Meatspace is Lora and Sarah’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
New to Meatspace? Sign up here: meatspace.substack.com
Follow us on twitter @itsmeatspace + on Insta @itsmeatspace
Dear friends,
Candidly, Sarah loves to spy. That woman on the Amtrak on the phone w her sister describing the entire plot of Three Identical Strangers and her unwillingness to “promote” her long-distance relationship? Listened to it. Your very large-print Kindle copy of Fire and Fury? Peeped it, along with whatever else you’re reading on the metro. Spy Kids? Watched it, through the crevice between headrests, on an airplane. The Thumb-Thumbs! A prescient commentary on the endless scroll.
Lora, meanwhile, refuses to peep. The prospect of locking eyes with a stranger on the subway after you’ve just watched them relive their Long Island wine tour is? Unbearable (even if the pics were hot). High risk/medium reward: peep she will not.
What we have in common howmstever, is that when we are being spied on -- especially without the tools to know when, and in what ways-- we feel violated. Unforch, our privacy is being violated all the time, often ostensibly with our permission.
We are not talking about the SF residents digging around for goodies in rich people’s garbage cans, bc they are honestly finding good stuff like whole vacuum cleaners and goblets and not hurting anyone, at least per this flabbergasting NYTimes profile. Trash = treasure, etc., especially when it’s “things people want to get rid of but don’t have time to bring to the Goodwill and/or the foresight not buy in the first place” aka “trash of convenience” aka “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It.”
We are more talking about things like follow-shaming, which surprisingly is not a phenomenon in which people follow you only to eventually shame you (which, yes, seems precisely what Twitter was made for) but where people call out other people for following people they think are wack. On the narc to chill scale: Narc!
But beyond friends dunking on u, there are much darker privacy violations afoot. Read The New York Times’ new series called the Privacy Project for a disturbing/enlightening peek at many!
Emily Chang, the author of Brotopia, wrote on why digital privacy is a women’s issue. Sarah Jeong wrote about how AI is changing insurance, and (not shockingly!) reproducing biases, with incomplete info. And Samantha Irby wrote a countertake, which is that she loves her phone regardless -- and honestly, because -- of what it knows about her: “My phone is always listening, and through a series of bloops and bleeps I do not understand, the data I have spewed into the universe gets sold and fed back to me in a targeted Instagram ad for whatever it is I now urgently need.”
To find out where you fall on the spectrum, there’s also a cool interactive quiz where you can choose to draw a red line when tech gets too invasive for you. Too bad this line does not exist IRL! (Kara Swisher argues it could, if the government put up some guardrails.)
In the lead-up to the project launch, the NYT put lots of easter eggs on the site, including one where if you looked at their source code you could read a v scathing email to James Bennett.
Happy almost Easter/Passover! Find some afikomen. Eat some peeps.
STAR + BORN
Your eggs are your own, ladies. But if you want to use a fun/cute app called Ovia while pregnant, everything about your eggs will be pinged to your employer, as well!
This jaw-dropping Washington Post report looks at how employees enter daily, intimate info into Ovia; employers use said info to make HR/financial decisions; and Ovia makes money and keeps ur data, proudly building “one of the largest data sets on women’s health in the world” for its advertisers and corporate clients to enjoy!
An actual line from a benefits exec at a company that uses (and saves lots of money using) Ovia: “I want them to have a healthy baby because it’s great for our business experience.” A ton of questions here but honestly: what even is a business experience! He also claims 20 women who were previously diagnosed as infertile have gotten pregnant since starting to use the app which?! Thank u Karl O for link.
We simply hope these mothers track their children’s birth times, so that later in life they can name their moon and risings with airtight accuracy. So that Amazon can use their horoscopes to recommend products! Bam.
Even mattress companies are trying to create their own horoscope-adjacent corporate personality quizzes. TY Ben M (famously a cross btwn Yearning Dreamer and Skydiver) for the link.
Final health creep alert: it appears that pharmaceutical apps Hers, Hims, Ro, etc. are operating with loose doctor involvement, in what the Times calls “restaurant menu medicine.” Yum!
FAST TIMES @
Someone who is reading from a very different, mostly blank, menu? Is notorious wellness influencer @jack, who came out with another lit interview about how he obsessively fasts and eats only rarely; works near a near-infrared bulb for purposes other than tanning; and takes ice baths.
