Over/Under the Influence
where are the plates
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,
We are staring out a window with “when will my husband return from war” energy but instead asking “when will the Caroline Calloway drama cycle end”?!?
To catch u up: influencer Caroline Calloway has lately been doing things, posting abt them, getting backlash, posting the backlash, and gaining followers in the process.
The latest is that this week, Caroline’s former insta caption ghostwriter/friend Natalie Beach wrote an essay exposing her in The Cut. Our feeds were like “IT’S HERE” and we were like...frankly if [it] isn’t a new iPhone that fits comfortably in our palms pls don’t rile us up.
(For a tl;dr on who Caroline Calloway is and how the drama was begat, read this nyt styles explainer. Fwiw, choire sicha and jonah engel-bromwich argue that tho Ms Calloway originally “went viral as a scam,” she is not a scammer in the Fyre Fest sense of the word. She perhaps is in the “most likely violating copyright law by cutting bb replicas of matisse paintings out of Michael’s craft supplies and selling them for $140” sense.)
Caroline feigned offense re Natalie but also vamped the cut story for days and has now linked to it in her bio! It’s an endless cycle of notoriety upon which they’re both feeding. Poetic!
Promise we understand the irony of this non-news cycle, and how we are playing into it by riding the content wave. We are almost over it—but a couple questions remain:
Where are the y*le plates?
And, crucially, was the essay about the tenterhooks of female friendship or was it about AMBITION.
Honestly we are jaded now and moving fwd we only trust female friendships formed in Bumble’s new women’s fortnite league.
For those who are interested in experiencing the fruits of another digital duo’s partnership, Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison’s holograms are going on tour. (H/t Ivy SS) At first when we saw the insta post announcing it we misread the words “rock n roll” as rick roll and thought roy orbison was the popularizer of the rick roll, which would have been too good to be true. But it’s still pretty good because it’s two holograms :)
PUFF PUFF PASS
Off-brand vapes, long known to make u look like ur puffing a teeny oboe at parties, have now truly ushered in panic and tragedy. This week the death toll of a mysterious vaping-related lung disease rose to six. :(
And Trump’s govt is even cracking down even on prestige e-cig brands such as Juul, mandating that vape brands can only sell tobacco-flavored pods. Farewell to strawberry milk flavor.
Pax, the vape company in the Juul family of brands, made a somber post like “don’t use off-brand vapes.” Might they be using a snowballing public health crisis to edge over their competition? Stranger things have happened...
Such as, well, this:
Bonus debate-themed vape content:
UBER SITUATION
A bill that would reclassify gig economy workers as full employees passed the California legislature this week! It is waiting for the fingies of Governor Gavin Newsom to sign it into law.
“This is an existential threat to Uber and Lyft!” many people including sarah wrote. “This is good for drivers who make under minimum wage and want a more stable livelihood,” they also wrote.
But, in the spirit of Principled Confrontation (a real Uber value in the Kalanick days, according to Mike Isaac’s new book Super Pumped), Uber’s chief counsel tony west (husband of Kamala Harris’ sister!) announced Wednesday that the company is just like... not going to comply?! More precisely, he said Uber would pass the test laid out in AB5, and be able to keep its drivers’ status as gig workers, no matter what CA legislators said. Only contractors who perform the “core function” of a company are supposed to be reclassified, and West argues drivers aren’t central to business! (A Caro/Nat-level betrayal.)
Uhhh because Uber’s business model is “losing a bunch of money”? (budum-ch)
There are some real mental/legal gymnastics happening here, but come to think of it there always have been! Remember, Uber rose to power by Greyballing elected officials and breaking hella laws. Also, Dynamex—the supreme case that AB5 was based on—was decided a year ago in favor of reclassifying contractors, and Uber and Lyft have basically been ignoring it. Why stop! “Feel free to sue us to bits,” West said, in not so many words.
This insane corporate maneuver reminds Sarah of the Amazon pull-out from NY on Valentine’s day! When a company is faced with a shred of accountability, they choose to change the rules of the game. We are on the edges of our carseats to see what happens next.
TASTY BITES
If You Can’t Read This It’s Too Late (for your posture) (Vice)
A heart-wrenching goodbye from a telephone pole (Twitter)
There’s Shazam for art now. Is this good? (By our friend Sophie) (New York Times)
Bama released an app that tracks students’ location data at football games, rewarding the students that stay until the fourth quarter/bitter end (NYT)
State attorneys general continue with their probing against Google (Washington Post)
People are running their neighbors’ license plates through license plate readers why (L A Times)
Apparently some users are comparing the new iphone w three (3) cameras to a spider’s face or a fidget spinner (NBC)
But honestly when we saw this phone we thought….
...who will photoshop this atop it.
Where’s the lie xx!
Sarah and Lora