Greg's Newsletter

About Greg's Newsletter

Listen to Greg orate his snazzy newsletter. Subscribe for thoughts and insights at the intersection of culture, technology, media, and communication. And occasionally I'll talk about like, I don't know, tortilla chips. greg.substack.com (https://greg.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Greg Brown

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Jul 2020

Latest episode

23 May 2023

Latest episodes

21 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   23 May 2023

   The Blog Era and Telling Internet History [No. 099]

   Welcome to Greg’s Newsletter NUMBER 99. I’ll be checking in next edition with a look back at some hits and misses since launching this in January of 2015 (!!!!). And there will be an announcement as well. Stay tuned. But for this issue, I want to talk about The Blog Era (https://theblogera.fm/). It’s a new podcast series by my buds Jeff and Eric Rosenthal, of hip-hop sketch comedy/podcast ItsTheReal fame and Pharell’s OTHERtone production company. You can find it on your preferred podcast platform. It’s a history of an upstart group of hip-hop bloggers (Nah Right, 2DopeBoyz, etc) who bypassed and outran traditional music media gatekeepers and created a new music ecosystem, in turn launching the careers of rap’s future superstars (Drake, J. Cole, Wiz Khalifa, Kid Cudi etc.). As up-and-comers, those artists eschewed the major label route and went direct to the bloggers. The years 2008-2012 were the sweet spot—it was a very specific time, with technology, communication, and cultural forces combining and I’m so glad the story is being told. And while The Blog Era covers the more mainstream side of the hip-hop internet (if you could even call it that at the time), there were other corners of the internet a part of this, too. Sites and bloggers giving voice and shine to the underground, the emergent, the left field, connecting artists and audiences from Europe to Asia, to the US. Sites like MOOVMT, 92 BPM, Classic Drug References, Renaissance Soul, and Fresh Selects. An absolutely essential crew to my musical knowledge and taste, to this day. Back to The Blog Era. The podcast has brought back a lot of memories for me. I started following the ItsTheReal guys in 2007-2008, on Tumblr (which absolutely needs its own retrospective!!). I reposted their sketch comedy stuff and chatted with Jeff on GChat (to this day, one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, who is somehow—despite EVERYTHING he and his bro are doing—will be down for an hour long Facetime sesh whenever). I also got to witness, firsthand and up close, as Chicago’s Andrew Barber and FakeShoreDrive went from covering and championing the culture to truly being a part of and helping shape the culture from within in the late 2000s (Episode 4 gets into FSD in more detail). So, yeah, it’s been a little bit fun to reminisce. But also: projects like The Blog Era are so, so important. As our lives have become ever digitized over the years, so too has art, culture, and consumption. There are “Blog Eras” to be told about internet subcultures big-and-small. We tend to assume that all things digital are preserved, and that’s just not the case. Sites go offline. Chat histories are erased. Videos and songs are taken down. And I’m not advocating that everything should be tracked and documented all the time online—not at all!—but rather that it’s important when people thoughtfully tell these histories. There are specific periods in my life that crossed over to the online that I would love to go back and document. The online Nike scene in the pre-Niketalk, 1990s era. Early Tumblr. Google Reader and sharebr0 culture of the late 2000s/early 2010s. There’s something interesting about The Blog Era being released as some of the tentpoles of 2010s media—Buzzfeed News (https://www.npr.org/2023/04/20/1171056620/buzzfeed-news-shut-down-media-layoffs), VICE (https://www.notion.so/No-099-eb67d9d683014e8c8d5990884e010fee)—are literally dying. We’re in a creator-led world of media and maybe socio-economic forces could have given us the foresight to say “yeah, duh, that was inevitable.” I don’t know. But a lot of this played out organically, sometimes in reaction to the digital media world and its gatekeepers. The Buzzfeeds and VICE’s of the world, well, they were launched to much fanfare with VC backing and splashy CEOs and executives claiming they were building the future of media. Turns out, they weren’t building the future of media. It was never going to be a VC-backed, top-down industry. (And despite that, people are still trying (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/business/media/the-messenger-jimmy-finkelstein.html).) Simply having a shiny new media entity with some new formats doesn’t solve the intractable demise of traditional media and journalism in the face of broader economic, political, and local trends. And, unfortunately, the amazing editors and journalists—the people who do the really good, important work—end up paying the cost in the end. That’s why histories like The Blog Era become so important. They’re telling a story of a of a particular convergence of technological change, communication, and culture. Because so often it’s not that people with unlimited resources who change the game, like the VC-backed media of the last decade. Not every new hip-hop blogger set out to “fundamentally change the music industry” like the folks behind the media industry constantly claimed they would do with news. No, these bloggers—and the artists they were inextricably linked to—had new tools, new ways of creating and consuming and sharing and talking about art. And fostered thriving communities surrounding it all. It was organic and, like, yeah, of course at some point (as you’ll hear in the podcast) they knew they were fundamentally changing the music industry. But it started with people, and new ways of doing things, and communities. And however big or small those little communities and corners of the internet are, they all have histories worth telling. Episode 7 of The Blog Era drops tomorrow (Wednesday, May 24). Go dig in! Get full access to Greg's Newsletter at greg.substack.com/subscribe (https://greg.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

