Weekly update: a linkname moonshot, TrojanTok up-and-running, TikTok's data black hole, and more

🙏 Just before I get started, I want to thank you for being one of 127 followers of the 12 Challenges journey. I promise to keep writing non-boring stories about the grip hold Big Tech has over society, and my Challenges to loosen it.

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This week, I dipped in and out of various bits and pieces. Let’s break it down.

Challenge 1: Linknames

I’m still forging ahead with getting linknames into the hands of celebrities, to popularize the concept.

This week, I initialized Operation Give Glover Gil.ga. Donald Glover is someone I hugely admire — it’s not hyperbole to say that he’s one of the most successful creative people in the world: a writer, musician and actor making art at the highest levels.

He also runs a creative studio called Gilga, which is as cool as it is mysterious. Based in an orange grove north of LA, the biggest clues to Gilga’s work come from the roles they hired for last year, including AI Prompt Animator, Digital Hospitality, and Architect.

Finding out about Gilga, I wondered idly whether there could be a linkname opportunity. Given that the word is just five letters and that short domains are generally hard-to-get, it seemed highly unlikely — but on looking up gil.ga (thanks, Gabon!), I was pumped to see it for sale. I bought it straight away for $25.

That’s when the plan took shape. I wrote up a pitch to Glover and emailed it to someone I know who is friends with him, asking if they could pass it on.

I’ll publish the entire pitch to Glover next week, because I think it’s a decent encapsulation of why linknames could be a handy tool for creatives.

To be totally honest, it’s not very likely that:

• Glover gets the pitch

• Glover reads the pitch

• Glover replies to the pitch

• Glover says yes to the pitch

But in the words of Michael Scott:

Next up for linknames:

I’m going to write an open letter to will.i.am, who is the best example of a linkname. I’ll urge him to adopt the concept and do more with his own linkname.

Currently, his linkname is an ad for his latest song and for his startup FYI, but there’s a ton more he can do with it, given that the traffic to the site is likely to constitute his biggest fans.

I’ll also try to convince him to become a prophet of linknames and kick off a generation of linkname-based artists. Surely that’s not asking too much.

Challenge 2: TrojanTok

Things are moving along now. Very excited that South Africa-based copywriter and social media manager Cole Nolte is taking on the TrojanTok Challenge.

On chatting for the first time, I was impressed with Cole’s thoughtful ideas for hacking TikTok to help people use TikTok less, and I’m excited by what I’ve seen so far on the dailybreakreminder account.

Feel free to follow if you want to get a nudge away from TikTok every now and then.

Cole’s approach, building on advice from Pink Mario, is going to be to experiment with different strategies on the account — for instance, science-based vs. trend-based vs. humour vs. inspirational, and so on.

This should help us figure out some good entry points into audiences who want to be reminded that there’s a world outside of TikTok.

TikTok’s top videos

Let’s talk about the world inside TikTok for a second. I can exclusively reveal that here’s what we know about the most viewed videos on the app every day:

It’s a black hole, in case you didn’t realize (which I didn’t — also what the hell, someone please tell black hole photographers to use autofocus).

That’s because TikTok does not give you data, either in their app, or from their Research API, on which the top videos are every day. Videos which are watched by hundreds of millions of people, and shape the information entire societies consume.

It’s truly, categorically insane. Read the full piece here.

Medium rare

Changing tack completely, on Tuesday I remembered that I have a Medium account. Medium used to be the place to blog. Now, when you compare it to owning your audience on Substack or Ghost, it seems like an oddity.

I started reflecting on how strange it is that 214 people liked my writing there enough to follow my account, but that Medium gives me basically no way to communicate with them, with articles being shown to only 1% of these so-called followers (and no direct messaging or other means of contact with followers). Yet another example of enshittification.

So I decided to take out my frustration at having these pointless followers by writing an equally pointless, but cathartic, Medium article, which pointed out how pointless the article itself, and the act of writing it, was.

The single ‘clap’ that the article received proved my pointless point.

Some chats

I spoke to seriously brilliant designer and thinker Mares Zhar about a series of articles I’m planning to write on the impact of AI on the ad industry. We share a common interest in the way that AI-driven operating systems are going to change the digital world as we know it. The angle I’m obsessed with is the impact of these operating systems on the availability of ad inventory — will AI mean we consume more or less ads? More coming soon.

I also had a chat with equally brilliant AI safety thinker Jamie Bernardi, an early supporter of 12 Challenges, who gave me a ton of brilliant suggestions — including one which spurred me to write the piece on Medium, and others which I will (hopefully) get to eventually.

One of the most important insights we had is that you should immediately register all social handles, Gmail accounts etc. for any names you’re considering giving to your future children, to save them having to add awkward numbers/use their middle names/use some embarrassing nickname.

In fact, if you really care about your future children, you should choose names for them based on handle availability.

Some stats

• 127 subscribers, slow and steady growth this week

• 1 mega-celebrity contacted

• A bunch of LinkedIn posts, some more sarcastic than others

That’s all for now — have a great weekend and I’ll be back on Tuesday/Wednesday, probably with the full Glover linknames pitch.