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What a week, huh? It’s been giving strong, “Lemon, it’s Wednesday” vibes since, like, Monday.
Now, at last, Friday has arrived. TGIF and all that.
With this week’s absolute firehouse of news, here’s what I’ll be digesting at the farmer’s market this weekend.
Well, actually, what we’ll be digesting, because this week I’m welcoming comedian, resident cutie-pie, and 1st Principle’s in-house lawyer (get it…he literally lives in my house…) David Drew to the crew/byline.
Tech journalist Alex Heath turns VC
Newcomer reported that Heath is hanging up his “capital J journalist hat” to join Sound Ventures (the hat becomes a Patagonia vest…is that anything?). The move follows a year after Heath left The Verge to launch his own outlet Sources — pulling in a reported $1 million in revenue along the way and proving new media continues to be an excellent bootstrapped biz for those with personal brands. Heath recently published a TIME feature on OpenAI and interviews with Altman and Zuck, and he’ll continue to publish interviews and startup features from his new perch.
Why it matters: VCs are increasingly becoming media companies in their own right. And they aren’t just relegating former journalists and creators to marketing roles — they’re putting them in investing seats. In May, Lightspeed Venture Partners hired creator Claire Zau as an investor and media strategist, and a16z continues to hoover up young new media talent.
Anthropic researcher resigns, sets off AI safety firestorm
In perhaps the biggest and longest-tail news of the week, researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic. His tweet set off a firestorm of conversation around AI safety, and a conspiratorial debate about whether the move was a plant. One side argued leftists had planted it to build support for AI regulation, with others not-so-jokingly joking that the AI companies had planted it to convey the power of their products.
My POV? Hard to imagine this is a true plant: Institutions are generally much less coordinated and savvy than they seem from the outside. But I don’t think the labs mind being perceived as dangerously capable.
Fun fact: Jacob even got a Wikipedia page out of the whole ordeal.
Why it matters: This was the rare Twitter debate that made it into mainstream non-tech media, with coverage in Variety, CNBC, and The New York Times, among others. Lulu Cheng Meservey has a thoughtful breakdown of why this one broke through. It’s worth paying attention to which online conversations break containment, because the timeline is not real life (with apologies to a16z) and real-world implications like regulation will depend on what politicians, small-business owners, and the general public think of AI.
Nike dropped from S&P 100
Following a $200 billion (that’s with a b) drop in market cap from its high in 2021, Nike is getting booted from the S&P 100. The company — named for the Greek goddess of victory, as Fortune brutally pointed out — is joined in defrocking by Honeywell, Simon Property Group, and Colgate-Palmolive.
Why it matters: Nike initially declined to comment on the news earlier this week, then found itself forced to clarify to its own executives that the brand remained in the S&P 500. A good reminder that your internal team needs to know what the f*ck is going on, no matter how tight-lipped you are externally.
Huge week for Hollytech
That’s what I’m calling the increasingly intimate relationship between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. (Intimate in a “love-hate, enemies-to-lovers / lovers-to-enemies” sense). Hate it? Me too. I’m open to better names.
After a surprise screening at Telluride, A24 dropped a teaser for You Can See Everything, the years-in-the-making secret doc following Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in her final days with her family before reporting to federal prison.
The collab between comedy “you can’t spell auteur without aut(ism)” Nathan Fielder and documentary wunderkind Lance Oppenheim (whose upcoming narrative debut Primetime, also with A24, is already one of the meme-iest films of the fall) promises to shatter our understanding of the documentary form - and, probably, spawn a resurgence in Elizabeth Holmes Halloween costumes this season.
Not to be outdone, Neon dropped its own hot teaser for “the movie they don’t want you to see.” (“They” = whoever is in charge of Amazon’s AI investment portfolio.) That’s right, we’re finally seeing footage from the AmazonMGM-produced-and-dropped, Neon-distributed OpenAI / Sam Altman bio-drama from Luca Guadagnino, Artificial, in advance of its U.S. premiere on October 5 at the New York Film Festival.
To ape SNL’s Stephon (god I’m millennial), the Artificial teaser has everything - twink houseboys, Cooper Hoffman looking despondent, a doomsday bunker full of guns, and a closing shot of Andrew Garfield’s Sam Altman smirking with a menacing, soulless glimmer in his eyes.
Documentary master Alex Gibney premiered his uber-long Elon Musk doc Musk (named for the smell that the audience begins to generate after having to watch four hours of Elon footage) at the Venice Film Festival, to both rapturous praise and legal threats.
Why it matters: On a scale of “it’s so over” to “we’re so back”, The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day have dragged the pop-cultural power of cinema squarely into “we’re so back” territory - and that power now very plainly has tech excess (tech-cess?) in its sights.
Of course, this isn’t a brand new phenomenon. The Aaron Sorkin / David Fincher masterpiece The Social Network defined an entire generation’s understanding of Zuck, and some of us (ahem) have been talking about the power of film and TV to shape our understanding of tech and corporate culture for years.
But the buzz surrounding You Can See Everything, Artificial, Musk, and Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming The Social Reckoning feels different - sharper, snarkier, less “gee, isn’t tech scary, we don’t understand its power”, and more “can you believe these freaks think they’re masters of the universe.” (And all of this despite the increasing influence of techno-capital in Hollywood; even A24 is VC-backed these days.)
So, if you’re not thinking about how your company’s lore might some day play out onscreen in the film-festival darling of the future - you’re looking far enough toward the horizon.
Also, some good book recs
Sigil — a company offering “a new way to write for work,” though I’ll admit that after much internet sleuthing I still couldn’t tell you what that means — hosted an IRL dinner in NYC this week with a Who’s Who of tech wordcels. Everyone recommended a book that shaped how they think about work.
The list is banger-heavy, and it’s personally inspiring me to finally dust off my copies of Creativity, Inc. and everything Ogilvy ever wrote, which I recently ordered in bulk from Amazon in a fugue state. (We’re all performative tech bros here, okay?)