Wow, what a week. With the US election result, and now big earthquakes and wild weather in New Zealand, I thought we could do with a little comic relief. Today we'll investigate my favourite piece of communication of recent times. I hope it will make you laugh as much as I did.
Because I aspire to a life of Sysiphisian scrambling and hate free time, I recently renewed my long-lapsed New Yorker subscription. Before becoming buried under a stack of thin volumes and a feeling of general ennui, I devoured—with equal parts prurient interest and visceral horror—Tad Friend’s October 10 profile of Sam Altman and Y Combinator, the famous Silicon Valley start-up incubator.
Last week, the Museum of Modern art announced it has added the first ever set of emoji to its permanent collection. These 176 icons were released by Japanese cellular provider DoCoMo way back in 1999. While some people have happily peppered their text messages with a multitude of colourful icons for close to two decades, I stuck to using boring old words until very recently.
Let’s watch a video. It’s not new, but it’s still worthy of comment. This video, titled Bits and Atoms was released to accompany Uber’s new logo and "brand experience” in February 2016. As of October 2016, it has under 49,000 views on Youtube so it’s hard to say who the intended audience was. It’s a deeply weird video. Let’s take a look:
