[SIC] 238: Intellectually Inconstant

Volume 5, Number 30

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Corollary sources this week (all worth your review, and all easily discoverable:After School1440/ Music Redef / Public Announcement / Today in Tabs / Ben’s Bites / Politico/ Axios / Elevator / The future Party / Dealbook /The Daily Upside /Morning Consult / Morning Brew

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Hi all.

The simplest ideas are the best. [SIC] Talks alum Cheryl Dunn’s timelapse of fave artist ESPO’s OG gate takeover is proof/ IG

Another favorite watch this week: ALD’s fixed gear ride thru NYC is Mesmerizing. And evokes [SIC] homie Peter Sutherland’s classic “Pedal” / Youtube

Thanks Josh, Celeste, Randy, Iolanda, Piers and Larry for contributions this week. And thanks to frequent contributor David Bloom for the title this week.

Now, the links.

======[SIC] 238: Intellectually Inconstant======

Zeitgest / Gestalt

• From Josh Gardiner: Loved this piece by Clive Martin (who you will know penned some of VICE UK's finest ever work. May have felt a little shade from this sentence, admittedly.  "There is no exact way of grouping these happenings together. Marketing and events types will likely term them as “experiential”, “immersive” and so on." / The FACE

• Related: [SIC] Talks alum Matt Klein’s noteworthy new one on How To Approach Online Culture. Or how to inculcate yourself against trend mania by calculating for force / Zine

• After The Last of Us everything will be transmedia. Game IP is increasingly valuable and you can expect to see a lot more crossovers baked into business strategies / Wired

• Related? Age of the Femtroll, or the Based It Girl. The reactionary, provocative, post-ironic It girl has emerged as the most influential figure on the New York art scene. Is she the new face of the avantgarde?/ FlashArt

• Related: Not MY mother, but My mother, the troll / The Guardian

• Corollary: Is the “Free the Nipple” Movement Too White? / Hyperallergic

• Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? / The New Yorker

• Related:Welcome to the Era of the Fake Six-Pack / GQ

• From Celeste Blewitt: “The trends of TikTok, can't say boiling wooden spoons was one I would be reading about, but then again, there's so many discussion points on everything currently. An insight into cooking and nostalgia, as well as boiling wooden spoons.” ['People Are Boiling Their Wooden Spoons On TikTok' / The Guardian

• J. Crew and the Paradoxes of Prep By mass-marketing social aspiration, the brand toed the line between exclusivity and accessibility—and established prep as America’s visual vernacular / The New Yorker

• Corollary: What makes skaters so swaggy? / Blackbird Spyplane

• From Randy Irwin: Cool People Accidentally Saved America’s Feet . Millennials popularized bulky, super-cushioned shoes. Then Millennials got old / The Atlantic

World Order

• From Ioloanda Carvalho: “Greetings from the Lisbon bureau 🙂 My favorite topic...Mapped: The World’s Happiest Countries in 2023” / Visual Capitalist

• TikTok CEO appears on TikTok to warn users about the TikTok ban / The Verge

• Related: Fear the wrath of the TikTok voter / TNR

• But Pulling the Plug on TikTok Will Be Harder Than It Looks / NYT

• Because? Former Trump official says TikTok 'disguised as candy' but is 'cocaine' / The Hill

• Car thefts are rising around the US—is TikTok to blame? / USA Facts

• The Gray Lady’s take on How to Fix the TikTok Problem / NYT

• Oh Also, Gen Z is trying to own homes by any means necessary / The Future Party

• New York has a new logo. New Yorkers hate it / NYT

• So [SIC] Talks Alum Ryan McGinness took it upon himself to rework it / NYT

• Corollary: how the Graphic Designer Milton Glaser Made America Cool Again/ The New Yorker

• Gangs are blowing up ATMs in Germany to get cash / Quartz

• 58% of institutional investors rely on Reddit / Markets Insider

• Of all people, David Byrne asks ”Can We All Be Like Texas?”. How a conservative, oil-pumping state became one of the world’s biggest generators of wind power / Reasons to Be Cheerful

• Meanwhile Meta Is Being Sued in Kenya, Again /Wired

The Speculative Future

• The rushed launch of AI chatbots from Google and Microsoft will degrade the web’s info ecosystem / The Verge

