The Weekstarter 05/22/23
Everything's still weird, let's drink some coffee: Context Collapse #212
Today’s mission = tell you about some interesting things that’ll make your friends and colleagues go damn.
In this issue: AI and existential future shock, AI and mass media, why media franchises keep going and going, the aesthetics of the Japanese internet, Roku as advertising destination, the remote work baby boom and more.
In 5… 4… 3… 2…
What I’m Thinking About Right Now:
Brxnd.ai’s Marketing AI Landscape 1.0:
Tyler Cowen on AI and human history:
on why media IP franchises keep on going and going:How well did people predict the final impacts of the printing press? How well did people predict the final impacts of fire? We even have an expression “playing with fire.” Yet it is, on net, a good thing we proceeded with the deployment of fire (“Fire? You can’t do that! Everything will burn! You can kill people with fire! All of them! What if someone yells “fire” in a crowded theater!?”).
So when people predict a high degree of existential risk from AGI, I don’t actually think “arguing back” on their chosen terms is the correct response. Radical agnosticism is the correct response, where all specific scenarios are pretty unlikely. Nonetheless I am still for people doing constructive work on the problem of alignment, just as we do with all other technologies, to improve them. I have even funded some of this work through Emergent Ventures.
Of course, even a successful brand franchise can die. But this happens for financial reasons—the movies stop making money—and not to achieve narrative coherence. So the closure will happen in a behind-the-scenes meeting at a Hollywood studio, and not on the screen.
And these cancellations happen more now than ever before. In the mad rush to maximize their ‘content’ (ugh!), the major media platforms need to launch something new almost every day. This creates an over-saturated marketplace, where failure is far more common than success.
James Bond might appear invincible, but that’s only because box office receipts are still healthy. Yet if 007 does die, it won’t happen on screen. It will take place in a meeting at Eon Productions (owner of the franchise) at 138 Piccadilly in London.
Roku’s plans to sell lots of homepage ads:
Roku’s popular screensaver, Roku City, is getting a new partner.
McDonald’s is joining TV’s biggest digital downtown, becoming the first brand to integrate with the screensaver, the companies announced Tuesday afternoon during Roku’s NewFronts presentation at New York’s Chelsea Factory.
Why Beyonce’s Adidas partnership wasn’t as successful as others:
Derek Thompson on why remote work is good for having more kids:
Indeed, the paper found that the biggest effect of remote work on fertility was on older women who already had a child, or several. The authors concluded that “remote work doesn’t necessarily trigger women to initiate childbearing,” but it might help older mothers “balance the competing demands of work and family.”
2010 all over again. Jonah Peretti, Nick Denton, Ben Smith discuss digital media:
Denton told me recently, Gawker would have been unlikely to have survived the digital media boom of the last decade. “I don’t think anybody really could have made it through intact,” he said.
“I think the big shift was the discovery of digital media as a category and the infusion of vast amounts of capital. That really started with the AOL acquisition of Huffington Post in 2011 and the Andreessen investment in BuzzFeed [in 2014],” Denton explained. “Transactions like that, transactions in the early period of the teens that really caused costs to increase, and caused all of our ambitions to inflate — and ultimately led to a reckoning. In our case, the reckoning of legal costs that we couldn’t withstand, and in other people’s case, other competitive pressures.”
Wharton’s Ethan Mollick on the weirdness of generative AI:
Why IBM blew up their online website content strategy:
Pinball’s revival is all about marketing.
Samsung drops their plans to replace default Google search with Bing. So curious for the behind-the-scenes on this one.
And, for newsletter operators, Beehiv has a nice calculator for figuring out your newsletter’s lifetime value.
Mirijam Missbichler on why UX on Japanese websites is so different:
Over the years, I have had many encounters with Japanese websites — be it researching visa requirements, planning trips, or simply ordering something online. And it took me a loooong while to get used to the walls of text, lavish use of bright colors & 10+ different fonts.
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What I’m Loving:
This Pirates of the Caribbean-themed Zillow Gone Wild house.
Naomi Klein’s new book is all about getting mistaken for Naomi Wolf.
Ernie Smith’s Online Community Glossary:
Two Tone Britain, a documentary about the 1970s/1980s British ska revival:
That’s it for this today. NOW DO AWESOME STUFF.