[SIC] 277: Scream Inside

Volume Six, Number Seventeen

Ben Dietz

Dec 21, 2023

[SIC] Weekly is a digest of pertinent developments, sent Thursdays to nearly 5000 subscribers who’ve individually opted in.

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Corollary sources this week: After School / Public Announcement / The Future Party / Politico / 1440 / Morning Brew / Retail Innovation Week / Champion Weekly / Garbage Day / Understanding TikTok / The Micromobility Report / Retail Dive / Jing Daily / Ben-Evans / Context Collapse / Part and Sum / Dealbook

Forgive the late send today. Been a busy last-week-of-the-business-year, and since I’m launching something new in 2024, I’ve been in herding cats mode. I’ll explain soon.

Meantime, so many developments this week. The gang and I have a new Culture Club Show episode with Sowmya Krishnamurthy, about her book “Fashion Killa”. My co-host and [SIC] alum Ruba killed this week on the “What’s Contemporary Now” Podcast. Likewise [SIC] homie Leo Fitzpatrick on the Serving the People Pod. And [SIC] Talks Alum Eugene Rabkin’s “Why You Feel Alienated from Luxury Fashion (it’s not just the prices) on his Style Zeitgeist site killed, too.

Talking of [SIC] Talks: #61 is here. Sami Reiss (of the inimitable SNAKE newsletter) is my guest, and you really oughtta listen to it. Sami is a wealth of curatorial knowledge across vintage, furniture, diet and exercise, sports and style, and a dude worth having on your cultural radar. And a great vibe, obvs. It’s Embedded here, and I’ll have it on YT and podcast platforms shortly too. Meantime, recommended you follow SNAKE and SNAKE Radio (which we talk a bunch about), like I do.

[SIC] Talks #61: Sami Reiss. Great chat. Still haven’t figured out thumbnails.

Speaking of people I follow: designer Eric Elms’s Our Gang News dropped and i’m stoked to check out what’s forecasted as “Words to read, images to see, objects to buy, places to go. A slower-paced newsletter where you can enjoy a little of everything weekly at your leisure”

Elsewhere in doing things at your own speed:, Nick Weidenfeld and Amantha Walden sent their annual IYKYK email banger “THE FIVE, TENS AND TWENTIES OF TWENTY TWENTY-THREE” (their Top 20 songs of the year is a great soundtrack while you digest this digest). And apropos of that, from Mick: “A fun lo-fi holiday playlist for you…For people who are over the retail / Mariah soundtrack vomit of the season. :)

Thanks guys! And thanks Lars Bengston, Piers Fawkes, David Bloom, Liz Mantel, Ben Pruess, Elaine Santiago, Molly Raskin, Celeste Blewitt, and of course Iolanda Carvalho for contributions this week.

Ok. Might take next week off. Or might just do a lite-lift version. Either way, happy holiday break to every single one of you.

======SIC 277: Scream Inside======

The Macro Narrative

Studio Ghibli vibes vs. history / One Thing
From Celeste: Nostalgia Marketing Is Powerful. Nowstalgia Might Be Even More Compelling / BBC
Nowstalgia is nostalgia hitting lightspeed / The Future Party
The Year the Internet Left Me Behind / NYT
The culture is suffering with relatability fatigue / Dazed
“Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore” / The Atlantic
Hence: The Myth of the Unemployed College Grad / The Atlantic
While: The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction / The Atlantic
Welcome to The ‘vibecession’ driving holiday mass layoffs / BBC
Related? Affirm published global WFH salary levels / Linkedin
The state of America’s cultural supremacy and geopolitical weakness / FT
Means? Getting Ready for a Post-American World / Zeihan
Case in point: Western Europe, Post America / YT
Also entering a new era: Will Hong Kong lose its soul without neon? / NYT
Speaking of losing it: What Color Is Your Scream? / Byline
Corollary: How mindfulness went mainstream / Vox
Yet We’re not so positive about constant positive thinking / X
Hence: This Was the Year Nicotine Made a Big Comeback / GQ
And ketamine became the decade’s defining drug / The FACE
Related? Against seemingly all odds, crypto can look back on a great 2023 / Bloomberg
Costco customers bought $100 million worth of gold bars last quarter / Business Insider
The office cubicle is making a comeback / NYT
Forced boredom as productivity hack / Mason Currey
Leads us to? Mulchposting: images and videos of dogs with captions and narrations about soil and mulch / TechCrunch
More current images: Year in Pictures / NYT
Q&A: Kyle Chayka on his ‘cultural investigations’ / CJR
On the other hand: A Reporter Who Has (to Look Up) Rizz / NYT
Burning Q, from Elaine: Just How Rich Were the McCallisters in ‘Home Alone’? / NYT
Speaking of getting money: Inside the mad dash to buy your Walmart and Amazon returns / Washington Post
Elsewhere, from David: “Fascinating WaPo piece about a woman who is targeting the outrage machines … A fascinating peek at an entire media ecosystem.” [Meet the woman working to stop the far-right creator money machine] / WaPo
A different creator money machine: Depop’s first trend report defines the Gen-Z trends to expect in 2024 / Glossy
Related: 2024 four key trends for the new year: Sleaze Academia (school uniforms meets grunge), Post Romance (Sandy Liang-ish girl culture), Sports Quest (video-game-inspired athletic wear), and Lazy Luxe (the aesthetic counterpart to quiet quitting) / Glossy
More trend, from Molly: How 'get ready with me' videos became a social media trend that won't go away / Yahoo News
And How Celebrating Girlhood quickly became the internet’s favorite trend /WhoWhatWear
From Liz: have Bows gone too far (yes, bows have gone too far / NYT
But Your Honor, I'm Literally Just A Girl <3 / Byline
Corollary, from Molly: An American Girlhood in the Ozempic Era / The Cut
Unrelated. What is Critical Mass? / The FACE
Can Sodium Battery Tech Compete with Lithium? / Micromobility Report
Should cities also start subsidizing shared micromobility services? / Cities Today
Speaking of city ‘government,’ from Piers: “Quite a clever little website” [ Welcome to the Eric Adams’s Table of Success] / Hellgate
Another from Piers: “Maybe seasonal" [How a European colour revolution brought us the humble Christmas card / The Guardian

