I always write this bit and the header of the newsletter last, and I can’t help noticing the headers I write are reading more and more like Radiohead lyrics. Maybe that says something about our times? (Or my age?)

I promise you I am not that emo in real life though. I’m a bouncy Tigger optimist, so curating this newsletter is always a joy. I’ve put in a few interesting long reads in here, but also some gorgeous creative eye candy. If you have a large screen at home, I recommend putting the GREEN PLAY link on it and letting your mind wander.

💻 DATA POINT: There’s a lot of discussion about ‘Google Zero’ at the moment, and our first link is a good analysis of research about how Google search traffic is changing as they focus on AI/LLM search. The news isn’t good - Similarweb’s Q1 survey found that only 32% of searches resulted in a click. That’s 68% of clicks not driving traffic to the rest of the web. The link below gives you some tactics and strategies to use now that we’re firmly in the Google Zero era.

Goodbye to Google Search (5-min-read)

Matt Dorfman Explains How He Designs Book Covers (5-min read)

How Fake Spotify Streams Broke Kalshi (8-min read)

Really Uncanny Robot Hand Video (2-min watch)

The Parallel Open Web (4-min read)

Ursula Le Guin on the Secret of Great Writing (8-min read)

How Playtex Helped Nasa Solve the Problem of Making Spacesuits (9-min read/17-min listen)

Know Your Agent (4-min read)

Yuge Zhou’s GREEN PLAY (3-min watch)

📣 Adam Lawrenson Crushes on the Bauhaus (23-min listen/watch) 📣

Goodbye to Google Search (5-min-read)
This excellent post from Tim Woodall, Head of Consumer Marketing at Faber & Faber, looks at the recent announcements from Google IO about LLM search, and gives you practical tactics to try. His recommendation to map out the ‘entities’ in your online content is very good, and got us reaching for pens and whiteboards at Storythings.

Matt Dorfman Explains How He Designs Book Covers (5-min read)
I love the power of collage to present a fractured version of reality that is human and yet somehow uncanny. In this It’s Nice That interview Matt Dorfman talks about how he uses collage and his advice when you’re stuck for creative ideas - “Do anything except what is right in front of you”

How Fake Spotify Streams Broke Kalshi (8-min read)
The first of three links that touch on what I think are really important themes in culture and society right now. This one is about how Kalshi prediction markets were broken by bettors funding fake Spotify streams, but it’s an example of the ‘arb’ - gaining financial benefits by exploiting inefficiencies between markets, or outright manipulating markets to create inefficiencies. It comes from the concept of ‘arbitrage’ in financial speculation, but as more and more of our culture is financialised and opened up to speculative investment, we are increasingly living in a world driven by artbitrage of one form or another.

Really Uncanny Robot Hand Video (2-min watch)
The next of our three augurs for present and future culture is a genuinely incredible video of a new robot hand that uses force feedback to enable soft and nuanced dexterity. For me, this goes beyond the uncanny valley and feels quite human, to the point where I got angry when the researchers attacked the robot with hammers when it was reaching for a snack in a bag it just opened. Don’t give the humans Funyuns if they hit you with hammers, robot! And researchers - maybe don’t hit the increasingly human robots with hammers. I’ve seen all the movies - this doesn’t end well.

The Parallel Open Web (4-min read)
And to complete our three links pointing to the weirdness of our near-future culture, Mike Mallazon from BRXAND extrapolates a few current trends to suggest that the rise of the AI agents is going to change online culture in ways we might not expect: “Perhaps it’s as simple as this— all signs point to the agentic web swinging us back towards things getting really weird again”

Ursula Le Guin on the Secret of Great Writing (8-min read)
After a bit of future gazing, here’s a brilliant summary from The Marginalian of Ursula Le Guin’s advice from her essay ‘Where Do You Get All Your Ideas From?’ Her answers are reassuringly human, and as relevant now as when she wrote this in 1987.

How Playtex Helped Nasa Solve the Problem of Making Spacesuits (9-min read/17-min listen)
If you were at our The Story conference in 2016, you will have seen science writer and broadcaster Dallas Campbell share a film he found of 1960s Playtex workers helping to make the Apollo spacesuits for NASA. This excerpt from Nicholas de Monchaux’s 2011 book SPACESUIT: Fashioning Apollo tells the story of how NASA approached Playtex when they had a seemingly unsolvable problem.

Know Your Agent (4-min read)
This is an excellent explanation from internet legend Esther Dyson of her new project, creating a new top level domain - .agent - that can regulate the integrity of public facing AI Agents. I’m currently helping an old friend create a new top level domain for public archives, and so this is part of an interesting trend in creating regulation and policy at the very heart of the internet’s domain structure.

Yuge Zhou’s GREEN PLAY (3-min watch)
I hope you’ve been able to keep cool in the recent heatwaves. This simple and fascinating video installation reminded me of the joy of aimless people watching on a hot summer’s day. Grab and ice cream and relax!

📣 Adam Lawrenson Crushes on the Bauhaus (23-min listen/watch) 📣
IKn the latest in our new B2B CMO podcast Creative Crush, Adam Lawrenson from Bowbridge explains his love for the early 20th C artistic movement Bauhaus (not the goth band!). I can’t tell you how happy I was when Adam chose Bauhaus, and I’m really pleased that in just a few episodes, our podcast interviewees’ crushes have included a TV/video game franchise, a Prince Album. a musician and writer, and now an art school/movement. You know you’ve got a great format when the contributors use it in ways you could never have predicted!

Nick Allardice is the President and CEO of Give Directly, and previously CEO of Change.org, so he understands a lot about how philanthropy impacts global issues. In this excellent LinkedIn post, he argues that a lot of NGOs are not equipped to scale for the incoming wave of post AI IPO philanthropic giving. It’s a provocative statement, and it’s worth reading the excellent comments (a rare thing these days on LinkedIn!). Of course, taxing the income of new tech billionaires might be a solution to this as well…

READ NICK’S POST >

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team