Sex Positive

Oct 3

It’s a Puritan’s world, we’re just living in it

Matt Mullenweg wrote WordPress. (It powers this website alongside an absurd number of other websites to the estimated tune of 40% of the entire internet.) The software is free to use, but, in order to make money, he founded Automattic as a consulting group to help with… well, WordPress, among other things.

Tumblr was founded in 2007, right as the first iPhone was bringing the internet to your hands. WordPress was almost five years old by then, and the two platforms grew up alongside each other, both gaining significant market share as browsing the internet moved from “reading news at a physical computer” to “doomscrolling social sites standing in a line somewhere.”

WordPress never stopped its ascent, as evidenced by its 2021 market share noted above. Tumblr was also on the rise, walking alongside heavyweights like Reddit, and one of the major contributors to Tumblr’s rise as a unique, irreverent, and thriving website community was its safe-haven for adult-related content.

But in 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr, which, in 2017, was inherited by Verizon after its acquisition of Yahoo. So, naturally, in 2018, Verizon subsequently banned all “adult content,” a purposefully vague term that torpedoed Tumblr’s numbers.

If I were to attempt the impossible task of distilling the importance of adult content to Tumblr, I would do it with this quote from Vice:

Tumblr’s decision to effectively ban adult content has led to the erasure of stories, history, and communities of often marginalized people who made homes on Tumblr’s platform over the years. Archiving is a way to preserve that history.
“Archivists Say Tumblr IP Banned Them For Trying to Preserve Adult Content”
Vice

It was clear the new owners wanted nothing to do with it. It was more a thorn in their side than a cornerstone of the future for the communications company, which, after typing that out, feels incredibly inadequate. But, as the leader of a group that has spent his life creating online communities, Mullenweg spearheaded Automattic to step in, which bought the property in 2019 for a rumoured less-than-2% of Yahoo’s purchase price. It brought a small part of the internet full circle, and many had high hopes its new owners would reverse course on the porn ban.

I get the feeling Mullenweg wanted to, but it’s a near impossibility.

I’m not writing this to litigate the politics of sex work and what the ban did to the thriving adult community. I do want to be on record as pro sex work, though, and I understand the incredibly difficult nuances of running a website that allows for user generated content at scale; it’s a literal impossibility to moderate every image to ensure it’s legal prior to its posting.

I’m writing this because I found it fascinating what a grip credit card companies have on the adult industry. They all refuse to legitimize it, Mullenweg notes this in his addressing of the porn ban, and it’s why I feel like he wants to do something about it but can’t. Actually, the only reason I wanted to write this entire post was to note his quote (from that linked post) on what it would take to truly run an adult business online in 2022:

If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users, and make a ton of money. I estimate you’d need at least $7 million a year for every 1 million daily active users to support server storage and bandwidth (the GIFs and videos shared on Tumblr use a ton of both) in addition to hosting, moderation, compliance, and developer costs.
“Why ‘Go Nuts, Show Nuts’ Doesn’t Work in 2022”
Photo Matt

It’s a Puritan’s world, we’re just living in it.

Quote Aug 25

You have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray
Of duty, that the brave endure,
Must have made foes! If you have none,
Small is the work that you have done.
You’ve hit no traitor on the hip,
You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip,
You’ve never turned the wrong to right,
You’ve been a coward in the fight.
“You Have No Enemies”
Charles MacKay

Permalink: You Have No Enemies

Quote Aug 7

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end.
Tobias Wolff
This Boy’s Life

Permalink: The End

Fear Is The Little-Death

Jun 17

David Card, Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences, 2021 — Photo By Brittany Hosea-Small

In 2021, David Card won the Nobel Prize for his work in Economics. The Fence Magazine gathered a number of these laureates together and asked them what they don’t understand about their own profession; in Card’s case, what he didn’t understand about his own discipline of economics:

I find it very hard to understand whether people stay on their current job because they are uninformed (or misinformed) about other jobs, or because their current job is the best of all possible jobs, or because they are just too tired (or scared) to look for something else.
David Card
UC Berkley Professor
Nobel Prize Laureate, Economic Sciences, 2021

It’s astonishing to a Nobel Prize-winning economist that people aren’t consistently looking for new jobs and to periodically better their situations — and has no idea why they don’t.

