The Good List 2023

2023 has been a whirlwind of a year. When we take stock of it a decade from now, I am confident that we will see the hinge points of fundamental shifts in how we live and work. What happened this year? We woke up to the internet, finally taking real stock of what it’s become and what it costs us. Behaviors shifted. Platforms shuddered. Like an Easter cantata record stuck on repeat, interest rates rose. And rose. And rose again.

The business of growing a business was cut loose from the fantasy land of magic clicks and free money. And it was easy to find a lot that was wrong. But that’s not what The Good List is about. From the headlines, books, media, and trends, I bring you 24 good things that came from this year... and a few hints as to what may happen next. 

Let’s go.

Culture

In weird years like 2023 we are whiplashed by what's ending and what's beginning. We've got to find our footing on shifting sand.

Owning the Youths and Showing our Rizz - 2023 was the year we woke up to Gen Z. After nearly two decades of blaming everything on the Millennials, suddenly they seemed passé, and a new crop of TikTok-obsessed youths entered the chat. I have a house full of Gen Z, and nothing annoyed them more than grabbing their very obsessively crafted slang (has any generation since the Boomer teenagers had such very weird slang?) and turning it against them. It's giving all rizz, no cap.

Here’s to the olds - But it was also the year that Boomers would not be denied their cultural dominance. Is this worthy of being on the "Good List"? Debatable. Boomers, you've got a couple of decades left here to clean up some messes you left in Aisle 9. But from boomeranging out of "retirement" to forcing us to talk about The Golden Bachelor and the sex lives of septuagenarians, Boomers reclaimed their place in the Zeitgeist. The good part? No one gets things done like Boomers. And dang, we've got a lot of good work to do in 2024.

Cunk on Earth and the TikTokification of truth - Another early and dubious addition to the "Good" list, you couldn't talk about 2023 without addressing TikTok. On the clearly bad list is how the platform has shined up the reputation of Osama bin Laden and Nazis. Influencer culture is truth-neutral at best when it's not outright lying to get a deal shipping Dawn soap. Was there a silver lining? Possibly. Cynicism about the truthiness of things is great comedy when done tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek. To that end, Cunk on Earth, a mockuentary view where the fictitious Philomena Cunk explores with real historians the greatest moments in human history, is the best thing on television.

College football remade - This summer, we all collectively decided that college sports weren't working, so we needed to make co-eds fly all over the country to play sports and get sponsorships with car dealerships so they could transfer to a different school for their 17th year playing college football. Is this good? Maybe. Is it fun to watch? Certainly, as someone who lives in Iowa, I can attest to the fact that it is an unqualified GOOD that some people stop deciding how college football should be played. And thankfully, those people got fired.

The soft landing we can't see - Blinded by the internet of untruths, accelerated by the distraction Olympics of AI, we all somehow missed the economy recovering at a steady pace. Markets rebounded aggressively, inflation cooled, and in a last-minute Christmas gift, the Fed said 2024 is the year they stop putting quarterly coal in all our stockings. What a gift. The gap between the state of the economy and Americans' ability to recognize it is something we all should be thinking about, particularly as we head into another dreaded election year.

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Tech

For 20 years we've wrestled with the blending of tech and culture. For the first time this year, we started to raise our heads and ask — do we really like it this way? That AND we obsessed over AI.

X-ificiation of the Discourse - In late 2022, I made the unwelcome call to de-platform the Discourse. For half a generation, the platforms (and Twitter specifically) had claimed ownership of the conversations that mattered (loosely, "The Discourse"). I believed their ownership was a study in mismanagement. We were getting stupider, more polarized, more impatient, all while actively moving wealth from places that used it to think well to places that used it to incite negativity and cynicism. In rare form, I was right. Elon has been destroying value over at Twitter (now X) on a weekly basis for months now, spreading users across platforms from BlueSky to Threads, to Post, to Mastadon, to nothing at all. Our brief obsession with "immediate news that is completely unverifiable delivered by @mamas_boy81922" is over. What a relief. But what happens now?

