Originally published at: The Fitness Influencers Who Tried to Make Me Like Trump - TPM – Talking Points Memo
It was March 2020 and suddenly I had much more free time on my hands. Presumably you did, too. All the hours we’d otherwise have spent commuting, traveling, or socializing were suddenly ours to fill with other diversions. In hindsight, it’s striking how much we gave over to screentime. That includes all the restless evenings…
Great article. I too first noticed this through fitness videos. I’ve gotten adept at recognizing a MAGA advocate in the first few frames and assiduously skip them. Unfortunately, by then they’ve gotten the click-through and the money. But at least I’ve preserved my sanity. A bit.
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Gotta check that embedded reel
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As always, it’s the only element of American life that is wholly innocent: Money.
Barry Diller seems to be the start of this recipe, and fitness victimization is just a recent iteration. Diller’s genius was to get at least one charge on the victim’s credit card and go from there. In the case of Expedia companies such as Hotels.com, Vrbo, Trivago, the fight for a refund or correction ends up with a third party or some person in the Philippines. In the modern fitness iteration, say, Mad Muscles, a Cyprus-based scam, the victim starts seeing unsolicited charges on their card and goes to the impossible-to-navigate account to seek a refund. As a kicker, the site spoofs the credit card issuer’s site so the uninitiated doesn’t realize that they never actually declined the charge. But there’s more! If the user remains clueless they may have also revealed insecurity worth preying on. Who wouldn’t want to look like AI slop? Diller, who’s a Democrat funder and supporter, probably never contemplated the consequences of the monster he unleashed.
The “golden era” still exists if you avoid social media. Besides TPM, I find myself on States Newsroom, The Guardian, Ars Technica, Techdirt, some subreddits and so on. The closest thing I have ever had to social media is Mastodon, and that is more like old Reddit or RSS than any social media. All of these are independent, most have no corporate ownership at all, and there are no engagement algorithms, nothing like that all. Just like the Internet 20 years ago.
Speaking of RSS, it still exists. You can install a reader and most of these sites still have RSS feeds. Just add /rss, i.e http://talkingpointsmemo.com/rss add it to your reader.