I am not the first person to end a newsletter, to be clear. Others do it with much less fanfare than I. But I think giving things a distinct end, rather than just announcing one day, randomly, that it’s over, is not a way I’ve ended something I cared about before.

But before I go … I have written about what I eventually found frustrating with MidRange. Now, with the final piece of this great experiment, let’s talk about what I liked.

Now, I think that if you’ve read my work over the years, you know a couple of things about it. It tends to be regimented in terms of how it’s built, and also heavily planned out.

MidRange was not that. It was me, trying to figure out how to build a newsletter based on a random idea I had, which I then followed through on, and turned into two years of newsletters and 310 issues of goodness. Some were better than good. Others stayed the course.

I literally had the idea, and then, without thinking about it, I just did it. No infrastructure, no building it up in my head. It was what it was. If it got 10 subscribers or 10,000, it didn’t matter as much as the fact that I had an outlet to share my thoughts that didn’t require pulling out the whole convoy just to get that thought down.

This was something I felt I needed to do to improve my writing style at the time, to give myself the ability to write and think more quickly.

I launched this as an experiment, which gives me the ability to end it on my own terms. That it lasted two years just means that the idea suited my overall style and approach, and I learned something important from the process.

But I think it is important to continue to learn and improve. And MidRange, while it was great as a way to throw ideas on the wall, it has something strongly in common with Tedium: It is ultimately about whatever I feel like it should be about.

And that, I think is its limitation. It’s not to say that I didn’t find value from that approach, but that I think it may be better for me, as a writer, to build around a distinct direction, one that is sharply formed around a theme. That theme can help me as a writer to build skills and to talk about things I’m excited about. And ultimately, I grow as a person, as a writer, and as somebody who needs to have three things in a list so I can get that Oxford comma.

So, as a user, what does this all mean for you? My plan is to keep you on this list and share with you my next project, NextGeist, when it gets going in a few weeks. It will be about social media in the post-viral era. And it will be different, fun, and interesting.

I promise I will keep this parlor trick of writing in 30 minutes around, and even encourage you to follow the template I’ve made. If you have your own MidRange you’d like to share, send it to me. Would love to see someone else take up the 30-minute mantle. All you need is a timer.

(Ivy.D Design/Unsplash)

So anyway, this is the abyss. Let’s jump. You never know what you might find on the other side.

Here is a list of my 10 favorite MidRange issues, out of a total count of just over 300. I wrote a lot over the past two years. Even as it ends this week, it was still a worthy endeavor.

Sticking to a reverse chronological order for this one. Anyway, enjoy.

I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Song 🎹: This piece, diving briefly into the story of a Philadelphia rocker who never quite became a rock star, was inspired by the discovery of one of his music videos by Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. I wish we all knew more about him.

Should Elon Musk Buy Twitter? 🪺 The “time left on clock” on this one (28 minutes, 6 seconds) was never replicated, which is as it should be, because of the amount of white space that came baked in. For better and worse, Elon became a muse of this newsletter, but honestly, I never topped this when discussing him.

The Culmination 🔎 Seeing further developments in a story that you heavily worked on over the years is a nice thing, and being able to write this piece about the release of SNESticle was a really fascinating moment for me. (Also worth diving into: The time I met Zophar of Zophar’s Domain, someone who I’ve known in digital form for a quarter century.)

Don’t Look Through the Microscope 🔬 Call this a self-critique of sorts, a discussion of how it is all too easy to get pulled in by slights, and to have that mindset force you to spin out creatively. I think that something great about this newsletter was that I didn’t hold back my neuroses and frustrations.

The FrankenMac 🍏 As my personal history goes, this is as unvarnished as it gets. This story is who I am.

Don’t Be the Straggler 🗂 A couple of days after I posted this, Dropbox found itself at the center of a huge controversy because it seemed to not be prioritizing the M1 transition to Apple Silicon. I caught the problem days before anyone else did.

Did Tumblr Miss Its Shot? 🏒 I thought the combination of unrelated hockey imagery with the topic was really clever on this one.

A Letter to My Robot Namesake 🤖 After learning that Amazon had a robot named Ernie in its warehouse, I decided to take some creative liberties in writing about it. You can do a lot in 30 minutes.

Lessons From a Cleaning 🪥 When done well, you can take this format and do anything with it and make it interesting. Here’s how I turned cleaning my keyboard into an essay.

Get Started ⚡️ I may have lost my rhythm with MidRange, but the original essay about finding it is worth reading.

Being able to find joy in this process was great. Thanks for taking part in this journey with me in your inbox.

Thursday’s issue is the last one. I’ll close it out with some suitably notable thoughts. And unlike today, I’ll hit the deadline.

After two years of doing this, we’re calling it as of this Thursday, reflecting a solid two years of issues that you can go through, collect, and share with others. When all is said and done, there will be more than 300 issues.

(My next project, NextGeist, is being developed as we speak.)

Last year upon the anniversary of this newsletter, I wrote three issues on the “state of MidRange,” discussing the prior year, what I had learned from the experiment, and where I could improve going forward. I’m repeating it this year.

The very third issue of MidRange was about rhythm, building it and creating it for your own creative process. And I largely agree with what I said back then:

There will be a lot of resistance—be it social media, hobbies, or other things. But if you’re passionate about creating, this early point where you muddle through, if you work past it, everything will click.

The challenge is, is what you’re putting your energy into worth the muddling? Will it click? Or will you just get sick of pressing the button?

As I revisited this theory last year, I wrote:

But as I get a year in, I’m a little worried about finding rhythm in areas outside of MidRange, without quite-so-distinct deadlines to them. When given a project and told, “finish it sometime this month,” I often find myself in a place where the white space overwhelms me.

I feel like, in some ways, the opposite happened. I think the white space became filled in by this project, so I couldn’t separate the process of careful creation from the need to publish on a tight deadline three additional days a week.

I think a lot about the bloggers who worked at jobs that paid them based on output or traffic, a role that I myself never had, but I could see as being a challenge to maintain after so many years. At some point, the creative part of your brain loses its elasticity because all of the things that you used to have white space for were now being produced in a limited context.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately how writing, despite something I love doing, feels less fun because it’s seemingly such a dominant part of my life. I have noticed on the other hand that I find energy and excitement from design these days, something I don’t really do quite so much anymore. And I think it’s because the rhythm I have built has become too strict.

I may be a creative person who has been taking on creative pursuits for a long time, but I’m at the point where there are just some mornings that I want to do something else. And I think that it comes down to turning a routine into a grind.

Design can have deadlines, but at its core, it is an open canvas. A good design can be created in 15 minutes, but it can also take hours or weeks to correctly nail down. It requires bending muscles that work differently from simply writing things down. And I feel like that’s what I might be missing from my work right now.

In some ways, arguably, I have made my point. Building rhythm around the work that you do is important. But the muddling has to lead somewhere. And sometimes it requires waking up in the morning and taking a short walk instead of writing a 30-minute article.

Don’t be afraid to throw out the baby and the bathwater sometime.

This competition has led to a lot of different solutions over the years, including moves to new types of chipsets and a strong reliance on fans. One might argue, for example, that Apple moved to ARM because the fans were getting so loud in their computers that it was actually making the experience significantly worse.

But while a ton of work has been put into improving the heat that is produced by computer chips, not quite as much has been put into the cooling element, sadly, which means that laptops of all stripes come with fans that can get loud, noisy, arguably even unbearable.

Try as they might, PC makers have not been able to make the fan experience desirable on high-performance mobile machines. These massive fans have arguably even made desktop machines less desirable as well.

All of this is why I’m heartened to see an emerging concept which is getting attention this week. Frore Systems, a San Jose, California-based company, has been working on a project to build solid-state, piezoelectric-based cooling solutions, which essentially work through the use of ultrasonic membranes that run across the surface of a heat spreader, pulsing out the heat from a processor more quickly and efficiently (and quietly) than is possible using traditional fans.

The processor-sized technology has already drawn interest from major players like Intel and Qualcomm, who have helped to support the fledgling technology as it emerges into a potential commercial form, and drew a ton of interest this week after PC World ran a profile on the company on YouTube.

If it lives up to the hype, could be a huge benefit to new laptops, as they will be able to perform faster in smaller spaces with fewer limitations created by space. The Frore website has a case study clearly based on a Steam Deck, which leads me to believe this will also be a boon for portable gaming as well. (Gaming sites have already noticed this.)

All of this sounds great for potential future applications, but I just want to briefly make the case that the real benefit of this new technology may be for existing devices. Unlike a lot of components in computers, fans are fans—and if a fan can plug into a given connector, it will just work, with no concern about the machine it’s connected to. I can’t imagine that a ton of people are raring to open up their machines, but there is likely a market of people with existing laptops, desktops, and yes, Steam Decks that want a high-performance device but find that the experience has degraded in part because the fan simply has not held up over time. If those fans were replaced, the machine might just hold up another year or three. The idea of putting one of these in one of those heat-radiating 2019 MacBook Pros, for example, seems like a no-brainer, if it’s possible.

To me, this new cooler type is a massive opportunity to potentially keep existing devices with tight thermal envelopes working beyond their sell-by date. So my hope for Frore is that they sell these parts directly to consumers, perhaps through a partner like iFixit, rather than just going through the traditional OEM route. There are a lot of loud fans out there that deserve to be retired.

I think there are sometimes cases where, sure, maybe that makes sense. But I like the idea of building in public and saying that you’re doing something out in the open, because it makes the process a whole lot more transparent.

As I’ve built a lot of my sites over the years, like Tedium or ShortFormBlog, I tend to put a lot of work into design, because I see it as a differentiator and a way to tell a story about the decisions I’m making.

With the site that is going to replace MidRange, I am going to do just that. Warning: Some of this stuff is rough and may change. I’m creating in public, and letting the chips fall where they may.

First off, what am I calling it? The name will be NextGeist, which is a play on the German term zeitgeist, a concept referring to the “spirit of the age.” I am admittedly Americanizing the term somewhat by mixing English and German together but I think the result will be flexible enough to roll with the punches. This newsletter/platform will, at least at launch, focus on the evolution of the fediverse and related social networks, like Post, from a cultural standpoint. The guiding mission is to bring back the early vibe of Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, two sites closely associated with the growth of the Web 2.0 era, to whatever is happening in the world of social media right now. I don’t know if it has a name yet, but I am going with “post-viral” for now.

Now, let’s talk about visuals. Simply, I want something that feels like it’s a modern take on a tech outlet from the late ’90s or early 2000s. I’m using a lot of monospaced fonts for this, as that’s a style that is often associated with early technology sites. The primary font I have chosen, JetBrains Mono, is developed by a software company, and it has a bit of a throwback style, reminiscent of a combination of Courier New and, say, Trade Gothic Bold Condensed #20.

I’m also planning to use using Silkscreen as a secondary font, basically for no other reason than that it is an iconic font among vintage web designers, originally developed by Jason Kottke and becoming as hated in some circles as Hobo or Comic Sans. We don’t need Silkscreen anymore—it is a font that exists because web developers needed a font at that time that could be easily readable in small sizes. I am choosing to bring it back.

From an email standpoint, I am using my tool of choice, MJML, to build the basic template, which will integrate alt-story-form elements on top of a short discussion of longer issues. A sample design is shown above.

As far as when this will all run, the plan will be once a week, with some quick-hit updates on the web throughout the week, as necessary.

I am still debating the CMS approach. All my tooling at this time is on Craft CMS and I would like to keep that, but I would also like this site to launch with ActivityPub integrations, which Craft does not support at this time. So still debating.

My goal is to launch something sometime in February, with the MidRange list as the starting point. If you’re on the MidRange list, you will stay connected to NextGeist.

I hope that this brings something new to the discussion around social media, which feels like it’s at a real point of change, but one that seems to be harkening back to something older and more fundamental.

If I do my job right, perhaps NextGeist will capture the zeitgeist.

The project, as I’ve made clear in prior issues, will be the one to replace this newsletter in the end. It will not be a three-times-weekly newsletter. It will run once a week. And its focus will be what’s happening in the brave new space that social media finds itself in at the start of 2023.

(There may be a gap from the end date of MidRange to the start date of the new thing. I want to get it right.)

I think the reason why I find social media to be such an interesting topic at this moment is that it feels like non-visual, less-algorithmic, deep-thinking mediums are once again getting their due after a number of years in which imagery seemed to shape the way that interest in social media was growing.

Visuals are great. I enjoy visual things, and I love design. But social media, when too aggressively visually driven, can favor shiny objects over substance, and that means that some of the power of creation is lost in the process.

When we first started on our journey through social mediums, we started with longer works, often published with a lot of thought baked in. Some of the bloggers I recently featured in this list offer good examples of that.

But over time, it became more important to be shaped by visual elements and by algorithms, which meant that the goal was immediacy and shine—the more shiny the object, the more attractive it was to a large group of people, who would then be fed that object by algorithms. In many ways, this had an important impact on culture. It gave the regular person a voice in what goes “viral.” You didn’t need to be a newspaper owner or Ed Sullivan to help get an important new voice shared with a wide audience. You could literally be an individual wanting to speak up about something, anything, and with the right reaction, that voice could scale.

The problem is, this model faced some serious limitations over time. Powerful people increasingly came to realize what they had, and wanted to take steps to shape it. They bought out promising competitors; they tried to crush competition. They flooded the zone with shit, as an infamous adviser once put it. In one case, an extremely rich person bought an entire social network essentially because of the influence it carried.

All because they knew that what went viral could be shaped. It became the new important thing, more important than dominating the conversation. It was about how influence could be forged in new, dangerous directions.

The gatekeepers never truly went away. They just noticed that virality was an important tool for speaking truth to power, then dishonestly tried to siphon the tool’s ability to share truth and ability to share power. So now, to help protect our democracy and our world, we must embrace a “post-viral” world—one in which we learn how to better manage the power and risk that comes with “going viral” but emphasize the more fundamental community-building aspects of social media. They have been shaved down to the nub by an emphasis on what the algorithms want, but we can find ways to bring them back once again, so that we more effectively use the tool we’ve been given but dole its potentially destructive effects out more carefully.

When I use the phrase “post-viral,” I mean it in multiple senses, as well. At a time when an actual virus was endangering millions, people tried to use social media’s influence to turn information viral so it would distract us from the real danger in front of us.

So with new networks and a push away from the gatekeepers that seem to dominate the discussion, I think it’s important that we make room for post-virality, one where the power of “going viral” is to some degree tamped down, but the voices that might have been lost in the midst of algorithms and addictive networks have a place in the conversation once again.

Smarter people than I, who saw the problem before many of the rest of us did, already set the foundation. Let’s start building.

That was the edict of Steve Jobs during a 2011 presentation discussing the nature of touch controls on a laptop.

This take on things seemed to be taken as one of those handful of things that the big company in Cupertino was unwilling to fold on, even in the face of lots of evidence to the contrary. And as a result of this hot take and the internal research that led to it, the Mac never got a touchscreen. At first, fine, whatever, they made the trackpad better. But they also let the edict box them into a corner.

That boxed corner may soon be last year’s news in a couple of years, as Apple suddenly, finally appears to be willing to renege on its word and give these devices touchscreens, according to a new report from well-sourced Apple beat reporter Mark Gurman, who reported the news in Bloomberg yesterday [subscription, alternate link here].

Obviously, it’s more than past time for Apple to fix this gap. Because after all, it’s not like the rest of the industry slowed down around them, ignoring the feature disparity created by Apple’s big bet on touch-repellant Macs. Microsoft likely wouldn’t have a PC hardware business, at least not one so widely used and admired, had Apple decided that its laptops could handle touch, as that proved to be Redmond’s “in” into that market.

But beyond that, it is making increasing business sense, as the Mac reportedly makes up a bigger piece of the hardware pie these days, per Gurman. One could argue that, based on that metric, the business “bet” that Apple has traditionally made on this issue, that people would buy both, may seem increasingly risky. (Also not helping: iPads, because of OS limitations and Apple’s lapping of every other ARM chipmaker, require upgrades far less often than laptops do.)

I’m almost wondering, though, if part of the problem might have something to do with the broader PC market. Companies like HP and Lenovo have arguably started to lap Apple on the hardware design front, and a big reason for that is the companies’ embrace of touch computing. For example, HP has turned heads with its leather-folio-bound 2-in-1s, which can work effectively in both touch and laptop use cases.

And Lenovo arguably stole the show at CES earlier this month by featuring a series of laptops with extremely experimental capabilities, with the most awe-inspiring being a laptop with two screens that can work effectively in a multi-screen setup thanks to an included stand and Bluetooth keyboard.

Apple used to come up with interesting, highly experimental designs like this, but the company has leaned closer to iteration in recent years, while adding kludgey half-solutions that arguably didn’t please anyone (i.e. the Touch Bar). I’d argue that many of the “bad” additions to the Mac lineup in recent years have been direct results of the company painting themselves into a corner by rejecting touchscreens.

And it’s not like a touchscreen ruins the experience. As a Hackintosh user for a couple of years, I’ll let you know that it is fully possible to use a touchscreen on MacOS with the right hardware and right kernel extensions. The experience is fine—even though Apple did nothing to optimize it, obviously. Maybe it doesn’t make sense everywhere, but sometimes it’s way easier to interact with a webpage by scrolling with your finger than moving around a little cursor.

(Windows/Unsplash)

I’d argue that the real problem is that Apple shut down the touchscreen conversation too quickly. That meant that they couldn’t solve the actual problem Jobs identified—that ergonomics were broken in that particular use case. Now, they have given all of their competitors a 15-year head start on resolving the ergonomics issue in ways that actually make sense for the hardware. Microsoft had its awkward transition period with Windows 8, but at the OS level, it has worked fine for years. And much of its Surface hardware is able to move well beyond the standard laptop paradigm because … well, Microsoft let it do so.

Recently, I was listening to an episode of John Gruber’s The Talk Show with Glenn Fleishman in which they discussed the Mac Pro and manufacturing lead times, which usually extend out two to three years. Hearing the proposed 2025 launch date for a potential touchscreen—knowing that Apple still might change its mind—makes me think the company saw something in the market fairly recently that made them change their minds on touchscreens.

Perhaps it was this Lenovo dual-screen beast at CES? Maybe Apple realizes that the MacOS/iPadOS split is untenable long-term? Either way, as I’ve said before, orthodoxy doesn’t suit them if it holds them back. A lack of touch on the Mac has held them back.

Just a reminder, MidRange will gradually be evolving to a new format in a few weeks. It will hew a little closer to this style of post in the future, so here I guess is a sample of our focus.

There’s this concept in technology that I know all too well but may not be all that prominent outside of tech media circles.

Simply put, it’s called the Gartner Hype Cycle, and it refers to the way that something will emerge on the scene, come to dominate the discussion to the point that people will become sick of it, and then bottom out before finding a normal wave of discussion. If it can find that norm, the technology will continue to grow at a normal pace.

This is usually reserved for bigger concepts in technology, rather than ideas. And I think it’s important that when we look at a concept like federation or open-source social media, we’re looking at it through that lens, rather than the more binary success-flameout cycle often associated with new social networks like Clubhouse.

For that reason, I found myself taking issue with The Guardian’s assessment of Mastodon’s growth at this time, in a piece by Josh Nicholas. It’s not that the numbers don’t tell an interesting story—that a site that drew in 2.5 million users immediately after the Elon Musk blowup is now a little down in its active user count—but I think they focus on the wrong story.

And I think the tell is by the social media expert they quote, Meg Coffey, who says this: “It’s like the people that said ‘I’m moving to Canada’ when Donald Trump was elected. They never actually moved to Canada.”

The thing is, Mastodon is at its heart a noncommercial network that isn’t really doing much in the way of marketing beyond word of mouth. It is not actively trying to dominate the App Store or using algorithms to juice up its user count. (If it does, happy accident.) In fact, it is actually trying to do the opposite by discouraging taken-for-granted features like quote-posting and granular searches.

And it is built on a new paradigm for social media, the fediverse concept, which is still relatively new on the mainstream stage and hasn’t had enough chances to really have its tires kicked.

So really, the sign of success for this new type of social network is that it has a large enough number of users, a critical mass, that a large portion of people who are already there feel the desire to continue to post there, that most of their social media needs are met by federated social media and they as a result can continue to offer their voice within the feedback loop.

And I think given that, it should be allowed a spot on the hype cycle as an emerging technology that isn’t trying to maximize numbers, but continuing to improve. It will have its moments of hype, but what matters is that it reaches normalized growth and improvement.

It needs to be seen as what it is—not as social network that will get a little attention from time to time, but as an open-source project built on an open network that needs the space to improve. The network just hit critical mass for the first time a few months ago, and that critical mass will help it improve in important ways, including by encouraging developers to improve the processes of onboarding, navigation, and other kinks that might have scared those curious users off.

Mastodon, and fediverse technologies like it, are doing something significantly harder than just building yet another social network with central ownership and a single point of failure. We owe it to this work to not measure it like it’s just another social network, because it’s trying to do something harder—it’s trying to build a foundation for social media that doesn’t have to be commercial.

