[SIC] 270: Tarantino Singularity

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Corollary sources this week: Context Collapse / Roca Current / Strat Scraps / The Future Party / The Unskippables / Magasin / Network Notes

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Hi all,

Tomorrow is the the big cut. As a public experiment in circulation management I’m going to ‘fire’ - ie unsubscribe - l[SIC] sign up addresses that have had zero-interaction  in the last three months. The idea is to both trim the rolls and to (hopefully) get a better sense of how [SIC] actually gets consumed and used. It’s about 15% of my total subs, or around 800 addresses. [if you think this describes you, all you have to do is open this email today and you’ll be off the list]

I say ‘addresses’ since a cursory glance makes clear a bunch of them are emails I know are no longer valid - old jobs or former colleagues who’ve moved on. Oddly, Substack doesn’t ‘bounce back’ the invalid address notes it must be receiving, something I didn’t realize until recently. So this will be interesting. Hopefully it’ll mean a more ‘engaged’ readership going forward.

Also interesting: contributions this week from Piers Fawkes, Iolanda Carvalho, James Friedman, Molly Raskin, Celeste Blewitt, Casey Lewis, Isaac Dietz and Gordon Hull, which I dearly appreciate. Keep ‘em coming, please.

Now, the links.

The Artist at Marcella’s Birthday Party.

======[SIC] 270: Tarantino Singularity======

The Macro Narrative

• The new lying flat? China’s Gen Z embraces ‘exquisite poverty’ / Jing Daily

• Related: The breakdown of China’s social contract. A once optimistic society now worries about the future as Xi Jinping’s promise of ‘common prosperity’ starts to fade / FT

• Elsewhere: WarTok II yields Lessons in memetic warfare and yet again dancing soldiers / Understanding TikTok

• Millions work as content creators. In official records, they barely exist / WaPo

• Hence? Fire Sales Sweep the Creator Economy as Startups Struggle/ The Information

• IE, from Casey: “Between [the] NTWRK news (which is CRAZY), and this news, some weird stuff is happening in the live shopping space…”[Livestream Beauty Shopping App Supergreat To Shutter, Fold Team Members Into Whatnot] / Beauty Independent

• Related, sort of, from Celeste: “[It’s a] $2.3 billion industry as the article quotes, who would have thought that the psychic industry was going great guns. I remember reading of the WitchTok trend in SIC perhaps a year ago, but it appears to be continuing swiftly. [Practical Magic,  The Lucrative Business Of Being A Witch On Etsy And TikTok] / NYT

• Content creators surge past legacy media as news hits a tipping point.  One recent study concluded consumers are looking for news that “feels more relevant,” giving a boost to creators on social media / WaPo

• Corollary from Isaac: “This article is fairly provocative given that this (IMO) is clearly legal but not nice, especially with the background of human disaster these places represent, all over the country” YouTube Is Monetizing Human Suffering at an Open Air Drug Market  / 404 Media

• In other trends: Identity and culture have killed genre in a scenes-driven industry / Midia

• Decidedly untrendy: The Black Label Bike Club's Halloween block party was a feast for the eyes. Here: a few scenes from Saturday’s Bike Kill / BKMag

• Goodbye to Identity Politics. Does identity politics keep us emotionally and creatively stunted? / The Salieri Redemption

• What If Memes Had Museum Wall Labels? / Hyperallergic

• Also a meme? The Real Real is selling an actual Picasso / The Real Real

• A visiting studio engineer was unimpressed with the cable management at the White House and posted about it / Tiktok

• Corollary: The Biden administration is urging schools to keep an opioid overdose reversal drug on hand and train staff and students on its use / Axios

• More politics: Saudi Arabia’s plan to conquer sports is working / Morning Brew

• Should investors be spooked by Tokyo’s Halloween? Muted celebrations in Shibuya have resurrected past economic demons / FT

• How Scandinavia cracked the productivity puzzle. Lessons from our most (and least) productive peers / FT

• Corollary, back home: Homeschooling is booming / Morning Brew

• Climate quitting is when a person actually leaves their employer due to a mismatch between the employer’s actions and the employee’s values on climate change / The Carbon Almanac

• With Gen Z, Millennials now the biggest ‘dupe’ shoppers, online culture has ‘flipped the script,’ analysts says. 49% and 44% respectively, have intentionally purchased a dupe of a premium product at some point / CNBC

