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Welcome to the first full week of work post-holidays! Getting back in the groove is always a struggle, so prepare for a lot less productivity and a lot more caffeine as you shake off the OOO vibes. 

….When’s the next holiday again?

DAILY TOP TRENDS

Major Tours Go Green

Coldplay’s and Billie Eilish’s new tours are putting on a masterclass in how to organize a global tour in a way that cuts down on the emissions that have become increasingly associated with the music industry.

The Big Picture: While the music industry isn’t one of the biggest contributors to worldwide pollution, its public nature has put it in the spotlight, especially as tours become bigger and longer. By putting an emphasis on making them sustainable, the two superstar acts are putting together a blueprint for others to follow.

Between the Setlists: So, what does an eco-friendly tour actually look like?

• Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft tour partnered with music-industry-focused nonprofit Reverb for its sustainability goals. It also constructs an “Eco-Action Village” at venues where fans can learn about local environmental and sustainability-focused organizations.

• The tour instituted “plant-based food options, allowing reusable water bottles, a ‘no idling’ policy for trucks, enhanced recycling measures, donating excess catered food, hotel toiletries, and camping gear left behind by fans,” according to Variety.

• Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour — now the best-selling rock tour ever — is working to cut its carbon footprint in half compared to its last tour in 2016-2017. It keeps fans updated on its progress through its website (currently standing at 49%).

• The band has been trying to do that through flying commercial instead of private, giving fans compostable LED wristbands, planting a tree for every ticket purchased, and installing kinetic floors that create energy when people dance on them.

Encore: While these changes are clearly making an impact on the band’s carbon footprint, the one thing that’s almost impossible to control is how fans get to shows. Both artists are incentivizing people to use public transit or more sustainable forms of transport to get to shows… which is actually working (45% of Coldplay fans arrived at shows by foot, bike, train, subway, or bus). If all of these measures lead to a cheaper net cost for people to see their favorite acts, expect music labels to make them boilerplate for future tours.

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Instagram Unfriends Its Own AI Users

After a week of bad press, Meta has seemingly deleted its nonhuman chatbot profiles from Instagram that quietly rolled out in 2023… signaling a potential retreat from its plan to offer a community of AI users.

Why It Hits: Meta has been trying to find a way to make chatbots across its social media ecosystem a thing to boost engagement — from fictional characters based on celebrities to deepfake actor profiles to just random AI users. But outside of chatbot-focused platforms like Character AI, there appears to be little mainstream approval for mixing human users with AI ones.

Between the Unfollows: Do you want to friend request a chatbot?

• Meta created a number of AI profiles, including “Scarlett” (“everyone’s bestie”), “Izzy” (“an aspiring singer-songwriter”), and “Brian” (“everyone’s grandpa”). They had a label reading “AI managed by Meta.”

• They didn’t post often (and barely did so in recent months), but they typically shared generic content like enjoying a “yummy” latte or AI-generated images.

• Unsurprisingly, users found this all… well… cringe. This week, there was a groundswell of criticism about their existence, leading people to share how to block them (which, it turns out, was kind of tricky).

The Future: So, what led to the fresh scrutiny? Connor Hayes, the company’s Vice President of Product for Generative AI, said that Meta was set to expand their capabilities, including having bios and being able to share content. People did not like that idea and especially didn’t like the difficulty in blocking them. It was the latter point that led Meta to suspend them (it said it needed to fix a “bug” in blocking them), but don’t be surprised if those specific chatbots never return to the platform.

DEEP DIVES

• Read: The LA Times spoke to the marketing teams behind Anora, Longlegs, and Conclave about the campaigns behind the hits.

• Explore: Variety released a report on the social, immersive, gamified screens that Hollywood is mostly ignoring.

• Listen: The Future of Everything chats with Colossal Biosciences co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm about the human benefits of resurrecting extinct species.

73.4% of you voted No in Friday’s poll: Should the US government invest in bitcoin?

“Crypto is a huge drain on our energy infrastructure, and it’s far too unstable to waste taxpayer dollars and expand our already ridiculous national debt on such a risky gamble.”

“It gets lost (it’s more volatile than the stock market), too much seems real and some is fake, it gets stolen, you need a special code, and if lost, you can never gain access again. And the biggest rub... you can’t spend it when you really need it.”

“When is enough enough? What’s the value of adding this currency to our lives? Seems like more of an inconvenience and not great for the environment.”

“It’s an obvious pump-and-dump scheme. Better off investing in the movement to a single-payer healthcare system.”

“Yes, but not as a foundational part of the budgetary plans. As we know, crypto can be extremely volatile, and should a major dip happen in the valuation, we shouldn’t be so invested that the country can legitimately become destabilized.”

Let’s keep the conversation going. Join our Poll Of The Day newsletter, so your opinions can shine. Discover how your views line up with your peers’, check out cool insights, and have some fun. It’s data with personality.

QUICK HITS

→ Entertainment / Media

🧙‍♀️ Wicked — the stage show — posted the highest-grossing week in Broadway history over the Christmas holiday week, netting $5 million in sales.

🎓 Lupe Fiasco is going to teach a course about rap at Johns Hopkins University.

📺 Lamborghini debuted a smart TV app that features interactive car insights and original programming.

→ Technology

☢️ The Biden administration made a huge purchase of nuclear energy to get ahead of AI firms.

🤖 Several AI laws took effect in California at the start of the new year, including ones that protect against pornographic deepfakes and unauthorized digital replicas of dead people.

🚗 Car-sharing app Turo is in the spotlight after the platform was used in two separate terrorist attacks on New Year’s Day.

→ Fashion / E-commerce

💸 TikTok is warning that small businesses will lose a billion dollars in monthly revenue if the app is banned.

👜 Social media is obsessed with the “Walmart Birkin” bag because… well… everyone’s broke.

😺 Roaring Kitty, the patron saint of Wall Street Bets, is meme-ing his way to a crypto rally.