📅Context Collapse: Weekend Links 03/01/24

Against internet doomerism: CC #285

In This Issue: Cory Doctorow On Amazon / Oprah Winfrey Exits Weight Watchers Board / New York Times Cooking App = Moneymaker / Microsoft All In On Copilot / GenAI As Get Rich Quick Enabler / Media’s Future In Sales / The Swirling Content Whirlpool / WordPress & Automattic Crisis PR / How Journalists Can Make Peace With AI / Danelle Morton On Ghostwriting / The Rise Of B2B Creator Superstars / Making The Last Of Us Part II Trailer

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

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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Before we get to the good stuff—the links—I have a personal confession: I’m very bad at doomerism and pessimism in general.

Doomerism? According to old man Wikipedia:

Doomer and, by extension, doomerism, are terms which arose primarily on the Internet to describe people who are extremely pessimistic or fatalistic about global problems such as overpopulation, peak oil, climate change, ecological overshoot, pollution, nuclear weapons, and runaway artificial intelligence. Some doomers assert that there is a possibility these problems will bring about human extinction.

I haven’t thought that way since I was, oh, 23 or so. I have a strong belief that humans are immeasurably creative and intelligent doers with the ability to fix or mitigate a wide variety of problems. I have a strong belief that us humans, as individuals, have far more individual and creative agency then we can possibly imagine. Since becoming a parent, especially, I’ve realized “I can’t do it” are some of the worst words in the English language.

But there is a lot of doomerism on the internet in general, on social media specifically, and in social media circles for professional journalists especially.

Let’s say it: Doomerism is a load of bullshit.

There are problems in this world.

And we can solve them.

Now on to the links.

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Cory Doctorow On Amazon: “Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop.

Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power.

For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!”

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Oprah Winfrey Exits Weight Watchers Board: “WeightWatchers suffered a loss of more than $88 million in 2023, according to a financial report released by the company this week. The loss was more than double the previous year’s of $35.8 million.

Meanwhile, makers of weight-loss drugs say they are racing to meet demand and spending heavily to boost their manufacturing capacity.”

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New York Times Cooking App = Moneymaker: “To keep growth going, Cooking's editors will churn out more recipes and videos this year than ever before. The plan is to produce up to 100 recipes a month, a roughly 40% increase over 2023; and to double its selection of cooking demo videos to 100.”

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Microsoft All In On Copilot: “These new capabilities build on the introduction of the Copilot Key on new Windows 11 PC keyboards, updates to the Copilot icon on the taskbar, and the ability to dock, undock and resize the Copilot pane. [….]

In addition to the new features in Copilot, over the next month, we are bringing even more value to Windows 11. We are adding new AI editing capabilities in Photos designed to make creating simpler, enabling easier video editing with the preview of Clipchamp silence removal, and launching improvements to features like Snap, Widgets and Inking, making it even easier to get things done.”

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GenAI As Get Rich Quick Enabler: “The get-rich-quick nature of AI obscures that the algorithms—no one quite understands them, and the creators keep it all safely tucked away in their block boxes—are predicated on disrupting industries that are not very lucrative. Graphic designers, technical writers, and 2010s-style online aggregators are all greatly threatened by the advance of AI. None of these professions, with very rare exceptions, are making anyone rich.”

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Media’s Future In Sales: “Ad supported media brands today have to have a means to connect advertisers to “the bottom of the funnel” - ie the point of transaction in order to compete and differentiate their value. Trusted, editorially-driven media can validate and endorse ideas, products and services with an effect on consumers that no other vehicle short of word-of-mouth can offer. And live commerce could be a burgeoning space to transact, create and be entertained, if you judge by the boom of a few years back in China - so there’s some potential upside there, done right.”

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The Swirling Content Whirlpool: “The issue is the ever-deepening sense that The New York Times is the swirling content whirlpool into which more and more of the media industry is drawn; this is broadly understood, widely fretted about, and not something that the Times can possibly fix.

The NYT is not yet in the position where its success is so large compared to competitors that they’re approaching monopoly status, but they appear built to last in a way that even the most celebrated of their peers are not. News of layoffs at the Wall Street Journal and constant rumors of a coming bloodletting at The New Yorker shake me.

You’d think Dow Jones marketing to the demographic that still wears suspenders would be a good business plan, and The New Yorker has maintained an exquisitely calibrated combination of genuine excellence and entertainingly hateable pretension for longer than I’ve been alive.”

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WordPress & Automattic Crisis PR: “The first problem emerged on Tumblr last week when Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg, who brought Tumblr into the fold in 2019 and later became its CEO, tried to personally defend the company’s reasoning for banning a trans user, the result of which proved extremely controversial among the user base and, unusually, led to a rebuke of Mullenweg by the company’s staff account, in a post that specifically stated, in bold text, “Matt does not speak on behalf of the LGBTQ+ people who help run Tumblr or Automattic.” […]

But then, as my pals at 404 Media reported yesterday, the company has apparently been working on a plan to sell Tumblr and WordPress data to train AI tools, which the company then rushed an announcement for. It’s opt-out, yes, which at least offers an option to prevent this. But the reblog-heavy Tumblr is a bit of a sieve—if your content gets reblogged on 100 Tumblrs, if even one of those has the feature opted-in, odds are, they’re going to get your data.”

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Danelle Morton On Ghostwriting: “The same skills that allowed me to uncover a bid-rigging scandal in local government also are applicable to Jennifer Aniston’s latest haircut,” says veteran reporter and collaborator Danelle Morton. “A journalism skill is a journalism skill.”

Indeed it is—especially when it is practiced at the crosshairs of journalism and celebrity, where Danelle worked for many years at The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, and People magazine, developing her nose for news and learning how to meet a deadline.”

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How Journalists Can Make Peace With AI: “What's it like to come face-to-face with your own deepfake? Anne-Marie Tomchak knows, and the encounter is captured vividly in her documentary Game Changer: AI and You, which aired recently on Ireland's public broadcaster.

It's a powerful moment, and one I would argue every journalist covering AI should experience: the unnerving feeling of seeing your own image and voice co-opted to say or do anything that the programmer desires.”

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The Rise Of B2B Creator Superstars: How Shawn Kanungo left accounting and management consulting to become a keynote rockstar.

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Making The Last Of Us Part II Trailer: “Learn directly from the team at Naughty Dog about what it took to bring the acclaimed sequel The Last of Us™ Part II to life, with a new behind-the-scenes look at development. Stay tuned to Naughty Dog’s official social accounts for details on when to expect the full documentary.”

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