Why has nobody sued Apple and other thoughts
A roundup from the last couple of weeks
It’s been an unduly busy time in work/life so I haven’t been able to write til now. Here’s a roundup of thoughts et al while I try to write a longer piece for the near future.
The Artemis launch and mission was amazing. It reminded me why I wanted to write this Substack in the first place - technology can be truly amazing and help humanity achieve incredible ends. It also has an ability to inspire people and make them feel a collective pride that very few other things can.
But when you try to reach for amazing things, there will always be naysayers. And they’ll always have large and influential platforms. It’s important that we ignore them. Completely. Exploration of all sorts feeds the soul in ways these people can never comprehend. They are incurious, small minded misery-mongerers who have no idea why ambition feeds the soul.
Whilst I was away, I surpassed a small Substack milestone, breaking through 150 subscribers. It may not sound like a lot but it’s meaningful to me so thank you to everyone who subscribes and read this. And if you want to help me break through 250, don’t forget to..
I have fully become the meme and, as a 41 year old man, have started reading about The Roman Empire. Just inhaled the excellent SPQR. Turns out this period of history is pretty interesting. Who knew? Current book is about Alexander the Great and then I’m going to read about the Ancient Greeks. By the time I’m in my fifties, I’ll be up to the Second World War and will be fully inhabiting that meme (or whatever we’ll be calling memes by then).
Speaking of which, it’s amazing the information historians glean from a broken piece of pottery or tomb. I wonder whether future historians of our age will be able to separate the signal from the noise.
Speaking of books, if you want an updated le Carré type spy novel, I recommend Oliver Harris. A Shadow Intelligence was an excellent first book in the trilogy. I’m saving 2 & 3 for Summer holiday.
Stray thought I had recently. How much poorer at the actual art of singing that male singers are than female singers and how much better you have to be, as a woman, to become just as famous. I wonder if this applies to anything else in life for women? It was Harry Styles that spurred this thought - the radio channel of choice in my household is Capital and young Harry has brought out some new songs recently. And whatever you think of him, he’s pretty damn famous. But as an actual singer, he’s decidedly average. Same for any of the 1D lads too or people like Benson Boone, Jack Harlow and Alex Warren. Compare their actual vocal abilities to people like Adele, Ariana Grande or my favourite newcomes, Skye Newman and you’ll see what I mean. Sabrina Carpenter obviously the exception that proves the rule.
Meta and YouTube were found liable in a recent lawsuit about social media addiction. These kinds of lawsuits were inevitable with big tech in the lawyers crosshairs now that Big Tobacco has been sued to smithereens. The lawsuit itself isn’t that interesting to me but what is, is this question; “How come nobody has sued Apple?” They basically invented the devices and allow what’s on them. They designed them for dopamine hits and haptic feedback. They maintain the app store and take their sweet 30% cut. Suing Meta and Facebook instead of Apple is like suing Zippo instead of Marlboro. If there was proper legal discovery, I’m certain that Apple has research (similar to the way tobacco firms did about lung cancer) about how addictive their phones are.
The most successful artist you’ve never heard of, N.B.A Youngboy - 109 million albums sold, 15 BILLION streams on Youtube, 100 chart-worthy singles and hardly any mainstream press. This is such a fascinating article that I can’t recommend highly enough, even if HipHop isn’t your genre it dives into success outside of the traditional press ecosystem. Distribution is the only moat.
This from Mike Solana over at Pirate Wires was also excellent about why he is still on the garbage dump that is Twitter. But it just made me miss Nuzzel. Maybe we should vibecode it.
Doesn’t it always seem that we, in the UK, see headlines like this. No matter what the global crisis, it’s always the UK that is going to be hit the hardest. I don’t know why but there must be something structural about our economy that means we’re constantly getting the most fucked of all the fucked nations. Solve that and maybe you unlock the growth potential we really have.
The Oscars happened and turns out my prediction of One Battle After Another winning Best Picture was correct.
And speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson, the Manosphere has been garnering headlines since Louis “Easy Target” Theroux released his documentary. As a dad of 3 boys, I have thoughts and a vested interest. So much so that I might write a separate piece on it. But, the reason I referenced PTA is that, if you saw his 2nd film, Magnolia, you’ll remember Tom Cruise’s role as Frank “TJ” Mackey. Watch that whole 7 minute clip and it will seem eerily familiar to the stuff Louis was “uncovering”. Magnolia was released in 1999 by the way and PTA didn’t create the character from whole cloth. He was based on people that already existed. My point isn’t that this stuff isn’t horribly toxic. It is. My point is that it’s nothing new.
Project Hail Mary - thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it had two endings too many but it was well done and really good. I’d read the book and kind of liked it but knew that my eldest would really like it. So bought it for him, he loved it and then we went to the movie together. It’s honestly really cool being a parent when you can start to share these things with your kids. Life is good.