Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail.
In this week’s issue:
👩🏽⚖️ Zuckerberg defends Meta at civil trial
💉 Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, explained
🏀 College basketball’s new assistant coach: AI
💻 The looming RAMageddon
SOCIAL MEDIA
Zuckerberg on trial
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for a landmark trial over whether social media platforms deliberately addict and harm children, on Wednesday.Ryan Sun/The Associated Press
On Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of a packed Los Angeles courtroom, defending his social-media company from a lawsuit that blames Facebook and Instagram for harming young people. The lawsuit was brought by a 20-year-old Californian known as K.G.M., who accuses Meta, as well as YouTube owner Google, of intentionally designing products to be addictive and alleging that compulsive use of these platforms is harmful to young people.
Zuckerberg, who spoke in a measured voice, rejected the accusations. “We’re building this thing to be a good thing,” he said of Meta’s products as he was questioned by Meta’s lawyer. Later, when the plaintiff’s lawyer brought up warnings that Instagram’s beauty filters presented body-image risks to teenage girls, Zuckerberg said there needs to be a wider discussion that includes freedom of expression and user choice. “Oftentimes telling people they can’t express themselves in ways like that feels a little overbearing,” he said.
The trial is considered a bellwether case. Its result will determine the course of what could happen with hundreds of similar pending lawsuits against social media companies. Read the full story from justice reporter David Ebner here.
VERY ONLINE
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, explained
The 20-year-old looksmaxxer, Clavicular.CASSIDY ARAIZA/The New York Times
It’s time we talked about Clavicular. In the past couple weeks, the influencer escaped the manosphere-adjacent online spaces he occupies and broke into the wider public consciousness, prompting many of us to wonder “what does mogging mean?” or “what’s bone-smashing” and “do I really have to care about this?”
Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, is a pre-eminent looksmaxxer, a type of (usually male) influencer who is obsessed with optimizing his physical appearance, often through extreme measures. Looksmaxxing is related to incel ideology, the idea that your worth is tied to how attractive you are. Peters has said he’s been taking testosterone since he was a teen, methamphetamine to suppress his appetite and smashed his facial bones to create a more chiseled jawline, an extreme evolution of mewing, which is trying to improve your jaw with exercises. (Medical experts say these are bad ideas.) He films videos of himself “mogging” other men, a domination practice of being significantly more attractive than someone else.
Peters built his following on the livestreaming platform Kick, an edgier version of Twitch with looser moderation policies. Yet in recent weeks, he’s gone viral beyond the looksmaxxing cohort after he filmed himself at a Miami nightclub with manosphere influencer Andrew Tate and white nationalist commentator Nick Fuentes singing along to Kanye West’s song Heil Hitler. The owner of Miami nightclub was forced to issue an apology after.
So, why should you care about this? Although the looksmaxxing community is niche, it’s currently having a disproportionate influence on online culture, which we’ve seen affect real-world events. For example, researchers of right-wing media found that the image-based platform 4chan, mostly visited by young men, helped propel Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Trump’s administration has since adopted 4chan’s style of trolling in its own social media presence, and has already co-opted looksmaxxing vernacular. This month, the X account for the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering posted an image of a grinning soldier with the caption, “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
College basketball’s new coach: AI
Coaches from Virginia Military Institute tested an AI assistant that made tactical suggestions during a January game against their NCAA Division I rivals from The Citadel.Supplied
Artificial intelligence has been transmorphing into a variety of roles: therapist, companion, shopping assistant, and now assistant basketball coach. The Virginia Military Institute’s basketball team is using a system powered by AI that has ingested and analyzed hours of game and practice footage, reports from coaches, details on players and opponents, as well as learned the team’s custom terminology and playbook. A chatbot was trained on this data repository, allowing coaches to ask the system for pre-game reports, drill down into the statistical minutiae of action on the court, and get recommendations for plays to call during live matches. But would it actually prove useful in live game play? Read the full story by reporter Joe Castaldo.
What else we’re reading this week:
Inside the gay tech mafia (WIRED)
The untold story of the high schools trapped in the AI boom (The Logic)
Etsy sells Depop, a secondhand clothing app popular with Gen Z, to eBay (The New York Times)
Adult Money
CHIPS
Prepare for the RAMageddon
It feels like everywhere I look online, I see people posting about a looming RAMageddon. AI companies, with their seemingly infinite budgets, are buying up scores of chips for the data centres that power the technology. As a result, the price of consumer-grade memory chips has also increased, which will lead to a rise in prices for everyday electronics such as computers, phones, video game consoles, routers, or basically anything that has a mini computer inside. The market research firm TechInsights predicts that higher costs for memory chips would raise the price of a typical PC by US$119, or 23 per cent by this fall. So if you’re looking to buy a big-ticket item, such as a new laptop, now could be the time for that upgrade.
Culture radar
MODERN DATING
Dating profile red flags and AI
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images
My colleague Graham Isador recently spoke with dating experts about the common mistakes people make with their dating profiles. One of the biggest red flags? AI photos. AI-generated photos – including filters or touch-ups – were an immediate no-no, so much so that if a picture even gave off the impression of being AI-generated, it was often an instant deal-breaker. But Isador found experts were split on the use of AI to help with the text-based portion of your profile. Some suggested that feeding information into AI and then editing the output could be helpful for people who feel stuck. Others saw it as an obvious no go, suggesting that an imperfect response written by a real person will always be better than something from a robot. Read the full story here.