Meatspace is Sarah and Lora’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
Did someone forward you this letter? Subscribe/read past issues at meatspace.substack.com
Follow us on twitter @itsmeatspace
Dear friends,
Since we last spoke, everyone in our respective feeds has had time to watch the Hulu and the Netflix Fyre Fest docs, and to develop takes and content around both.
Through all the noise cut a particularly daring meme:
Can you say occam’s razor.
Tho we took intro to art history and we know that the artist owes its viewer no explanation, we wanted nay needed to know more about this meme. So we went searching for its creator. And we are pleased to report that we found him: George Civeris, a comedian, Tow Center for Digital Journalism researcher, and the creator of this fingie-on-the-pulse image. We asked him a few hardball questions about this meme and more:
AN INTERVIEW WITH GEORGE CIVERIS:
Meatspace: Despite efforts to kill it, the distracted boyfriend continues to be the most persistent meme of the generation. Why did you choose this format?
George Civeris: I just think any meme that essentially boils down to "this thing is right and this thing is wrong" will have staying power on the internet. Down with nuance!
Meatspace: how much cocaine do you think they did?
George: All of it.
Meatspace: hulu or netflix???
George: Well the Netflix one was produced by Jerry Media, which literally helped market the festival, so I cannot get behind that! (I actually went to college with one of the Jerry guys, but that's a story for another time.) The Hulu one features Jia Tolentino, who is one of my favorite writers, so it has that going for it. But otherwise, I think it relies on super tired tropes about millennials to make some pretty unoriginal points.
In my opinion, if you're going to make a feature-length documentary about the whole debacle, the two main stories are (1)What does the fact that this idiot was able to successfully "scam" all these investors tell us about startup funding in general? and (2) What does the exploitation of the Bahamian workers tell us about similar phenomena in other industries (like tourism)? ... So I guess my answer is that I didn't find either documentary extremely compelling. Would I watch 4 more? Absolutely.
Us too, George. Thank you for your insights and service to the internet landscape, and everyone pls follow him on Twitter @georgeciveris!
SCIM SCAM SCUM
We talk a lot about scamming in this newsletter. But we mustn’t forget that in fact we are playing ourselves most of the time. FOR EXAMPLE!
Last week Sarah gave her personal cell phone number to an Uber driver who wanted her to join a new rideshare app called Tryp, which according to him treats and pays its drivers better than other independent contractor models but according to other people on the internet is a pyramid scheme. Then she started getting a lot of calls from Lithuania in the middle of the night. Spooky.
Not to mention that we continue to pour time n money into companies that - stop us if you’ve heard this one before - persistently don’t fix things they say they will. See: new report from today that Amazon’s Rekognition software still shows racial and gender bias. And also today’s announcement that (in spite of promises that he would never) Mark Zuckerberg is uniting FB, Insta, and WhatsApp under one big ole umbrella. Make it rain!!
JACK, ALACK!
Also, we all stood by as @Jack allowed himself to be interviewed by multiple major outlets, further exposing his descent into madness a la King Lear, but with an iPhone.
In an interview with Ashley Feinberg in HuffPost last week, he talked about doxxing (it’s “unacceptable,” but alas not against Twitter policy…), why he apologized to Candace Owens and.. very few other people (bc he “put her in a box”), and the definition of “conversational health,” which, ? (We also got no clarity on the ISIS amulet, sadly.)
And in Rolling Stone, Jack threw his friend Mark Zuckerberg under the bus (just like the Winklevii! smh) for… *checks mouthpiece* oh wait yep that’s crazy never mind... killing a goat with a laser and then cooking it, only to serve it COLD!! What?! To be fair we were all warned of Zuck’s quirky diet in 2009, when the #founder posted a public facebook album entitled The Great Goat Roast of 2009. NO they were not poking harmless fun at G.O.A.T quarterback Tom Brady, but setting fire to a real, dam-climbing, trash-eating goat. 10 year challenge! mwah.
The other disturbing part of Jack’s interview, though, as Casey Newton notes in his awesome newsletter, is the justification for why he keeps Square running smoother than Twitter: one deals in money and the other deals in words; and protecting $1.40 in cash is more important than preserving 140 characters. LEST HE FORGET, the pen is mightier than the sword. Also, tweets are 280 characters!!! We’re disappointed.
Good news is, Jack seems open to even more press: Quartz’s Mike Murphy tweeted at Jack inviting him to buffalo wild wings, and he tweeted right back! That he would like to go somewhere “more locally-owned.” Jack -- if you agree to a Meatspace interview, we will take you to our favorite Palo Alto watering hole: the Sushiritto.
