In this issue: All the links.
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
There’s a lot to cover today. On to the links.
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“You need to be more cautious than usual in verifying the things you see.”
Economist Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom on the developing situation in Israel:
“OpenAI announced it was giving its ChatGPT chatbot the ability to talk with users using voice and audio, putting the smaller artificial intelligence company on a direct collision course with tech giants Google, Apple and Amazon in the battle to create smarter voice assistants.”
“The millennial in San Francisco started posting the worst-offending "LinkedInfluencers" he found to his personal Twitter page — the shameless humblebrags, the personal anecdotes of dubious veracity, the #HustleCulture koans promoting a questionable approach to work-life balance. They were an instant hit, and the retweets rolled in. So he decided to spin up a dedicated meme page poking fun at the excesses of online professional culture and the Ted Talkification of LinkedIn. He called it @BestOfLinkedIn.”
“Don't share any personal info with Bard in conversation, it will get indexed.”
“The biggest thing keeping people from their local Starbucks these days isn’t that a grande blonde vanilla latte costs $7 or that a venti mocha cookie crumble Frappuccino has 590 calories. It’s the wait. The time from placing an order to being served now tops five minutes for more than a third of customers, surveys from researcher Technomic indicate. That’s mainly because of a sprawling menu and increasingly customized drinks with various squirts, shots and cold foams—which add up to more than 383 billion different possibilities just for a latte.”
“As TikTok pushes to expand its e-commerce business globally, the viral short-video app is turning to a group of sellers for help: Chinese merchants. TikTok is hoping such vendors will expand its online retail offerings. However, the app’s background as a haven for catchy dances and lip syncs has confounded even experienced sellers, more accustomed to retailing on traditional shopping platforms such as Amazon.com.”
“As part of the pilot, Spotify worked with a “select group” of podcasters — Dax Shepard and Monica Padman (“Armchair Expert”), Lex Fridman, Steven Bartlett (“The Diary of a CEO”) and The Ringer’s Bill Simmons — to generate AI-powered voice translations in other languages including Spanish, French and German for a few episodes.”
“The true tale of the Luddites starts with workers demanding that the laws be upheld. When factory owners began to buy automation systems for textile production, they did so in violation of laws that required collaboration with existing craft guilds – laws designed to ensure that automation was phased in gradually, with accommodations for displaced workers. These laws also protected the public, with the guilds evaluating the quality of cloth produced on the machine, acting as a proxy for buyers who might otherwise be tricked into buying inferior goods. Factory owners flouted these laws. Though the machines made cloth that was less durable and of inferior weave, they sold it to consumers as though it were as good as the guild-made textiles.”
“If you're looking to score some coke online, Google has made it a little easier — with an unsuspecting assist from the Food and Drug Administration, Interpol, the United Nations, and dozens of other government agencies, businesses, and nonprofits. "Cocaine for sale here," the page hosted on the FDA's website said alongside a telephone number and a handle for the encrypted-messaging app Wickr. "Buy crystal meth online." The culprit is a recent change by Google that makes defacing websites with advertisements for where to buy cocaine, heroin, meth, ketamine, Xanax, black-market Ozempic, ecstasy, and other drugs suddenly a viable way to find customers.”