• And now The generative-AI revolution is coming for video / the Future Party

• Thousands of workers are using ChatGPT on the job, according to a new survey — and the vast majority aren’t telling their bosses / Insider

• Execs are ignoring the dangers of ‘confidently incorrect’ AI and why it’s a massive problem / Digiday

• Yet ChatGPT was used to win a hacking competition / WSJ

• As the father of a high school junior who took the test for real yesterday: What does GPT-4’s dominance mean for the SAT? / The Atlantic

• Maybe Generative AI is just productivity software / Garbage Day

• Hence: Startups are already using GPT-4 to spend less on human coders / Motherboard

• But GPT-4 is more likely to spread misinformation — when prompted — than its predecessor GPT-3.5/ NewsGuard

• Ergo? AI-generated pictures depicting Trump being dragged away by police in front of the cameras send the internet into a frenzy / Hyperallergic

• AI image generator Midjourney's latest version can finally render realistic human hands / Hyperallergic

• From Ioloanda Carvalho: “This is from December but one of the charts has been showing up a lot lately (dunno why 😉...), so here goes the whole thing, in case .[The brief history of artificial intelligence: The world has changed fast – what might be next?]” / Ourworldindata

• Risk of ‘industrial capture’ looms over AI revolution. A handful of individuals and corporations now control much of the resources and knowledge in the sector / FT

• Senators Had Questions for the Maker of a Rent-Setting Algorithm. The Answers Were "Alarming." / ProPublica

• Meanwhile, “The Quest for Injectable Brain Implants Has Begun.” / Wired

• Hence Our New Promethean Moment / NYT

• What LLMs Can & Can't Do. On ChatGPT, the internet, and it's lack of connection to it / BRXND Dispatch

• And what Google’s new chatbot can, and can’t, do / NYT

• Speaking of what AI can’t do, from Piers Fawkes: “This Week’s AI project” - the Blackbird Spyplane sletter emulator / Linkedin

• Also from Piers: “as per our conversation at your breakfast meet up this morning…” TREND GOD's First Report 'How Allbirds can beat Nike' Has Arrived! And it's #Free to download / LinkedIn

• Not unrelated: Allbirds says its net-zero carbon shoe is here

Pop Cultures

• [SIC] homie Larry Warsh on His Early Eye for Basquiat, and the Octogenarian Artist He’s Coveting Now / Artnet

• While other homie Mick Batyske was on AdWeek’s The Speed of Culture podcast talking How Music, Culture, and Investing Work Together / AdWeek

• Speaking of investments: The Cure Tried to Stop Scalpers. Brokers Are Selling Entire Ticketmaster Accounts Instead / Motherboard

• The music industry’s enthusiasm for TikTok as a marketing platform is waning / Yahoo

• The Inevitability of Ice Spice / NYT

• A video game made entirely of paint: Step into Julius Hofmann’s glitchy universe / it’s Nice That

• New York court dismisses case over ownership of ‘world’s first NFT’ / The Art Newspaper

• The Button-Pushing Impresario of Balenciaga. How Demna engineered the rise—and near-fall—of the luxury fashion house / The New Yorker

• Elsewhere, button pushing legend Courtney Love asks Why are women so marginalised by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? / The Guardian

• 'Swarm' is about how we're doing fandom wrong / NPR

• Monocle takes a spin through the hits and misses of the Swedish music charts, from the sublime to the ridiculous and everything in between / Monocle Pod

• Why Ted Lasso isn’t the massive hit in the U.K. that it is in the U.S. / Monocle

• Related: 46% of US adults sometimes or always wait for the finale of a streaming show before starting it / YouGov

• 100 gecs, seriously / The Fader

• And Gisele Bündchen, Self-Professed “Witch of Love,” / Vanity Fair

Media Happenings

• Creator funds are even more bullshit than we realized / Simon Owens

• Negative words in news headlines generate more clicks — but sad words are more effective than angry or scary ones / Nieman Lab

• Hence?  'The Whale' Beats 'Cocaine Bear' on VOD / Indiewire

• And? TikTok’s suggested search problem / Embedded

• Brian Morrissey’s Media Schaudenfreude includes no small dose of VICE. Misplaced IMO, but not wrong / The Rebooting

