The battle between Gen Z and Gen X

🙌 Thursday! This week is whooshing by.
Issue #212: lowercase diary entries, Angular’s latest update, and the 4,000 weeks of your life

It was Netflix’s first-ever livestreamed sports event: 27-year-old Jake Paul (masculinity’s answer to the Kardashians?) v. 58-year-old Mike Tyson (once the youngest heavyweight champion in history). Actually, Paul is a pro boxing champ, too — his record is 11–1. Tyson’s is 50–7.

Netflix claims 108 million viewers tuned in. I didn’t watch live, but I did watch the highlights. It looked like a draw to me? Definitely not a knockout, but Paul won.

The fight itself wasn’t eventful (both of them seemed tired), but the conversations around it were more interesting. Deadspin founder Will Leitch highlighted the hype-y moment at the beginning of every fight when the announcer bellows out the name of each contender, explaining why they should be feared or revered (think: “introducing… THE BONECRUSHERRR”). His intro for Paul? “In this attention economy, HE COMMANDS IT AND HE TURNS IT INTO CAPITAL!”

…Wild. That sentence encapsulates what was at the heart of this fight, to me: a battle between Gen Z and Gen X. Two generations, two strategies. One demands respect through understated yet powerful actions. The other builds its reputation on image, influence, and visibility.

One last note: Many of you couldn’t watch at all, because Netflix’s servers got overloaded during the stream. Moses Mwemezi Kemibaro, in Kenya, tried to watch on a few different internet service providers to no avail. Data scientist Risto Trajanov took us deep inside Netflix’s tech stack to uncover what went wrong: the video couldn’t be pre-cached, and Netflix wasn’t prepared. Netflix’s CTO apologized for the outage, but claimed the event was still a “huge success.” One man in Florida already sued the platform for interfering with his viewing pleasure.

If you weren’t caught in buffering hell: What did you think? By 2030 will Netflix beat ESPN at its own game?

— Harris Sockel

🗞️ Two more things I’m reading

• Feed Me, a newsletter by former Meta creative strategist Emily Sundberg, started as a venue for freaky little fictional horror stories like this one about a female founder who hides her employees in her basement. (I died at the baguette-shaped lamp.) It’s now the fifth most popular paid newsletter on Substack in the business category. Sundberg’s most popular story examines the dynamics of Substack itself, specifically how the platform spawns millions of lowercase diary entries that sound the same. (Semafor)
• Angular, the Google-built framework for creating digital interfaces — used by everyone from Tesla to Microsoft to a humble blogging platform called Medium — just released version 19. It includes new features to help your UI load more quickly, like incremental hydration (turning static HTML into a dynamic, interactive experience) and event replay enabled by default. (Angular Blog)

⏳ Your daily dose of practical wisdom

If you’re reading this at age 40, you have around 2,000 weeks left to live. Most lifetimes are ~80 years, or 4,000 weeks. Do something good with this one.

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.