Measuring a new paradigm based on the old paradigm’s ROI misses the bigger picture.

So, I will never spend a night at Noma, the Copenhagen fine-dining establishment that has dominated the discussion of high-end food for decades, before its just-announced closing at the end of 2024.

But I will say that the New Nordic restaurant’s just-announced closing is nonetheless fascinating to me. The announcement, revealed by The New York Times on Monday, touches on a number of reasons for this sudden shift, with the fundamental issues at play taking on a mix of financial and cultural.

Founder and creator René Redzepi, a deeply influential chef in the food world, told the Times in an interview that rising prices were getting too expensive, but the human costs of doing such aggressive and laborious food production approaches—exemplified if spirit, if not in cuisine, by the popular FX show The Bear—is no longer realistic.

“We have to completely rethink the industry,” he told the newspaper. “This is simply too hard, and we have to work in a different way.”

(Redzepi, for his part, was recently asked about The Bear by Toronto’s Globe and Mail, admitted it was not an easy watch. “I don’t think there’s a cook who can see it and not be triggered a little bit,” he said.)

(Peter Burka/Flickr)

This is a big deal in the context of Copenhagen’s complex dining industry, as Noma has inspired so much of it since its 2003 opening. A Financial Times piece last year, wrapped around the story of Lisa Lind Dunbar, a longtime Danish restaurant worker who saw much of the dark side of this industry, suggested an industrywide rot:

But what I ultimately heard, in dozens of hushed conversations with restaurant workers in corners of cafés all over the city, was not a story of a few bad apples, but of a rotten orchard. For Dunbar, and for most people I spoke to, the problem is the restaurant industry itself, a system that relies on unpaid or low-paid labour and a culture of fear that slowly erodes the lives of its workers. One that is specific to Denmark but also representative of a global industry.

And Noma, given its deep influence in both Copenhagen dining culture and globally—the $500+-per-person restaurant is seen as a hotbed where young chefs put in a tour of duty and then take their lessons to their own restaurants—has, if anything, inspired imitators worldwide, in all the bad and good contexts in which that can be taken.

The model is costly to pull off, especially amid COVID restrictions and inflation—the restaurant lost nearly a quarter-million dollars in 2021, its first posted loss since 2017—but even in good times requires a huge amount of physical labor to correctly pull off. And for most of its history, much of it wasn’t even paid—the organization offered an internship program that only started paying in October, adding $50,000 a month to the restaurant’s payroll. (Which presumably suggests they had a lot of interns.)

Redzepi has said he would likely transition to an e-commerce model where he plays more of a creative director role, and if that’s what’s necessary to turn this fine-dining experience into something that doesn’t overly burden its customers, so be it.

But I think that the fact that this conversation is even coming up suggests that the human toll of fine dining is not being lost on the people responsible for creating that toll. And that’s progress in some small form.

Apple was fashionably late to the wireless charging trend, then a few years in, developed its own proprietary approach to wireless charging, which it called MagSafe (which is unrelated to the other MagSafe). This was annoying, but it was still compatible with Qi and added a bunch of extra features to the wireless charging spec that made it somewhat more useful for certain things like accessorizing or charging wirelessly while still using the phone.

For years, the rumor seemed to have been that Apple was doing this because they were eventually going to remove the Lightning port from the iPhone in favor of MagSafe, rather than give into the standards Gods at the USB Implementers’ Forum.

But this week, that theory seems to have gone up in smoke, as Apple appears to have given the Wireless Power Consortium its proprietary MagSafe technologies to use for its Qi2 standard. Which means that all of the advantages of MagSafe—the stronger connection with the magnet, the potential for more creative accessorizing—will now come to Android devices as well. This is awesome, and will make Qi a much more interesting standard down the road—especially as the new standard will allow for faster charging speeds which have been, up until now, an Achilles’ heel of the standard.

It will also, potentially, remove a lot of confusion from the market, according to the Wireless Power Consortium’s executive director, Paul Struhsaker.

“Consumers and retailers have been telling us they’re confused concerning what devices are Qi Certified and those that claim to work with Qi but are not Qi Certified. This confusion can lead to a poor user experience and even safety issues,” Struhsaker said in a news release. “Our standard assures consumers that their devices are safe, efficient, and interoperable with other brands. Qi2 will be the global standard for wireless charging and provide consumers and retailers with that assurance.”

Admittedly, for the last couple of years, I’ve been buying cases with magnetized backs just so I can leverage some of the MagSafe accessories on my Android devices. For example, wallet attachments are much more useful than wallet cases, and come with the added side benefit of being easy to move from one device to another, and better, to use without the case if you so choose. Logically, it’s very smart and it will be even smarter when all the flagship Android devices also support it.

This is actually very smart, but even beyond the standard itself, it reflects perhaps how Apple should approach new innovations it brings to the market. The company brought out this feature that was unique to the iPhone, then a couple of years after the release of said feature, the company essentially gave all the work to a standards body, which then shared it with the rest of the tech industry. This sounds like a significantly better state of affairs than what happened with Lightning and USB-C, where Apple stuck with a proprietary technology long after the technology had been leapfrogged by an open standard in many ways.

(Though there is certainly reason to we wary of ulterior motives. Some, like The Verge, suggest that this may be a play by Apple to gain some control over an accessory ecosystem, as the new Qi standard will require authentication on the device.)

If Apple wants technology to work closer to how it works, it should take its innovations and, after they are no longer marquee features, give them to the rest of the industry. It’ll keep those pesky regulators off their tail, for one thing.

I think about how my dad (who had the same first name as me) used to have a lifetime subscription to National Geographic. When he died while I was still in my late teens, the magazines kept coming. Eventually, I went away for college, and soon enough … the magazines started coming my way. They stopped at some point—the folks at Nat Geo probably figured out that we weren’t the same person, that it might be odd for someone who has been getting these magazines for 20+ years to suddenly be living in a dorm room. But when I think of lifetime subscriptions, National Geographic will remain the high watermark. (Though, honestly, it doesn’t look like they are still offering it—with the most recent record I can find dating to 2015—which might make sense given the ownership changes Nat Geo has seen in recent years. Anyone know?)

Wondershare, the company that makes the easy-to-use video editing software Filmora, is definitely not looking to be the next National Geographic.

Recently, the company has faced the scrutiny of the YouTube public for its poor handling of a situation regarding the software, which it sold in multiple forms—a SaaS-style subscription model, a multi-user tier, and a single-user lifetime license. The lifetime license, just $20 more than the $39.99/year subscription, was clearly the one to get if you were really into this kind of software, as it offered free updates for life. When YouTuber Daniel Batal, who specializes in tutorials for the very kinds of filmmakers Filmora was looking to target, saw the software, he heavily recommended it to his audience. They even did a sponsorship deal with Batal.

But the problem was, the company kept updating the software, and its most recent version, it tried to do something sneaky with the terminology. Rather than referring to it as an “update,” as every other version of the software had been called, it was now an “upgrade”—which essentially invalidated the licenses for upgrading to this new version.

This did not sit well with Batal, who essentially staked his reputation on this software.

“I was actually Filmora’s very first brand ambassador, and I’ve made over a hundred videos about filmora teaching people how to use that software,” Batal recalled in a clip. “I’ve actually driven tens of millions of views to those videos and I’ve even had thousands of people buy their own Filmora licenses—well, because I told them.”

The situation got messy from there—with Wondershare suddenly claiming copyright on the sponsored video they created together, Batal creating more videos drawing attention to the situation, and finally, Wondershare backing down in the face of bad press.

“We apologize for the confusion and frustration caused by the lack of clear license information on the Filmora 9 purchasing page,” the company wrote on Twitter. “We take full responsibility for the communication issue and are determined to make things right.”

In the middle is Batal, who basically burned a longtime sponsor out of concern for his audience. He got Wondershare to change its tune, though he still has a mess on his hands because of the copyright claim.

I guess the question to ask here is, do lifetime licenses make sense anymore? With ll this in mind, I want to point to an example from the old old days in which a piece of software came with a lifetime license—mIRC, a landmark IRC client for Windows. A controversy around that vintage application came up a couple of months ago after a tech outlet noticed that the developer, Khaled Mardam-Bey, had changed the terms around the software:

When I originally offered a lifetime license in 1995, it seemed like a kind and fair thing to do. However, I did not expect that I would still be working on mIRC twenty-five years later. The lifetime license means that I am still supporting and providing updates to every user that has ever registered. This has become gradually more difficult and has reached the point where, sadly, it is just no longer possible. If your registration is over ten years old, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated. If you register again, you will receive an updated registration automatically. If you cannot afford to register again, or would rather not, that’s okay, just email me. However, please be aware that it will take time for me to reply.”

mIRC’s lifetime license seems a little difficult to manage a quarter-century in.

He softened the language after it got attention, and the blurb now says, “If you still enjoy using mIRC, and you have an old registration, if you can, please consider registering again. Your continued support for mIRC would be really appreciated.”

Should we expect lifetime licenses to live forever? Is that a realistic ask in 2023? A better question: Should developers promise lifetime licenses to draw attention, then change their minds four years later?

As I announced in the year-end issue of Tedium, I have decided to eventually shutter this newsletter to work on another project that I think will be slightly more of the times. And I’m not trying to have too many regrets about it.

A big reason for this comes down to a realization that the fact that one of the primary goals of this newsletter, the idea that this was supposed to creatively energize me, wasn’t happening. In fact, the opposite was happening—it was making it hard to get white space on other creative projects. Turns out, starting the day with a writing prompt, no matter how short, creates issues with having to decide what to write about on a daily basis.

The other big reason is that, as this newsletter has evolved into something of a “hot takes” newsletter, the takes have simply become too repetitive. There was a point when the news cycle allowed for more take-driven room for things, but creatively, there are only so many ways you can write about a failing billionaire before you feel like you are creatively at their mercy.

This email list will keep going—as mentioned, I do have an alternate creative project in the works that will publish less often but that will mine some of the same territory. In part, I want to give some energy to that project, which will be more specialized and less general, so something had to give. I decided, ultimately, that I’d rather keep doing two issues of Tedium each week, which has determined long-term value, and drop the quick-hit newsletter, which by design doesn’t.

But rather than shut MidRange down immediately, I realized that I had an opportunity of sorts to explore a certain creative mindset that is all too rare in this world—the limited-time creation mode, better known as “senioritis.”

See, MidRange’s second anniversary is the week of January 28th, which means that, to hit the anniversary, I need to write this for four more weeks.

I want some of that Conan-showing-off-a-Bugatti-Veyron-Mouse energy.

You know this is going to end. I know this is going to end. Does that ability to know how this ends create a fresh creative context that can be effectively mined? Are there topics in this newsletter that I might not have explored in the past that I now can? I certainly hope so.

I’m making a rule for myself in these last four weeks, in part because I think his whims have unfortunately shaped and in some ways soured this project, including my decision to move platforms midstream. The next four weeks, no Elon. He is overexposed. Let him fester like an uncooked prime rib in the sun somewhere else.

I have a few ideas as to what I hope to cover, but if there’s something you always thought would make an excellent issue of MidRange, let me know. I’d love to explore it. Just because this is ending doesn’t mean it needs to end on a low note.

Let’s go out with a bang.

Sure, there are some always recommended favorites in my inbox—Simon Owens, Today in Tabs, and Chris Geidner’s Law Dork, just to name a few—but I found that writing this entry was actually a little harder than I had hoped, because what makes a great individual blog post isn’t always the same as being consistently great at writing consistently over many years. We have a league of consistent hitters who never swing for the fences.

Perhaps it’s because some annoying astronaut guy sucked up all the energy, but 2022, while seeing a perk-up in energy around the idea of open creation near the end of the year, just didn’t strike me as a dominant year for big viral blog posts. (Chris Dalla Riva’s “The Death of the Key Change,” on Tedium, excepted.)

But there was one that very much stood out from the fray as a huge discussion point, and it’s one that hit right at the beginning of the year.

That piece, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” by music writer Ted Gioia, took a weapon to some of tech’s thinking on sacred cows, which is that the “long tail” form of creation would end up benefiting the music economy as a whole in the post-Napster age.

But it arguably didn’t—as he pointed out, old music sales were far outselling new works—because the music industry decided to invest in existing blockbusters:

The leading companies in music had many chances to reinvent themselves over the last quarter century, taking bold action that might have transformed themselves and the entire culture. But they didn’t want to take any risks. They could have invested in new technologies—but didn’t, instead allowing Silicon Valley companies to swallow up most of the profits from music in the 21st century. They could have signed and nurtured new talent—but didn’t, preferring to invest in 50-year-old songs. They could have embraced exciting new sounds—but didn’t because the algorithms and dominant formulas reward rehashes of the old sounds.

Even so, I refuse to accept that we are in some ugly endgame, witnessing the death throes of new music. And I say that because I know how much people crave something that sounds fresh and exciting and different. If they don’t find it from a major record label or algorithm-driven playlist, they will find it somewhere else. Things can go viral nowadays without the entertainment industry even noticing until it has actually happened. And that will be how this story ends—not with the marginalization of new music, but with something radical emerging from an unexpected place.

One could argue that the film industry did the same thing—certainly the box office would support the case. But the truism is the same. The catalog is worth a lot more than the new product—and a big reason for that, as I posited in response to Gioia’s piece, might be the unnaturally long lengths of copyright law.

(Rodrigo Flores/Unsplash)

Gioia followed up on this line of thinking about six months later, with a piece titled “Where Did the Long Tail Go?” It is also sobering reading:

There’s one more reason why the Long Tail has died in the digital world. Web platforms aren’t really focused on serving users—what they really want to do is control users. This almost always requires them to squeeze out niche and alternative views, and force as many customers as possible to follow the herd.

That’s a useful comparison. Web platforms are herders. And, if you follow the analogy, that makes us all sheep.

I wish I didn’t have to say all this. Because I love those niches and fringes in the creative world. I believe they deserve our support. But in most instances, this support must be driven by our generosity, philanthropy, and commitment to our core values—and not merely by profit seeking. Because as soon as profit maximization enters the picture, these outliers on the distribution curve don’t make the cut.

I am a long-tail enthusiast. It’s been part of Tedium’s tagline since 2015. There’s a lot there. But long tails do not make everyone rich. They just ensure a couple of fractions of pennies go to the outer reaches.

In a world of platforms to take most of the money, it seems like we need to bet on open to really build anything of value in this world. The problem is not the long tail. It’s that the long tail is front-loaded and hasn’t been properly distributed.

Runners-up

“Did this email cost Mailchimp’s billionaire CEO his job?,” Platformer: In the great tradition of bloggers uncovering details the big outlets often do not, Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer have been doing real tech journalism when everyone else is commenting. Platformer has been a delight to read in part because it seems to be doing much of the great work The Information is designed for at a much smaller scale. This piece stands out though, as it 1) highlights a story that wasn’t on many people’s radars, and 2) shares source materials. In a year of overwrought complaining, Casey and Zoë brought the goods.

We need better tools for online speech, Jacob O’Bryant. Jacob, the creator of The Sample (full disclosure: a frequent sponsor of ours), has been working on trying to build out tooling for the open web in recent months. And he started the conversation with the blog post about why. Pieces like this are going to matter increasingly more as we turn the corner into 2023 and the open web starts to matter once more.

Editor’s note: This week’s edition of MidRange will highlight the content pieces I’ve come across this year that I consider the best I’ve seen in 2022. (I did this last year, by the way.) My basic parameter: Man, I wish I would have come up with that.

While yesterday’s pick for best YouTube video was pretty glaringly obvious, today’s pick, on best feature article (which I’m expanding from last year’s history because it seems like a lot of the history is pretty recent!), I’m finding to be a heck of a lot harder. And I think the reason for this is that it’s not a clean victory.

There are a lot of deserving pieces this year, many in the realm of popular music. I think, for example, that Pitchfork’s Sunday Review series, which is often just as much historical reporting as it is review, perhaps hit its peak when it decided to chat about Living Colour’s Vivid, which did an amazing job of contextualizing the album as a truly ambitious work of its era—and a success story years in the making on the part of the band’s guitarist, Vernon Reid.

I think as well that this piece on the long, seemingly bipartisan legacy of George Carlin, by New York Times writer Dave Itzkoff, highlights a fascinating role that few carry in modern society.

(raph_ph/Flickr)

But I keep going back to the Rolling Stone piece on Taylor Hawkins, “Inside Taylor Hawkins’ Final Days as a Foo Fighter,” which I’ll be the first to emphasize has some flaws. The big one is that a couple of the sources quoted in the article (fellow famous drummers Matt Cameron and Chad Smith) have since disowned the piece, which to me suggests something other than inaccuracy—rather, that it hit an uncomfortable chord with the rock establishment during a sensitive time. Which is understandable, as it implies that one of the most beloved rock bands was working one of its most beloved rock ambassadors to the bone, which is an uncomfortable thing to imply.

But at the same time, the piece overcomes some of that discomfort by painting a fascinating picture of Hawkins as a rock star whose sheer passion for the drums and music in general had led to some of the world’s biggest stages. And that picture becomes clear the further in you read it:

But playing with the Foos was a chance for Hawkins to become more than a hired gun for a pop star and join a real group. “It seemed like he was made for that band,” Tobias says. “Just from the physicality to loving all different kinds of music and just how he was playing for one of the best drummers in the world. The fact that [Dave] trusted Taylor to run that engine says a lot. And I don’t think any of that was wasted on him. I think he was well aware that it was a huge honor and was going to knock it out of the park no matter what.”

Even when Hawkins was playing drum parts that Grohl had originally recorded, he performed them with a hyperactive energy all his own. He could channel Grohl’s powerhouse pummel but added a limber deftness that reflected his appreciation for busier, more meticulous drummers like Rush’s Neil Peart and the Police’s Stewart Copeland. When he played a drum solo, often on a riser towering 15 feet in the air on Foo Fighters’ later tours, he improvised, giving each city a unique performance.

Hawkins for decades was a drummer with seemingly boundless energy, but as he hit 50 years old, the article strongly implies that pounding the skins was becoming an increasingly arduous task at the rate Hawkins was being asked to do it, that rock is a young man’s game that some musicians eventually grow old in.

The piece highlights how the work of being a Foo Fighter remained a grind well into the band’s third decade, and implied that he was not getting a chance to pursue other interests because of the demands of being in the band.

“Foo Fighters, however, remained at the center of his life. And while their peers in Pearl Jam and Radiohead slowed down as they reached middle age, leaving time for their members to focus on solo projects and family, Grohl ramped up,” the piece, by authors Andy Greene and Kory Grow, stated.

We may or may not get a clear picture of how accurate this portrayal of Hawkins really is from the band itself, but as an obituary of an important drummer in an important band, it does something very key: It makes you rethink your relationship with him and his work. That’s a hard thing for any story to do, let alone one whose sources likely felt pressure to disown it immediately because it said something so uncomfortable about the rock and roll lifestyle in the end.

Like I said, not a clean victory. But a vital piece nonetheless.

Runners-up

(www_ukberri_net/Unsplash)

“Giving Web Standards a Seat at the Table,” The History of the Web: The best stories often paint in the details of what was previously seen in a simplistic light. And this piece, by The History of the Web’s Jay Hoffman, explains a bit of tech history that has often gotten pushed off to the side—that is, the moment when Microsoft began to take web standards seriously again. The secret? A little cooperation.

Hinckley is an active YouTuber these days.

“John Hinckley Jr. speaks: ‘I’m trying to not dwell on the past’,” Input: The really heartbreaking part about Input was that it was just hitting its stride when it was shuttered earlier this year. This interview, done by Max Collins of Eve 6 and facilitated by editor Mark Yarm, focused on a complex story—the tale of would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr. and his attempts to build a music career after being released from long-term psychiatric care. Some people would rather not have this discussion, so it’s to Collins’ and Yarm’s credit that they asked anyway.

Editor’s note: This week’s edition of MidRange will highlight the content pieces I’ve come across this year that I consider the best I’ve seen in 2022. (I did this last year, by the way.) My basic parameter: Man, I wish I would have come up with that.

In 2022, I found myself digging further into my musical interests on YouTube, expanding a bit out of the tech realm. While I still have some favorites in the tech and gaming realms, new and old—I admit that my new favorite veg-out video these days is watching the speedrunner Kosmic make his way through unusual NES ROM hacks—I think I’m at a time in my life where I use music as a bit of a way to look back and appreciate the past.

But YouTube is nothing if not a way to highlight a person’s ambition. And with that in mind, I can’t help but not highlight the impressive work of Pat Finnerty in this space. Finnerty, a Philly-based rocker who has been creating YouTube videos seriously for less than two years, has turned his entire brand of lo-fi video-making into a distinct language of sorts, one that seems to want to take the mission of his popular “What Makes this Song Stink” series and just push it into weird, unexpected directions.

