Antonym: Attentional sinkhole edition
Antonym: Attentional sinkhole edition
Five minutes to read. Fifteen minutes of wishing it had been written by that AI he used last week.
Dear Reader
In a sinkhole in China, they found a lost world. It is my sincerest wish that within this newsletter you will find some lost attention and squander it all down the ever-expanding rabbit-holes and crazy-town shtick that is the internet/the world from the perspective of this author.
But sinkholes, robot dogs screaming at people, and psychiatrists with guns are among the things to come in this week’s Antonym. Let’s get down to business…
Our Quote Of The Week comes from an article about the settling down of post-pandemic commuter patterns—roughly a quarter to a third less than the Beforetime—from which we can draw all sorts of conclusions about work patterns, cities, daily lives and the like:
Like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff, politicians tend to talk as though nothing has changed. “The government continues to believe that going forward, many firms and individuals will value the benefits of working face to face,” it blithely stated in an integrated rail plan for the Midlands and north of England last November. Jacob Rees-Mogg, a government minister, has left notes on civil servants’ desks chiding them for being absent, as though home working is a momentary lapse.
— “The Future Of Public TransportIn Britain”, The Economist
It’s a lovely image. But while the trollishly out-of-touch Rees-Mogg types give everyone something to fume about, it’s likely that people and organisations are air-running and trying to figure out why they can’t get traction. The “New Normal” we started talking about in spring 2020 is finally here and as usual with reality, it’s far stranger and more complex than we imagined.
Writing—and reading—things like this newsletter are a way of reflecting and trying to spot the new patterns and trends emerging.
So now we got have our excuses in, let’s get to the links and the thinks…
Wow: that sinkhole, tho…
“Forest found inside massive sinkhole in China” - The Washington Post
Cave explorers discovered the hidden forest this month when they descended into a previously unexplored massive sinkhole in south China’s Guangxi region. Researchers say the hole, which is roughly 630 feet deep and spans more than 176 million cubic feet, could be home to previously unidentified plant and animal species.
Bonus fact of the week: ‘Large sinkholes are known in Chinese as “tiankeng,” or “heavenly pits.”"‘
A nice little learner for you, Terry
RIP Dennis Waterman. The thing about Minder was that Terry never learned.
ARFUR: Hello, Terry.
TERRY: Hello, Arfur.
ARFUR: Terry, can you do somefink a little bit dodgy for me?
TERRY: Oh no, Arfur!
ARFUR: Oh, go on, Terry.
TERRY: Oh, alright, Arfur.
The result? Solid gold-effect light entertainment.
Talking of nice little earners (a catchphrase from the series), spreadsheet tips on TikTok have become yet another of the platform‘s booming creator communities. The FT ran an article “Spreadsheets Are Now Cool, Thanks to TikTok”, which discussed the trend for “micro learning” — basically that short videos with tips about how to use software better is reaching average users who don’t have the will or the patience to put themselves on an actual course.
“The average everyday Excel user isn’t the advanced user,” [Kat Norton, a.k.a. @miss.excel] says. “So when you hit on that basic stuff, the things people are doing every day manually, those are the [videos] that go viral.”
At the time of writing, Norton’s TikTok profile has 836,000 followers (including me as of now) and 1.9M likes.
As words-first person who likes to throw data around in spreadsheets every now and again, the tips in these kinds of videos are brilliantly useful time-saving things.
The other thing “micro learning” immediately got me thinking about was how colleagues in my business could share tips with one another. Exactly the kind of employee-generated content I imagine LearnerLab’s Storytagger tool is designed for — I’m meeting with its CEO soon and look forward to finding out more.
Wow-Bow
Robot dogs with speakers duct-taped to their backs roam the deserted streets of a metropolis, screaming messages to frightened residents to stay inside to avoid the contagion. This episode of Dystopia Now is brought to you by Shanghai and its lockdown.
What Ridley Scott in 1980 said 2022 would be like:
What 2022 is actually like:
Language: was it an overnight success or slow evolution?
How To Be Animal thinks the evolution of language came slowly, as humanoids evolved…
If language, as argued by someone like prehistorian Robert Bednarik, evolved gradually throughout the Pleistocene period, when did we suddenly cross some unbreachable line between us and other animals?
