We're back. Meta is for losers, how Facebook and Twitter buried the hatchet, the best videos from the past few weeks, the case of the Pole Assassin, a fashion intervention for NBA coaches, and more.
I want to thank Will deFries and Logan Lewis for guest-editing the newsletter over the past three weeks. The fellas did a great job.
I am back from my honeymoon and back in the saddle. We’re a little scattershot this week, but I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, please share with a friend or coworker.
From Ted Gioria’s substack, “The Honest Broker” comes this analysis of Facebook’s big move to Meta.
Unless you live in a cave far beyond the reach of social media, you must have heard that Facebook is changing its name to Meta. What’s harder to understand is why. Or what it means for the platform’s 3 billion users.
True, companies often change their name, but rebrandings of this sort frequently have unintended consequences, even destructive ones. And what Zuckerberg did is especially risky. He’s giving a hitherto successful company the name of an unproven project: Meta, his futuristic dream of creating a metaverse, a kind of immersive alternative reality for web users.
The usual approach is to make sure an idea works before changing the company’s name. Zuckerberg’s lack of caution in this regard is tantamount to betting the business on his pet project.
I think he is making the wrong bet here. I’m not saying that the metaverse will be a total failure—in fact, I can imagine some consumers embracing it with enthusiasm. But these won’t be the cool kids who wear the hottest new fashions and buy the trendiest new gadgets.
Instead, the Metaverse will almost certainly become associated with losers.
Sounds about right to me. Gioria continues:
There’s something strange and unnatural about living in the Matrix, and there’s a good reason why alternative realities have been prominent in so many dystopian science fiction films. When you see these movies, you feel pity for the people who live plugged into their fake world. No matter how realistic the metaverse, you will never completely overcome that sense of pity and aversion.
Will people take the bait?
Certainly a few will. Or maybe even a lot. But they won’t be elite trendsetters and fashionable influencers. They will be nerds and incels and the most disgruntled members of society, each desperate for escape.
Somehow, it gets worse. And dark.
And users will look creepy too. You need to lock yourself into a headset to get the full benefit of the metaverse—and there’s no way that Zuckerberg can make that look cool. The people who spend hour after hour in his metaverse will be the subject of jokes and mockery.
And that will create a vicious circle, making these Matrix-ites even more obsessed with hiding from a real world that mocks them. I hate to say it, but I can already anticipate stories about drug addiction and suicide correleated with metaverse immersion.
On Wednesday, Instagram delivered an announcement nine years in the making. Since 2012, Instagram photos shared to Twitter have appeared only as plain text links. From now on, Instagram links will include a preview of the image — just as they did before Instagram sold to Facebook, and competitive pressures and professional rivalries combined to worsen our collective user experience.
The path to peace involved wine, pizza, and backyard dealmaking — but to really appreciate what happened, you have to start at the moment everything fell apart.
When it launched in October 2010, Instagram was maybe the easiest way to share photos to Twitter.
That all began to change in April 2012, when Facebook bought Instagram for $715 million. A few months later, Twitter blocked Instagram’s access to its following graph, preventing users from quickly finding their friends there.
Then, in December, Facebook retaliated: photos shared from Instagram would no longer appear in the Twitter timeline. As Sarah Frier recounts in her book No Filter, Facebook executives believed enabling photo previews was only helping Twitter to grow and increase its available ad inventory.
So how did this get solved? Pizza, wine, and sausages.
Falck reached out to his old friend Shah to see if he and their bosses would be amenable to a parley. It was May, and COVID anxieties in the Bay Area were still simmering. And so instead of meeting at a restaurant, the foursome met up for pizza in Falck’s backyard.
“We had some wine, we had some sausages, and then I finally brought it up,” Beykpour said.
In the end, though, the only thing thing that was truly needed to end the Instagram-Twitter feud was time — and a willingness to put users’ needs ahead of strategic anxieties.
“People don’t live on one product,” Beykpour said, noting the Twitter had also launched an integration with Snapchat last December. “They’re navigating in between them. So making those making those traversals feel convenient and colorful, I think, is important.”
An assortment of videos and other things I enjoyed the past few weeks
This video of Knicks fans after game one of the NBA season
Extremely NSFW. You’ve almost certainly seen this by now, but please, watch it again. It’s a masterpiece.
Tom Campbell, a Texas sports photographer and former USA Today stringer, tweeted on Monday what he had heard: Texas Longhorns special teams and tight ends coach Jeff Banks’s monkey had attacked a trick-or-treating child on Halloween. “The monkey’s jaws apparently had to be pried off the small child,” Campbell wrote.
Banks’s partner is named Danielle, and was at one point a stripper nicknamed “Pole Assassin,” and she performed on The Jerry Springer Show a few years ago.
By this point, you’re probably wondering, When do we get to the monkey? Right now. Pole Assassin used to perform with a Panamanian white-faced capuchin named Gia.
Danielle used her Twitter account to set the record straight, then nuked everything after a couple of hours, so you’ll have to rely on these screenshots and a video.
She blamed an 11 or 12-year-old for being bit by her monkey!
In the Before Times, most NBA coaches had a wardrobe deal with Men’s Wearhouse and a master tailor, Joseph Abboud, to customize their suits. Now, they are styling themselves as though they have to hop on Zoom at any minute: an untucked quarter-zip pullover, a pair of presentable pants only because the camera may accidentally pan down and some rubber-soled sneakers. Their new look is glam enough to pass for a high school administrator — they can probably draw up an ATO play and proctor an ACT exam at the same time.
They’ve been dressing like nobody is watching since the league restarted in July 2020. Those games were put on inside empty gymnasiums, and the bubblelike atmosphere called for a more relaxed attire. By the start of the 2020-21 season, the advocates for comfort had grown in number. And though normalcy in sports, or what was left of it, has returned, NBA coaches are still shunning the former formality of their wardrobes. They’re not just stripping away their suits; they’re losing the tradition of dressing like grown-ups who care.
Theirs is a pandemic chic. The haute couture of polyester and wrinkle-free pants. And it makes me long for the days when the NBA sidelines showed a touch of class.
Me too.
I miss pocket squares and plaid sport coats. My kingdom for the rare sighting of a monogrammed “LV” necktie hanging down a dress shirt of the coach who appreciates understated but classic luxury. Shoot, at this point, can we just bring back the days of shirts with collars?
That was when NBA coaches abided by a code. The league required coaches to wear dress shirts and sport coats for games. But wearing mandatory suits for 82 games can be costly, so in 2008, the NBCA brokered a deal with Abboud and Men’s Wearhouse to provide at least 10 custom looks free to the coaches who wanted them.
“You’ve got the entire coaching staff, training staff, strength and conditioning staff all dressed the same way on the bench,” Carlisle continued. “To me, it’s a very good look. So I certainly see the merits of staying the way we are, but it’s going to be a conversation on a year-to-year basis with the league to see how it goes next year.”
Try as Carlisle might to champion for the casual, there’s a reason ZZ Top never sang: “Every girl crazy ’bout a Dri-FIT polo.”
Of course, NBA coaches aren’t the only ones dressed down. We all are.
Like NBA coaches, we used to dress for the occasion. But almost two years into a global pandemic that has drastically altered the life we used to know, those of us still working from home have redefined the look of business attire. One that consists of an old pair of sweats and a college hoodie. One that screams: I woke up like this. No, really. I literally just rolled out of bed.
The bottom line:
These are professional adults, well-compensated, serving as the front-facing leaders of major organizations. They should dress like it.
Note: Recipe Corner returns next week. We’ll be going hard on Thanksgiving recipes in this space in the future as well. Thank you for reading.
