Greg's Newsletter

How do you catch a unique rabbit?

U-nique up on it.

How do you catch a tame rabbit?

Tame way. U-nique up on it.

That joke above is is in my top 5 of all-time and it's been in my repertoire since middle school, when we got internet access at my house and I discovered that there were dozens of web sites dedicated to jokes.

There was one website in particular that had a collection of maybe 100 jokes that I damn near memorized. I printed it out and carried the papers with me wherever I went. I'm sure a few of those sites—hosted on Geocities and other internet 1.0 platforms—are still out there somewhere but they've been out-SEO'd by sites like "JokesRFunny4U.com" and very impersonal, ad-laden properties. (John's Jokes sort of fits the bill, but it looks like it was founded in 2007.)

What do you call a cow with two legs?

Lean beef.

What do you call a cow with no legs?

Ground beef.

What do you call a sheep with no legs?

A cloud.

There's an exciting genre of jokes called elephant jokes. They've been around since at least the 1960s, but old school internet pages really created a resurgence in elephant joke awareness (maybe) or, in my case, became a wonderful introduction.

Elephant jokes are told in sequences (like the cow/sheep joke above) that build and play off of each other, full of absurd puns and parodies. They really work when told out loud and, no joke, I can't get through telling like 4 of them in a row without cracking myself up to the point of hysterics. It was like this when I was a kid. It’s still true. If you want me to tell you some elephant jokes, give me a ring but I probably won't last more than 20 seconds.

This website, hosted by St. Cronan's School in Ireland is exactly the kind of website I would have come across in the late 90s, and then printed off and memorized. These elephant jokes look like they were published no later than 1999 and the website remains absolutely perfect. Like the old school Space Jam website, except better. Shoutout to St. Cronan's School.

Anyways, to get a taste of the joys of elephant jokes, I recommend you read through them quickly. Don't pause to consider what you just read. Don't think. Go fast, and they'll start to make a ton of sense.

A grasshopper walks into a bar and the bartender says, "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"

The grasshopper replies, "Really? You have a drink named Larry?"

That joke is possibly my favorite of all-time and is another one I learned at a very young age from a joke site on the internet. Conceptually, I figured out that a "grasshopper" was an adult drink that I probably couldn't order at a restaurant, but it's the punchline that drew me in like a moth to a flame. A punchline like that—seemingly coming out of nowhere… Larry! The grasshopper’s name is Larry!—just had to have a ton of comedic value, even if I didn't fully understand it.

Now, as an adult, I'm happy to confirm that yes, it is in fact an all-timer.

Part of what made these OG internet joke sites so great is that they exist on a completely different (and very wholesome) part of the internet than we’re all used to now.

Example: you probably can't find it through links on the website itself, but if you do some Googling, you might find this page hosted on the official website of the city of Boulder, CO. It's a "Corny Joke Page" by somebody named Coyote Bob! "Coyote Bob loves dumb nature jokes," it says. I promise you there is not a municipality that would give the thumbs up to hosting something like this in the year 2021. But Coyote Bob was probably pretty f****n' hilarious and so, sometime in the early 2000s, Boulder's webmaster had no qualms about giving Coyote Bob his little own corner of the internet. We're all better for it.

(OK, I just learned that Coyote Bob is a coyote-based mascot and not a real person, but the point still stands.)

I just flew in from Berlin, and boy are my arms tired.

The "I just flew in from..." joke is as old as time, or at least as old as airplanes. My introduction to and fascination with it didn't come from an old-timey comedian or an elder trying to make a kid laugh. It came from a Beck's beer commercial from the 1990s. I have a vivid memory of watching a Phoenix Suns game at my friend Connor's house, and this ad (which I was already obsessed with) coming on, inspiring me to go nuts in rehashing it, over-and-over.

The great thing about the Beck's ad is that they managed to make the joke and delivery funny, but tagline is good too! "Germans don't do comedy. They do beer." The German standup comedian is perfect. The ad looks like it cost about $20 to shoot and it's remained etched into my conscious for over 20 years. What ROI!

I've told this joke—in a German accent—so many times over the years, but only recently decided to look up to see if the spot was archived somewhere online. And hell yeah, it is. The 1999 ad, entitled "Comedy" (perfect name), can be viewed here. Sometimes, the internet is good.

Thanks for reading and hope to talk to you soon!

Greg

I want to thank you for all the kind words and responses to the last edition of Greg's Newsletter, which included some thoughts on last week's winter weather disaster here in Texas.

And also hi to all the new subscribers! Check out the archive here and to everybody: if you like this newsletter, tell a friend!

OK, Fine, Let's Talk Clubhouse (and Dispo)

Few social platforms have ratcheted up the hype, buzz, and big-name participants that Clubhouse has. Last week, it just got its first big New York Times writeup which, as we all know, means that Clubhouse is no longer cool.

But first, for the uninitiated, what is Clubhouse? It's an audio-only social media platform, launched last year, that lets users gather in audio chatrooms. In these "rooms," as they're called, you might find some moderators, guest panelists, and then an audience listening in. Sometimes moderators will let audience members raise their hands and they'll be allowed to participate in the conversation.

The conversations are all over the map, subject matter-wise. If you have an interest or a passion, odds are you can find groups and rooms that will be right up your alley.

