Waiting My Turn

Never have I wanted to be 50 so badly. 

But no, even this child of the 70s is unable to score a vaccination appointment. I must credit my non-immunocompromised, nonessential 20-to-40-something-year-old friends who found innovative loopholes to exploit in order to get their jabs. I’m not so much feeling the brusque wind blowing from my moral high ground as a deep, burning FOMO, cut with disappointment in myself for not thinking hard enough about how to creatively cut the line while still being tethered to any sense of decency. 

Mind you, I was the kid who got away with eating snacks during class by insisting I had a blood-sugar condition not called diabetes. Thirty years later, I got nothin. 

A friend of mine wrote up a not-so-simple guide for securing a vaccination appointment in the Bay Area; she wrote it assuming, of course, her recipients qualified for a shot. Reading through the various steps, some of which involve staying up much of the night and being willing to drive to a CVS four hours away, are not optimal nor guaranteed. 

I haven’t felt this level of crowd anxiety since the early days of Gilt Groupe sample sales. Even if you were willing to spend the money you may have never gotten the chance to buy the handbag. But in this case, not buying the handbag is not an option. I have to buy the handbag, even if I won’t get it until August. 

“Just lie about your age so you can go in and do a practice scheduling run,” a friend insisted I try. “Practice moving quickly.” She anticipated the competition I’ll encounter with the age 16-49 crowd, many of whom grew up playing video games requiring unmercifully mashing the controller buttons.

I even offered to pay my friend to sign me up, which apparently is not easy or even possible without also surrendering my mobile phone to complete the two-factor authentication. She laughed and said I’ll be fine… Fine being like everybody else in the world, in decent health, and with access to vaccines, democratic institutions and modernized infrastructure. 

It’s all good. You vaxxed folk enjoy your long-haul flights to countries in the purple zone, eating off each others’ plates, sharing water bottles at your raves, spontaneous hugging, licking windows … I’l be fine. 

The most unsurprising news of the week

I did kind of sort of call it in my last newsletter, when I implored Roblox and toy brand MGA Entertainment to consider the NFT collectibles market for kids, in particular for L.O.L. Dolls which are the 21st century version of baseball cards. Except they appeal mostly to girls. And are not related to sports…or to any athletes or real people…and are 100% more camp…and involve more glitter. Otherwise totally the same.

Anywho, Michael Eisner must have been reading my newsletter: Where else would he have gotten the brilliant idea to go public by merging with a blank-check firm in a $1.3BN SPAC deal and take the Topps baseball card company into the world of NFTs?

Can anyone guess?

It does seem as though everyone is getting a bit NiFTy and SPACky of late. Now we have two more things, along with vaccines, we can all race toward and feel shitty about not having before everyone else. Forget that most of the population still doesn’t understand Blockchain or any of the nuances of SEC regulation (which is getting more persnickety about SPACs by the second).

OK let’s all gather ourselves for a hot minute and realize our collective history with bright, shiny emerging tech. James Surowiecki puts NFTs into perspective in a recent piece in which he shares an analog example of what will inevitably occur with NFTs, a phenomenon also known as the “Tragedy of the Commons.”

I have written over the years about my numerous crushes on emerging tech (AR/VR/MR, Blockchain) knowing full-well that, at the outset, the bulk of new entrants are going to massively screw it up. I liken this to the blue ketchup phenomenon, where companies leverage technology for novelty’s sake alone, forgetting that our taste for physical experiences are often so grounded that fundamentally changing them for the sake of adding blockchain/VR/AI to the tech stack is meaningless. 

Blue ketchup, even if it tastes like real ketchup, is just gross. Hard stop. 

All this said: While I’m not into blue ketchup, I’m totally in on both NFTs and SPACs. Provided they are not stupid ones. More to share on non-stupid versions soon.

Other stuff that made me go Hmmmm…

Will Clubhouse go the way of Meerkat?  Years after exiting my startup, which was firmly grounded in the Influencer Marketing space, I realized that there were still souls out there who knew how to properly wield the power of influencer content, and who simply loved the business of Influence. Jim Tobin is one of those people. And so I was particularly interested in his predictions on the future of Clubhouse, the latest social platform du jour, which frankly I give high props to, even if I have mixed feelings about it’s red-velvet-rope approach to community.

First Movers... After writing about how hard it is to get consumers to change habits, even if it’s to do something existentially better for ourselves and our society, I had to call out this latest post from Elisa Camahort Page, my former BlogHer business partner and all around badass I talk to about random things that bother me. She wrote candidly about her protracted transition off of her former email newsletter vendor, and off of “People-as-Product” tech in general. But the transition isn’t happening without some pain and anguish, which is a major impediment to the movement off of Big Tech and toward the Alternative Internet. It’s still too hard. We need more bridges that will enable us to keep a semblance of our online identities while still ensuring privacy. 

I often point to Elisa as my activist gut check: “If Elisa won’t make the move, NOBODY will!” She has lived her values as long as I’ve known her. I still regret that I didn’t know she had gone vegan the week before my wedding, which was situated in an unincorporated part of the Mendocino Country woods, about 4 hours’ drive from her home. I had a vegetarian-option menu. Did you know honey-based salad dressing isn’t vegan? I didn’t. She basically starved.

Hopefully her piece on living her values through tech will inspire us. Someone has to go first(ish). And it’s usually Elisa.

I have to also call out this video, which is pretty old now, but that caught my eye nonetheless. I am a big fan of the docudrama The Social Dilemma, which came out when I first joined The @ Company. And I was rather grateful for it. I had validation of what I had been suspecting about Big Tech companies and their unethical use of user data. 

But I also learned that in tech circles there was a lot of pushback against the documentary, not because the topic wasn’t important or untrue, but partly because of the experts involved in telling the story. Much of commentary came from largely white, male expatriates of Big Tech companies who had amassed fortunes from them before decrying their methods. 

Which is why I found this video by Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO of Social Capital and former Facebook growth marketing exec, to be so interesting. I’ve long been an eye-roller who did not believe Palihapitiya’s after-the-IPO angst was real. But I saw this talk to Stanford Business School students and believed this.

Be rich, have integrity, get vaccinated.  See you soon.