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
Frank Herbert
Dune

Quote Jun 13

The energy we pour into building archives of the past is transmuted into a means to condition our action in the future.

As the databases of the past grow in mass, their gravitational pull absorbs ever more of our attention and energy. Consequently, our capacity to inhabit the present and imagine the future deteriorates. The internet is Saturn devouring his children.
L. M. Sacasas
“We Are Not Living in a Simulation, We Are Living In the Past”

Permalink: Saturn Devouring His Children

Link Jun 10

Predictable

To put this another way: if you made a model combining some measure of “how hard is this chemical to obtain / how hard is this lifestyle intervention to practice?” and “how novel and high-tech does it feel?”, plus one or two other things like “is this a stimulant?”, it feels like this would predic the results almost perfectly. Does anything stand out as doing substantially worse than the simple model would predict?
Scott Alexander
“Troof On Nootropics”
Astral Codex Ten

Link Jun 3

The Emperor Has New Clothes

A luxury villa from a16z’s metaverse project White Sands

The screenshot above is from the the White Sands metaverse project and it’s what they’re calling a luxury villa. According to a16z Crypto, White Sands does not allow users of their metaverse platform to redesign the virtual interiors and has even imposed real-world-style zoning restrictions. “Parcel passes” for White Sands, which randomly assign you a parcel of “land” in their platform, are selling for around $800 on OpenSea right now.

This is patently absurd. In fact, it’s so absurd that I think people are uncomfortable admitting how genuinely bananas it all is.
Ryan Broderick
Garbage Day, June 3, 2022

No, emperor, your luxury villa looks great! It’s the most beautiful villa in all the land.

‘We Could Often Tell When We Were Wrong’

Jun 2

You have probably been Rickrolled, but there is a non-zero chance you don’t know what Rick Astley looks like:

His famous single actually spent five weeks at Number 1 on the charts before the label even made a video for it — scared that people would reject his look and thus the song — unheard of in the late ’80s, where the unabated influence of MTV was unavoidable.

The producers of the song, SAW (Stock Aitken Waterman), also admitted to subconsciously holding it back for the same reasons, taking their time before they presented the track to the label. They were trying different forms for the song, sending it to a number of different producers, trying to find a sound for the single that would harmonize with Astley’s look.

That is until one day someone was playing it in the production studio’s office and Pete Waterman, coming down the stairs, and Mike Stock, going up the stairs, heard the track beaming from one of the rooms and they both stopped in their tracks. “And we said, ‘Bloody hell.’ This sounds fantastic,” Stock related. “We heard it there at that moment and realized it was all hands to the pump. Let’s get it out there. Let’s not hold back.”

Stock, blind to visuals and acting from a state of autopilot, finally realized what he hand on his hands. His opinion on that experience is sagacious:

“We could often tell when we wrong, but you didn’t know when you were right a lot of the time.”
Mike Stock

Much of this anecdote comes from the fantastic Song Exploder podcast. Please consider listening!

Homo Anti-Economicus

May 22

John Stuart Mill worked to define that humans would be efficient with their actions

For misinformation to work, it has to be treated as factual.

This is the central conceit of a recent Bryan Caplan¹ post, “Misinformation About Misinformation”:

Misinformation won’t work unless the listeners are themselves naive, dogmatic, emotional, or otherwise intellectually defective. In economic jargon, the problem is that the story mistakes an information problem for a rationality problem.
Bryan Caplan
“Misinformation About Misinformation”

John Stuart Mill was a British economist who, in the mid-1800s, worked to define the term homo economicus: that humans would be economical (efficient) with their actions. Said a different way: Man would act in their own economic self-interest. And, if they did, markets would work themselves out.

