Easing into 2025
To celebrate our new circuit around the sun, I've collected a few thoughts to ease us into 2025. These are all based on recent posts on our members-only Forum – which you can access by joining Creative Good.
• The best article I read this week was this in n+1, by Will Tavlin, about Netflix. In the Forum thread Lies, deceit, and Netflix, I’ve pasted some excerpts from the piece. The article, or at least the excerpted post, is really worth reading. Examples:
Netflix is a steroidal company, pumped up by lies and deceit, and has broken all of Hollywood’s rules.
Netflix doesn’t just survive when no one is watching — it thrives.
The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was this: Blockbuster punished customers for being forgetful; Netflix rewarded them for being mindless.
The article makes the case that Netflix now pumps out mindless, bland content intended to keep people subscribing without actually paying much attention to what’s on. It reminds me a lot of what Liz Pelly has written about Spotify, which I hope to cover soon.
• In the Forum thread on drones, Starlink, and the Ukraine war, I posted this WSJ article (this is a gift link) with a gripping video from the war. A drone team in Ukraine, holed up in a basement near the front lines, is shown remote-controlling FPV (first-person view) drones to attack the Russians.
In the middle of the interview, the Ukrainians hack into the video feed of a Russian drone. It’s flying toward their basement hideout. The Ukrainians watch the video feed of the drone as it approaches their house, closer and closer, until – bang! – the house shakes and the video feed goes silent.
Welcome to the new reality of war: soldiers hacking into the livestream of a surveillance camera attached to a drone carrying a bomb pointed at them. (See the thread for more thoughts.)
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• A Creative Good member asked about "the energy consumption of cookies and trackers initiated by every website visit." I did some research and found that, indeed, median webpage weight is going up. Here's the relevant chart from the HTTP Archive:
• Creative Good member in the news: Congrats to Jason Poss for being featured in an interview about his work on Hollywood movie soundtracks. I've also posted an excerpt on the Forum about the use of AI in song transcription. (It can't keep up with human experts.)
• In our Fun Stuff thread, which has hundreds of entries, I just posted the compilation of Bee Family new year celebrations. It’s earnest and endearing:
• In our Good Experience Games thread I recommend Dyson Swarm, the game depicted below:
This is admittedly pretty geeky. First, it’s a clicker game – that is, you click buttons to increase your score in order to “level up” and unlock more powerful buttons. There are lots of clicker games out there, but this one dreams of a Dyson sphere (wiki), the notional celestial object that could surround the sun like a shell and harvest its energy. I won’t say more. No spoilers. But here’s the link to try it out.
There are tons more games, fun items, and threads about every conceivable tech topic on the Creative Good Forum.
I hope you'll join the Creative Good community to support my work, gain access to all these resources, and get to know fellow members.
Wishing you a healthy and meaningful 2025!
-mark
Mark Hurst, founder, Creative Good
Email: mark@creativegood.com
Podcast/radio show: techtonic.fm
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