Friday Musings
Stuff that got me thinking over the last week.
Is Andor the best Star Wars related TV show of all time? Or is it The Mandalorian? I think those are the only two real contenders (I’ve never watched any of the animated stuff, and I am not going to.) I’m still baffled by the fact that within a completely new universe, we created a character with almost the exact same last name as a known planet (Endor) and nobody talks about that. I also think that Diego Luna looks disturbingly like a Wings-era Paul McCartney and again, nobody is talking about this.
All this talk on the Metaverse and what will happen is an interesting question. It’s hard for me to think that Mark Zuckerberg has completely lost the plot, and it’s also quite possible he can buy a future that wouldn’t otherwise exist. But I just don’t see a lot of folks wearing a Quest Pro or anything nearly as bulky on the regular. I own a Quest2 and it’s fun for gaming but it’s a process and it’s disorienting at times. We are so far away. But it reminded me, as it often does, of this commercial, showing a guy who looks crazy sitting on a park bench - but he’s using “smart glasses” and trading pork belly futures. It was made in 2000 as part of an IBM campaign showing the future. Well, it’s 2022 and we’re really nowhere close. The West Wing absolutely nailed this.
Leo: My generation never got the future it was promised. Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh: The personal computer.
Leo: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack? My colonies on the Moon?
It is kind of vexing - obviously technology has blown up, but not in the fun ways we all predicted. Anyway, watch this and think about the fact that 22 years later we aren’t even doing THIS:
Elon Musk, who has absolutely taken over being the real Dr. Evil, now owns the most toxic social media platform and - I guess - that means that a lot of horrible people are coming back to it, including a former apricot treasonous President. It’s not ideal when folks “celebrate” you taking over Twitter by eagerly posting the most foul slur in our language. That’s not ideal. And this article about the mess Elon has bought himself into is … eye-opening.
What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.
Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
Ouch, Elon. Hope it’s worth $44,000,000,000.
Note: I wrote the above BEFORE Musk tweeted (and then deleted, which is unambigiously hilarious) a completely disgusting quote tweet suggesting that the attack on Paul Pelosi MAY have been a gay love dispute, not an attack from a psychotic QAnon/Trumpist. I’m pretty much out on Twitter from now on, as I can’t see the benefit. That said, I’ll continue to auto-post this so if you found this FROM Twitter, thanks!
Following on the above, but also something I’ve simultaneously been thinking myself but not able to state, here’s something from a Substack I follow - and you should too - called Today In Tabs.
It occurred to me this weekend that a lot of people have never worked in tech and may not completely understand that Elon Musk is not special in any way. He’s a very common type of tech business guy. I barely worked in “real” tech and even I ran into several of this guy in my career. There are thousands of him out there—guys1 who code poorly but think they’re technomancers, whose main skill is bullshitting their way out of one disaster after another, and whose main personality trait is a shameless willingness to abuse anyone else until they get what they want.
If you're thinking “well he must be the best bullshitter,” even that gives him too much credit. Do you have any trouble seeing through his bullshit? Of course not, it’s not very convincing. Each of those guys got a lottery ticket, and Elon’s just the one whose number came up for the grand prize. Imagine you start with a hundred people, and you flip a coin for each one. Heads they stay, tails they go. Keep doing this for a while, and you’ll eventually have one person left. What’s special about that person? Exactly the same thing that’s special about Elon Musk: he was present when you started flipping coins.
Yeah. Well said. Tech is full of so many people who THINK they’re a genius, and fail upwards. I think financial services is similar, and I’m sure entertainment and other fields I have NOT worked in are, too. Hell, perhaps everything is like this. The lesson that jerks and egomaniacs get rewarded in our society is a tough one to learn.
I don’t know what the WORST commercial out there actually is, but I know what my least favorite one is. It’s this:
Listen, I know they say if advertising sticks in your head, it’s working. But - I didn’t know until I searched for “car commercial Fleetwood Mac” that this was a) for Chevrolet and b) about how EV cars are for everyone. Because all I know about this commercial is that it feels like someone said, “You know what will sell more cars? People singing a classic song horribly out of tune!” It kills me. I have to mute the TV when it comes on. Please, for the love of everything holy (including Fleetwood Mac), MAKE IT STOP.