Does anyone else remember when a congressman was off the grid for a few days and his staffers claimed was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” when in reality he was on vacation with his mistress? That story fell apart rather quickly, but remains my shorthand for silly excuse.
Following the meeting, the administration attempted to reach Amodei but was told he was unavailable because he was attending a wellness retreat, one of the administration officials and the senior White House official said.
A spokesperson for Anthropic rejected the claim that he was at a wellness retreat, saying, “this is absolutely false.”
I don’t, as a generally rule, take what public relations professionals say at face value without knowing them personally as their job is to protect the principle.
I might trust an individual publicist but when in doubt verify before you truest. This is true for both Anthropic and the current administration so all parties are now annoyed and suspicious.
Ironically I am enjoying some time on wellness activities this Sunday myself. I wouldn’t call it a retreat but I did take a swim and read Europe AI 2031 under an umbrella. So let’s call that as close as I will come to being on a wellness retreat at a point of crisis in the AI race.
Maybe because the profession’s entire raison d’être is to engage you there is always a new name for people who are good at grabbing your attention.
I swear I’ve lived through half a dozen new names for the communications profession in twenty years of being paid, in one form or another, to get attention for other people. And I don’t even call myself a marketer.
Everyone on LinkedIn, and a few on Twitter have latched onto the latest buzzword: storyteller. Someone call Joseph Campbell and see if they can send him a residuals check beyond the grave.
The aversion to existing terms like marketing, communications, and public relations is endemic to the space. There is always the new hotness and thus always a new name. Crisis manager. Influencer. Honestly I miss socialite. That was a great term.
I had not intended to read the trend piece as it’s not news to me that we hire professionals to craft stories about brands and people.
Millennials were the original generation who experienced personal brand building as just one of those things required to get a job.
I am glad I opened it up though as I got to experience a pretty amusing bit of story telling inside the Wall Street Journals mobile application. A most unfortunate creative services choice to place storytelling sponsored content from consulting firm Deloitte.
Who knew that consulting firms final form would be not as management consultants but publicists? The remaining few journalists at the Wall Street Journal definitely were not involved in this.
There has been quite a bit of discussion in alignment theory with artificial intelligence that considers how legibility and openness might work at cross purposes when coordinating across different intelligences with different goals. Politics exist everywhere it would seem.
If you are transparent, but seek to change an agent’s behavior, you might reasonably be interpreted as adversarial by the agent. So it follows you must consider that their actions are no longer collaborative and open towards you but potentially adversarial and opaque depending on how it judges you.
The information habits and “winner’s optimism” that some American elder millennial display in public digital spaces are telling. In particular, we have skewed heavily towards legible openness as our internet was often friendly and our geopolitical positions was dominant.
These conditions are no longer true. And so we are now experiencing the Dark Forest Theory of Yancy Strickland (based on Liu Cixin’s stellar science fiction series the three body problem). American millenials are on a very different internet than we grew up on.
I’ll admit I have a bone to pick with Yancy as it felt more like he was defecting from the open web in 2019 because it was scary and filled with fascists. I didn’t think he believed it was because it was actually dangerous. His return makes me question his original declared intentions and his goals now.
The Dark Forest disappearing man has come back to the open web now. Things have changed and we all need our own private Idaho. Which you can find through his offerings.
I’ll note he needs the distribution channels of large adversarial networks like Twitter and that means gaining power in the dark forest. As we consider how open and legible to be in this very difficult moment I thought this was an instructional revealed preference.
It’s seems a tad unfair to use our porcine friends as comic stands in whenever we wish to mock trough consumers of remixed refuse. Pigs are intelligent animals whose biological closeness to human may allow us to use their organs in a pinch. We insult ourselves when we insult pigs.
And yet every time some new form of processed artificial intelligence content drops, we call it slop. Sooie!
Presumably so does staying spiritually healthy as well. If there is no Mozart to be had, I’ll take Moby. If there is no Melville then we take a pithy viral tweet. Where is the event horizon of art?
Michael Pollen called it the omnivores dilemma in our food system. When it comes to our art, it doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma. More creation and more tools for creativity are a social good but when it becomes regurgitation and re-ingestion does it not seem liable to make us soul sick?
And yet the industrialization of food has inspired the industrialization of all forms of content. Scale has indeed become the standard way we’ve come to feed our bodies and mind. It was Gut with Gutenberg but where are the limits? Do we even know?
