Remains of the Day: Issue 01
Narrative debt and platforms, overtourism of one's ideas, Alex Danco, Uncut Gems, and going carless
As a reminder, I’m Eugene Wei, a former product exec at places like Amazon, Hulu, Flipboard, and I’ve kept a personal blog Remains of the Day since 2001, offering what I like to think of as “Bespoke observations, 80% fat-free”, though the perceived fat ratio will vary depending on your tastes in technology, media, and all the other random topics I write about.
I’ve been thinking of what to do with my newsletter and turning to some of my favorites for inspiration. I knew what I didn’t want to do before I knew what I’d like to do. Another list of links felt like it would be one more assignment on what I’m sure is everyone’s ever-growing homework pile of reading. I enjoy recommended reading but Twitter already inundates me with more than I can keep up with.
One of my favorite newsletters is the one from Robin Sloan. He describes it as feeling like “a note from a friend,” and I like that as a way to distinguish my newsletter from my blog posts. There’s something more intimate about dropping a chunk of text into someone’s inbox which feels right for the newsletter format. A week feels like a reasonable cadence for dropping a bit of reflection on the week while also allowing me to clear out some lightly formed thoughts which don’t seem to lend themselves to a post on my blog.
So consider this the first entry in that experiment.
HBO’s Watchmen is fantastic, as many have noted. It may be one of the most polished first drafts of fan fiction to ever appear on the silver, errr, LED screen.
DC may lag behind the Marvel Universe in box office and audience acclaim, but it feels like DC is starting to find its footing in a different approach. Rather than having its directors conform to the ultimate vision of Kevin Feige, as Marvel does, DC seems to be allowing its directors a bit more creative freedom to put their own spin on various characters and franchises. Whether you liked The Joker or not, it was a very Todd Phillips-esque take, and it’s not even meant to be part of the rest of the DC Universe. It’s like a stand-alone vision of The Joker.
The trailer for Birds of Prey feels like an attempt to take Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and create a new franchise around that character. The Joker in Suicide Squad, and thus the one that’s implied to be in that branch of the DC Universe, isn’t the same one as in the Phillips’ Joker film. But Birds of Prey director Cathy Yan has stated that they removed the Jared Leto Joker character from their film so they could distance themselves from that failed film, creating yet another distinct franchise within the DC universe. Whereas all the Marvel films exist in a single comic universe, DC seems to be sprouting all sorts of forks.
Watchmen also capitalizes on this creative freedom. Alan Moore, the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, isn’t involved. I’m not sure if he would have given his blessing to Lindelof’s revisions to Watchmen lore, but it wouldn’t have mattered. HBO and Warner Bros. and the DC folks gave Lindelof free rein to fork the Watchmen mythology for this series.
Lindelof’s public breakthrough was as co-creator of Lost. To this day, it remains one of my favorite examples of what I call narrative debt. That is, when you’re building out a story, you tease plot lines and characters and conflicts that you have to resolve at a later point in the script.
You accumulate narrative debt. The implicit promise to the audience, the debt holders, is that you’ll pay out the trust that they’ve loaned you.
For a whole variety of reasons, Lost was saddled with so much narrative debt that at some point it was effectively insolvent. Pair that with an obsessive fan base poring over every frame for clues like auditors examining the narrative balance sheet and you had a recipe for a write-down of WeWork proportions. The showrunners couldn’t declare narrative bankruptcy as the show’s ratings were still solid, but they tried to prepare the fans for disappointment via public statements. Ultimately, they whipsawed fans through a series of dramatic story pivots until they were forced to crash land the story in the finale in a way that took the story full circle. The viewers at the end were like Jack and the other survivors on that beach in the series premiere, wondering what the hell had happened.
Chekhov’s gun is the most famous instantiation of the principle of conservation of narrative. Some people want the ledger of stories to balance perfectly. Every first act gun must go off in act three. All non-essential plot elements should be dropped. Not surprisingly, Chekhov was a master of the short story, a form which demands concision.
I’m less of a stickler for obsessively manicured stories, though I can nitpick plot structure with the worst of those YouTube critics if a film or show is marketed as having been assembled with the delicacy of an expensive wristwatch. There is a certain elegance to a plot in which every last element connects, but as the years go by I find that type of clinical precision can leave a show or film feeling a bit stifled and lifeless.
