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Welcome to Somethings, your weekly dose of highlights, recommendations and notes from my notebook. If you would like to receive this in your inbox, subscribe now. If you want to support, do checkout the links in the Friends of Somethings Section.
That didn’t last long. I was traveling and then got a little sick. All excuses. But really the newsletter stops being a priority for me since there are so few of you. Still, you enjoy reading these, please reply to the email. And if you are reading this on the web, make a comment.
✍️Something I wrote
Sharing another one from the archive: Search is Dead. I wrote this almost 5 years ago, about the dire state of Google search, and how it is destroying the open web. People blame the AI summaries for the decline now, but they are just part of the trend. Mountain View has been turning their search product into sage advisor for over a decade now.
Except they turn the search product from a keeper of knowledge serving you the most relevant sources and allowing you to make your own , to an oracle, serving you sage answers for your query. On the surface, this seems like a great idea for the users; you get the best answers immediately, without waiting for another web-page to load. In practice it can lead to misinformation, even on the trivial stuff like Dishwasher efficiency. It also gives legitimacy to fluffy listicles and blogspam. Google is notoriously bad at this. It impossible to even get a decent result.
📕Somethings to read
There’s a new kind of power emerging in culture: the identity industrialist. Not a filmmaker, not a technologist, not a marketer, but a person who manufactures human beings the way earlier generations manufactured steel, automobiles, or celebrities. They don’t manage talent; they produce it. And their raw material isn’t silicone or code but identity itself.
…
We’ve spent the last two decades constructing the cultural conditions that made synthetic humans not only possible but inevitable. This didn’t begin with AI. It began with the mass manufacture of persona.
And no one proved that the model worked better than the Kardashians.
📺 Somethings to watch
The Rip
Originally posted on letterboxd
Joe Carnahan is an underrated film-maker. He makes “manly” movies about men doing “manly” things. But they are the male-centric stories we need. This film is not completely dominated by a male cast. Especially great performance by Sasha Calle as someone caught in the crossfire.
A thriller that unfolds mostly in real-time, about cops that come across a massive amount of cash($20 million), while being investigated for corruption. What unfolds in the ensuing 90 minutes of some of the best suspense and neo-noir writing.
It flounders in the climax for a boring action set-piece, but overall a great experience.
Thank you for joining me this week. If you know some who might enjoy this, please forward this email to them. See you next week.
Mudassir Chapra