Meatspace is Lora and Sarah’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
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Dear friends,
If our Instagram networks are any indication, people who are not currently old love sharing simulations of what they would look like if (and maybe when) they are.
Yes we are talking about everybody using FaceApp the app that wizens your face!
This hearkens back to the whole Snapchat gender filter thing of like 2 months ago. And the trend of posting pictures of yourself aging over the natural course of a decade (Puberty Challenge). And also that we literally had FaceApp in 2017 (how quickly we forget).
Then, naturally, there was backlash to the fun: Ppl were like, don’t trust/sign away the rights to your face in perpetuity to this app that was founded in Saint Petersburg, Russia! But then inevitably there was backlash to the backlash: Don’t xenophobically demonize all Russian tech. And then there were the more nuanced takes, about the particular challenges people of color face when it comes to photo surveillance. Then backlash again, of the galaxy-brain variety: You know who really has all our face data? Facebook.
It’s def good that ppl are being more cautious about giving up privacy now than, say, when we were churning personal info into Farmville. MIT Tech Review confirms that FaceApp is prob not building a giant database to facially recognize us (comforting) but there are already plenty of other databases containing our likenesses scraped by the web (less comforting).
(Btw, peep this map of everywhere in the country where facial recognition tech is being used/local police have partnerships with Ring.)
But the learning curve is bumpy! if this news cycle illustrated anything, it’s that being aware of the problem is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t mean there’s a clear fix. And also that ppl love to look at themselves, even (especially?) when wrinkly.
Or, as Charlie Warzel succinctly puts it: “FaceApp Shows We Care About Privacy but Don’t Understand It.”
For the most cogent analysis of all, read Sydney Fussell in The Atlantic on the bleak fallacy of framing privacy—or things like climate change—as an individual choice. “We have much less control than we think we do, especially when it comes to how other people behave,” he writes. “FaceApp is everyone’s problem, but its viral use is nobody’s fault.”
LEXICON VALLEY
“A shrug so powerful it inverts u.” That’s how one person described the upside-down smiley, according to Katherine Miller’s Buzzfeed piece on what has become the emoji of the summer! The upside-down smiley is the facial embodiment of the “this is fine” fire meme, but more whimsically nihilistic, and people love to communicate w it. Another emoji coming to keyboards near u is the blue Ford pickup truck, which was secretly proposed by Ford as a gonzo masculinity marketing scheme.
Like emoji and many of our other favorite things the word “adjacent” is mostly able to shine on the internet, where it is used in ways that are only adjacent to its meaning. This reflects our society’s recent looseness with language (aka “semantic-drift”) and general snarkiness, writes Jonah Engel Bromwich in the NYT!
Clearly our brains are already broken but in case they aren’t broken enough, Elon wants to drill tunnels into them! The latest front in bio-hacking is putting threads in ur head that could eventually help you control your smartphone with your mind; or more helpfully, solve paralysis.
And tysm to Lara L for introducing us to the horrifying phenomenon that is children’s YouTube videos with dialogue generated by…..AI!
BUBBLING UP
Much like the bitcoin bubble and the Dutch Golden Age tulip bubble before it, we may be reaching saturation point for podcasting.
This amusing Styles piece looks at how ppl think recording themselves talking is very easy and so they dabble in the medium, only to give up because it is not easy and Casper won’t sponsor them. And how other ppl, like marketing gurus, can become very successful by just chatting on a hot mic, despite not being Terry Gross. (who, by the way, advised in the NYT that you should “be funny, if possible” to improve at the art of conversation).
Okay but also Substack (the platform upon which we publish) just raised $15 million in VC, including from bigwigs like Andreeson Horowitz. So we may be reaching peak newsletter sooner than we care to think. And frankly, then, the joke will be on us! (Sort-of-new and also good Substack newsletters we just subscribed to: Maya Kosoff’s Pithy Outcomes, Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day; Emily Singer’s chips + dip)
Speaking of bubbles (ha!) The seltzer industry is also apparently approaching a bubble. There are so many brands (yum!) and only so many vaguely wellness-oriented thirst millennials to drink it. (While we are talking water, we would be remiss if we did not tell u that cursed water brand liquid death is in talks to get $10 million more in funding lol).
WORKOUT/WALKOUT
Grimes posted that she plays with swords w/ her trainer in her elaborate workout routine, and also that she did surgery on her eye to eliminate blue light. Naturally she did this as part of a promo for BRANDs (Stella McCartney and adidas). One outcome (of prob many) of dating Elon is like...ppl can’t tell if ur kidding about acting unhinged.
Another woman who organized the Google walkout has left the company to continue her work at the AI Now Institute at NYU! She explained in an internal letter that part of the reason for her departure was bc “Google, in the conventional pursuit of quarterly earnings, is gaining significant and largely unchecked power to impact our world (including in profoundly dangerous ways, such as accelerating the extraction of fossil fuels and the deployment of surveillance technology).”
And over a million ppl RSVP’ed yes to a Facebook event inviting them to storm Area 51 and free the aliens. This prompted the Air Force to release statements like “please don’t.” And then bud light was like “free beer if u do.” Truly a big week for space. Time for Lora to dust off the equations she learned while taking “The Science of Science Fiction” in college (NB: a science credit.) Sarah took Movie Physics to achieve the same distinction. But she still can’t explain why the Cats cats are so tiny!!!
TASTY BITES
An insidious (and low-tech!) way tech companies staunch the flow of information is by insisting on talking to reporters “on background” (meaning the reporter can’t publish their quotes or directly attribute them; but they’re able to funnel messaging into the popular consciousness). (CJR)
Oakland banned facial recognition technology, following Somerville and San Francisco! (Vice)
Before FaceApp there was FindFace, incidentally also a Russian app, which allowed Russians to identify strangers by cross-referencing pictures u took with pictures scraped from Russian facebook (The Atlantic, 2016)
Christine Biederman’s Wired cover story on how the Feds’ handling of backdoor.com will shape how other platforms are regulated is riveting. Fosta/sesta; knuckle tats; alt weeklies; vice: it’s all there (Wired)
A Yang gang robotpocolypse is nigh?(New Yorker)
Tik tok is where it’s at, baby, per Taylor Lorenz (The Atlantic)
Netflix lost users this quarter. We apologize if we caused this by sharing a password with like 15 ppl. (looking at you Sylvia L, Sarah’s mom keeps being like who is signing into our account from Massachusetts!) (Verge)
Logic Magazine is about to drop a new issue on Bodies and they’ve titled their editor’s note “Meatspace.” Our influence? Just joshing but in the meantime watch for its drop. (Logic)
And we are excited because we are seeing each other in meatspace tonight in….where else? San Francisco, home of the web.
Warmest regards,
Sarah and Lora