Quration 13: 19th Nov, 2020
Chess esport grandmaster, Free stuff from Big Tech, and Wearing fungus
Each day I wade through the Cambrian explosion of news to find stand-out stories and create short summaries for my followers.
READ the newsletter👇 or 🎙️ LISTEN to the AI-enabled podcast version
⇨ Today's edition includes:
The Chess Grandmaster who made $280,000 this year playing esports tournaments
Big Tech Backlash Means Get Ready for Less Free Stuff
John Legend and Natalie Portman want you to try wearing fungus instead of leather
+ Extra Qurations
The Chess Grandmaster who made $280,000 this year playing esports tournaments
⇨ This brief comes from an article written by Claire Turrell that was published in businessinsider.com.
Hikaru Nakamura is a chess sensation. At 32-years-old, the esports athlete is a Grandmaster of chess, number one blitz player in the world and Twitch TV superstar. (Blitz chess is a game with a time limit of between three and ten minutes.)
In August 2020, Nakamura - known as GMNakamura by his online fans - was the first chess player to join the billion-dollar esports team, TSM.
The terms of the deal with TSM have not been released, but it’s sure to be a super-lucrative deal for the LA-based athlete to add to the US$281,000 he made in tournament winnings this year.
The number of people playing chess has continued to grow since its online debut in 1993. And Netflix's recent hit, The Queen's Gambit, has fanned the flames of popularity. A recent report from AGON confirms that chess players now make up one of the largest communities in the world, with over 605 million adults regularly playing chess.
When you mix the popularity of the game, the promotion of a mega brand like TSM esports, and the fast-paced excitement of blitz chess, it's no wonder that GMNakamura has over 500,000 followers on his Twitch channel.
But what does the everyday life of a chess celebrity look like? Is it all play and no work? Depends on your definition of work!
Nakamura wakes at 6:00am and starts his Twitch stream at around 8:00am. He streams live games, providing move-by-move post-game analysis. The Grandmaster even gives lucky fans the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play the champ!
On a typical day, Nakamura will spend around 7 hours playing chess online.
While Nakamura has the discipline of an athlete, his diet could use some work.
"I generally try to eat an energy-packed meal like pasta before a stream, since it can go on for hours without a break. If I’m behind schedule, I’ll usually eat a couple of breakfast bars and survive on coffee."
Playing and streaming for 7 hours a day, 6 days a week, there is no doubting his commitment to training. And, like any great athlete, Nakamura carries some superstitions:
"I’ve never been overly superstitious when it comes to competitions, but from time to time, I will wear the same shirt multiple days if I had a great game."
If you thought esports were reserved for smelly teenage boys yelling at one another on Twitch, it's good to know there are role-models like Nakamura leading the way - smelly shirt and all!
Big Tech Backlash Means Get Ready for Less Free Stuff
⇨ This brief responds to an article written by Tae Kim that was published in bloomberg.com.
There's no shortage of people calling for restrictions on the exponential growth of tech behemoths like Facebook, Amazon, and Google.
The average person has an unnerving feeling that Big Tech's influence on society has gone too far. The government is worried that they’ve become too powerful. Even worse, governments are struggling to gouge enough taxes from them!
All of this is creating an appetite for intervention. Presidential candidates, like Elizabeth Warren, have been outspoken proponents for a break up of Big Tech. So it’s in that context that Tae Kim argues that restrictions on anti-competitive behaviour by Big Tech will lead to a net loss for us - the customer.
But it's not because increased regulation reduces profits making it harder to hand out free benefits like unlimited storage for photos and free shipping. It's because only high-profit businesses like Facebook (84% margin) can afford to sink billions into free services.
Their ability to offer unlimited freebies to customers is seen as anti-competitive. How can a new business compete with a differentiated photo-hosting service when Google just lets you have unlimited photo storage for free.
So, it seems that in an effort to pre-empt the allegations of anti-competitiveness, Google has begun to pull the plug on free:
The possible allegation of being anti-competitive is super dangerous when you have the likes of Elizabeth "break-em-up" Warren in the wings. So the challenge is to find the elusive balance of eliminating some of the competitive advantage without losing too many customers.
Before we shed a tear for Big Tech, remember that this is their problem, not ours. We gave up our privacy in return for free trinkets. And they know we'll all leave at the first sign the freebies are over.
John Legend and Natalie Portman want you to try wearing fungus instead of leather
⇨ This brief comes from an article written by Jonathan Shiber that was published in Techcrunch.
Natalie Portman and John Legend are joining a group of venture capitalists and unnamed fashion brands backing MycoWorks, a company that just raised $45 million to commercialize its technology that makes a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather.
The goal is to get consumers to trade in their leather and lizard skin couture for some fungus fashion.
The company said it has inked some deals with big fashion brands as partners as it looks to bring its funky fungus to the masses in shoes, wallets, belts and other goods that traditionally use cowhide or other animal skins.
“We have been working with a few luxury brands and a major footwear manufacturer in very close collaboration,” said Matt Scullin, the chief executive officer at MycoWorks .
The unnamed fashion brands have already started producing products for stores in a range of items including shoes, ready to wear apparel and bags, according to Scullin.
Behind all of this push to find replacements for animal skins is a growing awareness of the problems associated with traditional methods for manufacturing leather for clothes and shoes. It’s a terribly toxic and polluting process, both in the tanning and dyeing and in the waste and landfilling associated with both animal leather and its plastic replacements.
“The process of growing the mycelium is carbon negative. Customers will look at [our product] versus an animal hide and say why wouldn’t I choose [that]!”
Extra Quration
A shortlist of other things I’m currently reading, watching and considering.
⇨ There’s no vaccine for misinformation
⇨ Ethiopia on the verge of civil war
⇨ I spoke to a scholar of conspiracy theories and I'm worried for us
⇨ Will factory farming kill us all?
⇨ Killer robots will make war worse
If you'd like to see more of what I'm exploring, you can follow me on twitter. If you've come across something you think I'd like, hit reply and let me know why it's worth checking out (articles, lectures, podcasts, books, exhibitions… whatever).