#70: Californiaaaa, prize money, Cuba's resolver, and hacking the news
Good morning, newsletter nation. Great to see so many of you at #MKTGNation (see my highlights here) and #CMC18 (had so much fun emceeing!)
Let's get into it...
Edition #70 of the World's Best Newsletter contains the following delicious tidbits of flim flam and jim jam:
1. Documentary reminder: Century of the Self
2. California now the world's 5th largest economy
3. Boston Marathon reverses prize money decision
4. How Larry Kim hacked the news with Facebook ads
5. News without the internet
6. Quote of the week
1. Documentary reminder: Century of the Self
Anyone else get into deep philosophical discussions with their Uber drivers at 3:30 in the morning when en route to the airport? Oh, just me?
En route to NY yesterday, I found myself recommending this 2002 documentary once again "Century of the Self." One of the stories within about Edward Bernays was included in my TEDx talk, and the series itself has a ton of stories that illuminate our human nature.
It's a fascinating look at what drives us, Freud, etc. If you haven't seen, it's a must-watch.
I know my Uber driver will be watching, so... really what are you waiting for?
2. California now the world's 5th largest economy
Even surpassing that of the United Kingdom, according to the LA Times.
California's economic output is now surpassed only by the total GDP of the United States, China, Japan and Germany. The state has 12% of the U.S. population but contributed 16% of the country's job growth between 2012 and 2017. Its share of the national economy also grew to 14.2% from 12.8% over that five-year period, according to state economists.
Californiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
3. Boston Marathon reverses prize money decision
The rules of the Boston Marathon were changed in 2004 so that the top women runners would start about a half an hour ahead of the pack in an effort to "better showcase the women’s elite field.”
Today, 14 years later, that meant three of the top-15 female finishers were ineligible for prize money they would have been entitled to had they been men.
"... organizers and the broader long-distance running community found themselves at a bit of an impasse — their rules, while clearly outlined ahead of time and perhaps well-intentioned, left three women without prize money that they would have received had they been men."
After a slew of bad press and public outcry, the BAA is doing the right thing, awarding these women the prize money correspondent to their placements. TBH, it's not a lot of cash, it's the principle of the matter - and a little fist bump moment for the women involved.
"Of course I should be awarded the prize money, because I feel what I did — what I’m sensing from the public and from the people I know — is an extraordinary thing.” - Jessica Chichester, Fifth-place finisher at the Boston Marathon
Get dat money, girls.
4. How Larry Kim hacked the news with Facebook ads
This week I had the pleasure of introducing Larry Kim on stage at the Content Marketing Conference. He's a fascinating scientist in the world of digital marketing, and on-stage he reminded the audience of an experiment he ran to hack the news.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent a combined $6.8 billion in their bid to become president in 2016. But the U.S. election is remarkably easy (and cheap) to hack. That’s because the outcome of presidential elections often hinges on just a few thousand votes (just 11,602 in Michigan, for example) in key battleground states, as we saw in 2016.
Read "Facebook Ads, Fake News and the Shockingly Low Cost of Influencing an Election [DATA]" to see how he used $50 and some fake news to reached 4,645 people in one hour, all with a well-known and debunked fake news story:
Incredibly easy to hack our democracy in the US because of Facebook's ubiquity:
5. News without the internet
On the flip side, here's what happens in a world without internet.
Most Cubans lack internet access - and therefore Facebook - but this resourceful nation has workarounds.
Their way around that is El Paquete - "a 1 Tb collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet." It's distributed on USB keys to 3 million Cubans, and selling EP is the largest occupation in Cuba.
"It is the internet distilled down to its purest, most consumable, and least interactive form: its content. This collection of video, song, photo, and text files from the outside world is cobbled together by various media smugglers known as paqueteros, and it travels around the island from person to person, percolating quickly from Havana to the furthest reaches in less than a day and constituting what would be known in techie lingo as a sneakernet: a network that transmits data via shoe rubber, bus, horseback, or anything else."
It's a fascinating and direct challenge to our notions of how networks operate / what they mean to citizens.
PS this article in WIRED is from Antonio García Martínez, whose book Chaos Monkeys I highly recommend - it's another POV from inside Facebook's growth.
6. Quote of the week
Is actually a word -- resolver.
From the WIRED article on El Paquete:
"An important word to know in Cuba is resolver. While literally meaning “to resolve,” in practice it’s closer to Silicon Valley’s notion of “lifehacking,” but without the humblebraggy lifestyle posturing."
Have a great weekend,
Katie
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