The Death of Tupperware, a Luxury Airline For Dogs and Why Amazon eBooks Are Such Garbage

It’s hard to imagine a more non-obvious music concert venue than a tiny desk. Last week I got behind the conga drums at the Tiny Desk inside the headquarters of NPR. In case you’re not familiar, it’s an intimate stage where U2, Taylor Swift and dozens of others have performed. And this is me standing there imagining myself in the midst of it all.  

My stolen moment at Tiny Desk reminded me what an honor it is to have a moment of your attention every week for this email. So, thank you for being a subscriber. Tiny desks oversharing aside, I think you’ll enjoy the topics this week too …

Can Amazon fix the plague of garbage ebooks flooding their site? Why is the Tupperware brand slowly dying? Is a new luxury airline for dogs really a brilliant marketing stunt? How can we all empower women to fight back against manipulative AI? Were Dubai’s floods caused by cloud seeding? 

Get all the answers in the links and stories below. Enjoy!

Stay curious,

Why Amazon Is Filled with Garbage Ebooks and How They Could Fix It

An article from Vox this week explored why exactly Amazon is filled with so many garbage ebooks, and the answer is infuriatingly straightforward. AI makes it easy to generate content, Amazon makes it too easy to publish large volumes of ebooks with minimal quality standards and effective growth hacker marketing makes it easy to promote these ebook to unsuspecting consumers on the largest online retail platform in the world.

Recently Amazon, in a half-hearted attempt to address the problem, limited the number of ebooks an author can publish to three per day … conveniently ignoring the reality that if you’re publishing three books a day, they are most probably filled with AI-generated bullshit anyway, so this “limit” is quantifiably useless. This may seem like a problem without a solution, but consider how Wikipedia works as an alternative.

On that platform, the shared responsibility to prevent any content that doesn’t fit Wikipedian standards is so entrenched there are entire articles pleading with site editors to avoid “overzealous deletion.” Amazon could use some of that overzeal. What if one of the world’s richest companies put some money towards enlisting the help of Wikipedian editors (or people with similarly aggressive know-it-all personalities) to delete garbage ebooks and offered them micropayments for their efforts?

Or another idea would be to use a reverse rating system where consumers could rate a book as spam and after a set number of spam votes, the book would be taken down. And adjusting the limit to one book per week would also help (and perhaps force some fast-publishing writers to be just a little more thoughtful with what they publish). The point is, self-publishing on Amazon doesn’t have to be the exponentially growing garbage pile that it currently is. Amazon could choose to fix it. They just have to care enough to do it.  

Meet Tupperware: The Slowing Fading Brand That Should Have Won the Nostalgia Trend

Tupperware parties were a thing; once so iconic that they symbolized an entire cultural movement of work-from-home (mostly) female entrepreneurs in a time when opportunities for women to run and own their own businesses were rare. Today the company is in rapid decline and the public shift away from plastic food containers is only one reason for it. A larger reason is the brand’s steadfast refusal to update its product line or direct sales-centric business model.

As it stands, the slow demise of the brand is likely to become a case study in business schools (if it hasn’t already). This is a brand that could have made a shift, rediscovered its heritage, leveraged the nostalgic trend that has resurrected many other flailing brands and exploded during a pandemic time when more people than ever were stuck cooking (and storing leftovers) at home. Instead, the brand is near dead and unlikely to come back. 

What Would You Put In the “Forever Library” to Archive Human Existence for a Billion Years?

Several million years from now when future civilizations or aliens or whatever is around then look back on human existence, at least they will know how David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear back in 1983. That’s just one of the archives of humanity that is part of the Galactic Legacy Archive–a library of humanity that has been sent to the moon where scientists estimate it will last for billions of years barring an unlikely meteor strike.

The entire library is on a disc made of nickel, a material that never decays or corrodes. It’s made in nanofiche (far smaller than microfiche) and will require a microscope to read, but everyone involved seems fairly certain that sort of magnification will be easily available to future beings who find it. Also in the archive are 25,000 songs, early human cave art paintings and a frozen-in-time version of Wikipedia from 2022 that will offer a concerningly dated look at humanity.

Hopefully this is just one of many such archives that will be sent in the future. In the meantime, in case you are wondering … you can already read how Copperfield did that famous trick here. 

The New Luxury Airline for Dogs Called BarkAir Is Not a Joke, It’s a Brilliant Marketing Stunt

Apparently it has been a dream of dogfood subscription brand BarkBox for more than a decade to create an airline dedicated to flying dogs and their human companions around the world. Now they are making it a reality through a partnership with private jet charter company Talon Air and the way they are doing it is actually quite smart.

They are focusing on long haul routes from the east to west coast of America and to London. The seats are all luxury with special amenities for dogs. They have a private concierge team to get to know the dogs and their companions ahead of the flight and the food, dog-calming scented cabins and in-seat belly rub buttons are all customized to dogs. 

It’s hard to guess how long the flights will run before they run out of money they’re willing to lose, but while it lasts the entire effort is a brilliant marketing stunt for BarkBox to promote their core subscription business. The underlying message is clear: if they can solve this pain point for dog owners, their subscription service and everything else they do for dogs may be worth a try too. 

AI Disproportionately Affects Women. We All Need to Fight Back.

This week, the “world’s first Miss AI” digital beauty contest was announced with $5000 prize awarded based on beauty and skill using AI tools. One tech expert predicted that the AI girlfriend industry could hit $1B in revenue soon despite multiple reports of how the creators of these digital companions may be hoarding your private data.

While these issues could adversely affect people of any gender, one report found that 96% of all deepfakes online are non-consensual fake videos of women. Clearly the tools pose a disproportionate risk to women, which is one reason why the UK recently approved legislation to criminalize creating sexually explicit deepfake images. This is one positive step. Another is seeing more marketing campaigns and commitments like the recent one from Dove Real Beauty pledging not to use AI in their advertising.

Ultimately, the thing that will have the biggest impact though is more women working in fields where AI technologies are being used and developed. TechCrunch has a podcast dedicated to interviewing some of the women behind the AI revolution. There are a growing number of events such as the Women In AI Flagship Summit that are offering learning and networking opportunities for women, and communities like the 6000+ member global non-profit WomenofAI.org are working hard to connect women working (or aspiring to work) in AI roles with one another.

For us to live in a world that has more than digital beauty pageants and AI-girlfriends, these events and communities that empower women will need all of our support. The world would be a pretty empty and soulless place if we continue to allow AI tools to manipulate or take away the voices of real women. 

Even More Non-Obvious Stories …

Every week I always curate more stories than I’m able to explore in detail. Instead of skipping those stories, I started to share them in this section so you can skim the headlines and click on any that spark your interest:

How are these stories curated?

Every week I spend hours going through hundreds of stories in order to curate this email. Looking for a speaker to inspire your team to become non-obvious thinkers through a keynote or workshop?  Watch my new 2024 speaking reel on YouTube >>

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This Non-Obvious Insights Newsletter is curated by Rohit Bhargava.

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