💘 Dua Lipa's Dual Lawsuits 💘
Mōrena lil shits!!
Yay for Monday because it means we get to have our highly anticipated weekend round-up! Let’s rewind to 5am on Friday when my two flatties Hayden and Tom got up to get the BBQ on and start smoking some meat for a potluck dinner we were going to that night. Tom walked in as I was making the morning pot of coffee and said “so... you do this every morning??” But the fact is - their passion for smoking meat got them up at 5am, just as my passion for writing to all of you gets me up! Same thing! (except I'm here daily... you're welcome.)
Anyway, we went to the potluck (the boys would like me to report that the meat was a success), and while we were sitting outside we saw a huge bright flash of white and heard a crashing sound, and all the power went out! It truly felt like the beginning of a horror movie (until we walked out to the road and saw that it was caused by some fallen powerlines, week.) For the rest of the night, we ate by candlelight, played beer pong by candlelight, and for some reason had a game of Twister... by candlelight.
I’m not gonna lie to you, I spent the rest of the weekend working on some very exciting new changes here at SYSCA that are going to make your lives (and mine, Liv & Ruby’s) so much easier. You’ll find out all about that in a few days!
✨ PS!! I've had a few people reaching out wanting to advertise in the newsy - if you or the organisation you work for is interested in renting some space to chat to over 50k of the coolest humans on the planet, hit us up (or just reply to this email!) ✨
In today’s newsletter:
An extremely special bonus podcast
Let’s talk about crypto
Dua Lipa? More like Dual Lawsuits
Kanye West has been banned from Instagram and InstaGrammys
Is it tidbit or titibit?
Liv and I recorded you an EXTREMELY SPECIAL PODCAST!
Our most embarrassing period stories! - The Shit Show — open.spotify.com
In this extremely special edition of The Shit Show, we've teamed up with our mates at Hello Period to talk about... periods!
We start off by very candidly running you through our experiences with the Hello Cup, before launching into all of your embarrassing (and amazing) stories. It's wild how so many of our mishaps (like accidentally putting in two tampons, or going swimming and having exploding pads) could be solved by using a period cup or hello disc! We also chat about the impact sanitary items have on the environment, and how Hello Period's new Hello Disc is game-changing for workers in the sex industry!
If you want to get your hands on one of these amazing products, you should head to helloperiod.com and use our code GOODSHIT15 for 15% off (anywhere in the world!)
💸The Latecomers Guide to Crypto 💸
I spent the best part of Sunday morning reading a couple of interesting things about crypto that I want to share with you (not a sentence I thought I’d ever be writing either.)
I thought I’d start off by sharing this new thing that The New York Times has started: ‘The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto.’ It’s essentially a balanced and ✨easy to understand ✨mega FAQ to help you get up to speed on this new world of crypto. I’m gonna share with you some of Kevin Roose’s thoughts because he sums up how I feel about crypto/Web3 better than I can:
“I agree with the skeptics that much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets, and I am unmoved by the most utopian sentiments shared by pro-crypto zealots (including the claim by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief, that Bitcoin will usher in world peace).
But as I’ve experimented more with crypto... I’ve come to accept that it isn’t all smoke and mirrors, and that there are things of actual substance being built.
I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech journalist, that when so much money, energy and talent flows toward a new thing, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention, regardless of your views on the thing itself.”
It’s that last line for me. I’d be doing you all a major disservice (and it would be a huge cop-out on my end) if I didn’t continue paying attention/ trying to understand/ trying to translate this stuff for you. That way, if it all comes to fruition then we’re not on the backfoot, and if it doesn’t, well, we all learnt some new buzzy stuff. At the end of the day, I can’t have us all getting left in the dust if a whole new era of the web is afoot can I?? (That’s basically the whole reason we created Extremely Online!)
