Stephen Bobbett – Stephen Heath Weidman

We Are The Walrus

A spray-painted electrical box somewhere in Los Angeles

It freaks me out that walruses can whistle.

Instagram’s For You page algorithm is like an eager child who discovered one joke that makes the adults laugh and now feels the need to parrot that joke ad infinitum. As a rule, I try to avoid the FYP and go straight to my follows, but sometimes the endless scroll of dopamine seizes me before my prefrontal lobe can intervene.

One day, the eager child showed me a walrus, and I liked it. Thus, my fate was (forgive the pun) sealed.

Walrus can whistle. They can make a lot of noises, in fact, like rubbery bells, and guttural roars, and sputtering farts. I’m fine with all of those. But a whistle crosses the line. When I see it, there’s a part of my primate brain that says, wait, shouldn’t only humans be able to do that? The idea that, with enough training, a walrus could cover the post-chorus bridge to Otis Redding’s “The Dock of the Bay” is unsettling to me.

It’s easy to forget that evolution doesn’t care what we think is exclusively human. It’s not a force with any intention beyond adaptation and survival. And if that means two species, who’ve long since diverged on evolution’s branches, are meant to whistle, so be it. It’s entertaining to think that both species might have developed the ability to attract a mate, with it being a severe liability at least to one. Either way, evolution is content to give them both lip articulators, like a distracted father giving his mammalian children cereal for dinner.

Truth be told, I enjoy when these behaviors shake me free of the assumption that humans won the biological lottery. Evolution is sort of like Robert Frost’s two roads diverging in a wood: no road is more advantageous than the other, and both are selected based on the necessity of the moment.

If anything, seal species got it right. They evolved just far enough to be a bunch of noisy goofballs who get to lounge on the beach most of the day.

That would have me whistling, too.

The Gaping Maw of Google

The open internet might be dead, and Google might have killed it.

Last week my coworker sent me a TechCrunch article about how Google Search, at least as we’ve known it for the past 25 years, is over. At the most recent Google I/O conference, Google announced an “intelligent search box” that, for an increasing number of inquiries, will use AI to generate not just responses but entire UX/UI modules. Gone will be the classic ten blue links, although they’ve been so buried under sponsored results and LLM summaries for the past decade that, in all practicality, they’ve been suffocated already.

The implications for the internet as a whole seem pretty dire. Google spent ages suppressing other indexing sites, absorbing parallel entities and paying companies like Apple $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine in Safari browsers. The result was Google Search becoming the gatekeeper for most internet traffic. And in short order, they will be closing those gates, demolishing the digital roads we’ve built over this past half a century, and using the scrapped asphalt to build their own giant cul-de-sac.

People are talking about this in apocalyptic terms, and I tend to agree. This is an internet where the world’s most dominant search engine no longer does what a search engine does, which is link out to other sites. Instead, it siphons data—and with that data, value—from all of us who make content on the internet. And I mean all of us, everyone from influencers and journalists and artists, to senior marketing staff at Fortune 500 companies. We all become serfs toiling in the fields that, whether we like it or not, our liege lord Google will reap for themselves—with no guarantee they will share in the harvest.

The age of the “clickless” search is upon us. Unless internet users claim greater agency over what search engines they use, the act of building, maintaining, and supplying content for a site will just be stocking a warehouse for which Google is the only vendor.

Ironically, if we indulge this avarice from Google, it will destroy the incentive to create on the internet in general. The less traffic going to our websites, the less content we’ll likely create for those sites, and the less food the hungry maw of Google will have to feed on.

The open internet might die. But if it does, it might just take Google with it.

Cough and Turn Heads

Since the pandemic, I’ve become super paranoid about coughing in public. It doesn’t matter that years of working as a bartender have trained me like Pavlov’s dog to bury my face in my elbow when I feel the slightest tickle in my throat. Now I’m afraid that any cough, no matter how sanitary, is going to cause heads to swivel and start screeching at me, like I’ve awoken the bodysnatchers.

I’m staying in Culver City for the next few weeks, settling on an apartment in Los Angeles for an upcoming job transfer. Today I was at a coffee shop, typing away on a PowerPoint for work, when I felt the ol’ throat tickle.

I’d forgotten just how dry Southern California is, and my late afternoon latte was not hydrating me the way it should. Not to mention I’d just gotten over a cold. I needed more than just one cough. I needed a cornucopia of coughs. A veritable smorgasbord. A whole Thanksgiving feast of them.

The shop was about to close anyway. So, while the tickle in my throat became a rapidly growing bramble patch, I calmly shut my laptop, placed it gingerly in my backpack, and slid quietly off my stool. As I did, the bramble patch caught fire.

The noise that emanated from my chest was incomprehensible, like being confronted with a visage of the Holy Trinity. It had the resonance of a burp, a hiccup, and a sneeze—embodying none of those sounds and all of them at once. If I had to summon it again, I don’t think I could.

I didn’t stay long enough to see anyone’s reaction. For all I know, nobody cared. All I know is, even as I move back to Los Angeles, a city that can make you very conscious of personal appearances, I will try to remain true to myself, even at the risk of being a hacking gremlin.

Also I’ll try to drink more water.

The Line-Go-Uppigator

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The Line-Go-Uppigator, or reptilius adlunamus, is a serpentine dragon with a zigzagging neck that grows indefinitely towards the moon. Its eyes and snout are locked in a permanent upward tilt as it hungers for the gems in the night sky. Meanwhile, its malnourished body remains seated on its hoard of gold in a state of inert and infantile fragility. One assumes that the vertebrae in its neck will eventually give way to gravity, but really, what about dragons was ever rational?

The Pugnacious Pigcock

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The Pugnacious Pigcock is an irascible avian-porcine hybrid with a proclivity for displays of feckless aggression. When provoked, it flourishes a tail made of red-tipped elliptical feathers, which have evolved to mimic the appearance of human warheads. But don’t let the pageantry fool you. Despite its flared eyes and menacing snort crow, its blunted herbivore tusks are little threat to any who encounters them. One is more likely to be harmed by its ceaseless flatulence than anything else.