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,
LEND US YOUR EARS!!! We need them, to listen to more podcasts :) We jest but also we are officially exposing ourselves as people that listen to podcasts, which is a lil embarrassing bc these days, there is nothing more divisive than whether you are “a podcast person” or “not.”
This is like asking Will Shakespeare if he was actually Christopher Marlowe, or “not.” Even if his answer is yes he will obviously have to lie and say he is not because of keeping up appearances!! (Convoluted analogy but Shakespeare is in the zeitgeist this week: per this New Yorker analysis, the bard was worrying about the “irrational servility” towards influencers well before follow counts existed.) And theater is on the brain because we went to a play together in the meatspace this week and had lots of fun :)
Anyway, for those of us who love podcasts, a new startup called Luminary was going to be a game changer. After launching this spring with $100 million in funding and contracts for shows w Lena Dunham (on women who have been called “crazy”) and Patti LuPone (as a “bebop-singing junkie nun”) and the team behind Slow Burn (about “governmental imbroglios” sigh love that phrase), the subscription service seemed destined to dominate the airwaves of millions of earwax-crusted airpods. But now ------ scandal has struck!
It turns out that, unlike other streaming services, Luminary was using a server that hid listener data, which is a crucial metric for selling ads and understanding audiences. Podcasters like Joe Rogan and Barstool Sports started pulling their shows! Read Ashley Carman on the action.
Comparisons to fyre fest are a-brewing, with podcast industry journo nick quah twting:
There’s also ongoing drama because Spotify (reminder: owner of Gimlet) and NYT are refusing to share some of their top shows with Luminary. Turf war!! Important for Spotify to protect such special shows as….Mark Zuckerberg’s new pod!
If you want to avoid choosing sides by turning to a third party podcast producer, try More Banana! All hosts and all the production team members on all the podcasts More Banana produces are women. One of their shows is called Scam Wow, hosted by Sue Smith and Caitlin Brodnick. Its subject matter is self explanatory.
Ok also, in an unsolicited cancellation, the son of Ronald Reagan, Ron Reagan, called astrology a “sad example from our flabby-minded post-truth era” in the Washington Post. Respectfully -- let us live, Ron!!!
BABY MAKES THREE
Lora is reading a book (brag). It is Hamlet from the perspective of a precocious fetus (?!). In years before 2019, it seemed crazy for a fetus to be a character. But in 2019? Not so! Influencers are writing their unborn fetuses starring roles in the Insta Stories of their lives. Nice.
Specifically, Curvy Wife guy and his Wife announced this week that they were pregnant.
To get those who weren’t online in 2017 up to speed: this dude Robbie Tripp posted on Instagram about how much he loved his curvy wife, even/in spite of her curves. While he was angling to be seen as body positive, actual feminists quickly were like...you are not. Ofc he still got a book deal, eventually publishing a manuscript that was virtually indistinguishable from the Unabomber’s manifesto (according to Babe.net, which he is trying to sue for libel!).
As the world laughed, Robbie and said curvy wife (who is a much more successful influencer @sassyredlipstick than him) moved on and made an impressive amount of sponcon, and now they are expecting. Robbie announced this in a post calling his wife a “sacred vessel carrying my seed.” Hm!
We look forward to sitting back and watching them spon this pregnancy -- and eventually, the birth -- into more viral con! As one does.
We’re baby!!
EL TAXI
There hasn’t been this much frisson surrounding taxis since the taxi commission threatened to seize Michael Cohen’s numerous medallions in 2018! (Context: he committed felony tax evasion.)
But now taxis in Japan are gearing up to facially recognize! Almost as weird as the grocery fridges also poised to facially recognize your age and sex. (h/t Karl O for both!!) Or the new AI feature on Bumble that detects nudes.
Elon Himself is breaking into the taxi business, as he announced this week during his autonomy day outline of Tesla’s next moves. They will be Robotaxis, no less! (As a fave tech journo/fellow Lora K reports for CNBC).
MARK IT UP
Even more than the Luminary drama, the spiciest he-said-she-said in tech media this week was the major and public fallout at The Markup (which, reminder, is/was to be a new tech watchdog publication funded largely by the Craig of Craigslist).
