Weekend Reading #142

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

This is the hundred-and-forty-second weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 30th October 2021.

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What we're thinking.

Names, especially those chosen for oneself, define not just an identity but also a mission, vocation and character. So, when Mark Zuckerberg announced this Thursday at the Facebook Connect conference that they were planning to change the name of one of the best-known companies in the world to “Meta”, it was no surprise that there was an eruption of opinions from all sides. And where rebranding has happened in the past, Facebook has taken it all the way, no holds barred. While Alphabet still uses its GOOG/GOOGL ticker which reminds us that the biggest chunk of that business is Google, Facebook is pulling out a clean slate: its iconic FB ticker is also changing to MVRS. The Metaverse. Zuckerberg is having a full go. Who takes arguably the biggest brand on earth and throws it by the wayside just like that? He is taking the metaverse and making it his. Quite simply we’ve never seen anything like this.

The cynics may look at this and brand this a last-ditch effort to draw attention away from its increasingly challenged advertising business, besieged by privacy lawsuits, political scrutiny, and Apple’s swipe at its tracking practices. That may have some truth to it, although anyone who has followed Facebook’s company commentary and strategy over the past years would have noticed the seeds of this transition being planted many years ago. Perhaps the current situation accelerated things, but this transition from desktop as a medium to mobile to now AR/VR has been in the works for years (remember their acquisition of Oculus?). Love him or hate him, maximum respect. If anyone can pull this off, he can.

We’ve been writing about the Metaverse for a while now (selected reading here, here and here) and as always, we aren’t ideological about how the metaverse should come about – whether privately owned, fully decentralised or somewhere in the middle. But what is now becoming clear to the rest of the market, when one of the largest Web2 businesses in the world throws off its old identity to reforge a new one around the Metaverse, is that it’s not “just a fad”. It’s coming fast, there’s serious capital being thrown at it from all sides, and to our mind it represents a profoundly transformational opportunity.

We’ve also this week seen our first evidence of Axie Infinity becoming a great political tool too as this tweet of a politician in the Philippines using it in his campaign came to our attention!

What we're reading.

@Punk6529 is a relatively recently-renamed Twitter handle that’s been formed by the owner of Cryptopunk 6529. We can’t tell who he (or she?) was prior to renaming the account to punk6529, and perhaps it’s for the best. But with 132k followers, this is clearly someone with gravitas. And he has a very grand vision for what NFTs can become. His vision (if you want to read this long tweet thread) for an open metaverse is grand but recently this tweet thread I thought gave an excellent precis to any NFT sceptics. This is an account worth tracking. DC

Call of the Raven was my book of the week. It’s an action-packed and gripping adventure by bestselling author, Wilbur Smith, about one man's quest for revenge, the brutality of slavery in America and the imbalance between humans that can drive – or defeat – us. This one got my attention after my wife (an avid reader) expressed her dissatisfaction on Smiths conclusion to the novel. Naturally, I felt that I needed to read the book to see why and found it to be a gripping read. DK

While on holiday last week I flew through Red Roulette, the autobiographical story of Desmond Shum. Shum and his ex-wife, Whitney Duan, rose from nothing to become billionaires as the combination of his business smarts and her guanxi or political networking rode them all the way from rags to riches. Their primary route was a “partnership” with “Aunty” Zhang, the wife of former Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Whitney Duan disappeared in September 2017 and is presumed to have been subject to one of the CCP’s “corruption” investigations. What’s fascinating is that a few months ago just after the book was released, Shum received a phone call out the blue from Whitney (who vanished without a trace for 4 years) urging him not to release the book. No one knows where she was or where she is today. Either way it is a rollicking story of the China of the past 20 years and how things really work. A real eye-opener. DC

What we're watching.

