Bonjour,
Happy Friday! It has come to my attention that some of you missed the livestream. No problem, check it out below. We cover AI Fruit Love Island, Surveillance pricing, and more.
ily,
Polygon knows when you move valuable things, the method matters.
Meek Mill, the Philly rapper you've certainly bopped along to many times over the last two decades, is the main character of tech Twitter this week.
He's a longtime fixture in the music scene, but his most recognizable record is 'Going Bad,' which was released in 2018 and blew up for a few reasons. It featured Drake, who Meek famously had beef with a few years prior. The running theory is that Drake, who had not yet been absolutely humbled by Kendrick, jumped on the track to signal the beef was over, and it proved to be a major endorsement of Meek when he needed it most.
You see, Meek had just been released from prison after violating his probation on a relatively minor infraction, which landed him a 2 to 4 year sentence. His case was brought to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and he was released in April 2018 after about 5 months. The case rightly garnered widespread attention, highlighting systemic racial injustice in the criminal justice system. After his release, he co-founded the REFORM Alliance, focused on changing probation and parole laws. And also dropped this club classic.
I say all this to set the stage for Meek being more than just a musical artist, he is someone who has been able to galvanize people and create cultural movements around real issues, so to not take him seriously is a fumble. Unfortunately, fumbling seems to be a favorite pastime of tech shitposters.
It all started earlier this week when Meek tweeted about how he was using Claude to organize his music catalogue and how he anticipated it would transform his business. He seemed to fall down a tech rabbit hole, tweeting about Palantir, LinkedIn, and asking about GitHub. For the record, he's been tweeting about AI tooling since August, so he's not a fair weather fan.
Someone with actual cultural cachet was paying attention and it was fodder for the timeline. Unfortunately, the most common response from big tech accounts was some version of 'we aren't laughing with you, we're laughing at you.’ To which Meek said, fuck you, watch me.
There was then some course correcting, apologizing, and Y Cominbator reply guying.
I for one am hoping for creative people to be active participants in the conversation around AI. We should be so lucky to have artists and musicians seated at the table as designer partners in how this technology takes shape.
And for the marketers who work at Anthropic and read this newsletter, Deana gave you some free advice on Wednesday.