Rational choice theory underscored the economic (monetary) aspect of this, which is why I believe Caplan emphasized this word in his piece. People will make decisions in their lives that make the most economic and social sense for them.

The problem is: They don’t. We’ve known humans act irrationally. It’s funny that I have to say that because if you’re reading this sentence, you’re nodding your head because you know someone who is in debt and just bought a new car. In the face of disease, people are unwilling to act in order to take preventative measures and instead hope to avoid infection.

I agree with Caplan’s premise: It’s not the fault of the entities who produce the poor product. Rationally, their market should cease to exist. If they kept selling a bad product, rational actors would not buy in and the market would dry up.

Except we all know that’s not the case.

via Tyler Cowen

¹ Professor of Economics at George Mason University who authors a Substack called Bet On It

Data Merchants

May 10

“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” was published this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research by Rebecca Janßen, Reinhold Kesler, Michael E. Kummer, and Joel Waldfogel. Here is the abstract:

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and aggregate app usage by about a third. Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation.
“GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps” — emphasis mine
Janßen, Kesler, Kummer, and Waldfogel

Please allow me to write this abstract in a different way:

…we find that GDPR has effectively removed about a third of apps that relied on ingesting and selling data as a value add to advertisers and has reduced junk app usage by the same amount. The privacy benefits of GDPR are valuable, and they have forced apps to substantially increase their value to consumers using innovation.
Me

Netflix Paints Its Picture With AI

May 3

Daybreak Premiered On Netflix On Oct. 24, 2019. “It was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows.”

From Ryan Broderick, podcaster at The Content Mines and author of the highly entertaining Garbage Day newsletter:

2019. The show Daybreak came out. It is horrible. It is what radicalized chuds on YouTube think of all Netflix shows. It’s, like, a perfomatively woke, algorithmically generated, teen-not-comedy thing about what it would be like to live in a high school that was in the post-apocalyptic, Mad Max kind of… thing. And it was just god awful. And there’s a ton of these shows. Where you’re like — you can just see the robot going, ‘This genre’s performing well and this genre’s performing well. Let’s combine them.’
Ryan Broderick
“The Facebookification of Netflix”
The Content Mines

Broderick paints a damning picture of how Netflix managed to become its own echo chamber. The machine learns what it’s programmed to do, the business green-lights the results. Soon, the system itself is flooded with an AI-generated list of shows that all seem to get canceled before a third season.

In related news, this is what artificial intelligence creates when I tell it to paint a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”:

I asked AI to paint me a picture of “a teenage student in high school surrounded by zombies”

It’s a questionable result. When you give questionable art to consumers who have, sight unseen, already paid for it, the results seem to be speaking for themselves.

Coming To The Center: The Intersection of Sports, Gaming, and Entertainment

Apr 22

Converging On Content

On a podcast at the end of last year, Nicole LaPointe Jameson said that professional esports organizations “bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports but also resemble modern-day entertainment.” Since my company works in the nebulous landscape of esports, I get asked about what the scenery looks like, and I now start that answer with a sentence that has been molded from Jameson: “Esports exists at the intersection of gaming and entertainment.”

Basketball and Esports

“Think of basketball,” I then say, comparing the world of esports to something more familiar. “There is a team on the court. They pay those players. They pay coaches to help the team improve. They do it to win and get people going to games, to compel people to watch them play.”

The same concepts apply in esports, which is what Jameson is referring to when she says esports resembles traditional sports. Everyone understands this business model. Traditional sports organizations do it, esports organizations do it.

But professional basketball is a great fit for this metaphor because the league writ large also leans into the hype surrounding the sport — not just the product that’s put on the court. The players bicker back and forth on Twitter. The arena is a fashion runway. The offseason dynamics are almost as entertaining and enticing as the in-season action.

Basketball has leaned into the magnetic pull of modern entertainment’s currency: content.

That’s how this landscape extends. From its beginnings, esports embraced content. They embraced the ecosystem surrounding their professional teams. People have been casually watching people play video games for as long as there have been esports teams. Pro orgs have long created fans of their brand through, among a number of other things, leveraging celebrity, merch, content creation, streaming, live events and collabs, Twitch chatting and community Discords, collegiate programs — all while supporting the actual teams that compete under the brand’s umbrella.