Facebook and OpenAI both released new content creation tools this week that were widely derided as slop factories in my circles.
Of course, I spend my time on the written web amongst producers of the tools that produce the slop. We think we know better and can use these tools wisely. We know what’s in it, or at least we have the know how that programs the machines extrude it. Some of us have some sense of the original material but precious few.
The engineers who built the Doritos factory probably enjoy a cheesy corn chip too even if they can afford aged cheddar thanks to pay which came with popularity of their creation. Imagine how a medieval peasant would have felt encountering that much extreme nacho cheesiness.
The intelligentsia of the written web like Substack, Twitter and Reddit (admittedly that being an intelligentsia is a funny conceit) presumes the unwashed TikTok, Reels and Shorts masses have no taste and will consume anything and without end.
My brother told me recently that our grandmother worked in a hotdog factory and refused to eat processed meat for the rest of her life. I also won’t eat hot dogs or sausages so maybe the sense memory runs deep.
I admit that I feel the same way about encased meats as I do about short form video content. No amount of condiments or “answering to a higher authority” will entice me into consuming the stuff. ConAgra owns Hebrew National now and they answer to the stock market not God.
Even if there are artisanal varietals of processed meats (and processed content), I struggle with the ease with which it bypasses my satiety filters. We have peptides for overconsumption of food but not yet overconsumption of dopamine.
It’s fine if we crave whole meats and whole books. Or at least a long form essay. Something can be created with the finest ingredients carefully sourced and prepared by caring hands. And yet we know man cannot live on tweets and sausage alone. Pigs probably shouldn’t either. Sooie!!!!
I have not watched Jimmy Kimmel in his current incarnation as broadcast late night variety show host. But I did watch some episodes of the Man Show so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the man’s career.
That one unremarkable but sort of likable dude can jump from hosting segments about girls on trampolines to a national broadcast host with political opinions is somewhat impressive and also bleak.
If I had to give mono-causal explainer as why millennial women seem split into two distinct political camps when it comes to modern American politics, absolutely over itor absolutely irate, I think the continued existence of Jimmy Kimmel’s career would be as fine an explanation as any other.
This guy gets promoted over and over for just being the worst and what do we get? We get scolded no matter what we do. Of course some women are screaming banshees and the rest are like mmm shrug. Who has freedom and who has responsibility has always been a polite fiction.
Being subjected to years of increasingly sexualized entertainment featuring bouncing boobies, mentally unstable underage pop stars and the men who were paid to ogle them professionally probably had some downstream influence on our current political climate and the shitty state of entertainment.
The backlash to the backlash to the backlash as it were has happened and we just don’t care anymore. I’ll fight for your right to be perverted but I won’t lie to you and say it hasn’t negatively affected me in anyway.
I’ve always been acutely aware of where popular culture derived a women’s value. Jimmy Kimmel had a career and Britney Spears had a breakdown. And now you want me to fight to keep this twerp on the air because of our proud democracy and its culture of promoting speech and expression? Fuck off.
I genuinely believe girls on trampolines has inherent entertainment and artistic value. Almost everyone has an appreciation for the female form.
I’m unclear if warmed over political takes on broadcast television delivered by a middling broadcaster at midnight is more or less valuable an art form or as political expression. Maybe the FCC needs an overhaul for this new era or maybe we get pirates wires.
I’m neither a satirist nor comedian. I watched the Man Show because I had a boyfriend in a fraternity but I am not watching Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue now and neither are you.
And that’s all that matters to the business of entertainment. Slapping speech and politics on it is a reach that now middle aged millennials can’t manage. Maybe if we spent more time on trampolines.
Elite competition skirmishes over who controls the airwaves of broadcast television are barely interesting except to the absolutely irate. And these days we are all too busy to remain irate unless we’ve got luxury signaling to do. Which I don’t need to do because no one is coming for my blog.
I don’t see how anyone can turn a microwaved soggy ready meal remake of the people versus Larry Flynt out of Jimmy Kimmel.
Who wants to fight for that? Hustler had some inherent entertainment value and Larry Flynt had “readers.” It was speech and it wasn’t on public airwaves with a boss in Washington DC. Maybe you didn’t like what he did but were you prepared to fight for it? Lots of people were. Who wants to fight for Kimmel?
