Earl Sweatshirt’s new album feels a little bit like wallpaper to me, but wallpaper where you could schedule an archaeological dig and find something juicy. Or you could just lose yourself, tumbling through its endless patterns. Pro tip: do so wearing headphones.
You’ve heard of Soundcloud rappers, but it’s getting awfully crowded on there, so a few intrepid souls are taking the game over to Linkedin. Before you knock it (which is really too easy anyway), consider the genius of this plan: Soundcloud is a place where you show your music to listeners and build popularity, right? And then once you’ve proven yourself with your number of followers or whatever then you ideally become somebody. On Linkedin, you bypass the need to build consumer popularity, cutting straight to connections with label types and other people who are corporate enough to pay attention to their Linkedin profiles. Nerdy? Yes. But nerds get ahead.
To draw a line through a bunch of recent headlines, our fave big tech companies are quickly, and in big ways, expanding beyond the West Coast. There’s Amazon’s new dual HQ, of course, and Apple is building a $5mm new campus in Austin, while Google sets out to double its presence in New York and others set up shop in Canada. Obviously San Francisco and Seattle are running out of room, which accounts for some of these moves, but it’s not like New York has a ton of room to accommodate massive growth either. But it’s not really about space; tech needs to go where the talent is. And if the industry is making moves to allow people to live in not-Silicon-Valley, then that might mean something else: ‘tech’ is not a specialized industry any more– it’s becoming a normal, multi-industry part of our economy, and it makes sense for it to be present in a variety of cities. For those of you with new jobs to come: congrats. And to the rest: hope this makes you feel better about losing your house.
