Clickbait Ghost Kitchens

Willkommen in der Zukunft, in der Menschen die Sonne verdunkeln müssen, damit unser Überleben nicht allein von Musks Marsraketen abhängt. Außerdem bald schon bei einem Lieferdienst des Vertrauens: SEO-Restaurants, die imaginäres Essen aus Geisterküchen verkaufen.

22nd Century Cyborg Death Squads

Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk (Opens in a new window): Getting past the cult of Genius and the bleakness of capitalist futurism.

Will man wirklich noch mehr über Elon Musk lesen? Ja, wenn es so eine Abrechnung ist. Nur ein Absatz: »You can see Musk’s dystopianism in the design for Tesla’s much-ridiculed Cybertruck, which looks to me like the preferred conveyance of 22nd century cyborg death squads. Legendary auto designer Frank Stephenson (of BMW, McLaren, Ferrari) says in a blistering review of the Cybertruck that it shows brutality and paranoia. (Musk has emphasized how bullet-resistant the truck is, as if we are resigned to a future of shooting each other on the highway.) Stephenson points out that the Cybertruck shows the bad kind of futurism, the kind that believes the future is something that happens to us, rather than that we dream and then create ourselves—meaning that a “futuristic” design is one that looks like “what we think the future is going to be” rather than what we want the future to be. Musk has said that “you want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great.” But for Musk, this seems to mean maintaining same neo-feudal social relations, but with the cyberpolice driving sustainable electric death-mobiles.«

Eine andere Vision der Zukunft: Statt uns mit Musik in kargen Marshöhlen bei Minusgraden vor Sonnenstrahlung zu verstecken, retten wir das Klima der Erde. Mit Geo-Inverventionen!

Wie Forscher die Sonne abschalten wollen (Opens in a new window): Die Menschheit versagt dabei, den CO₂-Ausstoß zu drosseln. Der deutsche Harvard-Wissenschaftler Frank Keutsch erklärt, warum er nun mit einem Ballon Kalk in die Atmosphäre streuen will.

Clickbait Ghost Kitchens

The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza (Opens in a new window): A quest to find the origin of a pizza place led me down a rabbit hole of clickbait restaurants—with Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick's new company at the end.

»In the 2020 ghost kitchen economy, design is the product. The specifics of a menu, the integrity of the cuisine—both, ultimately, are of little concern. The branding signals only to itself, to a mood, an energy, a current, an idea of an experience.« (Emma Kemp, professor at the Otis College of Art and Design)

Medien

The Substackerati (Opens in a new window): Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?
Did I end up sending a company I had never previously heard of my driver’s license information? (Opens in a new window) Yes, because apparently that’s how privacy works now.
The Clubhouse clones are coming (Opens in a new window): The technical concept behind the app is relatively simple in the grand scheme of things, and other tech companies are coming up with their own renditions.
How Crying on TikTok Sells Books (Opens in a new window): »BookTok« videos are starting to influence publishers and best-seller lists, and the verklempt readers behind them are just as surprised as everyone else.
Confessions of an Influencer Whisperer (Opens in a new window): How Amber Venz Box and her ‘Harvard of Influencing’ taught social media stars how to monetize their brands and got everyone else to spend billions on Instagram.
Inside a viral website (Opens in a new window): Peeling back the curtain of running a viral meme website for 5 days. More details than you could ever hope for.

Consolidated Platforms of America

The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza (Opens in a new window): A quest to find the origin of a pizza place led me down a rabbit hole of clickbait restaurants—with Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick's new company at the end.
A Kansas Bookshop’s Fight with Amazon Is About More Than the Price of Books (Opens in a new window): The owner of the Raven bookstore, in Lawrence, wants to tell you about all the ways that the e-commerce giant is hurting American downtowns. (Werbung für die Buchpreisbindung.)
Amazon Has Transformed the Geography of Wealth and Power (Opens in a new window): Understanding America in the giant company’s shadow.

Corona

The Pandemic Is Ending, And The Optimized, Ever-Distant Future Is Probably Coming Back (Opens in a new window): Because there was no end in sight, the pandemic paused the idea of a future where the tech disruption would end, the economy would level out, and we'd ascend to our final post–social media forms. And some things looked ridiculous inside.
Covid-19 Vaccine Passports Are Coming. What Will That Mean? (Opens in a new window) Scores of plans to verify immunity are in the works. But there are even more questions about how they’ll use data, protect privacy—and who gets certified first.