BRAINS: POISONED; BODIES: SAME
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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,
Ur toxic...I’m slippin’ under. Such said Britney in 2003. Such say we in 2019. Many things are toxic (often caused by tech companies), but at the same time many things are wholesome (often caused by TEENS). Some things are both! (The Bridge to Terabithia.)
A quite literally toxic thing for teens is a bootleg vape! Or possibly any vape, it’s not clear rn. All we know is, people are getting sick, and what they have in common is that they’ve been vaping!!!! From june 28 til August 22, there have been up to 193 (unconfirmed) cases of vaping-related respiratory illnesses reported across 22 states, according to the CDC. Someone died! :(
This of course has everyone reacting extremely calmly. Milwaukee urged ppl to stop vaping. San Francisco has already banned vaping so it can’t really do anything else. Even the Juul CEO, Kevin Burns, has started telling people who are not already addicted to tobacco to stop -- and avoid starting -- using his product.
As the CDC gets to the bottom of this often-mango-flavored mystery, here are some other things that are toxic and others that are wholesome:
TOXIC (literally): many products being sold on amazon! The WSJ published a spicy exposee about how third party sellers are peddling lots of mislabeled/unsafe goods. Their investigation found 4,152 items for sale on amazon dot com that have been declared unsafe by federal agencies!! And Amazon has not done much to curb these sellers.
WHOLESOME: Teens boosted a strike for their teachers on TikTok!! When their teachers planned a walk-out on September 10, to fight for fairer wages and better school conditions, the students decided to stage one too, on September 5. As Julia Reinstein writes, the revolution will be TikTok’d!!
TOXIC: pod review culture!! Some hosts told Ashley Carman of the Verge that they’d been bombed with troll-y one-star ratings and mean reviews on Apple podcasts for reasons unrelated to the actual quality of their show. Advertisers say they don’t rly care about reviews, but it is still sad and disheartening to be flamed.
WHOLESOME: teens are making make fake casting calls for musicals on IG. A beautiful (and rare) instance of Insta actually achieving the mission of bringing people together and building community. Part of us is like “cute but we don’t relate to these kids” and part of us is like….watch ur DMs we will be sliding in singing duets from Wicked (~~because i knew u~~).
TOXIC: Disgraced co-founder of period panty line Thinx, Miki Agrawal, has a new life goal and it is to make bidets cool via the twee brand Tushy! She hosted a “Butt Kissing” event at which people are encouraged to take “ass selfies” and talk about butts beneath a floating blow-up butt (sry this is just the reality of the event as reported by Jezebel). But lest we forget!! Agrawal very seriously got pushed out of her last nether-region-oriented company bc she was verbally abusive and sexually harassed subordinates. Trying to double down on the narrative that she was simply too subversive and therefore misunderstood isn’t working, argues Molly Osberg.
WHOLESOME: staying on the musicals thing for one sec lol, this vid of what characters in musicals are like before they sing is funny:
TOXIC/WHOLESOME: A forum infamous for doxxing porn actors was bought by the porn production company Bang Bros ... which promptly literally burned all its hard drives to the ground mwahahah.
WHOLESOME: greta thunberg, youth climate activist, took to the sea! She’s in NY now welcome.
TOXIC: After the news broke that human contractors for Apple were listening to Siri recordings, some of them got laid off and replaced with in-house employees! Unfortunate example of a company being shamed and then not really changing its ways, just making things harder for workers.
WHOLESOME: Carmen B’s response to our plea to remember weird online games that probably shouldn’t have been games! She writes:
Millsbury! Neopets-like game from General Mills where you could play games about General Mills products to get Millbucks to buy things including General Mills branded tshirts for your character! You could also have pets, the best of which was a potbelly pig.
Circa 5th or 6th grade, [a] friend and I spent a lot of time filling the entire surface area or our character’s house with potbelly pig food. Our goal was to stockpile and buy out the store of potbelly pig food and become Millsbuck-ionaires. Alas, we did not realize that the Millsbury world had an infinite supply of potbelly pig food.
Proustian <3
PEDDLING TOWARD BETHLEHEM
The break from toxicity? Comes from peddling ad infinitum on stationary bikes. Or that’s what Peloton would have you believe. The exercise company filed for IPO this week, and in its S-1 filing the CEO said, literally, “Peloton sells happiness.”
Also, lest you were inclined to mistake the exercise bike company for just being an exercise bike company, this slide at the start of its filing nips that silly notion in the bud!!
Same…...
Speaking of buying your way to self-improvement, Amanda Mull wrote a v amusing and also insightful piece for The Atlantic about how Goop tricked us into thinking the way to be well is to purchase more STUFF. (open for the cultural criticism ...stay for the brown bath nuggets she drops into her tub.)
And we invite u to revisit the tale of Brad the dad who both rankles and inspires Peloton peddlers (and spoiler finds LOVE).
Finally, vis a vis Bethlehem and peddling away, apparently more people are leaving NYC than any other city every day. Joan didion -- she was onto something!
PS: yes there is going to be a reality show where they remodel homes where a true crime mystery has been committed yes they’re turning homes from morbid to marvelous
I’D LIKE 2 ADD U 2 MY PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
We thought the most annoying thing on Linkedin was the post from the CEO who fired his intern on the spot for wearing AirPods. Turns out that people have started using LinkedIn for much most sinister purposes!
Mainly/insanely to fuel ESPIONAGE WARS!! According to this Atlantic piece, Chinese intelligence officers are reaching out to former CIA officials (who often are prompted by Linkedin/capitalism to list all relevant professional accomplishments such as languages known and security clearances maintained on their profiles) to recruit them to be spies!! Linkedin is apparently the only major social media not banned in China bc Linkedin agreed to censor some posts. Anyway add us on Linkedin after u spend some time with the CIA’s latest cryptic tweet:
Another absolutely dreadful Linkedin message to receive is one from a debt collector! Chasing you to pay hospital bills! Which happens to some people who are behind on their payments, according to this Olga Khazan piece.
And librarians are mad at Linkedin because they’re making people create accounts to access the learning tool Lynda. Let people learn and privately access public goods without ensnaring them in your professional network ecosystem!
TASTY BITES
Uber and Lyft and Doordash are sponsoring an alternative-to-AB5 ballot measure and have contributed $30 million each!! (Politico)
Why everyone loves looking at real estate apps (Vanity Fair)
Amazon finally reveals the number of partnerships they have with police departments: it is 405 (CNET)
People keep inventing apps that can help u report your fellow citizens for doing wack things like blocking the bike lane! But in the process everyone is being conscripted into surveilling everyone else. This freaks us out! (CityLab)
A new newsletter about climate change and what the heck we can do about it launches soon! (Heated.world)
Our friend sophie wrote about “recharging” - the word and concept (Real Life Mag)
Not-yet-launched Insta feature “threads” will apparently let u share ur location and stuff all the time with ur close friends. Lets u feel private while u still are sharing tons of info w/ FB and its advertisers... (Verge)
This medium post, written by a former google employee, tells the story of her affair with David Drummond, Alphabet/Google’s chief legal officer and her former boss; and details how he abandoned her and the son they had together. Note that Drummond is STILL employed at google and was paid almost $50 million in salary/stock in 2018 (Medium)
Pinterest continues to be the Wokest tech company by saying it will surface fact-based articles from verified sources when ppl search for vaccine-related stories (Techmeme)
THE_DONALD (Mother Jones)
TWO GOOD TWEETS
Happy LDW,
Sarah and Lora