Mid-Life Crisis!
sponsored by the corn lobby
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,
Welcome to our 50th issue. Like Paul Rudd and the woman math meme, we are ageless!
Okay actually a lot of celebs are shockingly turning 50 in 2019:
JLo
Gwen Stefani
Jay Z
Paul Rudd (seriously!!!)
Ice Cube
Someone who is not yet 50 but is peddling vigorously against the clock is this guy named Brad. This 42-year old father of two has both annoyed and inspired Peloton fitness app users, reports the WSJ. Ever since he started taking the seat right next to the instructor in the live-streamed spin classes, he shows up on screens around the globe. He was not previously fit but now is!
Some tidbits to whet your appetites: he gets a lot of haters (one woman put a post-it over his face because she hates seeing him); he elegantly slam-rhymes his name (Brad) with his goal (get abs); and he got engaged to be married due to these antics!!
Peloton Interactive, the fitness company, crushes as a business. It has even been taking steps to go (plane emoji!) IPO this year. But adding to the confusion is the fact that there is in fact another business called Peloton Therapeutics (a cancer research start-up) that is also currently filing for an IPO! But only one of these companies is counter-suing music companies for anticompetitive behavior... Will traders get confused? Maybe!
And while we are talking fitness, be sure to stay hydrated with this canned black water, which to be clear is just water but dyed black and thus sold at a premium and labeled “death.” The slogan is “Murder your thirst”......
And we extend a warm welcome to the meatspace to someone who is zero years old: royal baby Archie! : ) People are already using you to scam others via facebook : (
CHUMMY
We’ve all seen those little ad boxes at the bottom of news site, promising things like amazing weight loss tips or mind-blowing ways cod can improve your sex life or even gorgeous cavemen:
Kaitlyn Tiffany wrote a v delightful piece this week about these spots, which are called chumboxes, and the sketchy ecosystem that keeps them chugging on websites everywhere. But mostly she investigated which one vegetable doctor(s) say will mess up your gut! Read to the end for many reasons, including to find out the answer. (Hint: its political lobby has an adversarial relationship with Budweiser.)
We also recommend this episode of Reply All from last summer, An Ad for the Worst Day of Your Life. The story follows one man whose photo (with his late wife) ended up in clickbait ads, and his hellish struggle to get the photo out of the chum ecosystem.
UBER STRIKE
Uber and Lyft drivers went on strike on Wednesday! Lot of helpful reads out there on driver demands, implications, and happenings day-of.
Uber drivers are working 70-80 hours a week to make a living, and sleeping in their cars in San Francisco (The Guardian)
And Uber’s IPO could make conditions even worse, writes Alana Samuels, “as the company strives to become more profitable while facing public shareholder pressure for the first time” and potentially slashes incentives. (Time)
During the strike itself, drivers in different cities had different strategies (some just rallied without turning their apps off; others camped out at Uber greenlight hubs to recruit more organizers) -- but they also had varied demands, many of which were aimed at policy-makers. NYC got a ride-hail minimum wage this year. Why aren’t other city councils pushing that, drivers are asking? (CityLab)
Honestly not an overwhelming number of ppl turned out to protest (NYTimes) but the strike still “worked,” argues Veena Dubal, because it united drivers across the world, who for years (and as a product of the gig worker model) have operated in isolation (Slate) And, because it even got democratic presidential candidates talking about working conditions (Mother Jones)
And it could mark the beginning of a new, union-bolstered service-worker movement (Bloomberg)
Here is who was at the Wednesday rally outside Uber’s headquarters in SF, besides drivers: one woman who worked a retail job at Walmart; a few software engineers; two animal doctors who’d just unionized their own workplace; and an Amazon warehouse worker from Poland who said she and her colleagues have been “squeezed like lemons” by capitalism and that she was here to learn from American labor organizers! Also this guy that looked so much like Beto lol.
(Credit: sarah holder/meatspace)
This seemed to be a sign that across the retail/service sector and up and down the tech world, a coalition could be forming.
Now the strike is over, and Uber bulldozed ahead with its IPO, opening at $45 a share and trading a lil lower than that! Trade wars alone can’t be blamed, tho: Lyft started in the green, but is now also down 27 percent bc investors are dubious about its path to profitability. Word.
