1st August 2021

From @storythings. The Death of Counterculture: Where Are All The New Style Tribes?
‘In the early days of the teenager we had mods and rockers fighting on Brighton beach. But since grunge, the idea of style tribes has faded. This piece looks at a few ideas as to what happened: “Put simply, thanks to the internet, the churn of ideas, and the speed with which those spread – and become co-opted by fashion brands – makes the establishment of a style tribe a seriously tall order. Style tribes need time to bed in – those cited above didn’t just explode, but seeded and grew over the best part of a decade – and the internet’s info torrent does not allow that: the new is old almost instantaneously.”

From the excellent Tortoisemedia. ‘First he came for your friends, with a mission to bring the world closer together. Now Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, has announced an even bigger ambition: to build Facebook into a unified and interconnected digital world…. a goal to “transition” Facebook into a “metaverse company”? To Zuck, it’s a “successor to a mobile internet” where “instead of just viewing content – you are in it”. That means that Facebook users would feel as present in it, as if they were in the real world. 

Apparently, TikTok never drops below 95% in the proportion of installed users that open up the app weekly. Here is a useful WSJ video on how the TikTok algorithm works.

The world first learned of Sophie Zhang in September 2020, when BuzzFeed News obtained and published highlights from her nearly 8,000-word exit memo from Facebook. Zhang has supplied concrete evidence to support what critics had long been saying on the outside: Facebook makes election interference easy, and that unless such activity hurts the company’s business interests, it can’t be bothered to fix the problem.

A good read on the problem of link rot – the phenomenon of article links no longer pointing to their original target. This story reveals the extent to which the internet, which holds so much of our knowledge, is rotting: overall, more than half of all articles in The New York Times that contain deep links, have at least one rotted link.”

Interesting perspective from The Atlantic, on a remote work future. ‘Remote work empowers those who produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.’

Naomi Oreskes, a science historian and expert on climate denial at Harvard, says the anti-vax movement is following the same playbook. “The doubt mongers have a much easier job than scientists because they don’t have to prove anything.”

Young people can make real money selling vintage clothes online — if they can stay on the right side of the algorithm. These are the Teen Tycoons of Depop.

Great piece from The Guardian. Mental health memes are everywhere – can they offer more than comic relief? A meme may help, but it doesn’t come close to a hug.

As a keen paddler, I particularly liked this piece – Swimming gives your brain a boost – but scientists don’t know yet why it’s better than other aerobic activities.