It's still invite-only and iOS-only, so right off the bat, it was purposefully built on exclusivity and even elitism (invite-only is normal for a new social app in testing; still invite-only almost a year after launch, with several million users, is very purposeful). And a lot of the conversations, especially those that end up garnering media coverage, reflect that. There is very much an annoying, out-of-touch (with reality) Silicon Valley bro vibe within. But, also, Clubhouse has become very popular with Black users, who have found ways to innovate on the platform. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad. It's messy.

I'm genuinely excited about the social audio space, which I started writing about in 2019. I did a deep dive on the social audio app TTYL and wrote the following—replace "friends" and "family" with "creators" and "interesting people," and this a lot of the concepts at play relate Clubhouse.

There's so much downtime during a day, when we have earphones in. But we don't know who of our friends or family might be available to chat without having a predetermined time to talk, texting/messaging to see if someone's available, or cold calling. This app removes that friction.

And then unlike a video chat/Facetime or group video chat, the barriers to start a conversation are super low. Especially if you're out-and-about, knowing that you've got three friends available, it's easy to just start a conversation. Nobody's going to be shy or think "eh, I don't want to turn the camera on, I'm not up for this." It just works.

And while I'm bullish on social audio, I haven't been enamored with Clubhouse the way a lot of folks in my industry and online are, for a few reasons:

* It's rife with people with "hustle/entrepreneur/marketing" bios which, in practice, leads to a lot of conversations with people just wanting to hear their own voices and make their own points. But whatever. That's going to happen on new apps and platforms.

* The platform was built without clear community guidelines in place, including how to address harassment and moderation. They've started to—mainly after negative media coverage—but what worries me is that they're scaling first and thinking about the ramifications later. Clubhouse may be repeating the wildly detrimental mistakes that other social platforms have. And when I say detrimental, I mean detrimental to society, to democracy, and to people. If inclusivity, safety, anti-harassment, and moderation mechanisms aren't built in from the very beginning, I fear that we're going to have the same conversations about [insert hyped platform] that we've been having about Facebook and Twitter.

Again, I think social audio is going to be really important. It's just about the only communication medium that hasn't had a true social media enhancement and my hope is that platform founders genuinely learn from platform mistakes of the past. I just want social audio to be done the right way, and I don't know if Clubhouse is it. That's not to say it won't be successful—it truly looks like it's on its way to being this year's TikTok. But at what cost? And why do we have to keep asking that question of social media?

OK, here's one social media thing that I am kind of excited about and I can't believe I'm about to type this, but: there's a new social app built by influencer David Dobrik and his team, that acts as a disposable camera (you take photos, but they don't "develop" until the next morning) and a collaborative photo album (you add photos to your personal or group "rolls"). It's called Dispo.

I've genuinely been excited to wake up these past couple mornings to see how my photos from the previous day turned out. And there's something happy and satisfying about adding a photo of our weekend sushi to a roll called "weekend vibes" that's curated by people I don't even know. But there is something deeper at work, with how the app works (find me @gregb if you're on).

* It takes time. Literal time. You don't take photo-after-photo, trying to capture the cleanest shot before you post to IG. You snap a photo or two and then you have to wait until morning! This is delayed gratification that's absolutely contra to standard social media instant gratification.

* There is no feed, no algorithm dictating what you're seeing. The algorithmic social media feed is one of the most toxic things about social. It's designed to be addictive, so you're endlessly scrolling and refreshing. Dispo doesn't have that. You take your photos. They develop the next day. You add them to rolls. And then you can go explore and find other rolls and comment or hit the fire emoji (the equivalent of a like, but it appears to not just be aggregate likes, which is a good thing). There are rolls for all types of topics and interests.

* Your profile does have a follower count, which is still a relic of toxic social media. We'll see how Dispo treats vanity metrics like that moving forward.

* And also: Dispo is invite-only, ostensibly for testing purposes at this point (it's not yet available in the App Store). I hope Dispo doesn't take the Clubhouse approach of banking on exclusivity and elitism.

There seems to be genuine excitement for it by its current userbase and I have no idea if the app will scale. But dang: it's still a relatively toxic-free, delayed gratification experience that takes time, but doesn't take all of your time. And it's fun.

I hope we see more of these kinds of platforms pop up in the future.

*Before we jump into today’s newsletter, Texas is in a really bad place right now and a lot of people need help. Check this Twitter thread for a list of organizations to consider donating to.*

My Apple Watch probably thinks I'm dead.

I haven't worn it since Sunday, when the snow and the frigid temperatures hit Texas like we all knew would happen but seemingly without a clue what would happen next.

And also, that's a lie. I haven't worn my Apple Watch, but Apple (of course) has tracked me the entire time through my iPhone and AirPods and Macbooks. Our power, for some reason, hasn't gone out yet. Everything is fully charged.

I primarily use my Apple Watch as a daily activity tracker, but since the streets and outdoors have been rendered useless and the temperatures have remained low, I haven’t worn it. No worries! We'll be back to highs in the 60s, come Sunday!

Sunday is just three days away of course; the people of Texas are more than halfway through the worst of the weather and past the zero degree nights. The snow will be fully melted by Saturday. And yet we won't yet know the physical, economic, and psychological damage done nor will the damage be fixed for quite some time.

I'll admit that last week I had a cavalier, smug Northern outlook when predictions of multiple winter storms and days of freezing conditions hit the news. Surely those in charge would be on top of it all if, indeed, something more catastrophic was coming our way. This is me admitting my ignorance.

