The most romantic thing you can do is show your likes
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci. ICYMI, the Slate podcast I host, is doing a live show on July 21! Hosted by me and Club Internet’s Rachel E. Greenspan, the show features some of our favorite past guests, like Tell the Bees, as well as other creators, like Akilah Hughes, who have redefined what it means to make things online. Further lineup TBA, but until then, I’d love to see you there!! —Kate New on ICYMI: We finally found an excuse to have Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick on the pod!! We talk about the question I’m sure is on everyone’s minds: WHERE IS ZOELLA?
Head over here to subscribe to ICYMI wherever you listen to podcasts 🫶 My husband and I don’t plan it. We’re just laying in bed, probably with a movie on, while I’m attempting to read my book and he’s absentmindedly scrolling. Then he’ll turn to me: “Do you want to go through my likes?” I can’t remember when exactly this tradition started, but it was probably around the time that scrolling my Twitter feed started bringing me to the brink of emotional collapse. “Our feeds are so different,” he would say, laughing at a post from someone called “turd-destroyer.” While most people I followed back when I had Twitter were journalists and public figures, he is more likely to see random posts from men who live in Idaho and just had two beers. His feed is wildly better. He’d prove this by tapping over to his “Likes” tab, leaning his head against mine, and showing me what he had been enjoying the past few days. This is, if you think about it, an extremely vulnerable act. Liking something is almost automatic, with no real delay between your brain firing and your finger tapping. Sometimes, before Elon Musk made likes private, they got people in a lot of trouble. But I didn’t think much about this routine at all until Grace Byron revealed in her My Internet that she and her boyfriend do almost the exact same thing:
This isn’t a For You feed, it’s a For Them feed (free idea, TikTok)—the more modern equivalent to making someone a mixtape. My husband has, of course, already seen all the posts, but he gets to enjoy them anew, watching them through someone else’s eyes. Some particularly affecting posts have entered our shared lexicon:
The internet is most enjoyable when it’s at its most human. While algorithms help to sift through the never-ending flow of information and content we’re regularly dumping into it, they’re also responsible for the hyper-personalization that has ultimately made scrolling an isolating experience. Today’s post is a sort of follow-up to one I wrote in 2023, “My boyfriend stole my most precious phone time.” Three years ago, I was espousing a wildly different sentiment:
At that time, I viewed our habits as separate, and was trying to compromise in order to coexist: me on my phone, him on another, each in our own expertly-curated digital worlds, consuming content hand-picked for each of us by our algorithms. Instead, through actual time spent together over the years, a shared digital tradition emerged—which would make for a very sentimental kicker if I wasn’t well aware it was about posts like this:
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