Five Things: August 22, 2024
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_ONE
Louisiana 2050: Rising seas will upend life. Time is running out to limit the impact. | Mike Smith
Edwards, a Democrat, leaves office early next year, and the leading candidate to replace him, Attorney General Jeff Landry, has called human-caused climate change a “hoax.” When asked in June, the Republican and Donald Trump acolyte spoke of the need to address land loss and flood risks but declined to say whether his view had changed.
Ten years ago, we begrudgingly gave up on our dream of moving to New Orleans — partly because the post-Katrina school system was such a mess (unless you were rich), and partly because there wasn’t much of a publishing industry there and remote work wasn’t an option, which would have meant a career change for me. In the years since, politics and climate change made it seem like maybe we dodged a bullet, and then COVID came along. When we decided to visit again for my birthday last week, I was prepared for a farewell tour — belated closure for an abandoned dream.
Instead, it took less than 24 hours of walking around to rekindle our love for it, and by the end of the trip (which included a lot more walking, eating, and an impromptu Open House), we were once again trying to figure out if relocating was a realistic option now that schools and remote work aren’t concerns. Politics and climate change are even bigger factors now, and Smith does a great job outlining how the two are uniquely and frustratingly intertwined in Louisiana.
For all of NOLA’s climate concerns, though, it’s worth noting that our part of Northern New Jersey gets its fair share of hurricanes (Ida did as much damage in our area as it did in NOLA), and very recently, tornado warnings have become a common occurrence. It’s not apples-to-apples by any stretch, but if the world as we know it is coming to an end, spending those last days somewhere you truly love is at least worth considering, no?
__TWO
AI on the Horizon | Matt Enis
Notably, during the 2021 presentation, several virtual attendees raised concerns about how Readtelligence might be used for censorship. Although this is speculation on LJ’s part, one issue could be that—given the current book challenge environment that many libraries are facing—an AI tool with these capabilities might also be used to indiscriminately screen out titles that a library board or funding body considers “objectionable,” such as any ebook that might contain LGBTQIA+ content. Some of the most powerful AI tools may have to wait for better times.
This is a deliberately objective piece of trade journalism, outlining the various ways “AI” is being used (or experimented with) by library-adjacent companies, and its only misstep is not explicitly noting how many of these initiatives pre-date the current “AI” hype train, back when it was being called the similarly misleading Machine Learning. Some of the applications are more interesting than others, and some, like Readtellligence, are more troubling, but I appreciate the specificity of most of the examples — even as I vehemently disagree with almost everything they’re trying to accomplish.
Chatbots are the most boring examples, but also have the most potential to cause libraries unnecessary problems if they’re implemented sloppily — which is the case with almost every chatbot currently active. Relying on “AI” to determine which books to acquire or recommend (or suppress) is also a recipe for disaster, because no one’s been able to overcome the inherent bias of the datasets that power these tools — or the programmers creating them — and libraries are already shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to automagically managing hold ratios for ebooks and letting vendors make acquisition and discovery decisions for them.
Enis should have left the publisher example out completely, though, as it’s straight from the “inevitable” script and the lack of specificity is embarrassing when compared to the others. Reading it, I felt bad for the people who work there.
PS: One semi-related angle I’ve been keeping an eye on that doesn’t appear to be getting much media attention is System Pro. They crossed my radar last year via my “discovery” of systems thinking and struck me as a more constructive use of ML, albeit one that’s unlikely to attract huge investment or incredulous buzz since they’re focused on using credible, licensed sources and very narrow, practical use cases. They’ve slightly pivoted a couple of times in who their target audience is (or at least in their pricing strategy for that audience), but their core mission admirably appears to remain the same.
___THREE
You, Me, and Mythology | Preeti Chhibber
Ten years ago, a movie like Monkey Man could easily have slid into the ‘foreign’ category for western audiences – there was (and continues to be) often an instinct of othering and exoticizing stories like the one Patel created and starred in. Instead, it was produced by one of the most recognizable American filmmakers and production houses today: Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw productions.
I’ve known and followed Chhibber for years and still “discovered” two things she’d written that I’d previously missed (a short story in Sword Stone Table: Old Legends, New Voices, now on my TBR; and a review of Raji, now purchased for my Xbox), woven into an excellent essay that also smoothly pitches her newest book. I’m not really the target reader for her fiction (Marvel and YA, specifically), but she’s a smart and funny cultural critic — mostly in micro-bursts on Bluesky — and her relatively new newsletter is always a great read.
