A Divorced Adult’s Guide to Kids’ Culture: What Is Omoggle?
In this episode of “Out of Touch,” we explore the online virtual character creation competition Omoggle and investigate the hack that paralyzed schools across the country. We also examine a viral music trend created by AI and discuss how the technology we use every day could kill us all.
Organize a trophy hunt on Omoggle.
The website Omoggle is gaining popularity. As you can read in my glossary of Gen A and Gen Z slang , “mogging” is the act of being more attractive than another, usually intentionally or aggressively: if a young man is talking to a woman and a more attractive man steps up and takes his place, he’s officially “mogged.” Omoggle turns this attractiveness conflict into a game. It’s a competition between players, where a user uploads a photo of their face and compares it to another user’s photo. Artificial intelligence then analyzes the participants’ facial features to determine who is “mogging” and who is the one “mogging.” It may be named after the now-defunct Omegle chatroom, but Omoggle is more like “Hot or Not.” Only more disturbing, because the winner of this attractiveness contest is determined not by other users’ votes, but by an AI programmed to reinforce incel ideas.
Over the past 10 years, incels and members of the “male community” have developed and disseminated a widespread, spontaneous, and shared misconception about what women find attractive. Despite being a group of self-selected men who have little contact with women, incels believe they understand what women find attractive better than women themselves. According to this theory, all women are looking for a certain set of facial features—a strong jaw, high cheekbones, and so on—and if you don’t have them, you don’t stand a chance, so why even try? “Omoggle” is essentially part of incels’ constant attempts to convince themselves that the reason women don’t want to talk to them is because of the geometry of their eye corners, not because they’re weird.
Last week, computers in schools across the country broke down.
For us older generations, a temporary website downtime is probably a minor inconvenience, but when Canvas went down this week, right in the middle of exams, it came as a real shock to many members of Generations Z and A. Canvas is a learning management system that manages schedules, homework, grades, and more at nearly every college and high school in the country, so the hacking of the site by hackers practically paralyzed the educational process. The hacking group responsible for the breach, called ShinyHunters, threatened to publish user information unless an unspecified ransom was paid, but fortunately, the site appears to have fended off the hackers, and Canvas is back online—but for how long ?
Shinyhunters: A New Generation of Hackers
The Shinyhunters group, which perpetrated the Canvas hack, takes its name from the Pokémon franchise. Shiny Pokémon are rare, and according to security experts , Shinyhunters appear to specialize in finding rare data. The group is believed to be part of a larger collective of young hackers called “The Com,” most of whom are from the US and UK. While other groups within The Com collaborate with Russian ransomware groups, Shinyhunters do not. Their activities focus on extorting data leaks, i.e., “We’ll release all this data unless you pay us,” rather than the typical ransomware message of “We’ve locked down your systems and will unlock them when you pay us.” Shinyhunters have been particularly active recently, having attacked Ticketmaster, Wattpad, Pixlr, Bonobos, BigBasket, Mathway, Unacademy, MeetMindful, and other companies.
Viral Videos of the Week: Lyrics
Artificial intelligence continues to take over all areas of human activity. The latest proof is the popularity of “lyrics” videos on TikTok. The concept is simple: you enter text messages as lyrics into song-creating programs like Suno or Udio, turn them into a song and video, and make people laugh. While these videos feature a variety of musical styles, gospel music tends to perform best, perhaps due to the contrast between the mundane nature of text messages and the drama of music. Here are a few examples:
Bonus: Since I sometimes have funny conversations with my teenager, I made up my own.
If you want to listen to your computer sing to you all day long, check out the SongText section where you’ll find nearly 30,000 more examples.
Tech nightmares are being discussed on Reddit
Artificial intelligence is certainly fun, right? Incidentally, young people spend a lot of time thinking about how the technologies we’ve already developed will likely kill us in the near future. It’s not that there’s more anxiety now than in their youth, but that the options have expanded. In reality, we used to only have to worry about nuclear weapons, but judging by this Reddit thread , young people fear hundreds of different technological nightmares that could happen in the next few years or even tomorrow, including:
I could talk about this all day, but I won’t. You can read the discussion thread yourself if you don’t have anything to worry about.