Hey, I'm Kate Lindsay, and you're listening to I-C-Y-M-I-M-I, or in case you missed it,

Slate's podcast about internet culture.

And back with us today, friend of the show, culture writer Angelina Mata.

Welcome Angelina.

Thank you. I've always wanted to be referred to as like a friend of the pod.

Yeah. It's like the title I've been trying to attain my entire life. So thank you for that. Yeah, no. And I feel like when you're on your third I-Cy-Y-M-I episode, that gives you friend of the pod status. We should do jackets like how S&L does the life-time. I should get like a punch card also. Yeah, yeah. Redeemable for what? We don't know. Well, we'll figure that out. And I know you're thinking for this episode of particular, finally, finally you were on because you have been wanting to do this episode for weeks. You've been in my ear. But I am going to make you wait a little longer before we sort of introduce the topic, because first we need to talk about something that I'm sorry to say, in life at least is even more pressing and this is the new iPhone update iOS 26.

Angelina has this been inflicted upon you yet?

So I knew you were going to talk about this so I checked and yeah, I think it just updated when I was sleeping at one point yeah a non-consensual

that's my number one that's my first that's my first thing I didn't ask for this but it sounds like

you aren't as wrecked by it as me I am wrecked no see I I read your essay and I was like oh man I, I hope this doesn't happen to me, but it already happened. It already did. And I didn't, it didn't really phase me in the same way. And so I really feel like there might be a, maybe a generational difference here. No, I fear this is the case. And the essay I wrote is for my newsletter embedded. I wrote about how this new iPhone update is trying to kill me.

And yeah, I would say there's been a real divide of responses.

There's the people who are maybe over 30 who are like, this is ruining my life and it's

borderline scary to use.

And then there's Angelina, a spry 20-something, who it's like nothing even happened.

But if this hasn't been inflicted upon you yet, and you were over 30, if you're under 20, I guess

it doesn't matter. But, and you're over 30, what they've introduced is this thing called

liquid glass. And it is essentially that your phone is now a bunch of transparent layers.

And what they're really sort of tweaking the design for, in my opinion, is actually not for

your phone. It's for when we all inevitably wear meta glasses or Apple glasses. It's when we're

like fully in a sort of VR version of what we now think of as phones,

but what our tech overlords are hoping will be this sort of omnipresent way we live our lives,

where we're kind of in the phone.

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