Lindelof seems to be at his best riffing off of something less open-ended. The confines of an existing piece of intellectual property seem to provide guardrails within which his creative forks seem to flourish. The Leftovers had Tom Perrotta’s novel to establish the inciting incident, and he and Lindelof expanded that into one of my favorite television shows, a moving meditation on how humans grapple with loss and grief and faith.
Watchmen from HBO has Moore’s classic graphic novel as a narrative precedent, but Lindelof has remixed it as a story about white supremacy and the racial sin at the heart of America’s origin.
I often think of TikTok as a logical modern outgrowth of remix and sampling culture, but the television world conjuring a remix of Watchmen is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2019.
As large media conglomerates focus more and more on franchises, I’d love to see some of the more progressive leaders at those companies contemplate whether a limited open source strategy on their premium intellectual properties might not be the most defensible, modern approach.
Over a decade ago, Marc Andreessen defined a platform as “a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.”
Even longer ago, in 1986, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons released a twelve-issue comic book series titled Watchmen. Decades later, an outside writer named Damon Lindelof read a piece titled “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic and learned about the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921, remixed it with Moore and Gibbon’s original creation Watchmen, and produced something an unexpected new take on the franchise which I don’t think anyone saw coming when the series was first announced.
Watchmen is a platform.
Kyle Chayka’s essay “My own private Iceland” discusses the concept of authenticity in travel. It gets at the heart of one of the odd paradoxes of travel which always confounds me: everyone wants to avoid tourist traps when traveling these days, but the moment you go anywhere you’re essentially turning it into a tourist destination.
I link to the essay for a different reason, though, and that’s in regards to an old tweet of mine: “The rhetorical style of any Twitter account that continues to gain followers converges on that of a fortune cookie.”
Part of this is driven by the unbounded downside optionality of the modern social media age. As your number of followers rises to infinity the chance of deeply offending someone with some statement approaches 100%. You may or may not deserve it, but everyone would agree it’s the type of negative optionality that most people would rather avoid.
But Chayka’s piece gave me another metaphor for thinking about this phenomenon. One reason we retreat to platitudes as we gain an audience is that our thoughts suffer from over-tourism. One or more of your ideas gain traction, and throngs of people come to you expecting more of that. Soon you and your idea are a living museum, like an old European city.
I went to a screening of Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 14 at the Castro Theatre this week, and what’s stunning about the footage of San Francisco in the 1930s and 1940s is how much of the city looks exactly the same as it did back then.
Swap out the cars on the street for Teslas or Priuses with Uber and Lyft decals, exchange the suits and dresses for jeans and sneakers and shirts, and update the typefaces on some of the business signage, and you’d swear you were watching Instagram Stories about modern-day San Francisco.
This isn’t a city with centuries of history like most European capitals, how did it already end up preserved in amber? What was meant to be a nostalgic film screening (and it was a packed and engaged house) felt to me like a horror film in some ways, even if some of the vintage footage, especially the black and white, was gorgeous.
The first time I met Alex Danco was over lunch in San Francisco, at Marlowe, a few years ago, when he was still at Social Capital. At the end of the meal, he handed me a thick stack of paper, double-sided. Each side of the paper held two pages of a manuscript of a book he’d written on the history of the tech industry. He asked me to read it and see what I thought.
Reader, I must confess, as impressed as I was with Alex after just one conversation, I found the size of the thing a bit daunting and didn’t get to it right away.
When I finally did turn my attention to it, I raced through it and then had a flashback to the movie D.O.A. starring Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. In it, Quaid discovers he’s been poisoned and has 36 hours to live. He spends it figuring out who poisoned him, and [SPOILER ALERT] it turns out to be a fellow professor who murdered one of Quaid’s students after reading his manuscript. That same colleague then poisoned Quaid because Quaid knew who had written the novel and that dastardly professor needed to claim it as his own. This is perhaps the most flattering depiction of a writer ever, even a murdered one, that someone would want to claim your work as their own and would murder you to do it. In some ways, it’s the ultimate form of plagiarism.
Well, lucky for Alex he told me had shared the manuscript with a few other people otherwise I might have flown to Canada to knock him off and then stolen that PDF to publish under my own name.
A few months back I checked in to see how the publishing process was going and found out he’d shelved it to write an updated book building on some of the ideas in the manuscript he’d shared with me. He’s been publishing this new book, titled Scarcity in the Software Century, in chunks, via a paid Substack newsletter. This is a clever strategy to ensure that no one is tempted to murder him and steal the manuscript for themselves.