Both esports and traditional sports entities have teams — e.g. the Houston Rockets play basketball, 100 Thieves has a team that plays Valorant — but what separates traditional sports from esports is that the two interests have different starting points for colloquy. With (most) NBA teams, the chatter is first about winning titles and trade markets and salary caps; its Top Shot NFTs come later. With (most) pro esports organizations, the discourse commonly starts with the brand and its content.

Entertainment At The Center

Sports are obviously a form of entertainment, but fully-evolved modern-day entertainment is content.

It’s what makes the basketball-slash-esports metaphor really harmonize. Pro teams and pro orgs sell to their fans in a number of tangential ways that aren’t directly related to putting a product on the court (players, coaches, referees actually executing the game) and generating direct revenue (selling tickets to watch the game). Now, they’re both moving closer to pursuing the same things altogether: The importance of team success is increasing for esports orgs as the competitive world becomes more codified; the importance of off-court entertainment is rapidly extending traditional sports teams into new spheres of influence.

The Golden State Warriors, a team that plays professional basketball in the NBA, are leaning into this concept, shifting their brand to this new nexus of entertainment, initiating moves that make the team look more like an esports org than a professional basketball team. Earlier this week, the Warriors organization announced Golden State Entertainment (GSE), a division of the team that will “create licensed documentary content, produce music, and hold non-basketball live events in the Bay Area.” It will be overseen by David Kelly, the Warriors’ Chief Business Officer.

Content is king. Whether you’re talking about content in the form of games, whether you’re talking about content in the form of music, in the form of films — the ability to generate content that speaks to people will always be central.
David Kelly
Chief Business Officer, Golden State Entertainment

Not coincidentally, K-pop star BamBam is already a Warriors ambassador, previously releasing limited edition GSW x BamBam merch with the team. So why would the Warriors produce music? That’s why: GSE is set to release BamBam’s next single. They can grow revenue through the production of a documentary of him and have him perform in the Chase Center.

Traditional sports is coming to the new center of entertainment. The way esports organizations leverage content-as-a-driver for their teams will be the future for professional sports organizations. Warriors Majority Owner Joe Lacob has actually believed this for awhile now — he comes from the venture capital world and has been very public about running the Warriors with a “startup approach” — setting the entertainment train down the tracks in 2019 by announcing his intent to augment the Warriors’ organization with these ideas.

And guess where they’re looking for inspiration?

I want this to become more than a basketball team. I want it to become a sports entertainment, media, and technology company. It’s not just a team. That will become clear over the years. You can see, we’re into esports, which is related. We’ve got some other things that we’re working on as well. Utilize the management that’s here, utilize the resources we have, utilize the brand that we have, to turn this into something a little bit bigger. But I think that’ll all become obvious later.
Joe Lacob
Majority Owner, Golden State Warriors
“…The Assembling Of A New Rome,” The Athletic, Feb. 2019

Lessons Learned: Piggy-Backing

Apr 17

Building out a business model on the back of other businesses should be treated with caution

I call it piggy-backing, and it was a first-party lesson learned when my company, Mainline, started out: Be careful building out your business model on the back of another business.

Two examples:

Twitter

Chris Dixon is currently a general partner at Andreesen Horowitz. But, before he was the poster child for $3 billion in Web3 investments, he was a programmer in the 2000s-era Internet where the iPhone, Google, and all modern social media was born then refined then perfected. Specifically, Twitter.

