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,
Happy equinox. We regret to inform you that Mercury is still in retrograde. Aries season cometh. It is the year of the [Devin Nunes] Cow.
And the market for astrology-themed startups is growing, as outlined in tasty pieces in Wired and the LA Times. In 2018, Americans apparently spent $2.2 billion on “mystical services,” and a new app called Sanctuary, which provides free horoscopes and costs $20 a month for custom astrology readings, is riding the metaphysical wave. A subscription also includes “cosmic snacks.” Yum. Not to lay this on too thick, but seems like we are all just searching for meaning in a meaningless world!!
If the Big Three social networking companies had consulted their charts, they would have known that this week’s Retrograde was going to be rough.
Twitter (an Aries) turned 13. Hormones!
Instagram (Libra), Taylor Lorenz argues, has become the new home for hate, especially for indoctrinating young people in the wake of the Christchurch attack.
And, after a Propublica investigation found Facebook (Aquarius) allowed companies to buy ads that discriminated based on race, gender, and age, the tech giant dropped the big news this week that they would at last crack down on the practice, settling three cases for $5 million. Oh and Facebook (Aquarius) also admitted they had “mistakenly” stored pws in plain files. Oh and The NY Times Magazine ALSO reported that Facebook, (classic Aquarius skeptic!!!), is being used to EXPOSE psychics. Vigilante randoms suspicious that psychics are looking at client’s Facebook profiles before readings are trying to debunk them by baiting them with fake profiles!
To personally gird ourselves for the unpredictability of Being, we use Co-Star, the AI-powered social astrology app. So do the at least 2 million other people who have downloaded the app so far! (shoutout to Jackson R for suggesting we write about it last week!)
We are pleased to report that we (@sholder and @LK666 - add us) are compatible in our basic identities!! A relief as otherwise mayhaps we would have needed to cancel Meatspace. Basically only less compatible in love and sex which, fine for us personally!
We also learned that if you are absolutely jonesing to get someone else’s chart but u feel unable to invite them to join the app, first of all sweetie reconsider if they’re worth it, and second of all you can pay $3 to check your compatibility with someone else’s chart without their knowledge! (You can also kind of do this for free by knowing their birthday and asking their mom in a casual way the hour of their birth.)
We can’t say for sure Pete Buttigieg didn’t check his now-husbands costar alignment, but we can say for sure that if elected he will be the first president to have met a spouse on a dating app!
Tag yourselves we’re french onion and corn chowder. Love cosmic snacks!
SOCIAL LIFE
Because of the hellishness that pervades most trad social networks, it’s no surprise that increasingly, people have been looking to places outside of the Facebook cinematic universe to network socially. According to Natalie Sportelli of the VC firm Lerer Hippeau, some are looking to...Quora!
According to Mike Isaac in the NYT, it’s all about newsletters (which, word!) He did not talk to us (fine), nor any other women (less fine). (He apologized for the oversight.) But, as Lyz Lenz wrote in The Cut in 2015, the newsletter world has become one of the few that’s women-writer-dominated; a space that feels freer for expression, and that’s safer from harassment. “Honestly didn’t know men wrote newsletters lol,” Tracie Hunte tweeted.
Here is a v brief list of some woman-run newsletters we like that he could have mentioned: Oversharing, by Alison Griswold; The Drydown, by Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald; Wait —, usually written by Caity Weaver; Ann Friedman’s weekly; Lorem Ipsum by Margot Boyer-Dry; A Woman to Know by Julia Carpenter; The Plug by Sherrell Dorsey + team...what else are we missing? Let us know and we will subscribe!
Not everyone is here for newsletters as such, tho. Dan, the director of newsletters at the New Yorker, thinks that sending a whole damn email every week slash month is not the answer! Instead, he has been consistently updating this google doc with advice (about newsletters). It is called Not a Newsletter.
As if we needed more evidence that we may need new arbiters of social connection, here is a tip on interpersonal communication from someone who works at FB, h/t a Twitter bot that shows when Wikipedia pages are edited by Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and Wikimedia Foundation IP addresses:
Be hamble!
BLOOD MONEY
Obviously we watched the Theranos HBO doc the night and night after it came out, respectively.