The publication’s founding editor in chief Julia Angwin—who was also the star investigative journo behind much of ProPublica’s reporting on things like FB’s housing ad discrimination—was fired in an email last week. But why?! There are lots of rumors and various documents flying around!
One thing does seem certain: Angwin and her co-founders had differing leadership approaches. Angwin claims that co-founder Sue Gardner wanted to turn the site into an anti-tech platform more than an investigative site. Angwin even said that Gardner was ranking candidates based on how negatively they perceived tech companies -- but when Gardner provided that spreadsheet to Columbia Journalism Review to prove that wasn’t the case, she also revealed that she was ranking candidates on a scale based on *what she thought their social class was.*
Angwin’s co-founders also said she refused to take a personality test, which, we feel. (Sidenote Facebook is banning personality quiz apps a year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal which, if u recall, was that Russians used quiz data to scrape hella personal info. “To be clear, personality quizzes themselves were not the problem here,” The Verge writes.)
But Angwin defended herself in the NYT, implying that five (of seven!) employees wouldn’t have quit in solidarity if they doubted her editorial direction. Intrigue aside, we really just want to read the tech accountability work that Angwin, Gardner, and their colleagues were brewing, and hope that they and others can continue brewing it.
Also we noticed that both the NYT lede image of the Markup team and the Motherboard story on Jack Dorsey’s relationship with Republican politicians prominently feature stairs. Better than couches!!
Bryan Derballa for The New York Times
Cole Burston/Bloomberg via Getty Images
OUR INFLUENCE?
Propublica released a report about how TurboTax misled lots of Americans who legally should not need to pay for tax filing and made them pay for their services!
Our influence? We did a tax meatspace!
Anna Delvey is found guilty!
Our influence? We wrote about her early and often but especially way back last summer.
In spite of its rocky quarter (nudes, poor warehouse conditions exposed) amazon’s profits doubled.
Our influence? Sarah recently spent $30 on the site rush-shipping a hardcover copy of Middlesex to her bf but it was accidentally in German. Lora has a kindle :/
REPLY GUY
Our Philadelphia correspondent Ben M highlighted this insane local drama unfolding around a mysterious steel furnace party (?!) that, according to vaguely unhinged flyers posted all about town, will be held in a vacant lot on April 27th. Lots to unpack here (the intent of the party is to get rid of all the food bits that are still living in your body by self-immolating... yes....) but also this is tech-relevant bc a video of the flyer-er recorded on someone’s Ring camera (!) is now circulating Reddit. Always new ways to surveil thine neighbor.
EARNEST REQUEST FOR YOUR HELP
Friends: with your help, our subscriber list has doubled in size since January. Please help us reach our next arbitrary subscriber goal (we are 16 signups away!!) by forwarding meatspace to even one (1) friend this week and encouraging them to sign up.
If u will help 1 thing double this quarter pls have it be us instead of amazon lol.
Thank you for your crucial support of our project!
TASTY BITES
Allbirds are confusingly maybe not as dumb as Amanda Mull (and we!) thought? (The Atlantic)
Why won’t Twitter treat white supremacists like ISIS? (hint: because some of them are republicans!!) (Motherboard)
Uber is valued at $90 billion now…. (NY Times)
FB hired the State Department’s top lawyer (Facebook Newsroom)
Amazon fired a bunch of people for not being “productive” enough (The Verge)
Alexis Madrigal on the difference between ppl on twitter and the American populace. Takeaway: “Media Twitter is not Median Twitter.” (The Atlantic)
There is a new dating app called “Ship” where you can swipe for friends or like, your son lol it is fun (Ship)
Ian Bogost on what Sri Lanka’s current Facebook ban means (The Atlantic)
Kara Swisher calls Facebook’s $5 billion fine to the FTC a “parking ticket” aka slap on wrist for FB’s bad behavior (NY Times)
Black women banded together to stop fake alt-right troll accounts long before alt right trolls influenced the 2016 election. But few listened! Listen/read now (Slate)
Paris Martineau on the big business of donating human eggs (Wired)
Female founders now face a double bind: They are also expected to be Instagram influencers! (FastCo)
Sperm freezing is on the rise (Washington Post)
TWEET OF THE WEEK
Good night,
Sarah and Lora