In this issue: NYC recap / Substack as hungry monster / Google search monetization / NFL + Taylor Swift = revenue! / AI demonology / Consumer internet enshittification / American politics = perverse media rewards / Teaching AIs to see / Bandcamp layoffs / Dave Portnoy as pizza magnate / Writing about the 1978 New York Yankees.
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.
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It’s been a busy few weeks. My dad had a nasty fall at home—no bones broken, thankfully—but he was hospitalized for a bit and is now at an inpatient physical therapy facility in New York. It was also my 25th (!) high school anniversary. Both of which meant that it was a very good idea to go to New York for the weekend.
The trip was good. Seeing old friends was wonderful, as was meeting a new bunch of amazing people for the first time.
Stuyvesant is a free New York magnet public high school that offered an elite private school level of education and opportunities to make connections and open doors that I never, ever would have had as a lower-middle class outer borough kid otherwise. Going to Stuyvesant changed the trajectory of my life.
Now on to the links.
”Substack, it turns out, is a hungry, hungry monster. There are actual real people, many of them paid subscribers, who will notice if I don't write anything. These people, unlike random TV and film executives, are spending their own hard-earned money on this nonsense and must, therefore, be catered to in earnest, and with the requisite amount of enthusiasm.”
"Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."
”(Taylor) Swift and the NFL have stumbled upon the perfect solution to fill the gaps in each other’s audiences: They have joined forces. And the ability of these two behemoths to combine their largely divergent fandoms could help sustain the long-term dominance of both enterprises.”
”Sure, AI tools like GPT-4 are fun and interesting. But are they practical?
Can they help us do something truly useful… like, say, translate a 1,200 page book about demons written by an obscure sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian?
Let’s find out!”
”The consumer internet has smoothed your identity into some brand’s extremely specific Pyschographic. You know what I mean when I was Lululemon girl and Black Rifle Coffee guy. Don’t worry you think, I’m not a sucker. While typing this on an iPhone.”
”Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND): "The incentive structure in this town is completely broken... we have descended to a place where clicks, TV hits and the neverending quest for the most mediocre taste of celebrity drives decisions and encourages juvenile behavior"
“Once you give AIs vision, they gain a new method of interacting with the world, one that expands their capabilities into industries and uses that most of us had never considered. It does all the basics, of course. Basics like deciphering handwritten treatises on mummies written in archaic Catalan (a challenge given to me by historian Benjamin Breen) or becoming a solid photography coach. But that is just the start.”
”Epic Games lays off roughly 50% of Bandcamp amidst its sale to Songtradr. The Fortnite maker purchased the music platform just last year but is now spinning it off amid massive cost cutting.”
““One review from Dave (Portnoy) was enough for me to make enough money to remodel the whole place,” said Al Santillo, who owns Santillo’s Brick Oven Pizza in Elizabeth, N.J., standing under his tent kitchen on the festival field. And Mr. Portnoy did not even rate Santillo’s at the top of the scale. It received an 8.3, though a video of the review has been watched 3.5 million times on YouTube.”
Legendary sportswriter Peter Golenbock on writing about the New York Yankees.