And yet somehow, here you are—three clips deep into a recap you didn't go looking for, fully informed on the drama, with a very strong opinion about someone you've never met and genuinely wish you didn't know existed. Reality TV has found a way to colonise feeds that never invited it in, and the algorithm is getting better at making sure there's no way out. Today we're asking the question nobody who watches it wants to answer: what does it say about us that the content performing best is always the worst behaviour?

TechCrunch reports that a coalition of 12 states led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed an antitrust lawsuit to block Paramount Skydance's $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. It's the largest legal challenge to the deal since the Trump administration cleared it without conditions in June. The states allege the merger would harm movie theatres, drive up cable prices, reduce film production, and hand the combined company unchecked power over programming fees. Bonta announced the lawsuit in front of the Hollywood sign. The theatrics were entirely appropriate.

Meanwhile, the Apple vs OpenAI trade secret saga just got a new and deeply chaotic detail. TechCrunch reports that former Apple engineer Chang Liu didn't just steal a laptop. He discovered a rare, previously unknown authentication bug that let him keep accessing Apple's internal network storage weeks after leaving for OpenAI. Rather than report it, he texted a colleague still at Apple: "LOL, I found out I can access the network storage, so funny." Her reply: "I'm ready." The two then allegedly downloaded over a thousand pages of confidential engineering files. The lawyers are going to have a field day.

And finally, Anthropic launched an ad this week that is making people deeply uncomfortable, not entirely by accident. TechCrunch reports that "Hard Questions" opens on a burning house before cutting to surveillance cameras. You see a homeless person on the street, rows of cemetery tombstones, and what appears to be child labourers mining smartphone materials. The voiceover asks "Can AI be trusted?" and "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?"

The internet's verdict: unsettling, doomer-ist, and in many corners, deeply, deeply creepy. Anthropic's response, presumably, is that that is kind of the point.

Um, why would you ask? And also, I’m now wishing there was a secret trap door underneath you could activate with a button on my phone because why would you even ask me that.

And yes, it's not that deep.

But it also kind of is.

Because that entire ecosystem is a toxic, extractive machine designed to farm human misery for ad revenue. Yet, my refusal to watch the actual broadcast has proved completely useless against the modern algorithm.

My entire feed has been ruthlessly hijacked by creators dissecting the show. Reacting to the clips. And arguing with other creators who are arguing about the contestants.

But whenever a stray clip inevitably slips past my internal blockages, I am struck by the exact same unsettling realisation. The show isn't actually about romance, like, at all. It's not about connection, or human pairing or even the friends we all made along the way.

The content that achieves maximum velocity on our timelines is almost exclusively focused on the most toxic, manipulative, and jaw-droppingly sh*tty behaviour imaginable. We are watching young, vulnerable people systematically stress each other out. Gaslight each other in real-time. And inflict genuine emotional harm on international television.

And it raises a deeply uncomfortable psychological question about our collective cultural sanity: why on earth are we so profoundly addicted to watching human beings treat each other like absolute garbage?

But let’s call it what it actually is: The Commodification of the Public Whipping.

Nobody is watching these shows to be entertained by love; duh. they’re all watching them to participate in a coordinated and algorithmic mod mentality.

The internet has made us feel incredibly passive and powerless in our real lives. So we look for spaces where we can collectively exert absolute control. A reality TV villain provides the ultimate lightning rod for that repressed frustration.

We jump on it because it feels intoxicatingly cathartic. It allows us, the audience, to perform a twisted kind of moral posturing. Because by banding together to collectively destroy a stranger’s reputation in the comments section, we get to convince ourselves that we are the good guys.

We outsource our ethics to a trashy television set. And we use their unedited, low-IQ manipulation tactics to validate our own superior moral compass.

But the reality is even more sinister.

We have been conditioned by short-form video algorithms to respond exclusively to maximum emotional volume. A healthy, respectful, and functional relationship doesn't generate watch-time metrics. It doesn't cause a comment section to erupt. And it certainly doesn't trend on X for forty-eight hours.

The machine requires conflict to feed the pixel. It needs someone to cry. Someone to lie. And someone to experience a full-scale emotional breakdown. Because that is the exact raw material required to spark the outrage that drives corporate ad placement.

We can only pray that audiences are starting to notice the hollow, manufactured nature of these rage-fuelled engagement loops. The brands that continue to sponsor, align with, or mimic the aggressive, adversarial tone of reality TV commentary are playing a highly short-sighted game.

The ultimate luxury asset in a hyper-cynical digital economy is going to be Relational Sanity… i.e. refusing to participate in the public stoning of individuals for cheap metric spikes.

Society has progressed past the point of cheering in the stalls of a bloodied colosseum (or so I thought). You need not resort to digital savagery borderline salivating over the pain of other actual humans.

Take up yoga or maybe even go to therapy :)

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from creator Ken Eurich, who after having her car broken into posted a video defending her life choices to her followers with the kind of exhausted, defiant energy that is deeply relatable:

"And you know what? Maybe the programme I'm running isn't too fcking strict, okay? Just please, give me a break you guys."*

Creators are lipsyncing to the audio to describe all the rules, diets, boundaries and principles they swore by... right up until they didn't.

Some of my favourite examples:

Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound. Then, add whatever rule or principle you immediately abandoned the second it became inconvenient as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

Hey Renata!

Creating a podcast is a great way to create content for your brand. Because not only will you have the longform version, but you can also cut that up into shorts to post on your social channels. It's also a cool way to get to know other people in your industry by bringing them on as guests. The thing about podcasts, though, is a lot of people start them and very few make more than a few episodes. So if I were you, I'd start recording your first few episodes ASAP. Then just keep getting your reps in, learning as you go. Don't spend too long in the planning phase—otherwise you may never actually start!

- Charlotte Ellis, Editor ♡

We get it. Creating content that does numbers is harder than it looks. But doing those big numbers is the fastest way to grow your brand. So if you’re tired of throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks, you’re in luck. Because making our clients go viral is kinda what we do every single day.