BS Summary: This article contains 2 faulty reasoning types, including Indoctrination, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 19.2% saturation with 250 hits. Analysis detected 298 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,300 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 65.6% and a BS Rank of 70% (4,300 of 14,081 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 69.50% of the article peer group.
If you want the Smashburger, in New York City you’re in luck, because suddenly there’s a Smashburger joint every other block.
If you want gelato, you’re also in luck, because there’s gelato everywhere, too.
If you want a burrito, good thinking, there are plenty of burrito trucks; you will not be disappointed.
If you want to go to a fancy gym or get a peptide injection, then New York is the city for you.
If you wanna talk about the World Cup, or trailers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey , or Taylor Swift’s wedding, then ditto, you’re in the right city.
Everyone is thinking about those things because that’s what is surging through their phones; out with literacy, in with mimetic churn.
The Madison Square Garden marriage of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift was a perfect representation of a 2026 pseudo-event: this American mega-wedding was famous for being famous.
No matter how charmless and inauthentic, it was an object that one could have an opinion on — and thus was an incarnation of internet culture.
It symbolized how much our appetites have been shaped by social media; we want to experience, to obsess over, to be around, what is already familiar.
Everyone doing and talking about and following the same pseudo-events, or producing them themselves, however, does not produce culture or aura.
Rather, it displaces and draws energy from the original, spontaneous, and organic.
I’ve noticed that written communication, texting and emailing, increasingly sounds the same as more and more people either have AI directly write for them or have internalized the syntactical structures of AI writing.
The word most associated with this era of modern life, “slop,” is itself a memetic cliché that can’t illuminate how eerily homogeneous and fake life in big cities has become, or perhaps life everywhere has become.
More from this author The end of going out
By Matthew Gasda
With minor differences in uniform and language, the arrival of tourists from around the world in New York only demonstrates the convergence of habits, tendencies, and mores across cultures in our era.
The old, useful animus Europeans, for instance, had towards American culture is gone; large swaths of Brooklyn and Manhattan, in parallel, have no accent, no culture, no distinction, no history.
The lingua franca of the affluent, whether tourist or local, is what we might call “globalese”: a compressed super-language patterned on English, but increasingly reliant on Instagram.
Its images, gestures, and catchphrases convey a compressed reality that works as well in Paris as it does in New York or any other place where digital media reaches.
Lack of difference, lack of friction signals a die-off in culture.
Neighborhoods don’t have their own culture, cities don’t have their own culture, regions don’t have their own culture; it is all globalese.
And though we are all the same, we’re isolated from each other.
As much as the conventional wisdom says that it’s exciting to be in New York and other American cities during the summer of the World Cup, I sense that tourists and transplants, new arrivals and also longtime residents themselves, are not really mixing or encountering each other accidentally; it’s too easy to pre-sort an experience, to find the bar showing your game, to find overly like-minded friends, to find algorithmically-vetted romantic interests.
Even if there are sublime matches, like England-Mexico, uniformity is apparent in the way that World Cup teams play, all driven by the same academy training and analytics, just like in Major League Baseball and the NBA this summer.
“Being offline has become impossible, because the internet has matriculated into material reality.
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Compare this, for instance, to culture at the beginning of the globalization era.
In the early 1990s, movies such as Before Sunrise and Chungking Express were romances of the accidental.
If you meet someone on a summer evening in a big city, as happened to the characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise , you might never find them again.
As we learn in the sequel Before Sunset, Jessie and Celine take nine years to find each other again; this is romantic.
Qiu Miaojin’s cult 1995 novel Last Words from Montmartre , about a Taiwanese woman in Paris writing letters to a lover who’s abandoned her, is one of the most beautiful examples of the romance and melancholy of early globalization: everything is loosely connected, but there is still distance to imagine; travel still involves some risk and uncertainty; lovers and friends cannot be searched up and realized on a screen (“stalked”) at any moment of the day.
Social space, suffering a recession of the accidental and a corresponding inflation of the easy, has become a zone to gratify desires implanted by the phone, and to aggregate, not differentiate; there doesn’t seem to be much to do in public other than playact a lifestyle.
A friend always used to say that Los Angeles was the great American city of private experiences and New York was the city of public experiences.
But New York has become more like what LA used to be, superficial, Instagram-driven, pneumatic and soulless, while LA has deteriorated and lost its raison d’être: the film and TV industries.
The implication here is that being offline has become impossible, because the internet has matriculated into material reality.
Menus reflect trends; the optics and layout of bars, restaurants, and pubs cater to TikTokkers and Instagram influencers; bars are places to be on your phone.
Slop content has become slop reality.
And high inflation and rent inflation make it difficult for small businesses to say no to slop reality.
Entrepreneurs and business owners with soul can’t compete with the ruthless and soulless and are driven out.
High rent means that ostentatious fine dining is next to a bank, next to a gym, next to a spa that sells peptides, next to a startup office.
Suggested reading The end of going out
By Gesha-Marie Bland
If a place or community that is real or unique slips through the financial dragnet, then it is at risk of being turned into viral content, rushed, overwhelmed, and abandoned.
Everything from churches to dive bars is subject to influencer promotion.
For this reason, it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that private space will start to play the role that public space used to play: a place for strangers or near strangers to meet and have interactions and conversations, to drink and to eat, in ways that are not algorithmically determined.
If public space is going to survive as more than a zombie playground, young people — who bring life to cities and public spaces — will have to be intentional about letting things happen by accident, and about spending significant chunks of every day operating with 1990s-level technology.
A few weeks ago, I was at an event in Tompkins Square Park for the “Summer of Ludd” — a no-smartphone movement started in part by one of my former students, an amazingly outgoing and charismatic figure.
The event was mostly young people sitting on blankets and playing drums and guitar, very Summer of Love.
It wasn’t wildly new in appearance, but because no one was on their phones, the participants seemed genuinely connected and excited to be there.
They weren’t keeping a visual record of their afternoon in the park.
It was just happening.
It was a unique event, meaning it couldn’t be replicated or resold because the people involved would only be there in that exact combination once.
The split might be between those who are only comfortable with packaged pseudo events and those willing to cultivate, to see what happens, to show up — and then to go home without telling a soul, or getting a Smashburger on the way.
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Voice attribution · Experimental
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2speakers0.5%attributed speech1,294writer words
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0%flagged-word coverageGesha-Marie Bland
3 attributed words50% of attributed speech23% writer coverage
Indoctrination-3.7 pts
Writer 3.7%Gesha-Marie Bland 0%
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