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,
Want to kicking things of by wishing you all a hearty Beware the Ides of March!
What a week. We hardly found the time to write a Meatspace, what with feting the web for turning 30; doing Olivia Jade YouTube makeup tutorial vids; and personally causing the FB outage by posting FIRE takes on there! (we are kidding it was a "server" issue. Though the conspiracy theorists within us must note that it happened whilst federal prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into its data sharing practices! Interesting.) And, on a serious and horrific note that we will get to later: the tragic shootings in NZ, abetted and magnified by social media.
But for now the college scamming case: ICYMI somehow, a bunch of rich hotties bribed their way into USC by being photographed on an urgh machine (we dk how to spell this and don’t care to), and a rich Yale dad dodged a “pump and dump” indictment by throwing other rich ppl under the bus, among other scintillating offenses. “Operation Varsity Blues” is delicious for many reasons. The way it lays bare the inequality already baked into the elite college admissions game! The revelation that a soup distribution titan is somehow involved! The fact that Olivia Jade did sponcon for Amazon!
Add to that the fact that ppl in these wild times are truly addicted to scams, and you have a perfect recipe for the most 2019 scandal of 2019 (so FAR!)
New Yorker staff writer Naomi Fry captures all of this + MORE in her clear-eyed piece The College-Admissions Scandal and the Banality of Scamming. Read for yummy tidbits of the boring yet ultimately chilling lines - “ruh roh” “aw” “I love it” - uttered by these milquetoast / morally bankrupt individuals.
After reading this (and her sharp tweets on the matter), we had a few follow-up questions for Ms. Fry, and to our delight, she spoke with us via cyberspace (email)!!!
MEATSPACE: If you could see one more celeb entangled in this scam, who would it be and why?
NAOMI FRY: There are so many options here! It's not really possible age-wise, but I would have loved if someone from "Laguna Beach" or "The Hills" would have been involved in this. It seems a scandal just right for their demographic.
Do you think our world is truly more scam-thirsty now than ever? Is there a comparably scam-saturated moment in history?
I think scams in America have always been in vogue, but as our society becomes more and more stratified, things get more extreme—the rich become greedier to be even richer.
If u had to do a crime what would it be?
It would probably be something extremely marginal that I would be so worried about I'd confess all. (ed note: same)
Have you ever been the victim of a scam?
It's happened to me several times that accounts pretending to be John Mayer DM me on Instagram and want me to engage with them. So far it hasn't worked but maybe next time will be the charm!
We’ve already done college scam, medical tech scam, mystery novelist scam, ny socialite scam, politician son scam, instagram influencer scam, island concert scam….. what arena will next become embroiled in scandal do u think!
I wouldn't mind a good academic scam, especially in the humanities, in a good university. That would be delicious!
Delicious, indeed! Thank you SO much, Naomi, we hope you get the scam you deserve!
Almost immediately after doing this interview, we read in this v fun NYT piece about getting a famous follower that Naomi did in fact manage to get the REAL John Mayer to follow her. We are so happy to hear that. We also hope that Akon has read our glowing coverage of his cryptocurrency empire/2020 aspirations and will soon start following us.
Okay back to the teens doing crimes…...crimes aren’t all they are doing, as Taylor Lorenz reports that they are also flirting with each other via google docs!
BETOBLOCKERS
Erstwhile punk rocker cum web developer Beto O’Rourke is running for president.
Naturally the digging into his past has already begun. Apparently, Beto was once listed as the technical contact for the website turkeyrevealed.com....Upon very little follow up investigating, we found that the domain was registered on February 8, 2008, along with a veritable BEVY of turkey-themed sites.
Perhaps more pressingly, Reuters reported today that, as a Texan teen, Beto was a member of the cult of the dead cow (CDC) hacking group!! A progressive leader even then, he advocated for a woman to join the previously all-male hacker squad. He wrote under the handle “psychedelic warlord.” He started a message board called “TacoLand.” He ... “stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem”! A badboy indeed. We love the header image for the Reuters piece:
We will not belabor Beto further bc he is already being belabored (as Victor Luckerson wrote, he is the human embodiment of the “well this blew up!” tweet) BUT there is one more thing.
Beto announced his candidacy in a text message to a local news station (woot!), and announced his rockabilly Reagan aesthetic in a spread in Vanity Fair (entitled Beto’s Choice, which? Striking resemblance to Sophie’s….?!) But before this week most of his thoughts have been beamed through his keyboard onto another medium... MEDIUM.
He is not the only one.
