James' World 2

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For about five minutes a few months ago, people seemed to genuinely believe that our culture was entering the age of “deinfluencing.” “Step aside, influencers,” wrote CNN. “A new breed of ‘deinfluencers’ has arrived, and they’re saying that materialism and overpriced trends are no longer in style.” The idea of the “deinfluencer” was that instead of encouraging you to buy stuff, the influencer would encourage you to … not buy stuff.

At first, many videos tagged “deinfluencing” were genuine appeals to push back against influencer culture; people talked about how overspending and viral haul videos were part of an unsustainable and unethical system of capitalism that moved at the speed of TikTok trends, often including mea culpas about how their own videos had contributed to that system. It was pretty interesting, honestly, to hear people whose livelihoods depend on selling other people’s products reflect publicly on what their job has meant for the mental health, spending habits, and ethics of both themselves and their viewers.

What started as a rare glimpse into what professional salespeople truly feel and believe, however, immediately became a rather ingenious sales pitch once the hashtag caught on: Instead of influencing people to buy stuff, influencers who tagged their posts “deinfluencing” were simply posting negative reviews of products they didn’t think were worth the money, and — more often than not — telling you what to buy instead (one was captioned “showing you products that can potentially help with overconsumerism!”)

Did anyone really think a TikTok trend was the beginning of the end of capitalism? Probably not. In the months since “deinfluencing” faded from the discourse, TikTok has made consumption on its platform even more inescapable with the launch of TikTok Shop, a feature allowing viewers to buy a product shown in a video without leaving the app. TikTok Shop videos — recognizable by the orange shopping cart tag next to the description — are everywhere, and they are leaving people’s TikTok feeds “in shambles.” TikTok has always been full of product-hawking, much of it rather sneaky: You might be watching a video of someone doing their makeup, and they happen to name the brand of mascara they’re wearing, or a lifestyle influencer is showing her newly renovated living room and suddenly all the commenters demand to know where she bought her lamp. (If she says no, that’s gatekeeping! Even the very language of the platform encourages consumption!) The app was already full of cheap, unethically made goods from sites like Temu or AliExpress, but TikTok Shop has made it even easier for people to buy them and much more lucrative to sell them.

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Lorena Spurio for Vox

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Early in the pandemic, Bryan Roque lost his job as a software engineer at Amazon. Part of him was relieved. He’d been working himself to the bone for months on end, and he felt completely burned out. But the timing was tough: The company was dumping him into the worst job market since the Great Depression.

Roque called his parents to give them the bad news, then packed up his apartment and moved back in with them. He eventually found a new job, a position at IBM that was fully remote, but an underlying anxiety stayed with him. “It just felt like I had no control,” he told me. “I didn’t like that I was under the whims of a company that gets to decide whether I’m employed or not.”

So less than a year into the job at IBM, when a recruiter from Meta came calling, Roque had a thought. The normal thing would be to quit his old job and accept the new position, which was also fully remote. But what if he kept his old job, and secretly took on the new one, too? All he had to do was two-time IBM, and he could double his income as well as his job security.

As he mulled the idea, he discovered that he wasn’t alone. There’s a whole community of professionals online who trade tips about juggling jobs on the sly. They describe themselves as “overemployed” — and remarkably, they seem to be getting away with it. Helping them evade detection is a guy who goes by the pseudonym Isaac, who started the blog Overemployed in 2021 to share his secrets as the OG overemployed worker. Today there are some 300,000 members of the community on Discord and Reddit who celebrate one another’s successes, commiserate on their failures, and swap secrets for fooling their bosses.

So Roque set out to join them. He clinched an offer from Meta, landed another from Tinder, and after negotiating the two against each other for more pay, he accepted both jobs — in addition to keeping his gig at IBM. Fifteen months earlier, he’d been unemployed. Now he was suddenly employed three times over — and on track to earn a combined salary of more than $820,000 a year.

Holding down multiple jobs has long been a backbreaking way for low-wage workers to get by. But since the pandemic, the phenomenon has been on the rise among professionals like Roque, who have seized on the privacy provided by remote work to secretly take on two or more jobs — multiplying their paychecks without working much more than a standard 40-hour workweek. The move is not only culturally taboo, but it’s also a fireable offense — one that could expose the cheaters to a lawsuit if they’re caught. To learn their methods and motivations, I spent several weeks hanging out among the overemployed online. What, I wondered, does this group of W-2 renegades have to tell us about the nature of work — and of loyalty — in the age of remote employment?

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Remote workers are “double dipping” — taking two or more full-time jobs at the same time — without their bosses knowing. Tyler Le/Insider

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The annual Leonid meteor shower will kick off the weekend with a flurry of shooting stars, an event that has a rich history dating back to the 1800s.

The upcoming weekend will kick off with another opportunity to spot shooting stars in the night sky as one of the last meteor showers of 2023 unfolds in the heavens.

Friday night into Saturday morning will be the best night for viewing the annual Leonids, the last meteor shower before the start of meteorological winter on Dec. 1.

