Numlock News: August 15, 2025 • History, Facebook, Creators

By Julia Alexander

Walt is out on vacation, and filling in today is Julia Alexander, a media correspondent for Puck News where she covers the ever changing business of sports, entertainment, and the internet through the lens of data. She also writes the Posting Nexus newsletter for anyone interested in data-driven longform thoughts on the way platforms are changing media as we know it.. Follow Julia and the whole crew at Puck here.

Calm Down, It’s Just History Repeatiing

Although we may recognize that eras before our own brought great strife and anxiety, we have a hard time grappling with how common these feelings might have been since those past periods feel so foreign. The lives of people who lived through the drastic technological, financial and societal changes that occurred between 1875 and 1920 are completely alien to us in 2025. That said, however, much of the same general malaise around the unprecedented speed of these changes is incredibly similar to the anxiety-driven hysteria that many of us have faced over the last 20 years for those same technological, financial and societal reasons. As Derek Thompson points out in his excellent newsletter about the year 1910: many of the same grievances and fears we have with new technologies didn’t just become more common in the early 20th century, and they were affecting the same groups as those affiliations are today. As Thompson points out at the beginning of his essay, which relies on the work of Phillip Blom, “Great history books remind us that while history never repeats itself, its themes never stop rhyming, and we would all do well to listen with open ears.”

1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind — Derek Thompson

Netflix’s Viral Magic Finally Comes to Its Film Division

Ah, yes. It’s time for my favorite debate: can a streaming-first movie create the same kind of explosive, zeitgeist effect that a theatrical film can? Until now, most data has pointed to “no.” Movies with theatrical releases constantly outperform the top exclusive films on Netflix and Disney+, data from over the years has found, with one exception: Encanto. The movie, released in November 2021, didn’t cross $100 million at the domestic box office. For those who don’t watch Sunday weekly box office figures, that’s not great for a big Disney Animation film. On Disney+, however, Encanto saw its demand more than triple in January, becoming a genuine word-of-mouth hit as people gained access to the movie. Now, Jeremy Fuster at The Wrap argues that KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s second most-watched film of all time (and currently on track to potentially dethrone Ryan Reynolds and Dwayne Johnson’s Red Notice) could only happen because it was so widely available on Netflix. Most importantly, Fuster argues, is that Netflix finally leaned into giving people the ability to share clips and participate in viral social media trends. A big part of KPop Demon Hunters’ success, after all, came from its star-powered K-pop soundtrack. At one point, all 12 songs off the movie’s soundtrack populated Spotify’s Top 100 Songs chart. Just this week, one of the songs, “Golden,” hit number one on Billboard’s Top 10 chart. Finally, Netflix co-C.E.O. Ted Sarandos can hold his head high when someone brings up an original Netflix movie.

The KPop Demon Hunters Craze Couldn’t Have Happened in Movie Theaters — Jeremy Fuster, The Wrap

Facebook No Longer Cares About Your Friends

In one of those “blink and you may miss it” moments, Meta (neé Facebook) is no longer interested in connecting you and your friends. Mark Zuckerberg and C.F.O. Susan Li aren’t really interested in whether you’re feeling slightly isolated from your communities. Meta is now a company built on media networks, leaning into highly addictive short-form video and using some of the strongest machine learning technologies to keep people scrolling. Why? Finances, of course. Meta’s most recent earnings, which saw stock jump 11 percent immediately following its release, spell it out pretty succinctly: the more people scroll, the more people are incentivized to post and the more ad inventory Meta creates for its partners. Instagram C.E.O. Adam Mosseri hasn’t shied away from saying that Reels is the core future of Instagram’s business, and now we know why. As usual, I find that Ben Thompson had one of the smartest takes on Meta’s transition from social media giant to more traditional media network.

