Web Excursions 2021-12-27
Opinion | 2021: Covid, Wokeness and Other Debates That Defined the Year - The New York Times
Is there a reality crisis?
The idea that a reality crisis started over the past year or even decade is simplistic.
Social media has given a megaphone to perspectives — ranging from the necessary to the loathsome — that have long been ignored or suppressed by the architects of American reality.
Just because we couldn’t hear them before doesn’t mean they weren’t always there.
Social media has simply forced Americans to learn about one another, and we hate what we’ve found out. Call this, then, the too-much-reality crisis.
What does it mean to be woke?
It used to mean something to be woke.
From 1962 to 2008 — from when William Melvin Kelley used the word in a Times Opinion essay to when Erykah Badu sang, “I stay woke,” on her song “Master Teacher” —
to be woke meant to be aware, up-to-date, observant.
In 2014, during the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, #staywoke lit up the internet, urging people to open their eyes to police abuses.
Being woke meant being conscious of the white supremacy embedded in everyday life.
Since then, the term has been twisted and caricatured by conservatives, and it is now almost universally derided, even by liberals and leftists.
Where it once might have been used to praise, it is now used to slander.
Who’s afraid of critical race theory?
“Critical race theory” was arguably the most important phrase of the year, but how much can we say now, at the end of it, about what it really means?
Originally, the phrase described a field of study dedicated to examining the law’s role in sustaining racial inequality.
Now, thanks to activists and provocateurs on the right, many voters and pundits have been convinced that C.R.T. represents,
“a hostile ideology that seeks to divide the country by race and undermine the core principle of democratic control.”
Any mass social movement, like the current wave of activism for racial justice, is certain to include its share of outré, misguided and counterproductive thinkers and actors;
our hallowed push for civil rights in the 1960s, which promoted its own bizarre theories of whiteness and featured plenty of performative self-flagellation from affluent liberals, was no exception.
It’s ultimately up to the media whether the fringes of such movements come to dominate public conversation.
Far too often, the mainstream press’s coverage of activism and cultural shifts among the young has been characterized by sensationalism and shoddy reporting.
The quality of our long-awaited national conversation about race probably isn’t going to improve,
but it wouldn’t hurt for journalists to do some reflection about how our media environment contributed to the moral panic now sweeping the country.
What’s in a Subway tuna fish sandwich?
In January two Subway customers filed a class-action complaint against the sandwich megachain,
alleging that its tuna — which is grayish and spreads perhaps a little too easily for comfort — has been misleadingly marketed.
Rather than the “high quality” skipjack tuna Subway advertised, the suit claimed that the product was a franken-mash of “various concoctions.”
Investigations ensued.
The company tried to restore its good name (and put an end to the “something’s fishy” jokes) with SubwayTunaFacts.com,
and a judge soon dismissed the lawsuit.
But that didn’t stop the plaintiffs from filing a new version in November, which Subway has called “reckless and improper.”
The plaintiffs’ claim this time? That samples of Subway’s tuna contained DNA from chickens, pigs or cows. Yikes.
Who broke the supply chain?
for a few days there, the plugged canal was a convenient scapegoat (and an elegant metaphor) for a gummed-up global system in peril.
In mid-December, the Ever Given voyaged through the canal again, this time without incident. We could all learn something here.
Has the left gone wrong?
Over the past year, lots of liberals and leftists alike have come to believe that the language of the social justice left is needlessly alienating.
The broader left – including those who privilege class concerns over cultural ones –
have had to let go of the illusion that there exists a mass of alienated potential voters waiting to be roused by a sufficiently radical message.
Winning elections “pretty clearly involves
dropping the fantasy that everything is about mobilization and turnout and
acknowledging that to win in right-of-center states, you need to annoy progressives some with noteworthy moderate positions.”
Opponents of popularism have argued both
that it will lead to craven, ineffectual poll chasing and
that it would mean betraying key Democratic constituencies.
The dilemma is that structural reform is at once urgent and nearly impossible.
All that’s left for the left is “a long project of ideological conversion”
that might gradually encourage voters to demand “the establishment of a system
that we might reasonably call American democracy.”
Did George Floyd get justice?
That summer, it felt as though radical ideas were seeping into the mainstream, but after the verdict, the energy of the movement began to dissipate.