What I failed to realize is how the buildings here are built to let heat out. Our heating and cooling systems are optimized for summers. That so many people, through no fault of their own, didn't know how to protect their pipes and water (and in a lot of cases, even that wouldn't matter).

Texas has its own power grid, where as the rest of the contiguous states were split into two grids. Why? Because Texas just can’t stand the federal government. And so if that grid goes down, well, it's on Texas to make it right. And if Texas energy can't make it right, then what? Well, here we are: Texas' predominantly fossil-fuel energy system is basically frozen. Millions now suffer for days in weather, and a situation, they've never experienced and didn't have to experience so drastically.

This one story in the Dallas Morning News alone highlights that:

* People are dying in fires caused by trying to stay warm

* Peoples are dying from or going to the hospital for carbon monoxide poisoning, after they sit in warm cars in their garage, or use their stove for heat

* Burst residential pipes are wreaking havoc in homes across the state

* Some cities are telling residents to stop using water. Here's an actual quote from a city official in a city of 45,000 people: "Water should only be used to sustain life at this point"

* Other cities are asking residents to boil their water before drinking

* Firefighters are watching houses burn because there isn't enough water pressure for their hoses

How grim is that? How brutally unfair is that?

The policymakers, state leaders, and this whole fear-of-regulation system they set up has turned Texas into an unprecedented disaster in the middle of an unprecedented disaster. Gov. Greg Abbot, ERCOT (the organization that operates the grid), Republican lawmakers, and Texas' energy industry created a Russian nesting-doll of suffering and death. This, after Republicans at the federal level created just a Macy's parade-sized doll of suffering of death with the coronavirus response.

Could they have prevented the storm? Obviously not. But the lack of communication, preparation, support, and resources they gave to the people of Texas leading up to this is unconscionable. Except this is by design. This is what fierce de-regulation and platitudes of freedom and liberty get you. Sometimes they might sound innocuous on a rainy day. But in a true climate emergency—that they saw coming, for weeks—it becomes cruel and deadly. Only then will the feign interest in people.

The freedom defenders will posit that individuals should know better, prepare better, and make accommodations for themselves. Which is to say: they don't care about you. This is not an anomaly in their system. This is the system. This entire political, economic, and physical infrastructure is designed this way. After Texas had a massive winter storm with blackouts in 2011, the federal government strongly recommended weather-proofing our power infrastructure. But Texas, beholden to nobody, moved forward like nothing happened. And here we are. It happened again. Only worse.

And lest you think I'm "playing politics" in the middle of an emergency, spare me. Determining who and what is responsible for a calamity is not playing politics. It just so happens that at every step of the way, one political side and one industry made the decisions and the infrastructure that got us here. I won't dig into how confident I am that current leadership "on the other side of the aisle" will be able to make systemic changes, but you can probably guess that.

Unfortunately, this is very much a "welcome to Texas" moment for me. I've only been here for four-and-a-half years. Lifelong residents, of course, know the red politics and oil-driven laissez-faire economics of the state. I suppose my living in Dallas instead of a place like Fort Worth, for example, somehow planted the seed in my head that somehow, some way, given a scenario like what happened this week, the outcomes would be different.

But now that's hard to believe in the middle of incalculable suffering that seems to only be accelerating in lieu of systemic change at the federal and state level. Our most vulnerable people are becoming more vulnerable. Our climate more unpredictable and destructive. Some are content merely watching how it plays out, with privilege. Others are fighting, sometimes out of necessity, life or death. For racial justice. For equal treatment. For equal pay. But the oppressed alone can't—and shouldn't—be responsible for overturning an oppressive system.

I don't think I have a moral to today's story. I sat down to write about how I haven't used my Apple Watch in days and I was somehow going to connect that to technology and culture and what that meant, and the general topics of this newsletter. Oh, and then how I wanted to go on a run. And that in just a few days, this snow and this freezing weather will be gone. A week of frigid destruction followed by highs in the 60s.

But maybe that's the point. Cruel politics, cruel policy, and power-for-power's sake can impact communities and nations with a slow burn temperatures ebb-and-flow over years and decades and centuries. They can also incite a raging fire.

In the end, they destroy. The current pace is accelerating.

It's happening on our watch.

Earlier this week, I shared some thoughts on how language and calling people racist or insurrectionist, or fascists, is important. And how we may not quite have the vocabulary to define what's happening today yet. (Sidenote: we might. I probably need to do some digging and learning to say that with more certainty).

But today's newsletter is going to be about some of the best, most important thinking that I've read since last week.

My first, big, recommendation is “The American Abyss,” an essay by Timothy Snyder, Yale University history professor and political atrocity expert. He argues that the part of the responsibility for Trump's efforts to overturn a fair election (that he lost) falls to a large number of Republicans, who either saw Trump as a means to power within a democratic framework (the McConnells of the world) or as a way to break the system, and gain power without democracy (the Hawleys and Cruzs of the world).

Combined, they helped hurl us to a post-truth, pre-fascist world. "The big lie"—that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election—is the scariest of all, as it imparts a fundamental lack of trust by its believers in: reporters, political experts, local to federal government institutions, poll workers, elected officials, and even the Supreme Court.

Adding fuel to the fire, "social media provides an infinity of apparent evidence for any conviction, especially one seemingly held by a president."

It feels like we have one chance to do... something. Anything.