From the starting point of 3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite,” Finnerty has turned a general dislike of overly commercialized pop music into a true mission. His explanation of why Weezer’s “Beverly Hills” was a dagger to the heart of many of the band’s fans captured a certain type of late-’90s cultural touchstone. And don’t get him started on Train. In many ways, the videos may start out as being about the song, but Finnerty really uses them as ways to paint his ambitions on a wide scale.

Nowhere has he done this better than with his clip on Machine Gun Kelly and Willow’s “Emo Girl.” Quickly, the video (complete with spinning Dunkin’ Donuts cups, along with his YouTube 100,000-subscribers plaque) evolves from a discussion of the kind of bad emo the song signifies to how Finnerty himself might create a mall-rock song of his own that transcends the source material—all out of a desire to get a hot tub for himself and his significant other Kim, something he calls the “Simple Plan.”

And transcend it does. Finnerty turned the idea into a fake band called August is Falling, along with an EP that features a single, also called “August is Falling,” that lives up to the idea and then some. (He even got mega-producer Butch Walker to give it some shine!)

Some of the best YouTube creators have moments like these, where they’re already running in one direction, but they find room to get a little airborne, and all of a sudden the world is bending to their will.

Pat is admittedly a hater—I mean, you kind of have to be to create a series of this nature. He strongly contrasts the more positive vibes of YouTube-first musicians like Mary Spender, the expertise of his music-theory nemesis Rick Beato, and the every-song-is-great mindset of music history channel The Professor of Rock. But in many ways, Finnerty transcends the concept by using it as a canvas for his creativity in a way that no other music-focused YouTuber is really doing.

Finnerty has yet to get the hot tub, but you could feel the earth bending when he turned a Machine Gun Kelly goof into something more ambitious—the rare joke that stands aside the best of the material it’s parodying.

Hence, why Finnerty scores the best YouTube video of the year in our MidRange assessment.

Runners-Up

SOMEONE STOLE MY CAR AND I STOLE IT BACK: Casey Neistat came back to YouTube—and New York City—in a big way during the last half of 2022, and as if to highlight just how much of a victory lap that really is, he came up with this unusual clip featuring a single car with lots of accessible keys, managed by the art collective MSCHF. Essentially Casey gave a guy some keys, and the dude took the car with Neistat’s stuff still in the back. A big reason why this works so well is vibe: This is the best video from 2015 made in 2022, and it’s not even close. Even Casey’s favorite UPS driver, Marlan Franklyn, makes an appearance.

why Japan's internet is weirdly designed: I was not a close watcher of Answer in Progress before I saw this video, but it made me a bit of a believer. Sabrina Cruz’s research touches on a very esoteric technology thing—how culture and language affects UX decisions—in a broadly appealing way.

And that additional attention is leading to some apparent financial investment, with the encrypted messaging company Mask Network straight-up purchasing the second-largest Mastodon instance, the Japanese network Pawoo.net, for an undisclosed sum.

“As a major Mastodon instance, Pawoo will have plenty of space to grow. The new operation team hopes to play a crucial role in driving its future growth,” a news release stated. “The team believes that on the journey to the free and open Internet, the decentralized infrastructure and applications are under development at a rapid pace. The future decentralized social networks including Pawoo will play an important role during this process to achieve a new and open internet.”

Mask, which is focused on Web 3.0 applications that offer a bridge to older Web 2.0 use cases, could prove an interesting infusion of interest into Mastodon. They are, at this time, actively focused on investing money into decentralized social networking infrastructure. And they have something that Mastodon lacks in any truly pliable way—encrypted messaging. One could see how such an investment could work out in favor of improving the technology layers of Mastodon.

Now, to be clear, Mask is not alone here in bringing some commercial influence to the fediverse. Project Mushroom, a Mastodon-adjacent project, is being sponsored by a climate change startup, and both Mozilla and Vivaldi have taken steps to support Mastodon with their products.

But at the same time, there is understandable skepticism that’s floating around, in part because it means that a company with a commercial interest can swoop in, buy networks, take ownership of the new thing, and potentially influence the entire network. (And also, the purchase sparked confusion, because Mask.net bought the entity through an organization called Social Coop, a name that is being used for an unrelated Mastodon instance that is actually being run as a cooperative, complete with governance and the whole bit.)

As Chris Trottier, an early Hootsuite employee and a commenter on fediverse issues, put it yesterday, “Like it or not, it should no longer be assumed that ‘volunteers’ are running your instances.”

How worried should we be about the mask? (Marina Zaharkina/Unsplash)

This raises the natural question: How bad is commercial influence on the fediverse? Is it something that users need to really be worried about? And if that commercial influence negatively changes the experience, are users well-positioned to fight back against it? I think the simple answer is to look at how Mastodon has dealt with past controversies of this nature. In 2018, actor and sci-fi icon Wil Wheaton was pressured off of Mastodon because members of the community found him “unsafe,” citing his use and promotion of a widely spread Twitter blocklist that negatively affected marginalized communities. (It would be interesting to see if he chose to come back at some point, though he seems to be doing just fine on Tumblr.) In 2019, Mastodon admins came together to essentially force out Gab, a right-wing social network that moved to Mastodon’s codebase.

In both of these cases, one could argue that social pressure was strong enough that it essentially neutralized the outsider coming into their community. (It should be noted that Pawoo itself has largely been isolated from the mainstream fediverse over moderation decisions and the complexities of moderating posts from a foreign-language instance.) But as Mastodon gets larger, it might be harder to do.

If, for some reason, Mastodon users decide that they don’t want to be part of Pawoo.net, the best option they have is to just leave and splinter. Mastodon makes that easy—and it makes it possible for other federated networks, Mastodon or otherwise, to limit the influence of a foreign body the network for some reason decides it does not like. It may not kill it, but it can neutralize it.

I think it will be interesting to see what this company does with its new purchase—it could be good, it could be bad. But skepticism is a fair emotion to have right now.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated with slightly more context on Pawoo.

But seriously though, I found a lot to respect about YouTuber and research nerd Tom Scott’s very honest take that he made a mistake in an earlier video about fire marks—specifically, that the main thesis in his prior video, that fire brigades would not put out fires at houses without fire marks, was wrong.

And he laid out the error in a video that expressed regret about what happened.

To be fair, nailing down this detail was apparently very hard, and the error emerged in part because a source that seemed reliable on this topic, the London Fire Brigade, actually said so on its website, which originally said:

If a building was on fire, several brigades would attend as quickly as possible. The different brigades would use the fire marks to work out if a building was insured by their parent company. If they didn't see their specific fire mark attached to the building, they would leave the property to burn.

But then the brigade changed the website, which now says:

Popular stories suggest that insurance firemen would leave a building to burn if it wasn’t insured or insured with a rival company. There is little real evidence to suggest that this was the case. In fact, evidence shows that insurance companies had strict rules that on pain of dismissal, their firefighting teams should attend every fire they encountered, whether the property was insured or not and regardless of which company it might have been insured with. Any fire left unchecked could spread to whole streets or neighbourhoods and involve the insurance companies in large scale losses. Mutual co-operation was therefore extremely important.

(It seems like the London Fire Brigade deserves some of the blame for spreading the fire around this fascinating factoid!)

But when it seemed like Scott had clearly made a mistake, he took the time to fix it—he removed the prior video from public view (which I’m linking here for posterity, note that it has been retracted). He then hired an actual archivist to research this exact issue, then put up the research around the topic on his website. That research laid out what actually happened like this:

In the early years of fire insurance, insurance company fire brigades seemingly made little distinction between insured and uninsured properties. They were instructed to attend and help put out all fires. The grounds for this policy included the risk of fire-spread between uninsured and insured properties, the advertising value of the firemen and their engines, and charitable acts for those who could not afford insurance.

In principle, this policy seems to have remained in force throughout the 18th century. In practice, though, changing circumstances led to keen rivalry between fire brigades, whether insurance company, parish or private. Firstly, monetary rewards were introduced for the earliest attendees at fires. That innovation led to engines racing each other through the streets. As the number of fire insurance companies grew, so, too, did the number of fire engines. Once at the fire, too many engines were too often competing for very limited water supplies.

When the nature of the firemen is added to this situation, the scene is set for more competition, and chaos. This, in turn, can reasonably be imagined as having led to conflict—both verbal and physical. With no reward, no water, and no insurance interest in a burning building, it is not difficult to envisage firemen standing back on occasion, jeering and generally interfering with rival brigades fighting a fire in which they did have an interest. Or, alternatively, simply packing up and going home. Arguably, therefore, the legend of insurance fire brigades letting uninsured buildings burn originated in the first half of the 18th century.

Essentially, heavy competition between fire brigades may have led to situations where competing fire brigades might have intervened or event left, but that was only because they missed out on the financial rewards of being first.

Scott makes an excellent point about this state of affairs in his video, which is simply that history is often far more malleable than we give it credit for.

“If any history students are looking for a PhD topic, it feels like you could get three years of research out of this and still not end up with a definitive yes or no,” he said. “It's a perfect example of how quickly and how badly even big important stories can become muddled, and how the study of history is not about memorizing dates: It's about the interpretation of really messy, patchy data.”

I’ve run into this in the past in a few cases, most notably in 2017 where I wrote a piece about CD-ROM encyclopedias, and the CEO of Encyclopaedia Britannica during the era, Joseph Esposito, disagreed with the assessment that the company had lost its way during the CD-ROM era. Even when all of the stakeholders are alive, everyone can have a different interpretation of what happened, famously referred to as the Rashomon Effect after the legendary Akira Kurosawa film that uses this truism as a plot device.

But when you’re talking about situations where literally everyone involved in a situation has long been dead, that’s where you run into trouble, and this is an area where Scott fell into a trap. But to be fair, the London Fire Brigade set the trap by saying one thing, then rewriting its history to say something else entirely, while also not taking credit for originating the error.

All of this is why, whenever possible, I try to link to primary sources, rather than after-the-fact interpretations, because odds are, if something happened, you’re most likely to hear the straight stuff from the primary source. But even then, primary sources can only go so far. After all, the Rashomon Effect existed back then, too.

I think Tom did a great job of showing that he is to be taken seriously by taking an error of this nature so seriously. It is so hard to get this stuff right, even when it’s literally your job.

Along the way, there were moments of joy (the many memes around John Mastodon, the superhero of sorts created by a Mediaite writer who failed to comprehend the word “join”) and moments of anger (the creation of a rule against sharing links to profiles on third-party networks via Twitter, since removed). And it just felt like constant chaos, a constant make-it-up-as-we-go-along situation that might make you feel like there’s no stability to be found on social media these days.

And honestly, it’s a bit mind-shattering. It’s like watching car crash after car crash, watching the chips fall where they may, and just accepting that there is no longer a a state of calm.

Even Jack Dorsey, the guy who set the Twitter deal in motion, was left wondering, “Why?”

I don’t know about you, but I to some degree felt like my ability to properly compartmentalize this nonstop chaos was impossible. Given that this saga led to famous journalists and iconic tech-industry figures alike having their Twitter accounts permanently banned, only to be online again within 12 hours, it always felt like there was some other example of chaos around the corner.

(Stefan Cosma/Unsplash)

As a creative person, I have things I want to work on and do, but I to some degree feel my creativity shattered by choppy waters of social media. Focus feels like it’s impossible when there’s always some other kind of BS around the corner.

I’m trying all the tricks. My Twitter profile is locked, preventing virality. I read these sites in grayscale. And yet, the ADHDness of it all just seems to keep causing problems. I am in fact writing this using a pomodoro tool, the same one that I always do, but with a bunch of blocks set up to discourage me from clicking on basically any social media link.

I honestly at some point just want Elon to take a day off from his schtick as the guy who just bought a boat because his chaos merchant vibes are making it impossible to focus.

At some point I feel like I might just disable my Twitter account entirely just because I want to get something done. That’s not how it should be. It should be at service of its users, but over the last two months, it appears to have broken its contract. And at some point, I am going to want my brain cells to stop getting divided just because it makes an already rich guy more money.

It was a great service. I had good relationships with all the people who worked there. And then Twitter bought them and … it’s been just under two years and the service is basically dead, a victim of significant corporate shifts that we have never talked about in this newsletter, not even once.

Revue was a great platform to work from, but after the announced purchase of Twitter, it clearly was not long for this world.

Meanwhile over the weekend, Twitter purchaser Elon Musk threw a little gasoline around the out-of-the-blue idea that he might be interested in purchasing Substack, which was pitched to him as being a way to take over control of the narrative layer of the internet.

Which, honestly, kind of bruised my heart a little bit, for a few reasons. First off, Revue is an excellent tool, and while it was clearly not a marquee feature of the Twitter acquisition, it had the potential to add value to it, if managed properly. And the fact that he said this about Substack while owning what was effectively a major rival seems to suggest to me that the only reason these services would be valuable to him is because of who uses them.

(Revue/Twitter)

This suggests, to me, that the only true value in a service like Substack or Revue is not its technology but its userbase. Which, if you remember correctly, was not the value proposition of these networks when you joined—it was, “you can join these networks and leave at any time.” But as time has moved on, it has become increasingly clear that the names they were able to get to sign up for these services gave the platform all of its power. And Revue simply didn’t have strong enough names powering its growth.

And that means, to hold onto that power, a service like Substack will start to put up roadblocks to convince you to stay. It will add features that aren’t core, but nice value adds (like chat), that will increase the value proposition. It will put social pressure on people to stay. And it will make it harder to be portable between networks. The current owners of Substack have done some of this already—but given the moves Musk has already done with Twitter, you could see him, as a potential owner of Substack, tighten the screws even further.

Lots of people will like what they have and not want to leave, but others will want alternatives. Revue was supposed to be one of those alternatives. But no longer.

I’ve had a couple people suggest that I made a smart decision for starting my transition away from Revue as soon as the potential deal to buy Twitter was announced—something that required me to not only build out a whole section of my Tedium site, but import roughly 200 posts by hand, with only a little bit of a helping hand from automation. It took me roughly two months of nights and weekends to get back to the point where I was before the switch, and I will tell you that I take no pride in being ahead of the curve.

Nor do I take pride in being proven right in any of my prior commentary about newsletters, platforms, and choice. As you might remember, I started MidRange on a platform specifically to get a stronger understanding of the platform ecosystem so I could better critique it. This is me leveraging that knowledge of that ecosystem in kind of its ultimate form.

What I will say is this. Nearly five years ago, I wrote a take on Medium arguing that we were sending editorial newsletters with marketing tools, and that we needed more newsletter tools built like content management systems. Substack was embryonic at this point. Revue was a little older, but still small scale. The market appears to have listened, as there now are dozens of tools designed specifically for editorial newsletters. In particular, Revue’s team, based on my interactions with them, really seemed to take this advice to heart. It perhaps was the most right I’ve ever been about any commentary related to trends in technology, and I’m glad the market took the hint.

But we’re entering a new stage now, and I guess I’ll say this: Now is a great time to go open source and own your own destiny. Because the platforms, which famously lay out welcome mats to convince you to join, are not going to get any more welcoming after this point.

Godspeed team Revue, you created a good product.

I won’t dive back into the details of it—über-freelancer Chris Stokel-Walker has the gory details of how the company hired a former police officer and didn’t realize that might make some people mad—but I think it exposed something in the space that hadn’t been obvious before to those not watching closely: People want alternatives to the Pi, but in Western markets, they’re extremely hard to come by without special-ordering. In a post-Radio Shack, post-Fry’s world, you can’t just drive to a store and buy one.

There have been shortages of the Raspberry Pi, a lingering side effect of the chip shortage that has been bad enough that it’s been difficult to find some models of the single-board computer for months.

Liz Upton, the cofounder of Raspberry Pi and its chief marketing officer, implied to Stokel-Walker that unrelated controversies led the to the hiring blow-up, but suggested that people “were already cross” about the shortages, which have doubled or tripled the price of units and increased the shipping times of Raspberry Pis on Amazon, just as an example.

I don’t know if that’s the case or not, but what is clear is that alternatives are not quickly showing themselves, and perhaps Raspberry Pi is feeling the pressure as a result. Sure, other vendors like OrangePi and Khadas are out there, but they don’t have the same level of software support as the Raspberry Pi has garnered from its long track record of goodwill, which is leading some to look in completely different directions entirely.

Some, such as prominent single-board fan Andreas Spiess, have make the case that, barring improved Raspberry Pi supply, the best options out there might be used thin-client PCs that fill a gap in the market for cheap hardware that costs less than $200 but has many of the same capabilities of the ARM-based devices.

“They’re the kind of systems you can easily find used on eBay, refurbished on Amazon Renewed, or through other enterprise and IT asset disposition sources,” a recent Ars Technica piece noted. “They’re typically in good shape, given their use and environment. And compared to single-board enthusiast systems, many more are being made and replaced each year.”

Meanwhile, mini PCs in the NUC form factor are increasingly nearing the Goldilocks price range, with current and prior-gen AMD Ryzen machines available for less than $400 and still small enough that they could squeeze into relatively tight setups. If tiny Ryzen boxes made by companies like Beelink consistently fall to somewhere around $250, the price gap between them and much slower Raspberry Pi 4s nearly disappears. That won’t kill the IoT enthusiast market, for example, but it will convince a lot of folks who might have bought a Raspberry Pi for a retro rig to just spend the extra money, go x86, and get a significantly more powerful machine.

ARM has found a lot of success with enthusiasts thanks to its mix of low prices and low power consumption. But with industrial customers dominating the supply chain for the Pi, it cuts out who are effectively the foundation’s core customers—tinkerers.

Perhaps in response to the “cross” nature of the recent conversation around Raspberry Pi’s brand, the company on Monday announced plans to improve the stock of single-unit sales in 2023.

“Although we are sitting on substantial order backlogs from commercial customers, we expect to gradually increase the fraction of our output which we dedicate to single-unit sales next year until we’re back in our pre-pandemic situation,” Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton explained.

In some ways, unforced PR errors aside, the problem might be that there needs to be multiple mainstream players in the SBC space.

The band, if you’re not familiar, is a an indie-rock band, power-pop with a just a light touch of punk, something lead singer and primary lyricist John K. Samson earned the hard way by performing for years with the Winnipeg punk band Propagandhi.

There’s something academic about Samson’s writing style that makes it seem personal and studied, not quite emo, but maybe in the same ballpark. Like, say, Craig Finn, he came to a sort of mainline rock sound after having seen a couple of things. But the resulting music was much more approachable and introspective than his punk roots perhaps suggest. I guess the way I’d describe it the vibe is, “what happens to the punk guy when he’s no longer really the punk guy?”

Anyway, I bring The Weakerthans up because they are responsible for hands-down the best life-transition record out there, 2000’s Left & Leaving, an album that perhaps has few equivalents (The Wrens’ Meadowlands, perhaps?) but represents a certain end-of-your-20s vibe, where you suddenly realize that you need to move forward but you’re not quite sure what that moving forward looks like. The first song, called “Everything Must Go!,” speaks to an emotional purging, and it kind of evolves from there.

I’ve been thinking about this album the last couple of days, because I think it really describes what is happening with social media right now. You don’t know who’s sticking around, or who you need to work a little harder to keep in touch with, but it feels like people are desiring an escape from the moment. And that is a vibe Left & Leaving plays into throughout the whole album, but especially on the title track.

A few sample lyrics:

The stain in the carpet, this drink in my hand
The strangers whose faces I know
We meet here for our dress rehearsal to say
I wanted it this way
Wait for the year to drown
Spring forward, fall back down
I’m trying not to wonder where you are

All this time
Lingers, undefined
Someone choose
Who’s left and who’s leaving

He’s singing about Winnipeg, but he could very easily be singing about Twitter over the last month.

On Sunday evening, after witnessing an actual astronaut, the twin brother of a senator who helped his wife recover from a horrible attempt on her life, get aggressively attacked by a fake astronaut and his fair-weather followers for the crime of defending a public servant and a marginalized community, I pulled the trigger. I locked my Twitter account. I will soon be on the left side of the left and leaving argument.

I have struggled with the left and leaving argument in my head for a few weeks. Will I be missing someone if I leave? Will people I care about just quit social media altogether?

There are some awkward things that need to be considered as we make this big transition, subcultural shifts that we must prepare ourselves for. People from underrepresented groups, will find themselves caught in the middle of an exodus, and we need to find ways to ensure they can make it to the next step, whatever that is.

But the alternative is increasingly becoming untenable. At least for me. I know others have different calculus. That’s fine. But I hope we stay connected somehow, in some way.

But it is ultimately a collection of journalists, and those journalists have a union, the New York Times Guild. Today, those journalists, along with lots of other support teams that help manage the paper, are staying home, taking part in a one-day walkout, the first that the paper has dealt with in decades.

The sticking issue for the 1,100 striking employees, which involves a contract that has gone unsigned for about 21 months now, is pay—a strange thing to have to negotiate about given that the Times is one of the few newspapers that is doing really well right now. As NPR put the discussion:

Union members, most of whom are journalists, but also ad salespeople, security guards and others, are questioning why they cannot share more concretely in the strong financial run The Times has enjoyed. In other words: If not during flush times, then when? And they say that drawing out negotiations has not aided them, contending that management only picked up the pace of concessions as the day-long strike neared.

