Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/27 – More Buzzfeed News, If You Can Believe It

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

What can make Buzzfeed hit our headlines two days in a row? How about jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon? Amazon is apparently launching a major NFT project, like it’s 2021 or something. Is Stripe going to be our big tech IPO savior? And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: NFTTallinn.com and code RIDE for 10% of all tickets (Listener ad!) Radial.llc/ride (Listener ad!) Links: BuzzFeed to Use ChatGPT Creator OpenAI to Help Create Quizzes and Other Content (WSJ) Amazon NFT Initiative Coming Soon: Exclusive (Blockworks) Stripe Sets One-Year Timetable to Decide on Going Public (WSJ) Longreads The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (Wired) The Chess World’s New Villain: A Cat Named Mittens (WSJ) Welcome to the Shoppy Shop (Grub Street) The Disappearance of the Ashtray (Clive Thompson) Why Not Mars (Idle Words) RSVP For The Listener Meetup Tickets For The Comedy Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme right home for Friday, January 27th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. What can make BuzzFeed hit our headlines two days in a row? How about jumping on the chat GPT bandwagon? Amazon is apparently jumping on the NFT bandwagon in a major way, like it's 2021 or something.

Is Stripe going to be our big tech IPO savior? And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. In nearly five years of doing this show, I don't think we'd, ever done a segment on BuzzFeed before yesterday, and now we've got BuzzFeed two days in a row. The Wall Street Journal says BuzzFeed plans to rely on OpenAI to enhance its quizzes and personalize its content, while the humans at BuzzFeed are there to offer ideas, cultural currency, and inspired prompts, which is a bunch of euphemisms for chat GPT is going to be doing their listicles now. Bad news if you were in the listicle writing industry, which, to be fair, you got to figure was a

sent first job or first rung on the ladder for people starting out at BuzzFeed. Quote, in a memo to staff sent Thursday morning, which was reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, chief executive Jonah Paredes said he intends for AI to play a larger role in the company's editorial and business operations this year. In one instance, the company said new AI-powered quizzes would produce individual results. For example, a quiz to create a personal romantic comedy movie pitch might ask questions like pick a trope for your rom-com and tell us an enduring flaw you have. The quiz would produce a unique, shareable write-up based on the individual's responses, BuzzFeed said. Mr. Peretti expects AI to assist the creative process

and enhance the company's content, while humans play the role of providing ideas, cultural currency, and, quote, inspired prompts, he wrote in his memo. In 15 years, he wrote, he expects AI and data to help, quote, create, personalize, and animate the content itself rather than just curate existing content. BuzzFeed, which went public in late 2021 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Last year, moved to shrink its news division as it sought to make the business profitable and said it would be doubling its creator network. The company is getting paid millions of dollars by Facebook parent meta platforms to help generate creator content for Facebook and Instagram. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. BuzzFeed shares more

than doubled in value Thursday, closing at $2.9. The stock remains down over 75%. since the company went public. BuzzFeed remains focused on human-generated journalism in its newsroom, a spokeswoman said Thursday, end quote. Sources are telling Blockworks that Amazon plans to launch an NFT initiative this April and has looked at layer one blockchains to partner with to create what apparently is going to focus on a big blockchain-based gaming initiative, but also a digital asset exchange. quote, Amazon's focus is primarily on blockchain-based gaming and related NFT applications, two sources said. One example in the works per one source, getting Amazon customers to play crypto games and claim free

NFTs in the process. The effort is still developing sources said, April appears to have been penciled in for the e-commerce giant to make its bold crypto ambitions public. Amazon coming into the space is a big one for crypto for many different reasons, one source said. We knew it was possible, the source said, but now it seems like it's really happening. That's going to affect the existing players in the space, if they execute and do this right and are smart about it, end quote. Amazon executives leading the push reached out to at least one family office in recent months. One of the sources said, editor's note here, I'm assuming that means the family office of an artist. Quoting again, at the time, the plan in its earlier iteration was to do at least one NFT drop with an

established artist, the same source said. Amazon's Web3 blueprint appears to have significantly evolved since. It wasn't immediately clear who in terms of personnel is leading Amazon's NFT initiative. Details about the platform, which would include certain NFT gaming initiatives are still unfolding. But two sources said the platform is set to run out of Amazon proper, rather than its popular web hosting platform Amazon Web Services, end quote. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison have told Stripe staff that their goal is to take Stripe public or, at least let employees sell shares in private markets within the next year. Quoting the journal.

