Tunnel Vision

The Lotso Mystery A few weeks ago, a subscriber named Marco De Nobili told me a story. Walking the streets of Shenzhen and Guangzhou during a work trip to China, he noticed something strange: Lotso — or Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, the cuddly pink villain from Toy Story 3 — was everywhere. Images of his face were emblazoned on the sides of cars, scooters, and mopeds; shops were filled to the brim with every kind of Lotso-themed merchandise. Marco was confused. He’d been to China before, most recently in 2018. But he’d never seen anything like this. In Europe, where he lives, Lotso isn’t a particularly well-known character. Same goes where I live in the United States — you’ll see plenty of Mickey Mouse, Hello Kitty, Snoopy, or Winnie-the-Pooh. But in China, Lotso has become a phenomenon. Marco wanted to know why. I went down a rabbit hole to figure it out.

When my friend Paji wanted to buy a ChatGPT subscription, he did the same thing a lot of us do when we’re looking for something on the internet: he searched for it on Google and clicked on the first link. Soon after, he’d signed up for a year-long subscription to an AI chatbot. There was just one problem. It wasn’t ChatGPT — it was an AI aggregator service that showed up first in search results. We teamed up to figure out: What determines what makes it to the top of Search results? And how easy is it to game the system?