Generationations

• Gen Zers can recognize brands based solely on ‘sonic memes,’ report says / Marketing Brew

• Gen Z wants to change the world – or at least the workplace / The Return Podcast

• Whatever Happened to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? / The Atlantic

• The generation-minded Lindy Guide to Istanbul / The Lindy Newsletter

Platformations

• ‘It’s quite soul-destroying: how we fell out of love with dating apps/ The Guardian

• Fortunately, the hot new thing in social media is here. Again / NYT

• While The next hot Gen Z ad channel is free mobile phone networks / AdAge

• Instagram is testing a new feature that will let your friends add to your posts / The Verge

• While Tiktok is testing an AI Tool that identifies products in user videos so it can sell similar items via its e-commerce platform / Insider

• From Casey: “I got coffee with a Gen Zer this morning who was talking to me about Flip. This is not a new app - Glossy wrote about them in 2021! - of-online-beauty-shopping/ but they've weirdly popped off recently. It's literally TikTok but just shopping/product recs” / Glossy

• Meanwhile, Deezer’s ‘artist-centric’ model now has a new ‘user-centric’ element which, despite not really being ‘user-centric’, is quite a clever idea / Music Business Worldwide

Stylistics

• From Celeste: ‘This was on everyone's watchlist, and has been written of in every publicaiton possible, but it felt like although it's now on the launched list, will it be worth the continual wait? Will be great to see, tres luxurious.’ [Phoebe Philo's Eponymous Debut Is A Confident, Uncompromising, Delight’]  / Vogue UK

• But, from Ben: “People not so happy with VF and Supreme- ahhh maybe paid too much;)”[VF Offers Supreme Update Amid Activist Criticism of Deal] Eat Shop Surf

• Also At VF, the Vans Implosion Is Getting Worse / MediaPost

• Can Web3 save sneaker culture? An enduring counterfeit market and waning hype is forcing brands to rethink the way they court sneakerheads and reimagine concepts of ownership. Their solution? Web3./ Jing Daily

• Meantime: Retro Sambas Help Adidas Forge a Future Without Kanye / WSJ

• Target, On Running, New Balance Among New Collective of Brands Pushing Circular Footwear / BoF

• More thoughts on saving: Ghost Clothes / Early Majority

• And on Saving in general, by way of Phoebe Philo: Would You Rather Have a Leather Jacket or a Down Payment on a Home? / The Cut

• [SIC] Homie Bradley Carbone goes deep in the vaults on Throwing Fits / Spotify

• Sam Hine says The Sample Sale is Dead. Long Live the Sample Sale / GQ

• A History of America's Culture Wars in Fashion / Bloomberg

Culturations

• Billboard releases royalty calculator for Spotify and Apple Music / The Fader

• Corollary, from James: “What is old can never die.” Why De La Soul’s ‘Buhloone Mindstate’ still matters / NPR

• Unrelated, but “Millions Now Living Will Never Die” still gets my vote as best album title ever / Spotify

• Are the Cardigans Secretly Metal? – Rob Harvilla goes deep on “Lovefool” and the Cardigans’ metal roots /The Ringer

• But not speed metal: the music industry may try to slow down “sped-up” versions / The Future Party

• The Trapital Report #2: Download the free preview report version​ / Trapital

• The entire catalog of the Whole Earth Catalog is now available online. Great place to get lost / Whole Earth Info

• Apropos of catalog: Morgan Stanley is investing more than $700m to buy music copyrights in partnership with Kobalt / Music Business Worldwide

• Sesame Street is getting a makeover next season. As its streaming deal with Max ends, the show will switch its format from magazine style to two longer narrative segments and one short animated one/ Hollywood Reporter

• The Slow Death of Authenticity in an Attention Economy - “To grow you need to be noticed. To be noticed, you need to stand out. And to stand out is—usually—inauthentic. / Cory Zue

• Discovering A Tribe of Archivists in LA / URB

• Matty Matheson hooked up with WeTransfer to release a free digital cookbook / Hypebeast

• Who runs the show? As the power in Hollywood has moved from film to TV, so has the much-mythologised alpha male auteur / The New Statesman

