The News
TikTok, tech utopias, corporate fetish, and recommended reading — our 3.15.24 roundup.
A roundup of news, trends, and thoughts that we think were noteworthy this week — plus a reading list for the weekend.
TikTok, etc: As you probably read, the House voted to ban TikTok unless the Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it. TikTok launched a campaign ahead of the vote, sending a push notification to its users, urging them to call their representatives and sending influencers to Capitol Hill. If anything — this backfired, the House passed the bill with a vote of 352 to 65. If it passes the Senate, Biden has promised to sign the bill. Meanwhile, Trump, who tried to ban TikTok or force its sale in 2020, publicly reversed his position on the app over the past week. Most are worried about national security, some are worried about free speech, and everyone is worried about the algorithms.
In other social media news, the governor of South Dakota is apparently now a cosmetic dentistry influencer. A suit was filed against her that states: “Defendant Kristi Noem is a resident of South Dakota where she currently serves as governor of the state. Sitting politicians do not typically work as part-time social media influencers.” lol.
Cities: There has been sort of a lot of news about cities, both the collapse and the development of them, on the periphery this week. The New York Times reported on how a group of tech billionaires spent roughly $900 million buying land in Solano Country, just on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. Their plan — which they are calling California Forever — is to build a new city that addresses the ills of the Bay Area, namely “home prices, homelessness, congestion.” They spent years buying up the land in secret and are now, because the land is not zoned for residential use, shifting to a public-facing political affairs campaign as they plan to mount the local planning commission, the board of supervisors, environmental rules, inevitable lawsuits as well as the state’s Air Resources Board, the Water Resources Control Board, Public Utilities Commission and Department of Transportation to build their tech utopia. While the billionaires are trying to build a new city, the ones we know are still on the precipice of collapse. As real estate prices continue to fall, cities are losing tax revenue. In a piece in the New York Times, Arpit Gupta, a professor at NYU called it an “urban doom loop.” Essentially, as the Times reports, “to fill the budget holes created by the lost tax revenue, they posited that cities could cut services or raise other kinds of taxes. But that would come with its own downsides, including prompting businesses and residents to leave, exacerbating the problem by further eroding the tax base.” Dirt published an essay by Emily Sunberg talking about “corporate fetish” — a nostalgia for 90s office culture that is seen in the rise of influencers donning power suits, offices in the backdrop of fashion campaigns, and the most recent Prada show. As to why, she writes, “I guess there is something more romantic to think about here: the office as an escape. The office was once a place you put yourself together for and performed at.” For more on cities, read our interview with Keller Easterling, a genius and one of our favorite interviews.
Recommended reading for the weekend:
A short story by Noor Qaim in The Drift: “Really? I think people are just pervs. Curious pervs.”
A profile on writer Lucy Prebble in the New Yorker: “‘What I learned from writing the play—which is the only point of writing anything, I think, to be different at the end than at the start—was that it was a stupid question, what is real and what is not,’ Prebble told me. ‘It’s an irrelevant question. It’s not the question.’”
An essay on the CPAC conference by Gaby Del Valle in The Baffler: “In the end, everyone got what they wanted: the reporters got a story, the Nazis got attention, and the less overt extremists behind CPAC got to accuse the liberal media of smearing all conservatives as white supremacists.”
A profile on Cillian Murphy in GQ: “Don’t give it all away. Don’t even give most of it away. Retrench. Be clear. With yourself, but not necessarily with others. Let the fame wave pass. Live by the sea.”
A review of critic Lauren Oyler’s new book in ArtReview: “‘Media literacy is dead!’ they declare, discussing a TikTok made by a sixteen-year-old.”
See you next week!