Jason Zweig, back in 2018:

My father, who died in 1981, was an inexhaustible font of wisdom and wit. I don’t know when he told me this particular three-part rule, but I’ve never forgotten it. I tweeted it three years ago, but people keep asking for it in one place, so here it is.

There are three ways to make a living:

1. Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.

2. Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.

3. Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.

The rest is commentary.

Pairs well with Om Malik’s remarkable line about the success of “the grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things” in his “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World” essay that I linked to yesterday.

Neil Panchal, on Twitter/X (XCancel link):

Of all the dickovers, the dickover that blueballs you with some first-time buyer incentive. “Sign up and get 10% discount, new accounts only”, the dickover boasts.

Never understood why you’d ever penalize returning customers with a dickover, blue-balling them with 10% off teaser that they’re ineligible for. wtf?

And for first time buyers, they’d always feel left out if they don’t shove their email address in the dickover. The choice is an illusion with a penalty of 10%. But wait… there’s more! You only get a discount code if you, after clicking the confirmation email link, also sign up for their SMS marketing. You just got double dicked.

I fell for this racket once, albeit with my eyes open. Last year I bought a cap from New Era’s website. They offered me some sort of discount for giving them my email address. I knew they were going to get my email anyway because I was going to buy the hat, so I figured why not. Only then — exactly as Panchal describes — did they say I also needed to give them my phone number and grant permission to text me marketing messages. Now I was pissed. I did it anyway, just to see what happened (and get the discount). As soon as I bought the hat, discount applied, I rescinded their permission to send me text messages and marketing emails. (They had already texted me like two marketing messages, in addition to the ones confirming my phone number.) Overall I’d have rather paid a few more dollars than go through the hassle, which is why my standard operating procedure is to decline all such entreaties. A real discount is just offering a lower price. Anything else is a scam of some sort.

But the real problem is that it completely soured my impression of New Era. I am far less likely to purchase from them again. I will eventually buy a New Era cap again — their actual products are excellent, and they are the exclusive maker of official MLB on-field caps — but if I can buy it elsewhere, I will. I’ll go out of my way to avoid buying direct from New Era for the rest of my life.

The marketing shitbirds who press for these schemes — and insist on adding dickovers and dickbars to websites — do so by pointing to data that shows that they do convert some number of users. “It works” they claim, pointing to data. What doesn’t show up in their data are interactions like mine. They don’t have analytics that measure that I now consider their website an antagonist to avoid at all costs.

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Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy, last week published a remarkable essay surveying — with copious receipts — the rise and fall of “metaverse” hype:

The obsession with the metaverse seems to have solidified in Silicon Valley after Matthew Ball published an essay in January 2020 in which he forecasted that, at the very least…

…it is likely to produce trillions in value as a new computing platform or content medium. But in its full vision, the Metaverse becomes the gateway to most digital experiences, a key component of all physical ones, and the next great labor platform. [...]

Ball published this essay with darkly fortuitous timing. A week earlier, Chinese health authorities had isolated a new strain of coronavirus aggressively spreading in Wuhan; a day before, they published its genetic sequence. Within a couple of months, the world had turned upside down and many of us were suddenly spending our days in a space that felt more virtual than physical. We may have only been working from home — or, at least, those of us who had the option and were not laid off — and socializing over Zoom, all while remembering the last concert we went to or the last time we ate a meal in a restaurant.

Just a tremendous piece of writing and reporting from Heer. What a pile of horseshit “the metaverse” as promulgated by Zuckerberg was. To call what Heer has assembled here, in a compelling narrative to boot, “comprehensive” is a vast understatement. These hucksters were selling a bill of goods and now they’re trying to whistle past their own hype:

As for the futurists like Hackl, who confidently proclaimed the metaverse was “for certain”, they have found an out thanks to its flexible definition. Jeff Barrett, of the Shorty Awards’ “It’s No Fluke” podcast, published a glowing profile of “the Godmother of the Metaverse” earlier this year under the headline “Why Cathy Hackl Keeps Getting the Future Right”. “When enthusiasm cooled and narratives collapsed, many distanced themselves from the space”, writes Barrett, noting with seeming approval that “Hackl did the opposite. She reframed it”. Many people — perhaps everyone, come to think of it — could predict the future if they got to retcon their predictions to fit reality.

Bravo.

Follow-up: “The Metaverse Was Snake Oil for Isolation”.

Hamilton Nolan, writing at How Things Work:

There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.

Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.

The most likely reason, though — one that often overshadows the other ones — is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.

Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes.

Bilton tried to introduce himself to the (remaining) staff at 60 Minutes this morning and it did not go well.