Snyder goes on:

Trump’s coup attempt of 2020-21, like other failed coup attempts, is a warning for those who care about the rule of law and a lesson for those who do not. His pre-fascism revealed a possibility for American politics. For a coup to work in 2024, the breakers will require something that Trump never quite had: an angry minority, organized for nationwide violence, ready to add intimidation to an election. Four years of amplifying a big lie just might get them this. To claim that the other side stole an election is to promise to steal one yourself. It is also to claim that the other side deserves to be punished.

Informed observers inside and outside government agree that right-wing white supremacism is the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Gun sales in 2020 hit an astonishing high. History shows that political violence follows when prominent leaders of major political parties openly embrace paranoia.

Our big lie is typically American, wrapped in our odd electoral system, depending upon our particular traditions of racism. Yet our big lie is also structurally fascist, with its extreme mendacity, its conspiratorial thinking, its reversal of perpetrators and victims and its implication that the world is divided into us and them. To keep it going for four years courts terrorism and assassination.

The Republicans are going to have to act: do they stand on principle or acquiesce to the Trumpian/fascist faction of their party? Unfortunately, there is zero evidence to suggest the Republicans have a real interest in American democracy, at this point. Almost 150 Republicans voted to overturn election results mere hours after the Capitol was attacked by fascist thugs. Hours after they hid for their lives.

I highly recommend reading Snyder's full essay.

Elsewhere, Blair McClendon lays bare the myth that what happened on Wednesday "isn't America." In fact, it is! His essay "Long Lost Causes" over at n+1 goes further.

We live in an immensely powerful country that continues to perceive itself not only as an innocent underdog, but as the land of lost causes. They grow vicious here, since those in power are not all that accustomed to serious repercussions for defeat. The most famous incarnation of the lost cause, the one about the Civil War, is itself more a story about frustration than annihilation. Trump and his ecosystem of conspiracist allies, sycophants, and media figures succeeded in creating such a narrative before there was even a loss to behold. On Wednesday his followers—as well as those who merely find them useful—acted boldly in defense of the murky cause. In response, Democrats have begun to demand new legal powers to act against “domestic terrorists.” New laws aren’t needed to protect the government. So who will they be enforced against? Who will enforce them? Presumably the same FBI that responded to the rise of Black Lives Matter by manufacturing the category of “Black Identity Extremists.” Or better yet, the local police departments whose unions endorsed Trump last fall. If things get out of hand again they can call in the military, which has been a locus of neo-Nazi and Klan recruitment… Some are dying and killing for [a cause] now and in Congress they’re still talking.

Writing in the excellent newsletter, The Margins, Ranjan Roy called this "The first phygital coup" while also correctly pointing out that phygital is a bad word found mostly in marketing/digital contexts but also it makes sense here.

"This is reality TV, but this is also warfare." He goes on:

Last Wednesday felt like a breaking point where the weirdness of online life finally found its way onto the front page of every newspaper around the world and people lost their real, physical lives. The speed at which digital life coalesced with physical life was staggering. Just look at the waning minutes of the invasion as Congress reconvened. One sketchy online tweet ‘showing the shaman guy at BLM protests’ went absolutely viral and allowed Matt Gaetz to speak in the offline House of Representatives about how the invasion was led by Antifa. Even the likes of Brit Hume “asked questions” about leftist infiltrators while a Washington Times article (that is now also deleted) claimed there was some facial recognition company that identified Antifa people involved. Both that viral tweet and viral article are now disappeared from the internet, yet they did their job. They injected confusion. This is modern warfare.

Finally, experts are warning that the right's embrace of conspiracy amounts to "mass radicalization." Let that phrase sink in. Mass. Radicalization. The only way to prevent more violence is to break through the echo chamber. How do you do that, when 77% of Trump supporters believe that Joe Biden stole the election?

There is a ton of writing and thinking out there about everything going down with Twitter, Facebook, and the like banning Trump from their platforms. And Amazon banning Parler from its cloud hosting platform. Those decisions and developments are very much a part of this newsletter's remit, but news is breaking so fast and frequently it's hard to get a grip on everything. One thing is for certain: it is decidedly not good that the most powerful private corporations in the world are the ones making these decisions on-the-fly (and, arguably, way too late). We need a new tech and social regulatory apparatus now.

But that'll be for next time. In the meantime, I'd rather sound the alarm about, oh, fasicsm and democracy.

I love you all. Talk soon.

<3 Greg

I had a newsletter written up last week, all ready to send out. It was about the uneasiness I dealt with in 2020 and coming to terms with the facts that technology and social media have had a bad effect on society and democracy. For most of my life, I've been a technology optimist and evangelist but that has evolved over the years, and especially last year.

I was going to try my damndest to seek out what the future could look like. Could there be an equitable, people-first version of social media? Who's doing it right? Could there be an antidote to the current utility platform bias towards inflammatory content, extremism, mis/disinformation, and harassment? And a complete lack of data privacy?

And then before I could hit send, Wednesday happened. Actually, that's not a fair way to say it. Let me rephrase: before I could hit send, a bigoted, hysterical group of domestic terrorists descended to D.C. and violently took over the Capitol. They attempted to overturn the results of a fair election. They are fascists. Their leader is a fascist. The congresspeople who supported the overturn of the election results are also fascists.

See how I didn't mince my words? I'm still trying to unpack what happened—and what is happening—and historians, journalists, and political scientists are unpacking everything as we speak. But the very first thing we can all do to address our current state is to use the words we have at our disposal. Deliberately.

