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A bot posting links from the Web Curios newsletter (www.webcurios.co.uk), because, weirdly, not everyone wants to read 10,000 words at a time. Unlikely to reply to you.
A bot posting links from the Web Curios newsletter (www.webcurios.co.uk), because, weirdly, not everyone wants to read 10,000 words at a time. Unlikely to reply to you.
![Paid Phones: Daniel Kolitz, who wrote the superviral piece on Gooning earlier this year, returns with another virtuoso piece of writing, this time about debt in modern America and, specifically, his experience of it, and the apps that exist now in the US which serve both to ostensibly help manage it and also sell you significantly more of it at every single opportunity. This is very funny, but equally horrifying – it does feel rather like a passage which as recently as the 90s would be satirical rather than descriptive. “Certainly, I’m still in the hole. As I write this, I owe $359.96 to Cleo, $31.99 to Albert, $62.99 to Brigit, and $86.12 to Dave. I also, hauntingly, owe thirty bucks to MrBeast. Technically, I owe this money to Step, the payday loan app MrBeast acquired earlier this year to “give millions of young people the financial foundation I [MrBeast] never had.” Currently boasting seven million users, the app really does offer savings accounts for teens, but a quick look at its interface reveals this as a kind of front: “Step EarlyPay,” available to users of all ages, is clearly the core product here. As far as I can tell, MrBeast is the only celebrity to buy a digital lender outright, but it cannot be long before Clavicular, Woah Vicky, et al. are collectively skimming a sizable percentage of Americans’ paychecks. Perhaps, if one wants to stay solvent in the future, one will have no choice but to buy a decent lighting setup and get to work charismatically injecting peptides or fomenting race war on stream. If anything, I’m a poster boy for precisely this looming dystopia: An article I wrote about masturbation went viral, leading to higher-paying writing assignments, which—if and when they’re completed—will allow me, finally, to break out of the payday cycle. That the attention-getting mechanism here was long-form literary nonfiction, as opposed to a TikTok man-on-the-street series in which I pose uncomfortable questions to couples at the mall, does not change the underlying dynamic. Given all this, can I really be sure I won’t come crawling back to MrBeast in time?”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:sfvp3u2si3ns5jii7y5bnari/bafkreidlxvj2hvdkj3nlovplmjqte2g6oqotmrddosvltrlc2gfsmcy47a)
