New York City, June 30, 2015
★★★★ Now the sun bore down a bit, and the air in the park felt dusty. Starlings, one drab with new plumage, foraged in the clover and grass. Honeybees cruised low. A white stretch limousine, its rearmost window partway down, rolled to a stop outside the brassy Trump Internarional canopy. A sawdust smell rode the breeze up Lafayette. Out on the fire escape in the afternoon, the patch of sun went away and a chilly wind began blowing. A crow cawed loudly and flapped down to perch on a coil of barbed wire against the suddenly dark sky. The clouds thinned again, but there was still something damp and feverish on the air. The radar map on the phone couldn’t quite make the case against fireworks in Astoria. Some drops fell in the late Manhattan sun on the way to the subway. When the N train emerged in Queens, the light was dim and the wind tossed hair and branches. On the walk west to the park, orange rifts and a drifting mass of darker gray met in the big sky afforded by the ahuman scale of the expressway leading to the Triboro Bridge. Hip-high weeds pressed in on the edges of sidewalk. The lower clouds moved north so fast that the higher ones seemed to be moving in retrograde. Under the weight of the three-year-old, jumping and smashing down onto a supine body on the lawn, water seeped up through the blanket to dampen the back of the shirt. The ebbing light raised a few pinks and warm browns in the sky. The fireworks went up; now and then a raindrop came down. After the display was over, a yellow smudge opposite resolved itself into a blurry near-round moon, and then into a crisp one.
The Whole-Grain Startup
A photo posted by sweetgreen (@sweetgreen) on Jun 8, 2015 at 8:25am PDT
It may seem a little weird that a company which primarily sells leaves has raised nearly as much venture capital as the most insurgent advertising agency of our day, but when one considers in full the context in which Sweetgreen has amassed ninety-five million dollars, the logic of it will comfortably subsume you like a warm grain bowl.
The tossed (or chopped) salad is the optimal lunch for the optimized worker of the “knowledge” or post-employment variety, who require sustenance that is fairly healthy 1 but fundamentally palatable, which fulfills both their bodily needs and their capital-contorted sense of consumerist ethics with minimal friction. To regurgitate:
The chopped salad is engineered, in other words, to free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?
On the spectrum of food that runs from a vine-ripe organic heirloom tomato to a meal-in-a-pill, the no-less-engineered chopped salad with local vegetables sits far enough above Soylent goop that it can be consumed from its perfectly ergonomic bowl with minimal self-consciousness; at the same time, as an optimized feed, it prepares workers — particularly the ones who provide labor directly for and through apps and will soon, if they do not already, find ten dollars to be an overly extravagant amount of capital to exchange for lunch — for a near-future in which Soylent is their best option for mid-shift nutritional replenishment. It is more than a little convenient, then, that Soylent and Sweetgreen have both received tens of millions of dollars from the venture capitalists who are by and large financing the creation of the post-employment app economy. (This is part of what one might call “owning the whole stack.”2)
I suspect that Sweetgreen is underplaying one intended use of its new money, which is probably the actual reason it was handed another thirty-five million dollars: further development of its mobile ordering system, which can currently be used to order food for in-store pickup. The next logical step is on-demand delivery of Sweetgreen nutrient bowls (it’s easy to imagine how it will be pitched to the media as “powered by an Uber-like logistics system”). There is currently — no exaggeration — hundreds of millions dollars and a staggering number of startups dedicated to solving this exact “problem”: quickly delivering food that is carefully calibrated for both taste and nutrtition to anyone in a metropolitan area of a certain size for around (or just under) fifteen dollars per meal. The venture capitalist is investing, he hopes, in some magical hybrid of Uber and Chipotle that will totally change the way millions of wealthy (or at least aspirational!) people eat kale. And that’s worth at least as much as an Instagram, right?
1.The soft requirement that such food be at least moderately healthy is complex enough in its rationale to be worthy of a separate post, but it is some admixture of the modern Valley quest for optimization (of the body), practicality (sustaining sixty-hour-plus work weeks requires some level of self-care), cultural shame (cultivating a healthy body is now as much an expectation in large metropolitan areas as cultivating a healthy knowledge of the best and coolest restaurants), and outsized consumerist aspirations about purchasing the good life.
2.WeWork, which is building apartments in addition offices, is doing pioneering work on the shelter part of the human stack, while Soylent’s founder is hard at work on pooping.
Platform Creep
The platforms: they’re creeping. There’s Twitter:
On Twitter’s mobile app, there will be a new button in the center of the home row. Press it and you’ll be taken to a screen that will show various events taking place that people are tweeting about. These could be based on prescheduled events like Coachella, the Grammys, or the NBA Finals. But they might also focus on breaking news and ongoing events, like the Nepalese earthquake or Ferguson, Missouri. Essentially, if it’s an event that a lot of people are tweeting about, Twitter could create an experience around it.
