Pylocatabasis
On Saving LinkedIn, Competition, Crypto, Writing
There’s a word I have often used in my various online bios as a kind of conversation starter: “pylocatabasist.” (Pronounced like “pie-low-cat-TABB-uh-sist.” Maybe.)
The word comes from an otherwise throwaway exchange in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum:
“We'll have to see," Belbo said. He rummaged in his drawer and took out some sheets of paper. "Potio-section..." He looked at me, saw my bewilderment. "Potio-section, as everybody knows, of course, is the art of slicing soup. No, no," he said to Diotallevi. "It's not the department, it's a subject, like Mechanical Avunculogratulation or Pylocatabasis. They all under the same heading of Tetrapyloctomy."
"What's tetra...?" I asked.
"The art of splitting hairs four ways. This is the department of useless techniques. Mechanical Avunculogratulation, for example, is how to build machines for greeting uncles. We're not sure, though, if Pylocatabasis belongs, since it's the art of being saved by a hair. Somehow that doesn't seem completely useless."
Absolutely not completely useless. It’s been the leitmotif of my career, actually.
As I was putting together this edition of A Penny Ahead, it occurred to me that the emergent theme was about saving things. Enjoy.
Recommendations
“It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird,” Business Insider — I used to joke that LinkedIn needed its “dril” — a random, surrealist element. After all, “Weird Twitter” is a thing and, to be honest, it’s glorious. “Weird LinkedIn,” however, is devoid of humor. I once valued its culture of self-policing (e.g., “Facebook is that way!”), but that has degraded horribly. Further, much of the community that remains has become ignorant of its own excesses. It is becoming a performative, irony-unburdened hustle-culture hellscape, inviting ridicule. (I write this, however, hastening to add that if LinkedIn were to accidentally mass-delete its users, I could probably get by on Intellectual Digital’s Adam Harrington alone.)
“If we want crypto to succeed, we’ve got to give X the boot,” Blockworks — My favorite things — science fiction, jazz, heavy metal, and even crypto — tend to have one thing in common: they thrive as subcultures, enter the mainstream, periodically remember that subculture-status is where they belong, and begin the cycle anew. University College Dublin’s Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis observes that such a return “might be exactly what we need for crypto to succeed.” He laments that “we appear trapped in a toxic relationship with one [social media platform] in particular, X (the artist formerly known as Twitter)” — which he identifies as the mainstreaming force we must reject in order to rediscover our not-so-distant heritage as an underground ecosystem. Honestly, I’m with him. I am on Twitter purely out of professional obligation, since it stubbornly remains the foundational I/O interface of crypto news and opinion. I joined Twitter when it launched and, even as a Senior VP of a digital practice at The World’s Largest Public Relations Firm, I managed to keep the little blue bird at arm’s length. Hoping at least one of the many alternatives Dylan-Ennis identifies catches fire.
“Confessions of a Viral AI Writer,” Wired — I was encouraged that Vauhini Vara’s experience with ChatGPT so closely mirrored my own, if in a much more profound and emotional context. “AI could write a sentence, then. If I wanted to understand the relationship between AI and literature, I felt like I had to start by acknowledging that. I could use AI to do some of the most essential labor of a writer—to come up with the right words. What more could I do with it? And then, whatever I could do, there was that other question. Should I?“ To-date, AI has helped synthesize thoughts and concepts for me, but its handling of the words themselves too often come off like a transcript between ELIZA and a United Airlines phone agent. (More on my AI-related views.)
“Competition, Not Antitrust, Is Humbling the Tech Giants,” Reason — When the DoJ went after Microsoft, twenty-something me kept asking “Is this really about… web browsers?” Bundled with the Windows operating system, the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser was mainly a tool for downloading Netscape or some other alternative. You didn’t have to be a particularly savvy user to understand that Explorer, at the time, was broken — perhaps intentionally so. Much later, politicians would claim (implausibly) that U.S. v. Microsoft cleared the way for Google, Facebook, and more. For regulation to mean anything at all, it should be based on a set of very few, very narrowly defined rules. Otherwise, it just comes off as capricious. Given that our politicians call up these business leaders to explain simple business models and demand why campaign emails end up in dad’s spam folder, I could be forgiven for dismissing current and future antitrust efforts as unserious and historically unaware, even if I fear that their consequences could be dramatic.
Bottom Story
When I first discussed influencerdom in the context of l’affaire Bitboy, I had no idea it would escalate this quickly and dramatically.
Begun, the Jerry Springerfication of crypto has.
@Phil much appreciate the comment from a person with your PR career. Thank you!