2. 

   17 Feb 2023

   Do Not Disturb (I'm Available!) [No. 098]

   Welcome to edition #98. So glad to have you. The last several newsletters have been moderate-to—lengthy essay type-things, so let’s make this one a links issue. To the internet we go! First, from CNBC: Amazon, TikTok and YouTube are investing in Shopping Network-like capabilities (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/14/us-livestream-shopping-a-target-of-tiktok-amazon-live-and-youtube.html), hoping to capture the livestream wave that’s blown up in China. Some stats + context: “Of Chinese consumers surveyed by Coresight Research (https://coresight.com/research/china-vs-us-livestreaming-e-commerce-adoption-infographic/), 74% said they had bought products through a shoppable livestream in 2022. In the U.S., 78% said they’d never even watched one.” “People want to buy products with meaning or products that they can’t get anywhere else. And that’s really what’s the underpinning of live shopping in the U.S. That’s very different than in China, which is all about just a mass population,” said analyst Quyng Mai. The CNBC story dropped just about the same time that Meta announced it was leaving the livestream shopping business on Instagram (https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/14/instagram-is-killing-live-shopping-in-march-will-focus-on-ads-instead/). So, still a long ways to go in the U.S., if it catches on at all. I’m curious if some other live + commerce + social thing takes off here. Next, from VICE: perhaps unsurprisingly, some people are believing everything they see on TikTok (https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34a95/why-do-people-believe-everything-on-tiktok). Not dissimilar to the experiences of older generations on Facebook. We’ve learned nothing! But why TikTok? We’re consuming so much content, served at scale and personalized, and without any valuable kind of gatekeeping—we don’t have the added trust layer of media entities or journalists who have fact checked things. On TikTok, specifically, the For You page is meant to be an endless scroll without user scrutiny of the content. I think context collapse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse)—where several “different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one finds its way to another” thereby eliciting a completely different response—has a big part to do with it, too. This happens on Twitter all the time. But a joke-y TikTok meant for one audience can go viral, garner huge engagement to give it some semblance of credibility, only to find its way to another audience who views it with seriousness or shock and as truth. Finally, I’ve been keeping on the “Do Not Disturb” train for several years. My specific use case had to do with the completely overwhelming notification system I had set up on my iPhone—at times, getting pings from hundreds of Twitter and Instagram accounts. (In hindsight, setting up notifications when any of a list of 300+ people tweeted was pretty twisted s**t.) I figured out it was better for my well-being to set my phone to DND so that I could open my notifications when I wanted, rather than glancing at the phone every time it dinged. If that meant replying a little late to some texts or group chat messages, it was worth it. I’m reclaiming my time! kate lindsay (https://substack.com/profile/1396891-kate-lindsay) at Embedded (https://open.substack.com/pub/embedded) covered the growing DND phenomenon (https://embedded.substack.com/p/do-not-disturb-iphone-setting-trend) as a positive reaction to the larger consumption environment we're in: Society doesn’t actually just blindly follow the whims of technology. TikTok made everything short-form and threatened to “ruin” attention spans—and in response, people are actually leaning back into long-form content on YouTube. The constant texts, notifications, and other features on our phones that make us feel like we need to be overwhelmingly available at all times have instead led to people just … turning them off. I think it was only recently that Apple showed a user if the person they were going to message had “Do Not Disturb” on. So, when it’s on, it does, by default, make it look like that person (me, I’m at the center of the world) doesn’t want to be messaged at all. My reality is just that I’d rather sometimes check my texts periodically rather than real-time. But have I been looking like an unreachable curmudgeon instead? All that to say: keep texting me! Even if it takes me a bit to get back to you. OK, that’s all for today! Love you! Get full access to Greg's Newsletter at greg.substack.com/subscribe (https://greg.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)