And YouTube:
In partnership with Storyful, a social news agency we’ve worked with since protests broke out in Tahrir Square in 2011, we’re rolling out the YouTube Newswire, a curated feed of the most newsworthy eyewitness videos of the day, which have been verified by Storyful’s team of editors and are embeddable from the original sources.
And Instagram:
Instagram has real-time coverage of almost everything happening in the world. Now its unlocking that content with a revamped Explore tab featuring Trending Tags, Trending Places, curated content, plus a new Places Search. You’ll be able to see all the photos from Father’s Day or Coachella, scope out your next vacation spot, or see photos of important topics chosen by Instagram’s team.
About which founder Kevin Systrom tells Recode:
The Holy Grail is to give people the sense of now and what’s happening now. The gap between something happening in the world and you knowing about it is becoming fractionally small. I think we’re all in a race as companies to provide you that information.
For some time now, Snapchat has been offering something similar: collections of videos and photos created in or about places and events, slotted in between your contacts. These “Stories” feel like a more natural extension of Snapchat than the channels in its Discover page, a strange and sickly panel inhabited mostly by outside media companies. Vine’s human-moderated channels are, in addition to the platform’s homegrown celebrities, which they routinely feature, the app’s main attraction. Instagram’s human-moderated tags alternate between broad bordering on incoherent (collections like #lightning and #calendar) and focused, deep documents about cultural events. (It’s effective mainly as a showcase of the sheer amount of primary material posted to Instagram; it’s more thorough, in this respect, than almost any conceivable celebrity publication.)
Since channels like this feature at least some editorial oversight, it is tempting to see them as a sign of the re-humanization of the platforms; to suggest that they are evidence, or confirmation, that audiences cannot survive by algorithm or feed alone. This is comforting because it implies a basic flaw in the systems that are increasingly dominating the internet — a flaw that, in a satisfying turn, can only be fixed by the very people who feel most marginalized. It is also wrong.
The use of human editors is evidence only of a temporary inadequacy in human-created software. It is easier, cheaper and more effective — for now — to hire people to fill Snapchat channels, or to stock the Facebook Newswire, than it is to have different people design software to do the same thing. [DRUNK PROGRAMMER VOICE] The distinction between human editorial control and human editorial control through software design or sorting algorithm is one of tools and scale and time.
Our feeds and home screens — the ones filled with and by people we’ve followed or befriended using the mechanisms of the platforms — are the basis of the platform economy. They are incredibly compelling and demanding of attention. In the context of these large, central, diverse feeds and home screens — the perpetually refreshed interfaces that generate billions of dollars in advertising revenue a year — outside publications, posting as brands, offer a solution to two problems: that, in order to be good, engaged, ad-viewing platform citizens, people need a strong supply of things to talk about; and that our personal networks, as interesting as they might be, aren’t always the best or most complete sources of anything except news and information about, and projections of, themselves.
This is a diminished role for publishers — content-stocker and secondary curator — which don’t control the manner in which their content is displayed or distributed. But it’s still a role: the Times gets to remain the Times on Facebook or Twitter, in spirit if not in body. Savvy (or just game?) publications have found footholds in enough of the hundreds of millions of feeds to maintain some sort of institutional identity, or at least revenue. They have been able ingratiate themselves with users not just through individual posts but as institutions worth following. (What this ingratiation is ultimately worth can, of course, be altered by the platform.)
Internet publications are, in other words, making the best of a strange and inhospitable situation. Those most able are adapting, others are contorting, and some are convulsing. The optimistic outlook, fast becoming conventional wisdom, is that it is now the responsibility of a media company or news organization to meet readers and viewers wherever they are, rather than depending on a captive or even intentional audience, catering to the styles and voices and sensibilities of whatever platform might provide an audience. The prospect of making, or remaking, an internet media company around much larger companies’ audiences, rather than your own, is at once terrifying and exhilarating: the potential upside, at least in raw audience numbers, is as large as the potential downside is total. It’s all… very……. exciting?
Platform publishing is a strategy that depends on platforms welcoming other businesses as guests. And it would seem like these homegrown channels — event and location-based live feeds on Twitter; event and location based live feeds on Snapchat; event and location-based live feeds of photos on Instagram — complicate this relationship. Whether or not the platforms characterize them as such, and whether or not outside media companies want to believe it, these channels amount to competing publications.
