I Can't Go Because a Professional Cricket Team Found My Box of Human Teeth
It's giving... it's giving Tuesday
It’s giving… it’s giving midweek. It’s giving November. It’s giving darkness. It’s giving Tuesday, and The Right Honorable Robyn Rihanna Fenty is the new Queen of Barbados, respect be upon her name. The Excuse Generator is giving excuses (based on this tweet), and this is going to sound crazy, but the kid from Air Bud stabbed me. It’s giving Brian Stelter, which is to say: it’s giving excuses for Chris Cuomo actively using his sources to dig up dirt on the women his brother harassed. From CNN it’s giving “review and consideration,” but not actual consequences. Who, after all, could replace of the once-in-a-generation charisma and journalistic talent of… Chris Cuomo.
It’s giving supply chain. It’s an abandoned cargo container, and it’s giving Jake Slinn rotten pumpkin seeds. It’s giving six tons of mystery cheese. It’s giving a 2014 Citroën sedan full of clothes and housewares. It’s the metaverse and it’s giving Sweet Baby Ray’s. Nod your metaverse licensed headset to accept. It’s Ever Giving.
Jack Dorsey is giving Twitter the big namasté. He was eulogized by Will Oremus and Elizabeth Dwoskin in the Washington Post:
But Dorsey has also earned a reputation as a chaotic and distant manager who vexed Wall Street and sometimes befuddled his own employees. Well before the pandemic, he announced in a late-night email that everyone could work from home forever — without alerting the company’s head of human resources. He floated plans to move to Africa during the pandemic.
…and Casey Newton in The Verge x Platformer:
There’s a joke about Dorsey that says everyone at Twitter thought he was working more on Square, and everyone at Square thought he was working more on Twitter. This served to elide the question of how much he was working at all. One reason [activist investor Elliott Management Corp.] appears to have launched its attack was Dorsey’s declaration that (pre-pandemic) he intended to spend most of 2020 in Africa, to no apparent work purpose or shareholder benefit.
Perhaps Twitter’s biggest fans call it “the hellsite” and maybe it’s not very successful, but you can’t deny Jack was a True Poster and nothing he ever did made any sense. He will be replaced by former CTO Parag Agrawal, who spent his first day as CEO fending off the traditional bad-faith “old tweet” pile-on, and also tweeting out his email address. In other platform news, “Mr. Beast’s Squid Game Ripoff Is Exactly the Kind of Video YouTube Rewards” by Vice’s Gita Jackson. And apparently Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian is promoting a cryptocurrency shopping rewards thing called… Lolli? 😬
What is the New Economy?
Kaitlin Tiffany (the good Kaitlin) is giving a great story in The Atlantic today about what happened “When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z,” which is what happened when so many other things met Gen Z: they made all the same mistakes previous generations made, except with devastating speed and at ruinous scale.
An insinuation of grandeur, posted to Instagram over and over, with only slightly varying images and phrases, may well lead to exponential business growth. But the same message, and the same posts, can be quickly fact-checked on the internet, and debunkings will go viral too. Indeed, many of these companies have been publicly excoriated, thanks to ex-distributor testimonials shared on social media, the same platform that enabled their success.
And in the Decoder podcast, Nilay Patel talked to “Microsoft Excel influencer” Kat Norton, who is earning between six figures a month and six figures a day selling Excel courses online via TikTok. So maybe the new economy is an attractive white woman promoting widely available information, which is almost the same as the old economy except this time the woman is making most of the money? Who knows, maybe the new economy is just Mountain Dew Grilled Cheese, but it’s definitely not Quibi.
Today’s Song: Wet Leg, “Chaise Longue”
~ all my friends call it the big t ~
It’s giving @fka_tabs. It’s giving 30% off a year’s subscription. It’s giving me a headache. Would you like us to assign someone to worry your mother?