Tip your drivers/take more public transit! Worst case scenario is ur airpods get stuck ‘twixt the rails.
(For more on airpods, read Caroline Haskins’ socio-scientific history of where they come from, and why they’ll never leave [our planet]!)
NOTES ON CAMP
When Susan Sontag wrote “Notes on Camp” in 1964, she could not have anticipated Demi Lovato’s blockbuster Camp Rock, nor Campono (niche reference), nor those thick REI socks, nor this absolutely heart-thudding NYT Mag story about encountering a bear and the crushing forces of nature while camping in Alaska, which all have muddied our cultural conception of camp. Sontag’s camp is not camp! It is camp: a style “of artifice and exaggeration” that is “esoteric -- something of a private code ... among small urban cliques.”
We and the rest of the internet had to learn this because the Met Gala used camp as its theme, and there were a lot of hot people there. Plz read Rachel Tashjian’s GQ explainer for more!
There is nothing less (more?) camp than having ur body scanned digitally so a 3D printer can fire a pool of resin into the shape of a 30-pound dress designed by Zac Posen over the course of literally hundreds of hours. Five people attending the Met Gala this week did this, according to the MIT Tech Review!!
Also at the Met Gala, Bezos posed with some Kardashians and a severed Jared Leto head. Summer Emerald, a techno-capitalist satirist painter who we interviewed last month, was inspired.
Airbnb is releasing a new film (?) called Gay Chorus Deep South, and Sears has a new logo, which looks a lot like Airbnb’s, but a lil bit more bulbous. Is this camp??
OUR INFLUENCE?
After stripping this extremely advanced vibrator of an innovation award at CES (calling it “indecent”) the trade show is going to award it back. We wrote about the controversy in January, but honestly the influence for this can be credited more to activists and feminist writers who fought for the dildo’s rights!
WHAT WE’RE SNACKING ON:
Rare: The photos of teen Zuckerberg in this NYT piece calling for Facebook to be broken up. The twist? It’s written by FB co-founder and Mark’s former roommate Chris Hughes, whose own haircut decisions track alongst the demise of the democratic ideals of the web! (Some ppl noted that it’s frustrating that no one listens to these sorts of pleas to regulate tech until they’re made by the people complicit in its construction, but)
Medium rare: Summer hasn’t even started and already there’s an Aperol Spritz smackdown happening on the world wide web. NYT published this hot take about how aperol spritzes are not good, and Twitter/also NY Magazine clapped back that they are….good? We like them/ forget if we like them or not, respectively!!! Tepid at best.
Well done: The book “How to Do Nothing” by Stanford lecturer/Oakland resident Jenny Odell. Sarah is doing something, which is reading it! It is not one of those unplugging books that is like, stop sleeping with your cell phone next to your head. It is more like: Start doing literally anything else! Full of good reminders to notice people and birds and rose gardens around you, and to think about divesting from personal branding/social media/constant pluggedness not in pursuit of returning to your capitalist chains rested/reused/recycled, but so you can LIVE. Definitely recommend.
TASTY BITES
Consider the fleece: an investigation into business casual (ty Brian M!) (The New Yorker)
Fake German heiress Anna Delvey sentenced to 4-12 years in prison, while wearing a great front-tying black dress (NYTimes)
WAS SHAKESPEARE A WOMAN? (The Atlantic)
This twee app for ur photo memories pivoted to .... developing facial recognition tools that they then sell to the military.... (NBC News)
A Tesla’s self-driving features were featured in a porno. Don’t shoot the messenger! (Inverse)
Tech can solve a lotta inconveniences but not the inherent vice of mess!!! (The Atlantic)
Leaving this here: one in every 11,600 people in SF is a billionaire. (Vox)
But some of them might be leaving for greener pastures post-IPOs! (Like Colorado.... The land of brunch tacos....??) (NYTimes)
On the eve of our fiftieth bday, we and the rest of the world finally got a peek at Bezos’ Blue Origin plans, which are to create a space colony full of teeny Mozarts (to be fair there was no indication that the Mozarts would be anything other than person-sized; Bezos was just trying to imply space would be full of male geniuses, but we’re imagining they’d be teeny idk why). Blue Moon the beer (or at least the person running Blue Moon’s brand) wants to be beamed into space alongside them. We’d prefer to stay right here!
Are there robo-callers in space,
Lora and Sarah