[SIC] 218: Coconut Buttons

Volume 5, Number 10

Nov 03, 2022

Meantime, enjoy. Feel free to share, too. Here’s a button:

Future of Transportation / After School / Austin Kleon / The Face / The Art of Noticing / Morning Consult / Jing Culture / Protocol / Forefront / Daily Upside / Public Announcement / Magasin / Future Party / Ben-Evans / Inside Cryptocurrency / Nieman Lab / Motive Unknown / Future Perfect / PSFK / Seth Godin / Music Redef

Also, feel free to read this on the web instead.

Hi all,

I have to start by apologizing for (once again) accidentally sending the Sunday digest to everybody…. 🤦‍♂️. It’s meant to be an added value for subscribers who pay to support [SIC] with beer money, not another deluge of links to demand your attention. Apologies.

Apropos of that tho, it occurred to me that a quick “How to Use [SIC]” primer might be useful for everyone. It’s quick. Essentially:

Links included in [SIC] Weekly are generally copy/pasted directly from other media sources I read each morning.
Text is almost always headline copy - meaning that the link should give you a good sense of the story without clicking through. If all you do is read the link titles, you’re not doing it wrong.
I am fully aware that the weekly dispatch is A LOT (too much, even). As such, I don’t expect or even hope anyone reads every story.
“From [Friends name] means that that story was sent directly to me by that person (to that end, thanks Iolanda, Celeste, Martucci, Ken, Larry, David and Jeremy for contributions this week). “Per [name]” means I’m quoting somebody without direct communication from them.
“🔏” means art article is likely paywalled unless you subscribe to that publisher. Many outlets I cite frequently (NYT, The New Yorker, The Drum etc) paywall articles after you’ve read X number of their pieces in Y amount of time - but since the first one is free to read, I don’t add the icon to those.

Other than that, I hope it’s pretty self explanatory. Have a look below and LMK what you think.

Ben

Just a little advice from the mid aughts.

======[SIC 218]: Coconut Buttons ======

Zeitgest / Gestalt

“The Gaze” is Back on the Agenda, But Who’s Looking at Whom? How structures of power influence visual culture / The Art Newspaper
‘It’s out of order: Gen Z speaks up for cancel culture and “youth illiberal progressives” / The Guardian
Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy / Simon Owens
Ergo, the problem isn’t that Elon Musk owns Twitter – it’s that you don’t, says Substack CEO in announcing the platform’s new chat feature/ Substack
Kyle Chayka breaks down how and why “content” became the engine of our online lives / The New Yorker
Is the Multiverse Where Originality Goes to Die? Or, an evergreen font of possibility? / The New Yorker
Even teens are worried they spend too much time on their phones / Quartz
Teens turn to TikTok in search of a mental health diagnosis. For young people, it has become trendy to identify with a mental health disorder / NYT
From Celeste Blewitt: Another trend which seems to be taking off, hashtags along the lines of #sadgirlwalk and a leaning towards the darker side of life. [Sadness Is A Trend: Why TikTok Loves Crying Makeup] The Guardian
Corollary: The Galvanizing Body Horror of Heidi Klum’s Worm Costume / The New Yorker
So is the on Demand Economy Dead? / Om.co
Coworking spaces have regained popularity this year / Fast Company
Logical since Remote work saves companies a ton of money per worker. It could help them survive a recession / Fortune
Correlated: The Great Resignation is cooling off / Axios
And The guy who inspired the “quiet quitting” movement is back to working 50 hours a week / Quartz
How will we remember the age of cheap money? The end of low interest rates is stripping off a veneer of affluence / FT 🔏
Fast furniture: Pandemic sofas will soon be clogging landfills / NYT
Digital cameras are the new film cameras. It now seems that the digital camera is to the 2020s what the film camera was to the 2010s / Embedded
Taking a step further: Have you clicked with a 35mm camera? The analogue renaissance has turned the point-and-shoot into a collectable / FT 🔏
It’s time to rethink our approach to luxury fashion. Now is a good moment to wean ourselves on to new patterns of thinking about what we buy and when / FT 🔏
There’s a new Spyplane mindset: “C.O.M.B.O.V.E.R.” Mindset, which holds that Cringe Overcompensation Maneuvers Bespeak Obvious Vanity — Embrace Realness / Blackbird Spyplane
Ergo: “Bleisure” travel (or “blended” travel) — the combination of business and leisure — is on the rise / The Future Party
But how will crypto memberships change the way we travel? Web3 Wanderlust / Wunderman Thompson
The real competitive advantage in business? Self-awareness / Quartz
Hence?! The Rise of the Millionaire LinkedIn Influencer / Motherboard