Facebook is Dead; Long Live Meta — Ben Thompson, Stratechery

RIP to Our Neo-Tokyo 21st-Century Dream

John Ganz is my favorite writer working today (my entry below from Derek Thompson is from my favorite thinker working today). His latest essay is on what happened to the Japan-centric futurist 21st-century tech world that was promised to us via every sci-fi movie in the late 90s and early 2000s. Ganz found a number of intriguing potential answers based on the texts he consults — cultures around the inauthenticity of technology, bureaucratic slowness and an adoration of physical hardware that lost its necessity in the reality of cloud-storage, one screen for everything and AI rule. But the heart of Ganz’s piece isn’t an exploration of what went wrong, per se. Rather it fascinated by the nostalgia for this world that no longer seems possible for a generation of millennials who grew up thinking that technology could be cool rather than harmful. He points out that although the neo-Tokyo vibes that dominated sci-fi in the ’00s were built around dystopian storylines, audiences found themselves wanting to envelop themselves in Blade Runner aesthetics, but without the underlying Blade Runner fears. Is it possible to have one without the other? Ganz also gets into Japan’s faltering economy, American envy and cultural clashes that make for a truly enthralling and engaging read.

The Future that Never Was — John Ganz

What If AI is Just Fanfiction

Don’t quote me on this, but I think we’re coming to a point where a few of the more notable generative AI and large language model AI companies are going to start pivoting what their product is and what they’re trying to get to in the long run. Case in point: Character.AI. If you haven’t heard about the company, they basically allow interactive fanfiction for people around the world, creating chatbots that allow people to carry on romances with a version of Draco Malfoy or create puzzles for Sherlock Holmes-like characters to help you solve. Cute. Anyway, the company received a $2.7 billion deal from Google to license its underlying technology, taking two of the company’s top leaders and engineers in the process. Now, Character.AI is pivoting away from its original plans to build toward “AGI” or artificial general intelligence, which is what Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai and others are racing toward. Instead, Character.AI is an “entertainment AI” app, leaning into what the company has already proven it can do well. It is realigning itself with a base of consumers who really only want to talk to Draco Malfoy every day. Kylie Robinson has an excellent new feature on the company’s transition, how the company’s new leaders are thinking about safety as reports emerge about more people becoming unhealthily invested in these chatbots and what it means for the AI industry in general.

Character.AI Gave up on AGI. Now It’s Selling Stories — Kylie Robinson, Wired

Creators Are Coming for Your News Broadcast

As someone who spent close to a decade covering the creator ecosystem, watching as YouTubers and podcasters went from personalities that traditional entertainment and media executives waved off as silly timewasters to the becoming future of those businesses, I’m obsessed with each new story that illustrates the converging of these two worlds. Like, Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson being paid $100 million by Amazon to basically perform a version of his YouTube channel gimmicks with slightly better value. Or Pat McAfee signing an $85 million deal with ESPN. Hollywood has an easier time of integrating non-traditional performers into their own structured projects, but news organizations — the Fox News, MSNBC and CNNs of the world — don’t really know how to go about integrating these creators. However, executives like Mark Thompson and Cesar Conde know they need to, which is why I found my colleague Dylan Byers’ recent piece on a team of conservative podcasters finding a home at Fox News incredibly illuminating.

Creators Are Coming to News — Dylan Byers, Puck News

Why It’s Time to Care About Yahoo Again

When Numlock’s fearless leader, Walt Hickey, tapped me to help out, he mentioned that we could self-plug if we so desired … and I’m taking him up on that offer! What do websites like The Verge and aggregators like Yahoo have in common? They’re lifting some of the addictive, “want-to-have” content designs from power social media platforms like X and bringing them directly to their own platforms. It’s a way for those two companies to fight back against a scourge of problems facing the digital media industry; traffic from Google is depleting more each month, advertisers are moving their dollars to closed circuit search platforms (think tools like ChatGPT). People are seeking out websites less as they rely on tools that bring information to them ... think tools like ChatGPT. But The Verge, which still brings in 20-30 million visitors a month, and Yahoo are seeing positive trends based on the new designs and features they’ve implemented. I spent the last few weeks diving into why this is working, what it means for other island operators (my term for website owners) and empires (my term for large-scale aggregators) in their fight against Big Tech and the notorious “Feeds.”

The Feeds are Winning — Here’s How Media is Fighting Back — Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

Follow Julia and the whole crew at Puck here.

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