You’re being encouraged to liquidate. Maybe you’ve noticed. I first noticed this metaphor - that all our potential thoughts, feelings and attempts at expressing the sublime are like illiquid assets locked up in a box waiting to be smashed open by certain technologies for financial gain - earlier this year when VC and media founder Sam Lessin cited it as the primary use case for crypto."Bring liquidity to the vast majority of human assets. (And in the process make them all more valuable)," Lessin wrote. "Most things people own...have shit access to liquidity. ...Crypto smart-contracting platforms can fix this."But the forces encouraging you to liquidate (VCs, media, AI startups) seemed to coalesce around that image this week. First was James Duesterberg's very thoroughly reported and brilliantly written deep dive into the purposefully mysterious internet startup Urbit and the people attracted to it. Famously cagey about defining themselves, Duesterberg actually seemed to capture one Urbit evangelist, Justin Taylor, summing up the project.
"The key is something Justin kept calling 'cultural liquidity.'""This seemed to mean the ability to monetize something unique—an idea, talent or style—and turn it into a commodity," Duesterberg wrote. "OnlyFans, Soundcloud, Substack, Instagram: whatever kind of 'content' you produced, the middleman was disappearing. With Urbit, this disintermediation could go further, getting rid of the rent-seeking platforms and allowing you to host the content yourself and use crypto to monetize it, thereby 'bootstrapping your own cultural liquidity.'"Then, Ben Thompson weighed in on AI art, claiming that there's a different bottleneck at the point of "substantation" of content. Literally, people have ideas but are too lazy to turn them into a picture or a book. AI will liquidate all those ideas. "I would argue that not just the quantity but, in absolute terms, the quality of content available to every single person in the world is dramatically higher than it was before the distribution bottleneck was removed," Thompson wrote "It seems obvious that removing the substantiation bottleneck from ideas will result in more good ones as well."Thompson speaks of a coming flood.
You see media companies trying to liquidate your fandom. You see gaming platforms trying to liquidate your virtual labor. The most subversive thing one can do, then, is not to flood the world with an edgy Instagram or Substack, but rather to pour out thoughts only to those friends and family who are present in reality. Of course, this is nearly impossible.
What you don't need to know
Kim Kardashian's willingness to post about a portfolio company is now a differentiator for a private equity firm. (WSJ)
Ben Smith's Sunday night ex-NYT media column returns. (Puck)
Evan Spiegel had to kill Snap's flying drone camera. (The Verge)
Cursed article. (NYT)
“They don’t vet Launch House members at all,” said a former member. “They look at our name, our website, and how many Twitter followers we have and then looked at our company website to make sure we had a company website and didn’t do any further investigation.” (Vox)
Kourtney Kardashian's excruciatingly cloying line of "gummies" is called Lemme, as in Lemme Chill, Lemme Focus and Lemme Matcha(?). (WSJ)
Digging up dirt on a man named Mudge doesn't sound so hard. (TNY)
What you need to know
China plans to boost investment in digital humans. (Rest of World)
"LinkedIn reports August enrollment in its two most popular business etiquette courses was up 127% year over year." (WSJ)
"In New York...the number of people the [advertising] industry employed in July surpassed a pre-pandemic high to hit a record 85,700." (FT)
Olivia Nuzzi and Andrew Rice on the Hunter Biden laptop. (NYM)
Bob Chapek gets booed at Disney. (NYT)
And says that Disney+ will be the consumer portal to the company's Metaverse content. (Deadline)
Which just might look like this. (Twitter)
Ari Emanuel promises that we won't run out of content. (THR)
It looks like we are due for a new top fitness trend. (WSJ)
Mr. Beast launches a private equity firm, Night Capital. (NYT)
Go see Kor Skeete from "The Rehearsal" at Alligator Lounge Monday. (Instagram)