Generationations

Zillennials in the mil-liminal space: who are the contemporary ‘micro-generations’ in the misty marshland between established epochs? / Tatler
While we’re figuring that out, Gen Z, Let the Millennials Have Milk Bar / Jezebel
How Gen Z gets to know luxury houses through memes / Jing Daily
Related: Vibe Check: How Gen-Z Works, Lives and Loves / Insider
Zoom, Zoom. The Gen-Z vs Millenial camera zoom debate / X

Platformations

Twitch says its revamped sexual content guidelines are fairer to female streamers/ Quartz
From David Bloom: “This shift in content standards at Twitch lasted about as long as I figured it would, i.e., not long before Amazon uh, twitched over boundary busters….” Twitch Allows 'Artistic Nudity,' Immediately Regrets it / Kotaku
To keep their hand busy? Why YouTubers Hold Microphones Now / YT
Or because? TikTok creators are being tipped more than $11 million a day. This has gone too far. / Quartz
Girl math, Barbiecore and the Roman Empire: The year on TikTok / Vogue Business
TikTok is pushing longer videos. Some creators worry about the vibe shift / CNN
Case in point? TikTok is suddenly obsessed with the North Sea / NYT
While the US Army faces 'TikTok mutiny' / Daily Mail
Jack Harlow is releasing a concert film… exclusively in Meta’s VR metaverse, Horizon Worlds /Variety
Ergo? Adam Mosseri spells out Threads’ plans for the fediverse / The Verge
Elsewhere in mutinies: Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of the design tool Figma officially fell apart / Bloomberg
While in contrast: Everything’s returning to Netflix in the search for money and popularity / The Future Party
Speaking of everything everywhere, from Celeste: Wikipedia's Top 2023 Articles / The Daily Aus
And the 100 most-viewed YouTube channels for good measure/ Tubefilte
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Stylistics

SSOTY (Skateboarding Stories of The Year) 2023 / Simple Magic
The “Bachelor Aestethic is fearless self-love / For-Scale
From Piers: Vintage Ikea furnishings fetch £32,000 at auction in Stockholm / The Guardian
From Piers: “While super wasteful, kinda fascinating as they try to extend the limits” [The World’s Fastest Road Cars—and the People Who Drive Them] / The New Yorker
Corollary: How Fashion’s Business Model Is Wasteful by Design / BoF
And? The Ugly Shoe Trend Explained / Footwear News
Ergo, from Ben: Guinness’s “Foot Pints” / Guinness
Top 100 Items Of The Year as chosen by jawns enthusiasts/ Street Night Live
‘Dopamine dressing’ to ‘dirty fit’: 2023's fashion trends in China / Jing Daily
Why Farfetch was acquired by the ‘Amazon of Asia’ / Vogue Business
JDO identified six visual themes to watch out for [in 2024]– all guided by recent cultural shifts" / Creative Boom
IE: The 2024 bob haircut will dominate next year / Glamour
And from Celeste: The Party Tie Is Back - Yes, Really / FT

