What's Good: Oct. 8, 2021
Worlds, art, and democracy.
Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Also, happy #Worlds2021! The League of Legends World Championship kicked off this week, and it has been tremendously exciting. I am thrilled about the month ahead. At this very moment, I am watching game 5 of GS vs. BYG, and it is an utter nail-biter. You can watch games live, as well as vods, on the LoLEsports site. You even get rewards for watching if you’re signed in! My favorite part, though, is the live-updating statistics as you watch.
Also this week I had an interview with a partner that I enjoyed the most of any job interview I’ve ever had. He was just wonderful, and even if I don’t get selected to move forward, I plan to write him a follow-up email to ask him to keep my information. It’s nice to be this excited about an opportunity, but also a bit scary, you know? Anyway, here’s hoping it works out.
Also also this week is/was the Ted Lasso season 2 finale and the new James Bond movie, which I watched this morning and last night, respectfully. Both are tremendous and well worth your time. Please enjoy this screenshot of a happy Guoba.
Green light
The Great Gatsby is a story about having awesome parties, according to these people:
Let me tell you a not-so-secret secret: I sometimes wish I had one of those nice, well-paid boyfriends who work in tech. Like, I have a total crush on my roommate’s man, D. He’s tall, handsome, charming, and, oh yeah, he works in cryptocurrency, which I know basically nothing about, other than it seems to be something that is making some computer nerds rich. So when he told me last week that there was a crypto conference in town, and that there would likely be some late-night letting loose after spending all day revolutionizing global finance at a Marriott in Times Square, I knew I had to go down to a Men in Crypto Business Conference after-party to size them up for myself.
Maybe they should read the book again? Or they can just be their own farce, whichever.
The lone and level sands
Let’s check in on Ozy Media:
Ozy Media might have a securities fraud situation that has nothing to do with its infamous conference call.
Driving the news: Axios has learned that Ozy this year solicited prospective investors by saying Google Ventures has agreed to lead a new funding round, but three sources close to GV say that no such offer was made.
One source says that while GV and Ozy had exploratory conversations in the past, there were none in 2021.
GV declined comment, citing pending litigation.
Oh no! Securities fraud! Who could have possibly predicted?! Also,
Ozy Media executives did more than just impersonate YouTube employees as they sought to squeeze money out of Goldman Sachs.
The Wall Street giant — which reportedly was treated to a bizarre conference call with Ozy’s operating chief, who posed as a YouTube exec as he angled for a fresh cash infusion — is also among the A-list advertisers that recently got hosed buying ads with the digital startup, The Post has learned.
In the last month, insiders say David Solomon’s bank spent nearly $300,000 on a new advertising partnership with Ozy, which last week went up in flames over a series of scandals that also included lying about getting cash from Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne.
Oh no! The fraudsters did fraud repeatedly! Who could have possibly predicted?! Also,
Former Ozy editor Eugene S. Robinson suggested on Thursday that it was CEO Carlos Watson, rather than COO Samir Rao, who impersonated a Google executive on an investment call with Goldman Sachs that led to the shuttering of the media company last week.
Speaking on TheWrap-Up podcast, Robinson said: “People connected to Ozy? Maybe three or four have made mention of this, and outside of Ozy, pretty serious people, one or two have come to me and said that’s the only way it would have worked.”
Robinson said it was hard to believe that Watson wouldn’t have participated on that call, which was intended to secure a $40 million investment in the company by Goldman Sachs.
Oh no! The fraud is possibly worse than previously reported! Who could have possibly predicted?! Also,
But what I am asking here is, is there some level of crisis that is so complete and so embarrassing that the board will skip right past crisis management to “flee for your lives”? “Well, there’s nothing really to save here, we’re getting out and we never want to hear about this again”? “We can’t fire you, we quit”? If so is that … good? It’s not good, but is it something? If you are the founder-CEO, do you at least get total control of your company back, free from the interference of a board that would otherwise feel some obligation to investigate and make changes?
Here’s more on the wildest media story, and due diligence story, and corporate-governance story, of the last few weeks:
Ozy Media said it wouldn’t shut down after all, days after its board said the embattled digital-media startup was ceasing operations amid growing questions over the company’s business practices.