We have noticed that a lot of other public (tech and not) figures have taken to the self-publishing platform to lay waste to people, places and things. We spake of Bezos’ Medium post at length. But there are more! (A pattern...) See: Elizabeth Warren on breaking up tech! Howard Schultz on his haters and why Democrats need a moderate candidate! (We call his: the medium roast. Ha!!!) This restaurant group on what happened when Cat Cora of Iron Chef fame came to dine! One outlier is Zuck, who chose to post last week’s public message declaring the death of public messages on the social network he owns, which, ok you do you.
But this leads us to wonder...if notable Scandinavian memoirist Karl Ove Knausgaard were alive today, would he be writing on Medium? (ed. Note: he is alive). To be fair we are wondering this mostly because we took the well-constructed The Cut quiz “Who Wrote It: Beto O’Rourke or Karl Ove Knausgaard?” and only got 50 percent right.
And Medium now hosts a cool new publication abt tech and science called OneZero! We like this read on how the sharing economy has always been a scam (scams!).
WATCH THIS (MEAT)SPACE
Meatspace announcement: we are going to spotlight more founders, especially women, nb folks, and/or people of color in like a special new spotlight section (more deets to come!). Too many ppl who look like Beto (although most less hot!) are running the show in tech, and that’s messed up. There are many reasons why we are excited to do this and get more intentional about the tech stories we share, but why don’t we SHOW and not TELL you, through this anecdote:
In 2017, Janica Alvarez set out to convince VCs to fund her startup Naya Health, which makes a smart breast pump. Among the real questions investors posed: What does a breast pump do? To get people to take her seriously, Alvarez ended up having to bring her husband to meetings. Naya Health shut down this January (after disappointing customers who said it malfunctioned too much for its high sticker price of $1000), saying it could not raise enough funds. (Meanwhile Elizabeth Holmes.... Yes you know and we know.)
This is just one story of the hurdles female founders, especially founders of color, face on the path. Women of color are also at the most risk of being replaced by automation, according to a report Sarah wrote about for CityLab, which also indicated that, in the three top-earning tech jobs, the share of women has declined since 2010. Need to work on reversing this trend!
In better news, a Danish company made a genderless virtual assistant. Gender is a lie but certainly it is progress not to have a bot like this coded female. Unfortunately, the only gender-non-conforming name the developers could think of was….Q. Consequence of too few women in the room?? We women can think of like FOUR off the top of our head: Alex; Sam; Leslie AND/OR Ashley if ur in the old-timey film Gone with the Wind; etc.
If you know (or if u are!) an interesting founder/tech person we should talk to, please email us at itsmeatspace@gmail.com/DM us @itsmeatspace! Thanks to everyone who has already responded to our tweet abt this and nominated ppl :D
NZ SHOOTING
We are deeply saddened and angry about the mosque shooting yesterday in Christchurch; and ache for the people 49 killed and many more injured, and for their families, and for the Muslim community. Approximately one in every 500 Muslim people in New Zealand was among the dead or wounded yesterday, according to the New York Times.
We are far from experts on the extremism exhibited in the shooter’s 74-page manifesto, or the message boards he frequented to post hate. We do know that the horrific event was streamed on Facebook, and that you can stop video Tweets of it from autoplaying. YouTube tweeted saying they were trying to remove violent footage (to some skeptical responses).
But if you’d like to do further reading, we recommend following reporters like Kevin Roose and Julia Alexander this weekend. These extremely online journalists understand the levels of reddit, 4chan, memes, and other internet references threaded through this document. The shooters’ reference to Pewdiepie was chilling, but it was a booby trap, wrote Roose, perhaps designed to “pull a popular internet figure into a fractious blame game and inflame political tensions everywhere.” Candace Owens was invoked for a similar reason.
Unfortunately, Taylor Lorenz adds, “when journalists report on these horrific acts, the shooter’s hateful messages are sometimes amplified in the process.” But understanding how the shooter was radicalized online is important nonetheless -- as is reading guides like this from the Data Society, which lays out best practices for reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
TASTY BITES
Platonically Gwyneth really wants to connect with Bezos (Jezebel)
Also platonically but perhaps more eerily Flickr scraped ur faces (NBC news)
And FB and Insta may even be scraping photos of kids?!! (WSJ)
Our friend Sophie Dillon on the audacious whiteness of the recent white collar media darling scammers (Skin Deep Magazine)
Scooter companies are switching from gig mechanics to real mechanics (Wired)
True crime ASMR is now a thing?? (MEL)
When Jezebel commenters went on vacation together! (The Atlantic)
Online voting is like not rly working that well (sarah refuses to believe this) (Motherboard)
This week, Facebook bid farewell to two Chrises. And now, we bid farewell.... To you!
Farewell to you,
Sarah and Lora