[SIC] 254: Essay Forth

Volume 5, Number 46

The [SIC] newsletter on Thursdays is free, and will be forever, unless I change my mind. Unlikely.

But you CAN pay, if you want. I’m into it. Monthly or yearly, or founding support. Paid subscribers get an additional [SIC] Sundays newsletter each week. And founding supporters get invited to a dinner at my home in NYC with special guests.

Meantime, enjoy. And do please pass along to people you like (or people you need to be smarter).

Corollary sources this week (all worth your review, and all easily discoverable): Infinite Catalog / 1440 / Quartz / Elevator / Semafor / After School / Quartz / Morning Consult / Micromobility Report / Ben-Evans / The Future Party / Motive Unknown / Politico / Nice News / Understanding Tiktok / Lerer Hippeau / Beats and Bytes / Roca News

---

Hi all,

Feeling terse today, if that’s a thing. Will throw the intro to [SIC] Talks Alum Ilirjana Alushaj, who writes: “Wanted to share that the official issue of The Pop Manifesto is out live now, with new features coming out over the next few months. There will be limited edition publication with exclusive content, as well as a series of tees based around conversations for the features, the first one is now available! And Ili gets interviewed here for Monocle’s “The Stack” pod, too.

Thanks, Ili! And thanks to Molly, Matt, B, Celeste, Blue and Uncle Kev for contributions this week. I really appreciate your POVs, friends. That goes for everybody reading, too.

Speaking of friends: Byline’s Heatwave Issue dropped last week with guest artist Petra Cortright. I’m an advisor, but setting that aside, you should check it out.

Related: Another Byline advisor and new [SIC] homie Taylor Lorenz talked to Substack’s Hamish McKenzie about influencer culture, online villains, and the state of the media.

And my Culture Club Show partner Jeff Carvalho went on Coindesk’s Gen C podcast to talk Defining Culture in Web3. Good listens.

Last one before the main event: [SIC] Talks alum Cheryl Dunn’s got a new sideline selling prints of her photos over @shirky7, and you should check ‘em. Cheryl’s a legend.

OK, the links.

Dan Bern’s song “Estelle” always stuck with me for the line “she believed collage is the greatest of all the arts.” This one’s from France.

======[SIC] 254: Essay Forth======

Zeitgest / Gestalt

• The Society of Spectacle. The Culture Industry won, get over it / The Sociology of Business

• Case in point? Motherboard reports that The Taliban endorsed Twitter over Threads/ IG

• And Bob Lefsetz reports that Threads is Napster / Lefsetz Letter

• While Embedded contends that Threads is a mecca of Millennial brain rot / Embedded

• Makes sense: digital content is all "fed through the same sausage machine" says design legend Neville Brody / Dezeen

• Meantime, culture wars rage on, forcing marketers to decide whether to reevaluate or retrench / Marketing Dive

• Consider, then: The Puny Power of ‘Woke Capitalism’ / NYT

• Or not? ‘We must shed shackles of outdated moral judgment’, per an OnlyFans billboard model / The Drum

• Judgy: Dream of Antonoffication​. Pop Music’s Blandest Prophet / The Drift

• Also enshittifiying: Hollywood Shutdown Looms as Actors Say Contract Talks Have Collapsed / NYT

• Also screeching to a halt: The Death of Wall Street’s “WFHamptons” era. Recession fears are “killing the vibe” out East / Insider

• While, back in the building: Gen Z may have finally figured out what the office is good for: eavesdropping and snooping on co-workers to get ahead / Fortune

• Elsewhere: Gen Z bans scrolling phone with index finger — that’s for ‘old boomers’ / NYPost

• And Gen Z Has Made the Gathering of the Juggalos Cool Again / Daily Beast

• Emblematic of 2023 as the summer of nostalgia vibes / The Future Party

• Corollary: Jason Diamond on The Sophisticated Summer Jam / The Melt

• And The Accompanying Sophisticated Summer Jams Playlist / Spotify

• ‘Rick and Morty’ accidentally coined Gen Z’s new favorite phrase for hot older guys / Cracked

• From Molly Raskin: Doing the thing by not doing the thing: Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job / NYT

• The Barbie-Oppenheimer Double Feature Is Really Happening, Data Shows / Bloomberg

• Elsewhere in complicated relationships: The impossible paradox of car ownership / Vox

• Also, Jia Tolentino on the ways that climate change is reshaping our emotional landscapes / The New Yorker

• Guess it’s time to Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat? / The Atlantic

