A quick recap. So far, the House Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill. TikTok galvanized its users, telling them to call their representatives to push back against the bill’s passage. Lawmakers were pissed and complained about calls flooding their lines (arguably it's their job to hear from constituents). 

Creators who use the platform as a source of revenue fear loss of income. Even the ACLU has gotten involved saying the bill would “violate the First Amendment rights of hundreds of millions of Americans who use the app to communicate and express themselves daily.” President Biden, despite the fact that @BidenHQ is on the app, says he’ll support the bill if it passes. 

There was a great post from David Berkowitz, Founder of the AI Marketers Guild, that appeared on LinkedIn this week. It advised folks who weren’t heading down to SWSW to just fake it. It’s so easy to make it appear that you’re attending a large event, even when you sit it out. While his FOMO is Austin specific, you can play the same trick at any “must-be-seen-at” event. 

Excerpts from Berkowitz:

“When people say they want to meet, or you see people you want to meet, say you will figure out your schedule on the fly. It sounds insider-ish. Beyond a few must-attend things like certain dinners, almost no one knows which things they'll stop by in Austin regardless of what they responded to.”

“Do not actually go to SXSW. This is EXTREMELY important. If you go, you will ruin the whole plan. It's a shame because unlike the Las Vegas Strip, Austin has a lot of charm going for it. Most people like going to Austin, and the breakfast tacos are worth the trip. But it's better to visit when it's not SXSW anyway. Locals run for the hills that week if they can (they don't run too far because Austin is in Hill Country).”

“If someone texts you during SXSW and wants to meet, ask where they are, and then, no matter what they say, say you are too far away right now and you'll never be able to get there in time. They will have to believe you.”

Does This AI Make Me Look Lazy?
Has this been happening to you? That big deadline is tomorrow and there’s a fork in the road. You can sit down and ruminate on your writing or summon a little GPT genie to do it for you. I posed the question to ChatGPT herself and while she professed to have no emotions or physical attributes she could attribute to laziness, she told me that “if someone relies too heavily on AI for tasks they could do themselves, they might become less inclined to engage in those activities independently.“ Guilty as charged.

Life of the Partiful
Eventbrite has felt kinda stale for years. And besides you can never find the invite when it's time to retrieve it. Partiful is the new kid in town. It takes the ugly drudge work out of the party invites with a simple, fun interface, that’s easy to track.

No Code Tools
Feeling wistful because you never learned to code? You’ll be hearing more and more about no-code tools that build an application for you without needing to program a line of code. No-code apps rely on visual interfaces or drag-and-drop interfaces that connect blocks of pre-built code. If you want a no-code (or at least a low-code) app, look at Zapier, good for app integration, and Figma, a collaborative application builder. 

Virtual Chatbots Are Your Friends?
One of our go-to places for assessing the impact of technology and society is the Pew Research Center. Lee Rainie, longtime friend of VEG, is the Founding Director of Research. Together with Elon University, he’s now expanding on that work for a project called Imagining the Future. It doesn’t take much imagination to know that AI will affect us, but how? Follow along as the future is imagined, like in this essay about the ubiquity of virtual chat agents and how they’ll add a new level of complexity to what it means to converse.