The Sunday Digest: Consolidation, Censorship, and Creators' New Best Friend

Happy Sunday!

Ever notice product placement in sci-fi blockbusters? Not the Reese’s from E.T.—we mean the future: IBM’s eerily accurate FaceTime setup in 2001. The airborne McDonald’s drive-thru in The Fifth Element. Wall–E’s first-gen iPod.

It’s easy to dismiss that as cynical advertising. But these monolithic brand presences are also hints at the business climate of imagined futures. Are the corporations we’re seeing the only ones left? What else survived? What got bought? Is everyone else in I, Robot obsessed with Converse, or is it just Will Smith?

Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. So if we’re wondering where visions like these—of a select few massive companies dominating the landscape—come from, the present is a pretty good place to look. Take this week: on the heels of a mammoth publishing merger, Slack became part of Salesforce’s CRM monopoly and Amazon zeroed in on podcaster Wondery. As Nathan said on Wednesday’s Talk Therapy, “things are getting very consolidated.” So if sci-fi flicks start setting their eyes on workplace collaboration and audio storytelling platforms…we told you so. 

One industry whose future is looking a little more turbulent this weekend? The movies themselves. Warner’s decision to put all of its big-ticket 2021 films on HBO Max the same day they debut theatrically seems like a precedent-setter. Almost every major studio now has its own streamer (or is one), so a large-scale shift in HBO’s direction is entirely possible. Talk about consolidation.

Actually, that’s exactly what we did this week. We talked about plenty more, too—from eCommerce and government restrictions to the weird fun-house mirror that is LinkedIn.

It’s all below—plus news, and our favorite reads of the moment. We hope you dig it.

What We Published

The lowdown on this week’s output, including 5 articles, 1 podcast, and a live conversation.

📱 LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe

by Fadeke Adegbuyi in Divinations

“LinkedIn is the fucking worst” — or so says Fadeke Adegbuyi in her first guest essay for Divinations. And we agree.

Have you ever exhausted your usual doomscroll rotation and resorted to LinkedIn as a last-ditch social network, only to find it riddled with inexplicable posts and even more bizarre features? Is that just us? Either way, you owe it to yourself to take this ride with Fadeke. Her comprehensive study of the various absurd phenomena spread across everyone’s favorite professional network is