(He has not yet responded to our request for an interview. George Civeris: 1. Jack: 0.)
At the end of the day though, we are all also getting actively scammed. Specifically by people like Caroline Calloway, who we discussed a lil last week. Remember the influencer workshop she was going to hold then not going to hold then definitely hold again? That happened.
And Business Insider reporter Paige Leskin was there! She learned things like, "You cannot read that doubt like tea leaves" and "Sometimes closure is picking up a pretty red leaf and putting it on a bench and walking away." Bye.
WHAT’S UR SIGN
If you ride the subway, you may have noticed large and vague ads about cryptocurrency lately: grey panels reading shit like, “crypto needs rules” or “crypto without chaos.” And also the images of founding fathers (??) with messages like “Money has a future.” (Here’s hoping.)
All of these ads are captioned “Gemini: the regulated cryptocurrency exchange” or simply, elusively just “Gemini.”
The mysterious ads have been bothering us for weeks. What do they mean? Who is behind them? Why Gemini, a sign that rules both Donald Trump and Kanye West (!).
Today it occurred to us to...Google it. What we found was amazing: it is the crypto startup of none other than the Winklevoss twins!! (quick sidenote: The Winklevii have done something right, as Google docs spellcheck corrected us when we spelled their names wrong. Double sidenote: spellcheck also corrects “spellcheck.” Is it “spell-check”? Another thing we could Google but won’t.)
Gemini, founded in 2014 by the dashing yet devious duo of The Social Network fame, is an exchange where people can easily purchase crypto using USD. They are attempting to prove that crypto can be a safe investment, as long as it has guardrails and is regulated. (Explained further by Wall Street Journal here). They are marketing heavily to retail investors, including with the above subway ads and a recent full-page NYT spread.
But wait, you may be saying, isn’t crypto’s whole thing that it’s decentralized/not full of rules. You would not be the only one! Gemini’s critics are pointing out the same. But the Winklevii, who are both crypto billionaires, would probably respond a line that Cameron Winklevoss is known to say: “Our philosophy is to ask for permission, not forgiveness." Nice!
For now, we are staying tuned and attempting to parse the confusing historical images in their ads. Are they the founding fathers in this scenario? If so, would they be the first founding father twins?
And, speaking of radically recontextualized historical imagery:
Cursed!
WILL POWER
January is a time of Doing Better. Drynuary. Gymnuary. Idk, Callyourgrandma-ary.
But some people’s resolutions seem harder. Kashmir Hill tried to block Amazon from her life, and even installed a high-key VPN to do so. Still, “It was impossible,” she said. And this other guy tried to eat only meat for a whole month, with the goal of joining the World Carnivore Tribe.
There are smaller goals to work towards, tho. One thing we can all get behind is: stop replying all! This NYTimes advice column teaches you how to recover from such a digital faux pas, and more. (For example if you omit the word “glass” from an invitation to a “glass-blowing demonstration” by accident, just send five more emails with the right copy and people will get distracted. ok!)
But we honestly run into more trouble in situations such as screenshotting a photo of one’s text conversation to send snarkily to a friend, but then accidentally sending it back to the person you’re snarking on, thus outing yourself as a mole?? (If you have tips on how to deal with this kind of fallout, please tell us.)
UGH
The dept of labor sued Oracle this week. Apparently Oracle had been so systematically underpaying POC and women employees that it amounted to 400 million in lost wages. Christ!
More bad news - automation will take jobs from already marginalized groups in tech, according to Tanvi Misra in Citylab.
And Bloomberg reports that Google low key asked the government to limit employees’ right to organize using workplace email, all while publicly supporting their own employees’ protests.
But there’s hope: California Sunday reports on tech workers in revolt in pursuit of a more ethical Silicon Valley.
And this USA Today feature on Black women entrepreneurs starting/running cool companies is great.
TASTY BITES
Fast co writer Katharine Schwab investigates the builders who fabricate tiny homes on the Sims. (Fast Co)
Alexa apparently knows a lot about wine. Cheers baby! (Medium)
ICYMI, we are living in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism (NYTimes)
Will.i.am penned an editorial about how ownership of our own personal data should be a human right (The Economist)
What happens to your Amazon returns? Some of them are funneled through the “reverse reply chain,” and sold along with other random detritus to people on the internet. (The Atlantic)
And this interview about the attention economy is called, blessedly, “The Art of Eyeball Harvesting.” (Logic)
We are sorry to inform you that Antoni from Queer Eye made meatloaf with Gwyneth Paltrow this week. We learned of this through an email from goop with the subject line “meat cute.” Quick question what hath we wrought.
Meat love,
Sarah and Lora