Zombies, social media influencers, fun graphics, and CO2 emissions
another krappy newsletter #7
Aloha,
A lot has changed since last week. For instance, I now greet you in Hawaiian, brother. I know my strong command of the Hawaiian language may catch you off guard. It comes from those five episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter I watched four years ago.
Other things that have changed:
I am writing to you from my kitchen table instead of my standing desk.
The air quality in the Bay Area has been downgraded from unhealthy to slightly not healthy.
It is hard to keep up with all the change.
Here are all the things I read or paid attention to this week:
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Zombies as Zeitgeist
Zombie movies are a lot of fun. We all have our favorite. I lean towards the comedy Zombie movies like Sean of the Dead and Zombieland. However, I am in the middle of reading an interesting book that talks about the rise of the zombie in Western culture.
“Zombies in Western Culture” by John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, Filip Miscevic
The book starts with a startling fun fact:
The outbreak of zombieism is a twentieth century phenomenon, but in the twenty-first century it explodes into zeitgeist.
Over 600 zombie movies have been made since 1920, but over half of them have been in the last 10 years.
The author has already put forward a rather compelling thesis about how zombies are much more than a fad:
Zombies are the fictionally distorted, self-reflected image of modern humanity. Most zombie interpretations begin with this premise, that in some pivotal way, “zombies are us”.
Zombies do represent us, but more specifically, they represent the ruin of all that is meaningful within us. Zombies represent the modern deterioration of our uniquely human ability to make and sustain meaning in our lives.
I find this concept that “what is popular in entertainment actually speaks to some subconscious issue we cannot articulate” to be worth investigating and reading more. I will report back with how this book goes.
*SIDE NOTE*: Going into this book, my hypothesis is that this rise in zombie popularity is due to mimesis within Hollywood. “Well gotta make another zombie movie cause we know thats what’s working right now!” But I am looking forward to being proven wrong! *END SIDE NOTE*
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Social media and understanding it
A wild trend to watch unfold on all social media platforms is people who post generic business and/or self improvement garbage. It is not personalized. It is sometimes even copy and pasted from other famous accounts. But they drive incredibly high volumes of low quality traffic to their accounts.
Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) articulated this well:
A good rule to understand Twitter & perhaps all of social media: the more platitudes or fortune cookie-esque your updates, the higher volume and lower quality your following is. Never seen this not be true. It's on purpose, because these people are far easier to sell bullshit to.
These social media accounts are generally obsessed with quantity of followers. They think of it as a type of currency. I truly don’t understand why they care about this number.
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Amazing quote from Elon Musk
After Elon sold PayPal and Compaq, he decided to take the 9 figures that he earned from the sale and invest it all in Tesla and SpaceX.
The following quote is one of the conversations he had with a rocket scientist to get SpaceX up and going:
Take a moment to stop and reflect on how insane this dude is.
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Remote work during COVID
This is an eye opening graphic.
I know roughly zero people who are not teleworking right now. I live in a bubble.
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The Influencer Economy
A trend over the last ten years that has surprised me/ made me rethink everything I know has been the rise of alternative careers due to the Internet.
The Internet has greatly expanded the possibilities of what people can do for a career.
For example:
A woman who acts like a kinky dog makes over six figures a year. We have reached a moment in time where being weird as fuck/obsessed with something has become a realistic career avenue. Not only realistic, but can easily land you in the top 1% of American earners.
The only thing that would make this more ridiculous is if she was getting paid that much to act like a kinky cat. Thankfully we live in a just world where people hate cats.
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CO2 emissions around the globe 1959-2018
I have been looking into global warming a little bit more this week. Global warming is one of those topics that has become so well known that no one actually knows much about it.
What I mean is if you ask someone to explain global warming, you will usually get something like: “well CO2 goes up and then greenhouse gases and ozone and yea I mean it gets hot. I don’t understand why I need to explain it to you.” Odd how some ideas/concepts end up with this fate.
This graphic is from 2018, but I find it very interesting.
Three interesting notes:
China. Wow. From 2000 to 2018, they went from 3 billion to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions. As of 2018, they were doubling US emissions on a yearly basis. All in the name of stoking the economy.
India is on a troubling increase that probably sees it passing the US and Europe in the next few years. All in the name of stoking the economy.
It feels like whatever progress the US and Europe has made in limiting their emissions is mainly just an intra country political win. Globally, I am not sure area under the curve of emissions has changed. It is hard to not draw the conclusion that all the US/Europe has done here was export CO2 emissions to countries who want to get their economies going. But hey, at least we feel good about ourselves!
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Mahalo,
K. Rapp
Your Hawaiian is impeccable