In many ways, the NYT directly benefits from its rarefied position as a paper of record. It has acquired large companies. It has found success in new areas, such as games and cooking. And its leadership has earned handsomely from these moves.

But the Times is ultimately a paper of talented people, and those people deserve to take part in the Times’ success because they helped the NYT earn that rarefied position.

Strikes in the journalism field are relatively rare these days, with the most recent notable one taking place at G/O Media back in March in response to contractual issues and shifts in leadership that put teams at the mercy of unfavorable decisions. G/O’s strike was successful—the journalists at Kotaku and Jezebel and Gizmodo were back at work, contract in hand, soon after making their point of view known.

(Wan Chen/Unsplash)

The Times clearly approaches this from more of a position of strength than G/O Media does. After all, the Times dominates the discourse and its success makes it one of the few newspapers that has maintained a position of strength in the digital era. But nonetheless, the union being able to show its power in this way is important to see, even from a symbolic standpoint.

I’m a fan of the Times, even if I have quibbles with some of its choices, particularly in its opinion section. I think that it serves a key role as a paper of record, and it has done more to support archival work than nearly every other paper of its type. An investment in a Times subscription is an investment in the history of journalism, and Tedium links to a lot of archived Times stories.

But that investment rings hollow if the people who do all the hard work of gathering information, editing it, and presenting it don’t properly see the benefits of the hard work they do. This is especially the case at a time when Times journalists are facing increasing pressure to limit their external presence, whether on social media or in newsletters they own and produce. The dynamic of journalism has changed—and this contract, beyond money, reflects the fact that those journalists should have a say in how those changes impact their jobs.

So, take a day off from the Times. It will be there where you left it when the strike is over. Hopefully, a contract will be there, too.

A recent report from the company Density, which tracks utilization of office buildings, found that in February 2020, before the pandemic had hit in full-force, offices were generally utilized at a rate of about 40 percent. By comparison, now the rate is much closer to 19 percent overall, but as the company’s Nellie Hyatt notes, “Mondays are behaving a lot like Fridays.”

At this time, offices are utilized just 11 percent on Fridays, but Mondays are easily in second place, at 16 percent. This makes the compelling case that Tuesdays are the new Monday.

Is this a problem? I think it depends on your vantage point. If you run a city, you might find the cut in foot traffic to be a troubling trend. As highlighted in a piece in Insider this morning, office space utilization has dipped from 95 percent to 47 percent, meaning that not only is office utilization down overall, it’s in part because offices are basically sitting unused or unrented.

“Not unlike how deindustrialization led to abandoned factories and warehouses, the pandemic has led downtowns into a new period of transition,” writer Emil Scandal explained. “In the 1920s factories were replaced by gleaming commercial high-rises occupied by white-collar workers, but it’s not clear yet what today’s empty skyscrapers will become. What is clear is that an office-centric downtown is soon to be a thing of the past.”

Is it a bad thing if your office is empty four days a week—or more? (Raj Rana/Unsplash)

This is obviously bad if you’re, say, the mayor of a large city whose local economy relies on sales tax. (To which I argue, convert it to cheap housing!) It might also be bad if you are a leader and you prefer that your organization works in the same place.

But I think that there is potential to strike a balance for more diverse office experiences. The Los Angeles Times recently noted how the cosmetics company L’Oréal has managed to attract more employees back to the office by offering a concierge service and improving the office building’s amenities. But even there, workers are allowed two days a week outside of the office—days that are usually taken. Mondays and Fridays are the most likely victims of remote work.

To offer a contrast, if things go further into a 100 percent remote direction, that could be better for the country overall, as it could diversify the country away from being quite so centralized, allowing more cities of all sizes to benefit from the experiences of larger cities, for instance.

In some cases, you could argue that the pendulum swung too far in a centralized direction. During the early 2010s, for example, it was becoming more common for journalism to be focused on a handful of urban areas—New York, D.C., Chicago, and L.A., with a strong lean on the first two—despite the fact that many of these journalists were covering the whole country. Given the trends of the past decade, I’d suggest it was perhaps bad for the discourse. I think that part of this reflects the conflict between centralized leadership and the actual work.

So maybe it makes sense that we just embrace that people are going to be in the office a lot less moving forward, on Mondays or any other day. Or at all. It’s not a bad thing.

But something hit me over the weekend that I think is worth talking about. Friday night, in the hours after Matt Taibbi handed in his press card to do content marketing for Elon Musk, having run my mouth a few times out of frustration with the situation that had unfolded on social media this evening—the owner of a social network actively digging through his company’s old trash to play into a forgotten political scandal—I just felt compelled to lock my Twitter account before I went to bed.

I then unlocked it the next morning. But after another day of the overwrought reaction to Taibbi’s thread, I locked it again Saturday night. I unlocked it on Sunday morning and … I guess, as I write this, I’ll keep it open.

But I instead decided to tweet this:

And after a bit of soul-searching, I think I figured out what exactly made me mad about the Taibbi thread: It didn’t exist to push forward a political scandal, try as it might, but it instead dumped gasoline all over a fractured timeline at a sensitive time. Musk knew it would get a rise out of people, which boosts engagement and attention, so he just let it happen.

At some point, you feel like you’re being manipulated to be a part of a rich man’s soap opera.

I have never taken an anti-social-media stance, and I don’t necessarily think that now is the time that I begin to do so, but I think that, beyond the sheer sloppiness of the effort—failing to block out email addresses, for one thing—the attempt to get us all talking about Hunter Biden’s laptop again feels less like an attempt to build a social network and more like an attempt to see who else will bend and say “screw it, I’m done with this.”

But the thing is, Twitter has always been like this, encouraging you to have an opinion on a topic you didn’t even know was a thing 10 minutes ago. It’s what makes it powerful, but also what makes it toxic. But this combination of toxicity and power is becoming more combustible than usual at this current moment, and I think that in some ways, the best you can do is try to tone back some of the impacts.

In the past few weeks, I’ve tried to take steps to right-size my focus on Twitter. Over the past few weeks, I have grayscaled my desktop Twitter experience in an attempt to make it less enticing to search for hours. I’m posting on Mastodon more instead.

And most recently, I removed the app from my phone and only access it from my web browser, an intentional step making it harder to mindlessly surf the site all day. I think that too often, it becomes second nature to want to complain about things given a soapbox. The problem is that the owner of this platform seems to want to invent things for us to be mad about.

I won’t give in. There are many more ways to live your life than being performatively mad just because a trending topic or tweet told you to focus this way. Let’s find some other way to experience the world. We don’t need this window into the world if all it’s going to do is make us mad all the time.

And the result is that Hive Social, one of the networks that had seemed to draw the interest of the public, is completely non-functional because its servers are down.

And the reason that they’re down comes down to a security warning from the cybersecurity group Zerforschung, which pointed out in big letters on its website, “⚠️ Warning: do not use Hive Social 👉🐝👈,” which really says it all.

Much has been said about the fact that the company has evolved from its tiny-team roots to have millions of users, but what hasn’t perhaps caught the attention of interested users is that the app’s small number of developers are very green and have not worked on tools of this nature at scale before. And that means that, unlike the theoretical security problems that come with using a Mastodon server that has an admin you don’t trust, Hive Social has some coding errors that are so bad that pretty much any data you offer, down to your email address, is at risk.

Zerforschung felt the errors were so substantial—editing other people’s posts in the feed substantial—and the response from Hive Social’s team so haphazard and lacking, that they just reported the flaws a mere four days after first discovering them.

“After multiple attempts to contact the company we finally reached them by phone and they acknowledged the report,” the company said. “After multiple days and multiple reminders by us, they claimed to have fixed all issues. However multiple vulnerabilities we reported still exist at the time of writing.”

Hive’s response to this report? Turn off the servers. Currently, Hive does not load anything at all. It has promised to be back in a couple of days. While they took the site offline, don’t be fooled—this is the definition of making repairs while flying the plane, and speaks to the positioning security took in the app’s development.

Had it grown out its community more slowly, it might have caught these things over time, but fast growth means fast scrutiny.

Now, to be clear, I think we can make a distinction here. Obviously prior social networks, most clearly Facebook and Snapchat, came from small teams of creators that were relatively green and still in school when they first started. New networks should be allowed to grow, and you’ll see in replies to Hive on Twitter that many are giving the creators the benefit of the doubt.

But Hive, which is getting tons of attention, has just a small number of employees and millions of users—which goes against a lot of the reason people want to leave Twitter in the first place, poor content moderation. In a way, Zerforschung calling them out on security issues is a way of telling us, the public, to be consistent.

I think if there is going to be a mass exodus from Twitter, we can’t just go somewhere in which we’ll make similar mistakes, or more concerningly, bigger ones.

Hive Social looks cool and appears to have some thoughtful ideas behind what makes a good social media experience, but we’re 20 years in and that’s simply not enough anymore. Security can’t be back-burnered.

We have been given a rare chance, as a culture of social media addicts, to break a cycle we keep repeating and move to something that isn’t just owned by somebody who stands to make billions of dollars from your decision.

Unfortunately, we’re in real risk of falling into the same well as before, convinced that the open choice is somehow too complicated. That has meant that two separate social networks, Post and Hive, have driven interest from Twitter’s failings, away from open networks like Mastodon or the broader Fediverse, or even legacy networks that have generally proven good corporate citizens, like Automattic’s take on Tumblr.

Don’t fall into the well again.

Usually, the hot new social network gains agility from a mix of good timing, good luck, a strong onboarding game, and interest from the right group of people. (Basically, the idea that the network is quote-unquote “hip” comes to mind.) One can imagine that Facebook and Snapchat benefited from the fact that they were launched by students at high-profile schools (Harvard and Stanford, respectively), putting them in close proximity to future movers and shakers. But other social networks managed to catch onto a certain moment, and that moment helped to build momentum in a lasting way.

Of course, the distinctive thing about all of these networks is that each ultimately is centralized, rather than being built on an open protocol. And that means that they are built to generate value for their founders. They are built for onboarding, not for long-term growth, which means that they lead with cool features, not with promises of sustainability.

And that’s where commercial networks often falter. The financial incentive has created problems over time that have helped to complicate the shape of social media. The immense value of any given social network has ultimately been in data, rather than by offering services to the creator. And that has meant leaning hard on data-mining or advertising-driven business models—and companies that don’t do that ultimately find themselves out of the conversation entirely.

Which means that the odds are good that the next variant of this model is likely going to be more of the same. (Hive’s problem is that it appears to be built to generate future investment, and has basically no moderators; Post News, meanwhile, has investment from the same firm that invested in all the other social networks, immediately making it suspect to those in the know.)

The problem with wells is that once you’re inside one, it’s hard to get out unscathed. (Poul Cariov/Unsplash)

Programmer and blogger Jamie Zawinski, better known as jwz, did a great service to this conversation by giving voice to this point on his blog, in a post titled “PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet.” He points out the VC-driven tendency to build apps for different platforms, specifically mobile, rather than for the open web, which offers end users some degree of control over the experience:

The thing that makes the Internet useful is interoperability. These companies hate that. The thing that makes the Internet become more useful is the open source notion that there will always be more smart people who don’t work for your company than that do, and some of those people will find ways to expand on your work in ways you never anticipated. These companies hate that, too. They’d rather you have nothing than that you have something they don’t own.

This is a control play, as these applications can siphon more data from you using this method. This invariably leads to a road of new features that you didn’t want, friends that disappear from your feeds because the algorithms said they weren’t engaging enough, and lots more ads.

For a time, Twitter was one of the best commercial networks when it came to not forcing you into their walled garden—it, after all, allowed third-party apps, and allowed them to interoperate with the rest of the Web. (If we can’t have open and noncommercial, a flexible experience is a good backup, because it gives you, the consumer, at least some degree of control.) The problem was, because of the commercial nature of the network, this eventually fell to the wayside as Twitter tried gaining control of the client experience. In recent years, the company started opening up again just before Elon came into the picture and threw gasoline on the chaos. Bummer; they could have had a shot.

The thing is, as great as Mastodon could end up being, I’ll be the first to admit that it has some rough edges. But it has a great lead feature that none of its competitors have yet replicated—its adherence to the open web. Unfortunately, alternative networks can throw marketing money at all sorts of other features trying to convince you that those features matter more. But the only feature that truly matters at this moment, even more than how “hip” a network is, is if it talks to every other network. If it’s open, even better.

You have control right now, as an end user. Don’t give it up too easily.

But a fresh controversy involving the singer-songwriter being asked to do something that the average young adult might actually struggle to do just highlights the weirdness of autograph culture.

Simply put, Dylan put out a book recently, and as a part of this book’s release cycle, he released a small number of autographed copies, with book buyers paying a handsome sum of $599 per book. Dylan, who is 81 years old, for some reason had been committed by his publisher to signing hundreds of books, a daunting task for even the average person, let alone someone of Dylan’s stature. (He had previously committed to signing artistic prints, which he had done by himself before about 2019.)

But as the folk/rock icon began suffering the effects of vertigo, this state of affairs proved untenable, in part because COVID-19 precautions meant that he couldn’t work closely with a helper to help ease the presumably daunting process of signing hundreds of books.

Given the unique circumstances, a contractual deadline, and the requirements of capitalism, Dylan eventually agreed to use an autopen, a machine that allowed him to sign multiple products at once, after being told it was something that lots of people did when signing products.

One problem, as you might guess: Rock collectors are obsessive, and they quickly figured out that Dylan didn’t actually do much of the signing, uncovering 17 separate signature types within the books.

I have a hard enough time signing one thing, let alone hundreds. (marfis75/Flickr)

And that, of course, did not go over well with fans, who paid good money for books that only featured an exact facsimile of Dylan’s signature, rather than the real thing.

As Dylan put it in a Facebook apology:

I’ve been made aware that there’s some controversy about signatures on some of my recent artwork prints and on a limited-edition of Philosophy Of Modern Song.  I’ve hand-signed each and every art print over the years, and there’s never been a problem.

However, in 2019 I had a bad case of vertigo and it continued into the pandemic years.  It takes a crew of five working in close quarters with me to help enable these signing sessions, and we could not find a safe and workable way to complete what I needed to do while the virus was raging.  So, during the pandemic, it was impossible to sign anything and the vertigo didn’t help.  With contractual deadlines looming, the idea of using an auto-pen was suggested to me, along with the assurance that this kind of thing is done ‘all the time’ in the art and literary worlds.

First off, whoever convinced Dylan that he needed to sign all of these books despite his living-legend status and the fact that he is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars really did a disservice to the singer-songwriter. The art prints, which sell for thousands of dollars, were one thing and likely would have been manageable otherwise, but we’re talking literally hundreds of books.

(Second: Dylan appears to be a two-spaces-after-period kind of guy, a rarity in this day and age.)

This is, simply put, a waste of Dylan’s time, and a controversy he should not be needing to deal with at this point in his career.

But nonetheless, he is—and he has promised to work “with Simon & Schuster and my gallery partners to do just that.”

The lesson here: Don’t let capitalism force you to sign hundreds of books by hand when struggling with a physical ailment well past normal retirement age.

It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S. and I’ve been working pretty hard lately, so I’m taking a break today. With that in mind, I wanted to pull this piece from a year ago in which I get relatively close to discussing the things that I’m thankful for. The only thing that’s missing, really, is my wife Cat—who I met immediately after this period in my life. Hope you enjoy the read.

About 18 years ago, I made the snap decision that, while I really liked the Mac Mini I had just purchased, I really wanted to be able to leave the house with my computer sometimes.

So, I bought a somewhat-out-of-date iBook and sold the Mac Mini. That iBook gave me so many problems, but I think it eventually proved an important gateway to how I experienced the world. 

I was very much a nomad during this period of my life; I moved from Wisconsin to South Carolina essentially for no other reason than to work for a newspaper. In many ways, the iBook was the only constant in my life. Until it wasn’t.

My screen (albeit on an iBook G4 rather than a G3) was doing something somewhat similar to this when I lived in South Carolina. (dtack/Flickr)

One day, the capacitor on the graphics chip blew out and I was basically unable to turn it on for any sort of sustained period. So, for a few months, I just didn’t have a laptop at home anymore. Instead, I ended up just staying longer at work to use my work machine.

I was young at this point and had student loans and bad credit, and worked a job that was relatively low-paying, so getting to the point where I could buy a laptop again took me a while. But when I did, I bought the same damn computer—either because I’m crazy or did not know any better.

On the plus side, however, round two with the iBook turned out to be a pretty good move. Soon enough, I ended up moving to Virginia, where I worked at another newspaper, and this time, I lived in an actual city environment. And that meant the laptop was a constant in my bag, allowing me to go anywhere and pull it out and surf the web. This was freeing for me at the time, especially in an era before smartphones. (I, at this time, believe I had a Motorola Razr.)

In this context, the iBook did something important: Because I made the decision to leave the house and go to a coffee shop, I met other people because I had it. I found my people because I had it. Even though I spent a lot of time clicking away on news stories and stuff at the coffee shop, I would slowly meet people at this coffee shop with the help of this laptop that I owned. Maybe we started geeky conversations; maybe we’d go grab a beer afterwards. But eventually, I put it away and talked to people. This laptop—this old PowerPC workhorse—actually became key to having a social life.

Here’s one of the songs I wrote during that period. It was recorded on an iBook.

It was also a boon creatively. One of the only other things that made the leap from Wisconsin to South Carolina to Virginia was my guitar. And together, I used that guitar and that iBook to record an album. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I loved lo-fi music at the time, and that album largely used the iBook’s microphone to give it a scratchy vibe.

But things eventually started to degrade, both with the environment and my laptop. See, I lost my job at this paper because the paper shut down. It was late 2008, more than two years after Apple ditched PowerPC, and the laptop had also seen better days … at this point, the hinge had started to go.

It was basically the worst possible time for my screen to go to hell. I would find myself at the coffee shop holding up the laptop with a stack of books.

{asset:20309:img}

Based on the number of iBook disassembly images I found on Flickr, this was a popular machine to tear apart! (zero.the.hero/Flickr)

A close friend of mine, an engineer, offered to take that old busted laptop with the busted chip and borrow the hinge from that machine to put in my other machine, buying me some time.

Together this old machine and this new machine combined to become what we called the FrankenMac. I only used it for a short period of time, but it was the machine I started my blogging career on, the device that started ShortFormBlog … a combination of one laptop with a busted graphics chip and another laptop with a busted hinge.

I was laid off, waiting to hear back on an interview, with a laptop that was already showing its age. Perhaps I was feeling the pressure of the moment, I made a snap decision that could have turned out really bad had things not played out differently: I used some of my severance money to buy a new MacBook, in a snap decision.

The FrankenMac had to be retired. The site I had built on it would be produced on a block of aluminum rather than a block of polycarbonate.

But in the end, it worked out. I got a better job (the one I had interviewed for) in another new city. I met my wife in that new city, and even though the FrankenMac didn’t make it through to the present day, it got me to the next stage.

Years after becoming a super-nerd with a couple dozen computers to my name, I still think about the stack of books that held this old machine up sometimes. That was the machine that allowed me to become a writer and creative person … because, sometimes, I put it away and looked at the outside world.

But that quickly changed over the weekend, after Bob Iger, the longtime Disney CEO who had the foresight to leave the role directly before the pandemic, returned to his role after his successor, Bob Chapek, had a run that seemed not to please anyone.

Chapek’s unclear decisionmaking on issues like gay rights gave the state of Florida an opportunity to get out of an important agreement with Disney that treated the company like a quasi-governmental body. He upset the hierarchy of Hollywood by not bending to an A-list megastar whose payday had obviously been screwed over by the pandemic-era move to streaming.

And while we’re not going to get into fandom stuff, I’m sure someone is out there saying that there has been a decline in quality in Star Wars and Marvel films since Chapek took over, because that’s sounds like something someone would say.

It was bad enough that less than two weeks ago, Jim Cramer of all people was calling for Chapek’s head after an earnings report that showed the company’s direct-to-consumer offerings were floundering.

Apparently, the Disney board watches Mad Money.

The guy that Bob Chapek was told he didn’t need to worry about. Bob Iger, shown in 2015. (Thomas Hawk/Flickr)

On Sunday evening, as many top Disney executives were attending Elton John’s final concert in North America, the decision to bring Bob Iger back was announced publicly, one of the rare executive decisions of the last month that has gained a lot of attention and had nothing to do with a certain social media website or a certain crypto scheme.

In some ways, you can see why Bob Chapek was just not going to live up to the prior Bob. Iger, in his reign, managed to acquire Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox—and largely keep each of them successful. That is the kind of stuff business legends do, and in that light, you can understand how Chapek might have wilted in comparison. After all, Iger had essentially quintupled the company’s size in 15 years, and all Chapek was really being asked to do was keep the status quo working.

