The late roundup with mothwrites
Today's links are fun takes on serious subjects. Bitcoin, Shrek, and Palestine.
Look, I think I just got a bit caught up in the idea of something being good rather than something being done.
A medium read
1. Essays are like onions
As you may have been able to tell, I enjoy critically engaging with things that I like and things that I don’t like, but no, Shrek is not something that I’ve ever felt I had to critique in this way: Shrek at 20: an unfunny and overrated low for blockbuster animation. There’s a sentiment going around that we need to recognise that we just like bad things sometimes because not everything we can like can be good. It’s like telling a football player “it’s just a game”. Give you some perspective so you can sleep at night.
Anyway some highlights:
Shrek has an outhouse with a working toilet.
It is not part of the film’s cynical brand of “irreverence” that an ogre’s latrine is supported by modern plumbing. And it’s certainly not consistent with the hygiene of a swamp-dwelling beast who bathes in mud, brushes his teeth in slime and boasts of a killer weed rat stew.
Okay but you won’t stop me from revering the comedic genius that came up with “that is a nice boulder”. I just want jokes on jokes. I’m glad it bothers you that the Shrek-verse doesn’t work.
It’s hard to account for why Shrek hit the cultural moment as squarely as it did – other than, you know, people seemed to enjoy it – or why it will be celebrated in 20th anniversary pieces other than this one. But it’s worth pointing out how comprehensively bad its legacy remains, opening up the floodgates for other major studios to pile celebrities into recording booths, feed them committee-polished one-liners and put those lines in the mouths of sassy CGI animals or human-ish residents of the uncanny valley.
What’s left is an all-ages film that’s somehow more crude and juvenile in its appeals to adults than children.
For me it’s like the combination of genuine belief that the jokes are funny even if they’re not, paired with the idea that you’re genuinely trying to make a good movie with funny jokes. It’s accidental irony and lack of viewer cynicism, and it can’t be replicated in a deliberate way in order to make money in the same way that corporations can’t meme but people can. We’re too jaded now, we know what you’re doing. In fact, it makes it better that DreamWorks folded afterwards. This is MINE. Not yours.
I asked my younger cousins if they had seen Shrek and they said they had and that the animation was bad. That’s all they had to say about it. I was all “that’ll do Donkey, that’ll do.”
A medium read
2. It’s one bitcoin, Michael, how much could it cost?
The health of our planet and future?
Coiners like to say that Bitcoin doesn’t have a marketing department, but that’s not exactly true. Bitcoin has no centralized authority to promote it, but it does have cryptocurrency exchanges, venture capitalists, industry influencers, tech moguls, blockchain startups, sycophantic media outlets, and all sorts of other parties whose moneyed interests lie in boosting the reputation, the ubiquity, and consequently the value of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, though lacking a marketing department, resembles a multilevel marketing scheme. It’s a promise sold to the faithful of great riches if only you invest—and invest again. As with an MLM, coiners recommend addressing adversity—a decline in Bitcoin’s value—by recommitting to the program.
Driven by celebrity hype, Bitcoin is also an excellent example of the Greater Fool theory, in which to make a profit you simply have to convince the next person to come along that your asset is worth more than what you paid for it.
This is why Musk’s about-face is such a threat to the veritable house of cards that’s been built to prop up the Bitcoin cult. If the self-styled environmental savior of the tech world—of our world—can accept what’s been known for years—that Bitcoin is an environmental catastrophe, making it unacceptable for any use—then why don’t the millions of people who praise him as a genius and innovator?
Honestly, this was hilarious to watch on r/cryptocurrency. Just post upon post about buying the dip and holding. The cynicism this created, it’s like "*chef’s kiss*. People pointed out that this is what being decentralised means. It does, it means that narcissistic billionaires can mess with your finances more directly than a centralised system. Wooooooop.
3. Your first listicle
However, our research suggests that the benefits of humor do not extend to everyone — women may actually be harmed by using humor at work. We find that when men add humor to a business presentation, observers view them as having higher levels of status (that is, respect or prestige) within the organization, and give them higher performance ratings and leadership capability assessments compared to when they do not include humor. However, when women add the same humor to the same presentation, people view them as having lower levels of status, rate their performance as lower, and consider them less capable as leaders.
Harvard Business Review really outdid themselves with this essay on how Making Jokes During a Presentation Helps Men But Hurts Women. Don’t read that article. Read this one instead on the bad advice women in business get given.
I decided to list all the reasons the data in the HBR article just can’t be trusted.
Men aren’t funny
Some quick reads
4. Something fun, something serious
A quick look but a long read
5. The literal business model:
in retrospect, video rental stores *would* probably still exist today in some capacity had it not been for blockbuster. the nostalgia for the blockbuster browsing experience undermines the reality of how aggressively the chain snuffed out smaller video rental stores and would eventually become notorious for its abusive late fee collection policy once there were no significant competitors standing. the rise of streaming is often attributed to blockbusters demise, but what’s not often recognized is how netflix’ earliest (and most successful) marketing tactics were in fact advertising the absence of the aforementioned terrible late fees as opposed to the convenience of not having to go to the store. I was actually surprised to find out how much of blockbuster’s demise can be attributed to spiraling out of control as it attempted to manage viacom’s ever increasing debts than to the fact that people just naturally gravitated towards streaming (which is not to say that it wouldn’t have happened eventually, but).
see also: borders / barnes & noble with bookstores. amazon’s original pitch was probably more “look how convenient!” than it was “look, you can avoid the awful sterility of the inside of a barnes & noble!” but it’s interesting that with its aggressive tracking and tailoring of recommendations amazon is having machines do (in an impersonal and invasive way) what the staff at a local, non-chain bookstore would do, which is match their selection to your preferences
Barnes & nobles and Borders raced against each other, across the country, to oversaturate the bookstore market. This isn’t paranoia or conspiracy — it’s the same fucking model Starbucks used. Oh, your community supports three bookstores? We’re going to open five, until the little indies go under. Then we’ll close four of our own (sorry not sorry staff, enjoy competing with each other for a handful of positions!) and now you have no other choice. Movie rental chains did the same thing.
And then all these huge chain retailers have the fucking gall to weep and whine as amazon proceeds to wipe them out, and now I live in a small city where you just… can’t get stuff. If you don’t want to use amazon, if you don’t have a car to drive out to the big box on the highway, you literally can’t buy a pair of socks or an ice pack. No more pharmacies, no more bookstores, no more video or music stores… if this was plants and not retailers you’d call it monoculture, and you’d raise an alarm about how prone to catastrophic collapse monocultures are.