• Corollary: Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists​: What Happened to the Avant-Garde? / The Drift

• Wimbledon’s AI-generated announcer might have been a cultural inevitability / The Atlantic

• Kyle Chayka asked a Silicon Valley startup to replicate his personal writing voice with an A.I. version / The New Yorker

• Also inevitable: It Was Only a Matter of Time Before Everyone Started Dressing Like Kramer / The Atlantic

• At least this is new?! "Live painting" is the latest social media-fueled trend taking over weddings / Axios

World Order

• How the World’s Cities Are Working to Cool Down Amid Record Heat Waves / BBC

• But Is It Hot Enough Yet for Politicians to Take Real Action? / The New Yorker

• My hometown, Syracuse, New York, has a dream: to become a high-tech hub / MIT Technology Review

• From Matt@TheTechnorati: It Turns Out That the Debt Matters After All. America’s deficit could soon become a drag on the economy./ The Atlantic

• Per Peter Zeihan: it’s time for the US to reshore everything / Youtube

• Related: “How to Revive a Dying Main Street? One U.K. Landlord Offered Free Rent”/ NYT

• While across the channel, the European Commission unveiled its initiative for “virtual worlds”  — laying down proposed guidelines and regulatory concerns for the next evolution of the 3D internet / Europa.eu

• Which is good, because: In Europe, disinformation is winning / History Club

• Related: today’s college campuses are host to fraught relationships between teachers and students—and, increasingly, conflicts are breaking out in culture-war arguments around ideas about “trauma” and “care.” / The New Yorker

• Hence?! Colleges Are Dying, Long Live Higher Education / Zine x McLuhan

• Corollary: KPMG Gives Extra Training to ‘Lockdown-Damaged’ Gen Z recruits. The Big Four accounting and consulting firm noticed that its “lockdown generation” recruits were finding it difficult to adapt to working life / Telegraph

• And more caffeine isn’t the answer: Chuck Schumer calls on the FDA to investigate Logan Paul’s Prime Energy drink / NPR

• A group of activists protest driverless taxis taking over San Francisco by disabling them by putting an orange traffic cone on their hoods / The Drive

• Vivek Ramaswamy is paying grassroots fund-raisers 10 percent of what they drum up for him in his presidential fundraising bid / Dealbook

The Speculative Future

• Generative AI might be drowning the web in spam / TechCrunch

• Your crisis, my opportunity: as Businesses Clamor for Workplace A.I., Tech Companies Rush to Provide It.” / NYT   

• Writing guidelines for the role of AI in your newsroom? Here are some, er, guidelines for that / Nieman Lab

• Elon Musk unveiled his entry into the AI competition, xAI — pitched as “A new company… that sets out to understand the universe.” / x.ai

• And it’s staffed entirely by dudes / Quartz

• But maybe no bro-pocalypse?! Pro “superforecasters” are less worried about AI apocalypse than some others / The Economist

• The next artificial intelligence frontier: Causal AI / Semafor

• From Molly Raskin: Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? / NYT

• Meantime, Is AI the greatest technology ever for making dumb jokes?! /NYT

Pop Cultures

• What Brands Can Learn From Shein’s Fall / Morning Consult

• China’s ‘Philophiles’ are ready for Phoebe Philo’s comeback / Jing Daily

• [SIC] Talks Alum Eugene Rabkin, editor of StyleZeitgeist Magazine, on the enduring power of luxury status symbols / Dirt

• From B Emm: “This mailout [The Creative Destruction] is consistently great. This post in particular is a good zig to all your brand and marketing zag / Creative Destruction

• Streetwear brand Rare Humans caused chaos in Vienna / Vogue Business

• The digital fashion dilemma: How to convince people it’s here to stay? / Jing Daily

• Meanwhile, from Molly Raskin: This summer’s biggest fashion trend for women? Men’s boxer shorts / The Guardian

• Taking no shorts: Christopher Nolan says Oppenheimer doesn’t contain any shots fully created using CGI / Collider

• 87% of classic games are “critically endangered,” existing only on ancient disks requiring out-of-date hardware. Video games from the 1990s and 2000s are less likely to be available than 100-year-old silent films / Game History

• MSCHF’s answer: The Free Movie. Say hello to a hand-drawn, crowd-pirated, frame-by-frame recreation of the entire The Bee Movie. With 65,244 frames in total, what are you waiting for? / The Free Movie

