Christopher Enckell @CEnckell

@ehn You had me at ski

I finally decided to watch The Playlist. The series about "Spotify". The company in the series is called Spotify. The founders are Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek. The first employee is called Andreas Ehn. Then we leave reality. I first wrote a draft of this text in Swedish this spring. Why revisit it now? Maybe I shouldn't even write this tweet. After all, Daniel Ek has an assistant, but it's not me. So why bother? Because I think it is important and I was asked numerous times (by people not affiliate with Spotify) to release this text in English, but I didn't have the time until today, just a few days before Christamas, when someone actually botched a meeting I am supposed to have right now .-) The director is a Norwegian, which has a nice ring to it, but I can't refrain from googling his name. He has been second unit director at "Exit", which is a Norwegian series about the more decadent, dark side of the financial world. Or as it said on Norwegian Wikipedia: "The series creators claim that many of the stories are based on real events where the sources are supposed to have been interviews with people who claim to work in "finance". The series creators have not provided documentation for these claims.” What a context in which to learn the profession! First, it should probably be said that the series does not lack qualities. As a TV series. A somewhat more objective observer, such as Sweden's best and most prominent TV series critic, @kjellhaglund, has given the series a glowing review (tvdags.ghost.io/tvdags-med-kje…). He wrote on @TVdags, among other things, that Evin Endre is a: "better Daniel than Daniel Ek himself". I can't help but be reminded of Stanford professor Lawrence @lessig's text on Aron Sorkin's The Social Network, published in 2010 in The New Repulic (newrepublic.com/article/78081/…) : “As with all his extraordinary works, Sorkin created dialogue for an as yet undeveloped species of people - ordinary people, here students, who constantly converse with the wit and brilliance of George Bernard Shaw or Bertrand Russell. (I'm a @Harvard professor. Trust me: The students don't speak this language.)” The entrepreneur and investor @mattiasmiksche told @Dagens__PS in an interview just before Christmas ("dagensps.se/weekend/mannen…`"): "I'm in the new Netflix series as a fat, arrogant idiot who doesn't understand what the young people are up to. It was truly an image of passion. I was sad when I saw episode four, don't watch it!” It's pretty symptomatic of the entire series. The caricature presented as @MartinLorentzon is problematic, to say the least. One thing is that some parts of the facts are possibly incorrect. Another is that the portraits often deviate significantly from reality. Lorentzon is absolutely the biggest miss in the series. He is portrayed as a big-spending party animal. It feels like the director reused a character from "Exit". In reality, we're talking about a perhaps overly thoughtful cautious general who eats his shrimp salad with extra eggs to get enough protein for his ongoing exercise project. It is not that the portrait deviates in detail. It is in the order of a magnitude (or several) wrong if one should quantify. I sent a draft of this the text on an online friend who is a significantly sharper writer. He wrote that I have to justify this kind of attack with "more than a shrimp salad". It is the alleged diagnosis and its symptoms that I am really addressing. The one-sided, one-sided portrayal (yes, that's one-sided two times). Which perhaps to some extent means a new way of portraying a diagnosis on the TV screen where we as viewers really get to experience both advantages and disadvantages. It's actually very good in itself. But that portrays Lorentzon unusually poorly. This is not him. At all. History is a narrative about the past. According to the historians Klas-Göran Karlsson and Ulf Zander, history should be regarded as a process where traditional scientific methods are mixed with subjective, moral and political elements. History can partly be seen as fragments of facts that float around in a space and time dimension, but scientifically, history must still be seen as interpretive science that is based on facts. The events we study have occurred, such as wars, murders, divorces and marriages. There are remains and historical documents that prove the existence of the events, but then the process needs history to be able to interpret them. To speak with the historian, researcher and university lecturer Lena Berggren, source criticism is the "beating heart" of history. So I continue, with some source criticism. Watching episode three now. I learn that it was a near-partner at Mannheimer Swartling (the agency is called something else in the series) who came up with "freemium"? This is an alternate reality where @edyson never existed, @SteveCase's AOL didn't send out CDs and floppy disks to the entire American people, and @fredwilson and Jarid Lukin were completely unknown to Swedish internet entrepreneurs. Petra Hansson has certainly not been unimportant to Spotify. It probably wouldn't be going too far to say that there probably wouldn't have been Spotify, at least not in today's form, without her and her partner Niklas Ivarsson. But to portray their extreme endurance and skill at the negotiating tables and thousands of travel days would probably have become too boring. Instead, we get a different narrative. Neither Felix Hagnö nor Mattias Miksche come off as some lovely types here. The casting of them is, if possible, even worse than on Lorentzon. From worst to worse than worst. They also come across as complete idiots, which is very far from the truth. The episode about Lorentzon is factually better in parts, as it is largely based on stuff he has himself told media. Lorentzon himself, however, is still a pretty weird caricature who jumps around (physically) and is in every way uninvestable. Yet Peter Thiel diagnoses him in about five seconds and immediately invests in Spotify. The absence of @northzoneVC