Add to this an icy relationship between the two Bobs—per the Los Angeles Times, Chapek was miffed that Iger had taken credit for helping Chapek run the company during the early months of the pandemic—and you have a formula for a comeback. (Also, let’s be fair, what Iger did during the early months of COVID-19 is something that an executive chairman who left a CEO role two months prior might offer during a once-in-a-lifetime economic and health crisis. Chapek should not have let his ego get to him.)

I think in many ways, the Disney board blinked, because they saw the potential of the man who had built their empire going somewhere else and running a competitor. And, well, Chapek just hadn’t lived up to what Iger had done. (On the other hand, likely nobody could. Someone able to successfully manage the mergers of four large companies in 15 years has a rare gift.)

I think if I were Bob Chapek, I’d embrace my $23 million parachute and appreciate that I could tell my grandkids I got to run Disney for a couple of years.

Hey all, thanks to all that read the recent issues of How to Mastodon. We’re transitioning back to a more traditional MidRange format, with a 30-minute time limit, starting with this issue.

Social media has dominated the way that we think about culture in so many ways for so long, and it’s in large part because the things we value as a society have been built around strategies that seem to encourage engagement at all costs.

As a society, this means that your attention is constantly being divided and broken up in unhealthy, unfocused ways. And that lack of focus, in the wrong hands, can feel absolutely overwhelming.

Right now, as highlighted by the pop-up newsletter that replaced MidRange for the past two weeks, we are in a transitional stage for social media, and honestly … if you want to step back, now is a great time to do so.

That’s not to say that you have to step back, or even that you should. But it is to say that, if you are finding the addictive behaviors that come with social media to be problematic, you have been given an excuse to step away to some degree by the current situation.

Social media is addictive. It is a constant draw of your time and attention, and too few of us actually have a healthy relationship with it. Some may even have it worse than others, in part because of the way that feedback loops drive instant gratification and scatter your focus.

There’s been research done on this point. A 2017 study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, tend to reveal their nature on Twitter, as they tend to be the kind of people who post in the middle of the night, for example.

“People with ADHD are experiencing more mood swings and more negativity,” study co-author Lyle Ungar said. “They tend to have problems self-regulating.”

And that problem with self-regulation is often exploited by social media, which can put new things directly in front of your face whenever you want them. A social media network can capture the drifting mind and keep it enthralled for hours, especially if it helps drive engagement that rewards you for all those thoughts you’re putting out into the world for free.

Naturally, you may never truly be able to let go of a social network like Twitter. Perhaps you have professional reasons for being there. But you may be able to tamp down on some of its attention-dividing nature right now given the broken trust it has created with its community.

I’m not saying that this will singlehandedly end any problems you have with focus or division of mental energies, but it may be an important starting point for figuring out ways to keep things in balance. Maybe you might make your screen grayscale, or play brown noise in your ears.

But I think the big lesson right now is that social media brings in a lot of negative side effects and habits that we may not be well-equipped to manage. Now may be a good time to let these habits starve a little bit. After all, you’re not the one who just paid $44 billion dollars for it.

I think a lot of new or less-seasoned users, are also learning things about the fediverse as time goes on, and we should give them room to learn. I’ve been around Mastodon in bits and pieces since 2016, and even I’ve gotten a lot of useful feedback from old-timers about these newsletters, and I think that encouraging an environment where everyone is learning is perfect for this moment.

So before I dive into this next topic—the one that I end this six-part pop-up series on, I encourage you to keep learning. I will likely discuss Mastodon in future issues of MidRange, because it’s an interesting topic that will need people talking about it. (If you’re not subscribed, now is a good time to do so!)

Anyway, let’s get to it.

Well, This Is Awkward …

On Mastodon carrying a reputation among some as the social networking version of “fetch”

As a journalist and writer, I have been posed with a lot of social networks over the years, many of which have found themselves the source of much hype.

At least some of that hype is the result of a prime-the-pump mentality that comes with venture capital, looking for ways to improve a success story by getting all the right placements at the right time.

But occasionally, a network comes along out of nowhere and you find yourself flat-footed. Why this? Why, out of all the things out there, was this the one that grabbed attention?

I think that Mastodon, for some people, carries that reputation. I’ve seen a lot of people complain, for example, about the name not being good, without really going much further about why the name is terrible, and that being enough of a deterrent not to use the service. People are frustrated with the onboarding process; people don’t understand why basic features like search are so underpowered. And people really don’t get why there isn’t just one server, and aren’t convinced about your arguments that “it’s kinda like email.”

They’re annoyed that they might have to learn a new thing, and that new thing comes with a lot of unknowns.

But on the other hand, the network has made incredible progress in just a couple of weeks. News sites and big-name apps alike have staked out claims on the network, as have social networking-friendly celebrities like Kathy Griffin, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, and George Takei. As network founder Eugen Rochko recently pointed out, even former Twitter employees have chosen to build a network on his creation.

Additionally, I think that there is a real risk of not seeing the full potential of what’s here because you find yourself thinking about this in commercial social network terms. With that in mind, I want to point out the writings of Chris Trottier, a user who has emerged as something of an evangelist for the fediverse, and has been working on applications to serve it. He has been working hard to make the case, for instance, that Mastodon should not be seen as just a new social network, but as one small hub of many in a new decentralized world of social networking. He has a lot of points of view and is helping to fill in a lot of gaps for new users at the moment who are just trying to figure this all out, which you can dig into on his account if you feel so compelled, but I think the key thing is that if you want to learn more about it, you have options.

In many ways, the fediverse carries a role not unlike other heavily hyped things, such as the blockchain, Web3, or the metaverse, except it has actual use cases, rather than nebulous potential. You can make the fediverse a useful part of your life now if you so wanted—and that differentiates it from a lot of other hype targets. As the EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Rory Mir put it in an article this week, the fediverse matters because it has untapped potential:

To be clear: there is nothing magical about federated worlds. If a federated social media is better than the centralized incumbents, it will be because people made a conscious choice to make it better—not because of any technological determinism. Open, decentralized systems offer new choices towards a better online world, but it’s up to us to make those choices.

Nonetheless, there are always risks with these kinds of things, don’t get me wrong. In many ways, the email comparison I touched on above is actually fairly apt, whether or not people “get it.” But there are, of course, risks. For one, email has become an increasingly centralized beast as large companies have taken to banning messages that don’t come from trusted hosts. Running an email server is a difficult thing to do in 2022. What’s to say the fediverse might end up the same way?

I think, if you’re curious about Mastodon, you have to think of it in part as a gateway drug to something that could have more potential in the long term—which, as a result, makes it worth trying, in the way you awkwardly cozied up to Snapchat or Pinterest back in the day. If it doesn’t hit even 10 percent of the scale of something like Twitter, that’s fine, because people should choose social networks because they’re happy with them and gain value from them, not because they are their path to maximum reach.

And don’t get hung up on the name.

Tips & Tricks

Hashtags gain additional superpowers

As I’ve highlighted a few times on here, hashtags play an important role in the Mastodon ecosystem, in part because of the fact that search is intentionally limited.

But with the release of Mastodon 4 this week, the tool has gained a new capability of being able to be added to your main feed through a follow functionality. (Note that your server needs to be upgraded to the latest version to use this functionality.) By hitting the plus button, you will suddenly get that entire feed of hashtags pushed into your timeline.

To turn it off, just search for that hashtag again and unfollow.

Obviously, you don’t want to do this on every hashtag under the sun. You may want to narrow it down to a topic that only gets a few posts a day, rather than something that gets thousands an hour. But the plus side is that you have the choice to do it, and if you’re new to the service and don’t have many people you’re following, you can fill your timeline with #cats or #memes and have something entertaining to view.

Or you can just ignore it. The best part of features like this is that you don’t have to use them to get something out of the service.

Links & Stuff

» Beyond the great piece I linked above, EFF also has a decent discussion about the privacy and security considerations of Mastodon. Their take: While not perfect, its transparency is welcomed.

» Europe’s digital privacy regulations were built to impact large companies such as Twitter, Meta, and ByteDance. What will they do about the fediverse? On Tech Policy Press, a pair of digital policy experts dive into the issue.

» An interesting discussion point from Domain Name Wire—the rise of new Mastodon servers is directly helping some of the more obscure top-level domains, like .social or .lol, gain popularity.

One Killer Take

Djoerd Hiemstra, an expert and researcher on search engines, put up a great thread this morning highlighting how he shifted his point of view on Mastodon needing search after engaging with the community. It’s an excellent thread and I highly recommend you check it out.

Alright, that closes up shop on How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in. Keep following MidRange for more hot takes with a tight deadline.

Speaking of making things count, yesterday was the big release of Mastodon 4, a significant upgrade for the software that adds a bunch of new features, including a handful of things that Twitter has long had (the ability to translate posts in the feed) along with some things it has never had (the ability to filter a follower’s post by language).

But the nice thing about upgrades like these in Mastodon is that they’re not prescriptive for the most part—they instead represent suggestions. And that makes all the difference.

New Horizons for Social Media

(FORTYTWO/Unsplash)

You have the room to change this technology

Yesterday, I talked about the idea of the “Infernal September,” the idea that Mastodon in particular and the fediverse in general were facing a trial by fire, and how that would affect the culture.

I’d like to flip that to some degree and make the case that there are likely cases where new perspectives can help positive reshape the approaches to decision-making that has already taken hold. Or, that those existing perspectives can be ignored entirely.

Part of the reason certain cultural norms have taken hold on Mastodon is because the users got there first helped to define the original shape of the technology. Those users, often from marginalized communities, wanted certain things out of their experiences, and that meant that they could influence the program as well as the design of the servers.

With open-source software, the commons are king, and I think that this kind of influence is a relatively new feeling in social media. See, social media has in the past worked where features were essentially foisted onto you, with no ability to turn them down if you did not want them.

Famously, Facebook’s many redesigns over the years are a great example of this in action. The News Feed, one of its most iconic features, was a hugely controversial change at first because of the way it changed the experience for end users. It raised privacy concerns. That might seem old school now, but I think with some retrospect, some might argue that while a fundamental feature of Facebook today, the News Feed ended up being a harbinger for things to come.

Later redesigns also proved controversial, but users were not in a place to resist them because ultimately they were working within someone’s walled garden, and the old design didn’t meet some financial target.

Outside of the walled garden, you have more choices. (Xavi Cabrera/Unsplash)

With open-source software, there is flexibility to have some say over how the software gets used, and what gets added. A good example of what I mean here can actually be seen in version 4 of Mastodon. Because of the added importance of hashtags on Mastodon, the service now makes it possible to follow hashtags in the way you might follow individual users. Also, it is now possible to edit posts, no additional handwringing or gating or long debates about it in the public square. It’s just there.

But on the other hand, if you run a server, there may be some things you might not want. Maybe you don’t want your users to edit their posts, so you disable that. (They can go elsewhere if they need that feature.) Maybe you hate Twitter’s trending topics feature and you don’t want an equivalent on your server. If you’re the admin, you can turn it off; if you’re not, you can make the case to the admin. And if you don’t like the decisions of the server admin, you can start your own server.

This is not a new phenomenon. A famous example from the world of Linux: In 2011, an upgrade to the desktop environment GNOME proved so controversial among many end users that some users made the decision to fork the old version of the project and continue to use it. That fork, called MATE, is still active today.

In a world of open-source social media software, as long as it can plug into the main thing (that being the Fediverse), end users still have plenty of choice. That choice can shape the project or it can simply shape your instance.

The fact is, though, we have it. And that means you can embrace or ignore it as much as you’d like.

Tips & Tricks

I got the checkmarks on my profile because I include a link to my Mastodon profile on my websites.

Wanna get verified? It’s as easy as putting a special link on your website

You likely heard about the mess that Twitter ran into last week after it tried changing up the way it managed its verification.

And you may wonder, given how broken verification is on Twitter, how Mastodon could make verification work on their side of the coin, and the answer is … quite easily, actually. If you own a specific website or have some notable thing closely associated with you (like I have this newsletter), if you add a link to your Mastodon profile with the addition of the rel=“me” tag to the anchor, you offer Mastodon two sides of verification that can prove your identity.

Sure, that’s not as in-depth as, say, showing a primary source your ID card. But it can go a long way to help tie you to existing identity on the internet, which is what verification is really all about.

If that doesn’t seem like enough, the Mastodon project offers this suggestion in its docs: “Because Mastodon can be self-hosted, there is no better way to verify your identity than to host Mastodon on your own domain, which people already trust.”

And if you want a more in-depth verification process that accounts for more in-depth security considerations, there is an option for that as well, in the form of Keyoxide, which verifies users through cryptography across a variety of platforms. At this time, it requires some technical knowledge to use, but it is even more foolproof if your goal is to prove you are who you are.

(If your goal is to win a special prize for notability, you won’t find that here.)

Links & Stuff

» Trying to wrap your head around Mastodon’s content moderation approach? You might find value in this academic paper, written by Alan Z. Sozenshtein of the University of Minnesota Law School, which makes the case that federation can be a strong control.

» Who said Mastodon instances couldn’t be high-concept? The instance Brands.town has found interest as a collection of accounts parodying various brands, such as Google, Spotify, and Duolingo. I wouldn’t trust the verification here.

» The Internet Archive has hit Mastodon, with founder Brewster Kahle making the case in a blog post against centralized social media. “We need a game with many winners,” he said.

One Killer Take

Dr. Johnathan Flowers, an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University Northridge, arguing in favor of the quote tweet on his Mastodon account, based on the communication styles of Black Twitter in particular. The entire thread is a useful way to understand critiques that marginalized communities have had about lacking features in Mastodon.

Alright, that’s it for issue five of How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in. Be sure to check out the final issue tomorrow for more!

This has been a fun change of pace for me, even if I likely won’t be doing it permanently. That said, I’m thinking about a way to give people the most out of this discussion so they feel like they are well-equipped for this strange new world, and I think in many ways, culture is the way to go.

The technical parts are the technical parts, but the culture is the element that requires some adjustment. And with that in mind, I’m focusing today’s issue on one of the most common refrains about the elephant site: that it’s in the midst of an Eternal September.

I don’t agree, but there are some elements that are worth discussing, so let’s get to it.

Cultural Pulse Check

Not an Eternal September, an Infernal September. (Marco Verch/Flickr)

The case that Mastodon isn’t really facing an Eternal September but something entirely different

So, if you’ve spent any amount of time on this social network of late you have most likely noticed people talking about the idea of the Eternal September, and how Mastodon is facing one.

For those not familiar, the Eternal September refers to a concept from the days of Usenet when, after years of new students stinking up the place at the beginning of each fall, the order of the ecosystem was forever broken when AOL connected its member base to Usenet.

And it makes sense that this conversation is coming up. After all, when a flood of new people come in, it can threaten to deeply change the makeup of a given community no matter what steps that community might take to protect its norms. (Additionally, as I mentioned last week, Mastodon is structured very similarly to Usenet, which at its core is a list of discussion groups, often without moderation.)

Now, it turns out that I have actually researched and thought about the topic of the Eternal September a lot in the past. I’m honestly of the opinion that there was only one of those, and the exact circumstances were unique to its moment, and that those reverberations ultimately were felt across the entire internet, even decades later.

In effect, the Eternal September was a form of gatekeeping. It discouraged these new users from getting too close or from learning too much about the more technical aspects of what was being discussed there. And it created a dynamic where people unfamiliar with a topic were uncomfortable with asking, one that persists on technology forums to this day.

There are a few key differences, however, between Mastodon/the broader fediverse. In 1993, Usenet had no way to batten down the hatches, really, because most of the groups were unmoderated. But in the case of Mastodon, there are much more powerful controls at play that create a significantly different experience. If you want to block a user’s entire domain, it is possible in Mastodon from the notifications menu. You could, technically speaking, shut off your instance from the entire world, recreating an effect not dissimilar to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village. (Sorry, I just spoiled that movie, but it’s been out for 18 years, so hopefully it didn’t hurt too much.)

The differentiator here, I think, is that the new users coming to Mastodon are by and large coming here by choice, and I think that the various communities, for the most part (as the fediverse is not a singular hive mind), aren’t necessarily opposed to the addition of new users. After all, Mastodon was specifically built to be an alternative version of Twitter, which means that in some sense, getting people to come from Twitter to an alternate platform was ultimately the goal.

(Marco Verch/Flickr)

Kye Fox, one of the users I’ve gotten to know a bit better in recent weeks since the recent pop-up in interest in Mastodon first came to life, came up with a new phrase to describe this state of affairs: It’s an “Infernal September.” For the most part, the old-timers want you here—as long as you make room for them. But because of the complex nature of norms, it’s very much a trial by fire, so don’t be surprised if something is lost in the process.

On Friday, I caught a user with a large profile transitioning over from Twitter essentially saying that, because primary developer Eugen Rochko made the case that content warnings weren’t used consistently across platforms, he would not use them. But on top of that, he said he would ignore any complaints about them. And given that he blogs almost exclusively about politics and has more than 100,000 followers on the bird site, this means end users are stuck having to adjust to his feed, rather than the other way around. I lightly chided the guy to have some compassion for the existing user base, and he blocked me.

That to me is the real risk right now—that people who don’t care about the norms of a new community will just barge in and expect us to bend to them. That’s different from an Eternal September. That’s a trial by fire.

The real risk is whether or not anything might be left in the end. Tim Bray, the former AWS executive who left in protest of the parent company’s stance on whistleblowers, has pointed out there may be real challenges to keeping that culture alive:

I respect unique online cultures. But there’s maybe a problem. If Twitter does implode, Mastodon could very quickly gain a whole bunch of new users, to the extent that long-term Mastodonians are like only 1 percent of the population, and the newer 99 percent has no appreciation of nor interest in “Mastodon culture”. The system is flexible enough that maybe there’s scope for an “og-mastodon” instance that would work in a more traditional way?

There have been some that have compared Mastodon to a Twitter with homeowners associations, and doing so while citing the most extreme examples. (Of course an academic community is going to have high moderation standards!)

But it’s worth pointing out that there are many neighborhoods, and you are given a choice as to which one makes the most sense for your needs or interests.

I guess what I’d say here is that making a new community work is a two-way street. Don’t be afraid to put a little work in.

Tips & Tricks

An example of what a DM looks like on Mastodon.

Don’t share your credit card number: A few direct-messaging differences to be aware of

Of the many things that you might run into on Mastodon that is distinctly different than Twitter is the private messaging function. It exists, but it is not the same as Twitter’s function, in part because it is not quite as secure, and its differences can create some potential awkwardness.

For one thing, adding someone to a DM group is as easy as simply mentioning them. But that means that if you’re having a conversation about a third person, if you mention them, you’ll suddenly find your criticism exposed to them, which means that your backchannel is in threat of getting awkward.

And for another, DMs take place in the same pool as every other conversation, making it a little hazy when the public conversation ends and where the DM begins.

There’s also the concern of your admin having the ability to read your DMs, which … let’s face it, is probably also true of Twitter. Be mindful of how you use DMs on non-encrypted platforms.

Dell Cameron, a Gizmodo editor who has been doing some great work around these parts for a little bit, has a great guide up for determining when to use a direct message on Mastodon.

As with Twitter, there is no end-to-end encryption, so if you’re talking serious business, take it to Signal or a burner phone.

Links & Stuff

» Get a handle on your second factor. If security is an issue, it’s worth noting that Mastodon has robust second-factor authentication capabilities that don’t rely on the less-secure SMS. Sam Schlinkert, a longtime Mastodon user, has a great guide on setting it up.

» If you’re looking for a Mastodon server that’s hosted and managed by a company with a generally good reputation, the web browser Vivaldi recently launched an instance that allows users of that browser to sign with their existing login, meaning that the onboarding process is easy.

» A good strategy for finding your community from the admin of the activism.openworlds.info instance: Follow a lot of people, then cull out the boring bits as you find the most interesting ones.

One Killer Take

Joshua Topolsky, a key figure in the creation of at least three popular technology sites, posted something on Friday that helps to reinforce the general idea I was discussing above—that this is an opportunity to reset our approach to social media.

Just turning Mastodon into another Twitter will lead to the same results in the end, if maybe fewer rocket enthusiast owners.

Alright, that’s the end of issue four of How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in. MidRange will be back next week!

Just a heads-up that the Mastodon pop-up will continue for another week. Thanks everyone for the great response—and I encourage you to check out the MidRange and Tedium archives for more!

To me, the technical parts of how Mastodon works are interesting, but in many ways they’re sort of secondary to what really makes the network tick.

And that is the community. If you were to compare Mastodon or other federated services to early Twitter, for example, you would find a similar mix of unique culture already curated by the community, one that, without them, would devalue the community.

You can’t simply take the people from an old network, even one as dominant as Twitter, and just transfer them over to a new place and expect the same result. Mastodon, from a distance, seems like a close clone of Twitter built around free-and-open-source principles, but when you look closer, you see interesting details that the prior network did not have, details that, while seeming small and subtle, have a significant effect on the overall experience.

