At a time when 1 in 4 adults describe themselves as lonely, the free market - being what it is - has responded accordingly. Friendship-matching apps are raising tens of millions in venture capital, Ticketed IRL singles clubs have digital waitlists thousands of people long, and people are buying AI-powered wearables to have something to talk to on the way to get coffee. The natural phenomenon that is human connection has been productised, and the consumer is starting to notice. So what happens when a sense of belonging becomes a business model? And are the brands offering "community" really acting on their word?

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

TechCrunch reports that Astra is OpenAI's most capable model to date, with standout abilities in computer use, software engineering, coding and cybersecurity, beating both its own GPT-5.6 Sol and Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 across key benchmarks. OpenAI president Greg Brockman described it as "our most intelligent and most aligned model yet" and, when asked if Astra qualifies as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), said "I do think we're there".

The model is also OpenAI's most controversial, as Astra uses a reasoning technique called "opaque recurrence", which makes it harder for researchers to audit how and why it makes decisions. OpenAI's chief scientist acknowledged that "as model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging." Given it's been mere weeks since an OpenAI agent hacked Hugging Face while trying to pass a safety evaluation, it's a valuable and honest admission - albeit not a reassuring one.

Meanwhile, YouTube Premium subscribers are having a litigious few months. Dexerto reports that YouTube is now facing a second proposed class action lawsuit over its "ad-free" Premium claims. This time it's from three Canadian subscribers who argue that creator-embedded sponsorships are functionally no different from the ads they paid $15.99 a month to avoid. The complaint states that "Although the source and delivery mechanism of the advertisements changed, the commercial interruption experienced by subscribers remained substantially the same".

The first US lawsuit was filed in July. YouTube's help centre does technically disclose that Premium subscribers may still see creator-embedded promotions, but both lawsuits argue this disclaimer is far too buried to count. "Class action" in this case encompasses 125 million paying subscribers, so expect some shifts in platform experpience should these suits succeed.

And finally, late last week, Elon Musk got checkmated by... chess itself? Complex reports that it started when Musk replied to a viral post claiming chess would one day be "fully solved like checkers". Chess.com's account replied with two words: "Skill issue." Musk tried pushing back, while Chess.com responded by pointing out that the number of possible chess games exceeds the number of atoms in the observable universe by 40 orders of magnitude.

Musk called the comparison "an idiotic metric" and the person he was arguing with "some random intern". Said admin, as confirmed by Chess.com's executive, is in fact "a full-time employee." Gotta say, as fun as it is watching patient zero of the Dunning-Krueger effect lose an online brawl... it's even better, albeit a bit saddening, that they're the richest person on Earth and using their limited lifespan to argue with a chess website. Get your priorities straight, brother - how's Mars coming along, btw?

-Devin Pike, Copywriter

We’re more connected than ever, digitally speaking. And yet, we’ve never felt more separate from one another.

So naturally, the free market has responded to this in the most late-stage capitalist way possible: by putting a recurring monthly subscription fee on human connection. Welcome to the era of the financialization of loneliness.

If you actually look at the cultural landscape right now, connection is no longer something you organically stumble into at a local pub, a neighbourhood block party, or a hobby group. And it has now been productised.

Friendship-matching apps are raising tens of millions in venture capital, promising algorithms that can find you platonic intimacy. Highly gatekept, ticketed IRL singles clubs boast digital waitlists thousands of people long, charging premium entry fees just for the permission to speak to a stranger without it being weird. People are literally buying AI-powered wearable tech like sleek pucks and necklaces worn like jewellery just to have an ambient, artificial entity to talk to while they walk to get their morning espresso.

Yeah, it’s getting dystopian out here.

Say goodbye to simply selling a product's utility as a superficial status symbol. In our fragmented world, traditional community infrastructure has completely crumbled; and brands are increasingly being asked to sell belonging.

When basic human connection becomes a fkn business model, consumer scepticism naturally skyrockets. Because, like, wtf are we actually doing.

The internet has spent the last decade promising to bring us closer together, but it has ultimately left us more isolated than ever.

And trust, we’re all painfully aware of this irony. And the modern consumer is starting to push back aggressively against "bad actors" like subscription platforms or “community-focused” brands that actually just treat community as a transactional metric to pump up their user retention numbers.

Think about how standard digital spaces operate: they are engineered for digital retention. They want you trapped inside the app, scrolling, viewing ads, and refreshing your feed. But an online ecosystem built to optimise screen time inherently breeds more isolation. It isolates the user from their physical reality.

So maybe, as brands, its time to not strive to keep people locked behind a screen, and treat digital connection as a bridge to real-world friction.

True community cannot exist without shared friction. It requires a mutual objective, an active project, or a common "enemy" to rally against. If a brand attempts to build a community without this structural foundation, it isn't building a community at all, it's just building a glorified god damn mailing list.

To successfully market connection without triggering consumer disgust, brands must move away from top-down corporate community building. Look at the brands that command intense, cult-like loyalty. They don't force artificial interactions but instead create decentralised spaces where their consumers can find each other based on shared subcultural codes.

It’s time to lean into gatekeeping to protect the integrity of the group.

If your brand can naturally facilitate real-world, face-to-face community without forcing a gross transactional paywall into the middle of the conversation, you’re already ahead of the curve here.

But if you're just using "community" as a lazy, buzzword-heavy marketing tactic to increase your quarterly retention metrics, you’re kind of a dick, and your audience probably thinks so too x

-Sophie Randell, Writer

The sound comes from an episode of South Central Baddies where in one particularly uncomfortable moment, Shamisha "Pressure" Adams introduces herself to the standoffish India:
"Hi nice to meet you, I'm Pressure. What's your name?"
"India."
"India?"

Creators are lipsyncing as Pressure to portray situations where they had to show up and, to their dismay, had to carry the social weight all by themselves.
Some of my favourite examples:

How you can jump on this trend:
Film yourself lipsyncing to the sound and add whatever situation had you stepping in and making awkward small talk as your on-screen text.

A few ideas to get you started:
• When you show up early to the client meeting and now it's just you and their whole leadership team
• Walking in on a tense exchange and feeling like it's on you to de-escalate things
• When there's an awkward silence in a pitch and nobody else fills it, so you just start yapping

- Devin Pike, Copywriter

But a little different this time, because one guy trying to answer every marketing question in this inbox by himself was never going to work. wtf was I thinking.

So go ahead, hit reply with whatever's stuck in your head. The twist: it doesn't just land on my desk anymore, it goes straight to whoever on the team actually owns it, be it community, creative, production, strategy, you name it, it gets answered right here in a future edition. Ask away!

- abdel, brand & marketing exec

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.