Newsletter 6/17/2022: Co-working: the Final Frontier

From the Desk of Dennis:

Coworking Space - the Final Frontier.

I’m writing today’s newsletter from the comfort of a booked “collaboration room” with a big whiteboard, a nice record player with a tasteful collection of vinyl to match. I’m ignoring all of them for the new Drake album (which I have mixed feelings on - it’s a dancehall album, which means zero memorable lyrics). There’s free Red Bull in the kitchen outside, lots of beanbags, and half a dozen studios for me to book whenever the creative mood strikes. After two years working from home, it feels like I’ve finally arrived at a real space for productivity. Notably, it looks nothing like a cubicle.

Working from home was certainly beginning to blur everything together. Work blurred into play, days blurred into each other, and the slow petering out of my last full-time job in the face of a merger didn’t add any sharpness to the picture. In staking out my entrepreneurial venture, I’m grateful to have this new space providing me new energy, and supremely grateful that there’s a community here to help rejuvenate my network.

If you’re stuck working at home and feeling the Groundhog Day effect kick in, my advice to you is to change the scenery ASAP. Find a coffee shop with wifi, go over a friend’s house, or hit your local library. Trust me, the world wants to see you out there.

Best,

Dennis A. Wilson

This Week in Marketing and Technology:

Gizmodo, “Julian Assange Extradition to US Approved by UK Government”

“Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks in 2006 as a whistleblowing website that publishes classified media from anonymous sources... The extradition approval is a part of a years-long attempt by the U.S. government to nab Assange on charges of espionage, which has ignited a global conversation on the ethics of WikiLeaks and Assange alike.”

The long, twisted journey of Julian Assange and Wikileaks continues. I remember the moment in the early ‘tens when Wikileaks felt like such a natural extension of what the internet’s potential had been described as - a vehicle for transparency, accessible by any whistleblower with an internet connection and something important to share. Then Assange got accused of rape and messed around in the 2016 election, and I realized that Wikileaks wasn’t, as the name suggests, a platonic hivemind speaking truth to power online, but just another website run by a man with his own agendas.

Ars Technica, “SpaceX fires employees who wrote letter slamming Musk’s “embarrassing” behavior”

“The letter said SpaceX executives should "publicly address and condemn Elon's harmful Twitter behavior" and that the company "must swiftly and explicitly separate itself from Elon's personal brand."

Have you ever had a boss so bad that you started waging a public relations war against them? That’s what SpaceX employees are doing about Elon Musk’s whole schtick (treating Twitter like 4chan’s /biz/ board), which coincides with publicized memos from the company where he’s taking away the now-standard flexibility of WFH from what are presumably, some very talented and in-demand engineers. Meanwhile, I don’t even know the name of Ford’s CEO but I sure know about the Lightning F-150's they’re working on.

SearchEngineLand, “Search marketers agree: automation the least favorite part of PPC”

“We received an overwhelming number of answers ranging in everything from Google support to agencies (no offense taken), to clients with unrealistic expectations. But one answer stuck out: Google automation.”

I sympathize with my fellow search marketers in this article. I sincerely believe we are at the end of a golden age in digital marketing, in the sense that the data we have had access to during the height of cookies and Universal Analytics was plentiful and easily parsed. As ad platforms begin to solve for GDPR and similar regulations by removing granularity of some data (so that it can’t be personally identifiable), they’re simultaneously pushing automation, which feels like a bait and switch to experienced marketers who have been comfortable working with large amounts of data to make smart advertising decisions.