General interest content operations, old and new, have done well on social platforms by swarming around news or events or Cultural Moments in such a way that wins them admission into millions of users’ feeds. Their contributions range from fresh and valuable to utterly duplicative, cynical and stupid; many amount to little more than repackaging things posted on social platforms for the social platforms. Adding secondary, publication-like feeds is an attempt to annex some of that activity — or, at least, to recapture some of the heat it throws off. For younger, tighter platforms, this transition is more seamless and additive. On older ones, the addition of editorial channels is, possibly, an attempt at replacement and correction.
The biggest feeds have broad but distinct palates (Facebook’s is informed more by identity, Twitter’s by timeliness, Instagram’s by… brand?). There are types — whole categories! — of media that were well suited to, or extremely contingent on, a previous medium that do not fare well on current platforms; there are types of media and stories that fare well on one platform but not another; there are undoubtedly types of media that fail on Facebook that might succeed on some outwardly similar future platform, or that we aren’t even trying right now that will dominate in some incredibly, deceptively near future. Media companies, eager to stake a claim on any platform that will have them, occupy the volumes that are left open using any means possible. Their success at discovering and filling and even expanding these voids may be seen by the platform as evidence of its own latent or undiscovered potential; it may also be seen as evidence of a flaw in need of correction. Upworthy found great success in repackaging YouTube videos on its website and linking to them with Facebook-friendly headlines. Facebook, meanwhile noting the broad success of outside video on its platform, saw both a problem and an opportunity. Now, it’s a video host on the same scale as YouTube, and Upworthy is making a semi-voluntary “transition from curation to storytelling.” Facebook saw what worked and made it theirs.
Virtually every large platform has expressed an interested in news and media, and we should assume, as they make plans, that they are paying very close attention to what’s already working. Twitter was improved by URL-shortening services, so it built its own, privileged it, and made others obsolete. Twitter was improved by image-hosting services, so it made its own, privileged it, and made others obsolete. For online publications, which have made Twitter — and other platforms — better, but which have become dependent in the process, this pattern is disconcerting. Which of the things they do, and which of the services they perform, can just be turned into a feature? Or would be better done by a platform employee with more access to data, greater promotional ability, and a less convoluted and desperate set of incentives? Twitter has been improved by media companies in a variety of ways. Etc!
In a Q&A; on Facebook today, Mark Zuckerberg responded to a question from Arianna Huffington. He said, regarding how “stories will evolve online,” the following:
I think there will be a couple of trends towards richness and speed / frequency.
On richness, we’re seeing more and more rich content online. Instead of just text and photos, we’re now seeing more and more videos. This will continue into the future and we’ll see more immersive content like VR. For now though, making sure news organizations are delivering increasingly rich content is important and it’s what people want.
On speed / frequency, traditional news is thoroughly vetted but this model has a hard time keeping us [sic] with important things happening constantly. There’s an important place for news organizations that can deliver smaller bits of news faster and more frequently in pieces. This won’t replace the longer and more researched work, and I’m not sure anyone has fully nailed this yet.
Facebook’s Instant Articles will provide an optimized testbed for what really works on Facebook — not which headlines are best at luring people to outside sites, or which types of stories most reliably pull people away from their feeds. They will exist within the feed, alongside videos and images and personal updates. Zuckerberg’s recommendations: “increasingly rich content” or “smaller bits of news faster.” “Traditional news,” he says, has had a hard time keeping up. He’s not sure “anyone” has fully nailed this yet. Finally doing the work of a news organization on Facebook’s platform will help news organizations figure out what news on Facebook should actually look like. It will help Facebook figure out the same.
And maybe it will turn out that, even with every advantage, platform journalism is a marginal business. The most successful publications on Facebook still hover dangerously close to that faint line between attention-sapping middlemen and consistent contributors to Facebook’s own goals as a media company (an improved “user experience,” as indicated by usage metrics). Perhaps that’s where media companies fit in the platform picture — as verified users allowed to extract, at rates determined by the administrators of each micro-economy, a portion of the revenue they create in it. (Or, haha, maybe a platform stable enough to seem hospitable to current news media companies is a platform that has stagnated into failure?)
It’s worth asking, however, what happens if someone truly succeeds. Should some, or many, publications follow Zuckerberg’s recommendations and do especially well, turning their agile Facebook news operations into vast and lucrative enterprises that profit from new, Facebook-specific forms of media, how might a rational platform — a rational business — respond?
In 1998, a CNET writer surveyed an increasingly centralized internet.
In 1997 [netizens] found that there were any number of places — from traditional search engines such as Yahoo and Excite to software companies, online services such as America Online and Microsoft Network, and start-ups — that delivered, or at least promised to deliver [everything].
Web sites reorganized and launched, trying to morph themselves into that perfect site — the one so well-organized, so fast, and so filled with information that surfers need go nowhere else.