He also has a free Substack newsletter that has been amazing and wide-ranging. I love them all, but to suggest a few that delighted me, try “Positional Scarcity” or “Internet Crowds and Personal Space.”
Social Capital’s dissolution has been our gain. I recommend subscribing to both of his newsletters.
Film Recommendation of the Week
Uncut Gems opens in wide release this week. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and lord, the Safdie brothers are going to be a problem, aren’t they? With every film, they’re growing more powerful.
It’s a cliche, but this truly is like Adam Sandler like you’ve never seen him. However, the real shocker is that Kevin Garnett gives an amazing performance out of nowhere. It might be the finest acting performance by an NBA player in a movie ever. Anything is possibleeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!! The Safdie brothers have always blended professional and first-time actors in their work to interesting effect; the feeling is one of half reality. The lack of clean character arcs in their films contributes to the sense of their films as a form of dramatically heightened documentary.
I don’t know how to describe this film except that it channels the frenetic chaos of the “Sunday, May 11th, 1980” chapter of Goodfellas for an entire movie. That chapter in Goodfellas begins with a closeup of Ray Liotta snorting a line of cocaine, and I’ve never done cocaine, but after “L’amour Toujours” by Gigi D’Agostino started playing as the end credits of Uncut Gems unspooled, I felt as if I’d just face dived a small mountain of cocaine like Al Pacino at the end Scarface.
It reminded me of one time in Las Vegas when my brother James and I had been playing blackjack for hours and were down big, and then came a hand where my brother had like $5K on one hand and got two aces, split them, got another ace, split those, and got another ace which he split one last time. He didn’t get a single 10 on any of his four aces. The dealer was showing a 6, flips over a 5, my brother and I screamed as if someone had dumped a corpse on the blackjack table, and everyone in the casino stopped to stare at us. The dealer then deals himself a 4 and time froze. I almost blacked out.
The dealer paused to soak in our anxiety.
Finally, he dealt the next card.
It was a 10. The dealer had busted.
My brother and I stood up and howled, then I hugged him and spun him around, then we jumped up and down like baseball players after a walk-off home run, and finally we ran around and high-fived everyone near us on the casino floor. After that, we went on a hot streak that like I’ve never had in Vegas before and got way back into the black.
Anyhow, that’s a bit of the rush that I felt watching Uncut Gems, which, no surprise, features a gambler leveraged to the max on a parlay bet.
The Safdie brothers conjure a New York City teeming with a throbbing desire to get ahead by any means necessary. Beneath the weight of ever-soaring rents and an increasingly wealthy upper class, the Safdie brothers fine a thick vein of NYC hustle still alive and pumping. By the time the gems are cut, all the money is going to end up lining the pockets of someone much wealthier than you are. However, if you can somehow get upstream of all that and find yourself an uncut gem, then maybe, just maybe, you can make it there, and, as the adage goes, anywhere. At least, that’s the dream.
I’ve gone nearly nine months carless, and for the most part, it’s been fine. I’ve saved a lot of money, even with Lyft and Uber’s prices rising noticeably during the year in San Francisco. It’s a bit of a mental adjustment to stomach the cost of a rideshare to my sister’s place in the East Bay to visit my nieces, or a trip down to the Peninsula, but a useful mental heuristic was calculating the daily pro-rated cost of car ownership and using that as a daily budget. I seldom exceed it.
I say all this while having been in San Francisco for roughly half that period; it’s not a region known for sterling, or even adequate, public transportation. I subscribed to unlimited bike share from Bay Wheels (owned by Lyft) as soon as I went carless, and I had their limited stock of electric bikes to ride for just a few weeks before Lyft recalled them because of brakes that would seize up and toss the rider over the handlebars. You’d think that bike brake design was a solved already, but Lyft’s electric bikes had deployed hub roller brakes, a design that you hardly see in any bikes today, for good reason.
So I rode the non-electric bikes for a few months, these beasts that weigh anywhere from 50 to 70 pounds. One of the unpleasant surprises during my first few rides: sometimes the bike seat would just drop all the way down mid-ride. The clamp design for the seat post is very prone to loosening, so I had to remember to really crank that them tight before each ride. I don’t know what someone with weaker hand strength would do to avoid a potentially dangerous mid-ride level change.
Then, after many months, they brought a new electric bike design back to market in July, but before I could even ride one, they were pulled after less than a week after an electric battery caught fire. And so I the fleet was bereft of electric bikes again, for months on end, with no updated resolution date.