Oliver Stone has always been kind of a shitlib
Jimmy Kimmel was never anything more than the guy who read cue cards between the dopamine hits of girls on trampolines. Stuffing your politics into his pie hole doesn’t really change that.
Bob Iger knows it. I know it. The guy had dwindling ratings, an expensive contract and not nearly enough common sense to keep his mouth shut if one of his staffers was out of touch. If I were in charge of Disney that would be my excuse and I’d dump that Jimmy for literally anything else. I bet a swearing parrot would test better. Hell I know it would.
That’s why it’s so damned exhausting to care about the free speech that literally nobody asked to be said. Does anyone who genuinely cares about free speech feel like they can rally the cause to a bobble head spouting opinions that aren’t even his own? Doubtful. I’d sooner fight for Illinois Nazis. Shame about the ACLU innit?
Americans would rally for boobs though. If someone wanted to get the FCC to allow the return of the Man Show and place it on ABC after dark maybe then we’d have a worthy sequel to Larry Flynt.
But nobody is going to bat for Jimmy Kimmel unless it’s backed up with boobies. And there isn’t a perky tit in sight. No one is going to make a political meal out of this. I doubt even the Swanson’s heir could heat this frozen turd.
Daily overstimulation is starting to rub the pressure sores of America’s downer induced depression into a full blown mental health crisis. Like, even more than usual. War with Russia in the imagination, inflation and market volatility coaxing a recession, culture war skirmishes over every basic fact in the pandemic, along with generalized anxiety are fucking us up focus wise. And every propaganda outlet and publicist on the planet is having a field day.
I’m listing to The Prodigy’s Breath and mumbling lyrics like pyschosomatic insane. So I guess, come play my game?
I try not to listen too much music as it overstimulates my nervous system to be honest so its kind of rare for me to have Spotify playing. I’ve got a finely tuned propaganda radar that benefits from sensing subtle shifts in tone and extremely online discourse. I can’t do that if I’m too worked up from the rough stimulus that comes from pop music. I mostly use it to run my portfolio and investing but sometimes I think I should really be used in the service of some autocrat or multi-national. I’m the doubt factory
I guess it is nice I can make a buck during the end of the empire. I’m one of those post structuralism, post-capitalism babies. A regular Bane “born to the darkness” of hyper objects like markets and climate change. So I guess I’d better be molded to being the kind of villain that survives a world of agitprop and meme warfare. Thanks Adbusters!
Frankly I’m having a fucking blast. Sure I’m scared I don’t have my homestead property all shored up for civilization hiccups, but I’m of the mind that the crumbles is going to take a while so might as well enjoy the gains that come from a massive upheaval. I guess its true venture capitalists are ghouls. I mean at least we aren’t private equity carrion birds but it is wild that the system rewards a class of people that invest in creative destruction.
But even as I want to paint myself as bad, I do stereotypically think what venture capital does is often good. We can’t predict second order effects. Chaos theory doesn’t let us see all the future paths. But stochastic as shit power laws are just math so we’ve got a shot at accidentally making things better. So while the agitprop tries to sway your opinions might I recommend you just Breath? That is my professional advice.
I think most people dislike media because it’s hard to understand where a narrative came from. If you aren’t in the business of telling stories the natural braiding of emotions, motivations and public opinion can seem foreign. It’s like the weather. It’s completely comprehensible how different patterns emerge but you cannot predict precisely how it will play out. There is a science but the specificity of the modeling isn’t so accurate you can predict the course.
This is why I encourage startups that work with me to think about the long game. Give context about your space and your opinion of how it will change and grow. Don’t be afraid to state clearly and in specific why something is the way that it is when talking to a journalist. No one is out to get you.
Journalists just want to show a story that makes sense to regular people. A cohesive truth that can be proven with outside and objective fact still matters to virtually everyone outside of very specific Murdoch outlets (never give a quote to the NY Post).
So much of being covered in the media is not about having a publicist or being trained but is rather about interacting with the 4th estate as if they are human just like you. A reporter will happily tell your story if you can make a case for why it’s true. And no one is coming to “gotcha” over some secret. The Internet may roast you but that’s just the crowds. No one has control over public sentiment. You too may one day become the main character on Twitter. But that’s probably your fault and not a journalist’s doing.