The T20 Cricket World Cup got into full swing this week and the action comes thick and fast for these first couple of weeks with, often, two matches live on Sky each day. With the tournament being played in the Middle East, the time difference means that the first of the day’s games gets going late morning here in the UK, just as you’re enjoying your second cappuccino of the day. The second kicks off later in the afternoon and provides the perfect accompaniment to the end of the working day. Of course, nothing gets in the way of our commitment to the intense labour of furthering our business here at TBC, but we’ve found that a dose of cricket on the desk on the iPhone helps us to get through the to-do list with extra speed! England have started well but Pakistan are my favourites to win the tournament which continues up until the final in mid-November with the Ashes starting only a couple of weeks later. Let the winter of cricket commence!  EJP

The wait for the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm is finally over. The pure cringe-awkward nature of Larry David’s comedy is just magic. The show has been going on and off since 2000 which as I worked out incredibly is half my life. I still find it as brilliant as when I first watched it. I can’t wait to see what Larry gets up to in a woke, post COVID world as the season progresses. The first episode didn’t disappoint and, in a world where everything seems to be on edge it’s a great reminder to everyone not to take life too seriously. DC

I also finished watching the second season of Ted Lasso. I actually felt an emotional connection to the characters as the blend of drama and comedy hit the jackpot. It’s a show that is completely different from everything else out there and it just works. DC

As an international team speaking a whole range of languages, we come across many foreign language films that we simply must share for our global readers. Earlier this week, I sat down and decided to watch a Taiwanese film, 阳光普照 (or in English, “The Sunshine Illuminates everything”). The film is a crime drama chronicling the tragic downfall of a family after a brutal assault and consequent series of unfortunate events devastate them. The number of awards the film have won international are a testament to the fantastic character development the film displays and after further reading online, it was shocking to believe how many elements of the film are taken from a true story of a close friend of the director. HS

Away from the cricket and Sky Sports, I fell upon a fantastic new Netflix series called Suburra, an Italian show set in Rome that takes a look at the seedy and violent underworld of the city. Being in Italian (subtitled for non-speakers like me, of course), there is an extra frisson of excitement and intrigue with this show as it sounds so good to the ear, especially to those who agree with me that Italy is, without doubt, the finest holiday that any amount of money can buy. However, given the all-too-real stories portrayed in Suburra about the darkness that goes on just below Rome’s beautiful veneer, I might stick to Venice and Florence as my destinations of choice. EJP
One more series to indulge in, is the BBC’s recent blockbuster miniseries, VIGIL. This one I watched from start to finish all in one go and was just what the doctor ordered during the school half term break. The deeper you go, the darker it gets. When a sailor is found dead on submarine HMS Vigil, DCI Silva uncovers a conspiracy. This tense drama is set in Scotland and much of the action takes place on a fictional ballistic missile submarine of the Royal Navy. DK

What we're listening to.

Michael Sandel is a writer and philosopher who I particularly like. He makes complex problems simple and writes in a way that makes the often-mind-bending proposition of philosophy accessible and applicable to everyday life. His recent book, The Tyranny of Merit, was an especially good read that exposed the commonly accepted myth of meritocracy, especially for the large swathe of working classes in the UK and the US. Hence, I was delighted to hear that Sandel was going to be this week's guest on Desert Island Discs and I was even more pleased to find that Sandel was not only a fantastic mind but also a, seemingly, very good bloke with very good taste in music. EJP
 
For something a bit different, I've spent the last week or so reliving my youth (90’s / early 2000’s) and came across a little gem. “Trance Nation – Ministry of Sound” happens to summarise “most” of the all-time greats like Insomnia – Faithless, Children – Robert Miles, Salt Water – Chicane and Castles in the Sky by Ian Van Dahl to name a few... give it a listen. DK

This episode of Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast featuring philosopher C. Thi Nguyen is an interesting one, especially as it touches on games as an art form, with agency as its medium. Most fascinating is the point he makes of games being controlled environments within which we set up obstacles for ourselves to surmount which are reasonably challenging and complex, but not overwhelming. Within games, we have a temporary state of clarity of incentives, values and outcomes, and game design is as important as recognising different players’ motivations, whether to strive or to achieve. Equally, there’s the risk of making these temporary structures permanent when gamification is rolled out into real life. It could be a step too far to say that everything in life is a game (or a meme) but it’s certainly not too far from the truth either. And perhaps in the end, part of the fun could even come from losing.