Meatspace is Lora and Sarah’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
New to Meatspace? Sign up here: meatspace.substack.com
Follow us on twitter @itsmeatspace + on Insta @itsmeatspace
Dear friends,
Let’s hear it for the law!
Yesterday The Mueller Report™ was released, offering an opportunity for everyone to tell jokes on Twitter. Vice also just had some dude reading it aloud all day, taking brief water breaks. A parching task!
Though you too can read the whole damn redacted thing online for free, Barnes and Noble is selling print copies of it, because it can. So is the Washington Post! Profiting off the presidency and the drama of it all is incidentally what trump also is doing. Can’t wait to just rent the CD from the library and then illegally download it onto our red iPod nanos!
Nothing brings ppl together like...when they are on the same side of looming litigious proceedings! ICYMI, Hulu and Netflix each made their own documentaries about Fyre Fest (both engaged w central themes of dystopic music festival, droopy cheese sandwiches, slightly sunburned guys wearing polos; only one had water bottle bl*wj*b bargaining; neither adequately grappled w the implications for Bahamian workers). As with elizabeth holmes we say the more the merrier, content-wise. But the content creators were not content (homographs :) ) to share the spotlight. And now, both Hulu and Netflix are under threat of subpoena for using insane behind the scenes footage (including of Chanel Iman getting bitten by a pig) that apparently belonged to the Festival!!!!
Patagonia, after leaving countless fintech arms cold, is suing Anheuser Busch for jacking their logo and their name by selling Patagonia beer. To be fair also it’s the name of a region. So.
We know this isn’t technically a tech company, but McKinsey is also facing legal threats!! A dogged billionaire is accusing the consulting giant of hiding conflicts of interest while consulting companies going through bankruptcy. Read this truly spicy NYT piece about this yearslong legal/reputational battle (h/t Sam W).
And in further bad looks for McKinsey, NY Mag popped off with this report on how Puerto Rico is paying them millions for consulting.
Wish we could expedite Kim K’s bar exam so she could weigh the heck in!!
And, in further litigious news, check out our interview with Summer Emerald, the painter jonesing to get sued by Jeff Bezos.
CHECK MATE
Twitter stopped accepting verification applications in the wake of Charlottesville, when the platform blue-checked Jason Kessler whose central claim to fame was quite simply being a white supremacist. People were like, maybe you should reevaluate this system! 17 months later Twitter is still doing so, apparently, but in the meantime has sneakily verified public figures like @jack’s mom and dad and also Tom Brady. Verification shouldn’t matter so much but unfort it does bc otherwise you can be impersonated or more harassed. Verify Meatspace!!
This is in all seriousness very sad - apparently at LEAST 259 people died between 2011 and 2017 because the deceased was taking a risky photo. These deadly selfies are called “killfies” which we cannot help but think belies the accidental nature of these things! We read a good feature in Outside mag on the phenomenon and then this weekend another girl fell off the Ozarks mid-shot. Killfies strike again.
FOREVER EVER?
Some things are forever. Such as the tat this guy got of a QR code linking to a YouTube vid of an epic soccer win. But then rival fans got the link taken down. So now his flesh permanently links to...nothing! Which incidentally same.
This seems as good an opportunity as any to deliver the PSA that iPhone cameras can scan QR codes! A lot of ppl seem not to know this, which we discovered when we made a Meatspace QR code (shoutout to Nell G for prodigious usage). We love QR codes!!!! Which are apparently huge in China (h/t Russell V). Here’s ours if you want to share Meatspace on the go lol.
Anyway, it seems the youths are going the opposite direction, opting for total impermanence with their insta posts. According to Mel, teens delete all but their most recent posts. Obviously:
IN PRIME
As Sarah has learned all too well fml, robocallers are a plague.
This makes it all the stranger that Amazon has taken to cold-calling its Whole Foods visa holders to tell them that they’ve won a sweepstakes.
This is what improbably happened to Bloomberg reporter, who got a random call from Amazon/Whole Foods offering him a $10,000 prize and prompting him to enter his social number (?!) on an amazon site (he did not accept bc ethics). Amazon lists the winners with first name and last initial on their site. We like their style!
If u thought amazon prime and its robot, etc., were ambitious, try the services trying to send packages to the MOON!!!
Also, did u know amazon owns twitch?
REPLY GUYS
Reply guys generally suck on tweets, when they are doing things such as mansplaining. But we love when u guys reply to us!!!!!!! For example from this week alone, shoutout to Anna K for replying about how great last week’s Reply All epi was (it is great Lora listened!!) and shoutout to Sam M for emailing us this unhinged further reading about Colonel Sanders’s disturbing presence at Ultra in Pitchfork. Have something 2 share? Please reply to this email!
OUR INFLUENCE?
We are not influencers (or insta memers, who are unionizing).
But we have formed a habit of texting each other “our influence?” every time we see a piece related to a topic we’ve previously covered in a Meatspace. We thought you, too, might be interested to see further updates on topics we’ve previously discussed:
VC is showing interest in astrology, per The New York Times.
Our influence? Issue 43 was about astrology x technology.
Legacy art auction house Phillips is commissioning artists working on digital art.
Our influence? We did an art issue on Monday.
Tarzan of the Peeps in this New Yorker Cartoon?
Our influence? We mentioned Peeps last week.
TASTY BITES
100 Car2Go rental cars were stolen in Chicago!! Car2Go promised it wasn’t a hack. (Motherboard)
Lots of juice in this tick tock about Facebook’s terrible horrible year and a bit. (Wired)
The Information released its VC diversity index. Twelve companies tied for last place with no women or POC partners. (The Information)
When u discover ur face is being used to train facial recognition algorithms. (Financial Times)
In the throes of the Mueller news cycle yesterday, FB quietly updated an old “Keeping Facebook Secure” post to disclose that millions of Insta passwords were stored in plain text (!!) (Twitter)
“We don’t know who needs this right now, but...” there’s a new podcast from Mailchimp about times when people almost quit, but didn’t. (Going Through It)
India bans TikTok (Quartz)
Serena Williams announced that she has VC firm called Serena Ventures! (AdAge)
We love Alison Griswold’s Oversharing newsletter so much. Here’s her extremely informative guide to Uber IPO! Forget printing Mueller report she printed the 495 page Uber S-1!! (Oversharing)
Helvetica is getting a face-lift! (Wired)
Fondly,
Sarah and Lora