3. 

   17 Jan 2023

   What is the Deep State Doing on LinkedIn? [No. 097]

   Welp, at the end of last year, I was part of a large round of US layoffs at my agency. Even if they tell you it’s strictly financial and nothing related to performance, it’s still takes a hit to the ego. Rather than grind myself to a pulp finding the next gig during the holidays, I took the opportunity to slow down, pause, and enjoy the time off. It was a godsend. I did have some conversations with various recruiters and agencies, but I didn’t really hit it hard. (I am now actively looking for my next gig in the advertising/creative/PR/social agency world as a Strategy Director IN CASE YOU’RE LOOKING FOR SOMEBODY). As a result, I’m spending more time on LinkedIn. Networking, sourcing opportunities, etc. It’s entirely possible to spend whole-ass days on LinkedIn, messaging, connecting, applying. Rinsing and repeating. Because it’s true, you never know where your next opportunity might come from. So many people have been genuinely helpful in this process! Building and strengthening your network is most likely to yield a positive outcome versus straight cold applying to things. I review every LinkedIn connection request. I’m not interesting enough or important enough to be inundated with connections—and I haven’t tried to be a LinkedInFluencer (yuck!)—so it’s relatively easy. Enter: Phil Bell. What might have been an innocuous connection request from someone I didn’t recognize turned into an investigation that had the potential to unearth the underbelly of our geopolitical order. Let’s dig in. The first curiosity: Phil’s company This man named Phil Bell, who sent the connection request, identified himself as employee of a company called “Host Marriott Corp.” Right off the bat, I wasn’t familiar with Host Marriott Corp. but it sounded legit. Maybe the holding company or corporate parent for all of the Marriott hotels? Was this someone from the hotel giant wanting to hire me? Is it even worth looking into it—randos send LinkedIn requests all the time, after all. Like, this was the moment: right here. I can just ignore it and move on. But I couldn’t brush aside the curiosity. So, I went to Google for verification: let’s make sure the company is real. The first result is a press release from Marriott International, Inc. about the resolution of litigation involving Host Marriott Corp. So, OK, that’s kind of legit, insofar as Host Marriott Corp. is or was a real entity. But wait! It’s from February of 2000. TWO THOUSAND! Looking at the date of the stories/results on the first page, you see: 1995, 2002, 1995, 2005, 2008, 2006. In other words, whatever this entity is hasn’t been active lately, if it exists at all anymore. My mind raced. My first thought, naturally was: is Phil Bell a member of Obama/Biden’s Deep State trying to keep tabs on me? A Russian influence campaign? China’s next American surveillance effort? Hell, maybe I’m thinking too small-time here: this could be the tip of the iceberg of a 3-way collab between the Democratic party, Russia, and China designed to keep Trump out of the White House in 2024. But wait: wouldn’t Russia rather have Trump in office? This is some 5D chess. But what do these global and domestic powers, as a unified front, want? Everything seemed on the table. What about that profile photo? Phil’s profile photo seemed so generic that it was borderline parody. I uploaded Phil Bell’s incredibly generic profile photo and did a reverse image search and nothing of value came up, except that Google suggested that the photo might be related to Gareth Southgate, coach of England’s soccer team. But I mean, look at him. A generic, Anglo white dude you could possibly create. Garth Southgate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Southgate) was born in Watford, Hertfordshire and attended school in Cowplain, Hampshire and then went to Hazelwick School in Crawley, West Sussex. That could just as easily have been Phil, from the looks of him. Was this an AI-generated profile photo, a la thispersondoesnotexist.com (https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/)? I downloaded Phil’s profile photo and studied the headshot really closely. I did this while sitting at a coffee shop, so I looked kind of creepy. Just a man, sipping a cappuccino, hunched over a computer screen with his face two inches from this Phil’s zoomed-in profile photo. Not open in any image editing software. A human deeply staring at another’s photo, in a crowded room. But anyways, AI has gotten really good. It’s pretty plausible that my naked eye couldn’t spot it. And the tools of AI have been