A typical showing is expected this year, but the Leonids have a rich history, including one of the most captivating celestial sights that takes place only once in a generation.

What will the Leonid meteor shower be like this year?

Onlookers with a clear sky on Friday night can expect to see around 15 meteors per hour on peak night, a typical rate for many meteor showers throughout the year.

Activity will start off slow but will gradually increase as the night progresses with the frequency of shooting stars rising after midnight, local time.

The Leonids should remain active throughout the weekend, so stargazers who find themselves under a cloudy sky early in the weekend will have the opportunity to spot meteors on Saturday night and Sunday night if cloud conditions improve.

A handful of meteors associated with the recent North Taurids may also overlap with the Leonids, increasing the chances of spotting an incredibly bright fireball.

The night meteors fell like raindrops

Every November, the Earth passes through a field of debris left behind by Comet Tempel-Tuttle to spark the Leonid meteor shower. About once every 33 years, the comet passes close to the sun and spreads a fresh, dense trail of debris that sets the stage for an outburst of shooting stars akin to a fairy tale or Hollywood film.

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A burst of 1999 Leonid meteors as seen at 38,000 feet from Leonid Multi Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid MAC) with 50 mm camera. Credit: NASA/Ames Research Center/ISAS/Shinsuke Abe and Hajime Yano

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In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade. This process goes on all the time—it’s happening now, as you read these words—and its scale is beyond imagining. You have some eighty billion neurons sharing a hundred trillion connections or more. Your skull contains a galaxy’s worth of constellations, always shifting.

Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist who is often called “the godfather of A.I.,” handed me a walking stick. “You’ll need one of these,” he said. Then he headed off along a path through the woods to the shore. It wound across a shaded clearing, past a pair of sheds, and then descended by stone steps to a small dock. “It’s slippery here,” Hinton warned, as we started down.

New knowledge incorporates itself into your existing networks in the form of subtle adjustments. Sometimes they’re temporary: if you meet a stranger at a party, his name might impress itself only briefly upon the networks in your memory. But they can also last a lifetime, if, say, that stranger becomes your spouse. Because new knowledge merges with old, what you know shapes what you learn. If someone at the party tells you about his trip to Amsterdam, the next day, at a museum, your networks may nudge you a little closer to the Vermeer. In this way, small changes create the possibility for profound transformations.

“We had a bonfire here,” Hinton said. We were on a ledge of rock jutting out into Ontario’s Georgian Bay, which stretches to the west into Lake Huron. Islands dotted the water; Hinton had bought this one in 2013, when he was sixty-five, after selling a three-person startup to Google for forty-four million dollars. Before that, he’d spent three decades as a computer-science professor at the University of Toronto—a leading figure in an unglamorous subfield known as neural networks, which was inspired by the way neurons are connected in the brain. Because artificial neural networks were only moderately successful at the tasks they undertook—image categorization, speech recognition, and so on—most researchers considered them to be at best mildly interesting, or at worst a waste of time. “Our neural nets just couldn’t do anything better than a child could,” Hinton recalled. In the nineteen-eighties, when he saw “The Terminator,” it didn’t bother him that Skynet, the movie’s world-destroying A.I., was a neural net; he was pleased to see the technology portrayed as promising.

From the small depression where the fire had been, cracks in the stone, created by the heat, radiated outward. Hinton, who is tall, slim, and English, poked the spot with his stick. A scientist through and through, he is always remarking on what is happening in the physical world: the lives of animals, the flow of currents in the bay, the geology of the island. “I put a mesh of rebar under the wood, so the air could get in, and it got hot enough that the metal actually went all soft,” he said, in a wondering tone. “That’s a real fire—something to be proud of!”

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When Bill Kowalcic first heard that his company Advanced RV was trying out a four-day workweek, he was filled with questions.

“All of us were a little nervous — like, are we going to be able to get our work done? Are we going to do OK? Is this going to hurt us?” says Kowalcic, a skilled craftsman who works in the finishing department.

A year and a half later, he has answers.

Not only has his team found shortcuts and time savers, he’s happier on the job.

“Gosh, it’s been great,” he says.

“I’ve never had a job where I’ve said this before, but at the end of the three-day weekend, I’m ready to come back in Monday morning.”

The trial has spread globally, but few manufacturers have taken part

Advanced RV builds custom, luxury motorhomes out of Mercedes-Benz cargo vans in Willoughby, Ohio. It is one of more than 200 companies and only a handful of manufacturers that have taken part in an ongoing global trial led by the organization 4 Day Week Global.

For six months, businesses agree to reduce working hours while maintaining the same pay. The goal is not to do less with less, but to maintain 100% productivity by bringing more energy and efficiency to the workplace while lessening fatigue and burnout.

The success stories coming out of the trial have offered a work-weary public hope that a better work-life balance is achievable. Of the 41 American and Canadian companies that began the trial in 2022, none has reported going back to working 40 hours a week.

A closer look at how Advanced RV has managed to significantly reduce its working hours while keeping up productivity reveals some essential elements: a tolerance for risk, and also trust, creativity, and open-mindedness

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