I don’t wanna overwhelm you, so here are two good points from this new ‘mega FAQ’
Crypto will be transformative:
"Crypto’s madcap, meme-crazed online culture can make it seem frivolous and shallow. It’s not. Cryptocurrencies, even the jokey ones, are part of a robust, well-funded ideological movement that has serious implications for our political and economic future."
Crypto could be destructive:
"In the early 2010s, the most common knock on social media apps like Facebook and Twitter was that they just wouldn’t work as businesses… The theory wasn’t so much that social media was dangerous or bad; just that it was boring and corny, a hype-driven fad that would disappear as quickly as it had arrived.
What nobody was asking back then — at least not loudly — were questions like: What if social media is actually insanely successful? What kind of regulations would need to exist in a world where Facebook and Twitter were the dominant communication platforms? How should tech companies with billions of users weigh the trade-offs between free speech and safety? What product features could prevent online hate and misinformation from cascading into offline violence?
Are we making the same mistake with crypto today? It’s possible. No one knows yet whether crypto will or won’t “work,” in the grandest sense. (Anyone who claims they do is selling something.) But there is real money and energy in it, and many tech veterans I’ve spoken to tell me that today’s crypto scene feels, to them, like 2010 all over again — with tech disrupting money this time, instead of media."
And the other crypto thing...
The other crypto thing I read was Time’s profile on Vitalik Buterin: ‘The Man Behind Ethereum Is Worried About Crypto's Future’
Buterin is the 28-year-old creator of the Ethereum blockchain, and the most influential person in crypto - he also seems pretty well-intentioned (from what I gathered from this piece) for someone who’s worth over one billion dollars. Ether, (the platform’s native currency), has become “the second biggest cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin, powering a trillion-dollar ecosystem that rivals Visa in terms of the money it moves.”
One thing that really stuck out to me as I was reading this were the really weird parallels between being a founder of a game-changing crypto thing & the decentralisation of the crypto thing - let me explain.
Nine years ago Buterin (a kid genius) founded, thought up, helped create - Ethereum, but this doesn’t mean he controls it. The point of a decentralized anything is that there is no central figure or formal leader, it’s in the hands of the users.
To me (with a founder hat on), this seems terrifying, but to Buterin, this is all part of the dream.
“The irony is that despite all of Buterin’s cachet, he may not have the ability to prevent Ethereum from veering off course. That’s because he designed it as a decentralized platform, responsive not only to his own vision but also to the will of its builders, investors, and ever sprawling community. Buterin is not the formal leader of Ethereum. And he fundamentally rejects the idea that anyone should hold unilateral power over its future.”
And while he’s wary that greed could end up dictating Ethereum's future, Buterin also has extremely high hopes for it. It doesn’t seem that he’s out to make himself a shit tonne of money (though there is no denying that he does) but rather, it seems, he wants it to actually be a net good for the world, outside of just currency.
“Buterin hopes Ethereum will become the launchpad for all sorts of sociopolitical experimentation: fairer voting systems, urban planning, universal basic income, public-works projects. Above all, he wants the platform to be a counterweight to authoritarian governments and to upend Silicon Valley’s stranglehold over our digital lives. But he acknowledges that his vision for the transformative power of Ethereum is at risk of being overtaken by greed.”
There are so many more fascinating elements to this piece, and I would seriously encourage you to read it in full. The more we understand about the future, the more say we get in it!!
Dua Lipa? More like Dual Lawsuits
Damn, I fear that title worked better in my head. Anyway, in case you missed it, Dua Lipa has been hit with two lawsuits, both surrounding her song ‘Levitating.’ Both lawsuits are for copyright infringement - one comes from Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System, which accused Lipa of copying its 2017 song “Live Your Life” and the second from songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who say that Lipa stole from two of their songs — “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and “Don Diablo.”