Culturations

From Nick: The future of music criticism is NEOPUNKFM / YT
Related: The Making of Ziwe, Chief Cultural Critic / Vanity Fair
Why Gen Z’s biggest podcasters are working from bed / Fast Company
Speaking of jammy chancers: $4 thrift-store vase sells for $107,100 at auction / The Art Newspaper
From Piers: Walt Disney’s vision of youth savoring “the challenge and the promise of the future” is hard to locate in the reboots and prequels and origin stories and multi-episode side quests. [Disney Is a Language. Do We Still Speak It?] / NYT
Apropos: Steamboat Willie, the precursor to Mickey Mouse, is finally entering the public domain next year — after decades of Disney trying to extend copyright protections / Hypebeast
Related to that: Andy Warhol and a Year in Copyright / Frieze
And this Q&A: Anders Petterson and Adriano Picinati di Torcello on the Future of Art and Finance / Jing Daily
More convo: New Ways of Seeing. Franklin Sirmans and Pete Scantland In Conversation On art, advertising, and museums / Affidavit
And How Black Art Came to Stay at Art Basel / Bazaar
But 2023 was The year fashion backtracked on diversity / Vogue Business
Elsewhere in backtracking: Amanda Bynes said she will “take a pause” on her new podcast after just one episode /LA Times
SCP Merchandising, which handles merch sales for acts like Father John Misty and Mitski, surprisingly shut down / Billboard
Also mysteriously down: Christie's projects 26.1% decline in sales in 'paradoxical' 2023 / The Art Newspaper
Unrelated: Authors select their favorite books of 2023 / Shepherd
Speaking of storytellers: Conan O’Brien’s Wild First Year at Late Night: An Oral History / Vanity Fair
From Celeste: “An excellent breakdown of video games and how they've come to be such a huge industry. We were only tv watchers on Fridays and Saturdays and I vividly remember being loaned a Nintendo for a weekend, we didn't move for days. Super Mario!” [In History: The First Video Game Console, 50 Years On] / BBC

Technopolis

In the Age of AI, 'Her' Is a Fairy Tale / Wired
The reality? From David: How OnlyFans star Riley Reid plans to 'immortalize' herself with AI / Insider
Also neverending? From Iolanda: Data Never Sleeps, now in its eleventh year, depicts just how much we rely on data and its impact on our daily lives in one of the 525,600 minutes in a year." / Domo
Benedict Evans Live on Stage: “‘AI, and everything else’.” / YT
From Lars: Amid all the hubbub about AGI (or ASI now, apparently), last week there was a report on OpenAI's first efforts to curb a superintelligence from duping all of us / Technology Review
AI-generated news anchors are living deep in the uncanny valley / Ars Technica
Also uncanny? My Not-So-Perfect Holiday Shopping Excursion With A.I. Chatbots / NYT
Corollary? LayerZero: The Language of the Omnnichain / Not Boring
Or maybe we just start? Dismantling the technopoly / The New Yorker

Media-tions

Google’s AI search tool could be a threat to news publishers / WSJ
Inside The New York Times’ big bet on games / Vanity Fair
Elsewhere: A look at why The Washington Post killed its video game vertical / ReaderGrev
Speaking of big bets: Time appoints its first chief events officer as publishers double down on events in 2024 / Digiday
Will Condé Nast cash out on the Reddit IPO? / Medialyte
Related: Justin Smith explains how Semafor achieved profitable months in its first full year / Digiday
Why More Agency Reviews May Be Coming / AdAge
Hence: Inside the Rise of Agency Chief Marketing and Brand Officers / AdAge

Market / Influence

From Iolanda: Marketing Week’s roster of columnists have taken a step back to provide a to-do list for the year ahead /Marketing Week
MrBeast has to change the name of his “Deez Nuts” snack after losing a legal battle with the gourmet peanut company Dee’s Nuts / Hypebeast
The NFL’s Holiday Takeover Is Reaching New Heights / Front Office Sports
Inside Pantone, the company that turns color into money / YT
Ralph Lauren is expanding its luxury home collection to open freestanding stores and offer an expanded range of luxury furniture / Retail in Asia
All-American brands owned by foreign companies / CNN

Eats, Drinks and Ephemera

The ridiculously stupid reason the US is letting animals spiral toward oblivion / Vox
Chobani, the maker of Greek yogurt, agreed to buy the coffee brand La Colombe for $900 million / Reuters
From David: Saudi Arabia is creating the world's first gaming and esports district, surpassing Vatican City in size / Luxury Launches
From Piers: “commercial lunar marketplace” [NASA video highlights first commercial delivery service to the moon] / Digital Trends
Also moon? Chocolate iPhone 15 Pro Max costs the same as the real thing / Creative Bloq