Policy-level discussions of abolishing police departments have largely stalled across the country.
“‘Abolish’ mutated into ‘defund’; ‘defund’ melted into ‘delay.’”
Many activists now believe that Mr. Chauvin’s conviction ended up restoring faith in the status quo —
at least until the next high-profile case, when the cycle will begin again.
Of all the heartbreaks of Mr. Floyd’s story, the most perverse is this: Winning justice for him may have delayed justice for the rest of us.
Do Zoomers make good colleagues?
The spotlight on generational trends may be obscuring a broader change in employee expectations for more humane hours, safer conditions and fairer treatment.
A revolt, it would seem, is underway against a broken and oppressive corporate culture, but it’s coming from workers of all ages.
What is the future of work?
Employees looking for a drastic change soon realized they would have to make it themselves.
Millions of fed-up workers quit this year — many of them to chase “postpandemic adventure,” memorably dubbed the YOLO economy.
In retrospect, it was mostly C-suite managers who were able to shape the way we did white-collar work;
ordinary employees rarely had a say in the new platforms they had to learn, the dates of their return to office or even the desks they used.
So it’s unsurprising that workers started to care less about futuristic ways to have the same old meetings
and focus more on getting the hell out.
Is anyone going to be named Paul in 8,000 years?
According to the Social Security Administration, maybe not.
Its records show that the popularity of the name has been in more or less steady decline for the past century.
It was No. 252 on the agency’s 2020 list of most popular names for baby boys,
down from 100 in 2000 and 16 in 1965, the year the original “Dune” novel was published.
The 10 fastest-rising boys’ names? Zyair, Jaxtyn, Jakobe, Kylo, Aziel, Ander, Dior, Truett and Karsyn.
For those of us still acclimating to Apple and Blue Ivy, these may take some getting used to.
But, hey, at least it’s not X Æ A-Xii.
Is China heading in a new direction?
To anyone who still believed that the arc of China’s future bent toward liberalization, that economic reform would yield political opening,
the past several months have made clear that the country has swerved off those teleological tracks.
The old laissez-faire “to get rich is glorious” ethos of the Dengist era is out;
highly controlled, top-down “equitable development” is back in.
Is the G.O.P. still the party of Trump?
Occasionally a poll will come along that seems to show limits to the Republican enthusiasm for another Trump campaign, and in the day-to-day he clearly lacks absolute power over his party:
Republicans in Congress feel reasonably comfortable ignoring him on certain votes,
Mitch McConnell continues to bestride the Senate in the face of Mr. Trump’s avowed hatred,
and the former president’s primary endorsees are not all guaranteed victory.
But these concrete limits on Mr. Trump’s influence, often cited this year by observers hoping that his power will slowly ebb, haven’t yet created a situation
in which some other powerful Republican can challenge him directly and expect to succeed.
Should we get rid of the SAT?
The SAT is biased because it is correlated with parental income, but so is the rest of the application packet:
Grade point average, recommendations and personal statements have all been shown to track with class.
Dropping the SAT in the absence of any larger economic reform is a trivial victory and a potential distraction.
As long as economic inequality remains — as long as poor children, who are disproportionately Black, languish in failing schools —
any accurate diagnostic of our students’ abilities will reveal the effects of that inequality.
Removing the diagnosis doesn’t treat the disease.
Should you aspire to be a girlboss?
This year, with the emergence of an updated phrase, “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss,”
it seemed to be employed mostly to lampoon the very type of brazenly ambitious women who popularized it in the first place.
The change in usage took place in tandem with the demise of the girlbosses themselves, as many of the women who once proudly claimed the title have proved to be just as bad as the male C.E.O.s they aimed to replace. An abridged list includes
Steph Korey, a co-founder of the luggage company Away;
Christene Barberich, a co-founder and former editor in chief of Refinery29;
Leandra Medine Cohen, the founder of the fashion blog Man Repeller;
Audrey Gelman, a co-founder and former C.E.O. of the Wing; and
Yael Aflalo, the former C.E.O. and the founder of the clothing brand Reformation.
And, of course, Elizabeth Holmes, whose spectacular downfall may just prove to be the final nail in the coffin of girlbossdom.
Is life better when we’re together?
