Five Things: November 21, 2024
This is my bi-weekly “newsletter” delivered straight to your inbox, with at least one guaranteed typo I’ll catch after hitting send! If email’s not your thing, don’t hesitate to switch to the RSS feed. I encourage you to click through the main links (there’s only five and they’re all interesting!), and if you enjoy something — send me (or them) an email, leave a comment, or hit the socials!
NOTE: I skipped last week because I was burned out from the election results and had a ridiculously busy stretch at work, and this week hasn’t been any better, so I almost skipped another week. I realized the slippery slope that would have led to, though, and had some good links to share, so here they are with limited commentary this time around.
_ONE
Forget about EV range—and focus on this instead | David Zipper
New EV owners who pay more for a vehicle with extended range are likely to find they seldom use it, and those initially excited about blazing acceleration will discover it is impractical. Meanwhile, automakers focused on those metrics will design bigger, heavier cars that are more expensive, environmentally harmful, and dangerous.
Automotive advertising occasionally gets compared to the old days of Big Tobacco, partly because it’s so effective at glamorizing and reinforcing bad habits. Zipper is always a must-read, and this analysis of the marketing for 2023’s 10 most popular EV models is like he’s writing specifically for me!
RELATED: The War on Cars, Should SUV Ads Be Banned?
__TWO
Forget Gladwell | W. David Marx
If he actually thought about his “social epidemic” idea for more than a few seconds and read widely on the topic, he’d also conclude that it’s a terrible metaphor for social change, and that would be the end of The Tipping Point. So he runs his nonfiction career in the Theranos model: We’ve come this far convincing people of our genius, so no time for doubt! Just run with it!
Gladwell has always been an overrated hack, so it’s been delightful seeing him get belatedly raked over the coals the past few weeks. Marx nails the underlying problem, and it’s a great complement to If Books Could Kill’s hilarious episode on Outliers.
RELATED: Many, many years ago, I found myself surprisingly aligned with Gladwell as he took down an even bigger charlatan: Chris Anderson. Seth Godin, of whom I was still a big fan of at the time, caught a stray that turned out to be an omen of his eventual unveiling, too.
___THREE
Don’t call it a Substack. | Anil Dash
We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.
Being a Nazi Bar is an egregious enough offense, but my original complaint about Substack was how they’d successfully convinced people to promote their brand, saying “my Substack” instead of “my newsletter.” Media coverage was similarly complicit, frequently heralding them as the latest disruptor of the publishing industry every time some B-list author or disgruntled journalist launched a newsletter. Dash nicely unpacks that nonsense.
RELATED: It’s been amazing and disappointing to see the cognitive dissonance on display from writers belatedly abandoning Twitter while simultaneously promoting their Substack. #cmonson
____FOUR
Bluesky and enshittification | L. Rhodes
True, the recent announcement of a funding round by Blockchain Capital is a big, red warning flag. But while the announcement does herald an eventual pivot, we shouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon. If anything, Bluesky will probably look and feel increasingly great for some time to come.
Bluesky is officially the new shiny as Musk apparently crossed yet another red line that was finally too egregious for another large group of people to tolerate any longer. I’ve been lurking there for a little more than a year now and have been dismayed to see so many people fast-forwarding the worst practices that paved the way for Twitter’s downfall (long before Musk got involved), despite some of Bluesky’s admirable attempts to learn from past mistakes.
I get its appeal, though, and the comics and librarian communities appear to be embracing it, so I’ve resigned myself to accepting I’ll have to focus on it for the day job. I’m still prioritizing Mastodon as my primary social platform for personal use and, more importantly, prioritizing my mental health by limiting how much and often I’m engaging on either of them.
_____FIVE
Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive | Darius Kazemi
This even works if you only have access to your website through something like cPanel. Basically if the way you update your website is by uploading files to a web host, then this solution is a good one for you! Once it’s uploaded, there is a styles.css file that should be pretty easy to modify if you want to customize things.
When I finally deleted my Twitter account in 2023, it hurt. 14 years, 50k+ posts, and my primary day-to-day connection to dozens of friends, colleagues, and news sources disappeared — and this time, it was me pulling the plug on purpose. Fortunately, I’d downloaded my archive, hoping someone would eventually figure out a way to make it accessible that didn’t involve me having to do my own coding. All hail, Kazemi!
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