Project Voldy
an ignominious club
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,
In case you thought Snapchat wasn’t compiling damning dossiers on facebook and calling them “Project Voldemort” - let us disabuse u of that notion right now.
And lest thoughts of whistle-blowing distract u during this wild news weeek, we wish to direct ur attention to the fact that FB bought a mind-reading startup?!?!
More specifically, the company, CTRL-Labs, makes an armband that reads ur neural impulses and translates them into text or movement....... Aka if you think really hard about wanting to click a button, the button will be clicked!
Strongly reminiscent of that dude saying “I want to learn how to blow shit up with my mind” in the 2006 Justin Long movie Accepted.
For those who want to clear their minds, may we suggest this Amazon Ring-branded fidget spinner?
This was one of lower-tech products Amazon rolled out this week. Another was a geofencing device called Fetch that helps people track things like labradoodles, still in its testing phase. (Stop trying to make fetch happen! sry) Bc no one learns anything from anything, amazon is also trying to make google glasses happen again. And Alexa rings, into which you’re supposed to whisper sweet nothings like “remind me to send the police my doorbell footage.” Meanwhile, Amazon is drafting its own facial recognition laws to uhhh help regulate itself.
As April Glaser wrote way back in 2017 (about Apple’s foray into Airpods), it seems that more and more, tech companies want us to jam our heads into our own personal clouds! We will soon become little more than Sims chained to wearables! Yipkee Banakatoo.
But clearly there are perils to relying too much on the Alexas and Googles of the world. In the Atlantic, Lora wrote about knowledge panels, the little boxes on Google that contain bdays and net worths (see: Elizabeth Holmes $0) but also disinformation!! :/
Come for the commentary about reigning in bad actors stay for the fact that SEO strife made one guy go by his DJ name lol.
BONUS SAME NAME DIFF LIFE: The Lily asked a lot of 30 year old women named jessica (the most popular girl baby name in 1989) what it’s like being 30 and also named jessica.
WE ARE SO SORRY
Much ink but somehow never enough has been spilt on the rapid devolution of the We Company this month. WeWork’s “honesty markets” may be shut down coast to coast because too many people have been stealing items (maybe la croix) from them! The We Company is trying to sell three companies off, including Meetup.com; and it may lay off 40% of its weworkforce :( Construction workers were protesting labor conditions outside of a San Francisco WeWork last week, armed with blowups of a grim reaper and also a dog (?); and cleaners were protesting unfair firings outside of a London one!
And biggest of all, Adam Neumann, famed We-EO, has been pushed out.
He is in ignominious company. (Vocab word credit nytimes.) Juul CEO Kevin Burns stepped down, after everyone turned on his company bc it hooks kids on nicotine, apparently, and also on account of the whole vaping sickness debacle. He’s been replaced by tobacco company Altria’s big wig K. C. Crosthwaite. Devin Wenig, eBay’s CEO, resigned amid pressure to break up the online auctioning company. The Vokswagen CEO might follow, after being charged w stock market manipulation/lying about the company’s gas emissions.
As we read mike isaac’s book about Uber, Super Pumped, together/apart (in the chapter we’re on right now, Uber’s erstwhile CEO Travis Kalanick is -- much like “Sheryl Sandberg was seething” -- fuming) we are led to wonder if the cult of the Founder/CEO is coming to an end. Let us stop you there -- probably not!
Kalanick especially is doing fine he’s investing in the wework for kitchens!
TIKTOK ON THE CLOCK
Sitting in a Panera bread in West Hartford, CT this past weekend, scrolling through a Tiktok thread on twitter, Lora found herself jonesing for a destination where she could just see TikToks without those noisy tweets between. Then it dawned on her: she could just download Tiktok. And reader...she did.
Tiktok, in addition to being a home for Amish teens to find earnest viral fame, is now apparently a pathway for Uyghur activists to poke through e-fences of the Chinese surveillance state. People are even jumping through many hoops to locate family members on tiktok. Unfort, this is relevant bc there there are many barriers to info on the platform. As this WashPo piece about TikTok notes, there are relatively few posts abt Hong Kong protests, while there are 6.6 million views for “#snails” (h/t Jia’s piece abt tiktok for shouting this out).
We will be watching the news on this, as we avoid watching these earnest and dramatically scored Tiktoks of adults announcing their divorces.
TASTY BITES
Both Comscore (SEC.gov) and Match.com (FTC.gov) were cracked down upon for fraud this week, reinforcing that the twin pursuits of love and viral content are fraught endeavors
Lola Fadulu wrote abt the rise of facial recognition in public housing + its detractors (including Rashida Tlaib!) (NYT)
Silicon Valley is v polluted bc of all the toxic waste in the groundwater (The Atlantic)
Excerpt from Anna Wiener’s book about working in tech, Uncanny Valley, which we look fwd to reading in full!! (New Yorker)
Warmest,
Sarah and Lora