democratized—ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc. Everyone from the Chinese military to the person sitting next to you in a cafe could weaponize it. Real world experience Then I read the “Experience” listed in Phil’s profile. He’s a “Senior Speaking Director” but the description used doesn’t match the responsibilities of someone who does “speaking” as a profession. It lists “investment management” and “macroeconomic analysis” and “portfolio management.” All hallmarks of someone broadly in finance or investing. And come to think of it: what the hell is a “Senior Speaking Director?” To Google, once again. The first result? Not a resource about “Speaking Directors” or Google’s suggestion of the best answer, as you might get if you asked “what is a Marketing Manager.” The first result was another LinkedIn profile: for a “Gianna Stephanie.” More on that in a minute. Wait, what school? OK, so this guy Phil apparently earned his degree from MIT’s Sloan business school. That’s pretty amazing on the face of it. Top-tier program, and all that. But it’s kind of weird—the school’s logo doesn’t show up on his profile. And wait, isn’t it technically called MIT Sloan School of Management? Like if I were a proud graduate of one of the premier graduate programs in the world, I would for sure have that name locked-and-loaded on my profile down to the “T.” (I always thought the “T” in MIT stood for “Theatre,” but later learned it’s “Technology!” Wow!) When you click on “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)” (aka the wrong way to present the school) LinkedIn doesn’t direct you to an actual school page. Rather, it just functions as a generic search within LinkedIn, and pulls in various people and posts who have mentioned “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” on the platform. But, if you just search “MIT Sloan School of Management, the legit page —with the logo and 437K followers—shows right up. Phil probably didn’t go to Sloan. So what the heck was going on? There’s no chance that Phil is real, right? Or was my initial suspicion that a new Axis of Evil (Democrats, Russia, China, maybe George Santos and/or Anthony Devolder) was trying to reshape the world order still the most plausible explanation? And what did the Axis of Evil want with me, anyways? There’s another Phil OK, back to me Googling “Speaking Director.” Not only were there effectively zero sources or definitions of it on the internet, the very first result was another LInkedIn profile! How curious! “Gianna Stephanie,” it turns out, has the same exact profile vibe as my man Phil. Generic profile photo. Vague experience that doesn’t really align with the state job titles. Listing a prestigious school but with slight modifications to the actual name. And, of course, there’s no actual page for said school. Then I noticed that both of these profiles listed “LION” in their brief headlines underneath their names. There is no description of what “LION” is or means. So I did some digging and found a resource from an email marketing company (https://www.notion.so/LinkedIn-3702f323918243879557133174885514) that wrote an article on LION: it stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. People—especially salespeople looking for lead gen opportunities—add that to their bios to try to grow their network and accept requests from anyone. I looked at Gianna’s profile photo and this one seemed very AI generated. Let’s dig in. The first flag is that she’s only wearing one earring. In fact it actually looks like Evander Holyfield got to her right ear. The background was off too. The background on one side is a soft white/very light grey, while the other side’s has some green splotches. After digging into Gianna’s profile, I realized I hadn’t done the baseline thing I should have with the basic information that Phil (or “Phil”) had in the profile: Google his name + the school or the company. Nada for Phil Bell + “host marriott” and nothing close to information about Phil Bell + MIT—there’s an AI Engineer in the UK and a professor in the US with the name but neither have ties to the school. (And a note to the engineer and professor: I’m sorry if this newsletter pops into your Google Alert or on the first page of search results for your name and also I hope you’re doing well! Engineering and academia are noble pursuits! Coffee on me if we’re ever in the same neck of the woods!) A potential explanation I was a little creeped out by this whole thing. And look: internet scams are as old as the internet itself. Social media scams are as old as social media itself. But there’s something oddly nefarious about it happening