Perception correction
Antonym: 6.08 minutes to read. Links to last a month.
+ + Apologies to readers who got an edition repeating the first few sections. + +
+ + To read the AI re-written version of this newsletter follow this link to A(I)ntonym + +
Reading, watching and writing sections will be back next time. So many other things to share this week…
Dear Reader
Snake oil was actually good for you. Rich in omega-3, the Chinese medicine was introduced to the American West by labourers whom it would have helped with brain function, joint mobility and all the things we all want from cod-liver oil and the like these days.
Shysters and chancers took up the product and mis-sold it to the masses. They replaced what we’d now think of as a superfood with any old ingredients, bottled it up and sold it on as a cure-all. They made a packet. If happened now, we’d talk about the number of healthcare dollars that got diverted from more legitimate therapies — camphor, trepanning, narcotics and the like—into the pockets of these pushers of fake medicines.
We shouldn’t conflate the usefulness of a product with the hype about the product. But misuse and misappropriation will inevitably damage the reputation of the original. Even were snake oil a more sustainable and ethical choice than cod-liver oil you wouldn’t market it as such even 150 years after it got its bad name.
So. Yeah. Crypto…
Let’s take a quick What/So What/What Now look at web3, the collection of applications of web3 that have ballooned in value and bullshit simultaneously over the past few years, and which took a reputational and financial beating last week.
Web3: What?
A very simple explanation of the technology behind web3/crypto.
If you’re sure you know this already skip ahead.
The blockchain is a technology that creates a central record of everything that happens to a bit of information.
A currency’s transactions can all be recorded. This is a cryptocurrency.
A certificate of provenance can show where a piece of content comes from and who owns it. This is an NFT (non-fungible token).
The valuable innovation in the blockchain is that the central record is owned simultaneously by everyone using it. You can’t change it or fake it or claim something to the contrary because anyone can see from the record whether you’re playing straight or not. This makes it “trustless”—you can trust that bitcoin is genuine because you don’t have to trust the person you’re getting it from. The trust is outsourced.
What just happened?
Cryptocurrencies lost a lot of value last week, damaging confidence in companies in the sector and arguably related concepts like NFTs.
Shockwaves swept through cryptocurrency markets on Thursday as tether, the largest “stablecoin” and a foundational part of the digital asset ecosystem, broke its peg to the dollar in the latest blow to the struggling sector.
Bitcoin and ethereum, the two biggest cryptocurrencies, shed 5% and 12% respectively, extending losses that have seen both fall more than 20% over the past week. Losses have been even bigger for the smaller players, with dogecoin falling 10% on Thursday and 35% over the week.
— “Turmoil and panic in crypto market as ‘stablecoin’ slump prompts wider collapse” | The Guardian
For an in-depth analysis, the “The Week That Shook Crypto” is the FT’s Big Read feature this weekend.
So what?
The moment of panic amounted to the worst reset in cryptocurrencies since Bitcoin plummeted 80 percent in 2018. But this time, the falling prices have broader impact because more people and institutions hold the currencies. Critics said the collapse was long overdue, while some traders compared the alarm and fear to the start of the 2008 financial crisis.
— NYT: Cryptocurrencies Melt Down in a ‘Perfect Storm’ of Fear and Panic
Feeding narrative of panic and downturn. Markets are in retreat after years of growth, inflation. There’s concern that with institutions having invested in crypto the losses will affect them, and then the rest of us. Maybe.
Perception correction. In my own industry, marketing services, it will be a little harder for boosters to sell nonsense NFT and crypto-inspired projects to marketers who should know better.
Now what?
As you were. Don’t conflate the technology with the hype about the technology. The “we’re all going to make it” magical thinking of the get-rich quick community around crypto can’t obscure the very real.
For marketers and established businesses: web3 and all that sail in it should be either watched or invested in for innovation/learning.
For entrepreneurs — the opportunities are as real as ever. A correction in the markets may even clear the way for real breakthrough applications.
The shock of the normal
This has been a week of heart-rending normality for me. Over two days at the end of last week I went first to the BIMA100 awards night in London—a wonderful informal affair on a club rooftop in Soho. A crowd, some respectfully short speeches from the organisers and a lot of cheering. The next day was my daughter’s leavers assembly in an old church in Lewes. Again, a crowd of parents and kids, some speeches, an accidentally a capella communal belting out of “Jerusalem”.
In Brighton, where I live, the annual festival is in full swing in a way that hasn’t been possible for three years. Everyone is shocked and grateful for a relatively normal May, doing the things that we usually do when the summer is just beginning.
