Friday Links
Alzheimer Vaccines, Minimum Viable Communities and Browser Wars: CONTEXT COLLAPSE! 114
Content for humans, selected by a human. Mass communications-focused with a universal lens. Mid-week is usually for the articles, weekend is usually for the links. Not your thing? Unsubscribe below.
New Futures:
Yes, the potential Alzheimer’s vaccine is just as amazing as it sounds. (Melissa Pandika/Mic via The Futurist)
If your job involves computers, there’s a very good chance you live a large portion of your life in PowerPoint. (Russell Davies/Why Is This Interesting?)
The new frontier for digital crime is building bots that steal two-factor authentication codes. (Joseph Cox/Motherboard)
Cory Doctorow on how theme parks regulate guests’ emotional moods. (Cory Doctorow)
A year after the whole mystery seeds from China scare (remember that?), it turns out a lot of people who received mystery seeds simply forgot they ordered seeds on the internet. (Chris Heath/The Atlantic)
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
Understanding your minimum viable community. (Indie Hackers)
MVCs are a perfect way to get started with community, not only to understand if building the community is right for you, but also to understand what people actually need from it.
Inside Tyler Cowen’s primal branding strategy for his blog, books, fellowship and conferences. (Market Power)
In a two-day conference, it is hard to create rituals. But Tyler overcame this by tapping into societal rituals and making them his own. Every conference session has to end at some point, and usually endings come looking at the clock. Tyler replaced that ritual with a gong. No matter where you were in conversation, there was a ritual that when you heard the gong you returned to the main room.
The secret ingredient in leadership training: Public Narrative (Working Narratives via Strands of Genius)
By telling our personal stories of challenges we have faced, choices we have made, and what we learned from the outcomes, we can inspire others and share our own wisdom,” Ganz has written. “Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others.”
The 21 best marketing newsletters of 2021. (Built In)
Insider lists the 23 most powerful fixers in PR. The list has some interesting choices but if you like your lists skewed towards in-house and people representing large corporations rather than the fixers who actually are most powerful, this is for you! (Sean Czarnecki/Insider)
Media:
Casey Newton discusses how Instagram and Twitter became frenemies again. (Platformer)
Farhad Manjoo’s argument that “Facebook is bad. Fixing it rashly could make it much worse.” (Farhad Manjoo/New York Times)
Katherine Dee on “Why do journalists always turn into lolcows?” (Default Friend)
Journalism these days requires you to become a one man or woman content mill, to constantly stay fluent in mostly digital languages, and to have both feet in a digital, parallel reality.
A little old, but the Wall Street Journal put together a good overview of Axel Springer’s Politico acquisition (which was quickly complicated by sexual harassment allegations against a top non-Politico Springer editor). Bonus context from The Daily Beast’s look at internal tensions inside Politico:
He expects Politico staffers to adhere to Axel Springer-wide guiding principles that have raised controversy at times at its German properties—though they won’t be required to sign a written commitment to the principles like employees in Germany. The principles include support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.
RIP Dubsmash, too beautiful for this world. Dubsmash had a large user base (including 25% of all Black teens in the US at one time) and was a viable TikTok competitor, but had declining metrics for years before Reddit acquihired the firm in late 2020. (Sam Gutelle and Josh Cohen/Tubefilter)
Tech:
Making sense of the technological parentheses of our lives. (Samuel Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders)
Information storage methods have changed a lot since magnetic tape and floppy disks, but we are still used to the idea of storing information, even if it’s on the cloud. But being able to anticipate when basic skills will be rendered outdated is something we are ill-prepared for.
Remember when Mailchimp sold to Intuit for $12 billion or so? It turns out employees (including long-time employees) had no equity in the company! A highly unusual situation, to say the least. (Ben Bergman/Insider)
Jefferson Graham on what to do when your credit card is hacked. (Jefferson Graham)
When Amazon’s software for processing paid and unpaid leave encountered problems, those problems had very real consequences for Amazon employees. (Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, Grace Ashford/New York Times)
Workers across the country facing medical problems and other life crises have been fired when the attendance software mistakenly marked them as no-shows, according to former and current human resources staff members, some of whom would speak only anonymously for fear of retribution. Doctors’ notes vanished into black holes in Amazon’s databases.
If you’re an alleged January 6 participant, maybe don’t sell your house on Zillow and clearly show a whiteboard in your office with columns labeled “Food,” “Clothing,” “Shelter,” “Currency,” “Communicate,” “Move,” and “Shoot.” (Justin Rohrlich/Daily Beast)
Why Microsoft is placing so much $$$ behind having the Edge browser succeed. (David Pierce/Protocol)
Misc:
Tim Harford’s best podcasts of 2021. (Tim Harford)
Looking at the United States as an Indian. (Siddhesh/Obvious Bicycle)
There's much more variety in the kind of cars you see on the streets. In India, there are about five to ten car models (like Alto, Santro, i10, Honda City, etc.) that make up more than 50% of the traffic. Not here. Also, expensive and luxury cars are not rare at all here - they're everywhere. Also also, in India generally you'll see only either drivers or old-ish men driving the high end cars, but here, it can be anyone irrespective of age or ethnicity or gender.
What the Voynich manuscript says about us. (Justin E.H. Smith/Wall Street Journal)
The text was written in either a code that has not yet been cracked or a natural language and cipher that haven't yet been identified. Its numerous illustrations of plants, astrological signs and women in thermal baths might point to its meaning—but for the fact that none of the plant species has so far been identified and the astrological signs correspond to none that we know.
The long-term effects of the Spanish Inquisition. (Drelichman, Vidal-Robert & Voth via Tyler Cowen)
We show that in municipalities where the Spanish Inquisition persecuted more citizens, incomes are lower, trust is lower, and education is markedly lower than in other comparable towns and cities. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to still matter today, but it does.
Speaking of the Spanish Inquisition, let’s talk crypto-Jewish Purim in Latin America. (Wikipedia via Astral Codex Ten)
The festival was themed about a fictional saint called "Esterica" who was heavily based upon Queen Esther. During the festival the New Christian women fasted for 3 days as Esther herself, her uncle Mordechai and the Jews of Persia did in the Book of Esther prior to her meeting with King Achashverosh.
Martin Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos and Limpwrist time travels through punk rock Chicago. (Leor Galil/Chicago Reader)
Continuing on the punk rock theme, fellow Staten Island native Dan Ozzi’s new book Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo and Hardcore (1994-2007) is really good. And has an amazing Spotify playlist to boot!
Bill Hicks, Esoteric Mississippi and the evolution of the UFO phenomenon. (Lee Durkee/Southwest Review)
As he aged, his misanthropic humanism became interwoven with what most people have been trained by the media to call conspiracy theory, although Hicks begged to differ and did not consider himself a conspiracy nut but a sunglass-donning They Live! Rowdy Roddy realist, who, like the Shakespeare of Caesar and Macbeth, saw conspiracy as the very language of power.
The King of the Hill cryptocurrency matrix.
Bologna, Manhattan of the middle ages.
Alec Ryrie’s lecture on why it took so long for English Christians to oppose slavery. (Hint: There was money to be made)
And let’s switch to funnier topics with Desus & Mero checking out Dallas BBQ’s Gucci Royale.
Dusko Popov, the real-life James Bond.