No. 133: 🤨 "Walmart Land"
➕ R.I.P. Impostor Syndrome
Hello,
And welcome, at the end of what has been a good week for anyone that suffers from impostor syndrome.
All around us - no, above us - leaders are making mistakes that would make Caligula blush. I say put a horse in charge; it could hardly fare worse.
You see, you may have seen the historic ineptitude from Britain’s new leaders this week.
It made me realise that I’m not sure which is better:
The ignorance of being young and assuming the adults might not be entirely clueless
OR
Growing up and removing any doubt
We are meant to hold the holders of high office in higher regard than we would our peers. All of their paraphernalia is designed to keep us in place.
Yet I like to remove that arbitrary hierarchy by imagining who the equivalents of our so-called superiors would have been in my school class. And let’s just say I wouldn’t want them anywhere near the nuclear button. They’d get it all sticky, for one thing.
Meanwhile in the business world, Walmart announced its new “metaverse” initiative.
I have written about the metaverse many times, just as I’ve written about everything by this stage. I still struggle with the sheer lack of imagination on offer. The idea should surely be that in the “metaverse”, normal conceptions of space and time no longer apply.
With that in mind, Walmart is launching “Walmart Land” on Roblox.
Not six months ago, we were told Roblox wasn’t “the metaverse”.
“Walmart Land” sounds so insipid, I’d almost rather stay in our normal reality than go there.
Speaking of when I was in school, I remember we were once asked to come up with a new country and give it a name. I went for “Denclark” but most people went for “Adam Land” or “Suzanne Land” or “[insert one of the about 7 names people had in my school] Land” and you get the idea.
“Walmart Land” 🤦♂️
Call it Wal-onia or Walbania or something, at least. “Take a trip to the Waldives” has a ring to it.
“Walmart Land” 🤦♂️
Since you’ll never go there, here’s what they say it looks like:
Now you might respond in the following manner:
“Yo, what’s Walmart supposed to do? It’s Walmart ffs. What do you want, interpretive dance? They’ve got stuff to sell, goober.”
And while I’d chastise you for your crude speech patterns, I’d take the point.
My problem here is that Walmart’s announcement has made a splash like that of a sumo wrestler in the Trevi fountain. The metaverse industry is so thirsty for good news that it has promoted this everywhere, as though it were proof that the concept holds water. In the process, it risks proving the opposite.
Anyway, some guy posted on Twitter that he had just spent $290,000 (that’s about £3 million) on a metaverse house.
This reply, bawdy though it may be, made me chuckle:
As you can tell from the ribald tone, I’m on one this week. You see, The Daily Show is looking for a new host and I reckon my sideways take on the news could be just the ticket.
You laugh (you won’t be laughing when I’m hosting the show), but if Elizabeth bloody Truss can run a country then I can crack wise on TV.
If the world’s biggest businesses can imagine a metaverse so entirely dull you’d almost prefer to stay on our current planet, then I can swim the Atlantic, or tango with tigers, or just about anything.
And that’s to say nothing of my personal merits. You can do it all, too.
Which is perhaps the upside to this week’s otherwise desperate news.
Impostor Syndrome, we hardly knew ye.
Last week’s hi, tech. had the highest number of views I’ve ever had - and that’s quite something, considering I lose subscribers most weeks.
So why the change in tone this week? Mainly, I’ve been very busy and writing like this is quicker. This has been scribbled out in one Saturday morning session before I head off to the football.
But we can pick up on some of last week’s themes briefly now, to return in more depth later.
I saw this piece of research from a colleague at Kellogg Business School the other day:
Organisations really struggle to encourage employees to take risks. There are plentfiful factors at play here, but the lack of a space to trial new ideas safely is certainly one of them.
Thank you very much to those who reached out to discuss the topics in the last newsletter. It seems we might be onto something here, so I’ll keep posting updates as I make very slow progress. Do get in touch with any thoughts or collaboration ideas!
I enjoyed this article from the CTO at Stable Diffusion:
I did struggle with this bit, though:
“At Stability we're putting the open back in AI”
That’s just not how the idiom works, is it?
Here’s a working example:
“I’ll put the ‘pal’ back into ‘principal’.”
If you put the “open” back in AI, you end up with
Artificial Intelliopengence
Or
Artificiopenal Intelligence
It makes you realise why we took the “open” out of AI in the first place.
If you can overlook that (I couldn’t), it’s an interesting take on the open AI movement that raises as many questions as it answers. For instance, how can we possibly control AI that anyone can use for any purpose they wish?
Meta has announced its new text-to-video AI and that almost scares me more.
Although, I did go viral with my response to the announcement with my suggestion of a prompt to test the new tech to its limits:
I beat my personal best by 100 likes.
Cool Beans
“Surprisingly, winter hasn’t cooled iced coffee sales as it has in the past. In December 2021, ready-to-drink coffee unit sales rose 18.8% compared to the same month a year before.”
I’ve mentioned my idea before for an iced coffee shop called “Cool Beans”. But what if it were a canned drink instead? And what if we could make clear cans, so people could see the funky colours inside?
Well you’d have a billion dollar business, my friend. Or a trillion pound business, as we call it here.
10 biggest announcements from Google Search On 22
“Your camera is your next keyboard,” according to a suit at Google’s Search On conference.
I really do want to agree. I’ve been on board with visual search since before Jesus was born, but there are still important behavioural boundaries to cross before it goes fully mainstream.
Furthermore, the new features (for example, search for objects “near me” with a camera to find in-stock items in nearby stores) will only work if the store’s inventory is synced up with Google Shopping. There is still some friction here that will slow the process down.
And that’s if the retailer wants to share this data with Google, which I’d discourage.
Overall, I am still very optimistic about this technology. I just think that, five or so years on, we need to ask why it hasn’t taken off yet and then address those points. The technology is fantastic, but it has been for some time now. We need to work on the less glamorous parts now, too.
That’ll do us for this week.
Consider it my audition tape for that Daily Show slot.
See you next time! 👋
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