But Cormac McCarthy and his neuroscience friends think that it happened in an instant, relatively speaking:
The invention of language was understood at once to be incredibly useful. Again, it seems to have spread through the species almost instantaneously. The immediate problem would seem to have been that there were more things to name than sounds to name them with. Language appears to have originated in southwestern Africa and it may even be that the clicks in the Khoisan languages—to include Sandawe and Hadza—are an atavistic remnant of addressing this need for a greater variety of sounds. The vocal problems were eventually handled evolutionarily—and apparently in fairly short order—by turning our throat over largely to the manufacture of speech. Not without cost, as it turns out. The larynx has moved down in the throat in such a way as to make us as a species highly vulnerable to choking on our food—a not uncommon cause of death. It’s also left us as the only mammal incapable of swallowing and vocalizing at the same time.
— Cormac McCarthy “The Kekulé Problem”, Nautilus magazine, April 2017.
Wow-whee
I think we all deserve a treat. This is the funniest, funnest thing I saw this week:
Stuff I’m…
Watching
The Essex Serpent (Apple TV+) is fun, but less than it should be. Still watching for the beautiful locations, art—read arts and crafts—direction and costumes.
Navalny (BBC Storyville) highly recommended documentary about the currently imprisoned Russian opposition politician. Apart from the insights about Russian politics, the starring role of Bellingcat?’s investigative data journalism and the sheer character and chutzpah of Navalny prank calling the assassination squad that almost killed him is a thrill.
Clark (Netflix) is a kind of 1960s Swedish Flashman of crime. Rude, brash and constantly smirking, a great antidote.
Succession (various) is the gift that keeps rewarding rewatches. This week I watched one of the best episodes where the family and flunkies are stuck on a super-yacht as they manoeuvre to throw one another under the prison-time bus of a looming scandal. Included this week as three different people told me they’d caught up with it “late” and were loving it. If you’ve not seen it, it is the best TV of the decade. If you thought you didn’t like it after a couple of episodes: it’s OK — everyone gets a second chance to fall for this one. Go back and try again.
Reading
Global Marketing and Advertising by Marieke de Mooij. Global brand marketing is our business at Brilliant Noise—but how global can brands be when they be when the cultures they exist in are so different?
Razor Blade Tears by S.A. Cosby: The fathers of two murdered gay men on a path of redemption and revenge. Crime thriller that jumps right into the centre of America’s Cold Civil — both are violent, homophobic ex-cons who have to face their own prejudices and those of others. This will most likely be a streaming box-set TV series soon—consults internet: aah, yes—but the book is a little repetitive after a while.
The 4-Day Week, by Andrew Barnes. I best read up on it as we’re going to do this at Brilliant Noise very soon. This is the popular cheerleading book from a New Zealand CEO who ran a trial of four-week on the 100-80-100 model (100% of the productivity in 80% of the time for 100% of the salary) and found it worked.
Speaking
I’m doing a talk for young marketers about how to deal with new trends without risking becoming the person who persuaded their boss to go all in on Bitcoin last month. If you are a young marketer or know one, send them along to the next Marketing Talk from Silicon Brighton. If you’re not young, forget it. A Gen Z will be along in a minute to explain why you’re a know-nothing Boomer and what they will be doing when they get your job next week.
That’s all for this week folks. Thanks for reading. I hope you found something worth spending some time at the bottom of the sinkhole for.
Antony
P.S. Everything else
If I could write all day everyday I would have written about these too…
Martin Sorrell’s S4 resumes acquisitions with TheoremOne deal | Financial Times
TheoremOne clients include American Express, AT&T and Starbucks and the company made $58mn in sal enough enoughes last year. S4’s acquisition of the company will add one so-called “whopper” account, meaning a client that generates more than $20mn in revenue a year.
“When everything’s Web3, nothing is”. FTAlphaville dissects some hype from Vice Media’s frothy report on “culture 3.0”.
The terrorist that committed the Buffalo shooting last week discussed his plans on a discord server 30 minutes before the attack. (NYT)
“There is a moral case against crypto.” (FT opinion from Jemima Kelly)
‘I’m a Psychologist With a Gun. My Job Is to Help Troops Swallow Fear’. (The Times)
“VR Therapy Tools Key to Mental Health, Hatsumi Says” (XR Today)