So if you want to live in public think through what the long game might be. And work on convincing others that the future you see is not only good but inexorable. And repeat it with conviction. It’s ok if you get some shit wrong, cancel culture won’t demolish you. Probably. I mean some of you deserve to be canceled but somehow it never seems to happen to the assholes who really deserve it.
What kind of values are crucial in a PR or communication DAO or interest group?
Open
Participatory
Trustless
It’s important that whatever we do on behalf of crypt it must be done in the spirit of the space and why so many disparate types of people believe in its values. While there may be structures like executive teams, core teams, board members and studios and contractors to execute on our mission we want to use the tools and transparency of crypto.
But to what purpose are we organizing? We will create content and engage in conversations to shape media narratives and public sentiment aimed at promoting the positive elements, potential, and impact of crypto.
How will we do this? We will hire publicists to promote our stories in mainstream media along with commissioning content meme-ers and creators to share opinions. We will engage with spokespersons to share talking points created from the priorities of the community. We will place our content, from memes to editorials, on our own properties as well as in supporting communities and member publications.
I expect I’ll be doing quite a bit more note taking and research. If you want to be a part of this effort I’ve started a shared Google doc for collaboration. Email me Julie @ chaotic dot capital or DM me @ AlmostMedia. This won’t be built in a day but together we can push it forward.
When a new social media application hits the J curve, it’s the most exciting feeling in the world. The magic of network effects kicking in to make each day on the app more valuable than the next for its users.
It’s also stressful as hell for teams because everyone is watching and has opinions. So I feel a little bad that today I’m going to talk about live audio talk radio app Clubhouse, but it’s on my mind and I made a commitment to myself to hit publish every single day, so here I am.
First some disclaimers. I didn’t join the beta in the spring because early users do the bulk of culture building and I didn’t think I had it in me. Several female friends of mine had negative experiences and I didn’t want to be on clean up duty. Toxicity compounds and I get plenty of it having significant visibility on Twitter. I’ve been doxxed, stalked, harassed (my favorite story is about Glamour Magazine’s attempt to do a crowd sourced Dos and Don’t section), and canceled by Gawker. So I’m inclined to steer clear of being an early adopter these days as I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to build positive communities that I’m not getting paid to build. This is not a commentary on whether I think Clubhouse is a good or bad place so much as a personal preference I have.
So I’ve only been on Clubhouse since it hit exponential. That means most of my feedback reflects the experience of the app hitting popular consciousness and not it’s early Silicon Valley FOMO insider days.
Audio is a wonderful medium that carries emotional depth. It connects you more intimately and is exceptional at narrative. It’s also much slower as an informational conveyer than writing and an attention resource consumption hog when you pay attention (some people like background noise, I personally do not). These two factors are the driving tension in the Clubhouse product. You feel connected listening to other humans, but your attention quickly lags as your brain works faster than the content.
Unlike in photo feeds, or a mixture of image and written content, you cannot scroll out of a lull. And unlike in precorded podcasts you cannot play it at 2x speed or rewind for something you missed. So you get stuck in boring rooms in Clubhouse but feel bad that other nice humans bores you. People are on a stage in Clubhouse “rooms” so you tune out, as unless you jump on stage there is no way to improve the engagement. And in large rooms you aren’t getting on stage.
But you shouldn’t feel bad that you’re bored because it actually is usually pretty boring in Clubhouse. People don’t naturally talk in consistently engaging ways without significant production and preparation. No one is always concise and engaging. Literally being “interesting” means to hold interest. And no one, not even A list actors or television hosts, are interesting all the time. Even though they have entire teams dedicated to making it seem like they are.
So what does this mean?
First, Clubhouse is going to need to elevate influencers that have experience in the kind of production work that works in audio. That probably means talking product cues from talk radio like call screening, cueing the audience what is coming next, having prepared topics and set time frames and giving audio stitchers to drive attention. TikTok is the gold standard in narrative tool enabling creation and might be a good source for product inspiration on what tools to give those on stage.
Clubhouse is also going to need to decide if they want to be more conversation driven. A stage and an audience naturally begets status anxiety and a one-to-many dynamic. But that means you can’t drive the same massive numbers as a one-to-one or many-to-many social space. Maybe they will be content to have a smaller influencer driven creative pool that brings in audiences but they will be forced to adapt their tools to that reality. In that way it looks more like Spotify. People use Spotify because the talent is there and it happens to have some social feature. I believe Clubhouse could pull this off as it certainly has the money for it and there is clearly an appetite for produced audio. Rush Limbaugh is a very rich and influential man (disclaimer I worked at 77WABC as an EA and did stints on his show) and there is room for more types of voices.
