I had a whole other track queued up for you and then this came on and turned my brain into a dancefloor. “Ich Mwen” comes from Topical Dancer, the latest album from the Ghent duo Christiane Adigéry and Bolis Pupul. On this record, they use word play to explore the absurdity of translation and all the meaning that gets lost across borders. Per Pitchfork: “When everything—from art to language and determinants of identity—can be constantly referenced, appropriated, and given new contexts, does anything have true meaning?” Our single seems to. Produced in collaboration with Adigéry’s mom, “Ich Mwen” is about learning to love yourself the way you love everyone else, showing up as a solid entity rather than as a shape-shifter built to please.

Beautiful, right? Listen here, and then apply that maternal wisdom to the slimy-shady media ventures below.

🚨 BUMMER ALERT: Last week, a friend of mine was laid off from The Recount, a promising news startup that’s about to close. Another friend had a story killed at WaPo magazine, which is also abruptly shutting down. Yet another buddy has learned they’re coming back from leave to a to-be-determined job at [I haven’t gotten consent to share the name of her outlet, but you probably know it] after the company executes a budget-saving re-org.

Media is in a bad place — not necessarily because revenue has fallen so drastically yet, but because everyone’s expecting lower ad buy next year as the economy ~recedes,~ so companies are turning off the spigot now.

It’s sad and alarming, and still, I was tickled to see that the tech outlet Future is also shutting down. Future, you see, was launched last year by the VC fund Andreesen Horowitz, with the goal of taking back the tech narrative from the pesky mainstream outlets that report on the industry with “criticism” and “balance.”

At first read, the closure is a little bit of a relief. Like, wow, is media really so bad that even the money people can’t make it work? No, it turns out — the money people are just bad at running media.

“It doesn’t always end well when you hire people to tell the world how great you are,” wrote tech journalist Brad Stone in Bloomberg.  “Future.com, from my periodic glances, is a snooze fest, devoid of even the most justifiable skepticism and tension.”

The general readership agrees and is therefore paltry, and it’s no longer worth it for the firm to employ writers to turn out one-sided stories. Their media arm a16z will continue to air insidery podcasts and videos, but they’ll leave the critical journalism to…….. ah shit, where’d all the newspapers go?

If media’s not making any money, you know what totally will? Fraud. After getting out of prison earlier this year, Fyre Festival mastermind Billy McFarland is at it again with PYRT (pronounced “pirate”), a Fyre Fest redux scheduled for the same string of islands in the Bahamas in 2023. And would you believe this vanity project from disgraced-not-dissuaded scene bro features web3?

“PYRT is not a festival. It’s not an event,” says McFarland. “And it’s definitely not the metaverse… PYRT is a technology I’ve been working on for the past few years called the VID/R: the virtual immersive decentralized reality.” Contrary to those assertions, PYRT appears to be a festival and therefore also an event that is then streamed to the metaverse for those who understandably refuse to imperil their wellbeing by physically attending. If you’re worried that we’re already being misled here, fear not: whether or not the (non-)event actually happens, McFarland promises that some of the revenue will go toward repaying the people he defrauded to put on the Fyre Fest. Just the upright conduct you’d expect from a PYRT.

The money bros may be unstoppable, but you know what you can manage? Your own finances. CreditStrong helps you build personal and business credit in a way that works for you — so whether you want to build credit at low cost, grow a savings account and credit at the same time, or build the largest amount of credit possible, they’ve got a plan (including both revolving and installment lines of credit). Learn more and start building here.