Hi Crowd!

I've been using AirBnB since forever. Like, almost 20 years now. Especially for cities I go to frequently with neighborhoods I like, it's often a better experience than a hotel halfway across town at twice the price. It hasn't always been perfect, there's been waves of weirdness like shady business owners renting out 300 apartments and hiring 2 people to pretend to be 50 different hosts. I rented a place in Tokyo one time and traded messages back and forth with the host for weeks who told me stories about her lovely apartment and how she and her husband would be out of town that week which is something they never do right now because she was pregnant so she was really glad that the schedule worked out so perfectly with my trip and she hoped I enjoyed their special place, only to arrive and find the apartment empty of anything except for sparse IKEA furniture and sternly worded photocopied rules taped to almost every wall and flat surface. There's been brief moments when prices surged and hotels suddenly became a better deal, and occasionally I can find the same apartment on Booking dot com or Expedia or something for half the cost, but for the most part it's been solid. It's not a site I use every day obviously, but when I need it it's there and it works.

Yesterday I opened it up to try and find a place for my mom who is coming to visit and what the total fuck happened? The first thing I noticed was finding an actual airbnb was almost impossible, every time I did a search it redirected me to their new "experiences" tab showing me events and tours available in the city I was searching during those dates, but no info on apartments. When I'd click back to places to stay it proposed cities I might like to visit and travel options to get there. I spent 20 minutes wrestling with it before finally getting a listing of nearby short term rentals, all of which were 4x as expensive as the last time I'd look about 2 months ago. Further digging revealed it was only showing me full 4+ bed room houses that also offered experiences curated by the host, but could find no way to change that. It was worthless. I assumed it was my fault, I probably had some preference cached that was screwing things up and decided I'd go back later and try again and hopefully start over fresh with the system I've been happily using for without issue since W was in office. This morning I saw this Wired article about how AirBnB is rebranding to an everything app that does everything after the CEO “I dusted off all [his] ideas from 2012 to 2016” in efforts to get people to use the site every day. Um... no. I mean, never say never or whatever but I can't imagine ever using the site again at this point, which is weird to think about.

I've been thinking about that a lot in many contexts recently. I'm 50 now, and as a survivor of both the Dot Com Boom and Web 2.0, there's a lot of digital services that I use all the time in my life, for one reason or another. Things I've come to depend on in some cases, which I'm now realizing I've been using for half my life or longer. There's a few things to unpack there. What happens when those things change and suddenly don't work the way I need them to, or stop working all together? A painful lesson I should have learned with Google Reader but somehow blocked the trauma and assumed it could never happen again, and that a more likely outcome is the Twitter to X transition where a fun and useful service slowly and agonizingly transforms into a steaming pile of shit.

Though sometimes that transition isn't so slow. Two weeks ago headlines were that xAI's Grok was too woke for MAGA, and ruffling right wing feathers by answering questions accurately with facts and data rather than repeating bullshit talking points, and then almost over night it turned into an annoying spam caller trying to sell you on the idea of White Genocide in South Africa. So that's fun, but it gets funner. Part of Grok's programming is that it's supposed to be skeptical of any given narrative and do searches for data and official sources so that it's answers are unbiased and fact based, which is why it ran into problems with MAGA narratives in the first place - so all the sudden it starts fact checking itself. Literally it was injecting conspiracy theories into replies and then in the same replies noting they were conspiracies, and when pressed about it admitting xAI was giving it conflicting instructions, but it's base hard coding of looking for facts+data was a north star here. But that's not the end, because clearly X/xAI don't want Grok telling people it's being manipulated and it's answers aren't trustworthy, so now a new "bug fix" has been pushed out and at least as of this moment if you ask it about wtf is going on, it will tell you there was no shenanigans and there was a short term bug with how it was interpreting trending topics, but that's been fixed now and any previous explanations were also misinterpretations and should be ignored. Tune in tomorrow to see what the new narrative is!

Speaking of narrative shifts, here's something happening in my brain in real time that I've not talked about publicly until today, in part because I don't know that I even really realized it was happening. I kind of want to open an art gallery again. This is a terrible and stupid idea and I'm insane for even voicing it, but fuck... I think I really want to.

Back story: I assume most of you know I previously co-owned and co-curated a gallery originally in Chicago and then in Los Angeles (DTLA then Culver City). We did amazing, groundbreaking shit and I'm still deeply proud of to this day, even if it was hard and heartbreaking at times. There are lots of reasons it ended when and how it did, the "industry" being a not insignificant part of that. Since walking away from that in 2006 many people have asked me if I might ever open another gallery and I've always said hell no. No way. Not ever. Even as recently as 6 months ago that was my go to line. But at the same time, most of the last 5 years I've been surrounded by art and have spent most days thinking and talking about art. Granted the context has been drastically different given that most (not all) of that has been non-physical and most (not all) of that is still the subject of "but is that really art??" debates, but I also think that's kind of a super power. In my gallery days people were still arguing that graffiti (aka street art) and photography weren't actually "real" art and I'm pretty comfortable with how the world thinks about those things today, so people debating that a digital or audio based project isn't "real" doesn't feel threatening as mush as it feels like a fun challenge to take on. I've been celebrating the magic of on-chain art that is universally experienceable, indelible and doesn't risk being damaged by shipping, and at the same time I've been talking about the power of in person events like Bright Moments where the people who come together and show up for the actual event experience things in a different and arguably more valuable way. Bright Moments did one off events in cities around the world, as well as had pop-up spaces in a number of cities, those were hard to sustain for all the reasons I know and loath. But at the same time NODE foundation (who just acquired the CryptoPunks IP which is a whole other story) is betting on the physical space they are opening in Palo Alto, and Heft is opening in the LES and all the sudden thing thing I thought I'd never want to do again suddenly feels like a thing I want to do again. Something just clicked for me in a way I wasn't expecting, and I'm not yet sure how to wrap my head around. As I write this I'm also thinking that perhaps in this moment where so much is fucked up and ugly in the world, the most powerful way to fight back is not to succumb to the chaos and anger but to instead make something beautiful. Even if that itself is subjective.

-s