Writing advice
Another have-done-this-since-the-Beforetime moment last week was running a lunchtime learning session about writing with my colleague Natalie Laurence at Brilliant Noise. It was the first time we’d had more people in the room than on Zoom for a company meeting since we evacuated our old office in March 2020.
Natalie and I used a handful of our favourite quotes about writing to talk about how to approach the craft as a non-specialist.
Here are three things I learned and re-learned from the reflection, preparation and then conversation in the session were:
1. Make everything poetry
2. Style matters.
3. The importance of a shitty first draft:
And a bonus bit of writing advice: First sentences
Joe Fassler of Lithub drew on years of writing about how writers write for a farewell columnhttps://lithub.com/i-talked-to-150-writers-and-heres-the-best-advice-they-had.
The one that stuck with me all week was the way that many writers find the first sentence of a work like a kind of key toy unlocking the rest:
Everyone knows that the opening line is a crucial invitation, something that can make or break a reader’s interest in a book. But far less attention has been paid to the role first lines play for writers, leading them through the work’s dark, uncertain stages like a beacon. “The first line must convince me that it somehow embodies the entire unwritten text,” William Gibson told me, a radical, koan-like conviction that nonetheless seems to be commonplace. Stephen King described spending “weeks and months and even years” working on first sentences, each one an incantation with the power to unlock the finished book. And Michael Chabon said that, once he stumbled on the first sentence of Wonder Boys, the rest of the novel was almost like taking dictation. “The seed of the novel—who would tell the story and what it would be about—was in that first sentence, and it just arrived,” he said.
Wow. Just Wow.
Three science stories had me reeling this week:
1. Moon shoots
Scientists have germinated seeds in soil comprised of dust from the surface of the moon. The University of Florida’s write up of this by Samantha Murray gives you a sense of the thrills and intricacies of this project. And the implications are mind-blowing: Rob Ferl, one of the researchers tells Murray, “it’s pretty clear that somebody is going to be growing plants on the Moon in the next decade.”
— “One Small Sprout” | Explore
2. Mad Maths
I read about the mathematician Grothendieck in When We Cease to Understand This World, the mind-collapsing book by Benjamin Labatut. One of the challenges of writing about maths is to communicate the significance of breakthroughs to minds like mine, which are several levels of understanding too low to really understand what’s going on. This article, like Labatut’s book, succeeds in making you feel the enormity of the achievements.
I loved this passage about the genius of naming simple things that haven’t yet been described well, and how that labelling can open up whole new fields of thought and possibility.
Ravi Vakil, a mathematician at Stanford, said, “He also named things, and there’s a lot of power in naming.” In the forbiddingly complex world of math, sometimes something as simple as new language leads you to discoveries. Vakil said, “It’s like when Newton defined weight and mass. They had not been distinguished before. And suddenly you could understand what was previously muddled. — The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician | The New Yorker
3. 27,000 light years away
The first images of the supermassive back hole at the centre of our galaxy were shared. Called Sagittarius A* it is literally what our whole galaxy revolves around. As well the astonishing scientific achievement that this represents, this feat also inspired the absolute best article headline of the year:
Behold, the Bottomless Pit Holding Everything Together
For [UCLA astrophysicist Andrea Ghez], the new picture of Sagittarius A* is an important contribution to astrophysics. That’s her answer when she’s thinking like a scientist. When she takes a moment to consider the work in another, more sentimental way, she appreciates “the fact that we as humans, that are so finite and small, can have this understanding of things that are so immense.” And not only that, but to feel some kind of kinship with it. “I love to talk about our galaxy, as opposed to the Milky Way,” she said. “It’s our home.”
And on that mind-shattering, soul-compressing singularity, you have reached the end of this week’s Antonym. I hope you found something you liked. I’ll be honest: it was a hell of week looking back.
Antony
P.S. (Everything I couldn’t fit in above.)
Total cheat, but I can’t leave these things in the dark of my notes. I need to let them out:
There is some reason to believe psychopathy, at least in moderation, might be a reasonable evolutionary adaptation.
Is Google over-hyping its auto-translation glasses? Machine translation is here and has been for a long time. But despite the plethora of languages it can handle, it doesn’t speak human yet.
Margaret Atwood on criminalisation of abortions ‘Enforced Childbirth Is Slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the Right to Abortion:
No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim. (View Highlight)
GCSEs should be abolished because they do not reveal who will go on to succeed or fail in life, Euan Blair has said — The Times: “The co-founder of Multiverse, which promotes professional apprenticeships, told a conference held by The Times Education Commission yesterday that corporate graduate schemes were missing out on talented people.” normal May, doing the things that we usually do when the summer is just beginning.