Week #20: Songs for Kids, Copaganda
Week of May 12, 2025: Open tabs and links
WHAT IS THIS? A roundup of interesting stuff I read this past week. Maybe it’s helpful to you? Generally, they’re going to be related to leadership, food, culture, digital strategy, investing, fatherhood, writing and other stuff that’s interesting
Songs For Kids - Learned of this group via Spencer Tweedy and it’s just a beautiful, kind organization. Music and jams for kids with developmental disabilities and diseases. All in on teamwork, mutual support and making sure folks aren’t lonely during a health battle. I want to give Josh Rifkind a hug. Check out this video and tell me you didn’t cry. We need more like this, please.
Every Augmentation is an Amputation - Some deeply considered thoughts on AI from Neal Stephenson. He’s a helluva writer (obviously). This one ends on a desperately bleak note, but along the way he offers a helpful take on what’s actually happening, and frames it in the context of other non-human intelligences (animals). The key prompt: How do we coexist with intelligence(s) that are superior to us (vs subservient to us, like animals).
More interesting and more important in the long run will be AIs that are like sheepdogs, in that they do useful things for us that we can’t do ourselves. But I think that we’ll also have AIs that are like ravens, in that they are aware of us but basically don’t care about us, and ones like dragonflies that don’t even know we exist. What people worry about is that we’ll somehow end up with AIs that can hurt us, perhaps inadvertently like horses, or deliberately like bears, or without even knowing we exist, like hornets driven by pheromones into a stinging frenzy.
and, this dagger: “Earlier I spoke somewhat derisively of lapdogs. We might ask ourselves who is really the lapdog in a world full of powerful AIs.”
Copaganda - An overview from Teen Vogue (!) of how stories in the media - especially from the law enforcement sector - are selected to keep us in support of law enforcement work. Tends to focus on fear, power, punishment.
The selective curation of anecdote is an essential mechanism of copaganda. Imagine two scenarios. A city had ten thousand shoplifting incidents in 2023, down from fifteen thousand shoplifting incidents in 2022. But in 2023, a local news outlet ran a story every day about a different shoplifting incident, while in 2022, the news ran only fifteen stories all year on shoplifting incidents. In which city do you think the public is more likely to believe shoplifting is a greater problem, even a crisis? In the city with more shoplifting, or the city with twenty-five times more stories about shoplifting?
Guess what: the more the press talks about violence and danger, the more people fear violence and danger, even if the data doesn’t always match the fear. (via @kottke.org)
Dent, Don’t Own - DHH asks “us” to reconsider why companies get started. He reminds us that a) Not everyone needs to massively transform the world and b) independence is the real goal.
“Well, the reason I’m here is to remind you that maybe, just maybe, you too have a nagging, gagging sense that the current atmosphere of disrupt-o-mania isn’t the only air a startup can breathe. That perhaps this zeal for disruption is not only crowding out other motives for doing a startup, but also can be downright poisonous for everyone here and the rest of the world.”
George Floyd - It’s been five years since the death of George Floyd. How has it changed American’s perceptions on race? Pew has a good story. It doesn't look like perceptions of the situation for Black Americans has moved much in spite of the focus.
When the Agents Do the Shopping - We all had to see this coming, and maybe there’s a lot of coverage of the emergence of these tools (that I haven’t seen), but this is a good snapshot of how the e-commerce guys are prepping for autonomous purchases.
Looking ahead, Vasudev foresees the establishment of an industry protocol that enables those third-party shopping agents to communicate with retailers’ own agents, he said, handing over product recommendations from the retailer’s website based on user preferences.
Palate Cleaners
I was in Nashville last weekend, so now i’m going deep into a classic country rabbit hole. Some suggestions:
Cocaine and Rhinestones - This is a little bit of a fanatic-energy deep dive into the stories of classic country. Coe is everything you want in a writer: Opinionated, wry, insightful, energetic, entertaining and a little crotchety. Love it.
Buck Owens - I grew up seeing HeeHaw and thinking country music was for goobers. But all the performers, the bloated and sweaty and tired folks on the show, were once complete killers on the stage. Buck Owens (and Don Rich) were among the very best (and I still don’t love “modern country”). If you like guitars and singing, you gotta go back and listen to the early stuff.
Bruce / Born in the USA - Saw a lot of flags last weekend and it made me wonder how much these folks really think about America, the idea, vs ‘merica the meme. Springsteen has been a critic of America - the place, the people, the idea - from the beginning. He’s a true believer, but honest about where we’re failing. Listen to the demo version of Born in the USA and tell me it’s not a protest song. Then, if you want another take, here’s Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires with a haunting, weary but ultimately satisfying version.
Hope your week is great!