The Fediverse - Panacaea dreams of humans who go offline, talk to their neighbors, reset their nervous systems to the rhythm of real life, and generally stop believing that a hyperspeed network of 1s and 0s is a reliable place for truth... shall not come to pass. For better or worse, we are Internet People. We will keep looking for something worth having here. One increasingly plausible option? The Fediverse. A network of networks where social media starts to behave like email. You can post once, and it's accessible anywhere, regardless of whose platform you read it on. Meta's Threads has promised to participate, and BlueSky and Mastadon are already there. Treating information sharing as a public good rather than a cesspool to sell to advertisers feels like progress, but we have full capacity to screw this up, too.

Crypto Reckoning - Sam Bankman-Fried is likely going to prison, and his white whale Binance is also under criminal investigation. Crypto-haters will do victory laps, claiming it was all fraud all along. The problem is, that's not true. Non-fungible digital currency backed by a federated blockchain that validates ownership without overpowered intermediaries could still be a good thing. And there's a few trillion dollars still sitting in coin waiting to figure it out.

ChatGPT gets boring and a little stupid - On the surface, it was the "Year of AI," but the surface is usually wrong. In fact, it was the year large language models, chiefly ChatGPT, convinced everyone that "AI" was the future because you could ask a computer screen any question, and it would answer without any sources or fact-checking. What a panacea. Along the way, users discovered that they'd been doing AI all along (the social media algorithms and chatbots would like a word) and that LLMs who use the internet and their own circular answers to inane questions as training data may not be the dream imagined. Stay tuned for 2024, when some other tech will promise world-changing effects, and we will not be able to think about anything else squarely along the way.

Media

Before we can look some of the best TV and film of the year (a definition that is... in FLUX), we need to look at the landscape itself where the rules of how we tell and consume stories is changing every day.

Netflix Transparency - Well, we now have confirmation; everything is mid. Netflix released its bare-minimum viewership data, mostly as a flex to show how many hours humans spend on Netflix. What do we know that we didn't know before? TV hasn't changed much. People spend a lot of time watching shows that aren't particularly good, and great, thoughtful media barely registers. Falcon Crest, by a different name, carries on.

Writers' and actors' strikes rewrite the script - While the summer strikes in Hollywood did very little to shift compensation for creators (because streaming is a business like most internet unicorns that likes to lose a lot of money). But what they did do is create enough of a pause for creators, executives, and viewers alike to ask the question: is this working for us? Do we like this "watch whatever we want but own nothing" world we've created? Consensus is no. And that's a good thing. The fact that David Zaslav is the lead player in creating what's next? Well, that's a horse of a different color.

Critics at Large - in a difficult year for the audio industry, podcasting finally got its (first) reckoning. We saw a lot of good podcasts leave the airwaves, some very popular and mediocre ones outlive their welcome (I'm looking at you, Smartless), and a very, very short list of new entries of note. The New Yorker launched Critics at Large, a smart, expansive weekly romp through topics we know (like Taylor Swift, celebrity memoirs, cringe TV) and addressing them from a broader lens, always widening to include us, the viewers: who are we to make this content important? And why do we do it? On my must-listen list every week.

TV & Film

There were a lot of great TV and movies this year, and my list is far from exhaustive. But these were the moments that I loved AND that best told the story of where we are and what happens next.

Barbenheimer - The Barbie / Oppenheimer zeitgeist over the summer reawakened America to going to the movies. Two movies (which couldn't have been more different) will forever be linked. I loved both for completely different reasons and found—strangely—that they were asking similar questions about the world from very different vantage points.

Succession takes its final bow - We all doubted whether it could stick the landing. So many had failed before it. But Succession, the story of late-stage capitalism, and the comically dark lives of the barons of the Second Gilded Age left us in glorious perfection. I, for one, will never forget "I'm the eldest boy!" as I will continue to use it in billion-dollar negotiations that are slipping through my fingers.

