Dear Reader,
Greetings from Austin, Texas! I'm here speaking at PerspECCtives as the Fall conference season is officially upon us. If you're in the DC area, I do have a talk coming up in two weeks for senior IT professionals and there are a few open registration spots left. Other cities I'll be in over the next two months are Chicago, NY, Toronto, LA, Punta Cana (DR) and Tampa. If you're in any of those and want to join a non-obvious gathering, hit reply and let me know.
For stories this week, you'll read about shamehires, the conundrum of awards shows, why we should stop underestimating "the world's silliest science awards" and why choosing media based on rage might be a good idea. In bonus stories, you'll read about the long-awaited announcement on a corrected Earth map projection and the inside story behind the return of 60 Minutes.
Enjoy the stories this week and stay curious!
Rohit
Did you get this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here »
This Week's New Videos ...
Why To Stop Underestimating the Ig Nobel Awards
It's easy to poke fun at scientists studying the effects of burying underwear. Or the team exploring the nutrition density of cockroach milk. The Ig Nobel awards are known as the "silliest awards in science" where researchers are chosen for ridicule based on their obscure or seemingly ill-advised research quests. Taunting venomous snakes to study why they bite or asking why bedsheets get wrinkled isn't for everyone. Though these sorts of questions may not seem useful, there is an underlying truth about what these awards expose year after year that I find intriguing.
There are people who ask questions that others don't. Some, like Dr. William B. Bean (yes, real name), famously tracked the growth rate of his own fingernails for 35 years. His conclusion? Human nail growth rates slow down over time and middle fingernails grow faster than the others. Will this knowledge change your life? Perhaps not, but there may be an unexpected upside:
While, on the surface, the Ig Nobels might seem like a silly, good time, there is a point to the zaniness: the awards’ twofold purpose is to make people laugh and then think. Scientific advancements don’t proceed in linear fashion; they usually zig and zag before reaching any point of significance for everyday people’s lives. Take, for instance, research honored in 2012 in which scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to find dubious signs of “brain activity” in a stone-dead Atlantic salmon. That seemingly laughable result ultimately led neuroscientists to rethink how they analyze their data.
Along with the fun and quirkiness, the awards also show that listening to people who are bold enough to ask and study the questions that others never think to ask might also offer an underappreciated roadmap to innovation too.
Yes, Social Media Has Gotten Quantifiably Shittier
Social media enshittification has become a popular idea. The term, coined by writer Cory Doctorow, describes the idea that there was a time early in the evolution of many social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter when the user base found them universally delightful and useful. People authentically connected with one another, voices felt democratized and advertising (largely) was missing. The tools were about the people. But over time, Doctorow argues, each of these platforms became compromised by the pressure to scale, monetize and turned into forces of manipulation and addiction.
In a new article NYU Professor Ruby Thelot argues that enshittification isn't real, it's "merely platform narcissism." His argument is that the real problem is:
"What people call enshittification is the feeling of feature-need dislocation. In this case, it is felt by mostly geriatric millennials. The platforms are more popular than ever. You can see it in the Monthly Active Users (MAU) growth mentioned above, 140% in ten years. The revealed preference is that people are using them more and more. Moreover, satisfaction surveys such as ACSI indicate that satisfaction with social media has remained consistent in the last 8 years, with a slight increase in the last three years, from 2020 to 2025, satisfaction grew from 70 to 75 (out of 100). Contrary to the enshittification narrative, when broken down by platform, all platforms show increases in satisfaction."
The problem is, as 404 Media astutely points out, "Thelot’s argument falls apart when he tries to prove people are actually satisfied with their time on these platforms." There is plenty of data to show that young people are largely unhappy with the amount of time they are spending on social media and dislike what it has done to their relationships and its negative impact on human society. As someone who fits that "geriatric millennial" age range, I do think social media has indeed enshittified itself ... and in almost every measurable way, from the quality of posts to the invasiveness of advertising, the "good old days" of social media were infinitely better. Do you agree?
What Is The Point of An Awards Show?
This week the organizers of the Emmy Awards decided to reduce the number of awards presented live on the show from twenty-six last year to nineteen this year. The rationale is that this will free up the show to offer more live entertainment and make it more fun to watch for the television-loving general public.
The move has already been condemned by several industry trade groups including the DGA, SAG-AFTRA and the WGA who all issued a joint statement saying that "the decision to eliminate these categories from the prime-time broadcast devalues the contributions of the talented people the Academy is meant to honor. An awards show dedicated to recognizing excellence should not reduce recognition for the artists whose work gives it meaning.”
The question this raises, though, is who is an awards show really for? I've been invited as a speaker to more than dozen events where awards were also presented. Usually it is to recognize people in front of others from their professional or personal community. The Emmys, Tonys, Grammys and Oscars are all different.
They have an audience of industry peers in the room, but they also have a live audience who don't really care who won the award for Best Cinematography and would rather experience moments such as the red carpet arrivals of stars or the rapport between presenting duos. So maybe the best solution is to have two award shows. The first for the industry and another where the entertainment value of the show is prioritized. What do you think? And will you be watching the Emmys this weekend?
Should We All Choose Media Based On the Rage It Causes?
There is a new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk and he is raging about how it's a "hit job." The upcoming movie about Sam Altman's sociopathy is also getting similar PR responses from the Open AI team. Last year, Meta had a similar response to the explosive book Careless People about the leadership failures of Mark Zuckerberg. The year before that, President Trump raged about The Apprentice - a film about his business failures from early in his career. This is sort of the opposite of ragebaiting. Media that incites rage and angst in one person or a small group of people who are the subject of truthtellers who expose them for who they are.
It's something I was thinking about this week as I started watching another show called The Audacity. It's a dark satire of Silicon Valley with plenty of villains that are pretty clearly modeled after real companies and people. The behemoth tech brand is called Cupertino, and their CEO is "big Tim." The show is described as being "powered by a sustaining belief: that the business it chronicles is no longer about creation but about extraction. Its version of Silicon Valley wants to strip-mine its consumers’ digital lives for granules of precious ore." It's hopeless depiction of Silicon Valley also created a stir ... and also seems highly plausible.
All of these examples led me to the central question of this article. The TV shows, movies or books that irk their subjects this deeply probably do so because they come closest to the truth. Should that make them irresistible (and necessary) for all of us to seek out and consume?