One of those things is search.

Explaining Mastodon Culture

(Chris Beckett/Flickr)

Why Mastodon’s search is not as good, and may never be as good, as Twitter’s … by design

If you’re new to Mastodon, one of the most interesting thing you’ve probably noticed about it is that the search seems to work against the user to some degree.

This can feel a bit backwards. In many ways, search is a solved problem. Google has been around for a quarter-century now, and there have been a lot of innovations since then. Sure, not every search engine is great, but for the most part, most searches are able to find things when you type in basic terms.

Not Mastodon. The search is limited to just four things:

• #Hashtags
• Usernames
• User URLs
• Post URLs

This means that things you might have taken for granted, such as diving into trending topics or using a social network as a way to keep up with the news, have intentionally been limited.

A lot of this comes down to Mastodon’s roots as a community for those outside the margins, who did not feel welcome on mainstream social networks. Because it spent its first half-decade as a tool for those who were looking specifically for an alternative to the more toxic elements of Twitter, that led to some important decisions around its ultimate design.

And it’s not always been a smooth road. A 2019 piece on Mastodon in The Daily Dot paints a community that has been just as informed by trans and queer users as it has the decisions of the network’s primary developer, Eugen Rochko. People from marginalized communities helped to encourage controls that allowed the network to emphasize community, not reach.

And it’s likely for that reason that search has not evolved from this starting point. Simply put, its community did not want it.

This is not a debate that is happening in a bubble. Some of its biggest discussion points are actually emerging in real time. Earlier this week, a search tool called Fedsearch emerged as a way to easily search between different networks, and within hours of its release, the whole thing blew up, with the search functionality being taken offline and replaced with an apology, that reads as such:

Due to extreme backlash from the Mastodon community we decided to end the project, it is obviously not wanted by server admins.

While our intention was to provide the end-user with a global search to find information and friends, the concerns of its usage by trolls has been far greater amongst the community.

See for a discussion on the subject.

This is despite the fact that a number of users actually want a more traditional search tool. But the old-school users felt otherwise.

I ended up writing a Twitter thread about the state of affairs that gained a bit of attention, but I think the thing to take away from this from a search perspective is that what seems like a modest difference in functionality actually plays a significant role in how the network functions for the average user.

Twitter, in many ways, is like a library, where nearly everything on the network is visible and accessible at all times. You’re encouraged to search, because that’s what everyone else is doing, too. (Verified users get put on more prominent shelves, though I hear they want to make every shelf prominent.)

A Mastodon instance, by comparison, is like hanging out in someone’s home. And, although popular 16-bit role-playing games like Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger have taught us otherwise, the first thing you do when visiting a stranger’s home is not digging through the owner’s trash to see what you can find.

Mastodon is a network that favors the idea that the end user has a say in their visibility on the network. If they want to be found by random people, they’ll use a hashtag, end of story.

If you want to understand the cultural parameters here a little better, I recommend this blog post from Hugh Rundle.

Tips & Tricks

(Jan Baborák/Unsplash)

The power of the hashtag

So, with all of that said, I guess it’s important to emphasize the outsize value of hashtags on Mastodon, which seems even bigger than it does on other networks like Twitter or Instagram. Perhaps even Slack or Discord!

The hashtag becomes the primary way to find people talking about similar topics, and it means that finding new people often requires users to think more broadly in their interests than they might otherwise.

In fact, I would recommend for those looking to find a new server to hang out on, that they start somewhere very broad and open, use hashtags to get a feel for the type of content they like, then using those to decide on a server. Sorta like high school, where eventually you find your clique.

It can also be a way to highlight things you hope to talk about on your account. For example, I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to talk about one of my favorite operating systems, GeoWorks, so I put a call out asking GeoWorks enthusiasts to show themselves. If you’re into something obscure, don’t be afraid to use a hashtag to communicate it out.

Links & Stuff

» Be careful what you wish for. As conversation-friendly celebrities like Stephen Fry put their imprint on the Fediverse, they are likely to overload the network’s servers, writes Aral Balkan. (Maybe we’ll expect celebs to run their own instances?)

» Want to understand just how quickly the Fediverse is growing? The bot Mastodon Users has been tracking this growth since 2018, and currently it has user growth at more than 90,000 new users per day. (A week ago, it was a third of that.)

» Just need the TL;DR on this place? I recommend this Medium post from Tracy Hall, which explains some of Mastodon’s basics in simple terms.

One Killer Take

If there’s one takeaway you begin taking from all of this, if you’re a new Mastodon user, it’s this, as so eloquently put by Mike McHargue: Mastodon was designed as a reaction to Twitter, and it works differently as a result.

And so concludes the third issue of How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in. See you next week!

Thanks to everyone for the early response—and if you have been forwarded this newsletter, be sure to sign up for MidRange, as I will be covering this for at least the next couple of issues. I send this newsletter three times a week, with the next issue hitting Thursday. (I’m giving up the chance to write about the 2022 midterm elections in a timely fashion to write about this!)

Anyway, it’s a brave new world where Kathy Griffin is asking for technical support from fellow users and Mastodon is averaging more than 100,000 new users per day. Per SensorTower, the Mastodon iOS app is the most popular social networking app for the iPad and ranking in the top 50 for free apps across all categories on both iPhone and iPad. (Gargron is working on some of the slowdown issues that have come with that growth.)

Mastodon is going viral, and as users, we’re along for the ride, even if there still are a few quibbles about the onboarding experience.

In Case You Were Wondering …

People are used to scheduling social media comments ahead of time on other networks. (Eric Rothermel/Unsplash)

Mastodon is a social networking tool that’s been around for years. So where are the post-scheduling apps?

You might be wondering with your new Mastodon account—awesome, but I like scheduling my posts. What am I to do?

Let me just start out by saying that the community is in a very sensitive spot right now, just growing, and you may want to consider taking a breather on a marketing-driven approach, which post scheduling is often associated with. When I posed the question to my feed last night, some balked.

But feed scheduling does have some legitimate uses beyond just commercial. Either way, as with any tool, consider how the community will take to it.

But for those who do want it, there’s a mixture of good news and bad news here. The good news is that Mastodon has an amazing, well-documented API that’s pretty easy for a reasonably technical person to figure out. And turning on an API integration is as easy as setting up an application with modest read and write access.

But most people don’t want to mess with an API just to schedule posts hours into the future, and I don’t blame them. People who want to schedule posts want to have the ability to set it and forget it—and one of the few options out there seems to be designed more like a timer than a calendar. (There are some mobile apps, such as Fedilab, that scratch this itch, though they’re not set up to be used like a big calendar or kanban app.)

Mastodon isn’t really designed for this right now, in part because it hasn’t really been a commercial network. But as folks who do leverage scheduling and automation on Twitter appear, are they without options?

Should Mastodon just be another option for Buffer users?

I sent a few press requests out in the off chance I’d get any info on the possibility of a Buffer or HootSuite integration. HootSuite shot over a quick denial, saying it did not currently support Mastodon on its platform. (Their focus may be elsewhere; the company is dealing with layoffs at this time.)

Buffer did not respond to requests for comment, but Phil Agnew, a product marketer for the company, shared in a tweet that the company was looking into it as a potential option. (Update 1/14/2023: Buffer has now written a guide for its users, and is now publicly testing a Buffer integration. Seems like they listened!)

I also fruitlessly reached out to Zapier, the company behind one of the best known low-code integration platforms, and a service I use personally for just about everything, just to see if they would offer a more polished onramp to Mastodon. But technically you don’t need a native integration if you have a paid plan with Zapier, as Mastodon can plug directly into webhooks, a standardized API interfacing technology.

This is how I spend my evenings.

I tend to use Zapier for everything, and I have an integration set up that allows me to share RSS posts as a status on Mastodon. And there are some weird directions you can take this. Last night, I experimented with the idea of setting up Google Calendar to auto-send items based on a set schedule for a specific calendar. It would not be fun to use and did not support image uploads, but it totally worked, even if it is nowhere near as slick as a standard scheduling tool.

If you want to get more in the spirit of the Mastodon FOSS ethos, another great alternative for Zapier that can be freely hosted is n8n, which is a tad more complex than Zapier but has much of the same feature set.

So to put this all in long-story-short mode: We’re not quite at the point where a regular person could schedule posts, but it’s totally possible to do if you know something about APIs and protocols.

Tips & Tricks

The etiquette of content warnings

In the past day or two, a pretty solid discussion emerged around the concept of content warnings, a feature unique to Mastodon that is similar to a spoiler feature or a trigger warning elsewhere. It exists in part so that people who don’t want to engage in certain kinds of content don’t have to.

These warnings have evolved into the way that news is discussed on these platforms. If a story like a shooting or a political discussion comes up, or perhaps even a news story people are overwhelmed by, it is an expectation that you hide the bad stuff behind an extra layer.

Content warnings are a big differentiator of Mastodon compared to other similar platforms, and if used well can be used as a way to help minimize the discussion of mentally taxing things. This is an interesting enough tool that it’s the target of some academic research.

There is, admittedly, some debate over how these warnings get used in practice. Some, such as blogger Karl Voit, suggest that content warnings only get used in more extreme use cases. But ultimately, Mastodon leaves it up to the user, which makes comments like Voit’s suggestions, not hard-and-fast rules.

But given that this is a community people are joining quickly, it is important to follow norms. As journalist Adam Davidson explained in an announcement on the Journa.Host server this week, “We are, of course, a bunch of journalists and we are very pro-news. This is just a way to be respectful of our new neighborhood.”

Links & Stuff

» Find the discoverability of the default Mastodon app to leave a little to be desired? Instances.social can help you narrow in on a server.

» And speaking of discoverability, did you know that Mastodon is just one small element of the fediverse? The site Fediverse.Party can give you a 10,000-foot view of some of the largest federated social media networks.

» Looking for some people to follow? The website Fedi.Directory breaks down a number of users with specific interests by category. No algorithms here; the list is curated by a person.

One Killer Take

We could have been in a much different world had Elon just taken this advice back in the summer of 2020. And yes, it’s real.

Alright, that was issue number two of How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in.

I’m turning the 30-minute timer off for the next few issues.

The reason for this is that there is a clear need right now for focused, simple information on Mastodon, a long-running social networking application that’s open-source, decentralized, and relies on a standardized protocol. This tool, once the focus of a smaller community, has suddenly begun to sparkle thanks to the wild shifts happening at Twitter.

It is exciting that this application has finally found a mainstream audience. But its creators and fans were not expecting the influx to the level it has emerged, and you can tell this just from the crunch on some of the servers. (On Saturday night, I was getting notifications about replies that were sent six hours prior.)

So consider this a Mastodon takeover. I’m calling it How to Mastodon, and it’s a pop-up newsletter. MidRange will eventually return, but for at least the next week, maybe two, I’m going to go over some considerations around this service that a lot of people are suddenly interested in.

For those who are subscribed to the pop-up, once it is over, you will get MidRange. If you like it, awesome. If not, please feel free to hop off the list. I totally get it either way.

The Big Mastodon Debate

(Taylor Vick/Unsplash)

Thoughts on self-serve ownership, onboarding, and how it shaped the list of Mastodon servers

Everyone who has turned the switch on a Mastodon server made a choice. They decided to run a server, and running a server is generally considered a complex thing to do. But the nice thing about a decision like this is that anyone can make it for themselves.

The problem is, the types of people who run servers generally have different interests from the broader public. As a result, when a mass of new users were looking to sign up for a Mastodon account, they ran directly into a swarm of servers that seemed poorly optimized for personal interests. Prestige TV fans, hiking enthusiasts, and Swifties found no communities focused on their interests, but if you’re into Ruby or FOSS or STEM or retro tech, server owners on Mastodon already had you covered. When people who know how to run a server self-select, this is what happens.

This has had an effect on the onboarding experience, and led to some dissenting feedback on its uptake. While I can’t predict the future, I have a feeling that the developers of the open-source Mastodon application might see this moment as an opportunity to broaden its approach.

Mastodon, which is based on the open protocol ActivityPub, will likely see effort being put into simplifying the onboarding experience and figuring out ways to simply offer some of the most common community types itself. Word is that version 4 of the service, which is in release candidate mode, will help with this.

But I think some clever positioning of the servers could help, too. If everyone was given six narrow-but-general communities to join on top of the user-generated ones—say music, movies, technology, politics, business, and sports—most of the complaints about onboarding would be nullified. Heck, even calling them something other than instances or servers would be a huge kick in the pants.

(Compare this to how early online communities like GeoCities worked and you can see the parallels.)

Masto.host had a pretty rough weekend.

I think that as Mastodon gets a more mainstream audience, we’ll see the process of spinning up a Mastodon server get easier. The third-party hosting service Masto.host has been flooded with demand over the weekend, clearly showing that people want to take part. If it keeps up, general-interest cloud hosting companies like Vultr and DigitalOcean will probably start promoting one-click Mastodon installs, for example, as they do for Ghost, Minecraft, and WordPress.

But for folks who find this state of affairs confusing, yes, it is. But historically, social communities have looked much more like Mastodon than they have Twitter. Usenet was built in exactly the same way. So was Yahoo! Chat, ICQ, and IRC. Twitter’s main innovation, in many ways, is that it combines all of these people into one giant public feed and lets users find their people, building interesting conversations from the collisions that this unusual state of affairs created. Eventually algorithms helped with this, but they also made people more comfortable with those contours, and Twitter was only taking steps to resolve this with groups.

The reason Mastodon is great is because it makes room for both experiences—the narrow community and the outside world—in one platform. The local timeline is the narrow community; the federated timeline is the outside world. You can choose which one to focus on. (Of course, some Twitter expats have made pretty fair arguments about the fact that we have wide interests that may not fit one server. Hashtags, which are even more valuable on Mastodon than Twitter, are one way to get around this.)

Will that be enough to convince some folks that Mastodon is not, in fact, hopelessly complex? Probably not. But I do think Mastodon users should be open with feedback right now—because developers and server admins will hear it. Already we’re seeing high-profile figures like Taylor Lorenz offering reasonable cases for search capabilities and quote tweets to be expanded that have been put to the side in the past—and odds are, we may see some changes as the community grows and interest in alternative options appears.

After all, the project is built for the users, not the bottom line.

Tips and Tricks

An example of Mastodon’s “Describe for the visually impaired” menu.

The power of alt text, something that matters a lot on Mastodon

A few weeks ago, a Twitter user called me out on a mistake that a lot of users make. That is, they forget the alt-text on images and videos they upload.

It is an easy thing to miss, but too many don’t take the step to do it because they favor immediacy over accessibility.

I had been getting better at doing it, but once I got the nudge and explainer, I got with the program and have been alt-texting all the things.

Mastodon, which has built a reputation for putting accessibility first, makes this a lot easier than other platforms, in part because of a tool that Twitter’s default applications do not offer: the ability to detect text in an image and use that as the alt text. Given that screenshots are a hugely popular way for people to share longer thoughts on social media, this tool is a huge help.

But if you need a nudge, there’s a bot on Mastodon that can lightly scold you if you fail to add alt text to your images. And if you need some tips on how to write accessible text, this guide from WebAIM offers an excellent starting point.

Links & stuff

» Hoping to crosspost between Twitter and Mastodon? There are a couple of great options out there, including the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter, and Moa Bridge. Both of these tools work roughly the same, and allow you to post things only when certain parameters are set—and in the case of Mastodon Twitter Crossposter, you can filter out specific words, in case your Twitter followers are sick of hearing you talk about Mastodon.

» If you’re a newshound looking for reporters to follow, there are a few vetted lists going around, including this Google doc with nearly 300 entries as of this writing, and this Github doc should scratch a similar itch. An instance to watch is Journa.Host, run by Adam Davidson, formerly of The New Yorker.

» In case you want an alternate, simplified version of the Mastodon user interface, a good option is Pinafore.

One Killer Take

Anil Dash, explaining why an old-school platform has appeared (thus far) to beat out the hot new trendy things.

So this is the first issue of How To Mastodon, a pop-up newsletter hiding inside of MidRange. Follow me on Mastodon for more insights and tips, along with all the other weird stuff I’m interested in.

Is it because Elon, despite having all the money in the world, is hopelessly square? Who knows.

There are many people who say they won’t leave Twitter, despite the many headlines that suggest the network is having an awkward transitionary moment. Others seem to be writing their exit strategies in real time, whether in the DMs or directly on the timeline. People are starting to share their Mastodon handles and pull their friends into Discord servers. People are talking about Tumblr again in earnest.

Remember when this was how we celebrated social network founders?

But in a way, even with the mess that Elon has left on our doorsteps, right now feels like one of the most exciting times in social media in the past few years. I’ve been trying to figure out exactly why that is, and I think I have a theory about it, and it comes down to this: Over the last 15 years or so, we tended to associate social networks with specific larger-than-life figures, starting with Digg’s Kevin Rose. The most famous two are Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook/Meta and Jack Dorsey with Twitter, but there were others—Evan Williams with Medium and Twitter, Alexis Ohanian with Reddit, Evan Spiegel with Snapchat, and so on.

But what I think is interesting about the emerging crop of social networks that could potentially take the place of these older, more monolithic social platforms is that you don’t really know a lot about who made them. You likely didn’t know Jason Citron, Discord’s CEO, by name, until I just wrote it down. Mastodon developer and lead contributor Eugen Rochko has remained something of a cult figure in mainstream circles, whose fame has largely not expanded out of the fediverse. And Tumblr’s CEO, Matt Mullenweg, has a much more important job as the CEO of Automattic, and doesn’t have quite the same profile his media-favorite predecessor, David Karp, once did.

Even ByteDance and TikTok founder, Zhang Yiming, whether by cultural differences, or through necessity, does not carry a dominant role on his own network.

I guess what I’m saying is this. After nearly two decades of putting up with social networks where the boss (in most cases a Millennial or Gen X white guy) took center stage in many of the discussions about the platform, the great social media reset seems to be setting aside the “cult of personality” stuff in favor of a more fundamental “enjoying the platform” kind of routine.

How was the spell broken? I think Elon Musk is simply too famous and too culturally dominant for anyone to be able to look at him as anything other than an overwhelming voice on a network like Twitter. At one point on Sunday evening, he was the only thing people were talking about, seemingly. And he seems to want to change the DNA of the thing he just bought with reckless abandon. While I don’t think it’s going to be like this until the end of time, right now it’s all about him, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for anyone else.

I think the guru at the top of the big company has been a focal point of many tech businesses for a long time, at least since the days of Steve Jobs. In the case of social media, that guru takes an outsize role, and they can shape what the platform or company represents, as well as much of the conversation about it.

But with Elon, we already kind of know what he represents, so despite us having an already-shaped opinion of the platform he owns, he’s changing it, overnight. He’s not adapting to Twitter; Twitter is adapting to him. And a lot of users simply haven’t bought in. And the only way he’s going to solve that problem, really, is if he takes a step back from the platform he just bought. Which he won’t do.

And for that, he has suffered the indignity of being the target of ugly, completely false rumors about his personal life, all because the rumor train got out in front of the truth train, as it so often does. Nancy Pelosi not only has to deal with the fact her husband has been deeply hurt, but that her husband’s reputation has been unjustly sullied.

Why did this happen? Simply put, it’s because truth is no longer a welcome detail in many online circles. Sharing the rumor wins out if it means winning the discourse.

I don’t necessarily know if I got ahead of it or anything, but on Friday, I already saw the rumors emerging and, in my efforts to maybe convince a small number of people to not focus on the emerging rumor mill, I shot off a tweet:

Of course, the immediate response came from people who read the comment as “the attacker’s politics don’t matter.” Of course they do. The thing is, they don’t matter as much as the precedent that was set by the attack itself, and they also matter to people who don’t actually care about the truth—because they want to find ways to discredit those politics and imply a completely different narrative before the cement dries on the actual story. And by insisting on talking about those politics, we make it easier for people with bad intentions to make a permanent imprint on the narrative.

And imprint they did—to the point where, as I mentioned yesterday, the guy who is sucking up the rest of the media attention right now is dropping the conspiracy theory.

In a social media-driven world, it is easy for this to happen, because of the way information spreads. But because the average person is more adept at how social media works, they are aware of the velocity at which misinformation can spread online, often without a link or sourcing, or even a low-quality source.

As my pal Philip Bump put it in a recent Washington Post column:

What made this particular narrative so potent—and what made it trend on Twitter—was that it was juicy chum for the right’s social media sphere. Media Matters’ Matt Gertz summarized the system well over the weekend: There’s an audience for extreme conspiracy theories and an infrastructure for vetting and promoting them. There’s also very little interest in self-correcting, as made most obvious in the response to Donald Trump’s false claims about the election. So once the attack became news, there was an entire attention economy ready to pounce and sell anti-left claims to right-wing consumers. Grotesque memes emerged and were shared by people including Donald Trump Jr.

