Boomer Sway
You gotta move.
Last night we did the boomer sway to Paul Simon at Forest Hills Stadium. Simon did the respectful-artist thing, indulging himself with new material, then indulging us with the glorious hits. His 84-year-old voice struggled to keep up with the splendor of the songs. Now and then, his wife, Edie Brickell, 24 years his junior, stepped in to provide support. The 12-piece band was tighter than yoga pants. I longed to hear them rip the entirety of Graceland.
His observational songwriting transcends by lingering in the ordinary, occasionally reaching the surreal. Like the song “René and Georgette Magritte with Their Dog After the War,” where Simon imagines the two lovers, swaying romantically to doo-wop records in private, betraying their cultivated art-world exterior.
No need for stupid AI comparisons here. If we are swaying nostalgically to AI artists in 50 years, we deserve enslavement.
In other positive AI news, technology is opening up an entire lane of innovation for news people. Tech is no longer a barrier to making post-text, data-rich, interactive thingies. Which means the landscape is flattening for local news orgs who can now innovate alongside well-funded biggies like the New York Times. We talk about this with Bridget Williams on the pod. Go get ’em.
As proof of the potential of a dummy with newfangled tools, I have continued to fiddle with PvA Field Notes (pvanotes.com). The journey is teaching me a lot about variants of feed / chat experiences and the importance of UX considerations that differentiate each. Text, WhatsApp, Slack, X and Discord all exist in the same primordial social slime, but each has evolved different appendages to own unique parts of the ecosystem. I aspire to create a post / chat hybrid, a place to drop a link or a thought for collective teardown. The SMS extension is essential connective tissue to hold the group together.
Field Notes is the exoskeleton of our little media experiment. A place where you can see the nuggets we are picking out of the soup. You can learn alongside, while helping us metabolize more effectively. Metaphorical infractions!
Importantly, it is forcing me to reconsider the role of Substack. I don’t really care about the Substack ecosystem, though I admire how it has broadened the social remit of the email service provider. For me, it is just an easy way to send out emails, though I suppose we do benefit from the network. I see a near future where we administer most of our email and text outreach through our own platform. It’s never been easier to roll yer own.
Sorry to ramble about swamps and such. Great episode this week. Have a listen.
Pod: Protecting Alpha
Out FRIDAY 6 AM EST Apple | Spotify | Substack
This week, we discuss why the AI safety narrative is shifting from doomerism to the risk of AI eliminating both companies’ and individuals’ alphas, or what makes them unique and confers on them an advantage over the rest of the crowd. For companies, that means assessing whether to trust big AI companies with their proprietary data, and for individuals it means not outsourcing critical thought to a robot everyone else has. Plus: Why Xbox hit a wall, publishers pivot again to video, and the World Cup’s heroes and villains. On PvA OT, Hearst Newspapers chief product & strategy officer Bridget Williams discusses how to make local news a utility.