In the process of examining how “religion and culture inform the stories” she tells, she weaves together several reference points that were vaguely familiar(ish) to me, and I ended up understanding her a little better as a writer. Suddenly, her novel was a little more interesting to me, too, despite not being my genre at all, and I’d like to believe she sold a lot of other people on pre-ordering it as a result.
Even if it didn’t drive direct sales, it’s a great example of how to do one right for authors fumbling with newsletters. Bonus: she’s not on Substack!
____FOUR
What Clickbait Tells Us About the Evolution of Print and Online Media | Holly Baxter
Decisions are made based on data, rather than vibes. We can talk all day about whether that data may or may not be evil—sometimes it definitely is—but we can’t deny that having some independent arbiter of what does well and who counts as a reader has forced newspapers to become more heterogeneous places.
“Data-informed, never data-driven.” has been my professional tagline for years, and I’ve even considered getting it as a tattoo. My entire career in marketing has been built on understanding how to gather and analyze data — from my early days in old school circulation (aka, subscription or direct marketing) to the various forms of digital marketing that have been built upon that foundation. More importantly, I know how to use data to complement or counter tactics built on vibes.
Baxter’s argument that “clickbait” has a bright side is a provocative one that I was ready to vehemently reject, but she makes a compelling case, particularly for its impact on diversity. On the other hand, we’re all too familiar with the myriad stories of traditional and digital media organizations becoming more diverse, bragging about their expanded reach, until it’s time to boost profits cut expenses and those “diversity initiatives” are the first things to be cut, sometimes conveniently ignoring what the data has to say about it.
Data itself is neither good nor evil, but without a set of clear principles to guide its acquisition, measurement, and analysis, you end up with Buzzfeed, Forbes, and Vice, or even worse, The New York Times.
_____FIVE
Whatever happened to ZESTWORLD; or how to spend $9 million – UPDATED | Heidi MacDonald
A couple of things jump out at me here. One is that no one leaked this to me or any other comics site….and that is rare. No one seems to have mentioned it on social media to the extent that anyone noticed, no subscribers were upset….it just ended. Or as that email put it, “We set out to build digital tools that enable artists to earn income directly from fans. After a little over a year of experimentation, we have not hit on a sustainable monetization model for creators.”
Zestworld’s “failure” isn’t surprising, but as MacDonald graciously concludes, it failed the right way: fast, with no apparent victims. It did blow through its $9M+ investment surprisingly fast, but that’s chump change for investors like Alexis Ohanian and Kevin Lin. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly enough money to build something as ambitious as what they envisioned, especially not from scratch, and especially not if the expectation was “sustainable monetization” in less than three years.
Unlike other recent comics startups (or Substack’s opportunistic PR and lead acquisition stunt), they deserve credit for seemingly trying to solve a tangible problem for creators instead of just building yet another IP factory, doomed storefront, or jumping on the “AI” hype train. In addition to being a comics-centric Patreon + Discord + Comixology, one of their more interesting offerings was a digital commissions tool, which was unfortunately tied to NFTs, presumably hampering one of the rare, potentially sensible implementations of that nonsense.
It also suggests NFTs were the most likely angle for “sustainable monetization” in the initial pitch to investors, and when that ship had clearly sailed, they had nothing else to attract additional investment to allow them to continue iterating on the platform. In light of their newest venture, though, Zestworld’s fast failure might have been the best-case scenario for everyone involved, particularly the creators who lent their credibility to the platform.
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“if the world as we know it is coming to an end, spending those last days somewhere you truly love is at least worth considering, no?”
As someone looking to escape Florida because I fear I won’t live to see it turn progressive, boy. Yes. So much.
On the use of so-called AI for libraries, as for healthcare and government agencies: too many people with the power to make decisions got drunk on the idea of “less work! fool-proof!” and never looked behind the curtain (by hiring unbiased experts not paid to hype the product). Now everyone is stuck trying to make something work that could never have worked, while harming the public and after having fired the workforce who could have prevented it.
“Data itself is neither good nor evil, but without a set of clear principles to guide its acquisition, measurement, and analysis, you end up with Buzzfeed, Forbes, and Vice, or even worse, The New York Times.”
It seems to me that a lot of the people who swear up and down that they make decisions based exclusively on what the data “tells them”, love to ignore that the way they look at those numbers is informed by who they are, both their values and their prejudices.