I’d personally prefer a conversational platform as a user. I was a rabid fan of the first iteration of Anchor before it became a podcast product. It was call and response “voice messages” initially. It was enormous fun to talk into the ether and get messages back. I still talk to friends that I made on it. To call back to my opener, it was a magical time as the app grew quickly around a massive influx. They eventually pivoted and sold to Spotify for what was clearly a better business, but I look back on those few months as some of the best time I’ve ever spent on social media. The magic of asynchronous audio messages made me feel in control as a user. There something I don’t feel I have yet on Clubhouse which has given me a sense of being overstimulated and even anxious. Timing choice is a significant part of social media scale for users as not everyone can be extremely online.
Clubhouse’s product choices in the next few months will determine how long they can keep that magic going and for how many people. Their team has captured something special for a lot of people and and they some of the best institutional backing in venture capital. I’d personally love if they went in a more conversational less status audience driven direction. But it’s not my startup so all I can do is comment from the sidelines and wish them the best.
Interacting with the media used to only be a concern for politicians, executives, and law enforcement. You would give a press release or stand up in front of a podium for questions, and that was about it. Now virtually anyone can become the focus of intense press interest, meaning the skills to interact constructively with media is becoming crucial for any normie trying to survive online.
I’m going to write up a four part series on the basics any slob can use to make sure that when the time comes (and it will come), you don’t accidentally immolate yourself. I’ll break it down into four parts.
What to say
Who to say it to
When to say it
How not to fuck yourself
Today is part one in the series and we will focus on “what to say” should you find yourself talking to a reporter.
First, and this may seem obvious, but the press are not your friends. They have a job to do. Many people find it insulting that a reporter will chat you up, seeming all friendly like, only to find themselves portrayed in a light they didn’t expect. They blame the reporter. But it’s not the reporter’s fault. The responsibility for coming across the way you want is on you.
Step 1 is to Figure out your main point. If that’s the only key insight that gets communicated, you will be happy with the result. That means you need to plan out what you need to communicate. Rehearse it in your head. And do not deviate from what you planned to say. That means don’t give out idle chit chat to the press. Don’t make jokes about opponents. Stick to the point you wish to make and do not give any additional detail or color. Don’t get nervous or get rushed. Stick to what you planned to say. If you are a normie who just needs to survive a media encounter unscathed do not fuck around. Leave the advanced moves to the professionals
Think of it like talking to a cop. They are not your friend either. You don’t give up any additional information to law enforcement and you know you shouldn’t be talking to them without a lawyer. If I had my way, no one would talk to the press without a publicist on hand but we haven’t quite reached the stage where that’s a legal right (maybe it should be).
If you are being interviewed you may encounter questions you didn’t think of beforehand. That’s OK. Don’t panic. Recall your main point. Journalists anchor stories with what is called a “lede” which is the first thing mentioned a story. If you give an interview where you repeat your main point over and over again the journalist will intuit that this should be their lede. Or at least you increase your chances that your main point will become the entry point of the story. You will get your point heard.
You may notice skilled communicators always circle back to their original point. No matter what story or anecdote they tell they always get back to the one key thing that need you to grasp. I don’t care if the key point is “chocolate and peanut butter is the best combination” but if you are telling a reporter how you think caramel is also tasty and you actually quite like marshmallows and graham crackers with melted chocolate, I need you to come back to the punchline “but none of them compare to chocolate and peanut butter”
If you don’t get back to your main point you may find yourself reading a headline that says committed Chocolate & Peanut Butter Advocate admits that caramel may be just as good with chocolate. You can imagine how this turn turns out right? “How can we ever trust this agenda if they willingly offer up that other alternatives are equally tasty? Why do they insist on this combination for us when they know others are equally delicious”
Sure, this sound ridiculous but think of how many policy discussions are derailed when an academic innocently offers up that other points of view have merit but ultimately do not support their core conclusion. The doubt factory sets in and simple conclusions are clouded. Present your information clearly and as conclusively as possible.
Coming up soon, how to know who you should be talking to in the press.
