hustlers and entrepreneurs and gym rats and freaks it cultivates makes the city fascinating and compelling, not “bad,” as such.