Dear Reader,
It's been a week of working on some big initiatives, from reviewing last minute submissions to the Non-Obvious Book Awards to putting together my annual Non-Obvious Holiday Gift Guide (email me if you have any great suggestions!) to getting ready for our launch of Future Words next month. Lots in progress, not as much to share or launch quite yet. Of course, we still have stories!
In this week's newsletter, you'll read about some combined thoughts I've been having about how AI can unlock the power of public data for new creations. We will also look at Spotify's efforts to curb music slop on their platform and why Amazon could be doing much more to prevent it with AI generated garbage books. In other stories, you'll read an article about Americans who are actively regretting leaving Trump's America for Europe, how the entry cliff is disappearing the jobs that give people their first experiences, why Mr. Pibb is now Coca-Cola's fastest growing brand, how Europe's ban on destroying luxury goods might create an aftermarket and why the US government just made "content creator" an official small business category.
Enjoy the stories and stay curious!
Rohit
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How Data is Becoming a Catalyst for Imagination
Most weeks in this newsletter there is at least one story about a survey result or a new finding from science or insights groups that might offer a unique perspective on human behavior. In seeking out stories every week, I often gravitate to those sorts of stories myself. This week I encountered a few that got me thinking about how the power of data and what it can unlock for us all is shifting.
First there was a story from fashion about how several resale platforms are pivoting more to live auctions [paywall] instead of fixed price sales. The more successful auction deals, the more data they can generate about the real prices people are willing to pay for various items. Then there was the story about the Wheels4Wheels project that uses sensor mapping data from e-scooters to assess what streets are most accessible for wheelchair users. The pilot program in Estonia "generated 40.5 million data points and more than 66,000 surface ratings across eight districts." Finally, there was a report about a deep dive analysis into the number of shots and cuts in 8,770 movies and how the pacing of those cuts has evolved over time.
What is interesting about all of these is how the data itself presents open-source opportunities for any of us to build our own creations from this. I found beauty in this over the summer while I was building The Unwondering Project. The amount of public data that was available on places to spotlight was fascinating. With the data from the stories above and the help of AI, you could build your own pricing engine for various products, create accessibility maps on your own or build a film editing engine based on the editing habits of successful directors.
Some of this data is (or should be) owned by someone and the questions of ethical usage of what you can find online aren't easy to answer. When data becomes this ubiquitously available along with new tools to be able to sift through it to create new meaningful things, the real limit is going to be motivation and imagination for what any of us create next.
How Much Curation Should We Expect From Platforms?
This week Spotify reported that they removed 50 million AI generated "slop and spam" music tracks from their platform. It's the latest move in their year long effort to prioritize "authentic, human artists" and portray itself as a platform more friendly toward actual musicians. Primarily, the tracks removed were ones reported as spam or frequently skipped by listeners, and Spotify has promised to employ "many signals to help it detect slop and spam, such as metadata, user feedback, upload patterns and third-party AI detection tools."
Amazon deals with the same problem through a flood of AI generated books on their platform, and also suggests they are doing something to help remove those books. Experts suggest it's significantly harder to eliminate the slop in music where there are lots of platforms, versus Amazon which could more easily use their monopoly position to largely eliminate this problem. Their "limits" which include reducing the number of books a single account can publish to two per week are still minimal. It's hard to imagine anyone who publishes two books per week NOT publishing complete slop.
The question that both situations raise, though, is what responsibility we should expect platforms to have when it comes to authenticating content or making sure that it passes a certain bar of quality. Retail sites like Stockx have a model here that may be worth copying. The site, which promises to give you "access to the world's most coveted items in the smartest way possible," has a sophisticated product verification process that allows them to guarantee that a product you buy on the site is real and not counterfeit. They require sellers to verify their identity, they physically inspect goods and they offer a trusted third-party intermediary to create real trust on their platform. As a result, fraud is minimal and people love the platform.
Imagine if Spotify or Amazon used at least some of these similar features on their own platforms. As an author, if I could complete a verification program that would allow books authored by me as a real human to be authenticated, then people could use this as a search vector for books. Spotify could have similar features. Social media platforms could largely eliminate the slop from bot farms and fake accounts doing the same thing. The point is, the technology for this sort of verification exists. We just need to demand that more platforms implement it.
The Inside Story of Americans Who Regret Moving To Europe
A recurring theme in the media is the appeal of Americans moving to Europe to escape Trump's America. People joke about having a second passport "just in case" and the romantic idea of Europe as a "social paradise" is often showcased by digital nomads who rack up hundreds of thousands of views on social media sharing their enviable lives. According to a recent article from WIRED, the truth about abandoning America for Europe may not be quite so easy.
It turns out a lot of Americans who did leave encounter cultural challenges, including Europeans who don't actually like Americans (shocking) and many other life challenges ranging from a lack of widespread home air conditioning to the pacing of work life. When you add in European social unrest that we're seeing with protests in France and the prominence of right-wing political leaders in places like Italy, Germany and Portugal, the allure of Europe in particular is waning for many of these Americans featured in the article who are now planning to move back to the US.
Migrating to another country is not an easy thing to do. I only did it once in my life and it took a little over two years for my adoptive country (Australia) to really feel like home. Certainly, some of these regretful Americans may be giving up on their new homes too quickly. Yet the bigger conclusion is that perhaps the idea of fleeing your home country instead of choosing to stay and create the culture you want to live in was an idea flawed from the start. What do you think? Do you see this as a predictable boomerang from people who were not prepared for the reality of living in a new country, or a sign of something else? Hit reply and let me know.