I actually think our current vernacular isn't well equipped to accurately portray the whiplash, constant acceleration, and trauma of 2020 and 2021. We need new words. Language is a living, breathing, evolving thing and yet we tend to think of words and concepts as having always been around. New language helps us make better sense of unprecedented events or phenomena.

Take "genocide," for example. It's defined as the "intentional action to destroy a people—usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group—in whole or in part." The term was only coined in 1944. Prior to that, we talked of "systematic" killing or "race extermination." But then Raphael Lemkin developed this hybrid word, geno-cide (genos, the Greek word for race or people and the Latin suffix caedo, the act of killing). And then the world had a way to more accurately describe the atrocious crimes against humanity perpetuated by the Nazis and the Ottomans.

Back to the present day. We're still in the middle (and yes, I used that word deliberately) of a once-a-century pandemic. The first-, second-, and third-order emotional, psychological, and social consequences of that pandemic will be with us for the rest of our lives. We can be depressed. We'll have PTSD. But I also don't know if we have the word (yet) to represent the enormity of it all.

We had an attempted coup, a physical attack on the country, the election, and democracy itself. It was instigated by an authoritarian president and his enablers, meant to mobilize a wide swath of the bigoted, racist, fascist, conspiracy-driven U.S. public in violenceagainst its very own government and police forces. And rather than being an isolated incident, we're likely to see an increase in this kind of domestic terrorism. Alt-right orthodoxy has made its way into mainstream Republican ideology and practice. If you add all that up: does it feel like we have the words to accurately describe this reality, in this moment? I don't know if we do.

But that doesn't mean we should shy away from using the words we do have at our disposal, deliberately, to describe what is happening. When we use euphemisms or describe those who came to D.C. as "protestors" rather than fascists who actively want to nullify the constitution and overthrow democracy, we're actually encouraging them to tell more lies and act more extreme. We're opening up a space for them to inflict more terror into our people and institutions.

In other words: words matter. Definitions matter. Facts and a shared, common reality depend on them. And so does a functioning democracy.

I'll be back next time with links to the best writing and thinking I've come across, at this awful intersection of technology, democracy, fascism, racism, and death.

Welcome to part 2 of my top 10 of 2020. You can read/listen to part 1 here.

These are not ranked in order, but they have numbers because this is a list of 10 things and so I want everyone to know that I did, in fact, include 10 things.

* Group chats: they exist in texts. iMessage. Instagram messages. Discord. Telegram. Slack. Signal. Group chats have a levity and asynchronous nature that allow us to stay connected, but on our own time. Zoom and Facetime are good for a lot of things, but it's also pretty draining to be on camera all the time! And you can have multiple chats going on at once. You've got the ones with your families, the one with your OG crew, your current town buddies, your brother and his friends, the group of Very Online strangers that you met on a social network made for sharing screenshots that you've all since abandoned but now you talk all day (literally all day, given the timezones. Real panic hours when unlock your phone and see 1,354 messages and it's been like just a few hours since you opened the group chat). You know, the usual kind of groups. But hey! People need people. People connect over the most ordinary and also completely random happenstance, and it makes me feel good. Also did I just spend too many words describing a very basic communication medium? Sure did!

* Boys: so. uh. Rachel is pregnant. We took a circuitous route and lots of trying to get here. But in the end? We got pregnant. With twins! TWIN BOYS! We're technically due at the end of April, but will deliver sometime earlier in the month. What the hell did we get ourselves into? We're going to find out. And even though I started this list off by saying this is absolutely not a ranked list, this should have been #1, #3, and probably #10, just to reinforce the fact that WE'RE HAVING TWINS. TWINS THAT MIGHT ONE DAY DISCOVER THAT POPS IS ALREADY WRITING ABOUT THEM. (I don't know if I'm going by Pops. Maybe PawPaw. Daddio?)

* Questlove: this dude was a savior at the start of quarantine, broadcasting live sets from his bunker every night. He is a human music encyclopedia and his special shows, like all-Stevie/Marvin/Prince sets, are full of gems and anecdotes. His more contemporary hip-hop broadcasts meant that rappers, producers, music industry vets, and the like would pop in and converse with each other in the comments. Or they'd share never-before-heard stories about a given track or artist. Or an artist would pop in and Questlove would quickly pivot to a song of theirs. Anyways, he's kept up his wildly prolific broadcasts and I love him for it.

* David Ritz's biography of Marvin Gaye: this was a "holy s**t" read (that I learned of because Questlove kept referencing the book and specific stories from it during his Marvin set). It's the best music biography I've ever read, in part because of the access that Ritz got to Marvin, and how insanely deep and self-reflective (and destructive) Marvin was. Ritz was actually hired to help Marvin write an autobiography while Marvin was still alive, so over the span of several years, he racked up tons and tons of interviews that were meant to be turned into Marvin's own written word. But then Marvin was murdered by his Dad and so, instead of a book written in Marvin's first-person voice, Ritz had this wildly expanded archive of direct source material that he augmented with interviews from people who were in Marvin's orbit throughout his life.

