See The Algorithm’s Dark Gleam In The Hunter Biden-Andrew Callaghan Crypto Scam Email Whoopsie

In a time when the algorithmically determined social internet serves primarily to trick people into becoming hosts to various parasites or simply drive them mad, it might be perversely comforting to imagine that the people on the other side of the screen are knowing, cynical actors, free from the brain-shredding effects of life online. Noxious as it is, some sort of harmony or human logic would at least be familiar and capable of being understood. But no, those guys are the algorithm's subjects too. Two of those guys are Hunter Biden and YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan, presently involved in what I'll call a crypto scam email whoopsie perpetrated by the former with the unwitting help of the latter. I find it quite instructive. You can see in the odd anti-collaboration something like the algorithm talking to itself. There are no good proper nouns here, only two people driven to make the world a little worse by the incentives of their platforms. Presumably you know who Biden is. The son of former president Joe Biden was a fascination of right-wing media for years, both for the salacious details of his years of addiction and for the various sinecures his father hooked him up with. In October 2020, the New York Post published a bunch of supposedly damning emails from a laptop the younger Biden inexplicably brought into a Wilmington computer repair shop. The laptop scandal was less interesting for its particulars than for the way it turned him into a sort of hyperobject among right-wingers. To them, Hunter Biden was the neat personification of both the personal moral decay and corrupt dealings of their opposition.

Read it at Defector ↗

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