And it’s true that especially for 'Levitating' and 'Live You Life,' - they do sound familiar - but it comes back to that same conversation that Liv and I had on Culture Vulture a few months back. where we looked at ‘Good 4 U’ vs ‘Misery Business’ (or Olivia Rodgiro vs Paramore.) In Western music, there are only 12 notes - and for pop music (which limits itself to basically major notes) there are only 7. For this reason, there are a limited number of progressions and melodies, and yes, it’s still possible to sound original, but it’s also possible that by accident you might sound like a little-known Reggae band.
Musicologist E. Michael Harrington compares it to having a conversation in the English Language:
“Sometimes this word leads to this word leads to that word. It’s the same with musical notes… What juries need to understand is that you can independently come up with the same notes without copying.”
In that episode Liv also talked about what is protected under copyright law - which doesn’t include things like key, tempo and instrumentation - but rather, “specific series of expressions of music” (not ideas, but a series of lyrics, a series of pitches or rhythms that formulate a melody, a series of chords or harmonies…) Sounding ‘alike’ isn’t really the important thing here - lots of music within a certain style or genre sounds alike. And when it comes to lyrics, Harrington says “suggesting that using a few common words in a pop hook is infringement is silly.”
We also explained the ‘Blurred Lines’ lawsuit (which cost Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams $5 million for plagiarizing Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up), and sorta changed the music copyright game. It set a precedent in the industry for people to keep coming forward and making copyright claims like this, so I’m not surprised that we’re seeing them pop up more and more frequently.
I'll leave with you with an excerpt I agree with from a deep dive on all the music involved here:
“When push comes to shove, do I think that Dua Lipa and her team are guilty of copyright infringement? Not at all. But do I think that a jury could be convinced that passages of “Levitating” were plagiarized? Absolutely. If an expert witness focused on the notated courtroom exhibits and only played short segments of each song, a jury could easily be swayed. And besides, everyone loves a David and Goliath story: Given the success that “Levitating” has found, it’s easy to get swept up in the (likely false) narrative of a struggling artist toiling away in obscurity, only for famous pop star to make a smash hit by stealing their work.”
No, Olivia Rodrigo Isn't Stealing Your Music - Culture Vulture | Podcast on Spotify — open.spotify.com
In today’s episode of Culture Vulture Luce & Liv break down why Olivia Rodrigo shouldn’t have had to add Hayley Williams and Josh Farro to the writing credits for Good 4 U, the difference between sampling and interpolating, and we even get Gemma Styles’ take on the whole thing!
Kanye West has been banned from Instagram and InstaGrammys
It's not been a good few days for Ye. Amid... everything... he's been banned first from Instagram (well, he had a 24-hour freeze on his account) for violating policies on hate speech, bullying, and harassment after he allegedly wrote a racial slur on Trevor Noah's Instagram page. For his safety (and you should listen to our two-part series on Kanye West to know more about why he might be unsafe) and for the safety of others, I think this was a good move by Meta (and I don't say that often). Since it feels like no one in his circle can limit his use of social media, the big tech companies seem to be the only ones who can do something about this atm.
Oh, and because of his online behaviour, Ye has also been banned from performing at the Grammys.
Do you say tidbit or titbit?
Ok so I didn’t even know titbit was an option???? But as we usually find with these ones, ‘titbit’ was used first, but in American and Canadian English, 'tidbit' is the preferred spelling of it. And if the Americans use it the whole world does, right????
86% of us say tid
14% of you say tit
All of your most embarrassing period stories (The Shit Show)
Trolls Aren’t Like the Rest of Us (The Atlantic)
F1 SPOILER!!!! (BBC)
The internet forgot about Clubhouse. Anti-war Russians didn’t (Input)
The Songs That Get Us Through It (This is fucking SICK)
Why the HELL is fuel so expensive right now? (The Shit Show)
The Complicated Life of Kanye West, Part 2: Kim, Trump & Mental Health (Culture Vulture)
You can listen to us talk about all things pop culture on Culture Vulture, about THE WORLD on The Shit Show or watch us explain the internet on Extremely Online.
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