I recently received an email that the electric bikes would soon return to San Francisco, but I'd already canceled my subscription. Fool me twice, I’ll reserve judgment until you convince me of your engineering competence.
Electric bikes aren’t as critical for LA with its predominantly flat roads, but in San Francisco with its numerous steep hills, they’re essential to convert people from other forms of transportation like driving. People generally prefer not to arrive at their destination drenched in sweat after trying to power a tank of a bike over hilly terrain.
Because of Bay Wheels’ inability to design a safe, functional electric bike, for most of this year Jump Bikes, owned by Uber, has been my only powered option.
That is if you can find one. The city limited Jump's fleet to some pitiful number that is inadequate to depend upon if you have a tight time window between places you need to be. Often by the time I’ve walked to the nearest available bike I’m so close to my final destination that I just finish the journey on foot.
Those times I’ve found one, the experience has been highly inconsistent. Sometimes a bike that is shown on the map isn’t where it’s displayed. That’s to be expected, GPS isn’t that precise. But often when I go to unlock the bike I receive an error message. The message is opaque, you can’t tell why it doesn’t work. Sometimes, when you do hear the click that confirms the cable has unlocked, it can’t be extracted.
If you manage to get past these steps, then you’re hoping the bike is operable and that the electric motor works. I’ve had bikes where the gear is stuck in some tiny gear where you feel like you’re riding a kids tricycle, you have to maintain a cadence of 100rpm to move at 5mph.
At the end of a ride, I’ve had bikes that wouldn’t lock back up, thus leaving the meter running. If you ever have to contact their customer service while experiencing an issue during a ride, good luck reaching a human.
Thinking back to that year when all the VCs were throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at bike share and scooter companies, one of the theses seeming to drive that mad rush was the idea that the hardware was commoditized and the first to scale in each market would capture an insurmountable advantage.
This may yet turn out to be true in some markets in the world, but my impression, having ridden many a shared e-bike or scooter, is that we’re far from the final form factor. That is, the hardware wasn’t commoditized as previously thought. Especially in the West, perhaps in part because of rough handling from users who are anti-tech, the shared bikes and scooters just don’t hold up very long. The useful life of these things is often so short that the effective unit economics are negative, and even while the vehicle is operational, the ride experience fails to achieve a consistent standard of quality and safety.
One of the limiting factors, especially for scooters, is the battery power to weight ratio. Today’s batteries don’t supply a high enough power-to-weight ratio to support a larger, sturdier, more stable bike and scooter form factors. The scooters that are in use today are really frail, with narrow frames and platforms, and not much power; even a mild hill can be beyond a scooter’s ability to move an average person uphill, not to mention the heavier form factor of the average American.
The tires are solid discs of plastic rather than pneumatic. Good luck keeping your balance if you hit any pothole or bump in the road. Even pneumatic tires of that tiny radius would be uncomfortable on bumpy terrain, even with suspension.
The handlebars on scooters are very narrow, meaning even a subtle steering movement causes the scooter to change directions quite drastically. The platform for your feet is so narrow that most people have to ride with their feet turned to the side, like they’re riding a skateboard or snowboard, rather than facing forward with their feet side by side, a more natural and intuitive position for most people. I’ve encountered enough people on scooters while out cycling to be convinced the average person isn’t able to balance themselves on these things safely except on very smooth surfaces.
With more battery power, both e-bikes and electric scooters could be built up in more durable and stable form factors. Hybrid bike/scooters that you can sit on to ride have started popping up in a few cities around the world, and they seem much safer for the average person to use on roads. The useful life for larger vehicles may be longer, leading to more positive economics for the companies operating them.
Perhaps the social norms once these things are available in larger quantities, once they seem inevitable, will shift such that people don’t vandalize these vehicles. And perhaps more American cities will have added more protected bike and scooter lanes by then, making these safer to ride on the street (many cities, like San Francisco, ban the riding of electric scooters on the sidewalk, but when there aren’t protected lanes to ride in, many riders are too scared to ride them on the road, leading them to ignore the law and flee to the already too narrow sidewalks where pedestrians, who aren’t accustomed to sharing space with motorized transport, often collide with scooter riders moving at speeds they don’t anticipate.)
I would love to live in a much less car-centric America. It’s a healthier, safer civic equilibrium. We won’t achieve it by ignoring the execution flaws of alternative forms of transport, however. Americans are already so possessive of their vehicles, only a thoroughly convincing and flawlessly executed set of alternatives will change their minds.