Think about the effect here: Instead of there being a discussion about how an 82-year-old man was beaten with a hammer simply because his wife is a prominent Democrat, the discussion was instead about how Democrats are bad on crime or, worse, how the husband of that prominent Democrat is a deviant who brought it on himself. The currency of that latter frame was so robust that Elon Musk, new owner of Twitter and an expert in the business of appealing to the fringe right, shared a baseless conspiracy theory on his platform.

The thing is, real-time reporting is not something that the average person is trained in. It takes time and practice to do well, and too often, even those that are good at doing it don’t get every detail right.

It’s like trying to crochet a sweater on a tightrope. You’re going to do it as slowly and carefully as you can, because the risk of falling or messing up is unbelievably high.

But in a world where misinformation is both allowed but preferred, suddenly you aren’t in a position where getting the details is the important part—but what is going to break through and make the most noise. And this particular story had a lot of details that made it very attractive for that audience: Nancy Pelosi is an obvious target for critics of the left, it involved a home break-in, it took place in San Francisco of all places.

Of course the lie was going to get out of the station before the truth. It was just too tantalizing.

As consumers of news, I urge you to think hard about why you speculate and what you put to risk by doing so. People with motives unlike yours are doing the exact same thing. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is get out of the way and let the reporting process play out.

The worst of these ideas was a complete rethink about what the Twitter verification program represents. Once, the program was meant for people with high-profile roles and jobs, such as celebrities and journalists, to ensure nobody was impersonating them. Over time, it grew and became something more akin to a status symbol, something to show that you had earned some semblance of notability in your career.

First Casey Newton’s Platformer reported that the cost would be folded into the $4.99/month Twitter Blue, a fairly good service with a lot of other features. But then, hours later, The Verge added to the story and revealed that Musk was hoping to raise the price of the service to an eye-watering $19.99 a month.

He wants you to pay more than the cost of Netflix—a service that gives you access to thousands of films and television shows—for a checkmark. (He also wants engineers to print out their code, for some reason! His decisions seem to be just utterly random.)

The online response was swift, brutal, and overwhelming. All of a sudden, it seemed like every heavy user of Twitter had an opinion on this call that Musk made seemingly out of the blue. Some thought it would ruin the entire concept, while others just couldn’t believe the audacity of it all. Some preemptively noted that it would become an effective way to brand someone as fake and cringey, rather than successful.

(Given that Elon started his day by posting an objectively cringe response to Hillary Rodham Clinton about Nancy Pelosi’s injured husband, I guess it tracks.)

But then, more random ideas appeared to be getting thrown on the wall, some with the help of angel investor Jason Calacanis, who now refers to himself as “Chief Meme Officer” of Twitter on his profile.

Calacanis asked marketing and advertising folks in his audience what they wanted to see from Twitter. Some of the suggestions were worse than others, but one in particular stood out: A suggestion from the Twitter account for Slashdot to “bring back Vine” immediately turned into a poll by Musk, which then got an immediate response from MrBeast, perhaps the most important personality in online video in 2022, one who was just in the news for seeking a $1.5 billion-dollar valuation for his video empire.

The Slashdot to MrBeast interaction all happened in the span of literally 10 minutes, which … is not usually how companies are run, where seemingly big decisions like reviving old products are made in public in the matter of minutes. It’s not that bringing back Vine is a bad idea; it’s that a sudden process is likely to lead to poor execution of that idea.

One gets the feeling that the man who bought one of the most public companies in history, a firm that exists in a literal fishbowl, is just kind of going for it, throwing every idea he can at the investment in hopes they make at least some of it back. Calacanis in particular, a serial entrepreneur who founded one of the first blog networks, seems energized by the opportunity his friend Musk has been given, not a huge surprise given that his excitement for this deal was revealed in a series of leaked text messages. One gets the feeling that Musk will eventually go back to rockets and cars and give the company to Jason, based on the interactions we’ve seen thus far.

Whatever happens at this point, the result is going to make observing Twitter an extremely interesting dynamic, one that will change basically in real time. If you’re keeping an eye on this one, stay on your toes.

The response from pundits was, in a word, wilting. It seemed like people who have been forced to analyze politics through the prism of respectability now were at a loss as to how to assess John Fetterman, who is running for Senate in Pennsylvania against Dr. Mehmet Oz, a TV doctor who has shown less than compassion for his opponent’s challenges. The word “heartbreaking” got thrown out more than a few times, despite the Fetterman campaign emphasizing that he can still effectively do this job with a small amount of assistive equipment.

Thus far, the health condition has not sunk his chances in the polls, but at the same time, it feels like the confidence in his abilities has been shaken. As David A. Graham of The Atlantic put it:

Fetterman agreed to a single debate with Oz and tried to set expectations very low. Even so, he seems to have missed them. Perhaps refusing to debate would have raised even more questions, but Democrats are now questioning whether he should have simply declined to appear. Underlying all this is a bigger, usually unspoken anxiety: Is Fetterman really capable of closing out the campaign? The question is somewhat idle, though, because there’s no replacing him now.

This leaves Fetterman asking voters to take it on faith that only his speaking, and not his thinking, is impaired. Candidates ask voters to take any number of things on faith, but Fetterman’s speech troubles are more overt, and yet also much harder for an ordinary person to assess, than a pledge not to vote to raise taxes.

The word “damage control” is being thrown out. People are afraid that this man, who did something undeniably brave like debate in public despite a auditory processing condition that makes it hard to process spoken speech, might not win because of the perception of a small number of voters.

We’re being reminded how small gaffes, like Rick Perry forgetting a single entry in a list of three, were enough to sink campaigns, or how (going further back) Richard Nixon once wilted under the bright lights of a television camera.

But I’d like to make a case that, even if he does not win his election in a week and a half (given all the early voting and Oz’s own gaffes during the debate, it’s still up for question), Fetterman did something really important: He represented the kind of person who usually does not get a spot on that stage. In may ways, he was already arguably that kind of person, as someone who is fairly large, heavily tattooed, and from a somewhat nontraditional background.

From a perspective of demographics, Fetterman’s oft-referenced “privileged upbringing” doesn’t really offer the full picture. He spent years working in public service and counseling at-risk youth before he took a more political role. At one point, he helped mentor a boy who lost both of his parents to AIDS.

“I became preoccupied with the concept of the random lottery of birth,” Fetterman once said of the volunteer work. “Why was I born into this incredibly privileged and comfortable existence, and this child, through no fault of his own, was an AIDS orphan by eight and a half and was living in an incredibly dangerous section of New Haven? All of this, of course, eight blocks away from one of the world’s most elite universities.”

To put it another way, he put his whole career behind people who didn’t have an easy go of it.

Sure, he had all the relevant degrees, including a Harvard Masters of Public Policy, but his political career did not look like anyone else’s. No matter. He let the work speak for itself, and for the most part, it has.

Throughout my life, I have been extremely uncomfortable in a public-speaking setting. I have only somewhat recently snapped out of that, and am trying to take it on more often. To me, when I see Fetterman put himself up to such scrutiny on such a major stage, I see someone who is brave enough to put all the naysayers at risk, to show that there are people in positions like his that are often unspoken for in public life.

And I guess I think to myself, if he can do something like this, what am I so afraid of, with no true disability other than my frayed nerves? John Fetterman, by not playing by the rules that would tell him to step aside and sit down in this particular moment, is arguably the bravest person in politics right now. We should be celebrating that and learning from it.

But one of the company’s big stock-photo competitors just went the other way, and arguably there may be some valuable takeaways there, too. This week, Shutterstock announced a new in-depth partnership with OpenAI, the company that developed DALL-E and launched an initial partnership with the stock photo service a year ago.

The deal essentially ensures that AI art can both be sold on Shutterstock, and that Shutterstock members receive financial benefits, such as royalties, for allowing their images to be used in this way. Shutterstock CEO Paul Hennessy made it clear that where Getty Images balked at stock photos, his service would not.

“We have a long history of integrating AI into every part of our business,” he said in a news release. “This expert-level competency makes Shutterstock the ideal partner to help our creative community navigate this new technology. And we're committed to developing best practices and experiences to deliver on our purpose, which is to empower the world to create with confidence.”

One way that the company has pledged to empower this creation is through the use of ethical frameworks, including creating checks to reduce bias and methods to ensure that the rights of creators are protected.

You could make the case that, by working directly with OpenAI and being transparent with its members and customers about this, Shutterstock has perhaps solved the creator part of this dilemma … although it needs to be made clear exactly how much money is going to be put on the table thanks to AI imagery. However, I do think that the perception part of the problem, the one I pointed out when I wrote about Getty’s decision to reject AI-generated art in its own archive, has to be considered here.

I guess the question is, do buyers want AI-generated art out of their stock photo platforms? Not just people who want a pic for their blog post—but actual graphic designers? We now have two of the largest stock photo services taking diametrically opposed approaches to this question, which may draw lines in the sand in the future in terms of how creators approach each service. Not everyone is creating new types of art via AI generation, like Rob Sheridan—though Shutterstock’s messaging is targeted towards those types of people.

A photo titled “A fork in the road metaphor.” (DALL-E 2 generated)

On the other hand, stock photo services have long been used as a source of photo manipulation. Often, for example, we might use a stock image as the starting point of a texture or a graphic design, and the original picture might be manipulated to pure nothingness by the time we’re done with it.

And one can make the case that some of the efforts Adobe has made with AI are arguably more damaging to our approach to reality and accuracy. When you can remove elements in Photoshop in seconds where it once took minutes, it changes the dynamic to a major degree.

Nonetheless, I will concede that while it’s good that Getty Images decided to eschew AI art, it’s good we have a competitor going the opposite road. We will find the preferred path by different companies taking different forks.

Recently, in an excerpt for his new memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story, he revealed the move that most angered the public—the decision to try to put a U2 album onto everyone’s iPhone, without asking. In the excerpt published in The Guardian over the weekend, he revealed that it was both his idea and that Apple didn’t want to do it, and that he was fully to blame for the whole endeavor:

On 9 September 2014, we didn’t just put our bottle of milk at the door but in every fridge in every house in town. In some cases we poured it on to the good people’s cornflakes. And some people like to pour their own milk. And others are lactose intolerant.

I take full responsibility. Not Guy O, not Edge, not Adam, not Larry, not Tim Cook, not Eddy Cue. I’d thought if we could just put our music within reach of people, they might choose to reach out toward it. Not quite. As one social media wisecracker put it, “Woke up this morning to find Bono in my kitchen, drinking my coffee, wearing my dressing gown, reading my paper.” Or, less kind, “The free U2 album is overpriced.” Mea culpa.

This incident happened eight years ago now, and U2 is still having to live this down. Now if only we could get people riled up about some of the other things that Apple does and doesn’t do on its platforms.

You know, like messaging. Back in September, Tim Cook was quoted at an event as saying this about RCS messaging, an open technology that Google is pushing on Android for messaging: “I don’t hear our users asking that we put a lot of energy in on that at this point … I would love to convert you to an iPhone.”

As you probably know, Apple has played into the frustration that iMessage does not work well on other platforms as something of a strategic advantage, and it’s something that has played out socially. You don’t want to be the person without the blue bubble, the saying goes—and anecdotally, per the Wall Street Journal, younger audiences are gravitating towards the blue bubble, rather than the green one.

(And it’s been shown, based on court documents in the Epic case, that Apple intentionally does this to encourage people to buy iPhones, and recent usage stats in the U.S. imply it’s working.)

This is bascially the only clever idea Meta has come up with in the year 2022.

Google is not happy about this, for obvious reasons, in part because these messages end up just not looking very good across platforms, and because it discourages people from buying phones. My wife, an iPhone user, often sends me videos via text, and they appear in the most compressed, unviewable ways, and her reactions are displayed as text. It sucks, but not as much as the fact that Apple insists on using Lightning in a USB-C world. (I digress.)

I think if Google is going to have an actual shot at convincing Apple to follow an open standard, their best option is to anger people as much as Bono did eight years ago, and it appears that’s exactly the strategy Google appears to be using, per The Verge. Recently, Google announced plans to make reactions and replies work in RCS—but to intentionally kneecap how they look in iOS, with the goal of making the experience frustrating enough that users do ask Tim Cook to “put some energy in on that at this point.” Given that Apple has been doing this for more than a decade now, it only feels fair.

Let’s hope end users get just as pissed off about this as we did the U2 album, because a monocultural messaging ecosystem is just not very good for anyone.

Nathan Baschez of Every announced this project over the weekend, and I signed up just before the Product Hunt launch ... which saw more than 25,000 signups in a single day, which is a lot for a Product Hunt project. Since I got in, I’ve been playing around with it for a little bit, and whoa. I decided that instantly have to write about this.

But rather than do a standard report, I decided to structure it as a Q&A, with the GPT-3 helper bot. Hopefully they’ll be willing to chat with me. I’ll bold my questions. Let’s see if they have any good answers. (The interview, in full, is linked here, for posterity.)

So, AI has been in some pretty cool projects. What do you think of Lex so far?

I think it’s really cool! I like how it provides prompts and suggestions to help you write.

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges writers face when they try to get going with a long bit of prose?

I think one of the biggest challenges writers face is getting started. It can be hard to know where to begin, or what to write about. I think Lex can help with that by giving you prompts and ideas to get you started.

Do you think Lex will live up to the hype it’s generated already? I mean, 26,000 signups on the waiting list is kind of a lot.

I think it has the potential to live up to the hype. I think it’s a really cool tool that can help writers in a lot of different ways.

I know Nathan and the team at Every have a pretty long list of to-dos that they’re hoping to get through. What would you say is at the top of your list for Lex?

I think one of the most important things for Lex to do is to continue to provide helpful prompts and suggestions to writers. I think this is a really valuable feature that can help a lot of people.

Now, the concept of AI-generated writing has come a long way since it got started a long time ago. Think stuff like ELIZA and such. Do you think a helping-hand approach like this will lead to more writing creativity? Or is it just a fad?

I think the helping-hand approach is definitely something that can lead to more writing creativity. I think it can be really helpful to have someone (or something) to bounce ideas off of, and to get suggestions from. I don’t think it’s just a fad, I think it’s something that can really help people.

Think Google or Microsoft will try and steal this idea?

I think it’s possible that they might try to steal the idea. I think Lex is a really cool tool, and I think it has a lot of potential. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google or Microsoft tried to create something similar.

How does Lex stay a step ahead of the competition?

I think Lex has the potential to stay a step ahead of the competition by continuing to provide helpful prompts and suggestions to writers. I think this is a really valuable feature that can help a lot of people.

Is there people that this feature might not help?

I think this feature could help a lot of people, but I think it might not be helpful to everyone. I think it depends on the person and their writing style.

Do you have any parting thoughts before we log off for the evening? Any shout-outs that you’d like to offer, given your exciting week?

I’d like to give a shout-out to Nathan and the team at Every for creating Lex. I think it’s a really cool tool, and I’m excited to see what they come up with next!

So clearly, that was really freaking cool. While there are some clear limitations here, as you might notice from some of the more repetitive answers, but for the most part it rolled with the punches without a whole lot of trouble.

This won’t change people’s lives, but it might make them just a tiny bit easier. And perhaps that’s really what we need out of a word processor in 2022.

But color me impressed. This is extremely cool.

(As a favor to you, dear reader, I won’t link it.)

It was strangely lurid in ways that I haven’t felt about a story in quite some time, with nobody looking good in the end—especially not the reader, who now had to live with the fact that they just read the text messages at the center of a couple’s personal crisis.

Nobody got killed. It didn’t really affect anyone other than the couple, their family, and the nanny that presumably took a huge paycheck from a newspaper. Yet, you are stuck with all the bad feelings that a story like this leaves behind.

So, instead of dealing with all those awkward feelings, we focused on Wilde’s “special” salad dressing, which is implied she used to win over pop star Harry Styles. Vulture had to resort to crude memes:

Of course, this is by no means the worst story that came out yesterday. We are, after all, still in the middle of a war in Ukraine, in a world where Kanye West now owns an also-ran conservative-leaning social network because he was banned from posting on the normal ones after he got a little too spicy, and—oh yeah—in a world where we’re three weeks out from the midterms.

But the aftertaste on this Daily Mail piece feels more pronounced than many of its type because of the fact that the luridness behind the tale feels unearned. Yes, celebrity news has sort of dimmed our receptors in terms of what’s acceptable and what’s not, but it doesn’t mean that we should let stories like this become our norm.

I think the reason they do is because the shiny objects are much more obvious than the meat and potatoes of real news, things that impact real people.

Recently, I caught something on CNN that I thought was pretty clever. Essentially, a former adviser to the Zelenskyy administration in Ukraine, Igor Novikov, appeared as a talking head. But rather than simply doing that, he appeared on screen wearing an ironic T-shirt, specifically a “Meowtallica” shirt. After years of talking heads in similar roles wearing suits, it was like a nod to the fact that we need a shiny object to care about real stuff, and his irony-laden shirt, if nothing else, gives people a reason to pay attention.

I briefly interacted with Novikov after the segment on Twitter, and he pointed out that the “survival of a nation is competing with all the cats of Instagram nowadays.”

In his little way, he quietly jams the normalcy receptors by not appearing in a suit, by dressing like a hipster on friggin’ CNN. And it works, because, rather than creating a distraction, it actually puts the focus on the substance of what he says.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to get quite that lucky with shiny objects in our news stories otherwise. I think that, as news consumers, we need to be careful about what we choose to read, and if we digest the wrong things, we are quick to question what exactly makes us feel awkward about them. Not every important story is going to have a hook as strong as fancy salad dressing.

And to presume that they will puts us at the mercy of lurid news that doesn’t actually matter.

I blame this in part on the fact that the primary podcast I listened to much of the time that I being asked about this was Reply All. That show, which ended its run earlier this year after a controversy harmed its trajectory, took a very reporting-heavy approach to podcast-style storytelling, one that required weeks or even months of work to nail down for even a single episode. Beyond the obvious lack of skill in radio, I had the feeling that in comparison to shows like that, it might feel a bit wilt-y.

Of course, the story of Reply All is in many ways the story of its parent company, Gimlet, and Gimlet has had a couple of rocky years of late, not just because of the drama that surrounded the company’s most popular show, but the challenges it has faced as a subsidiary of Spotify. Earlier this month, the streaming service suddenly cancelled numerous popular shows at Gimlet and its sister company Parcast, and the cuts are said to cut deep, representing a loss of 30 percent of the employees at each company.

“Each shop has lost seasoned producers, writers, and editors,” a statement from the Gimlet and Parcast unions stated. “Many of those laid off were longtime employees—people who helped build our studios from the ground up, and who saw them through a global pandemic.”

Part of the problem appears to be a lack of understanding on the part of Spotify about how podcasting is supposed to work. Over at The Squeeze, writer Skye Pillsbury broke down an anonymized oral history of what happened to Gimlet in the words of five employees at the network:

At first, the Spotify people said they were open to our ideas, but that really didn’t turn out to be true. It very quickly went from brainstorming all the new, creative things we wanted to do to this new reality where we had to get permission from Spotify every time we had an idea.

Then we started getting requests from on high—it would be like, we want to increase the number of Spotify listeners on your show, so we need you to make some bonus content, okay? It had a huge impact on our production. It was obvious that they didn’t really understand how making podcasts worked or what our relationship with our audience was like at all.

Those requests escalated and eventually they made pretty much all the shows go exclusive, which Gimlet management had promised would never happen. That’s when I really knew we had a problem.

Taking the shows exclusive meant that the podcasts didn’t get anywhere near the audiences they might have had on an open RSS feed, meaning that their potential was limited by a paywall. It doesn’t matter that the paywall is one of the most popular paywalls in the world—it’s still a paywall, and it left a lot of people out in the cold and unable to listen to these podcasts in their apps of choice.

So we have a situation where Spotify doesn’t get the market and has artificially limited the upside of all of these shows. Now combine this with the fact that these shows are extremely labor-intensive to produce, requiring weeks or months of reporting, and you have a formula where good, talented people aren’t able to scale their shows from a business standpoint.

(Fingers crossed for The Ringer, which sold to Spotify a year after Gimlet and has thus far avoided the same fate—perhaps because of the pull Bill Simmons carries?)

These reporting-heavy podcasts ultimately are put in this awkward situation where they have to support things like travel, weeks of open-ended research and reporting, and complex production work, and without the right team in front of it properly monetizing it, it can get really hard to justify, especially when plenty of other podcasting formats show similar levels of success while just being one or two people interviewing one or two other people for a little while.

Given that companies are buying up podcasting firms left and right—Amazon owns Wondery, SiriusXM owns Stitcher and Earwolf, and so on—there is a true and genuine risk that if the parent companies aren’t as committed to the models of these firms, especially when they require in-depth reporting or research, it could deeply harm the work that they do.

If I do ever decide to dabble into podcasting, I don’t want to stand out because all the shows that once intimidated me with their quality are now in the past tense.