Ozy Media Chief Executive Carlos Watson said on NBC’s “Today” show Monday morning that the company would resume operations, calling it Ozy Media’s “Lazarus moment,” a reference to a follower of Jesus who is raised from the dead in the biblical Gospel of John. …
Ozy Media’s board said last week it had hired the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison LLP to “conduct a review of the company’s business activities.” That investigation is no longer ongoing, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Not because the board decided the investigation was unnecessary, but because the board members decided that they were unnecessary. As of Friday there were two board members, Watson and Michael Moe, and:
On Monday, a person with knowledge of the matter said that the Paul, Weiss investigation of Ozy will not go forward, because the Ozy board members who commissioned the law firm are no longer with the company.
This guy named his company after the poem Ozymandias and then name-drops Lazarus after very possibly doing some corporate governance crimes and/or securities fraud. It seems apparent to me that he learned a bunch of names of famous guys who got totally fucked up, and yet somehow missed the parts of their stories where they got fucked up.1 Maybe someone will eventually learn that lesson!
Arson
I regret to inform you that it’s not just cops:
When his fellow cadets at the fire academy gave Kareem Charles a racist nickname in 2015, he said, he chose not to “escalate the issue.” Black firefighters had warned him that speaking up about racism went against the culture at the New York Fire Department.
But after the murder of George Floyd more than a year ago touched off protests against racism and violence in policing, the culture inside New York City’s firehouses deteriorated beyond repair, Mr. Charles and other Black firefighters said.
White firefighters shared racist messages and memes on their phones mocking Mr. Floyd’s dying moments. They gloated about how police could “legally shoot Black children.” And lieutenants discussed turning fire hoses on protesters, prompting debates about whether the tactic would work, because “wild animals like water.”
Human, capital
Something important is being lost as local news organizations are swept up and dismantled by rich people who think they know better:
The grain elevator exploded on a cool April morning in 1987, six years before I was born. My father was testing a clay sample in a lab two miles away when suddenly the dial jumped. He ran outside, thinking that a car had smashed into the building. My mother, doing yard work at home, assumed that the nearby ammunition plant was testing a new explosive.
Dale Alison saw the blast up close. He was 32 years old, and it was his first day as the city editor of The Hawk Eye, a newspaper in Burlington, Iowa. From the front door of the office, he saw the train tracks outside ripple, and the air seemed to vibrate and sway. Then the windows of the newsroom blew out. Alison and his colleagues ducked under their desks, and a few looked out to see a plume of black smoke blocking the sky. The 12-story grain-storage facility—a longtime fixture on Burlington’s riverfront—was wrapped in orange flames.
Altruism, egoism
If you haven’t read it by now, allow me to introduce you to Bad Art Friend, the story that set the internet on fire this week:
There is a sunny earnestness to Dawn Dorland, an un-self-conscious openness that endears her to some people and that others have found to be a little extra. Her friends call her a “feeler”: openhearted and eager, pressing to make connections with others even as, in many instances, she feels like an outsider. An essayist and aspiring novelist who has taught writing classes in Los Angeles, she is the sort of writer who, in one authorial mission statement, declares her faith in the power of fiction to “share truth,” to heal trauma, to build bridges. (“I’m compelled at funerals to shake hands with the dusty men who dig our graves,” she has written.) She is known for signing off her emails not with “All best” or “Sincerely,” but “Kindly.”
And then once you finish the article, read this thread.
We’ll do it live
Twitch, the giant Amazon-owned streaming website that even I occasionally stream on, was hacked this week:
Tuesday night, an anonymous user on the anything-goes online forum 4chan posted a 125GB torrent they said contained the “entirety of Twitch.tv” going back to “its early beginnings,” as well as payouts for over 10,000 streamers. Twitch confirmed the breach via Twitter Wednesday.