Stripe hired Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase to advise it on both options, the people said. Stripe's last fundraising nearly two years ago valued the company at $95 billion. More recently, Stripe had approached investors, including Berkshire Hathaway, about raising at least $2 billion in fresh cash at a valuation of $55 to $60 billion, people familiar with the matter said. The money would have gone to cover a large tax bill associated with some employee stock units. The people said it couldn't be learned whether the talks are still active. A Stripe stock market listing could help revive an initial public offering market that went dormant in 2022. Traditional IPOs in the U.S. raised just $8.6 billion in the whole of 2022, less than any other year in at least two decades, according to

deal logic. Strip probably wouldn't conduct a traditional IPO, though, because it doesn't need to raise additional capital, the company would likely pursue a direct listing, the people said. In a direct listing, a company places existing shares on a public exchange and lets the market determine the price. Unlike a traditional IPO, the company doesn't choose the price of the shares or who gets to buy them, and it typically doesn't raise any money. Those selling stock in a direct listing are usually employees or other early investors. Stripe is also part of an older generation of Silicon Valley startups that are facing pressure to give employees the chance to sell their shares. Many private companies that decided not to mount public listings last year were forced to find new ways to keep employees who now must hold on to their shares motivated, end quote.

I recorded the long read segment you're about to hear last night, and of course I forgot to include the one long read I didn't want to forget. But in a way, this is better because I can highlight this one a little better. It's maybe the most important long read I've ever shared. When I first read it, I was sitting there pumping my fists in the air with every single. sentence. It's from Corey Doctoro, and it's called the inshidification of TikTok. And it's about TikTok, yes, and social platforms, but it also gets into all the tech platforms and how they go stale. Amazon, Google, complaints we've voiced about them lately, too. Seriously, I really could quote this entire thing to you, but let me just give you the first couple paragraphs and then promise

me you'll read the whole thing, even if you've never read a long read before. Please read this one. It's so, so good, quote. Here is how platforms die. First, they are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die. I call this in shittification.

And it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value combined with the nature of a two-sided market where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever larger share of the value that passes between them, end quote. I'm for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, we've been speaking about AI, and, you know, AI first burst onto the public consciousness, what, 20, 25 years ago, largely through chess, right? Well, from the Wall Street Journal, a look at Mittens, a ruthless chess.com bot with a kitten

avatar that was only introduced back on January 1st, but is driving more people to play on the website than ever before. Quote, since Chess.com introduced this bot with the avatar of a cuddly big-eyed kitten on January 1st, the obsession with playing her has been astonishing. Mittens has crashed the website through its sheer popularity and helped drive more people to play chess than even the Queen's Gambit. Chess.com has averaged 27.5 million games played per day in January. and is on track for more than 850 million games this month,

40% more than any month in the company's history. A video that American Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura posted on YouTube titled Mittens, the Chess Bot Will Make You Quit Chess, has already racked up more than 3 million views. This bot is a psycho, the streamer and international master Levy Rosman tweeted after a vicious checkmate this month. A day later, he added, The chess world has to unite against Mittens.

He was joking, mostly. This particular bot was the brainchild of a Hamilton college student named Willowellon, who Moonlights as a creative strategy lead. He had a crazy idea. What if they put an incredibly strong bot behind some devastatingly cute eyes? Then Mittens was born, Whalen says. But Mittens didn't become a brutal troll until a chess.com writer named Sean Becker led a team that developed Mittens' personality to become the evil genius tormenting chess players everywhere.

Part of why Mittens has become such a notorious villain is because she acts like one. I am inevitable. I am forever. Meow. He-he. Mittins tells her opponents in the chat function of games, end quote. Then the Instagramification of the world continues apace from Grub Street. Why does the interior of every store suddenly look the same? Quote, Big Knight touts itself as a jewel box of a shop that carries pantry items from all. all over the world, tableware, condiments, and yes, olive oil. It's the kind of store that gave rise to the great tinned fish renaissance of the late teens. It offers all the essentials you need for a fabulous dinner party, including this $145 pitcher. But more than anything, Big Night feels like a place where you can touch all of the products you see on Instagram. Neil Shankar, a designer at

the company formerly known as Square, has a term for these types of stores, shoppy shops. He told me the name resonated on his TikTok page, which dissects the consumer packaged goods industry. Quote, there didn't really seem to be a name for all these artisanal markets that are popping up that carry these brands, he said. You could walk into any one of these shoppy shops, and you'd see Graza, you'd see Brightland, you'd see Diaspora, you'd see Fishwife. So there is kind of this symbiotic relationship between these modern brands and the curated shops that carry them, end quote. Next, every so often, there are stories about how wild it was or is, or in retrospect, was that when I was a kid, you could smoke cigarettes anywhere on airplanes, in the mall, all through the 80s, at least in the main walkways of the mall. You could smoke on the benches. What about

