when people tell you who they are
check if their actions match
“be on the internet the way that you try to be in real life,” which is just be normal and don’t be a pain in the ass and try to have fun. I think about this stuff theoretically all the time, but in practice, it seems pretty easy. Be chill. Be chill and don’t be stupid about things.
I found that interview with Jia Tolentino after bouncing through a string of pieces trying to pin down what The Wing was or represented.*
Speaking of exclusivity and not falling for marketing about ~community~: I’m on Clubhouse and something about it is… off. Browsing it feels like an obligation to check in on The Discourse™️. Or being forced to go to networking events, after sitting through lectures you aren’t enjoying, given by people not necessarily qualified to lecture, and attended by lots of I-have-a-question-that’s-really-a-statement? It feels like… VC firms telling you how fun works, both literally (🤖: “here’s how to build community, defined as human interactions characterized by signifiers of verbal information exchange, beep boop beep boop whirrrrrr”)**, and figuratively (“creators are the ~future~ and we’re just here to support them 🙏 🤑”). Yes, I’m sure I’m just not in the right rooms or whatever but also: I typically have my phone on silent at all times (shout out to cc video as a default!), so hopping into other people’s conference calls and not being able to read*** — my preferred method of ingesting information — is… a really weird way to spend my downtime? (nb: I also legitimately didn’t know that getting an invite was contingent on someone else sharing their own contacts with CH. If I had known that, I don’t know that I would have accepted the one that was offered to me?) All of that said, it is nice to have an option to chat sort-of-spontaneously with long-distance friends I might not schedule for a zoom catch-up, so… here we are.
All of the above actually makes me happy to see the hastily-named Super Follows (also Spaces) from Twitter. While Super Follows is a paid product, it’s a much less exclusionary product: you don’t have to give up your contact list to use it; given Twitter’s breadth it can’t reasonably be [iOS]-only; and maybe most importantly, because see above about phone-on-silent-24/7 life: it has components addressing more than just audio, or just visuals****. If you can hear someone telling you there’s a cat, but you can’t see the cats, are you really in a community on the Internet?
Request: last year I created a Negotiation Survey. I’d love your response if you didn’t see it originally, or if you’ve changed jobs since responding the first time. Thanks 😊
some other stuff:
sort of related to the CH discussion above: don’t spend real money, or your bitcoin gainz, on NFTs (because they’re arguably worse for the planet than regular crypto mining*****).
meta-newsletter-thinkpiece of the day
A user guide for a service targeted at law enforcement clients indicates the company’s technology can send a warning when it detects someone it identifies as Uighur; a consumer-facing product offers a feature to sort by race individuals who pass in front of its cameras… screenshots from a consumer-facing Dahua platform for examining footage captured using company cameras show a “race” filter available to some users… Modesto City Schools paid $362,000 to buy and install 57 Dahua camera kits in buses in October.
ok wow, rude
I don’t actually watch a lot of yt but I overhear a decent amount of it, and I always enjoy overhearing MKBHD. Also, it’s just dawned on me that Marques is probably one of the primary reasons I can have my fake theory of “we all want to be YouTubers”.
[shop talk] on having and developing good product judgment
in case you need more arguments in favor of a sustained revolution against commuting, “visit clients more frequently and in more fun ways” is one I hadn’t thought of, but I like it a lot. And I don’t know how long it will be until I’m back in a stiflingly humid, in-person C2 class again (😭), but yes, I am all-in on the social-will-go-local prediction. It’ll probably be in late 2024, though, and the rainforests and polar ice caps might be gone by that point (😭😭😭)
* as with many things, reading or listening to Jia interviews is a better use of time than reading anything about the Wing’s implosion that doesn’t also include a running total of how much money the WeWork founder has extracted from Softbank at the expense of most WeWork employees, while selling a similarly unrealistic community-based vision for the world. And how much he will still likely collect in the future!
** from the CH Community guidelines on how to… interact… with other humans… in a way that other… humans… will find convincing:
strategically unmuting is just as important! This means going off mute for a few seconds to laugh, acknowledge what the speaker said, signal that you want to speak next, or just be more present in "hangout" style conversations.
“Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha. Ha ha! I understood that reference. I would find it acceptable if you would cease speaking within the next 25 second-length time units such that I might resume and/or continue my own vocal announcements. This transmission is intended to remind you that I continue to exist in this exchange, despite my not being physically visible.” - 🤖
*** I’m sure there’s a VC-funded product out there right now, which would help me solve the problem(?) of not physiologically being capable of reading other content while consuming CH audio, and it’s just a question of my puny human brain not [yet] being equipped to multitask on that level. This all reminds me that I have a vegetable garden to plan.
**** there is a v important conversation that should be raised about not only the exclusivity but the accessibility of CH: if your app’s content is completely auditory, but the navigation is visual and ignores key aspects of accessible design built into iOS, should I believe the marketing that you’re building a community for everyone?
***** emphasis added — this could describe general crypto trading, not only art:
Crypto art buyers could be using smaller and smaller amounts of their more and more valuable currency. Or they could just convert crypto into cash at these insane rates then turn the money around into art. The point is that many fear crypto art buyers are not making economic decisions about purchasing something with a portion of their income. Rather that they seem to be frantically trading symbols that only notionally correspond to what most people think of as money…
and on the “democratization” aspect:
That’s the problem with the discussions of NFTs. It’s not about the art. It’s not even all about the money. (That’s not entirely true. The artists are all wondering why they can’t get some of this seemingly free money.)