Hi, welcome to your Weekend.

When it comes to the way people under the age of 25 use their phones, I try to have what Zen Buddhists and certain tech CEOs call a beginner’s mindset. For example, not too long ago I learned that my daughter shares her location through her phone with two dozen college friends and that they all do the same with her. It’s a little hard to reconcile that kind of behavior with the privacy discourse in media, tech and policy circles, in which the idea of an advertisement following you around the internet is practically considered a form of stalking. 

“Chill, man,” I told myself about my daughter’s smartphone habits. And I chilled. 

But then I read Erin Woo’s cover story this week about how young people are using a Snap subscription service called Snapchat+ and I felt the old man in me awakening. The features of the service—which some people at Snap have described as social media “superpowers”—include a friend ranking system. Basically, it tells you where you are on the relationship podium for other Snap friends, using Snap data. 

The teenagers and young adults Erin spoke to for the story had conflicted feelings about the friend ranking feature. It could make them feel awesome at times and miserable at others. At the same time, many of them were very insightful about their fixation on the technology. “It just makes me wonder why I care so much about things like that,” one 17-year-old told Erin. “Like, why it takes up so much of my thoughts.” 

That's a little heartbreaking, but I also don’t think an adult could have expressed ambivalence any more articulately.

Now onto this Weekend’s stories...

The Big read 

How a Snap Sleeper Hit Got In the Heads of Its Young Subscribers

Snapchat+ has become a sleeper hit for Snap, but some of its young users are making themselves neurotic by checking where they rank on their friends' lists of top Snap buddies.

Q&A

Dean Phillips on His Bid to Disrupt Biden—and Trump

The Minnesota congressman talks AI, TikTok and his effort to challenge Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Watching: The Handsome Scientologist 

There’s a new heartthrob on TikTok: Sebastian the Scientologist. Sebastian, who’s last name is unknown, is an attractive young man who stands for hours outside Los Angeles’ Scientology headquarters, trying to persuade passersby to join the controversial religion. As EJ Dickson writes for Rolling Stone, Sebastian catapulted to internet fame this month when he inadvertently ended up in videos of anti-Scientology protests. The protestors hoped their TikToks would bring awareness to the danger of the cult-like religion; instead, viewers fixated on the handsome young worker in the background, flooding the comments with the #SaveSebastian hashtag. The obsession has translated into real life too: The protestors told Rolling Stone that people have been crashing their protests to hug and harass Sebastian. It’s a wild story that encapsulates the danger of the internet today: well-meaning influencers turning controversy into content, only to lose control of the narrative entirely. —Margaux 

Generating: Buy-a-GPT 

After months of delay, the GPT store is finally open. If you’ve ever used ChatGPT, you know how much trial and error it takes to get the AI to respond how you’d like (for example, when I want feedback on my writing, I have to tell ChatGPT to “pretend you’re a literary critic at The New Yorker” for the bot to actually be useful). With customized GPTs, users can feed ChatGPT personalized information and give it a goal. For example, at OpenAI’s Dev Day, CEO Sam Altman fed ChatGPT videos of him giving startup advice, and instructed the customized GPT to give founders useful tips based on the videos. The store, available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, features everything from user-made writing coaches, travel agents and golf analysts. A wave of layoffs in tech and finance this week won't help dispel fears that AI will make many jobs extinct. But it's a great time to test whether AI tools can currently replace a litany of services on the cheap. —Margaux 

Reading: Austin’s Answer to Homelessness 

Last year on a vacation I took to Texas, I was stunned by the contrast in the homeless situations in Houston and Austin. I wasn’t surprised that I saw no homeless encampments anywhere in the several days I spent in the former city as I had previously read about Houston’s remarkable success in moving people from the streets to shelters. Austin was another story. Encampments lined the shoreline of Lady Bird Lake, resembling the clusters of tents that have long been fixtures of places like San Francisco and Seattle. Now Austinites are working on an innovative approach to building low cost shelter for the homeless. The New York Times reports that a large and growing village on the outskirts of town is poised to grow to nearly 2,000 homes over the next few years, mostly tiny homes and recreational vehicles. It’s encouraging to see solutions to what has come to be viewed as an intractable problem in so many other places. More cities ought to pay close attention to what Texas is doing. —Nick       

Makes You Think

Call it Baby Shark Tank.

Until next Weekend, thanks for reading.

—Nick