the ashtrays next to those benches? What about the ashtrays in our houses? In our living room, my living room as a child growing up, there were ashtrays, even though When I was a kid, I had asthma. So if you lit up in my house, you were basically a real jerk. I guess it was that 70s and 80s sitcom fear that one day the boss might come for a visit or the priest, and you would need to cater to his every need, even the need to smoke. Well, from Clive Thompson, the humble ashtray. It used to be a piece of furniture, a designed piece of the domestic space, a thing of beauty and taste, and now it's gone. Quote, To our contemporary eye, perhaps the most surreal thing was that kids in elementary school would, as part of arts and crafts, routinely make an ashtray for our parents.

If your class was doing a segment on clay or ceramics, everyone would have to figure out, huh, what should I make? A pencil holder? A paperweight? Perhaps an even more mystifying artifact to the youth of today. No. Instead, easily two-thirds of the class would decide that, hey, mom needs another ashtray. After decades of gorgeous design and pride of place in homes, the most common ashtray in America these days is the sidewalk, end quote. And finally today, I'm going to get super counter-conventional wisdom here. I love space. I love it as much as the next person. I think space is cool. Space tech is cool.

Going to space is cool. But this piece from a guy whose name I can't pronounce, but his blog is called idle words, has totally convinced me we shouldn't send humans to Mars. at least not right now. Maybe ever, though. I know this is super provocative, super against the prevailing conventional wisdom, but read the piece. It's a long one, but I challenge you to disprove it. The thrust of the idea is simple. There's no reason to send people to Mars. Most of what we would do once we got there would be done with robots anyway, and those can be controlled remotely from Earth. So why should we be sending people to Mars to control robots with, you know, joysticks that will be hard to use because they'll be wearing spacesuits?

Humans on Mars would basically be like if fish decided to explore the land, but they'd have to stay inside their fishbowl and never really do anything, never touch anything, never actually be there because they'd be inside their fishbow. In fact, the entire thrust of the enterprise, all of the resources and most of the functionality of what we would be doing on Mars would be to just keep the people alive, sort of like keeping fish alive inside an aquarium. So seriously, what's the point? Quote, 50 years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space.

Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude, while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1916, or for that matter, 1060. Today's automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less to send, though it's hard to be exact since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972. The imbalance between human and robot is so overwhelming that despite the presence of a $250 billion international space station national laboratory, every major discovery made in space this century has come from robotic spacecraft.

In 2023, we simply take it for granted that if a rocket goes up carrying passengers, it's not going to get any work done. As for that space station, the jewel of human spaceflight, it exists in a state of nearly perfect theological closure. Its only purpose being to teach its creators how to build future spacecraft like it. The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves. At 22 years old, the ISS is still as dependent on fresh meals and clean laundry sent from home

as the most feckless grad student, end quote. Basically, you send people to Mars, and once there, they do nothing because they can't do anything except try to stay alive inside their bubble, their aquarium. We could do that at the bottom of the ocean, too. We might learn more. The other interesting thing to think about is we'd also on Mars be spending a bunch of time making sure we didn't contaminate it. Now that we know there's basically microbial life everywhere on Mars, we'd be trying hard not to seed it with our own alien microbes. Although, of course, the argument is maybe life on Earth was seeded from Martian microbes, but that's another story. Anyway, quoting from the conclusion, one path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past 50 years and go explore the hell out of space with robots. This future is available to us right now. Simply redirecting the $11.6 billion budget for human spaceflight

would be enough to staff up the jet propulsion laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year. It would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history. A different path forward would take us to Mars, the slow, dangerous, and hard way. It would take decades and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It requires developing a solipsistic that can't take us anywhere else except Venus, and it's not guaranteed to work. If there's a reason this plan is better than going exploring, NASA should articulate it to the people who are going to be paying the bill, end quote. Yeah, let's go mine some asteroids. At least we know there's stuff there we could use. All right, as soon as I hit publish on this bad boy,

I'm on my way to the airport to head to San Francisco. So for the very last time, the two bottom links in the show notes today are first the link to RSVP for the listener meetup tomorrow night and the second is a link to tickets for the comedy show tomorrow night. Talk to y'all on Monday, but for some of you, see you soon. By the way, here's a quick joke from my boy, Max. I would the bug, um, what? Try it. Why would the bug, bug, bug a bug? What? It wanted to.