This week's best things
We're all theatre kids now, 2025 trends, your camera roll, Gen Z consumer behaviour, the isolating effects of technology, AI bias, an analysis of The Love Song, silly AI-generated music, and the Moulin Rouge.
Everyone's a theater kid now
The latest issue of the Garbage Day newsletter is initially about singing along at Wicked screenings but turns into an interesting perspective on the effect that internet culture has had on how 'fandom' now happens in almost all walks of life.
"You could sit and watch all eight episodes of Disney’s Star Wars spin-off, The Acolyte, but chances are you didn’t. Though, you may have seen the cool headbutt scene. TV shows, movies, gambling, dating apps — you are likely consuming all of that via vertical videos first, if not completely.This doesn’t mean the actual source is abandoned entirely. Just look at all the overrun “hidden gems” and lines around the block for food caused by TikTok trends — which aren’t so dissimilar to the irl lines you’d see on Broadway. Viewers want to make the pilgrimage themselves, which is why those lines get so long and also why the Wicked musical has never closed."
100+ 2025 Trend Reports
Amy Daroukakis does lots of interesting things but the thing I'm sharing today is the latest edition of her annual collation of over 100 trends reports.
This is a really really useful resource, although as Amy says "This file isn’t an oracle—it’s a tool for inspiration, collaboration, conversation, and also, a challenge - what voices are not being heard, valued or seen - year after year?"
Amy Daroukakis
Our camera rolls, our selves
A nice long read from Emily Chang in the One Thing newsletter about the evolving role of your camera roll.
"Today, not only is the camera roll a collection of visual portals that one can use to access the past; the overflow of imagery also captures everything that’s not in the frame. We can take infinite images, so we take pictures of anything and everything, oftentimes in quick succession, which has become such a problem that Apple even created a feature that tells you how many repeats of an image exist on your phone.
These unexceptional repeats have a surprising value, however. Just as smell, our most nebulous, non-literal sense, has the ability to take an indefinable scent and trigger precise memories, there is something specific about certain images that are so imprecise that they pull from our entire consciousness to organize meaning. "
One Thing
How do Gen Z and millennials discover new stores and brands? By just walking around, it turns out
More research, this time on how Gen Z and millenials find out about new businesses and brands.
"a surprising new study finds that a majority of those consumers are learning about new businesses and brands the old-fashioned way: They’re just walking around their communities.
That’s one of the takeaways from the 2024 American Express Shop Small Impact Study, released on Tuesday. Specifically, the study finds that 90% of Gen Z and millennials have found new businesses while hoofing it—which is more than the 80% who said they’ve discovered new small, independent businesses through social media.
It begs the question: Have younger consumers short-circuited entire marketing departments with their low-tech sauntering?"
Collabureaucracy
From the very smart Carrie Goucher's weekly newsletter.
I suspect anyone that has worked in any sort of organisation on any sort of project will recognise this.
"You might not know the name, but you'll definitely know the problem.The great paradox of progress is it creates new hard-to-solve problems.
In theory, we can collaborate with anyone, anywhere, on any subject, faster than ever before.
We can meet, chat, share, edit, check, ping, tap and @ someone like never before.
Need a document reviewed in four languages? No problem!
Want to get 12 people on a call, viewing a shared pipeline. One click away!
Now the issue is not whether the letter got lost in the internal mail system but how any human can possibly manage the volume and diversity of electronic asks coming at them from so many sides.
The bottlenecks that collaboration was supposed to eliminate have given birth to a new kind of problem."
Network of Time
Select two 'notable' people from a very long list and this site will spit out a series of photos that connects them in a sort of 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' type way.
It's an interesting example of what I assume is a whole bunch of metadata being indexed and queried to return the results.
Collections-based organisations could steal this idea and do some fun/unusual storytelling with it, maybe there are already examples of this sort of thing I haven't come across - please do share them if there are!
Turns out the zombie apocalypse isn’t as fun as they said it would be – Rebecca Solnit on our dangerously disconnected world
A quite (very) depressing long read that is also (very) America/Silicon Valley-centric in its perspective, but it raises a number of worthwhile questions to ponder.
"I suspect a lot of people are now if not outright disoriented, not really oriented to where they live. Unlike using a map to find your way, which gradually becomes superfluous as you internalise it, using an app means obeying instructions without grasping the underlying geography, so you never really learn where you are. As someone who learned to navigate several cities and regions before smartphones came in, I wonder about the spatial blur the phone-reliant inhabit, the lack of a mental picture of the terrain. As San Francisco awaits its next big earthquake, I also wonder how my most tech-dependent neighbours will cope when it comes and electricity, and likely cell phone towers, fail."
Rebecca Solnit
AI code assistants entrench gender salary gap
A stark example of the shortcomings of AI tools in this example shared from an AI coding assistant which suggests a function for calculating a women's salary that is a fraction of the set salary.
Copilot is Microsoft's AI assistant, but there are numerous examples from other tools, which demonstrated similar behaviour, shared as replies to the original tweet.
Macquarie Dictionary names 'enshittification' as 2024 Word of the Year
Australian dictionary publisher, Macquarie, has named 'enshittification' as their 2024 Word of the Year.
It's a word I use a lot.
""Enshittification" — the gradual deterioration of a service of product — has been named the 2024 Word of the Year by Macquarie Dictionary.
That is the last time we will use the word in this story. For obvious reasons.
It is what many Australians feel is happening to so many aspects of our lives at the moment, the selection committee said."
Not just Australians.
LBy Lewis Wiseman
Is the Love Song Dying?
A load of data visualisation to explore what's happened to the love song over recent decades.
It looks at "all 5,100 Billboard Top 10 hits from 1958 to September 2023". It's some nice, visual storytelling.
The Pudding
I didn't steal your underwear
This song is by someone called Mister Month (or possibly Mister Medieval).
They make AI generated songs from text conversations.
Every element of it is very silly.
This week's consumption
We finished season 2 of The Diplomat, it's really really good TV.
I watched this very beautiful animation from Kate Bush (spotted via Chris Michaels' newsletter).
I also watched Moulin Rouge for the first time, I wasn't expecting it to be quite so...trippy. Jim Broadbent's performance is something else.
Book recommendations are welcomed.