Buying shares of people
Fantex, Inc. announced today that it has entered into brand contracts with five Major Leaguers: Phillies third baseman Maikel Franco, Astros right-hander Collin McHugh, Orioles second baseman Jonathan Schoop, Twins right-hander Tyler Duffey and Padres third baseman Yangervis Solarte (as noted on BusinessWire.com).
Fantex offers professional athletes an up-front, one-time payment in exchange for a portion of that player’s future earnings both on and off the field. Fantex then sells “shares” of that player to public investors for a set price (thus covering the up-front payment to the player), allowing those investors to turn a profit if said player crosses a certain threshold in his career earnings. Obviously, that creates risk for the investors, who stand to take a financial loss if the player fails to earn enough money in his career to justify the shareholders’ investment. Angels left-hander Andrew Heaney became the first player to enter into an agreement with Fantex last September, taking a $3.34MM up-front payment in exchange for 10 percent of his future earnings. (Notably, the league and the MLBPA each approved that agreement, and Fantex’s announcement seemingly suggests that the same is true of these five agreements.)
Hmm. I wonder if this becomes more widespread. I'd heard this idea proposed before but never heard of Fantex. Purchasing shares of Jennifer Lawrence just after you'd seen her in Winter's Bone might feel like scoring a Mantle rookie card, back when baseball cards still had real scarcity (and thus value).
Innovation in organization design
For example, Uber has a mobile app (UI) that talks to their servers (API). You can imagine that their servers effectively take three parameters: credit card, drive from, and drive to… and they dispatch a human to do it.
uber.drive(card, pointA, pointB); // pseudocode obviously
What does that make the drivers? Cogs in a giant automated dispatching machine, controlled through clever programming optimizations like surge pricing? Drivers have often told me that the job grants them incredible autonomy: they can drive whenever they feel like it, and they’ve stopped looking for jobs in finance or construction because the daily freedom is so valuable to them. There’s liquidity in the marketplace that allows them to come and go as they see fit. But the actual driving is perfectly orchestrated by software, and it’s not a secret that Uber intends to eventually replace all their drivers with self-driving cars. I worry that the army of Lyft and Uber drivers is opting into an easy, and sometimes-intended-to-be-temporary, dead-end career path. This may be ok at the moment for some drivers who enjoy driving and the flexibility of the job. But driving as an occupation will disappear practically overnight when self-driving cars hit the road.
Similarly, 99designs Tasks has a web interface for the customer to explain a simple and quick design task, plus an API to dispatch a visual designer to complete the task. At Segment we’ve actually built a 99designs Tasks API to create vector logos from an image url:
99designs.logo(card, url); // pseudocode ;)
What’s bizarre here is that these lines of code directly control real humans. The Uber API dispatches a human to drive from point A to point B. And the 99designs Tasks API dispatches a human to convert an image into a vector logo (black, white and color). Humans are on the verge of becoming literal cogs in a machine, completely anonymized behind an API. And the companies that control those APIs have strong incentives to drive down the cost of executing those API methods.
Peter Reinhardt wrote this a while back on replacing middle managers with APIs. It speaks to a broader trend, but depicting this gaping skills gap as an API call is an elegant visualization.
Mistress dispellers
Mistress-dispelling services, increasingly common in China’s larger cities, specialize in ending affairs between married men and their extramarital lovers.
Typically hired by a scorned wife, they coach women on how to save their marriages, while inducing the mistress to disappear. For a fee that can start in the tens of thousands of dollars, they will subtly infiltrate the mistress’s life, winning her friendship and trust in an attempt to break up the affair. The services have emerged as China’s economy has opened up in recent decades, and as extramarital affairs grew more common.
(h/t Ken)
Well this is something. Coming this fall to ABC, the explosive new series from Shonda Rhimes: The Dispeller, starring Halle Berry.
Mistress dispelling typically begins with research on the targeted woman, said Shu Xin, Weiqing’s director. An investigation team — often including a psychotherapist and, to keep on the safe side, a lawyer — analyzes her family, friends, education and job before sending in an employee whom Weiqing calls a counselor.
“Once we figure out what type of mistress she is — in it for money, love or sex — we draw up a plan,” Mr. Shu said.
The counselor might move into the mistress’s apartment building or start working out at her gym, getting to know her, becoming her confidante and eventually turning her feelings against her partner. Sometimes, the counselor finds her a new lover, a job opening in another city or otherwise persuades her to leave the married man. Weiqing and other agencies said their counselors were prohibited from becoming intimately involved with the mistresses or from using or threatening violence.
Even the term is spectacular—mistress-dispelling—like some overly literal translation of a Chinese phrase.
At first blush, this seems like a ridiculous solution, but understand the social context and there is a Coasean efficiency, an almost ingenious elegance, at work.
Style transfer
Frank Liu developed a technique he calls “style transfer” in which he renders an image in the style of another.
Bhautik Joshi riffed off of that for video, resulting in experiments like this rendering of clips from Blade Runner in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night.
Prisma has capitalized on this technique by taking it mobile. I've enjoyed using the app to render some photos in my camera roll in a variety of styles. I had previously found expensive apps and plugins on the desktop that could do something like this, but now it's available in a free mobile app. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a free app on your phone, eventually.
I'm looking forward to when Prisma can handle video, it's only a matter of time before style transfer videos like the one above are flooding your social media feeds.
A market opportunity for human ingenuity remains, however, for those who can actually transfer not just the visual style but the entire cinematic grammar of one artist to another. What if Werner Herzog directed Toy Story? What if Stanley Kubrick directed Star Wars? Who wants to see Terrence Malick's take on Captain America?
I draw much too much pleasure from style transfer in prose, like imitations of Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and the such. James Wood once wrote of McCarthy:
To read Cormac McCarthy is to enter a climate of frustration: a good day is so mysteriously followed by a bad one. McCarthy is a colossally gifted writer, certainly one of the greatest observers of landscape. He is also one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.