The Chain Becomes More like a Swarm
This is the new weekly rhythm of this newsletter: Sunday nightish, Wednesday, Friday morning. How's it feel? For me, I love the way making 5it tunes my brain to look for certain kinds of stories. It's good to be back.
The schedule is out for the Real Future Fair on November 15 in Oakland. What other event would bring together Zardulu, Sammus, Mitch Kapor, and Malkia Cyril? Early bird pricing ends today (Friday), so you know what to do.
1. As Vine gets mothballed, read Doreen St. Felix's 2015 essay about the uncompensated role young black people play in creating the culture (and business) of social media.
"I know the line by heart. Such is the nature of internet virality. As of this writing, Kayla’s original 'On Fleek' Vine has generated over 36 million 'loops,' or replays. That’s where any sensible person stops the tabulation. A month after Newman’s upload, someone named Kevin Gadsden reposts her Vine to YouTube, where it acquires around 3 million views. The expression 'on fleek' passes through the clutches of Ariana Grande, who vines herself singing it in August 2014 for another 9 million loops, and then through those of seemingly every other social media-literate celebrity outfit that fall; corporate entities like IHOP and its rivals employ the phrase in an effort to feign cultural relevance; talk show host Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper exchange vaguely unpleasant jabs about its meaning. “On fleek” ascends to near-officialized language. It’s impossible to track the chain of ownership from there on out. In fact, the chain becomes more like a swarm."
* There were so many good vines.
2. The toy industry is remarkably reliant on Lego.
"'This time last year, it was all hoverboards. And where are they now? Drones are where it is at this year,' says Panjiva research analyst Chris Rogers. Lego could be one of the big losers this year, with shipments down 8 percent for the third quarter, and down 21.5 percent for September. That dip, caused primarily by supply chain issues within the company, is dragging down the whole sector. Toy shipments are down 3.4 percent overall for the quarter, because the popular brick toys account for so much of the toy volume."
"'Recently we have seen what we think is a Trojan Horse kind of UAV or drone,' Townsend said. He went on to explain that Islamic State militants landed a UAV inside coalition lines. Thinking they’d gotten an intelligence boon. When the allied forces went out to recover the drone it was detonated remotely, injuring the troops. 'We expect to see more of this, and we’ve put out procedures for our forces to be on guard for this,' Townsend said, adding that U.S. troops and others have downed many drones harassing coalition troops with small arms fire and electronic means, 'with varying levels of success.'"
4. Frida Kahlo's "Self Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States, 1932"
"Whereas the Mexican side of the border has a partially ruined pre-Columbian temple, the United States has bleak skyscrapers. Whereas Mexico has a pile of rubble, a skull, and pre-Columbian fertility idols, the United States has a new factory with four chimneys that look like automatons. And whereas Mexico has exotic plants with white roots, the United States has three round machines with black electric cords. The machine nearest Frida has two cords. One connects with a Mexican lily's white roots, the other is plugged into the United States side of the border marker, which serves as Frida's pedestal. She, of course, is as motionless as a statue, which is what she pretends to be. With the high-voltage irony of her withering glance, Frida looks, once again, like a 'ribbon around a bomb.'"
5. This is a dense, kind of staggering essay about bots that's hard to excerpt, but ...
"But there’s another reason the bot’s multiplicity of selves makes me think of a friend in Paris whom I visited recently. For years he had been working on a novel. When I saw him, his computer had been stolen, and because the novel existed only on it — he’d neither backed it up nor shared it — the novel went with it. I was working on a manuscript of my own, and because my computer for some reason will not back up, I emailed it to myself at intervals, as often as twice a day when I spent all day working on it and became afraid I’d lose my work. The manuscript, which is long, must contain every English word or phrase, because now, whenever I search my email for anything, the hundreds of emails to which the manuscript is attached turn up, burying whatever I hoped to find. In this way, the hundreds of attachments tenant a state as volatile as my friend’s single copy, canceling out to nothing, becoming the opposite of information, noise."
1. thefader.com 2. reuters.com 3. businessinsider.com 4. fridakahlo.org 5. reallifemag.com
The Chain Becomes More like a Swarm