World Order

What you need to know about 3‑MMC, the party drug of the moment / The Face
TikTok has become a global giant. The US is threatening to rein it in / The Guardian
In the meantime: TayLo says Democrats hope TikTok creators will help sway voters / WaPo 🔏
While an FCC commissioner suggests the government should block TikTok / Axios
A hard-hitting PSA starring Jennifer Lawrence and Ed Helms that detailed the violent threats received by many US election workers / The Drum
After a COVID outbreak Shanghai Disney was shut down on Monday, locking all guests inside until they received a negative test result / Reuters
Monocle travels back in time to 1957 to unpack the Sputnik crisis / Monocle Pod
Malcolm Gladwell asks: was Jack Welch the Greatest C.E.O. of His Day—or the Worst? / The New Yorker

The Speculative Future

Happy 14th bday this week to Satoshi Nakamoto's nine-page document called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" aka the “Bitcoin Whitepaper” / Cryptopotato
Luxury phone maker Vertu recently popped back up to announce a “Web3 phone” that can run its own blockchain node and convert photos and videos into NFTs with the push of a button / Decrypt
From Celeste Blewitt: “Even As NFT's Plummet, Digital Artists Find Museums Are Calling' / NYT
How AI Is Generating a Tech Industry Upturn / The Information
Apropos of that: if you Need a name for your project? This site will not only invent a thousand names, it will also generate a nearly infinite number of logos / Namelix
Deepfake celebrities are populating commercials / The Future Party
What If Rumble Is the Future of the Social Web? / The Atlantic
Is Meta really in a death spiral? Here's an argument for yes, and Ben Thompson's argument for no / VICE, Stratechery
Meanwhile Mastodon's microblogging app saw a record number of downloads after Musk's Twitter takeover / TechCrunch
And Truth Social’s influence is growing despite its many business and legal woes / NYT
Shutterstock will start selling AI-generated stock imagery with help from OpenAI / Vox
While predictably AI-generated art sparks furious backlash from Japan’s anime community / Nieman Lab
An amateur’s guide to Using AI Image Generators / Hyperallergic
From B: “I was reading this [Cowboy Bebop Was a Warning] and thought it would probably fit your tec / futurism / anthropology venn diagram. Blockchain Socialist is a pretty good resource - if the latter word doesn't enrage your US readership” / FWB

