Weekend Links Are Here
Just posting memes and running through $28 billion business deals. Context Collapse #137
There’s a lot going on here.
Is there a lot going on with you? There’s a lot going on with me.
Business at Ungerleider Works is doing good. We’re onboarding a couple of clients and I’m super damned busy with the usual challenge of balancing administrative running-a-company stuff with creative work.
Anyway, I could really use some coffee right now. So on to this weekend’s links.
New Futures:
William Gibson’s 1997 Wired magazine dystopias.
Something stinks in the town of Uvalde. You’re probably going to get COVID over and over again. Speaking of that, long COVID has a decent chance of causing a global disability crisis and the US government is trying to figure out how many deaths voters will tolerate. Life under Russian occupation. How an airline error put a man in jail for 17 days. All you wanted to know on Joe Biden vs. Joe Manchin. Why Americans not being able to afford retirement screws over everyone. Meanwhile, America has a subcurrent of gun idolatry. It’s not your imagination, customer service is getting worse. The risks and advantages of hospital care at home.
And the world is headed straight into a recession.
Last but not least, a small cancer drug study led to every single patient going into remission. Every. Single. One.
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
Big Milk x Sean Evans’ Hot Ones
Why live conferences and trade shows still matter. Amazon’s expanding into local advertising and letting you use AR to try on shoes. Facebook’s working on post-cookie advertising. Microsoft is halting TV advertising right in the middle of the Windows 11 rollout. The Bud Light account is up for review and every agency wants it. Ten marketing mistakes you shouldn’t make. Starbucks is looking for a new CEO. Why direct to consumer brands are cutting their social media budgets. The owners of The Vitamin Shoppe are probably purchasing Kohl’s.
And a recommended instructional video: Pat Flynn on building a personal brand. (Note: I hate the term ‘personal brand’ with a perpetually burning fire, but his advice is really solid.)
Media:
CNN going after the Fox News viewership demographic and slowing their roll on calling everything breaking news.
The Biden administration’s stage-manage-the-President strategy. Marjorie Taylor Greene as political shitposter. Hot on the heels of the Will Smith affair, the Academy has a new CEO. Top Gun 2 as the first post-pandemic blockbuster. Startup Latino Media Network raises $80 million and Tom Brady and Michael Strahan’s new media startup raises $50 million. Chinese influencer shows off tank-shaped ice cream, runs into Tiananmen Square censorplex. Elon Musk’s Schrodinger’s Twitter acquisition and Musk as bot magnet. 48% of American gamers are female. The Washington Post is having very public HR problems on Twitter and noone involved wants to use backchannels. There’s a ghostwriting angle to the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard court case. Kara Swisher is leaving the NY Times and returning to Vox Media. Conspiracy theories as bizarro current things. 60 Minutes launching their own streaming channel on Pluto. Meet the Freemasons of TikTok.
Social media idiocy rule of thumb:
Tech:
James Bridle’s new book on plant, animal, human and artificial intelligence, Ways of Being, is amazing.
SEO firm Ahrefs is launching Yep, a search engine that shares ad revenue with content creators. Mobile apps keep vacuuming up data on children. Text-to-image AI tool DALL-E is a gamechanger and all sorts of cool stuff happens with AI when you muck around with foundation models. Someone had the terrible, inevitable idea to train an AI on 4Chan. Google canceled an employee-organized event on caste bias under weird circumstances. Remembering the Apple Newton. Oracle’s buying Cerner for, uh, $28 billion or so. How Deadheads and One Direction fans made the internet what it is. Pinterest is acquihiring The Yes. Understanding the metaverse land rush.
And, last but not least, how to level up your weird internet career.
Misc.:
That’s it. Have a good weekend you amazing people.