SPECIAL DELIVERY
But @ what cost
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 hope u all had a nice labor day. We soaked in a semi-nude hot spring filled with Burners coming down from la playa and ate Cheetos on a coach bus from opposite coasts, like ships in the night. Meanwhile, Caroline O’Donovan published a phenom BuzzFeed News investigation on the harrowing dangers of overnight shipping.
The story served as a valuable reminder that free next-day delivery is not free!! Drivers literally pay with pedestrians’ (and their) lives trying to meet Amazon’s speed and delivery quotas, while Amazon eschews responsibility for accidents by blaming “3rd party” drivers that are often using non-Amazon-branded vehicles, and consumers happily renew their Prime subscriptions none the wiser. The New York Times followed up with an investigation co-produced by ProPublica, identifying “more than 60 accidents since June 2015 involving Amazon delivery contractors that resulted in serious injuries, including 10 deaths”—and that’s prob an undercount.
A more wholesome online ordering enterprise is Etsy! Read Kaitlyn Tiffany’s deep dive on the shop’s evolution from 2005, when it was founded and also when Martha Stewart got out of prison; to its rise as a twee indie seller of tea cozies and crocheted tampon holders; to its stilted transformation into a big biz today. Also amazing detail in this Atlantic piece about lunchlady scammers is that one of said scammers got so many UPS deliveries to her house that neighbors assumed she was running an Etsy shop...but of course.
The point is, Americans love to have stuff shipped to them, regardless of how!!! Books clothes baby shoes but crucially also lunch.
Derek thompson reported that in 2020, more than half of the nation’s restaurant spending is projected to take place “off premise” aka not in a restaurant. Already, online delivery is the fastest-growing food industry!
This leads us to ask: Any news on Digiorno lately?
MONOPOLY MONEY
On Tuesday Lora went to the genius bar to get her phone turned off and turned on again, and while there she encountered a completely cursed game on a sample iphone where u had to find names of tech companies in balls and tap them to complete the names. Strong spanish 1 quizlet energy.
But that got us thinking: what if instead of piecing Ap - ple or Lin - ked -In back together we just...left them there...broken up in this proverbial word soup…
Perhaps such a soup state would be the preference of FTC regulators, who this week set the stage further for Google antitrust probing. More than half of state attorneys general are poised to open an antitrust investigation into the search giant, prob on Monday.
In other meh news for Google, YouTube got fined $170 million by the FTC for advertising to kids, but critics see it as a slap on wrist/are like...this fine is just encouraging them to follow the law, which they should have been doing all along.
And meanwhile as FB continues being probed for anticompetitive behavior, two of its arms, WhatsApp and Instagram, apparently may be hotbeds for misinformation leading up to 2020. But at least u can now do facebook dating in the US!! Which, bravely, facebook announced u have to opt into.
ARTIFICE
This AI system called Aristo is able to pass an eighth grade science test (which impressive but also like same).
Seems like a good sign that AI should *checks notes* control the nukes.
This is what some US deterrence experts proposed this week!
Definitely a bad idea but also a good opportunity to remind u that a current human controller of the nukes (Energy Secretary Rick Perry) was duped by the instagram copypasta hoax last month.
Our president, who is similarly nuke-button-adjacent, evidently Sharpied an extra loop onto a map of the path of Hurricane Dorian to make it seem like the storm was going to hit Alabama so he wouldn’t have to admit to tweeting a mistake. And now he has doubled down on it!! Yet another case for the edit button @jack.
And in other AI news, a Chinese app called Momo (not that momo!) that uses AI to make u look like u r in movie scenes is embroiled in controversy abt them keeping ur pics forever.
We would like to see ourselves in National Treasure and we would give our privacy—or really anything—to do so.
SHOP TIL DROP
Remember when aforementioned Sharpier thought you had to show ID to buy groceries? Amazon took this idea and went straight to the patent office. According to the NY Post, the company is testing a system that would use shoppers’ biometric information as a payment method. (The project is nicknamed “Orville” which is thissssss close to Orwell.) The main question is—AS IT OFTEN IS—why?
Shoutout to Jess K, who alerted us that u already have to use an app to use the bathroom at a Whole Foods in the haight! This seems like a great way to refuse to serve homeless people while scraping restroomers’ data. Nice :)
Honestly grocery stores are just getting too high-tech for us. At Amazon Go stores, sensors track u via glyphs. In several Stop n Shops around the country, googly-eyed robots named Marty follow u around making sure you don’t shoplift. If you must kick the robot, you can and should, argues Sara Harrison in Wired, responding to a robot-kicking incident in a California parking garage.
But soon we will need to be doing more than kicking! Bc the U.S. military is developing a fleet of killer robots. Uh oh
BONUS: another peril of going too high-tech is that Zipcars sometimes won’t open if you don’t have cell service.
ICE AGE
For the past few months, Sarah has been really desperate to know why the WeWork she works at doesn’t have any communal freezers for people to put their lunches in. In dozens of articles about the company, their svelte fridges and Kom-brewcha taps are lauded. BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FREEZERS!
Other coworking companies replied to Sarah’s inquiry (“do you have freezers”) that they indeed had freezers (“not a silly question at all,” they said, for they are in the business of helping people eat lunch!). But she had to email WeWork comms like three times before they finally responded saying, “we will politely have to decline comment at this time,” which?? What doesn’t Adam Neumann want us to know!
The fact that there are Sweetgreen delivery caddies on each floor but not places to preserve frozen Lean Cuisines seemed to symbolize something something millennial culture optimization pivot to kale salad (read Jia for more on that). It could have even been a sign that WeWork is clinging to austerity measures in this trying time (they’re bleeding money and pathways to profitability are slim). But then apparently there are freezers on other floors just not Sarah’s lmao. To be fair most of them are frozen shut. Thanks Matt B for the intel and sry to have wasted everybody’s time! Lol
Last night, we learned that WeWork’s parent company’s IPO valuation might be slashed in half from $47b to around $20b due to major investor skepticism and the inherent meaninglessness of numbers! Other experts think that they may cancel or delay the whole deal and not go public. We can’t say for sure that the freezer thing is part of it, but nothing is off the table...
TASTY BITES
Google is surfacing climate denier content in its discover feature (Buzzfeed News)
The MTA is mad about people dropping AirPods in the subway lol (Verge)
Youtube removed a bunch of vids but extremists can still find workarounds :/ (Wired)
RIP to Jeremy Renner’s app, the Jeremy Renner app (GQ)
Katie Notopoulos on ppl who weren’t addicted to tobacco but then got addicted to juul (Buzzfeed News)
Google contractors are unionizing in pittsburgh (Washington Post)
WHAT IS SPOTIFY (The Nation)
Great april glaser piece on the anticapitalist dream of a better internet (Logic)
And finally, if u need us we will be hiding out eating incogmeato (h/t Maddie B)
Warm regards,
Sarah and Lora