Succession marks the unofficial end of the "prestige" era of TV. As Warner Brothers Discovery pushes the HBO brand into the background and the Netflixication (see above) of TV production accelerates.

The Last of Us, the first of its kind - If you told me in 2022 that I would start my year by watching a video-game-based show about zombie fungus, I would have laughed in your face. And yet, the inimitable Pedro Pascal (reigning king of charm in 2023) woo-ed me in. What kept me in? Storytelling that was high stakes, intimately personal, and culturally relevant, all while keeping us floating in a sea of despair. There has never been a good video-game-based movie or TV show until this. Maybe HBO isn't over yet?

The Bear (Season 2) Hulu - Every entrepreneur needs to watch The Bear. To experience the visceral link between family, joy, friendship, trauma, hope, and redemption that drives all of us to do the ridiculous: open doors, make space, and invite others to buy what we make.

Daisy Jones and the Six - Was it perfect? No? Was I always glad to be there? Yes. This televised version of the book that took the literary world by storm was must-watch viewing. The SONGS. The gorgeous 1970s aesthetic. The subtle nods to Fleetwood Mac everywhere. And Elvis' granddaughter reminding us that some talents are hereditary.

Books

30,000 or so pages later, 2023 is just about in the books. (Sorry, not sorry.) Here are some of the best of the year that captured this moment in time while being timeless all in their own way.

Congratulations, the Best is Over - R. Eric Thomas (@oureric across the interwebs) is a reliably genius narrator of America as it happens, and his latest book is no exception. The 2016 election and the pandemic years that followed are notoriously difficult things to write about with any sense of wit or hope, but this book grounds the years that got us here in a real struggle but also the gentle and comedic voice that makes meaning and light of it all.

The Raging 2020s - Like many publications, I went searching this year for a framework for how to think about the fundamental shifts in technology, culture, and business that I saw happening around us. While a stack of about 12 books contributed to the working thesis I've built, one set the process in motion, a dense but accessible book on the forces that got us here, and a framework for how to think and act our way forward. Highly recommend.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton - My "beloved books of 2023" was such a long list that many made their way here. Birnam Wood knows exactly what it is, twisting the morality of tech bro demigods, eco messiahs, and what we'll do to each other to stay in the moral high ground, I couldn't put it down. It is a not-so-gentle retelling of the milieu we find ourselves in. And if that doesn't grab you, the glorious homage to New Zealand will.

Saving Time by Jenny Odell - I loved Odell's previous book, How to Do Nothing, and if the title offends your hustle culture sensibilities, it's on purpose. Odell is not giving us a self-help manifesto, she is offering a thoroughly researched, philosophically grounded view on why our way of seeing our lives thorugh productivity and output is killing us (and our culture) and how to make a way forward. The prose is gracious, but the message is sharp. Not for the faint of heart.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett and read by Meryl Streep - Ok, so hear me out, I am not an Ann Patchett person. The languid multi-decade family dramas pulled the the interiority of a central character is... not my usual cup of tea. But the way Tom Lake grabbed me, the way Meryl's PERFECT performance of the reading (and performance it was) pulled me into this small story with big meaning. I loved every word.

Facing the Truth of the Internet: Traffic by Ben Smith - This was the year Gen X and Millennials realized the internet we built didn't love it anymore. And no one told that story better than Ben Smith. I've already written at length about the importance of this book, but I couldn't leave it off this list. And I saved it for the end because, in many ways, the "Why isn't the Internet fun or useful anymore?" is the story of 2023.

From the remaking of streaming to the culture wars between Baby Boomers and their grandchildren, from the neutering of HBO to Barbenheimer to Twitter's demise... all of this year's best and most interesting moments touched back on something truly good: We are breaking up with the 2015 internet. Finally. What that means for marketing, for finance, for growth, for culture... well we've got a whole bunch of 2024 editions coming your way to figure that out.

CultureCraft stands at the intersection of trust and growth--where what we're building stretches from the foundations of who we're becoming. It's been a great year. And next year will be even better.

See you there.