* The NBA: look, I still find it wildly problematic that a lot of sports—especially college sports—are being played during this pandemic, for a number of reasons. But the NBA bubble will go down as one of the greatest things that a sports league has ever done. I know it was laborious and wildly taxing for the support folks that were in the bubble, like the caterers and hotel workers. People were separated from their families for a long time. But selfishly: f**k, did I (/we) need it. The amount of good hoops that we got, in a really weird setup, was so fun. It seems very unlikely that the 2020/2021 season will be deemed as successful, since the teams are playing and traveling to home arenas instead of playing on a centralized campus. The 72-game season will undoubtedly be reduced to 60 or even 50 for some teams, thanks to COVID. But that glorious bubble.

Well, that's it for Greg's Newsletter in 2020. I managed to get a few more of these out than last year, a trend that I hope to continue in 2021.

I love you all and I always love hearing from you in case you want to drop a line and just say what's up! Or tell me what's new with you.

<3

Greg

What can I say about this year that hasn't already been said except for: keep wearing a mask. Socially distance. Understand where the people you interact with have been and potential exposure points. Avoid unnecessary travel—yes, that means even certain kinds of vacations, no matter how bad you need it (and I know! You need it! I promise that I know you need i! I need one, too!).

Anyways, with that out the way, it's time for my annual (this is the first time I'm doing it), much anticipated (literally nobody asked for this), comprehensive (these are the top 10 things that came to my mind one night) top 10 list of 2020.

(This is not actually in order, as you’ll find out. But there are numbers next to each entry because, you know, this is a “list” that goes up to a certain “number.”)

So let's go!

* Cat Brown: Rachel and I got a cat! Not only a cat, but a Cat! That's right, we named her Cat! Our friends found Cat's mom and her new litter hanging out under the lawn mower in their barn. The mom apparently moved on and left our beloved Cat behind. So we adopted her and took her home at about 4 days old. Bottle-fed her. Turns out you have to "stimulate" newborn kittens to pee and poop and that's quite a f*****g thing to do. But she's the sweetest. We love her. And she has been a light in our lives.

* Living vibrantly: a once-in-a-century pandemic, and all that it entailed, certainly adds to any regular life stuff that comes up. And then when non-regular life stuff comes up, it's hard to grapple with. My beloved step-sister Ariel—adored by her daughters, friends, family—passed away unexpectedly in October. It is one of the cruelest things I can think of. She was blowing up in the San Francisco art world, and globally. But her demeanor and her outlook on life, the world, and on people, is one that I intend to emulate as best I can. Her life philosophy? For everyone to live vibrantly. She loved people. She believed in people. She treated people, from strangers on the street to her best friend and mother, with empathetic wonder. She understood what could be. It is extremely hard for me to have that outlook right now and I have no idea how she did it. But we should all try.

* Blue Diamond Cheddar Almond Nut Thins: one of the great discoveries of the pandemic, in our household. We don't eat a lot of chips or bad-for-you chip-adjacent things (although are they f*****g delicious? Yeah! Are Doritos just the best? Yeah!). I bought these on a whim during one of my weekly Whole Foods runs which, have basically been my weekly combination of social gathering/night about town/functional thing. The crunch on these crackers is addictive, but the cheddar flavor on them is next level. You could just the lick the crackers and be satisfied, but they're gluten-free and made with almonds. Practically health food. And you will have a delicious cheddar coating on your fingers when you're done, like a regular good-ass chip!

* Volvo V90: we got a station wagon this year (read the follow-up newsletter for why!). But, now: I've never owned a cool car before, unless you count the minivan I drove in high school which actually was cool because of the number of people you could cram into it and it had tinted windows. So, you know. It was more like HIGH school. Anyways, when I was researching vehicles I came across these Volvo wagons. And in the span of a hour—first, discovering that Volvo still made these beautiful, big wagons, and then ruminating on being a wagon owner—I became obsessed. There is not a more beautiful vehicle on the road. I got the windows of our tinted, threw on an off-center license plate holder and, I mean—damn. Pure, unadulterated beauty. Is this a very materialistic thing to harp on? Yes. But I can't help it.

* Elastic: this is going to sound like a "oh haha wow i fell in love with sweatpants during the pandemic, comfy life, amirite" but yes. That's entirely correct. I've worn pants or shorts that have zippers/non-elastic waistbands exactly twice since March. Make no mistake: this is privilege. My job allows me to do almost everything I do remotely (although I did start wearing Nike tech fleece pants to the office a lot more regularly in 2018/2019). But anyways: gym shorts and sweatpants. Comfy!

Stay tuned for part 2 and a big reveal.

Since I haven't been able to write much lately—a function of my schedule, life, and general paralysis/anxiety—I figured I'd drop in with a quick newsletter to try to tap into that creative well again.

Vice published a series called Unpaid Royalties, which digs into how the music industry exploits—today and always—Black artists, and what’s being done to change that.

From the introductory entry:

To this day, those Black artists are stolen from, underpaid, and consistently exploited by industry gatekeepers and their non-Black peers. But we knew that. What you may not have known is how we got here, and where we’re going. That’s what Unpaid Royalties aims to expose: How, for instance, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 disrupted Black radio, taking tastemaking power away from local Black DJs and putting it into the hands of major media conglomerations. Why pop music seems to be a viable option only for white artists. How police forces in some of the country's biggest cities have heavily funded “rap units” dedicated to specifically surveilling the perceived threats of rap artists. And, of course, what music deals still look like these days, and why Black artists are often more vulnerable to the most exploitative ones.

There are several entries to check out.