When Twitter changed their API in 2011 or so, there was a big wave of startups — including a lot of my friends — who built Twitter startups. That was a thing in 2009 and 2010, with Tweety, TweetDeck, and all sorts of API services. There was a VC firm that started that was literally only doing Twitter apps. People thought of it as the new web and a new platform, but then there was this very harsh lesson learned. For a long time Twitter did not have a client software, and at some point they decided, “Hey, we need to control. We are going to have client software, have an ad-based model, and change the API,” and that whole industry died. Same thing happened with the Facebook platform.
Chris Dixon
Decoder Podcast

PUBG

The second thing Mainline set out to do was generate revenue by running professional esports leagues for the game title publishers. It’s not a particularly easy thing to do; for the most part, a developer’s core competencies are not in governance, broadcasting, tournament organization technology, and the things necessary to create and sustain competitive league balance. It’s in making the game the best it can possibly be for the players.

Perfect. We could step in. We were already running the largest competitive PUBG leagues in North America, so we reached out to work with the publisher (then called Bluehole) and set about to do exactly that.

The good news for PUBG is that it became an international leviathan, by nearly every metric, holding the title of most popular mobile game in the world and the desktop version has been one of the most-played games on Steam since its release in 2017.

The bad news for us meant that it was able to take its competitive league in-house.

Link Mar 16

Waiting For Oblivion

Job’s Sacrifice by William Blake, 1805

Talmudic interpreters have even said we should read the story as the final part of the biblical narrative — the exclamation point ending the age of humanity in which God spoke to us. I love this notion. Perhaps Job made an argument so airtight that God, embarrassed, ceased talking to humans altogether.
The Impatience of Job
Abraham Riesman

Did God give up?

Quote Mar 12

Out of 10 longlist nominees for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, all 10 are college graduates. On average, the nominees attended universities with rejection rates above 80 percent (i.e., highly competitive). Five went to Ivy League schools or competitive equivalents, and winners tended to double up. Charles Yu, who won the 2020 award, attended Berkeley as an undergraduate and then went to Columbia for his JD. Susan Choi, who won in 2019, graduated from Yale and Cornell. Sigrid Nunez won in 2018; she’s a graduate of both Barnard and Columbia.
Bertrand Cooper
Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?
Current Affairs, Issue 59

Permalink: The Deck Is Stacked

Life Begins

Mar 11

Francis Crick at a dinner at the Nobel Prize Winners Conference in Lindau, Germany, 1981

Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself in which he argues, from a scientific point of view, that life could not have got started on this planet. … To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe … and one of those spaceships crashed into the early earth, its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us. And that’s honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, thought of (the) beginning of life on this planet.
Stanley Miller
American Chemist

Yes, Francis Crick proposes what he called directed panspermia, which is to say some alien civilization put some cells — some bacterial cells — on a rocket and crashed it on the earth.
Nick Lane
Professor of Evolutionary Biochemisry at University College, London

Both quotes from Life in a Barrel, Radiolab, around 43:10

Francis Crick won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and he truly believed life began, more or less, as the science experiment of an extraterrestrial entity. It’s important we don’t discount or marginalize ideas too quickly because they sound crazy today. People were killed because they believed the sun didn’t revolve around the earth.

The same episode claims that “99.9%” of all life that’s ever existed on Earth has gone extinct. Which is to say: The possibility that we began as an alien experiment, that we began as a creation of a god, that we even exist at all — is roughly the same.

Photo: Francis Crick at a dinner at the Nobel Prize Winners Conference in Lindau, Germany, 1981

Link Mar 4

The Future of the Creator Economy

Artists will be able to create stadiums, sell advertising, charge for tickets, release music all in the same virtual world

Imagine building a digital stadium or house party in Unreal Engine where the musician can release their music at an 82% profit margin and then charge for tickets to their own virtual concert while making extra money selling sponsorships or advertising at said concert.

Quote Mar 1

We saw hopesfall play as a local band and came home and wrote the riff of “Walls” that night. A direct influence. Not from a certain riff or the record but from what they were making happen on the stage as a local band — that feeling, chasing that feeling, was the riff of “Walls.”
Matt Carter
Emery Guitarist from The BlackSheep Podcast

Emery’s “Walls” is an all-timer. It would make perfect sense that the band behind that band is another all-timer.

The quote comes at the 1:10:20 mark.

Listen to “Matt Carter: Emery” on Spreaker.