Pop Cultures

From Ken Miller: “I recently had the pleasure of chatting with my colleague Gustavo Luz about his timely little project ‘What If Tweets Could Tweet?’; read about it in our interview” / LinkedIn
‘It won’t tell you anything useful’: how Palace turned product descriptions into art / The Guardian
Congrats to [SIC] homie Larry Warsh gift of Chinese contemporary art to the Hirshorn gallery / Hirshorn
And to [SIC] homie Jeremy Toeman on getting funding for AugX, the audio-based animation start up he’s been jamming on / Venture Beat
Trapital’s The Culture Report. Their breakdown on the most important trends in music, hip-hop, and more / Trapital
Sofia Coppola’s “Morning on set” playlist / Spotify
Inside the world of Wikipedia’s deaditors / The Face
Big pictures : Claire Evans on the lost art form of elaborate, pre-PowerPoint “multi-image shows.” / Dirt
Barbara Kruger about art, politics, the internet, and her favorite reality television shows / The Drift
Do Straight People Exist? Emily Ratajkowski Is Unsure / Them
Is Hot Pink Here to Stay? / BoF
Rave report: guttering. A night of pulverising gabber and head-turning outfits in a Tottenham warehouse / The Face
Turnstile are on a Taco Bell ad / Stereogum
TikTok Killed the Pop Star / The Ringer
Amazon Music VP Steve Boom doesn’t think NFTs will upend the music industry/ The Verge
Mainly because?! Music NFTs Don't Exist / Appetite for Distraction
From Eric Martucci: “Some coverage on gba and my homey derek. For your records/ intel” [How Derek Wiggins Is Supporting Artists as the Co-Founder of Guilty by Association] / Complex]
From Iolanda Carvalho: “Go Figure” [ Mondrian painting has been hanging upside down for 75 years] / The Guardian
Anna Delvey on Her Lawyers, Lucien Lunch Deliveries, The Paris Review, and more / Perfectly Imperfect
And SSENSE launched a books category / ssense

Media Happenings

There’s a new Patreon Video feature allows creators to upload their video content directly to its platform / Patreon
And Tumblr Says Clothing Is Optional Again / NYT
Hearst wants Gen Z's social shoppers to use its new commerce platform, FirstFinds / Digiday
Stats on how many people get around news paywalls. LINK
How "Hot Ones” Turned Spicy Chicken Wings Into Celebrity Interview Gold / Vanity Fair
While elsewhere CNN Cuts Back on Original Series and Films / NYT
From David Bloom: From [The Observer’s] newsletter on influencers and the creator economy….Note the different language they use, which is smart….” [Reddit’s New NFT Platform Already Has More Users Than Other Industry Leaders]/ The Observer
Apropos of that: breaking down what made the Reddit NFT play so successful. Arguably most importantly, there is little to no mention of crypto lingo in the Reddit UX. NFTs are called collectibles. Wallets are called vaults / Twitter
Gaming mega-influencer Ludwig is launching Subathon 2.0, a livestream event happening Nov 18th–20th. Over the three days he’ll be filming continuously in a glass box in front of a live audience at gaming facility DreamHack Atlanta, raising money for charity organizations Alveus Sanctuary and No Kid Hungry / Twitter
Related: In the last two months, Ludwig has announced a creative studio and bidet company—showing his aspirations far exceed gaming / Offbrand, Tubefilter
The antitrust hammer breaks up Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster deal / Deadline
Sprezza is looking for content creators to help grow the offering / Sprezza

Market-ations

Are chief digital officers leapfrogging the rest of the C-suite to the corner office? / Digiday
Semafor’s revenue strategy will be reliant on the relationships that the company’s CRO and sales team will be able to forge with advertisers / Digiday
Related: why SEO is such a key component of content, and how it can be incorporated into a brand's content strategy / The Drum
Hence the “protest plushie” — an object-as-argument in the form of uterus-shaped plush? / Fast Company
Goodbye influencers... hello user-generated content? / The Drum
Top marketers from United, Disney, Mastercard on the trends that will define 2023 / The Drum
Meet the “AInfluencers:” 14 Creators Using Generative AI to Gain Big Followings / The Information
S/o [SIC] homie Krystal Watler aka The woman behind making TikTok tick for creators / Digiday
The Big Tech boom is over and Wall Street knows it / Recode
Who killed the social media ad boom? / FT
How does the music industry work? Planet Money started a record label to find out / Planet Money
What Does the End of Yeezy Mean for the Sneakerverse? / NYT
Marketers continue to chase 'authenticity,' but what is it? / Digiday
Related: how Liquid Death became Gen Z’s LaCroix / Bon Appetit
A new concept store in Brooklyn looks to bring together fashion, culture, community, and more merging real-life products with digital art / Vogue
Barbour's Wax for Life program is rooted in the belief that longevity is the most crucial component to the concept of more sustainable fashion / CoolHunting
Meanwhile, Shein’s opening a permanent store that won’t sell anything / Highsnobiety
And Shein copycats chase its explosive growth / FT
Sidebars, limiteds and digital gowns: How fashion can win on Roblox / Vogue Business
Roblox Isn't The Metaverse: Why It's The Closest Thing Marketers Have to Web3 / Ad Age
Related: GameStop has officially launched its NFT marketplace / The Drum
And Ralph Lauren to launch Fortnite fashion line with first-ever polo logo mashup / Bloomberg
While Nike Taps Its First Esports Player, China’s League of Legends Pro Uzi / Jing Daily
For gaming’s old guard, mobile is necessary for survival / Protocol
The Best of Thingtesting 2022, an annual list of the best brands on Thingtesting / Thingtesting
Related: is it time for a new "it" luggage brand? / Thingtesting
Cursed collab of the week: Kraft Mayo x Juicy Couture x Elite Daily x Nylon mix of on-site and online content to promote “Smooth” velvet tracksuits across their TikTok and Instagram channels / The Drum

Superficial Interest

From ‘Celeste Blewitt: A great piece on how we are being hard-wired to avoid conversations with those we don't know, but it brings up so many interesting points on how great it is to step outside the square. [Why Talking To Strangers Can Make Us Smarter] / BBC
You can own small piece of Joan Didion’s life at her estate sale on Nov 16th / NYT
Is J.Crew's New Suit Any Good? / GQ
Can Ibiza survive by building a sustainable future? / MixMag
A new spa in Brussels is offering beer-filled baths, straw beds and "barley massages" as part of its relaxation offerings / Dezeen
While in Turkey there’s a massive abandoned town of Disney-esque castles / Conde Nast Traveler
Related: This winter’s most exciting ski destination: Albania’s Accursed Mountains / FT

Food / Drink

How a South American Surplus Flooded Philadelphia With Free Avocados / Reasons To Be Cheerful
London's best restaurants are embracing ugly food. From brown stews to beef tongue, the best thing you eat this winter might be the least photogenic / GQ UK
Also in London: high-end poppers with a luxury sommelier / The Face
Jason Diamond’s tribute to GOAT food writer, the late Gael Greene / The Melt

Friends Section

But What I Really Want to Do Is Write!. The Year of the Auteur Novel by [SIC] homie Hanson O’Haver / The Drift
[SIC] Homie Heron Preston is auctioning off his sneaker collection to combat overconsumption / Futurevvorld
Lizzy Goodman and [SIC] homie Adam Green shared some recommendations on cool stuff they’re into / Perfectly Imperfect
And s/o [SIC] homie Helen Hollyman on her new show. Paddlefish Caviar Heist podcast review — when the Russian mafia came for US fish / FT

Useful Diversions

Buy some prints by Ray Potes. $25 each. Printed on various laser print machines on various papers in various cities. 8.5″ x 11″. Open edition. Some have multiples, though most are 1 of 1. Signed / Hamburger Eyes
Tonight in NYC: The Drift’s issue 8 launch party at Café Kitsuné / The Drift
Catch me November 17th at the Friends from New York Friendsgiving party / IG
Scene at [SIC] Talks Alum Cheryl Dunn’s short doc "BEYOND … I Wanna Go” screening at Tuesday night’s Creative Growth fundraiser

======[SIC 218]: Coconut Buttons ======

[SIC] 218: Coconut Buttons

Volume 5, Number 10

Meantime, enjoy. Feel free to share, too. Here’s a button:

Corollary sources this week (all worth your review):

Also, feel free to read this on the web instead.

Just a little advice from the mid aughts.

Scene at [SIC] Talks Alum Cheryl Dunn’s short doc "BEYOND … I Wanna Go” screening at Tuesday night’s Creative Growth fundraiser

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