Notes from the collision of meatspace and the internet. Click to read Kneeling Bus, by Drew Austin, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.| kneelingbus.substack.com
A decade before Airbnb persuaded homeowners to transform their homes into hotels, Netflix convinced its users to turn theirs into mini Netflix warehouses. Customers who held onto their DVDs for longer meant fewer shipping costs for Netflix, and fewer DVDs for the company to manage and store. Netflix tracked heavy users of its service — labeling them internally as “pigs” — and secretly throttled their deliveries. It didn’t matter if Netflix rented fewer DVDs than Blockbuster,...| n+1
Much of TikTok remains inscrutable to me, but even I can tell that it has dethroned Instagram as the internet’s most vital aesthetic engine, if not yet the most broadly transformative.| kneelingbus.substack.com