The most-hyped Prince George restaurant opening in years (ever?)

Plus: What is viral anymore?And the UNBC roots of an accused leaker of internationl intelligence

November 09, 2023

I’m hard-pressed to think of a restaurant opening in this city that has come with the same level of hype as Red Tomato Pies. People get pysched up about chains but I don’t remember Carl’s Jr. having as many regular posts in Facebook groups asking when the opening was coming. Likewise, places like Ivy’s and Wall of Fame were anticipated by the folks who knew about them but that seemed more limited? Regardless, the opening date is here, and it’s next week:

Once this happens, we can officially call it on new pizza places and focus on more regional cuisines.

The UNBC roots of an accused leaker of international intelligence

I’ll admit I haven’t been following the case of Cameron Ortis very closely. If you share that admission, here’s the quick version:

According to his LinkedIn profile, Ortis studied at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George from 1994 to 1998. He would later credit one of the professors there, Heather Smith, in his PhD dissertation for laying “the groundwork for a continuing interest and passion for the study of international relations.”

During his studies, Ortis worked part-time as a bouncer at a local club. Years later, he shared stories of some of the hooligans he had to deal with, friends recalled.

From there he went to McMaster and UBC and an international career to his current situation.

What is viral anymore?

In yesterday’s newsletter, I linked to a story about a video from a pro-Palestine rally in Prince George that was reported as having gone viral via TikTok and Twitter/X. I also wrote this line to go with it: “I feel like the TikTok ecosystem has resulted in far more viral moments from Prince George than any previous iteration of social media.”

What I didn’t write, but felt at the time, is that the definition of going viral has also changed to a large degree. In the past, if something went viral, it seemed like pretty much everyone on the internet — or at least everyone on a certain site — would see it. Certainly, if something from Prince George went viral in the 2010 to 2017 version of the internet, it would almost certainly cross one of my timelines naturally. But now it seems like things from the city can go viral without really being seen by people in the city — I follow the account that posted this video and it never crossed my timeline until there was a news story about. Which I think means “going viral” now means something different than it did a decade ago.

I was playing with this idea in my head when I received yesterday’s edition of Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick, an internet culture newsletter. And, lucky me, he wrote about exactly this — in the context of support for Palestine online — in a post title Welcome to the Vapor Web. You can read the full thing here, but this is the part I’ll highlight.

And TikTok’s algorithm is almost the inverse of something like Facebook’s. Its network effect isn’t based mass appeal snowballing into global virality, but about identifying niches. Your TikTok and my TikTok will never be the same and that increasingly means that my internet and your internet are not the same. And if you actually tried to view TikTok like you would Facebook, it would even make sense.

He goes on to demonstrate this by sharing the most-viewed videos and hash tags on TikTok over the past six months, all of which you have almost definitely not seen.

Which is to say that the internet doesn’t make sense in aggregate anymore and trying to view it as a monolith only gives you bad, confusing, and, oftentimes, wrong impressions of what’s actually going on….

I’m going to call our current moment the Vapor Web. Because there is actually more internet with more happening on it — and with bigger geopolitical stakes — than ever before. And yet, it’s nearly impossible to grab ahold of it because none of it adds up into anything coherent. Simply put, we’re post-viral now.

Let’s take that back to trying to be someone who has their pulse on what’s going on in this city. Previously, following the big conversations on Facebook and Twitter was relatively simple to do because the algorithms of both those websites was at least somewhat interested in showing me content from my city that was being viewed and shared by a lot of other people. But TikTok, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have that same interest — which means the conversations from Prince George on TikTok are largely being had and served to people with little to no connection to the city itself. For example, this is, I think, the biggest video on the website with the Prince George, B.C. hashtag up until the aforementioned one from the Palestine rally:

To my credit, I knew about this — but from Facebook and Instagram, not TikTok. In fact, I had no idea the Open Door Cafe had a TikTok account but here they are with 1.2 million views about a Starbucks opening nearby — though I feel safe in saying most of the viewers and commenters are people whom the algorithm decided wanted small business/coffee shop content, not people based in Prince George because I clicked through on the top comments and the majority are based in completely other locales.

And I should say, if the other top videos from Prince George were like this, I don’t think I would have quite the same theory. However, this is — I think — the next-biggest video under the #princegeorgeBC hashtag:

Which is… a video but yeah, idk, I certainly can’t imagein building a story around how it went viral on one of the biggest and fastest-growing social networking sites in the world. None of this is aimed at discrediting the videos mentioned here — they are reaching people and doing their thing. But the extent to which they are part of the local conversation certainly seems detached from their relative heft online in a way that I don’t think we saw in the past. Which means some combination of the definition and relevance of going viral has changed and/or I am just getting old.

If you read this far and you want a Bluesky invite code, here’s one for you. First come, first served:

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