and @Creandum is painful. Where is @pjparson, perhaps one of the most colorful characters in Spotify's investor collective? He was left behind in reality, next to @_fredrik Cassel. If you want to know what happened in reality, Cassel has written a very transparent blog post about how he viewed Spotify in 2008 (blog.creandum.com/inside-the-dus… investor-looking-at-how-we-were-right-and-wrong-7938abcd36e1). The episode about Andreas @ehn is at least decent at times, albeit with a number of scenes where I hug the armrest a little harder, perhaps especially the scenes with Miksche that seem to been viewed through Alice's looking glass. The key to Spotify's success has been mobile and being able to make a pivot to the new technology, which is covered with silence in the series that focuses on the initial tech stack and P2P technology. You have been in the cloud for a long time. Lisa @enckelli comes out as a Lisbeth Salander figure, which was a refreshing breather compared to the other caricatures. In general, the female portraits are nicer than the male ones. That doesn't mean they are more accurate. Kjell Häglund took his review a little further than one might ask. Among other things, he interviewed Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi about the design of The Pirate Bay. Peter replies coldly: "the whole track with Per and us in the series is very made up." They are in good company. Henrik Pontén is played by Samuel Fröler, who was 65 years old at the time of the recording. The only problem with that choice is possibly that Pontén was tragically killed in a bicycle accident when he was 54 years old and was at most 45 years old when the events of the series took place. Also, he is some kind of prosecutor in the series. Or as Peter Sunde Kolisoppi said: "It was a funny thing, that Pontén got to be a prosecutor and arrest people. That was his big dream.” Unfortunately, he never got to experience it, even on the TV screen. So, I have finally seen everything. The section about the artist is completely bizarre. It all ends with some kind of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations for artists' rights worldwide while Daniel Ek himself (@eldsjal) finds himself in a congressional hearing. Year 2025. I decide to write something about this after all. Sorkin and Fincher set the bar low for the startup drama documentary, but I don't even understand why it claims to be based on any kind of reality, or "inspired by". Does it matter with all these inaccuracies? History serves several needs. It creates meaning and context. It also creates an understanding of our present and people past and present. It also creates, to quote Margaret Macmillan, a "construction for the future". Whoever controls the past also controls the present and the future, as Orwell would say. It is to some extent a bribery thought, but historical knowledge is what society decides along with politics. There are requirements we can place on the historical scientific process in order for something to be called "history", but at the same time the content is based on the questions we ask and thus society controls what is important history and what history we write. @Netflix can of course do exactly what it wants. What is particularly problematic, however, is that the recipients are not informed of how far from the truth Netflix is. On the contrary, the story is clothed in some kind of claim to "truth". In the creators' defense, they have had no access whatsoever to the founders. One thing is that a future researcher who wants to know how Spotify was created might start off in this nevertheless ambitious TV series. Worse is that the contemporaries believe that somehow they were like this and that the gallery of people behaves like this "for real". So it does matter to some extent, which history usage one adopted. In this case, however, it adds to the problem that the people depicted not only live but also mainly operate in the same context. If you are going to make people look like complete idiots or have severe neuropsychiatric impairments on loose grounds, you can at least have the good taste to wait until they are dead. Somewhere, even in a commercial use of history, maybe after all you want to approach what Leopold von Ranke called "wie es eigentlich gewesen". In conclusion, after all, I have to agree with Kjell Häglund. It's a fun TV series and Evin Endre is absolutely fantastic. There are (at least) two possible discussions to have going forward: 0. should the founders have participated more in projects like this and even more journalistic approaches (like the book that was to some extent used as background), and 1. is this use of contemporary but fictionalized history acceptable? The only remaining question is why Netflix said that the show was about Daniel Ek, Martin Lorentzon and Spotify? Because it isn't. The series should come with a warning label.

@wallinto Det går snabbare om du kryper dit

@xNovadota Please play with Ame!

@ehn Det är en kluring, du ska ta av däcket ;)

@NoahRettberg Thank you for sharing this! A very nice thread :)

@tiffanyton First layer, merino wool. Perhaps not swag but still clothes

@wykrhm Beforeingers, Norwegian show,

@hankai1998 Hiring engineers and sales in US, São Paulo and Stockholm

@LimmpDota @officialSwinTe

@wallinto Nej!

@big_Poppa_Chop @JenkinsDota post draft analysis is by far the worst production with #TI10

@ehn Who would you trust to be the “App Store”?

@keepingitKyle Can u name any sports with as equivalent conditions globally? This is really big!

@NFLFantasy who do I start, Rahem Mostert or Kareem Hunt?

@ESYudkowsky This is probably a good site for what you seek, trine.com. Investing in solar panels where they have a significant high impact

@erikstarck @palace Är dessa siffror korrekta? 😳

@briannekimmel @enckelli ?

@ehn I see, if I understand u correct I are looking for a store with “approved” products. All of them working as intended with high quality. Of those products there could still be a variation suiting different needs. There should be plenty of shops like that around btw