Errbnb
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The pushback on tech’s encroachment into the real world continues, with Airbnb in the hot seat. They are currently being sued for racial discrimination, to which they’ve responded by claiming that a fraction of their hosts are being given unconscious bias training. Hardly the sort of inspirational rhetoric we’re used to from the company that tried out a bad Maya Angelou impression when they asked “Is Man Kind?”
The short-term rental company has removed hosts who blatantly discriminate against guests, but, unlike traditional hotels, there are basically no protections for guests who are trying to #AirbnbWhileBlack (or trans). Noirbnb and Noirebnb are a pair of unrelated sites that have responded to the problem more proactively and aim to provide alternatives to people of color who have found Airbnb impossible to actually use. Noir[e]bnb immediately reminded me of Green Books, guides that African Americans used to safely travel through Jim Crow-era America. As much as Airbnb likes to claim they have created community and trust, the reality is their community in many ways merely reinforces privilege.
Airbnb is also facing regulators in their home town: the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 10–0 to impose much stricter rules on short term rentals. The company faces as much as $5 million in fines per day if they continue to list properties not properly licensed by the city.
Requiem for the future
Wired and Spy magazines were the first that I remember being completely enamored by. I was too young to understand them when I first got ahold of a few copies, and they felt illicit, like the intellectual equivalent of smoking clove cigarettes or something. They were snarky, they swore (in print!), they were urban in ways that were impolite in the suburbs. It’s fair to say they informed a great deal of how I came to see media and, yeah, the world.
So “On Reading Issues of Wired from 1993 to 1995” by Anna Wiener was a must read (as is Wiener’s superb “Uncanny Valley” for n+1). It’s sugary nostalgia, sure, but evocative, too, and reminded me that there was a time when tech wasn’t pervasive, was still hard to configure and badly designed, that the future was still being grasped at, not thumbed idly.
Last week I mentioned that Vanity Fair’s new site The Hive overlaps considerably with Wired and the same can certainly be said for The New Yorker. Wiener’s piece is a reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that Wired really did see the world at a skew that’s hard to imagine today.
Even Tim Berners-Lee can’t help but notice that the world he helped usher in isn’t living up to our expectations, less than 30 years later. He wants to try again.
Smaller Bite
Apple’s relationship with the press continues to, if not soften, certainly evolve under Tim Cook. Phil Schiller, who now oversees all of Apple’s app stores, gave one-on-one interviews to The Verge, Daring Fireball, and The Loop to preview some changes. The updates are fascinating in their own right — essentially, taking a smaller revenue cut from apps that switch to subscription pricing — but so is the timing. Apple’s annual developer conference is next week, which seems like a perfect time to discuss a major change to app store pricing, unless Apple wants to get anything controversial out of the way.
Most software is moving to a subscription model and this seems to offer indie developers a chance to compete head on with bigger players like Adobe or Microsoft. Alas, for all the attempt at clearing the air, there’s still plenty of confusion about what it all means. For publishers, the model is nothing new but seeing a bigger piece of revenue is certainly welcome.
Sidebar
“Between 1990 and 2016, the newspaper publishing industry shrunk by nearly 60 percent, from roughly 458,000 jobs to 183,000 jobs, the bureau found. In this same time, the number of internet publishing and broadcasting jobs rose from 30,000 to 198,000. In just under three decades, the newspaper industry has transformed from a media juggernaut into a secondary form of communication, and there are no signs this trend will reverse any time soon.”
The Columbia Journalism Review looks at 100 years of Pulitzers.
Publishers aren’t (yet) seeing much of a bounce from Google’s AMP.
Radiolab’s first spin off show, More Perfect, taking a look at The Supreme Court in a perfectly Radiolab way, is predictably off to a great start. See also: NPR’s Code Switch, the podcast.
Podcasting has been on the verge of the next big thing for over a decade now but may finally be at a crossroad with Scripps buying Stitcher. The big money players are certainly worrying to more indie concerns like John Gruber and Marco Arment, wary of someone coming along and doing to podcasts what Facebook has done to publishers. Ben Thompson thinks there’s a third way.
The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance enlisted Robin Sloan to help her build a neural net-powered bot that could write like her (you’ll recall Robin’s neural net ghostwriter from FF1.1). The results are predictably hilarious/uninspired but what I like about this story is all of the process bits: how big does the corpus need to be, how does the neural net fail, what should we even expect from the bot?
Tribune Publishing, parent company of iconic newspapers like The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun among others, announced a rebrand and the internet (mostly on Twitter) lost its damn mind. There’s all kinds of boring corporate machinations pushing and pulling at this, and plenty of room to snark at the stupidity of the Tribune’s executives, but this rather earnest take makes for a better, if sobering, read.
I’d never heard of Superfeedr before and they just got acquired by Medium.
The Ringer profiles Whalerock Industries, the digital agency behind the Kardashian empire of apps. “According to Whalerock, Kimoji was profitable on day one — actually, hour one. While the company declined to offer hard numbers, I was told I could directionally deduce how it’s performing. (Well.)”
Facebook prompted users in Europe to register to vote ahead of the upcoming election. The next day, the number of people under the age of 35 registering more than doubled. Which could, of course, be a coincidence but wow.
“It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know”
The Marshall Project is one of my favorite new(ish) publications, giving a hard look at criminal justice. This detailed piece on new research looking at more effective techniques for interrogation reminds me of the best advice I ever got about reporting: let the subject talk, let silence linger.