• Corollary: BuzzFeed Is Not About to Go Out of Business / A Media Operator

• While elsewhere, Girl-focused media company Rebel Girls picked up an $8 million Series A round - now get into TV, theater… and even the metaverse / Fast Company

• Even tho Meta is putting the metaverse on the back burner / Nieman Lab

• And Pinterest’s quiet battle for ad dollars is getting louder / Digiday

• Bytedance’s Capcut hits 200 Million Active Users /Tube Filter

• Hundreds of Hearst Magazines Media staffers plan to walkout this week / Deadline

Market-ations

• OG [SIC] homie Amy Madonia’s ecomm article on Generational Marketing / Future Commerce

• Miami’s Run to the Men’s Sweet 16 Reflects College Basketball’s New Reality. While the N.C.A.A. dithers with how to regulate name, image and likeness deals, the Hurricanes have unapologetically jumped in with both feet / The Athletic

• EBay is adding a sprinkle of AI to its digital ad tech to track where you almost bought something. The company seeks to patent tech that uses machine learning to generate “personalized banner ads.” /  US Patent Office

• Telfar's radical new pricing system is the ultimate anti-luxury move / Fast Company

• How direct-to-consumer brands are racing towards profitability / Thingtesting

• And how agencies are navigating economic recovery / Digiday

• How marketers and creators are thinking about a potential TikTok ban / Marketing Brew

• Corollary: ‘It’s very TikTok-led’: BuzzFeed’s Tasty is making its videos look less professional, driven by feedback from its viewers / The Drum

• The magazine that impacted a generation. As sneaker culture exploded in the mid-1990s, Eastbay went from an "if you know, you know" niche following, to a pinnacle pillar of the industry / ESPN

• ‘Home of 7 MPH Fastball:’ Meet Topgolf for Baseball / Front Office Sports

• Loro Piana Partners With Aura Blockchain Consortium To Present Its Origin Story In Web3 / Jing Daily

• While Karlie Kloss unveils her own fashion destination on Roblox / Vogue Business

• And Roblox launches its first generative AI game creation tools / Engadget

• Web3 gaming will onboard up to 100M gamers in next 2 years, Polygon and Immutable presidents predict / TechCrunch

• Subway and other fast food chains offer subscriptions to build loyalty / Axios

• White Claw Upended the Beer Business—Now It Is Coming for Vodka / WSJ

• Squarespace lets users sell ‘anything,’ including cryogenic chambers / The Drum

• Google was beloved as an employer for years. Then it laid off thousands by email / CNN

• The problem with “quiet quitting” and other buzzy management terms / Quartz

• Amazon’s layoffs are the latest correction to years of over-hiring / Quartz

• Hipstamatic makes its return as an anti-instagram social network / TechCrunch

Superficial Interest

• An AI clock that “composes a new poem every minute using ChatGPT / Instagram

• A driver’s guide to hydroplaning and how to handle it / PopSci

• New Mexico is hiring professional bear huggers / CBSNews

• You Too Can Have Your Art on Postage Stamp. The process isn’t complicated, and thousands of people submit themselves for the talent pool every year / Hyperallergic

• An ‘Unsexy’ System for Greening Fashion That Actually Works. Forget pants made of car tires — to truly make fashion more sustainable, a collaboration between dozens of brands is slashing the industry’s carbon footprint / Reasons To Be Cheerful

Food / Drink

• North Sea cod are getting smaller—can we reverse that? / Ars Technica

• How Tokyo’s Farms Have Survived for Centuries. In the world’s biggest concrete jungle, over a thousand small farms continue to grow crops protected by a powerful ally: the city itself / Reasons to Be Cheerful

• A second US lab-grown chicken producer cleared a regulatory hurdle. California-based GOOD Meat got a step closer to the supermarket shelves / Quartz

• Starbucks olive oil-infused coffee will be available at some US cafes starting today after debuting in Italy last month / CNBC

• Without comment: Little Caesars’ Corncob Crust Pizza / Dexerto

======[SIC] 238: Intellectually Inconstant======