Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients.
The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show.
In April, Justin Bieber headlined two consecutive weekends at Coachella. Coachella is the biggest stage in pop music save only for the Super Bowl, the kind of event that in theory generates its own attention. And yet on both weekends, a Discord server writer Lane Brown had been monitoring hosted paid campaigns for Bieber’s Coachella performances, offering clippers — people who are hired to turn a song, trailer, interview, stump speech, or whatever into short, social-media-friendly fragments — as much as a dollar per thousand views.
“On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that ‘everybody’ is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas,” writes Brown.
“Everybody is doing this now,” Lim says. “And if you’re not, you’re behind.”
Brown reports on how the same techniques are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip: https://t.co/hlcdfSmzPc
i can't believe they're really gonna do it again
the last time stripe shipped a primitive this big, it literally birthed modern saas.
shopify, substack, gumroad, all your fav indie hackers...
they exist only because stripe's payments api let them easily accept money with a few lines of code
yesterday stripe shipped the spending version.
anyone can now get an agent to spend money on their behalf.
if stripe's payments api created saas, this spending api creates autonomous commerce:
a new category of businesses that run on agents buying, booking, restocking, and paying on your behalf
to make that concrete for you, here's some cool ideas you can build now:
1. ai ad managers. you connect your meta, google, and tiktok accounts, set a monthly budget cap, and an agent runs your entire paid strategy.
2. ai procurement agents for ecommerce. they monitor supplier prices, auto-order when costs hit your threshold, send you a morning summary of what they bought and why
3. ai travel agents that actually work. they search, compare, book, and pay within your budget rules. no more toggling between 6 tabs to save $40 on a flight
4. ai bookkeeping agents. they handle the recurring operational payments your business already makes every month (contractor invoices, ad account top-ups, subscriptions, etc)
the 18-month window after a new primitive ships is historically when the category-defining companies get built
if i was building right now i'd pick one of these, find the narrowest possible version of it, and ship before it closes
generational opportunities here imo. good luck!
Eric Kripke diz que foto de Donald Trump como Jesus Cristo arruinou uma das piadas mais absurdas de “The Boys”:
“Eu achava que essa era a coisa mais insana que poderia acontecer, até Trump divulgar uma imagem dele como Deus 48 horas antes da exibição do episódio. Há um mês, quando estávamos pensando em marketing, eu pensei: ‘Capitão Pátria como Deus é exagerado. Temos que ter cuidado até mesmo sobre como apresentamos a ideia ao público, porque eles dirão que fomos longe demais, e aqui estamos’. Posso dizer uma coisa? Eles estão dificultando muito a sátira. Parem por um minuto e nos deixem ser mais absurdos que o mundo? Seria ótimo.”
🚨 BREAKING: Anthropic’s Most Dangerous Model Ever Breached By Hackers
> anthropic builds a cyberweapon
> calls it mythos
> “can hack every major OS and browser”
> dario: “we’re the safe & responsible ai lab”
> “can’t release it to the public”
> Mercor (their training contractor) gets breached
> leaks anthropic’s model naming conventions
> hackers guess the URL pattern
> contractor credentials still work
> they’re inside
The group also has access to other unreleased Anthropic models.
Not just Mythos. The whole pipeline.
Anthropic’s statement: “investigating a report of access through one of our third-party vendor environments.”
Mythos got breached on day one 💀