The 4chan user posted the leaked information — which they said comprises almost 6,000 internal repositories — to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space,” calling Twitch’s community “a disgusting toxic cesspool.” This comes in the wake of Twitch’s recent hate raid woes, in which malicious users have employed dummy accounts and bots to spam streamers with hateful language. Notably, the 4chan user concluded their post with the hashtag #DoBetterTwitch, seemingly a play on the #TwitchDoBetter hashtag that shined a light on hate raids in August. (Twitch is owned by Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
Among many other things, the leak includes streamer payout details since 2019, source code for multiple versions of the Twitch client, Twitch software development kits and Amazon Web Services code, and what appears to be an unreleased gaming client akin to Valve’s Steam PC gaming platform called “Vapor.”
The data about how much each streamer makes is interesting, sure, and the ways that streamers have reacted to the public posting of their Twitch-based income has been truly very funny. One of my favorite streamers, Blaustoise, has made “1850” - his alleged ranking on the leaked list - a meme in his community. Chat, of course, is having a wonderful time with it.
I think the public discourse about streamer income reveals something important about the way media consumption has changed over the last few decades, and especially for millenials and gen z folks. It doesn’t offend me that some of my favorite streamers are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, or even per month - I think it rules. It’s a testament to the quality of the content they produce, it shows how dedicated they are to their communities, and it completely upends the traditional paths to monetization and success. You can’t just make beaucoup bucks by turning on your webcam while you play games or work on projects - streaming, as a primary means of income, requires both significant monetary investment and significant effort.
In exchange for that effort, though, streamers large and small have been able to build their communities without relying on talent or marketing agencies to give them an audience. And those communities can be both robust and loyal, providing benefits to each other, not just a way for the streamers to pay rent. In many ways, platforms like Twitch have facilitated the democratization of content creation, and it has been amazing to watch that story unfold.
In the future, I think we’ll see more shifts towards a marketplace that allows consumers to support specific creators, regardless of their industry. I really enjoy reading content by Gene Park, who writes for the Washington Post, but I refuse to pay for a New York Times subscription because part of that money would fund the publication of absolutely atrocious op-eds. You know the ones. “Homophobia is good, actually” is not an opinion that I want a single penny of my money to go towards.
I don’t think we live in a world, anymore, where creators of any sort can be viewed truly separately from the work they create. Journalists and musicians, authors and streamers, they are individuals, not just faceless elements of a larger platform. I’m pleased to support the creators who I think make the world a better place, and I look forward to them getting the recognition - and compensation - they deserve.
Ape shit
Okay, one more:
Cryptocurrencies are riddled with a dazzling array of scams. Rug pulls, a term for when developers take the money and run, are common. And NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, aren’t immune to that old trick, as thousands of investors of a project called Evolved Apes found out on Friday.
Evolved Apes is described on NFT marketplace OpenSea as “a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs trapped inside a lawless land.” They are “fighting for survival, only the strongest ape will prevail,” it says, referring to the project’s much-hyped fighting game, which hasn’t materialized.
A week after the project launch, the anonymous developer known as Evil Ape who promised that game vanished along with the project’s official Twitter account and website. But they left traces behind on the blockchain that shows they siphoned 798 ether ($2.7 million) out of the project’s funds in multiple transfers. The funds, derived from the initial public sale of NFTs and commissions on the secondary market, were meant for project-related expenses like marketing.
If you bought one of these expecting anything other than a scam then I don’t know what to tell you, sorry.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
Harold’s Mild Sauce Is Being Sold At Grocery Stores — And It’s Already A Massive Hit. Sunrise Movement Launches Hot Bisexuals Against Kyrsten Sinema Phonebank. We’re Losing Our Humanity, and the Pandemic Is to Blame. Tetris vs. Trauma. The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants. Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less. South Dakota’s tax avoidance schemes represent federalism at its worst. Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? MAGA Icons: Where Are They Now and Are They OK? WHY ARE MEN SO OBSESSED WITH DRIVING STICK? How the ‘Succession’ Star Nicholas Braun Elevates Cousin Greg.
Lazarus’ story more or less ends with priests planning on killing him. This element of the story is maybe forgotten or left out of the popular memory of the Lazarus of the Bible, but is extremely prevalent in every other popular culture reference or concept inspired by the Biblical Lazarus. Users of the Lazarus Pit in the DC Universe, for example, famously face terrible consequences.