He also walks five miles to work, from his home in Seacliff to his office on Market St. Hop on a scooter please! It’s meditative, in its own way, unless you fall.
As Madison Malone Kircher points out on The Cut, Jack’s eating habits illuminate a v gendered double standard: when tech men do it it’s a defensible bio hack; when women do it it’s viewed as a disorder.
We further point you to: Amanda Mull on the ripple effects of a famous man lauding the benefits of intermittent fasting; Gray Chapman on Reddit’s obsessive calorie counters; and Graham Starr on a two truths and a lie interpretation of @jack’s sweet hacks.
If you are looking for another way to do some self-health-assessment, plz read our friend Charlie’s newsletter, Chunk, this week, where he talks about the problem of there being too many variables to identify why or when you feel the way you do. Is it a phone thing? Or...? Can relate!
ODD COUPLES
Some things just belong together: insta and influencers; AirPods and tools. But sometimes pairs come together in odd and perhaps baffling ways. This week in things you never thought you’d say in the same sentence: so many things!
For example the New York Times And Everlane rolled out an earth day brand campaign selling shirts about the Truth. Surprising!
KFC wrought a CGI colonel sanders influencer with a busty CGI girlfriend (that’s not even the odd couple part) and is partnering with TurboTax. (Ty Luke F for the tip). (Also related/not: Congress is about to ban the government from offering free tax software...is it in the pocket of Big Turbo??)
Apparently everyone came together in odd and baffling ways to create Spotify families without telling Sarah. But joke’s on them bc with her lonely premium plan, she now gets Hulu (partner) for free! And she has been using it to watch the Kardashians (#TeamScott).
Also Kim is becoming a lawyer. Random but genuinely cool that in California you can become an attorney via apprenticeships and the bar and skip law school?!
Our question for all of the above: but why!
Honestly: maybe doesn’t rly matter. We will just go back to rooting for weird couple Rosario Dawson and Corey booker. The latter of whom, btw, cracked down on biased tech tools. Okay corey!
WHAT WE’RE SNACKING ON
RARE: lil nas X went from viral tweeter to creator of a famous delightful song with opposition along the way. Our friend Jordan wrote about it in GQ! Yeehaw
MEDIUM RARE: This Reply All episode on Mazdas and podcasts is ranked medium because neither of us have admittedly listened yet lol, but per Maya Kosoff’s tweet, “this is the best thing i’ve listened to in ages. it’s utter lunacy. i can’t say more than that but just trust me.” we trust her!
WELL DONE: Small Fry, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, which examines the complicated relationship between Lisa and her dad, Steve Jobs. (Heard of him?!) He was portrayed as acting cruelly (he basically kicked her out of the house bc she skipped a trip to the circus; he wouldn’t turn on her room’s heat). But after reading it this week, sarah thinks the beauty of Small Fry wasn’t that it was some exposé -- it was an honest portrait of a daughter and a father trying, and mostly failing, to connect. Other takeaway: from now on only want to read books about founders written from the perspective of their long-lost/secret/estranged daughters.
Tell us what you are snacking on too!!! @ us or email itsmeatspace@gmail.com
TASTY BITES/THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT
China might ban bitcoin mining (TechCrunch)
Inside the Yang Gang discord chats (NBC)
Pray for the Megachurches using insta/savvy branding (Topic)
Uber IPO’d! (The Government Records)
And it’s historic in spite of/because of its wacky margins, per Alexis Madrigal (The Atlantic)
We wanted to make sure that u also know that Chuck E Cheese is going public and is worth...a lot of money (CBS).
YouTube execs ignored warning signs to drive engagement. Ty Beau D! (Bloomberg)
The UK rolled out p sweeping new laws to rear in tech companies, but some worry they will lead to censorship. (MIT Tech Review)
Robocalling is still rampant!! Meanwhile, Sarah’s Belarussian robocallers have migrated to Andorra. (Wired)
Inside Facebook’s plan for stopping white supremacist content. spoiler, not super comprehensive (Gizmodo)
New, non-Instagram apps are wooing ppl away from Insta. Featuring... Jeremy Renner? (Fast Company)
Also tay on how teens are making insta into FB with groups etc.
Wikipedia, famously non-social network, is also a site of harassment for women (NYT)
Can robots farm? (The New Yorker)
Check ur emails on Monday for a treat!!
Will leave you with this:
Bye!
Lora and Sarah