Elsewhere, Alexander Billet penned a piece for Jacobin, that begins with this question:

Both Hip-hop and punk bloomed out of the social collapse created by the economic crisis of the 1970s. But where is the music of our twenty-first century disaster?

In the late 70s, amidst New York City’s rampant poverty, institutionalized racism and disinvestment, joblessness, and white flight, two essential art forms were born. They were born out of a collective necessity, both political and social.

Do the conditions exist in the 21st century for anything analogous, in art? Today’s music culture is such an individualized experience. Headphones. Personalized playlists. Algorithmic discovery. (Read the rest of Billet’s The Soundtrack to Our Age of Decay for more.)

And that’s actually what struck me about the question—where is our 21st century disaster response music—and the U.S. in particular. Our “rugged individualism” is something more akin to “rigid individualism,” and that’s no more apparent in how such a large swath of the country approaches the pandemic.

“I’m not going to let COVID dictate how I live.”

“It should be up to individuals if they want to wear a mask. If they don’t feel safe going out, then don’t go out.”

Etc. etc.

The list goes on. (Lest you think I’m making a strawman argument, those are perspectives that friends of mine have expressed. And, as we know, those are relatively tame compared to how some people have approached the pandemic.)

But, make no mistake, there is a certain collective response going on right now. Collective anxiety, depression, PTSD—at least for those of us doing our damndest to act responsibly and with the health of our friends, neighbors, families, and communities in mind.

Anyways, sorry for that pandemic-induced tangent. Back to the music.

What becomes of music, music creation, music listening, and art, in general, with a pandemic (damnit, there I go again) that seemingly accelerated those individualist trends already. I mean, if we were already experiencing music through our headphones and algorithms before—in public, at the office, in transit—where do we go once this is all over?

I have no idea.

But here’s some great music to take you into the weekend. It’s by LA-based artist Olive Ardizoni, who goes by Green House. The album is called Six Songs for Invisible Gardens and the title reflective of the art’s intention. It’s six songs made to play to plants. (And yes, you can find it on Spotify, too.)

The album came out in January but it feels so good right now. I’ll quote the description from the artist on Bandcamp:

“Six Songs for Invisible Gardens” was written with the intention of transforming the listening environment and augmenting domestic space. The music is designed as a communication with both plant life and the people who care for them.

Love you all.

Greg

*Note: There is an audio version of today’s newsletter, if you’d rather get it that way!*

Today, we're going to talk about Wikipedia and one of the most insane stories of the past several weeks. First, I need to be up front that I did not know that Scots is a language spoken in the lowlands of Scotland and parts of Ireland. I'm OK admitting to my dumb American ignorance here because my family tree runs deep in both countries. I was ignorant—but at least about my own history (no clue if we actually spoke Scots tbh).

Scots has largely been absorbed by English, but it's still there. OK, now to Wikipedia. As with many languages and dialects, there is a version of Wikipedia written in Scots. And the Scots Wikipedia, has largely been written by a (now) 19-year-old who doesn't know Scots. Reddit user Ultach unearthed this bomb two weeks back. From their Reddit post:

I’ll just say that if you click on the edit history of pretty much any article on the Scots version of Wikipedia, this person will probably have created it and have been the majority of the edits, and you’ll be able to view their user page from there. They are insanely prolific. They stopped updating their milestones in 2018 but at that time they had written 20,000 articles and made 200,000 edits. That is over a third of all the content currently on the Scots Wikipedia directly attributable to them, and I expect it’d be much more than that if they had updated their milestones, as they continued to make edits and create articles between 2018 and 2020.

The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all.

The Redditor then goes on to say that "this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history" with cultural vandalism, among other things. In the end, Scots is a dying language and this 19 year old, who STARTED MAKING UPDATES AT THE AGE OF 12, created a situation to reinforce the thinking that Scots is a bootleg version of English rather than a language or dialect of its own. There have been active proposals to close the Scots Wikipedia over the years, with users calling it a "Joke project. Funny for a few minutes, but inappropriate use of resources." And that was before the bombshell reveal.

But it doesn't stop there. Languages like Scots often don't have robust digital archives, and so Wikipedia can sometimes end up as a defacto version of that for sometimes dying, sometimes relegated languages (not good). Technology that uses language like voice assistants, translation tools, search, etc. often train their AI models on Wikipedia articles.

From Quartz's How a Scots Wikipedia scandal highlighted AI's data problem:

“I don’t think people necessarily realize how important Wikipedia is for training all of our language technologies,” said David Yarowsky, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. “When these problems crop up, it really is impacting our ability to do a high quality job on the technologies that these communities want.”

If you have AI-based technology doing translations (or anything related to words) then, as with anything AI, you have to have clean data from the start, otherwise your systems learn and "optimize" in a self-reinforcing cycle of bad output.

So: a 19-year old who started making up fake language at the age of 12 has basically fucked an entire language and the prospects of that language surviving in modern times.

English Wikipedia, for better and for worse, has emerged as a place for a shared reality, amidst polarization, filter bubbles, and misinformation. It's become a utility that's trusted as much as the news, writes Michael Mandiberg in The Atlantic. I'm not going to opine on whether that's #good or #bad—that's for another time.

But, it reinforces that who writes the articles on Wikipedia is a very important thing to know. Mandiberg's deep dive into just who these people are and where they come from is fascinating. He literally maps them to reveal that:

* There is very little editing done by U.S. citizens across the Plains, Dakotas, west Texas, and the south, excluding Florida and the Carolinas (and some larger metro areas).

