Technological Difficulties

Remember when SXSW became Sundance but for apps?

Mar 09, 2025

Keeping it short this week, my son has his 8th birthday party today along with two other classmates (also boys). The amount of sheer 8-year old bruh energy I am about to face, I feel like I’m lining up to return a punt, only instead of an NFL special teams unit it’s a far scarier field of kids two Primes deep, shouting skibidi and rizz, armed with Nerf and much stretchier ligaments and tendons.

SXSW—basically the same thing but for brands—is also in full swing all weekend and into next week. I’ll have some more in-depth thoughts there after the festivities wrap, it’s definitely an interesting vibe shift down here. Slowly, then all at once.

All of that plus trying to sneak out on spring break next weekend, my time is limited (as is yours, I’m sure).

Let’s get this show on the road.

The future is already here…

(And these three are just the ones happening in Texas1, in the last week alone)

Company Seeking to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth Creates a ‘Woolly Mouse’ (Scientific American)

ICON and Michael Hsu to create 3D-printed houses in Austin (dezeen)

Waymo is now available exclusively on Uber in Austin (The Verge)

…but there are admittedly distribution challenges

Why crashed cars are increasingly totaled (Axios)

TL;DR: More electronics, more expensive parts, more expensive servicing needed. We’ve made it easier to just throw it away than fix it.

How Plastics in the Brain Connect to the Wider Debate over Petroleum (Scientific American)

What Went Wrong at Saudi Arabia’s Futuristic Metropolis in the Desert (WSJ)

Saudi Arabia's $140bn hidden megacity revealed in satellite map

Australians lose more money to gambling in a year than government spends on aged care, report finds (The Guardian)

A New App Lets You Hire Your Own Bodyguards (The Supersonic)

Denmark's postal service to stop delivering letters (BBC News)

Even Our Sex Scandals Are Sexless (Magdalene Taylor)

From Y2K to here

W. David Marx is one of my favorite living writers, his book Status & Culture is a masterclass charting the long history of objects, symbols, and other items conspicuously consumed in pursuit of cultural status.

This week, he announced his next book, Blank Space, an ambitious history of culture in the 21st century. He talked about the challenge of trying to create a snapshot of a period as frenetic as the current moment:

When researching 20th century European art, very little in the news cycle affects your work: Picasso is dead. By contrast, writing about present times means that every single morning begins with encountering at least four news stories and essays to consider for inclusion. And the news cycle forced me to continually update the text.
For example, the Hawk Tuah Girl:
• “There’s a new thing on the internet — the Hawk Tuah Girl.” → I write a few sentences on Haliey Welch (and get really good at spelling it "Haliey")
• “Oh, the Hawk Tuah Girl went to a crypto conference.” → The sentences become a short paragraph
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl now has the #3 podcast in America.” → The paragraph becomes a section-opener
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl launched a memecoin.” → Haliey Welch now embodies the economic aspirations of her entire generation
• “The memecoin was a rugpull, and she’s in hiding.” → More furious edits, uplifting Welch to the greatest possible embodiment of culture in our times (after DJ D-Sol)
• “The Hawk Tuah Girl disappeared and maybe wasn’t anything at all.” → Anxiety, doubt, fear

The book comes out November 18, 2025. Pre-order yours today.

Pre-order Blank Space today

And if you haven’t already read Status & Culture, or his first book Ametora, you should read both of those while we wait for Blank Space.

What this week taught me about B2B sales

This major ad agency for Google, Samsung, and Nike just bought back its independence (Fast Company)

The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0 (NY Times)

It’s About Aura, Not Content (o32c)

Sul sul! How The Sims influenced a generation of creatives (It’s Nice That)

Abrdn adds back vowels after widely mocked rebrand (BBC News)

In 2011, at the Chicago Humanities Festival, famed science fiction writer William Gibson was already doing a panel called “The Decline of Cyberspace.” (Gibson in the eighties coined the term cyberspace.) At the event, he says two interesting things. One: “the internet is turning itself inside out.” Two, he repeats a line from one of the characters in his 2007 novel, Spook Country: “cyberspace is everting.” The word ‘everting’—another neologism—is the opposite of inverting. Rather than being a new frontier, a repository for things from our world, the internet has become something in and of itself. It isn’t sucking things in anymore. It’s extruding things out.

Sean Monahan,
productive misunderstandings

The Leisure Class

31-21-22. (ESPN)

Fanatics Launches Ticket Strategy in Two-Way Deal With Ticketmaster (Sportico)

This is the start of something bigger. Whether it’s a JV, some portion of spun-off Live Nation assets finding their way into Fanatics in exchange for a chunk of pre-IPO shares, or a straight-up merger, these two were made for each other. Great news for fans!

(Narrator: It is not great news for fans.)

White’s Snowboard League Debuting with Billion Dollar Aspirations (JohnWallStreet)