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,
It’s tax season, baby.
Taxes are not a game, allegedly. But clicking is! So delightful to click click click “yes yes yes” on Turbotax. Then you get money back! It is as simple as that. Or is it.
If you like us are scrambling to file your taxes rn, you likely have used an online tax service. Maybe you used a free one.
But beware. As the Washington Post reports, “Nothing is certain except death, taxes … and tech companies making grabs for your data!”
In other words: Some free taxes services are free because they take your data. Classic example of paying for privacy! The main site investigated by WashPo, Credit Karma, uses the tax info you input to target you for financial products advertising (they don’t share your data with third parties). But they keep your data for 10 years! Even, as writer Geoffrey A. Fowler notes, if the company pivots to doing something else....and therefore something more nefarious with your data. (Life insurance?)
Technically you have to opt in to Credit Karma’s data grab. But then u must ask yourself: Is getting fast, free assurance that you—unlike Icelandic whale-noise band Sigur Ros—will have your taxes done accurately and on time worth it? When there are trade-offs...
Also makes us wonder about Free Credit Report Dot Com and specifically their commercials. How did they pay for all the pirate suits and ukeleles if the service was truly ~free~?
A note: the IRS has a site where they outline how to get actually free tax services if you make below a certain income (generally $66,000). Leaving this here in case any of u qualify and are interested!
And for all u bitcoin bros reading this (reveal yourself cowards): the IRS will tax you if you make purchases using your ‘coin. Sidenote, remember when the cryptobillionaire died without revealing the password to access his bitcoins? Apparently $143 million went missing from his wallet, post mortem!! The plot.... so thick.
Okay now that we have given u these amazing pieces of service journalism, we wanted to share two more: Rachel Tashjian’s GQ piece about how Anna Delvey used a courtroom stylist (choker her own), and Tanya Chen’s Buzzfeed interview with said stylist. Key quote: “Obviously there are challenges to styling someone who’s currently incarcerated.”
JUST VENMO ME
Who among us has not had a crush come back from abroad, think it’s so on after you jovially catch up in the art history library, and then recoiled in horror when you see he’s Venmoed a (girl you thought was his ex) girlfriend a “sushi” emoji.
Just us? Honestly, no! Madison Malone Kircher in The Cut takes us through a delightful and actually quite similar experience she had of seeing a former flame Venmo-ing a new one whilst abroad in amour central, Paris. (And she also links to the term “venvy,” an elegant portmanteau of venmo and envy that we will use whenever Sarah’s camp friend from 2011’s bf venmos her “didn’t wanna wake u...bfast on me”).
It would be p easy for the police to start using Venmo captions to catch c*nn*bis dealers who unoriginally charge ppl for “:leaf emoji:”s. And Venmo is now sending debt collectors to pressure people with negative venmo balances (which we didn’t even know was possible), because the platform is losing money. To Venmo we say: Have mercy on the couple who was simply trying to buy two Justin Timberlake tickets only to be SCAMMED! (read the WSJ story for more on that.)
We wonder as well. One time Lora saw someone send a venmo captioned “chicken pot pie, it’s on your dresser” and she thinks about it almost every day.
In conclusion, Venmo voyeurism is almost as painful as when you used to be able to see a list of people’s Snapchat best friends. Put yourselves on private mode, y’all!
WeHorny
Not us in particular, rn. But people at WeWorks in general, yes!! Put a lot of young people together in an open space with kegs, and they are bound to “furiously make out” on “cinco de mayo” before and/or after striking up a “robust Gchatship.”
There are lower stakes when the people you are co-working with are not your coworkers, evidently. You can just switch pods if things get awk! But there’s also a dark side, bc there always is. One actual WeWork employee sued the company last year, according to the GQ story linked above, saying she’d been sexually assaulted at two events and that WeWork fired her after she reported the incident to HR. And Bloomberg has reported that, in addition to being underpaid and overworked, WeWork community managers employed in the company’s early days had to do things like pick up used condoms in the meditation room!! The grind. #TGIM.
Bonus: It is harder to find a loyal WeWork friend than a lover.
As far as co-working lounges go we are partial to Delta’s. But other companies are also trying to make lounges happen. This start-up Brex opened an exclusive lounge in SF that’s apparently a “homier version of a WeWork.” Let your minds wander!
And guess what that start-up Brex DOES! In its own words, it is creating “the corporate card that actually lives up to the hype.”
“It's not about exclusivity,” Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras told Business Insider. But it is literally a members-only club built for people who have the same credit card. Billy McFarland is quaking! Also, Brex is advertising on the subway with the hashtag #fyreyourcorporatecard. Bit on the nose!
SOUPED UP RIDESHARE
I! P! O! Lyft did it, before Uber, today! It opened at $24 billion, which, as Alexis Madrigal notes, is “a lot for a company that’s never made money, may never make money, and in fact lost nearly a billion dollars last year.” Lorde grant us the confidence.
Reread Nellie Bowles’ report on what might happen to SF when it is teeming with (more) millionaire IPO-cialites (trying this term out lmk what u think), many of whom may be obsessed with performatively suffering. Relatedly, here’s who will get rich(er) from the Lyft IPO.
Ahead of said IPOs, Uber and Lyft have been vying to increase their respective hold on driver loyalty, and thus their market share. But gig drivers have felt mistreated by both! After Uber cut per-mile pay rates in L.A. by 25 percent this month (after raising them by 25 percent in September), drivers for Uber and Lyft organized a strike in the city, turning off their apps for 25 hours. NYC just implemented a ride-hail minimum wage at $17.22 an hour (which Lyft is fighting). Drivers want other cities to follow.
One anonymous Uber driver wrote an open letter on OneZero, demanding that “all of our drivers are fairly remunerated, that they gain greater transparency about how their earnings are calculated, that they are guaranteed greater protections, and that their collective voice is heard in the boardroom.” As more drivers join the platforms, and base pay stays low, drivers have to work longer hours to stay afloat, chasing surges and tips. It’s taking a mental health toll!
“I want to say it’s a job, but it’s not a job—it’s more of a game that we’re playing, and they’re playing with us,” Karim Bayumi, an LA Uber driver, told Sarah.
Further reading: How Uber tried and failed to make a monopoly
Cursed tweet:
WATCH THIS MEATSPACE
Something big is coming for Meatspace…..soon!! All we can say is…….check ur emails on Monday…….!
TASTY BITES
Sex tech is becoming big business (Forbes)
A fake Bloomberg journalist whose twitter pic was an AI-generated woman’s face followed a bunch of Tesla short-sellers lol (Twitter)
WeWorks are dog-friendly but they are decidedly not child-friendly (see ABOVE!). These co-working spaces, meanwhile, are open to kids (CityLab)
Grindr as a national security risk?! (h/t sam H) (Verge)
Move over influencers.....and verminfluencers....captionfluencers are here. (NYTimes)
Why does social media makes us feel lonely? The ~~philosophy behind our “techxistential” crises (h/t Andrew S) (Quartz)
The end of iPhone screen time// the end of feeling accountable for our failures?? Something to think about. (OneZero)
This Gen Z-er loves newsletters! Bc they are intimate xoxoxo (NYTimes)
Scammers phished a hundred millions from FB and Google whoa! (Intelligencer)
We leave you with this log of real life vanity plate requests that were rejected by the DMV, as gathered by Sam Braslow for LA Mag. (Ty Sam W for the tip). A fave:
Verdict no,
Sarah and Lora