Age of abundance, #hashtag edition

People are appending anything up to 50 hashtags to their Instagram posts, carefully researching the most popular hashtags, or formulating individual strategies (here’s a travel blogger explaining hers).
 

Hashtags are a search tool, providing a way to make your content discoverable by people who don’t already know or follow you. In this way, they’re a means of getting attention – and therefore status – in the endless popularity contest that’s metric-driven social media. Excessive hashtag use may be a bid for Instacelebrity, and the ensuing Instacash – with reports of top style bloggers earning $1m per year, and an estimated $1 billion sponsored Instagram post economy - or a sheer addiction to the dopamine hit of the ‘like’ count ticking upward.
 

But as a matter of taste, it all looks… a little grasping.
 

Anyone well versed in social media understands hacks like these to gain distribution for their content. This piece, whose opening is cited above, is much more interesting for its analysis of hashtag use in conveying and reinforcing status.

Let’s start from the principle that hashtag usage is often a bid for attention – you want your content to be discoverable, for more people to see it (and hopefully like it). But visibly betraying a desire for attention is a sign of neediness – and neediness is low status (you are dependent on other people’s behaviour to define your self worth). Therefore:
 

Hypothesis: High status brands don’t use hashtags extensively
 

Evidence:  We find @ChanelOfficial using hashtags, but with two constraints:
 

· A maximum of three per post, often only one
· Almost entirely ‘owned’ hashtags based on their campaign names
 

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Whole thing isn't that long, all worth a read.

I recall being a kid in school, struggling to learn, often painfully, about how my words and clothing and haircut and actions affected how people perceived me, what circles I could enter and which were closed off. A terrifying crucible.

What must it be like to grow up today, not only having to learn the real world signaling prices but also the values of strategies and cultural assets and selfie poses in the social media market? I've heard from many people that if they post something to social media and if it doesn't garner a certain volume of likes within some period of time, they pull it down immediately. Oh the horror of changing your Facebook profile photo and not getting enough likes within the first hour. Every one of these kids a William Masters or Virginia Johnson of social media, exploring the boundaries of what is or isn't acceptable to local and global tribes.

From my limited sample set of observation (yep, it's still a sample set of one), a lot of social media usage cuts along a generational line demarcated by whether you grew up in the age of scarcity or in the internet-driven age of abundance. I don't have data to back this up, but if someone out there does, please let me know.

Older people, who largely grew up in an age of scarcity, publish content to social media and interact or affirm such content carefully. A like from such a person is difficult to earn because they treat it as something that must be earned. The act of giving out such a like also conveys something about the giver, so it is a considered action.

Younger people seem to be more generous and prolific with content, likes, etc. They've grown up in an age where everything digitizable is available on demand, from TV shows and movies to music to photos to articles. Their likes are freely given, and plentiful, often used more as a read receipt than a standing ovation.

It makes sense if viewed from an abundance economic framework. Likes are an infinitely replenishable virtual good, and if it adds some happiness to the recipient, what's the harm? Perhaps everyone would be happier if we all liked and favorited more frequently, more generously. Social media need not be a zero sum game.

The other view, that of scarcity, is that we'd just be reinforcing coddled millennials who, in receiving affirmation for everything, receive it for nothing. Damn these sensitive unemployed self-promoting kids with their need for trigger warnings and their impulse to take offense at even the most harmless of jokes!

The piece quoted up top comes full circle by the end.

High status social media usage often demands that the labour of working at one’s social media persona be concealed. As with beauty, status is something one is supposed to attain effortlessly – and should the frantic paddling below the surface be revealed, that is vulgar, a faux pas.
 

This is why Kim Kardashian is so interesting – because she, almost uniquely, does not pretend she #wokeuplikethis, but instead makes the artifice of her social media persona not only evident but into a published art photography book, the brilliantly entitled ‘Selfish‘. In this way, Kardashian (and also Amalia Ulman,) make the ‘Oh me? I’m not self-promoting’ hashtaglessness of Chiara Ferragni et al. look like the studied pose it really is.
 

Hyperproliferating hashtag useage is thus interesting as one potential tactic to invert social media ‘good taste’.
 

What more suitable patron saint of the age of abundance than Kim Kardashian, who finds every opportunity to shove her ample, or shall we say abundant, derriere in the public's face through all possible social media channels.

The most scarce play she's made is releasing an actual physical coffee table book that costs $9.97, at last count, on Amazon, and includes photos not released on Instagram before. I suspect these first several customer reviews are from the scarcity school of thought.

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COCOM Limits

In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 60,000 feet (18,000 m).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
 

Some manufacturers apply this limit only when both speed and altitude limits are reached, while other manufacturers disable tracking when either limit is reached. In the latter case, this causes some devices to refuse to operate in very high altitude balloons.[3]
 

Next time you bring your GPS into outer space and wonder why it isn't working, you'll know why.

Via reddit, which, after all the recent outcry and pronunciations of doom, seems to be trucking along the same as usual, for all its good and bad (and awful, hiding in plain sight). It strengthens my suspicion that most of the people predicting its doom weren't regular users of the service. It may not be a great business, or maybe it chooses not to be, but it still commands a whole lot of eyeballs.

That's why they call it Gawker

While it is de rigueur among observers of Silicon Valley’s Game of Thrones to dismiss questions of profitability as short-sighted hand-wringing, the detailed documents obtained by Gawker demonstrate conclusively for the first time that Uber has been financing its astronomic growth by taking staggering losses.
 

