"The Pinterest Paradox: Cupcakes and Toxicity."

Great title for a fascinating exposé — by Francoise Brougher — of the inner workings of Pinterest. This was written last August, but I'm reading it now because it was linked in a new NYT article, "Pinterest Settles Gender Discrimination Suit for $22.5 Million/The suit had been brought by Françoise Brougher, Pinterest’s former chief operating officer, who said she was fired after speaking up about mistreatment."

"Cupcakes and Toxicity" is at Medium, so you don't need to worry about a paywall. Brougher was the COO at Pinterest. Excerpt: "There is a reason that women do not negotiate as hard as men for higher pay. It is not because we are not good negotiators. As I would learn at Pinterest, it is because we get punished when we do."

"It might be most helpful to compare a social network to a party. The party starts out small, with the hosts and a few of their friends."

"Then word gets out and strangers show up. People take cues from the environment. Mimosas in a sun-dappled atrium suggest one kind of mood; grain alcohol in a moldy basement suggests another. Sometimes, a pattern emerges on its own. Pinterest, a simple photo-sharing site founded by three men, happened to catch on among women aspiring to an urbane life style, and today the front page is often a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware. In other cases, the gatekeeping seems more premeditated. If you’re fourteen, Snapchat’s user interface is intuitive; if you’re twenty-two, it’s intriguing; if you’re over thirty-five, it’s impenetrable. This encourages old people to self-deport."

From "Reddit and the Struggle to Detoxify the Internet/How do we fix life online without limiting free speech?" by Andrew Marantz (in The New Yorker).

I went to Pinterest to see if the front page was a collage of merino scarves and expensive glassware, and I couldn't figure out how to get there — it was impenetrable — other than as myself, the person who opened a Pinterest account to collect photos to show my hairstylist. So this is what I see on the front page:



Lots of chopped off hair — and one Jack Kerouac — but no scarves and glasses.

IN THE COMMENTS: Rabel corrects:

Three Jack kerouac's plus Women of the Beat Generation.

AND: Here's Kerouac on the subject of glassware:

What she was doing whoring in Mexico at that age and with that tender cheek and fair aspect God knows. Some awful grief had driven her to it. She drank beyond all bounds. She threw down drinks when it seemed she was about to chuck up the last. She overturned glasses continually, the idea also being to make us spend as much money as possible. Wearing her flimsy housecoat in broad afternoon she frantically danced with Neal and clung about his neck and begged and begged for everything. Neal was so stoned he didn’t know what to start with, girls or mambo.

Not happy about the banal wisdom of Pinterest.

"Here you go, Internet: more examples of Bad Advice I Read on Pinterest — from the questionable to the facepalm-worthy."





Many more at the link. I chose those 2 because they worked on me... in spite of my defenses!

"Over the past year, we have arrived at an odd cultural and lexicographical moment: To dress 'normal' is the height of chic, yet to call someone 'basic' is the chicest put-down..."

"Basic, according to the BuzzFeed quizzes and CollegeHumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-hop world and brought it into the realm of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is an exception for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum flattering and long (or at least shoulder-grazing) hair reliably attractive. She exercises in various non-bulk-building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She bought the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad’s wedding on the cover. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands up and down the spine of female-centric popular culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn’t, apparently, long for more."

From "What Do You Really Mean When You Say 'Basic Bitch'?," in New York Magazine.

"Quinoa always keeps a spare 'urban outfit' in my purse in the event we're going to be around a lot of chain link fencing."

"One time Quinoa thought she had accidentally squashed a bug, but what she had really squashed was all the predictable style rules society has tried to place on her."

From the hilarious Pinterest "My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter."

Via Metafilter. Sample comment there: "OK, Quinoa is pretty much the greatest fake toddler name ever. I just know I would absolutely hate her parents. In fact, I do hate her parents, even if they're not real. GOD I HATE THOSE PEOPLE SO MUCH. I HATE THEIR STUPID FACES!"

An expansive, shapely hairdo.

Source: flickr.com via Barneys on Pinterest

That's Richard Avedon photograph, at the Barneys New York Pinterest site, which pictures some things you can buy at Barneys and some thing that (presumably) expand your mind into a shape within which you might decide to buy some things at Barneys.

"The L.A. house, nestled between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills and blessed with terrific views, is by far his most modern creation..."

I love this Daniel Romualdez place:



ADDED: I don't pin that much, but looking at the 4 things I've pinned as "interior decoration," I'm confronted with how much I like white.

"Your 'Pregnant' Other."

#1 on a list of "The Five Worst Pregnancy Trends on Pinterest."

(You'll love the photo!)

Pinterest — where you display pictures of stuff you like — fosters "the feeling of being addicted to longing for something..."

"... specifically being addicted to the feeling that something is missing or incomplete. The point is not the thing that is being longed for, but the feeling of longing for the thing."

The site’s name combines the words “interest” and “pin,” in reference to “pin boards,” which are also known in various creative professions as inspiration boards or mood boards — basically a large board onto which appropriated images... are juxtaposed to evoke in the viewer a certain feeling, atmosphere or mood. Once the exclusive province of advertising art directors, designers and teenage girls in boarding-school dormitories, mood boards and their electronic equivalents have exploded online. Not just on Pinterest, but also in the form of dopamine-boosting street-fashion blogs and cryptically named Tumblr blogs devoted to the wordless and explanation-free juxtaposition of, say, cupcakes and teapots and shoes with shots of starched shirts and J.F.K.

Mood boards used to be an "exclusive province," something for the "creative professions," and now ordinary people are doing them too. Reminds me of the relationship between journalism and blogging. There's something disconcerting about everybody getting into the act. And the riff-raff who do what was once exclusive must be disparaged. Something missing with these people.

The author of the linked piece Carina Chocano (writing in the NYT Magazine) makes a big point of distinguishing Pinterest picture-posting as different from "curating" and more like advertising, because a curating makes us "more conscious" (like the creative professionals in their exclusive provinces), while advertising makes us less conscious (you peons!).

Why less conscious? Chocano seems to think that operating in the dimension of intuitive desire is lowly — a notion that spikes me to a higher level of consciousness where I observe that Chocano is dealing in elitism and snobbery. (In the New York Times!) She even refers to these pictures as "lifestyle pornography," calling to mind the old feminist argument that pornography shouldn't get First Amendment protection because it doesn't express any ideas. It merely stimulates feelings.

Here's Pinterest if you want a taste of the feeling of being addicted to longing.

ADDED: I just happened upon an aphorism that seems relevant: "In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing."