Seinfeld: Movies Are Over
Every month, High Lantern Group gathers a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you - and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.
Six Ideas That Made Us Think
1. Musical Dinosaurs
Spotify’s new AI-powered DJ is meant to analyze your tastes to help you discover new music. To the chagrin of Daniel Parris, the app only confirmed that his musical choices have barely changed in a decade:
I am 31, apparently on the precipice of becoming a musical dinosaur. I like to think I'm special—that my high-minded dedication to culture makes me an exceptionally unique snowflake—but apparently, I'm just like everybody else. I turned 30, and now I'm in a musical rut, content to have an AI bot DJ pacify me with the songs of my youth.
2. The Father of American Conspiracy Theories
In the 1950s, Paul Linebarger was a US Army PsyOps specialist who moonlighted as a sci-fi writer. These twin pursuits, according to Annalee Newitz in The Atlantic, helped Linebarger develop a theory of psychological warfare that drew heavily on storytelling. It also created a distinct approach to US propaganda:
Propaganda was like advertising in a popular magazine: It should push one simple message, in a persuasive and seductive style. This makes an instructive contrast with what the Rand Corporation has called Russia’s Soviet-derived “firehose of falsehood” strategy, whereby operatives inundate the media with lies and chaotic, contradictory stories to undermine the public’s faith in all information sources. If Russia’s motto is, in effect, “Believe nothing,” America’s has been “Believe us.”
3. Nobody’s Reading Your Book
The anti-trust lawsuit that stopped the merger of Penguin and Simon Schuster speaks volumes about the state of the publishing industry: 50 percent of books published sell fewer than a dozen copies; most books sell fewer than 1,000 copies; during a four-year period, only 50 books sold more than half a million copies. Elle Griffin offers her assessment:
The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry.
4. The Cable Guys
The Verge goes deep – literally — to explore the technology, economics, and geopolitics that shape the underwater cables that deliver the internet to the world. Amazing...and terrifying:
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data. If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function.
5. Seinfeld: Movies Are Over
Jerry Seinfeld has directed a new movie. In the process, he discovered that moviemaking is a cultural antique. From his interview in GQ:
These movie people are unbelievable. They’re insane. Like we had a prop master, Trish Gallaher Glenn. She had a room and it was floor-to-ceiling toys and bikes and clothes, everything from that era. Everybody does their job 150%. It is weird...I thought I had done some cool stuff, but it was nothing like the way these people work. They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea…Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social, cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives. When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it. We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.
6. Opinionated
Lazy opinion columnists are an easy topic for ridicule. Hamilton Nolan can’t resist. Even as he takes aim at all the “uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry,” his main target is Pamela Paul, a regular on the New York Times op-ed page:
As soon as the sun crept back out after the eclipse yesterday, I thought to myself, “This much-hyped natural occurrence is a gift that will offer a day’s reprieve for a desperate newspaper columnist who is out of ideas.” And lo, when I looked, there it was: “A Moment of Unity, on Earth as in Space,” by Pamela Paul…These types of columns are the telltale sign of desperation. You can imagine them all as a writing exercise where a teacher tells you “You have one hour to write a thousand words about something that you see in this room. Go!”
Websites Worth Reading
Music Festival Wizard: 2024 Event Guide
Sleep Data: Hit the Snooze Button
Earth Day Predictions: Wrong Guesses from 1970
Feeds We Follow
@narlak: Opinion editor of The Hindu, India’s national newspaper
@metrics52: Josh Angrist, economist
@howie_hua: Math memes