Thank you for subscribing to Yap Year (:

This has been an extremely gratifying project to produce and has given me many gifts. Now, it’s time for Yap Year to take a gap year. 

Okay, not exactly a year. But I’ve looked around at my algorithms lately and found myself with little to say. So, I cut back from twice a week to once a week. After a couple months of that, I’ve come to the conclusion that Yap Year, in its current iteration, has reached its limits. Or perhaps, I have simply reached mine. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of digital culture. I am a person shaped by and deeply influenced by the internet. But I have not been able to form cohesive ideas or narratives about it in recent months. I’ve done a lot of reaching back for this newsletter, tracing the lines between our online past to our present moment. However, at present, I’m not sure what to make of the content on my feeds. 

I’ve joked to friends recently that I feel like I’ve reached the end of the internet. Everything served to me has been extremely niche (examples: ranking ways that Fast & Furious characters hold their beers, condiment packet archiving, and the guy that has starched his jeans 1,000 times). And while that is certainly fun, engaging, and interesting, it doesn’t really tell me much about the collective culture, which is my main interest in this newsletter. Perhaps that is a goal for social media companies, to strip us of monocultural experiences and make us decidedly less social. But how many times should I say the same thing?

Culturally, we’ve been in a weird time of nostalgia, which is clearly brought on by the Horrors™ that the world has endured in recent years. But overall, there has been an on-and-off feeling of stagnation, at least online. So, I’ve been spending more time outside in search of what people are up to, how they’re socializing, and how they’re spending their time. 

Touching grass does in fact make the internet less decipherable. On a personal front, that’s not such a bad thing. Unfortunately, it does mean that I don’t have enough to write a weekly newsletter about what’s happening online right now. 

So, this is my long-winded way of explaining that Yap Year will no longer be a regular newsletter. I will use it to comment on the Big Viral Things — although, I acknowledge that I am not wading into the viral Western Massachusetts Lesbian Bar Mask Policy Discourse today — because I think that makes for a better product for you and for me. Obviously, there’s no predicting when those will be, but when the mood strikes, you will know (because it will land in your inbox). 

As a result of these changes, I’m also pausing all paid subscriptions. So if you are one of my dear Yappers, you should not be charged moving forward (although do let me know if there are issues). Thank you for supporting Yap Year for the past year and a half <3

With that, I will see you after the next big internet thing hits timelines. I will leave you with a playlist before I go. Mwah! 

Every Monday letter gets a playlist. This isn’t a goodbye playlist because I’m not saying goodbye. Instead, this is randomly a Coyote Ugly-inspired playlist. Go wild and go outside! That’s what I’ve been doing!

In this week’s playlist: