Weekend Links: Things Keep Happening
Ukraine, self-isolation, UFOs, media training and more: Context Collapse #126
Hey there.
It’s been a week, huh?
I bet it has. Let’s get to the links.
New Futures:
WHY UKRAINE IS DIFFERENT. (David Leonhardt/NYT)
Let’s kick off with something, uhh, timely. Good “explain the Ukraine crisis to me like I’m five years old” overview by Leonhardt:
A Russian invasion of Ukraine seems likely to involve one of the world’s largest militaries launching an unprovoked ground invasion of a neighboring country. The apparent goal would be an expansion of regional dominance, either through annexation or the establishment of a puppet government. Few other conflicts since World War II fit this description.
A few days old, so might be made irrelevant by events on the ground, but good!
And also, because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is… sadly pretty relevant right now…, a few other resources: History blogger Bret Deveraux has a smart post on understanding the war in Ukraine. Sh!tpost has a resource list for navigating the information warzone around Ukraine. Nieman has resources for following the war in Ukraine. Last but not least, German state broadcaster DW put this doc together on short notice:
PHYSICAL STORES STILL BEAT ECOMMERCE. (Shira Ovide/NYT)
Even in a pandemic, even when ecommerce is growing like never before, a heck of a lot of people prefer shopping in person. In fact, IRL shopping beat ecommerce in 2021:
Americans spent 18 percent more on food, cars, furniture, electronics and other retail products last year compared with 2020, the Commerce Department disclosed on Friday. Online retail sales increased by 14 percent. In other words, e-commerce lost ground last year to brick-and-mortar stores.
A FUTURE WHERE WE NEVER SEE EACH OTHER. (Freddie deBoer)
I’ve always been sympathetic to contrarian thinkers and pundits who don’t like staying in a single ideological lane, and deBoer checks off both boxes. He gets it when it comes to social atomization:
When I see that Eric Adams is urging companies to force their employees to come back to the office in NYC, and further see how much derision and mockery he’s received in return, I really do worry for our future. So many people seem dead set on spending their entire lives in their holes, surviving with Amazon and Instacart and DoorDash and Peloton and Netflix and Pornhub. And aside from that seeming like an impoverished way to live to me personally, I genuinely wonder what happens to basic civic functioning when people never interact with any of their neighbors.
SIX PEOPLE YOU MEET IN THE PANDEMIC WORKPLACE. (Dorie Clark/WSJ)
Speaking of that… I really enjoyed this Clark overview of modern office worker personality types. It’s in the Journal so “workplace” in this case = hybrid or fully-remote offices (Doordash drivers or skilled electricians or plumbers need not apply!), but it’s some good anthropology for a particular slice of the knowledge worker class:
For many companies, new hires—sometimes recruited entirely through virtual channels—may have become a substantial cohort. And they’re confused out of their minds. Of course, they have done their best to pick up company culture and mores through implicit clues (analyzing team communication patterns and vocabulary choices, and the power dynamics of who seems to get listened to the most).
JACQUES VALLEE STILL DOESN’T KNOW WHAT UFOS ARE. (Chantal Tattoli/Wired)
Last but not least, Wired magazine just ran a great profile of veteran venture capitalist/UFOlogist Jacques Vallee. Having read Vallee’s Passport to Magonia years and years ago as a young Fortean Times fan, going through Tattoli’s profile was a pleasure:
On a white restaurant tablecloth in San Francisco, under the glow of a stained-glass dome ceiling with images of laurels, fleur-de-lis, and a ship, rested a portion of metal the size of a shallot. Around it, three men were having lunch one day in the summer of 2018. Jacques Vallée, a French information scientist, was explaining to Max Platzer, editor of a top aeronautics journal, how the metal had come into his possession. The story wound back more than four decades, he said serenely, to an unexplained episode in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
WHAT A REQUEST TO SEE AL BUNDY’S FOUNTAIN TAUGHT ME ABOUT CHICAGO’S ALLURE. (Bill Utter/Chicago Tribune)
Comms consultant and former Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau VP Bill Utter explains a simple truth about high and low culture: No matter what you think tourists will want to see, no matter what high-end stuff you promote, tourists will want to see the “Al Bundy Fountain.” (PS: It’s Buckingham Fountain, it’s an easy fifteen-minute walk from the Art Institute and it really does look awesome.)
JOBFISHED: THE CON THAT TRICKED DOZENS INTO WORKING FOR A FAKE DESIGN AGENCY. (Leo Sands, Catrin Nye, Divya Talwar, Benjamin Lister/BBC)
This is an absolute bonkers story about an alleged conman who created a fake agency with fake clients that hired real designers to do real work that they never got paid for. Fake agencies and wildly exaggerating founders are more common than you’d expect in advertising world (maybe I should write about that? hmm….), but rarely at this scale.
"Elon Musk works 16 hours a day, I'm trying to do 17!" he wrote in one email trying to motivate his team to keep pushing through. And - weighing up another tough business decision - he used a quote often attributed to Steve Jobs. "If you want to make everybody happy, don't be a leader, go sell ice cream."
For months, Madbird's daily business hummed along, more designers were hired to meet the backlog of briefs being negotiated by the sales team.
But even before the truth about Madbird was revealed, its workers had a problem. Because of the unusual way their contracts had been written, they were yet to be paid.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT PHIL MICKELSON AND THE SAUDI GOLF LEAGUE. (Matt Bonesteel/Washington Post)
There are two kinds of celebrities who sit down for interviews with journalists: Those who stick with the media training and those who don’t. Phil Mickelson talking with the author of an unauthorized biography of him about how he was working with the Saudi Arabian government on a new golf league is in the second category:
Mickelson was thought to be a supporter of the breakaway league, but the extent of his support was not made clear until unauthorized biographer Alan Shipnuck revealed last week that Mickelson had told him in a November interview that he and three other unnamed “top players” paid for attorneys to write the operating agreement for the SGL.
[…] The six-time major winner also told Shipnuck that he was willing to overlook Saudi Arabia’s human rights record to get the new league off the ground.
“They’re scary motherf-----s to get involved with,” Mickelson said. “We know they killed [Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi] and have a horrible record on human rights. They execute people over there for being gay. Knowing all of this, why would I even consider it? Because this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”
Media:
HOW MY DEPENDENCE ON FACEBOOK COST ME MY STARTUP, $100M, AND 110 JOBS. (Joe Speiser)
This Twitter thread by LittleThings founder Joe Speiser details how his old company had “a female focused feel good entertainment company was pushing $75m+ a year in revenue, had 110 amazingly creative employees, and a fledgling OTT streaming channel.” That is, until Facebook (allegedly!) changed their algorithm and shifted the content that was highlighted in their news feed.
Anyway, good warning of the potential downsides of building a business where the biz model depends overwhelmingly on an external platform you can’t control or influence.
INSTAGRAM QUIETLY LIMITS ‘DAILY TIME LIMIT’ OPTION. (Natasha Lomas/Techcrunch)
Speaking of the Metaplex, Instagram appears to be limiting the ability of users to set their daily time limit on the service inside the IG app for less than thirty minutes. This isn’t a super-big deal as this can be done quite easily through iOS or Android’s external settings, but still a look behind the curtain…
REDDIT ADDS NEW VISUAL EDITING TOOLS. (Andrew Hutchison/Social Media Today)
Someone once told me that Reddit’s home to the best and the worst of the internet, and they were probably right. On the UI/UX front, Reddit’s always had this interesting in-between status that bridged the way between our BBS and MySpace past and the brave text-degraded image-emphasized TikTok/Instagram future… That was a hindrance in the past but is now a distinct benefit as people look to communicate online in ways that are more versatile than 280 characters or a quickie video clip. Love seeing Reddit lean in hard on this home field advantage.
Misc.:
If you want a good critical take on the NFT marketplace, watch Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs. (It’s also around 2 hours long, be careful! I also am significantly more optimistic than this dude on NFTs and see the marketplace more as a way of creating digital baseball cards than a giant MLM scheme, but I can always appreciate a good righteous cry from the heart so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
Finn McKenty on when scene kids and metalheads grow up. As a onetime punk rock kid who grew up seeing Los Crudos and Against Me! in basements and now works in advertising… This hits close to home.
Nick Cave has a boutique and it’s awesome.
Last but not least, the great Mark Lanegan passed away this week. His KEXP show was nothing short of amazing. RIP.
And that’s it for this one.