Sometimes when we can’t sleep we like to hold our phones very close to our faces and watch Tasty Videos—a sort of ASMR for the eyes. A thing that admittedly does not provide the same comfort is to scroll through the Riker’s Island Instagram geotag (Relatedly, close Riker’s Island…), but this week we did it anyway to get to the bottom of a very big mystery: Did notorious Riker’s-confined scammer Anna Delvey really instagram a selfie there—then delete it only datys later??
Before we jumped to any conclusions, we were reminded of the ancient proverb, “A geotag does not a location make.” Plenty of other pics insta-linked to the prison were not taken there, for example a clip of a Meek Mill concert and a video of a woman posing in front of a bicycle. And The Cut also suggested some alternative hypotheses: the pic might have been META SCAM/publicity stunt by Shonda Rhimes, who’s producing a forthcoming scam-dalous Netflix series about Delvey’s life; or simply a throwback Thursday of treacherous origin (a #TBTT, if you will). We decided to find out.
The first evidence of malfeasance was the accessories: we do not believe that Anna Delvey would wear a choker to prison. But we also felt inspired by the geolocation sleuthing in our fave episode of Caliphate to do a little digging of our own. Using satellite imagery (google maps), we were able to recreate the view of a Riker’s inmate staring out into the distance/into the screen of a phone. And did we find any of the tall buildings hovering stage left of Anna’s choker-clad neck? Nope.
All we see are waste management sites on many sides, and La Guardia airport—a waste management site in its own special way. Those are flat-lying buildings, suckers!
Now that we have gotten to the bottom of that scam, we bring you this week’s hottest stories in high tech.
BEEP BEEP BEEP: cars making moves
We, two ballers on budgets, would be lying if we pretended that we splashed out on pricey ubers in any but the most dire of circumstances. An instance of such a dire circumstance? Being sauced. Ubers are great thing for reducing drunk driving! But this can also be p frustrating for uber drivers who get stuck with pukers. So uber is rolling out AI tools to predict whether ride-hailers are drunk. Tracking factors like the customer’s speed of walking, rate of drunken typos, and other “unusual” behaviors, and taking into account details like the location and time of day (ie. the club at 2 am), the app could start warning drivers that their passenger is likely inebriated.
Uber, beyond watching your drunk fingies dance, is also making grand plans to infiltrate every corner of the the globe//to roll into “emerging markets” like India soon, with a “uber lite,” its app that can run on 2G networks and takes up way less storage space on devices.
SPEAKING OF UBER! Sarah wrote a rly good piece in CityLab this week about how, in spite of the hype, gig work such as driving ubers still makes up only 6.9% of the economy. (Tx Lora! Blush!)
Aaaaand uber apparently now has its own in-car magazine, called VEHICLE, leading us to ask: do you pronounce it ve - icle or ve - H - icle with a hard haitch? (Their old magazine was called Momentum, which evidently lost its.)
In other less sexy car-tech drama, cursed Elon’s cursed car company will be laying off 9% of its workforce in order to "move faster” and The Economist worries that the market for driverless cars could be driving toward monopoly. Speaking of monopolies….
THINGS WE’RE BUSTING THIS WEEK: TRUSTS, NUTS!
Big news in the antitrust space this week: ATT had the urge to make a merge w/ Time Warner! This one mega-company will now control both content and distribution of content, in what can be characterized as a vertical merger! Much like if a grain company were to buy a hot dog bun company -- or when Amazon bought Whole Foods -- a vertical merger involves a company from one step of the supply chain buying another. So it is not technically as monopoly-y as a horizontal merger (when a company straight buys its competition, such as if the NY Times tech newsletter, disgustingly entitled “Bits,” were to buy our tech newsletter, tastefully named Meatspace). But it still consolidates industry enough to raise a few brows!!
Interestingly, both left-leaners and Tr*mp were against this merger, albeit for v different reasons. Many on the left were worried that this would consolidate too much power into a few rich hands, harm consumers, and threaten competition (The Nation calls it appalling!!). Trump didn’t want the merger to succeed because he uhh wanted to punish CNN (which Time Warner/now ATT owns).......
Many fans of the deal, meanwhile, wanted it to happen so a non-Silicon Valley power could take on streaming big boys like Netflix and Amazon. Lina Kahn, a hipster trust-buster, may be just the one to take the latter boy down. Concentrating power in one company, even one whose logo is smiley-face-shaped, is just one more step on the road to corporate overlordism, she says: “For most people, their everyday interaction with power is not with their representative in Congress, but with their boss. And if in your day-to-day life you’re treated like a serf in your economic relationships, what does that mean for your civic capabilities—for your experience of democracy?”
And now, after reportedly waiting to see how the whole ATT/Time Warner merge would shake out, Comcast is attempting to nab 21st Century Fox from Disney. P much immediately confirms suspicions that this week’s ruling will have massive repercussions in the world of industry.
BEEF OF THE WEEK:
Merriam Webster and Dictionary.com have both started taking to Twitter to dunk on the (mostly Republican) etymologically confused (Kellyanne Conway, Spicey, Roseanne). But, when brands—even nerdy ones—become Extremely Online, their personalities come with a side of ego: In jockeying for leader of the linguistic Resistance, these saucy dics just can’t stop comparing diction.
GENERAL OTHER TASTY READS WE LOVED:
Is Elon Musk Scamming Chicago (Vanity Fair)
Vice Media Was Built on a Bluff (New York Mag)
“She Absolutely Has Sociopathic Tendencies”: Elizabeth Holmes, Somehow, is Trying to Start a New Company! (Vanity Fair)
I'm A Pete Davidson & Ariana Grande Truther (Refinery 29)
DIVERSION OF THE WEEK:
Our friend Caleb Madison (with Marley Randazzo!) has launched a weekly puzzle about the internet on Vice! See if you can Solve the Internet.
Here is a preview/clue from last week's puzzle!
Before we go, we leave you with The Outline’s fascinating cultural history of the letter X in tech. From X-men to Gen X to TeslaX + AppleX today, a lot of folx have leaned on the letter’s X-factor cachet to vaguely point toward an innovative future. But pls don’t worry, we won’t be changing our name to MeatspaceX any time soon.
Xoxo,
Sarah and Lora