Meatspace is Sarah and Lora’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,
Let’s kick things off with a quiz: Mitski lyric or Lora’s mom talking about her visit to the Amazon Go store in Chicago. (Answer key at bottom)
“You just walk in like you own it. Silently choose what you want”
“My God, I'm so lonely. So I open the window. To hear sounds of people”
“One last thought….was kinda a lonely feeling”
“Does it smell like a school gymnasium in here”
“It’s not about my device (phone). It’s about my own body.”
“Nobody Nobody Nobody Nobody Nobody Nobody Nobody Nobody”
Full disclosure we may listen to too much Mitski: Sarah listened to a whopping 25 hours of her music in 2018, according to the annual Spotify year wrapped...Lora to 30. But if indie pop’s saddest (and best American) girl wanted to use her platform to sing about the existential dread and alarm about the future of retail, Amazon Go would be a good place to start.
Amazon Go stores are a relatively new phenomenon -- so far they exist only in SF, Seattle, and Chicago -- and they are the latest in Amazon’s path toward upending the shopping experience as we know it.
Have u been to an amazon store?? If so, tweet us @itsmeatspace and tell us about it!
For those who haven’t had the pleasure: we learned from Laura Bliss in Citylab that the Go-ing works like this: “Wall-to-wall cameras and sensors track shoppers, their phones, and each item we pick up and put down via special glyphs printed on the product packaging.”
This means once you’ve chosen your pre-packaged egg salad or whatever, you can just leave the store, without checking out with a person or sliding through self-checkout. Not so easy to steal bananas here! Amazon’s already opening your doors and your trunks, sitting in your living room, and singing you lullabies -- making the act of buying so mindlessly efficient so it becomes almost instinctual is a next logical step. “Frictionless,” as Lora’s mom put it.
(Read on for how this tasted.)
This week was not “frictionless” for Amazon overall. 24 Amazon warehouse workers were hospitalized after a robot punctured some bear spray (Vice Motherboard). WNYC refuses to call the incoming Amazon Queens campus a “headquarters” (GeekWire). And, critically, Bezos refuses to call Gwyneth back (The Cut).
FOUNDING FRIENDS
James Somers wrote an excellent piece in this week’s New Yorker about the friendship of the Google founders. They are different in personality….but come together to change the web (and, relatedly, contemporary life/future of the world). The piece offers a history of Google, too, including the key trivia that the search engine used to be called “Back-Rub.” Okay!
A pair of founding friends we are less impressed with are the co-leaders of MoviePass. WE WANT TO SEE ‘THE FAVOURITE’ FOR CHEAP! (btw - excellent take on this film by our friend Sabrina in GLAAD’s amp series). The MoviePass guys told the NYTimes they want to win back customers’ trust by offering ... more expensive subscriptions. Okay good luck!
But the story also made us notice that every New York Times story about Tech Founders Making It Through Hard Times—With A Lot of Heart is topped with a photo of two to three men chilling on a couch -- smiling and not smiling, manspreading and not manspreading, sweatered and buttoned-up -- but at the end of the day all alike in that they are leading their company, which to be clear they founded, through a rough patch.
Moviepass guys. We hope taking $100+ from Sarah in 2017 made you happy! // Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
Instagram founders // Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
Instagram founders again (same outfits different article). The more the couch changes, the more the zip up hoodie and soft smiles stay the same. // Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
Siraj Khaliq, left, and David Friedberg, founders of the Climate Corporation. Note the couch -- it’s green! And one is sitting on a table. Don’t fall! // Annie Tritt for The New York Times
Genius founders Ilan Zechory, left, and Tom Lehman, right, talking about going to couples’ therapy. Founders have feelings too // Dina Litovsky for The New York Times
Travis Fitzgerald, Josh Pavlacky and Daniel Wallace, the founders of American Medium. This time, on mini pink blocks! // Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Bobby Murphy, left, and Evan Spiegel, the co-founders of Snapchat app. This pic was used in various other publications, too, and not always as the lede image. But the trend STANDS! Or sits. Awkwardly. On a grey couch. //J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times
TASTY BITES
Facebook employees are talking shit to each other on burner phones (Business Insider)
A YouTube network called Defy Media folded, allegedly leaving creators owed thousands (The Verge)
Shoutout to loyal reader Aly F for sending us this nuanced take on Tumblr’s adult content ban and what it means for corporate overlords to regulate nonnormative sexual communities online (The Atlantic)
And another, on how sex workers and NSFW artists will suffer under the Tumblr ban, creatively and potentially physically (Huffington Post)
Everyone is watching your children -- and you are letting them (based on our audience survey many of you probably don’t have children so maybe yOU-you are not complicit but. One day maybe if you make that choice!) (Vox)
Here is Mozilla Foundation’s gift guide on the creepiest products lol. See sliding scale emoji for how creepy users think Alexa is! (Mozilla Foundation)
ANSWER KEY:
Lora’s mom on Amazon Go: 1, 3, 5
Mitski: 2, 4, 6
Here’s one final poetic insight from the Amazon Go store (this one about the egg salad Lora’s mom bought and ate): “Umm ok. Certainly fresh enuf. But needs some crunch, like some celery or something.”
Yours in something,
Sarah and Lora