Weekend Reads (Jan 20): Google, Ello, Movie Stunts, Pitchfork, Marriage
Recommended weekend reading for January 20, 2024.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Google has been the dominant search engine for decades. That influence has had some positive effects but it’s also led to increasingly homogenous website designs and content that are made specifically to rank highly in search results — sometimes to the detriment of human readers.
Google’s outsized influence on how we find things has been 25 years in the making, and the people running businesses online have tried countless methods of getting Google to surface their content. Some business owners use generative AI to make Google-optimized blog posts so they can turn around and sell tchotchkes; brick-and-mortar businesses are picking funny names like “Thai Food Near Me” to try to game Google’s local search algorithm. An entire SEO industry has sprung up, dedicated to trying to understand (or outsmart) Google Search.
The relentless optimizing of pages, words, paragraphs, photos, and hundreds of other variables has led to a wasteland of capital-C Content that is competing for increasingly dwindling Google Search real estate as generative AI rears its head. You’ve seen it before: the awkward subheadings and text that repeats the same phrases a dozen times, the articles that say nothing but which are sprayed with links that in turn direct you to other meaningless pages. Much of the information we find on the web — and much of what’s produced for the web in the first place — is designed to get Google’s attention.
I appreciate some of the influence that Google’s had (e.g., improving page speed and accessibility) but sometimes, I do miss the wild Flash sites that were all the rage in the early ’00s. And when I stumble across a website that’s still using a table-based layout, I sometimes feel like I’ve uncovered a precious relic.
Related: The irony of so many people spending so much time, energy, and money to rank highly on Google is that Google’s search results are getting worse. “The research showed that spam sites are hyper prevalent, showing up at the top of Google’s rankings in what is ‘a constant battle’ between the sites and search engine.”
Andy Baio chronicles the rise and fall of Ello, a social network launched in 2014 as an ad-free — and very idealistic — Facebook alternative that catered to artists and other creatives.
From the moment it launched, I liked Ello and wanted it to succeed. Experimentation in social networks is critically important, and there’s enormous value in making new online communities for creative people. I even loved Ello’s minimalist monochrome design, which some people bounced off of.
But from the moment I read about their seed funding, I worried that they wouldn’t be able to build a long-term sustainable business if they were hooked on professional funding and busy chasing growth.
Via Manton.
Related: Back in 2020, I wrote about AllSocial, a slick-looking social network with conservative political connections that promised free speech and privacy, only to disappear into the ether about a year after its launch.
What, exactly, does it mean for a film to be a “blockbuster” in our current age of Netflix and other streaming services. Keith Phipps considers the case of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon films.
With not as much fanfare as might have been expected, Netflix premiered one of the biggest movies it’s ever produced last month. After an extremely limited theatrical release on December 15, Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire debuted on the service on December 22. Despite scathing reviews, it quickly shot to the top spot on Netflix’s most-watched list. That result seemingly confirmed Netflix’s instincts in letting Zack Snyder create a two-part, big-budget space opera with designs on launching a franchise. Yet every subsequent development, from the film’s fairly rapid descent down the same chart to intangible factors like cultural traction, has muddied up the picture, making Rebel Moon a case study in how the film business defines success in the mid-‘20s, and whether that definition makes any sense. To look at the film from virtually any angle is to be pelted with conflicting data points.
Brandon Streussnig and Bilge Ebiri are proud to announce the nominees for their second annual Stunt Awards.
At the time, 2022 seemed like a watershed year for stunts, with titles like Top Gun: Maverick, RRR, and Everything Everywhere All at Once on everyone’s minds. Well, 2023 was even more so: Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt jumped a motorcycle off a cliff in Norway (well, actually, he did that in 2021, but we finally got to see it this year), and Keanu Reeves’s John Wick fought all of Paris. The action in 2023’s horror movies was spectacular. Even some of the big-budget blockbusters that underperformed had fantastic action sequences. Plus, we had how many racing pictures? And these are just the movies one would expect to have great action sequences. There were also films like Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid and Bottoms — not obvious stunt titles but great stunt pictures all the same.
Not surprisingly, John Wick: Chapter 4 and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One lead the pack, but there are plenty of other worthy titles, as well. The winners will be announced on March 4.
Related: The John Wick movies notable not only for their mind-blowing stunts and action sequences, but also for their increasingly Byzantine mythology.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, but Pitchfork has been one of the biggest and most influential forces in online music journalism since its founding in 1996. But now the site is being folded into GQ (of all places) and much of its staff is either leaving or being laid off.
“Today we are evolving our Pitchfork team structure by bringing the team into the GQ organization. This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” wrote Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer, in the staff memo.
You can read Wintour’s full memo here.
Although I don’t read Pitchfork nearly as much as I once did, this does feel like the end of an era. But there’s still lots of great music writing out there, via sites like Treble, The Quietus, Consequence, Bandcamp Daily, Slicing Up Eyeballs, A Closer Listen, Space Echo, and, of course, Opus.
Related: Casey Newton considers the impact that AI and streaming platforms like Spotify had on Pitchfork. “As consumers of criticism, we came to Pitchfork to ask one question — is this worth listening to? — and got an entire education in return. But once that question lost its meaning, we had fewer and fewer reasons to seek out criticism on a daily basis.”
Also related: Consequence’s Alex Young considers the legacy of Pitchfork as one of its competitors. “While there were many occasions where I rolled my eyes at the snark, scoffed at a review, or yelled into a void because a publicist handed them a premiere over us, my agitation was rooted in a simple desire: to be as good as Pitchfork.”
Ken Fritz spent years and $1 million building the perfect stereo system in his house. But his impressive technical achievement came with a higher cost for his family.
The faded photos tell the story of how the Fritz family helped him turn the living room of their modest split-level ranch on Hybla Road in Richmond’s North Chesterfield neighborhood into something of a concert hall — an environment precisely engineered for the one-of-a-kind acoustic majesty he craved. In one snapshot, his three daughters hold up new siding for their expanding home. In another, his two boys pose next to the massive speaker shells. There’s the man of the house himself, a compact guy with slicked-back hair and a thin goatee, on the floor making adjustments to the system. He later estimated he spent $1 million on his mission, a number that did not begin to reflect the wear and tear on the household, the hidden costs of his children’s unpaid labor.
This is a fascinating story that veers from impressive, even awe-inspiring, to tragic and heartbreaking in just a few paragraphs.
There’s frivolous, and then there’s frivolous. Case in point, one video game developer is taking action against another developer because their respective logos both use the same letter.
Take-Two, which owns Rockstar, has filed a trademark dispute against Remedy, claiming that the ‘R’ is too similar to Rockstar’s — which features an ‘R’ with a white star attached. Other than the fact that both involve a capitalised ‘R’ (because, you know, that’s what their names start with), the similarities seem pretty non-existent. So it’s no surprise that Twitter (sorry, X) users are already speculating that Rockstar doesn’t stand a chance here.
Via TLDR Design. What makes this story even stranger is that both companies are currently working together on a remaster of the first two Max Payne games.
Dr. David L. Mills, the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), died earlier this week at the age of 85. You may have never heard of NTP, but without it, the modern internet wouldn’t be able to function.
Dr. Mills created the Network Time Protocol (NTP) in 1985 to address a crucial challenge in the online world: the synchronization of time across different computer systems and networks. In a digital environment where computers and servers are located all over the world, each with its own internal clock, there’s a significant need for a standardized and accurate timekeeping system.
NTP provides the solution by allowing clocks of computers over a network to synchronize to a common time source. This synchronization is vital for everything from data integrity to network security. For example, NTP keeps network financial transaction timestamps accurate, and it ensures accurate and synchronized timestamps for logging and monitoring network activities.
When you stop and think about it, the ability to send and receive information around the world in an instant is mind-blowing, like something truly out of a sci-fi novel. And how many individuals — individuals, like Dr. Mills, who are probably unknown to the general public — have made it a reality? Heroes, every one of them.
One of the original selling points of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is that it would be truly secure and private. Nobody — like, say, the government — would be able to track what your activity on the blockchain. But then a young mathematician discovered that was far from the truth.
When she had started that process of probing the Bitcoin ecosystem, Meiklejohn had seen her work almost as anthropology: What were people doing with bitcoin? How many of them were saving the cryptocurrency versus spending it? But as her initial findings began to unfold, she had started to develop a much more specific goal, one that ran exactly counter to crypto-anarchists’ idealized notion of bitcoin as the ultimate privacy-preserving currency of the dark web: She aimed to prove, beyond any doubt, that bitcoin transactions could very often be traced. Even when the people involved thought they were anonymous.
Finally, Alisa Ruddell reviews Marcia A. Zug’s history of marriage in America.
You’ll Do demonstrates that, by marrying the right person at the right time, Americans have acquired things like status, wealth, safety, racial equality, citizenship, and parental rights. On the other hand, things like deportation, discrimination, stigma, and criminal conviction for rape, prostitution, domestic violence, and even murder, have been evaded with a well-timed “I do.”
I never knew that American marriages had such a checkered history, that the laws we crafted to protect women and children, and to uphold certain moral norms and ideals, were so wrought with loopholes, prejudices, and perverse incentives that Zug’s book — packed as it is with old court cases and dry statistics — would read like a fusion of thriller and tabloid. I was shocked by how often I was shocked.
And here’s part two of her review.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, podcasts, and sneak previews. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.