• Anticipating The Hollywood shutdown? A24 launched an App / App Store

• While Bjork interviews Ahnoni for Interview/ Interview

• The Tom Holland and Nicki Minaj deepfake drama explained / Creative Bloq

• Also kinda hard to understand: Travis Scott is launching his latest album, Utopia, with a live-streamed performance at the Pyramids of Giza / Hypebeast

• Not hard to understand, tho: Working Girl parallels sex work to the art market / Frieze  

• Corollary: Could we be on the verge of another art market crash? / The Art Newspaper

• Hence: the Dealers Made the Art. Art (by) Dealers at the Manhattan gallery Long Story Short features works by 94 gallerists at $500 a pop/ Hyperallergic

• And Hiroshi Fujiwara is auctioning some of his collection / Sothebys

• Related: A warehouse full of art: what will happen to Silvio Berlusconi’s collection? / The Art Newspaper

• From Celeste Blewitt:  “Always intriguing to read of how these paintings are found in collections.” 'Rembrandt Portraits Rediscovered After 200 Years Sells For £11.2 Million At Christies' / Tatler

• While 4 Pages Found in a Couch Are Ruled Aretha Franklin’s True Will / NYT

• Corollary, from Matt @TheTechnorati: How to Leave Grandkids Your Retirement Savings—and Not a Huge Tax Bill. The new rules for inherited IRAs might warrant a rewrite of your estate plan / WSJ

• Back to art: Refik Anadol and tennis superstar Andy Murray made "The Exposition," a digital artwork that provides a unique visual interpretation of Murray's nearly two-decade-long Wimbledon career / Jing Culture & Content

• The Brooklyn Artist Revitalizing New York, One Flyer At a Time / Hyperallergic

• How Thursday Frontman Geoff Rickly Wrote This Summer’s Trippiest Drug Novel—While Sober / GQ

• True True and Unrelated is a standout post from Aaron Stern/ Another Newsletter

• Unrelated to that: Making an ASS out of décor / For Scale

• Oh and Coldplay introduces environmental accountability to tours / The Carbon Almanac

Media Happenings

• Why the early success of Threads may crash into reality  / NYT

• Instagram Head Says Meta ‘Won’t Encourage’ News on Threads / The Information

• While Meta’s Threads could fortify the metaverse / Ben’s Bites

• Snap’s Push to Tempt Creators Seems to Be Working / WSJ

• Meantime, TikTok wants to get in the chart rotation. The “Hot 50” and “Viral” charts exist as a button on top of the song's sound page, which lets users immediately see where it ranks / Business Insider

• Related: Musical Guests on ‘Call Her Daddy’ get major traffic boosts/ TubeFilter

• Tucker Carlson’s Twitter show have fallen as much as 85 percent since its debut last month / Business Insider

• More decline: Disney’s Harsh New Reality: Costly Film Flops, Creative Struggles and a Shrinking Global Box Office / Variety

• “Orange Is the New Black” Signalled the Rot Inside the Streaming Economy. The innovative and daring show was a worldwide hit for Netflix, but some of the actors say that they were never fairly compensated / The New Yorker

• Ergo? Sarah Silverman Sues OpenAI, Meta for Copyright Infringement / The Verge

• Meta announced the opening of its NIL Empower 3.0 incubator program designed to help female athletes maximize NIL opportunities / Meta

• A different kind of “both sides”: The L.A. Times’ new section De Los aims to draw Latino readers without the paywall / Nieman Lab

• The latest attempt to sell the National Enquirer fell through / WSJ

Market-ations

• Amazon’s Prime Day Is Growing Increasingly Irrelevant / Motley Fool

• Total US e-commerce sales were expected to grow by ~116% on Prime Day this year vs an average day / Axios

• As users, marketers undertake Threads' pre-ad experimentation / Digiday

• Threads reportedly plans to adopt Instagram’s branded content tools, allowing marketers to engage in paid partnerships on the new app while traditional advertising remains unavailable / Axios

• Shutterstock is expanding its partnership with OpenAI, allowing access to its library while Shutterstock users will see continued access to OpenAI’s text-to-image generation and synthetic editing capabilities / CNBC

• The TikTok Cultures Network is a group of TikTok researchers all around the globe, incl. Marcus Bosch of the excellent Understanding Tiktok newsletter/ Tiktok Cultures

• Coca-Cola Believes In Music In Ads So Much It Is Growing Its Own Studio To Record Original Songs / Digiday

• How PepsiCo’s partnership with EA highlights the brand’s expanding approach to gaming / Digiday