Call it the ‘Year of the Channel,’ she wrote.
These channels were arranged around search, not feeds. They were much smaller than today’s platforms. They predated smartphones and social media. But they were, in their time, the center of internet experience. They had the people — people they needed to keep, people they needed to turn into money. So they offered tools for communication and play, entrenching themselves with email and messaging services as best they could. For years, wielding enormous audiences, they provided news. They navigated syndication and aggregation deals with news organizations and wire services. They partnered with TV networks. They tried mingling media with their search results; they incorporated it directly into their portals. Sometimes they sent huge traffic to outside sites; sometimes they sucked it away.
In contrast to their glory days, Yahoo, MSN and Aol exist in various states if comparative failure, so their lessons are hazy. (Their closest modern counterparts are all-inclusive apps like WeChat.) But one thing sticks out: Eventually, to the last, they tried to make media of their own.
Gifs via BMG KAIST
Your Arty Novel Won't Pay Your Rent (Or Even Buy Your Lunch)
“The open secret is that literary fiction does not pay big dividends. At least not to most of its writers and publishers. Even with excellent reviews, there’s no guarantee that your book will sell.”
The Sounds In My Head So Far This Year
We’re halfway through 2015 — I mean, summer is practically done already and the next six months will be gone before you know it, even though each goddamn day will take an eternity to get through — so let’s take a look at what’s been good so far this year if you’re me listening to music. Rather than load down your page with a ton of sound and video I’ve placed a link back to tracks from each selection, where available; those albums without links are just as worthy of exploration, particularly the Ensemble Signal take on Steve Reich, which I can’t stop listening to. Anyway, you will notice that most of this music is wordless and fairly blippy-bloppy-meer-meer intensive, which is deliberate because fuck words, but I will still vouch for the albums that maintain a traditional “rhymes set to music” scheme. These are listed more or less in order of release but I probably screwed up one or two dates. Also I’m the last person who listens to actual albums, right? These should probably just be singles you saw on Snapchat or whatever. I don’t know what to tell you except I liked these records and maybe you will too, enjoy.
• Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Euclid
• Natalie Prass, Natalie Prass
• East India Youth, Culture of Volume
• Andreas Ottensamer, The Hungarian Connection
• Kendrick Lamar, To Pimp a Butterfly
• Mahan Esfahani, Time Present And Time Past
• Ludovico Einaudi, The Taranta Project
• Ben Chatwin, The Sleeper Awakes
• Mbongwana Star, From Kinshasa
• Kuba Kapsa Ensemble, Vandraught 10, Vol. 1
• Thore Pfeiffer, Im Blickfeld
• Ensemble Signal, Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
• High Wolf, Growing Wild
• Nick Diamonds, City of Quartz
• Kölsch, 1983
Rough Sex, Three Ways
“In a weird way it enhances the sex, because it’s not about necessarily losing yourself as it is about being focused on what’s happening, and being aware of what the other person is experiencing, and what you’re experiencing. Which is not to say you get all rational, either, or you step back like, Oh, I’m going to be Mr. Safety now.”
— “Three Men Talk About Rough Sex With Women”
Nice Man Chastises Mean Man
In one of the great self-pitying speeches towards the end of the show’s run, Tony Soprano, ruminating over the decline in his relationship with nephew/protege Christopher Moltisanti, whined, “All those memories are for what? All I am to him is some asshole bully.” The parallels are not exact — Tony Soprano is an infinitely more sympathetic character than Andrew Cuomo — but you wonder if, even for a second, that same kind of response emerged from the governor of New York in the wake of comments from his former protege, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, describing Cuomo as a bitter, vindictive prick who is more interested in revenge than he is in helping people in town. For those of us who have feared that, rather than craftily allowing himself to appear as an amiable dunce in an attempt to do liberalism by stealth, de Blasio actually is just a big fucking dummy who means well but couldn’t tie his shoes without asking for four different perspectives on whether you put the left lace over the right or the other way around, it’s a pleasure to see him finally stand up for himself, whether or not it will have a negative effect on how the governor treats the city from now on. (What’s Cuomo going to do, fuck New York over worse? He’s boxed out from running for president and if he wants a third term he’s not going to get it on votes from Utica and Plattsburgh alone.) Maybe it’s even possible that Cuomo will develop a new respect for de Blasio for showing enough spine to — hahahah just kidding, it’s good to have a laugh as everything falls to shit and giant glass boxes where the world’s wealthiest scumbags can park their money in case things go bad at home continue to rise all around us. In the meantime we might as well enjoy the spectacle of two grown men bitching about each other through the press while the city is once again run by a man from Boston.