Permalink: Are You Listening?

Imitate And Improve

Feb 26

The STEM PLAYER And The Movie Pig

Pig

Heads up: There are spoilers in this section.

I recently saw the movie Pig. On its surface, it’s loaded with the Nic Cage fanboy treatment. Cage plays a man who refuses to speak, lives in the woods with his (very) valuable truffle-finding pig, pig gets stolen, his idiosyncratic, mythical figure must exact revenge and get his pig back.

Except he doesn’t exact revenge. He takes beating after beating. When he is (constantly) presented with the opportunity to leverage violence as his means, he improbably relents and pursues peace. It’s not “Taken but with a pig.”

The movie was a critical darling, but by all accounts, it didn’t make money. The best estimates have it slightly above breaking even, others have it as a million-dollar loss. I found the movie lost momentum towards the end, undermined its climax, and that fantastical elements of the plot distanced it from the reality it was trying to create. I wasn’t enthralled by the result, but I very much enjoyed a number of its individual mechanisms, including its cinematography and the risks it took in its storytelling.

There should be more movies like this one, though, ones that don’t just take a left turn when we’re expecting a right — ones that are written from an entirely different place on the map. That’s why I believe it’s important that the movie got made. My feelings on its final assembly aside, it’s important that Pig was recognized so broadly and publicly in the hopes that more movies like this will get greenlit. It’s wild that an esoteric movie leveraged the real-world fandom of Cage’s acting choices to pursue an unexpected narrative. It’s emblematic of a creative approach that plays on the real-world expectations of fans, further blurring the fourth wall between our art and our lives. And when new creative approaches are pursued, we get further innovation and collaboration and remixing and rebuilding.

These results are rarely perfect out of the gate, either, but that’s rarely the point.

Stem Player

In today’s economy, video games are bigger in terms of the size of the business than movies and music and TV all put together. And what are they? They’re about going into the world and changing it and interacting with it. … My fundamental opinion is, the more we can see together, the more together we’ll be.
Alex Klein
Co-Founder of Kano Computing in GQ Magazine

Alex Klein is the co-founder of Kano Computers; Kano created the Stem Player device with Kanye West. GQ Magazine interviewed him about his work on the new product where he discusses, among other things, the inspiration for its design: Kano’s see-through computers, the machinery used in music studios, children interacting with it at Ye’s Yeezy Christian Academy, a destroyed Apple laptop, stress balls, (literal) rocks, arcade machines, products designed for people with autism. The two of them found inspiration for it everywhere. It was a communal process.

Read the Full Post

How Much Is Your Work Worth?

Feb 6

Designer Paul Rand Behind The Cover Of The Origins And History Of Consciousness Featuring His Design — Courtesy Of Print Magazine

Jayme Odgers is a graphic designer most known for his work with collage and new-wave in the 1980s. Also notable, he was an apprentice for one of the most famous designers of all designers, the visionary Paul Rand.

Odgers had a hell of an anecdote about Rand in Print recalling his first day on the job (recounted by another hall of fame designer, Steven Heller, in one of his columns):

On that very first day I began working for Paul, he had a book jacket design due. I watched as he reached into a drawer and chose two sheets of colored paper, … a red-orange and a complementary green color. Using scissors, he cut three smallish green shapes and in seemingly random manner glued them onto a square of the red-orange paper. With a circle cutter he cut out a doughnut-like shape about six inches in diameter and one inch wide, which he glued onto a sheet of white paper. It was like watching a magic act. I was mesmerized.

Covering the entire doughnut shape with acetate, he used a rather large nib pen dipped in white ink to deftly draw a linear serpent eating its own tail over the torus shape — an ouroboros appeared as if out of nowhere. Done. No sketches, no indecision; in less than 15 minutes, with minimal material, he had created the cover art for Erich Neumann’s book The Origins And History Of Consciousness for Bollingen Publishers.
Jayme Odgers
The Daily Heller: The Assistant, Jayme Odgers, Works for Paul Rand

Here is that work: