So much to say, but not a lot of time to say it as I was wrapping up work to enjoy the holidays and take just a hair more time off besides.
Here are some recommended reads that I hope you might consider curling up with, as I have, during the Christmas-to-New-Year’s interregnum.
See you in 2024, Pennyheads.
“The Story of Reality Winner, America’s Most Unlikely Leaker,” New York Magazine — I became aware of Kerry Howley’s work through the excellent Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em podcast. Ahead of the upcoming biopic — the second, even — here’s the in-depth 2017 story that inspired it.
“What went wrong with ‘the Metaverse’? An insider’s postmortem,” VentureBeat — This is a great lesson for technology marketers: Be prepared to defend your notional “category” against very large companies that can change your industry’s agenda and perception at a whim. “Ironically, [author and coiner of the term ‘metaverse’] Neal Stephenson himself has frequently insisted that virtual reality is absolutely not a prerequisite for the Metaverse, since flat screens display immersive virtual worlds just fine. But here again, the tech media instead ratified Meta’s flawed VR-centric vision by constantly illustrating articles about the Metaverse with photos of people happily donning headsets to access it — inadvertently setting up a straw man destined to soon go ablaze.”
“When the New York Times Lost Its Way,” 1843 Magazine — When its own journalistic scandals hit, the Gray Lady and its alums don’t do anything small. (You might remember the Times’s gigantic and very public performance review of fabulist Jayson Blair from twenty years ago.) Here, former opinion editor James Bennett tells his side of the story regarding his own very public dismissal from the Times following the publication of Sen. Tom Cotton’s infamous “Send in the Troops” piece. At about 16,000 words, he outlines a lot of the reasons why I didn’t pursue a career in media or academia — the groupthink is just too exhausting, whether or not you broadly agree with said group’s goals.
“How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco,” WIRED — Smart doorbells. Smart phones. Nextdoor.Com. Now, add that mix to a gutted police department, rampant outdoor drug use, and feckless politicians. (Like, literally… The people running “Baghdad by the Bay” have zero feck. No feck at all.) Throw in a dash of vigilantism, both digital and alarmingly physical. “You wanted to surveil. You end up surveilled.”
“David Byrne Isn’t Himself. Or Any Self, Really.“ The New York Times — For some reason, I really want to re-watch Stop Making Sense now. “Yes, to me, there’s a growing sense that lots of different things in the world are related to one another and connected in ways that we are still discovering. It’s not quite religious, but it is amazing.”
“Robert Downey Jr.’s Third Act,” Vanity Fair — Honestly, what an amazing turnaround and series of re-inventions that this man has had. “‘Robert has certainly lived a complicated life. He understands the stakes, he understands loss, he understands the turns life can take between ups and downs. He’s always looking for that level of depth, that level of complexity. I think he knows that’s what we all come to movies for in the first place.’”
“He’s Got $250 Million to Spend on Communist Revolution,” The Free Press — Meet the leader of the bourgeoise-hadeen. “He is covered in tattoos, including a double portrait of Stalin and Mao inked onto his thigh. He looks as if the phrase ‘Fuck you, Mom and Dad’ were a person.” In this particular case, “Mom and Dad” are the family behind telecommunications giant Cox Communications. Fascinating story.
“Tyrian purple: The lost ancient pigment that was more valuable than gold,” BBC — I feel like everyone went through the grade-school history lesson about how purple was regarded as an especially regal color. But did you know that more than 10,000 sea snails had to die to produce even one gram of the… ummm… dye? A great read for those textile historian-archeologists out there.
“The Skyhook Solution,” Aeon — This article proposes an interesting use for space junk, which is a category that could even include the International Space Station in about a decade. This new function: ballast for a kind of low-orbit launch-trebuchet. While you’re at it, check out SpinLaunch, which takes a different approach to propulsion-lite/propulsion-free launches.
“Excuse me, but the industries AI is disrupting are not lucrative,” Erik Hoel — I get the point he’s making, and it’s a valid one. That said, half-dismissing the impact of the A.I. revolution as only impacting non-lucrative industries is perhaps cold comfort to those who make their living in those industries, who have perhaps found them just-lucrative-enough. I’m certainly rethinking how I approach my own trade in the A.I. context, and marcomm leadership has been a fairly “lucrative” career.