This unaudited revenue and expense breakdown for 2013 and 2014 shows that, though Uber’s net revenue has grown substantially, the company lost more than $56 million in 2013. By the first half of 2014 alone, that number had leapt to more than $160 million. 
 

Another document, laying out quarterly profits and losses in 2012 and part of 2013, shows the same dynamic: healthy growth in revenue coupled with steadily deepening losses. In 2012, Uber’s losses totaled $20.4 million; from the first quarter of 2012 until mid-2013, quarterly losses more than doubled from $3.5 million to $8.1 million.
 

Juicy get by Gawker on Uber's financials, but the financial analysis is about the quality you'd expect. The original version of the article included this line:

“Net revenue” typically refers to the money you have left after the cost of doing business—profit.
 

Yikes. I give lots of tech journalists grief for not knowing the subjects they're covering, but I'd venture to say most anyone with the a basic finance or econ course under their belts knows the difference between net revenue and profit. This hilariously defiant correction was later added:

Correction: Although net revenue is sometimes used as a synonym for profit, in accounting terms it means simply gross revenue minus the cost of sales. Two sentences that confused this meaning have been removed.
 

If I were an investor, I think I'd be ecstatic to see these internal financials. In a commodity market where the last company standing will be incredibly valuable, Uber is subsidizing a price war that favors the company with the scale advantage (i.e., Uber). Try calling an Uber Pool and compare it to calling a Lyft Line and you'll get a sense of how much thicker the Uber market is, on both the driver and rider side.

The subsidized pricing in a variety of cities are a worthwhile customer acquisition cost for what might be a lifetime rider. The last time I was in Los Angeles, riding Uber all over town was so cheap it fell into the category of no-brainer, and I contemplated not renting a car next time in town. I was in New York City recently and whereas a year ago a lot of Manhattanites still took cabs most of the time, now most of them are Uber converts. Once the introductory rates and subsidies go away, I suspect most of them will still be customers. That's when the profits come.

And yes, someday one of Uber's chief costs, the drivers, may be replaced by driverless cars, adding to their gross margins, and also their profits.

No moral judgments here, just some impressed gawking at Uber's flawless execution. That wouldn't have made for a Gawker-worthy story, but that should've been the headline.

The new writing fundamentals

Spidery scrawls across faintly lined paper or the carefully penned love letter will be the stuff of fairytales for many young Finns thanks to a new government policy. Schools in Finland are phasing out cursive handwriting classes in favour of keyboard skills, as officials accept that texting, tapping and tweeting have taken over as the primary means of communication in the modern age.
 

“We used to do joined-up writing so that we could write faster, but these days kids only start learning it in grade two [aged eight] and have a year to get it right before moving on to concentrating on what they write, rather than simply how they write it,” said Minna Harmanen of Finland’s National Board of Education. “They don’t have time to become fast at cursive writing, so it’s not useful for them.”
 

Joined-up writing has also become more difficult since Finns introduced new ways of writing their letters in 1986: “We moved from the old Swedish-derived handwriting style to a more modern one and now a few letters look very similar to each other in joined-up writing,” explained Harmanen. “It’s not easy for children to write – or for teachers to read. When they write in print, it’s clearer.” From 2016, pupils will be taught only print handwriting and will spend more time learning keyboard skills – “something we recognise is very important for the job market,” said Harmanen.
 

Full story at 10.

My niece is nearly turning two, it's probably time for me to teach her how to switch to the emoji keyboard in iOS, followed by Advanced Instagram Filtering and the Spatial UI Basics of Snapchat. If the schools won't add this stuff to their curriculum, I'm on it as an uncle who wants his nieces and nephews to be digitally fluent.

Sneaky feminism

Feminism has been sneaking around. Don’t believe me? A recent New York profile of TV host Katie Nolan hailed the “woman bringing a sneaky feminism to Fox sports.” A few days later, the New York Times went long on Amy Schumer’s boisterous feminism, which it characterized as her “sneaky power.” Like Broad City (another purveyor of “sneak-attack feminism”), Schumer’s work is something of a trysting spot for furtive sisterhood; last year in Slate Willa Paskin declared Inside Amy Schumer the “most sneakily feminist show on TV.”
 

Psst! Do you know what else is “sneakily feminist?” Showtime’s The Affair. Meanwhile the Hugh Dancy and Maggie Gyllenhaal flick Hysteria is “slyly feminist,” as is Pixar’s fable Inside Out(which, according to a separate reviewon Slate, accomplishes a “subtle but surprisingly feminist” swerve). Plus, the show Trophy Wife has bloomed, like some nocturnal desert flower, into “secretly one of the most feminist shows on TV.” Sundance chose the “top ten secretly feminist films” of all time (with Thelma and Louise at the mist-shrouded apex). Spy is “secretly a feminist attack on the patriarchy.” Not even academic books prove immune from such subtlety, secrecy, surprise: In a chapter on Ursula Le Guin’s invented folklore, scholar Jarold Ramsey notes that the “slyly feminist … appropriation of the mystique of ‘Old Man Coyote’ can be illustrated by the beginning of a Kesh myth about a war between bears and humans.”
 

Let’s read that myth! Once upon a time, a lady Coyote tried to dissuade the King of the Bears from attacking humankind. “We should all live in peace and love each other,” the Coyote pleaded, and “all the while she was talking,” Le Guin writes, “Coyote was stealing Bear’s balls, cutting them off with an obsidian knife she had stolen from the Doctors Lodge, a knife so sharp he never felt it cutting.”
 

Katy Waldman on that verbal tic of an adjective that must precede the word feminist or feminism. Anyone referring to Amy Schumer as sneakily feminist must be an extreme feminist indeed.