• From Celeste: “MONA on a global scale as a museum is always creating a new experience, this experiential moment by Jonsi of Sigur Ros fame, focusing creating sensory experiences of volcanoes is an interesting read. The expanse of MONA would suit this excellently.” In The Depths Of Hobart's MONA, A Volcano Is Brewing' /The Conversation AU

• Elsewhere in museums: Butt-Naked Visitors Take Over Barcelona Museum /Hyperallergic

• The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat is partnering with Phillips to release a special edition of the iconic vinyl single “Beat Bop,” originally produced by Basquiat himself in 1983/ Jing Culture

• Download FADER & Friends Vol. 1, The FADER’s 44-song transgender charity compilation / The Fader

Technopolis

• Content moderation on the internet has gotten harder — and easier — because of advances in artificial intelligence /The Atlantic

• From Celeste: AI can't get the gist of slang, this is intriguing.…It's just a mish mash of words from the way the article highlights it.” [Why AI Doesn't Get Slang] / The Atlantic

• AI is stealing your content. Steal it back / Medium

• A new fashion brand is rethinking production using AI / Vogue Business

• From Iolanda: “It's kind of like if Clippy went to get his MBA and wants to be your personal assistant." [Microsoft’s generative AI work assistant Copilot debuted to millions of enterprise customers] / Gizmodo

• A new pixel-shifting tool lets artists protect their work from being scraped and used by AI image generators / Hyperallergic

• GenAI's Downstream Effects on Media, PR, Advertising & Marketing / Context Collapse

• Back to tools, from Iolanda: "Researchers at Imperial [College] are analysing the reasons people don’t get their gadgets repaired, and suggesting measures to change their minds." Repairing is the new buying / Imperial College London

Media-tions

• What Omnicom Buying Flywheel Means for the Holding Company and the Industry / Ad Age

• Behind the numbers: unmasking the complex reality of platform advertising / Digiday

• Corollary: Adventures in sales. RIP talking a dog off a meat truck / The Rebooting

• Also RIP: Why are journalists losing their jobs in record numbers? Blame the Trump slump / Nieman Lab

• Ergo: Condé Nast will cut 5% of its workforce  / NYT

• So maybe the answer is Trade the News, Then Publish It?! / Bloomberg

Market / Influence

• From Iolanda: “From bestseller lists to runways, gaming’s influence is all-powerful.” [Power Players: The Women Reshaping The Gaming Industry – And Entertainment As We Know It] / Vogue

• Millennial meme marketing must end / Embedded

• Elsewhere: Nike's new campaign promotes holistic health outcomes, including mental health wellness, by partnering with Deepak Chopra / Cherry Flava

• How National Geographic is using its contributor network to refresh its social media channels / Digiday

• Why Cirque du Soleil is creating its own influencer network / Digiday

• 'Turn on the comments you cowards': Why are brands blocking feedback on social? / The Drum

• Urban Outfitters’ fast-growing Nuuly is threatening to end Rent the Runway’s run as the biggest fashion rental service / BoF

Eats, Drinks and Ephemera

• Thingtesting’s Best Of 2023 winners named / Thingtesting

• Speaking of bests: A blue cheese from Norway crowned world’s best cheese / TimeOut

• But the Rigid World of French Cheesemaking Meets Unbound Climate Change / NYT

• From Piers: Can interior design impact the taste of your wine? / The Drinks Business

• Obvi, then: Where You Live Is As Important As What You Eat /Wired

• IE: The Apple-Picking Apocalypse of Upstate New York /  NYT

• From Iolanda: Please, take my beloved dark chocolate out of the list…[Foods with the Largest Environmental Impact] / Visual Capitalist

The Natural (?!) World

• Japanese environmentalists warn of a surge in bear attacks due to food shortages in their natural habitats / The Guardian

• Speaking of exploding myths… Everything I Thought I Knew About Nasal Congestion Is Wrong / The Atlantic

• Unrelated: Modular waste bins by Group Project distributed across New York City / Dezeen

• Recycled plastic won’t save us. Could recycled leather? / Futurevvorld

• From Iolanda: This is so cool!  To get a glimpse of the future, one has to move from everyday life to the edges of society. From the mainstream to the margins. This is where trends start and inventions that drive our future advancement are spawned / Rolling Stone

Finally: bonus content from Gordon Hull: “How to stand out in a crowded field with your branding…”

======[SIC] 270: Tarantino Singularity======