on LinkedIn—of any of the big social networks, this one is so tightly wound up with peoples’ real identities. You basically have to have verifiable proof that you went to a certain school and worked places. You have references, work samples, etc. etc. Whoever was behind this—again, maybe the Biden administration, or maybe a consortium of Big Tech trying to bring down the common man, or a troll farm in Saskatchewan—was preying on the norms of the platform to try to do… something. But what was it? Digging further, I came across an NPR story from last year (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/27/1088140809/fake-linkedin-profiles) that featured Renée DiResta, a researcher at the Stanford Internet Observatory. She was messaged by a “Keenan Ramsey” on LinkedIn who had some of the same profile characteristics as Phil Bell—the overly generic headshot, suspect school and business credentials, no other relevant identifiable information. NPR was able to actually reach out and contact the business and schools listed in this suspect profile (unfortunately, Greg’s Newsletter has neither the resources nor the relationships to carry out real journalism) to confirm that there are no records of the person with the name in question at either entity. But what’s the purpose of these accounts? Some type of phishing scam? Or my initial and very plausible hunch: a wild coordinated campaign carried out by the new Axis of Evil, the likes of which our geopolitical order has never seen? Welp, NPR found that these profiles often have a less nefarious (but also super annoying) aim: …many of the LinkedIn profiles seem to have a far more mundane purpose: drumming up sales for companies big and small. Accounts like Keenan Ramsey's send messages to potential customers. Anyone who takes the bait gets connected to a real salesperson who tries to close the deal. Think telemarketing for the digital age. By using fake profiles, companies can cast a wide net online without beefing up their own sales staff or hitting LinkedIn's limits on messages. Demand for online sales leads exploded during the pandemic as it became hard for sales teams to pitch their products in person. There’s another more serious set of scams going around on LinkedIn, where people searching for a job end up applying and then send personal information and money! (https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/contributor/2022/10/10/linkedin-scams-beware/8209606001/) as part being “hired” at fake front for a real company. I didn’t know what to think of Phil. Like, at the end of the day, that’s it? He’s just the (computer generated) face of a scammy marketing company trying to generate leads? Or an (AI) photo that represents a new version of the Nigerian prince scam—i.e. give us your information or front us money, and we promise to deliver you something of higher value (like a job)? Maybe “Phil” is just part of some bot farm thing, the purpose of which I’ll never know. Learning that the more mundane explanations were actually the most likely was both heartening and disappointing. On the one hand, these profiles are somewhere on the spectrum of unethical/obnoxious to predatory/criminal. But as a LinkedIn user, you can pretty easily safeguard yourself: you can ignore suspect incoming connection or message requests, not reply to messages, block accounts, report suspicious profiles, etc. On the other hand, I had already started building my backyard bunker in prep for whatever this Axis of Evil influence/misinformation/psyop campaign was going to inevitably incite after I pulled back the curtain—Jan. 6, but worse. And my back hurt from the shoveling and my lawn was in shambles—all because some random company was taking advantage of LinkedIn’s set of formal and informal norms to, most likely, carry out the modern equivalent of telemarketing. In conclusion I’m back on the hunt for my next job and hitting LinkedIn pretty hard each day. If you or anyone you know is hiring for a brand/social/media strategist, I would love to talk. Phil still hasn’t messaged me. I’m not sure why. By now, I would have expected some quasi-salesy message to try to bait me. So I proactively messaged him and hope to hear back so that I can ask some clarifying questions. He didn’t reply right away. As my focus turned back to my job search, I went back to that “networking” mindset: you never know where your next opportunity is going to come from. So I sent Phil one additional message. Might as well shoot my shot. Fingers crossed! Get full access to Greg's Newsletter at greg.substack.com/subscribe (https://greg.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)