• Related, the State of the Play in the gaming industry / Prof G Pod

• KFC's Colonel Sanders in Street Fighter 6 is finger breakin' good / The Drum

• Pepsi is relaunching its pineapple soda, but only via a Little Caesars pizza combo / Daily Meal

• Banana Republic Wants to Outfit Your Home, Too / NYT

• Claire’s evolves beyond its mall brand roots to ‘be a first mover’ and appeal to Gen Z, Gen Alpha / Digiday

• JanSport is taking advantage of Gen Z’s taste for nostalgia by expanding beyond its iconic backpacks to apparel and accessories in time for back-to-school/ / Modern Retail

• The trends & brands that resonate most with Gen Z / The Drum

• Managing Gen Z: Fast Company’s 142-point guide for leaders / FastCo

• Nonetheless: adland still has an inclusivity problem / The Drum

Superficial Interest

• Silence: Simon and Garfunkel were right. It really is a sound / NYT

• Cheap package holidays in the 1960s are being linked to soaring rates of skin cancer in the UK / The Guardian

• So? Stay indoors and bring back the great British junk shop / FT

• How E-Bikes Became the Coolest Thing on the Road / HeatMap

• Yet. Cult ebike brand VanMoof has paused sales and some of its top execs are departing / TechCrunch

• Design out of Reach: what happens to unwanted office furniture / NYT

• From Matt @TheTechnorati: This Canadian lake should mark the start of the Anthropocene, scientists say / WaPo

• Hence: to Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Paints. Scientists created a white paint that, when applied, can reduce the surface temperature on a roof and cool the building beneath it / NYT

• And Releaf is using leaves to make the bags, saving 78% of carbon emissions and using 15 times less water compared to paper bags made from trees / Carbon Almanac

• While a former diamond-mining town in Namibia is growing giant kelp forests to combat climate change/ Reuters

• The Cascading Effects of Bringing Back Sea Otters. In Oregon and California, efforts to repopulate these furry engineers could revive struggling ocean ecosystems / Reasons to be Cheerful

• California wildlife officials are hoping to apprehend a 5-year-old sea otter who steals surfboards / NYT

• And sustainable Fish Leather, Made From Invasive Species, Could Help Save Coral Reefs / Nice News

• Related: why (cow) leather has yet to be duped / Dirt

• Rhymes with: Dogs prefer to poop on a north-south axis / Frontiers in Zoology

Food / Drink

• Sotol and the Making of the Next Big Drink. The Mexican spirit has been called the next mezcal. But its newfound popularity has brought problems, too / The New Yorker

• While from Celeste Blewitt: 'Free Trade Talks Between Australia, EU Stall Over Prosecco, Parmesan, Feta Naming Rights' /ABC  

• So? Here’s a modest proposal for peace in the Jollof Wars / Semafor

• Why does Coke taste different at McDonald's? / YouTube

• Related: a group of 71 investors managing $15.2T in assets is pressuring 12 fast food companies to stop using antibiotics / UMN.edu

• And Burger King Thailand introduced “The Real Cheeseburger” – a meatless burger with no condiments and 20 slices of American cheese / NYPost

• Back home, Chatbots are already taking over the drive-thru lane / Bloomberg

• Don't show up empty-handed. Sue Chan taps experts to share the gifts your dinner host will actually use / Magasin

• Further tips at Sue’s newish editorial site / CareofChan

• Related: HTSI’s entire “How to Host It” section / FT

• Everything on Janet Yellen’s “God of Money” restaurant menu in Beijing / Quartz

• The history of the humble moka pot / Departures

Useful Diversions:

• Listen: From B Emm: “This pod [What’s Contemporary Now] is really good and it's also a good commute length. It focuses on CULTURE. NOW. So it's like catnip for me. This Tim Blanks one is good because Tim Blanks is always good. He's like fashion's good parent; always guiding and observing but never a stan to his own child” / Spotify

• Then there’s this from Kevin Tachman, via Popbitch: Online radio that mixes air traffic control with lo-fi beats / LoFiATC

• Less talky: David Blue’s Music for higher tempo summer activities and/or gatherings

Do:

• Friday July 21st, fave gallery Espo’s Art World are popping up at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. They are doing pay-what-you-wish admission and live screen printing a Philadelphia logotype / Philadelphia Museum

• The Independent Print Market in London August 5th / Velocity Press

======[SIC] 254: Essay Forth======

This one’s from the Nassau stop in Greenpoint. Nothing to do with Henry Miller.