Lots to unpack. One big thought: is Elizabeth just the move fast/break things/dream big ethos that permeates Silicon Valley pushed to its logical conclusion? That she thrived in SV says a lot about her (scammer; doesn’t blink) but also a ton about the environment in which her star rose! And, that she continues to be mythologized to this extent -- don’t forget there’s also gonna be a feature FILM starring JLAW about her! -- shows that her appeal still intoxicates the masses even now that she’s disgraced.
The number of powerful white men that were willing to champion her (Clinton, Mattis, Kissinger, Schultz, Biden) and the clout their support won her... The Yoda quote on the wall... The blood-spattered lab equipment... While the movie didn’t add a lot more to the narrative we’ve already heard/read/injected into our veins [sry!] via Bad Blood, The Dropout, and this delightful profile about the other Elizabeth Holmes, it did color in the above crazy visual details, and it also shows Holmes and her illicit bf slash coworker sunny dancing to can’t touch this. Eerie!
Other Qs we have: Is Errol Morris the Fuck Jerry of Theranos? Is phlebotomy really that bad? Where did Tim Draper buy his bitcoin tie? (Well this one was easy he got it from ZAZZLE and it cost $45.)
Take note!!
WHERE ARE THEY NOW
As we’ve extensively told you guys in previous Meatspaces, Elizabeth is now living her best life with her half-wolf Balto, and her rich fiancé. But what about the whistleblowers? Besides appearing earnestly in this documentary, where are they now!
After a quick google search we learned that, when he’s not being a hot/noble health scheme narc, Tyler Schultz is a weed-smoking narc!! He’s making an app to breathalyze for THC…
Erika Cheung is doing biotech and ethics stuff, having been reborn from “the ashes of the Theranos scandal.” Per her Linkedin:
Her linkedin from her time at Theranos was vague, maybe bc she wanted to avoid being contacted by people like Carreyrou.
The theranos website is down, and we’re amazed some silly pranksters have not yet bought other theranos-adjacent domains to unleash their goofy tricks. But you can still buy third-party Theranos merch, per this Observer investigation, like duvets, clocks, a shirt that says “I think my soulmate is Elizabeth Holmes,” and a miniskirt. (Personally gonna stick with fyre fest merch the US Marshal’s service is auctioning off [ty for tip Aly F], or perhaps this USPS-branded Forever 21 tube top labeled “Priority,” tyvm!!)
SALTY
Medium announced that unprocessed-food stan and celeb food journo extraordinaire Mark Bittman was launching a new Medium vertical called “Salty.”
Pretty quickly, ppl from an existing magazine also called Salty with a similar logo to that of the Medium thing were like….not cool.
Especially bc the original Salty is a magazine on “Everything feminist sex, dating and relationships for women, trans and non binary people,” the tech co/white writer’s adoption of the name and largely the aesthetic was not a great look for Medium.
Mark Bittman tweeted he would change the name after backlash.
Speaking of things changing after backlashes: Hudson Yards is pivoting from owning all your selfies taken there after everyone on twitter was like….no. But it still has license to repost them at will! Simply the logical next step in the Instagrammification of public art? Sidenote Burning Man’s terms and conditions are even WILDER. Sarah is writing about it. Spoiler alert they have a very tenuously enforceable “decommodification” clause.
And something that deserves a lot of lashing back and hopefully will change as a result:
INTERESTING TWEET CALLING FOR FURTHER ACTION OF THE WEEK
ASTROLOGY TWEET OF THE WEEK
TASTY BITES
Peloton getting sued for using pop music without paying royalties!! Lora DMed her fave instructor to see if she’s okay. No response yet (CNN)
Pinterest is going [plane emoji] IPO prob next month (WSJ)
BBC did a meme documentary (Twitter)
Glossier and Rent the Runway (both women-run!) are the newest billion-dollar “unicorns” (Fortune)
Amanda Mull on letting Insta shop for u (The Atlantic)
This guy made an influencer bot! “It’s a lifestyle brand generated by something that’s not alive.” (Buzzfeed)
Reads on how new women’s health clinic Tia is padding the health system for rich ladies and also scooping up a lot of data (Jezebel) and also (The Cut)
Riding scoot as far from civilization as it will take u (Gizmodo)
We leave you with this: if you must take a journey, take it like Caity Weaver: on Amtrak for no reason.
In retrograde,
Sarah and Lora