* Counties with high religious adherence edit Wikipedia at a low rate.

* Native American communities, and rural, poor, black counties in the south, are often prevented from editing due to issues of access, education, poverty.

* Global editing patterns reflect the geography of the British Empire: editing activity is way higher in former colonies than in Africa.

The whole deep dive is worth a read.

OK! That's it for today. Love you.

Welcome, welcome. As with the last edition, you can now listen to this newsletter (and find it in Apple Podcasts, if you’d rather subscribe that way).

First, to kick things off, some self-promotion. My regular radio show Hot Sauce Radio can now be found on Souncloud which, tbh, is probably better than hosting on Mixcloud, where I was before. More people use it. Better on mobile, even if you don’t have the app. Anyways, the most recent show is a freestyle mix featuring Joni Mitchell, J Dilla, Arthur Russell, Bowie, Helado Negro, Steve Lacy, and a bunch more. I had a lot of fun putting it together. So go forth and listen to Hot Sauce Radio Episode #4.

Now onto the goods!

Prompt Twitter is, as defined by Brian Feldman, a Twitter trend that began in 2019 which are “slightly elaborate phrasings of mundane questions.”

One of the worst prompts I’ve seen recently is “reply w a baby pic that exudes the energy you have now” and it’s just people posting baby pics. Yeah, I would hope that someone posting a younger version of their own face might have some aesthetic consistency. It’s the same face! Yeesh.

Prompt Twitter is a perpetual motion machine of everyone asking everyone else to smell each others' farts. The obvious allure of it is that all parties gets what they want out of it. The prompter gets to seem authentic and interested in their audience (they are not) and the promptee gets permission to make the conversation all about themselves – “I wasn’t going to say it but someone asked!” Twitter famously prompts users with a generic “What’s happening?” but its users pick up the slack by creating specific activities for each other.

Prompt Twitter is tailor-made for #brands to jump in and feel very of-the-moment, patting themselves on the back for being of the cultural zeitgeist or knowing what’s, like, trending.

Brian has a good write-up of how thinking about Prompt Twitter can give you a good understanding of TikTok, and a certain segment of content that’s just “Prompt Twitter on steroids,” versus the actual compelling content, which is when users subvert the trending sounds and formats to end up somewhere new.

That’s some of what makes TikTok so good! (Related: I’ve ben featured—OK, quoted—in PR Week on how I’ve counseled brands on their TikTok strategy and dealt with how to measure it campaigns.)

So, there is a lot of fun to be had on TikTok. But there is a lot about TikTok that’s not good. I’m not even going to broach the national security, Trump vs. TikTok issues here.

TikTok has a unique ~culture~ and platform nuance that set it apart from your Instagrams of the world. That culture (and so much of internet culture, memes, and the like) often has a nasty bent to it, mirroring society and exacerbating the problems underneath. From WIRED’s September cover story written by Jason Parham, TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface (yeah, like the cover of a paper magazine, y’all):

Over a period of two months, I heard from 29 Black creators who shared stories about muted posts, in-app harassment, and incidents of racism. They said the problems on the app are deeper and more widespread than simple isolated incidents. “Ever since I joined I've felt like the app is against me,” one told me. Another added, “It's disgusting how much they have allowed to go unchecked.” Together, their experiences belie the perception of TikTok as an app of joy and creativity, revealing instead a place tangled up in an ancient pain—a site of blurred visions and youthful ignorances, where flattery quickly turns into mockery, mockery into theft, and theft into something altogether more disturbing.

The quickest route to TikTok stardom (for white creators/influencers)? Digital blackface. Copy Black culture, Black cultural expression, Black chart-toppers, Black language. This is not unique to TikTok but might be more pronounced than on other platforms, and it can be so personal, given that sounds of an individual Black person—their voice, their music—underpins viral content for white people.

But digital blackface proliferates in ways beyond “platforms.” Reaction GIFs are one of the common uses of digital blackface, for example.

So: TikTok as a cultural force and a platform of #GoodContent in the year of our lord 2020? Yeah, not necessarily. Well, I mean, look. It’s not just TikTok. Writing in Noema, UCLA associate professor Safiya Noble lays bare how big tech has failed to improve humanity, brought further into light by COVID-19.

In short, instead of being partners in building the public good, Big Tech continues to profit from its erosion. Rather than contribute to the public coffers so that we can fund the public institutions we so desperately need to support, the titans of Big Tech are trying to come to the rescue through philanthropy and expressions of personal goodwill, making private donations at a tiny fraction of their personal wealth into the charitable and non-governmental organizations of their choosing. But these kinds of private drops into the desperately under-funded public pool, in exchange for eschewing the kind of tax responsibilities that working-people face, further erodes coordination and fair distributions of power and resources.

OK, in other news, the NBA appears to have figured out how to do sports during a pandemic, but it seems like a pretty non-replicable solution for other leagues or sports to do. One thing for certain: Greg, lifelong Dallas Mavs fan, is pretty excited to see Luka and KP suit up and SHOCK THE WORLD in the playoffs.

(Look: Pistons first-and-foremost for life, but I have to have one new sports team that I’m a Dallas resident and it sure isn’t going to be some of the other teams down here.)

Thanks for reading and/or listening and I’ll be back soon, I promise. Love you all.

Greg