Humans have an almost unstoppable propensity to clump ourselves together into groups.
We tend to understand this rationally and in flattering terms:
It’s our capacity to form a community and feel invested in that community that allows us to work cooperatively and succeed.
We tell ourselves that we choose to identify with a particular group because that group is meaningful, productive and right.
But fundamentally, banding together may be more of a compulsion than a strategy.
There’s something intoxicating about solidarity itself.
In the early 1970s, the psychologist Henri Tajfel lead a series of studies at the University of Bristol that would become known as “the minimal group experiments.”
[which was deemed as] “among the most important studies in the history of psychology.”
They demonstrate that “the human sense of self — your gravitational center — does not stay in the same place.
With a flip of a coin, people constructed entirely new identities in a matter of minutes.”
this phenomenon is morally neutral.
Togetherness is a fissile material;
we can’t necessarily predict or control what reaction it will set off.
It’s depressing to recognize that community, a powerful tool for solving our most intractable problems, can be a powerful incubator and accelerant of problems, too.
When a system appears to be malfunctioning, indifferent, reckless or corrupt, that’s a kind of disaster, and people are likely to come together and respond, for better or worse.
Some will be volunteers, and some will be vigilantes.
But both may be reacting to a similar feeling of free fall, of tumbling.
This doesn’t make them morally equivalent;
in the end, morality is what keeps them from being equivalent.
I know it’s important to keep drawing that distinction, to keep calling it out. I also know it’s not enough.
Why Content is King: How media creates power
We’re going to analyze media from a systems perspective, and explore the properties that make it a good source of power.
We’ll use my favorite framework, Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers, to structure our exploration
1. Scale Economies
It’s easy to spend more than your competitor on creating content,
but it can be hard to translate that increased investment into predictable increases in value to audiences.
They don’t primarily scale by increasing quantity, they scale by increasing quality. They’re aiming for hits.
And they develop creative ways to reduce that risk by spending more.
2. Network Economies
Ultimately, each new unit of content is a new unit of culture.
The more popular the unit becomes, the more it gets woven into the basic fabric of society, the harder it becomes to avoid knowing it.
3. Counter Positioning
This term is a Hamilton Helmer original, and describes situations where startups have power relative to incumbents,
thanks to a superior business model that can’t be copied without damaging their existing business.
Content can counter-position other content, too.
The incumbents can’t copy the startups’ content, or they’d make the product worse for their existing customers.
4. Switching Costs
This happens in a weird way with content, too.
Imagine how much work they’d have to do to get the same kind of satisfaction from another subject
All their built up knowledge can be leveraged to make future content more meaningful and interesting to them.
Without that history, new subjects just aren’t as compelling.
This whole phenomena is connected to the more general pattern where people tend to have stable interests once they reach adulthood.
And the switching costs get even higher when communities form.
5. Branding
Brands are the sum of the perceptions people have about products and companies.
They can be a source of power in two main situations:
When quality is uncertain, and
especially important in media, because content is, for the most part, consumable.
When people want to associate with the brand in order to signal something about themselves
social signaling is also extremely common in content
Brands are the only way we can reliably navigate to the good stuff.
We tell people about stuff we like in order to communicate something about ourselves, but it only works if other people know what the signal means.
On the other side, one of the main ways people decide what content to consume is by listening to recommendations from people they respect.
So it forms a self-reinforcing cycle that makes some content wildly popular, and keeps other content from spreading.
6. Cornered Resource
This power happens when, for some reason, a business has an exclusive claim to a scarce and valuable resource.
With content, the ultimate cornered resource is creative talent. Creators can’t be separated from their creations.
This strong bond between content and creator is a weakness for many media businesses,
forcing them to pass big chunks of their profits along to talent,
rather than keeping it to themselves like most businesses.
Some media companies manage this problem by devising systems that generate content without relying too much on any particular creator.
The goal is to build a locus of value that lives inside the system, rather than specific individual’s brains.
Other companies exploit this strong linkage by empowering creators to go independent.
7. Process Power
A complex, opaque process to create superior value
The creative process is also incredibly complex and opaque.
Every successful creator has to cultivate their own information ecosystem, prototyping process, and methods for polishing their work.
Conclusion
understand why some media businesses are so much bigger and more profitable than others