A second year of the pandemic passed in which I didn’t attend any film festivals in person. I miss it. My viewing output of is lower than usual but still much much higher than that of the median filmgoer. Film is one category of media in which human recommendations still feel superior to algorithmic ones. It is notable that none of my favorite Netflix movies this year came via their recommendations. Some I might have never heard of had some critic or friend not written about them. Film rema...| Remains of the Day
It feels as if we're at the tail end of the first era of social media in the West. Looking back at the companies that have survived, certain application architectural choices are ubiquitous. By now, we're all familiar with the infinite vertical scrolling feed of content units, the likes, the follows, the comments, the profile photos and usernames, all those signature design tropes of this Palaeozoic era of social. But just as there are reasons why these design patterns won out, we shouldn't l...| Remains of the Day
Now that everyone is spending many of their waking hours in Zoom, a lot of people are laughing at, and then asking me about, my Zoom setup. It’s actually not all that elaborate. I know many people with much more elaborate setups. Still, for a simple upgrade to the mic and camera that come with your laptop, here are the two pieces of gear I use. For a microphone, I use a Blue Yeti USB mic. I bought mine years and years ago now, during one of Amazon's Black Friday deals, or maybe it was a Pri...| Remains of the Day
NOTE: I'm going to start cross-posting individual stories sent out in my newsletter over here on my blog. The versions here may contain additional side notes, and often as I bring them over I'll do some light word-smithing or additional copy-editing because I can never stop editing my own copy. If you want to be the first to read things I publish, your best bet is to sign up for my newsletter, but if you're more about reading the most finished form of what I write, it will always be here. ---...| Remains of the Day
“Si vis pacem para bellum” translated “If you want peace, prepare for war” I hadn’t planned on seeing John Wick 3 - Parabellum, but out for a walk in Stockholm in May, I got caught in a sudden downpour without an umbrella. I was in Sweden for the first time thanks to an invitation from the Spotify product team and had decided to spend some of my downtime seeing the city. Sweden, by the way, is the country with the second highest unicorns per capita. Fascinating, and a topic for anot...| Remains of the Day
I believe mass entertainment suffers from a bit of format rigidity due to the natural inertia from structural ossification in the music, film, and publishing businesses, to name the most prominent. One of the ways this manifests is in the one-way broadcast nature of much of our entertainment despite the fact that several billion people own internet-connected smartphones now, and even though they consume an increasingly large share of that entertainment on such devices equipped with all sorts ...| Remains of the Day
HBO’s Watchmen is fantastic, as many have noted. It may be one of the most polished first drafts of fan fiction to ever appear on the silver, errr, OLED screen. DC may lag behind the Marvel Universe in box office and audience acclaim, but it feels like DC is starting to find its footing with a different approach. Rather than having its directors conform to the ultimate vision of Kevin Feige, as Marvel does, DC seems to be allowing its directors a bit more creative freedom to put their own s...| Remains of the Day
“When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into,...| Remains of the Day
Sorry for the long hiatus. I've been doing some formal advisory work and a bit of angel investing these past months, and so more of my writing has been private. More than that, though, the Internet, with all the status games and incentives I wrote about in my last post, began to feel like an obligation that started whispering in my ear from a permanent porch on my shoulder. I needed a break from reading all the takes, most of all from the ones I felt myself forming in response to every next e...| Remains of the Day
I was in Taipei the past few weeks working on a documentary with friends. Because of a busy schedule, it wasn't like my usual travels abroad for fun, it felt more like a work trip. Still, even if I'd been there purely for vacation, I would've wanted to try a different mode of travel, one less focused on eating at nice restaurants or visiting notable tourist destinations and ticking them off the list like some big game hunter hoping to stuff and mount my quarry on Instagram. Instead, inspired ...| Remains of the Day
In a conversation with Matt Levine, Tyler Cowen asks: COWEN: Like you, I’m mostly an efficient markets guy, but when I look at initial public offerings I’m very baffled because investment banks take such a huge cut. If you needed to argue, “Well, they need the cut because they talk up the security, and in the absence of their efforts, no one would be interested, and it’s worth it,” maybe that argument works. But it seems somewhat to stand in tension with an efficient markets hypo...| Remains of the Day
It has been some time since I posted here. Outside of lots of meetings around the country and some trips with family and friends, a few creative projects have stolen the lion's share of my free time. While I won't publish some Medium screed on how spending less time on social media transformed my life, it is an unavoidable truth that one's free time is a zero sum game. For infovores, Twitter is a bit like heroin, and for all the other gaps in one's time, other social media apps are like some ...| Remains of the Day
I don't know that I'm aware of enough entries in this category to even consider it one, but I'm a sucker for the union of political and film satire as embodied in alternate film commentaries. I was reminded of it when seeing The People's History of Tattooine which was first one of those spontaneous, emergent forms of Twitter humor that always brightens that otherwise dystopic landscape. JACOB HARRIS What if Mos Eisley wasn’t really that wretched and it was just Obi Wan being racist again? ...| Remains of the Day
It is hard for us humans to separate information from meaning because we cannot help interpreting messages. We infuse messages with meaning automatically, fooling ourselves to believe that the meaning of a message is carried in the message. But it is not. This is only an illusion. Meaning is derived| Remains of the Day
Last week Instagram announced it was supporting more than just square aspect ratios for photos and videos. This led of course to a Slate article decrying the move, because Slate is that friend that has to be contrarian on every topic all the time, just to be annoying. The square confines Instag| Remains of the Day
NOTE: I’d been working on this piece on and off for a few weeks while trying to move to NYC and settle into my new apartment, and just as I was about to publish it, Elon rate-limited Twitter and so, sensing a moment of weakness, Meta pulled up its launch date for Threads to yesterday. This piece doesn’t cover Threads directly, nor does it talk about the rate-limiting fiasco. It’s focused on why I think Twitter got so much worse over the past year. I thought about holding off and reworki...| Remains of the Day
TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity. It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami.| Remains of the Day
In my previous post on TikTok I discussed why its For You Page algorithm is the connective tissue that makes TikTok work. It is the bus on its motherboard that connects and closes all its feedback loops.| Remains of the Day
NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle.| Remains of the Day
"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." -| Remains of the Day
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series| Remains of the Day