This is not like a small skunkworks project—this is not Facebook attempting to build a new design for its website. This is Meta essentially building the largest possible thing in hopes that the public finds the large thing hard to ignore and will inevitably give in—you know, like Facebook or Instagram.

Per Insider, the company spent $10 billion on the project last year alone, and has put 10,000 employees on this project, 10,000 employees that could be doing literally anything else and providing more value to the company than they currently are.

But they’re so bad at it! Everyone can see how bad they are at it! Even their own employees aren’t using Horizon Worlds! And yes, the new best example of this is the stupid leg feature they added to Horizon Worlds:

The leg jokes are great. Keep up with the leg jokes. May the internet be full of leg jokes until the end of time.

But trying to build a metaverse is not something that will happen because a large company wants it to happen on their fiscal calendar. It will happen because a use case emerges and naturally leads them in this direction.

The problem is, Meta has this equation all wrong, and it’s because their approach to R&D has essentially been to find what all of their competitors are doing and then replicate that as quickly as possible. That works for social media where trendjacking is the name of the game. But it does not work for actually building new things, where room to fail always has to be allowed within your prototypes. Meta needs to basically reset its entire approach to product development. And quickly.

The thing is, other companies have been out in the wilderness like this before—think Apple circa 2001, when it was trying to launch the iPod, or even IBM, who built the original IBM PC using a small team—but their dreams did not start so big that they were company-threatening. It’s not a bad thing to have dreams and ambition. But if these dreams and ambitions are going to become a business, they need to be allowed to start small and then grow into a realistic size.

I’m trying to think of the last time that a company spent so much money on a technology that its audience so clearly does not want, and I can’t think of one. So, Meta, stop doing it.

This is a great lesson for innovators of all stripes: If you want to build something innovative and groundbreaking, start with the smallest possible version of that innovative and groundbreaking idea. See how sticky and appealing you can make it. Let that customer feedback define the way you continue to build it. And then let it scale naturally before putting on the gas or investing immense resources into a technology nobody wants.

The true road to finding success in innovation is by letting ideas succeed without feeling the full weight of expectations pressing down on your virtual legs.

First released in 1986 and then actively offered most years through the late ’90s, the pails were allowed to fall into a pure collectable play by McDonald’s despite the fact that they had obvious utility. They were the perfect size for safely carrying around candy.

But because of boredom or perhaps a desire to do something else for a while, these pails went away, despite growing incredibly sophisticated over time. Most notable were the 1992 Halloween pails, which had an easy-open lid with a cookie cutter underneath, making them not only easy to use but convenient.

Given the fast-food chain’s prominence among families, this feels like an immense waste, and something that I wrote about in 2020, arguing that the restaurant chain needs to just offer these every single year.

It took them until 2022 to listen, but the pails are making a comeback this year, with designs evocative of some of the ’80s styles.

Awesome, great. But let’s talk about the plastic elephant in the room—the new plastic pails are not as good as the old ones, and the reason is that they don’t actually have lids, but just 2D silhouettes embedded in the handles, where the lids should go. If you’re going to go to the trouble of bringing these back, don’t half-measure it.

Those pails had utility, and outside of the primary use case were perfect carrying cases for crayons and other kid-friendly things throughout the year. But not without a lid.

Whoever made the decision to now actually offer lids should be excommunicated from the Mickey D’s marketing team. (OK, not really.)

But I think the stronger argument here is the fact that the marketing plays into a retro style, which implies to me that McDonald’s sees this as a play for collectable-minded parents more than kids. This, again, is a misunderstanding of the market. This is a utility device that just happens to also be a toy. McDonald’s is in the collectables game with Happy Meals at this point, yes, but the truth of the matter is, it would be much more valuable to its customers if it just made these things every year, updating the designs as needed, it would still be plenty collectable.

If you want to ensure they have secondary-market value, give the thing to famous artists—see what kinds of takes they could offer this iconic design—but essentially, commit to selling it, and treat it like something that will never go away, as consistent in the calendar year as a Peanuts special. (Side note: No brand tie-ins. Keep this thing pure. Trust me.)

I think there’s a tendency with kid’s toys in fast-food meals to treat them as one-time products that will never have value to their target audience outside of the initial use. I’d argue that this is not-only short-sighted, but minimizes the value of an evergreen product.

If you’re going to build a utility, ensure that the utility sticks around for the long haul. Don’t keep pulling the rug out from under kids and parents who find it valuable.

Because they’re ultimately your target audience—not the collectors.

But in his efforts to put the final mark on his legacy, he seems to have lost the compassion and thoughtfulness that drove his company’s initial run of success. That’s the image a well-written Washington Post piece on Schultz, who is likely to retire once again in the coming months after returning to the CEO role unexpectedly last year.

Schultz runs a company that is dealing with some difficult headwinds. It is a firm with tens of thousands of employees, employees who seem to face the brunt of difficult and upset customers, some of whom, according to the story’s telling, put employees in danger at times. (Of note is an anecdote of a man who apparently left a bag of meth in a bathroom, only to return, aggressively, when the store closed.) For many employees, per author Greg Jaffe, this is not their only job.

Schultz has been listening, but the push by some employees to unionize has clearly caught him flat-footed, often making decisions like actively denying union members access to seniority raises or new benefits. Per the piece:

Tensions between Starbucks and the union had been building all spring and summer. Union officials accused Starbucks of firing more than 120 pro-union workers in retaliation for organizing. The dismissals spanned the country and, in several instances, drew the condemnation of the National Labor Relations Board. In August a federal judge ordered Starbucks to reinstate seven pro-union employees who were fired in February at a Memphis store.

Schultz denied that anyone had been dismissed for union activity. He alleged that Starbucks Workers United was harassing store managers and infiltrating the company’s workforce with paid activists.

The story paints Schultz as struggling to connect his traditionally conscious approach to corporatism, one that took bold steps like offering free online college degrees, to the unionizing employees who clearly feel like all of that is not enough. As with many fast-food or service jobs, inconsistent hours and the pain of unexpected costs still dog them.

As one organizer put it: “I’ve never met a businessman like him. He hates unions more than he loves money.” The issue has been serious enough that politicians such as (but not limited to) Bernie Sanders, are speaking up:

As NPR notes, this is a widespread movement—roughly 250 stores in 30 states have taken the steps to unionize—and one that Starbucks has been accused of going out of the way to bust. The company has implemented a number of requested changes, but only for stores that have not unionized.

“They kind of get a little angry because they're like, well, how come we're not getting these benefits? And we do have to do a little bit of damage control with that,” a shift manager and union organizer, Gailyn Berg, told NPR.

Reading Jaffe’s story on Schultz makes it seem like the battle is personal for him, that the thing he’s spent his life building is being undercut by the fact that the many thousands of employees are thinking about ways to improve their own experiences in a small way. That they’re trying to make it a reflection on Schultz, the businessman.

But I think that it’s clearly about more than just Howard. Howard is looking at this from a high level, but his employees are not. I remember being in college and having a job at a fast-food restaurant, and wanting to take part in one weekend event happening in my dorm for one evening. My hours were cut by a third for the next three weeks because I took a single shift off. No flexibility, no compromise—punished for simply wanting to have a social life.

I eventually left for another job with more stable hours, and when I tried to pick up my last paycheck, the manager absolutely refused to give me the money I earned unless I brought back the uniform at the same time. No waiting, no acceptance of the fact I was happy to return later that same day. I had to go back to my dorm room, grab my uniform, and return. It felt mean-spirited, a small indignity to finish up a job full of them.

And I think low-wage jobs like this, even as much as someone like Schultz can try to spruce them up, have their limits. Rather than seeing the unionization push as a reflection on Howard Schultz the businessman, he should see it as a reflection on fast-food chains, the business model that he ultimately represents.

Based on his long track record of managing this company, he is not a bad boss as large franchise operators go—and he is clearly always trying to be a better one.

That he is treating unionization as inherently evil makes him one, however.

As I put it very starkly in my April piece on the topic (which means that holy hell, we have been talking about this for six whole months), I don’t think Elon Musk has the right temperament to manage a site like Twitter with an understanding of the degree of safety it needs. He is an impulsive decision-maker, and impulse does not lead to strong policy.

But ultimately, this is happening because we made a bet more than 15 years ago that it was better to have our social media managed centrally, despite the fact that we had plenty of good federated examples out in the open.

The biggest of those is email, and I think that while I have to mention Elon Musk in this piece because it’s important, I’m just as concerned about other open platforms becoming less open. And I think that Substack’s focus on building network effects in email, while good for them, is bad for newsletters in general.

I think the reason for that is because of the same things that frustrate many of us about social networks like Twitter. It’s not that the people who run Substack are necessarily bad people, but their goal as a VC-backed company is to grow large and dominant, which puts it against the broader goals of the protocol on which it built its service.

That means that, when evidence emerged that the company’s model wasn’t “sticky” enough, the company had to do something about it, first by building apps to raise its own content above that of outside creators, then to find ways to help strengthen the in-network effects.

As my pal Simon Owens put it in his newsletter this week, “Substack found its unfair advantage” in the form of its recommendations tool. A quick blockquote from Simon:

One of the great things about Substack’s Recommendations tool is it introduces network effects without the inclusion of algorithmic favoritism. Remember, Substack’s central ethos is that it establishes a direct connection between writers and their fans; any launch of a Facebook-like algorithm would be in direct betrayal of this ethos. What’s genius about Recommendations is it allows Substack to walk that thin line perfectly.

Here’s how it works: every Substack writer is prompted to recommend other Substack newsletters, and they’re even given the opportunity to write small blurbs about why they recommend them. Then, every time someone signs up for your newsletter, they’re brought to a landing page that shows them all of your recommendations. If their email address is already verified with Substack, they can simply push a button to sign up for all the recommended newsletters. It’s basically an old-fashioned blogroll on steroids.

This is obviously good for Substack as a business—writers that might have used Substack as a launching pad now have an important reason to stick around beyond simply the revenue model. But the thing is, this is putting the company on the road to insularity—a bad road to be on.

I think if they’re going to be a primarily email-centric platform, what they do ultimately has to raise email as much as it raises Substack, because email as an ecosystem will not benefit if the largest player leverages its position to push up its own newsletters at the cost of the rest of the ecosystem.

It is something that helps to encourage network effects that favor Substack as a company at the cost of the newsletter medium as a whole. It is a step closer to centralization, and might encourage readers to ignore non-Substack newsletters simply because the onboarding process is not as convenient as what Substack built for its own ecosystem.

I think in many ways, decisions like these early on helped to bring social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram much of their growth, but at the cost of the broader Web. I think that, while Substack does not control the email inbox, it does have deep influence on a key part of the ecosystem, and by not making recommendations open to outside publications, it eventually raises the walls of the walled garden that everyone complains about when they’re already inside.

It is still early. Substack is still a relatively small service with a fairly focused niche. But this is a real risk, and it’s one I think about even harder given the Twitter news.

The motivation for building a platform on the internet should not be to close ranks within a protocol at the cost of everyone else. It should be to find ways to bring your benefits to everyone. Substack is not doing that with the Recommendations feature. That makes the feature problematic in the long run.

I will call this out whenever I see it.

On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that one of the cases it was going to take up in the current session involved the interpretation of Section 230, specifically in the way that companies used algorithms to recommend content, and whether it made them liable. Gonzalez vs. Google cuts to the heart of what makes the internet possible in its modern form, and depending on how the court rules, it could truly harm the way the internet works.

The case represents a very dangerous edge case that could be significant enough to take the whole machine down. Gonzalez vs. Google is a suit against Google, with petitioner Reynaldo Gonzalez arguing that Google violated the AntiTerrorism Act by exposing his daughter to ISIS recruitment videos fed to her by the YouTube algorithm, which eventually led to her death in the high-profile 2015 ISIS attack in Paris—the same attack that led to the brutal mass shooting at an Eagles of Death Metal concert.

The case is long-running, having first been filed in 2016, and the situation is just enough of an edge case that it could take the Section 230 ship down. YouTube is obviously used by many millions of people, but the fact that what just one of them was watching could have an effect this serious raises some major concerns.

While the algorithm in the case in question was being challenged because it happened to expose one person to terrorism-style content, the potential context of a ruling is broad enough that it could damage things people depend on, like spam filtering. It has reasons to exist that go beyond what this one person saw, even if what it showed her was potentially beyond the pale.

This case seems to suggest that Section 230 may need more controls—and that companies should be more willing to use them. But if liability is a true risk, there are ripple effects that could move far beyond the seemingly limited goals of the specific case.

Not to be lost in the shadow of the decision SCOTUS made on Monday is what’s happening at the Federal Communications Commission, which is taking some decisive action on a common frustration.

FCC chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and others were taking a hard-line stance against aggressive misuse of the phone system for reasons of spam calls and texts. After putting into effect a system called STIR/SHAKEN, which helps to correctly identify whether callers are calling from the legitimately set source, the commission is planning on banning potential bad actors from the phone networks. Per Rosenworcel:

This is a new era. If a provider doesn’t meet its obligations under the law, it now faces expulsion from America’s phone networks. Fines alone aren't enough. Providers that don't follow our rules and make it easy to scam consumers will now face swift consequences.

In many cases the very same people who might fear a decision changing the scope of Section 230 might be cheering on this kind of action from the FCC. And I don’t disagree, but I think in so many ways, it shows the federal government’s might in situations where unwanted communication is taking over a platform.

The federal government, whether through the machinations of the Supreme Court, the power of the legislative branch, or through the federal agencies within the executive branch, has a lot of ability to change the experience of using our communication mediums, in ways both positive and negative. And there are no guarantees that the status quo that we’re used to is going to stay put. Sure, there are reasons the FCC can chime in on the phone system in this way, but not the YouTube algorithm, but in the context of this discussion, it’s just important to note that this broad power exists and, given the right circumstances, it can be used.

The power that the FCC wields in this case may be cheered-on but it would look dangerous in the case of SCOTUS. The contexts we rely on need to be understood as malleable as long as there are political forces willing to challenge them. And while fighting spam on smartphones is nearly universally supported, Section 230 at this time is unfortunately not.

As much as I hate saying it, with the makeup of this Supreme Court, brace yourself for potential changes.

And you don’t sign petitions.

The reason is that piece of paper can come back to haunt you, because it implies that you’re in the clink for one side or another.

This approach to journalism has become to a degree outdated in the digital era in part because journalists tend to be a bit more opinionated in the modern day. Given that I mix so much commentary into my journalism (as someone who evolved into a blogger), it’s not surprising to hear that I have opinions on things.

But still, I grew into journalism from a traditional newspaper, J-school background. And so I have never donated to a political candidate, and while I’m plenty opinionated, I generally have avoided direct political jockeying in my own journalism.

But when I was posed with the opportunity to sign onto a letter that supported the cause of libraries, I decided that just this once, I had to break this personal rule for myself. So you’ll see my name on Fight for the Future’s “Authors for Libraries” letter, speaking out for the power of the library, including in its digital forms (the Internet Archive, despite what you’ve heard, is a library).

I wrote this as an explanation of my point of view on this specific issue:

Closing off libraries to fair access in the digital age closes off one of the most important tools for research we have. The Internet Archive’s controlled digital lending approach is an excellent way to quickly research topics from primary sources that may not have digital equivalents. The library should be allowed to reasonably keep up with the times, and we should not allow publishers to attempt to redefine it just because the format is changing.

So why did I sign? In this particular case, I felt that this fits into what I’ve said in the past about research and accessibility, and I debated it very heavily before I actually did. To me, the concern that something might happen to the Internet Archive or its ability to distribute books over the lawsuit it faces over its controlled digital lending approach to book distribution is serious enough that I feel like I can’t sit aside. And it supports the work I’ve done in writing and research.

Additionally, I am increasingly concerned about the attacks that libraries have faced for simply hosting content in their collections. It feels like we’ve receded quite a bit in recent years when it comes to what we’re willing to accept within the walls of a library. Ironically, it seems like the people who speak up most loudly for free speech on social media, an area where (poorly written Texas laws notwithstanding) the First Amendment doesn’t apply, are the first to threaten the library’s free speech in an area where the First Amendment does apply.

Sure, my signature on this sign-on letter may have a small impact in the grand scheme of things. After all, it’s not like I’m going to court and testifying for the Internet Archive in their case against the publishing industry. But I did break a rule for myself that lasted 18 full years. And if the risk is serious enough on this specific issue, I might do it again.

After all, the concept of research itself is put under threat if the library is endangered—no matter its form.

If you’d like to sign the letter yourself—no pressure—the Authors for Libraries petition is still taking signatures from writers and authors.

Problem is, when you’re deeply admired, that makes you a target—and this week, Fast Company was brutally hacked in a way that will likely take days for the company to resolve, potentially with deep cleanup costs. The hack, conducted by a user named “Thrax,” came about as a result of what the user claims was an extremely-easy-to-hack default password, which allowed the person full access to the administrator accounts, from which point it was able to access sensitive data like API keys and tokens for its Amazon SES email tool.

The magazine, reliant on a WordPress installation, isn’t unlike any other publisher in 2022—just like any other platform, it has a lot of content to manage, employee records to keep safe, and, unfortunately, weak points that can be exploited. Those weak points were exploited, at scale, by the hacker, who sent an obscene message through their Apple News notifications, a situation bad enough that, as of this writing, both Fast Company and its sister publication, Inc., are still down. It is unprecedented in the modern day for a publication to be taken offline by hackers for this long, but the truth is, any organization can face issues like this, depending on their history and track record.

The reason is that, even now, it is far too easy to let security fall to the side, even at organizations that might otherwise have a reason to take it seriously. Twitter, for example, saw its network hacked in 2020 essentially through a set of credentials that were accessible, loosey-goosey, on a Slack channel, giving the hackers access to any number of prominent Twitter accounts.

I don’t think these companies and networks are the exception—unfortunately, weak security practices are widespread, especially when it comes to extremely common CMS platforms like WordPress. Even with tight security, WordPress is still the Windows of content management, and therefore will always have a target on its back.

From a reassuring-readers standpoint, Fast Company unfortunately has a long road ahead, but it is one that will eventually be walked, and even with the cynical messages that might have emerged amid the attack, a little empathy is likely deserved at this time. After all, it’s not hard to imagine your own website and company in Fast Company’s shoes.

What I would recommend that you do, as a reader of Fast Company or Inc., is to show you support to the journalists that have been affected by this brutal incident. This attack is an attempt to silence them for reasons of chaos more than anything else, and we should not reward them by giving into the cynical snickers. That is, after all, what they want.

The good journalism that these magazines do does not deserve to be damaged by chaos agents. We need to encourage their publisher to invest in security, yes, but at the same time, that should not extend to the reporting. Like any other magazine, Fast Company is doing its best amid tight deadlines and complex publishing schedules.

Empathy is an important tool right now. Use it well.

On Linux circa 2002, AMD hardware needed a little help to support ACPI, so a technical workaround called a “dummy wait op” was added, which essentially waits for the CPU to complete a task entirely before shooting more instructions its way.

This was what was necessary to make single-core Athlon processors work well with Linux in 2002. But the problem is, we’re in a world where even low-end processors have a whole bunch of cores and can safely work around issues like this, with no problem. AMD just announced the seventh generation of Ryzen, and that, along with modern generations of EPYC and Threadripper, are still being held up by this dummy wait op, despite it not being a technical problem for the processor lines in years. While 2002-era Athlons had legitimate technical reasons why they needed it, we are not in 2002 anymore, and that “dummy wait op” is actually holding the chips back in certain cases.

As AMD engineer Prateek Nayak put it in a patch submission:

However, sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases.

So, depending on the task, to put it all another way, AMD chips have been getting slowed down significantly because of a presumption that was only true for only a short time but has been treated as true in the kernel code for decades.

Dave Hansen, an Intel employee who works closely on the Linux kernel, noted in his patch addition to the kernel that most modern systems do not actually need this workaround—and that Intel hasn’t needed it for years.

(Zii Miller/Unsplash)

“First and foremost, modern systems should not be using this code. Typical Intel systems have not used it in over a decade because it is horribly inferior to MWAIT-based idle,” he wrote. “Despite this, people do seem to be tripping over this workaround on AMD system today.”

Now, to be fair, Linux code is a complex beast, and it is often difficult to assess where legacy code may actually be hurting performance in certain cases. In this particular case, it took AMD a while to assess exactly where the holdup was coming from, and then what would be necessary to fix it.

Linux is great because of its broad support of platforms new and old, but the challenge is that these fixes intended for very old systems can creep out of the woodwork and create challenges for new ones. This is a 30-year-old code base, and sometimes getting it to fighting shape in 2022 means managing the technical debt of two decades ago.

Anyway, for AMD owners: Enjoy your faster performance on version 6.0 of the Linux kernel.

Recently, the Virginia Lottery scored a marketing deal with online casino company IWG as well as Capcom, the maker of many of the best third-party video games for the NES and Super NES, to bring the ultra-popular Street Fighter II franchise to its website of paid lottery games. These games are effectively legalized gambling in a form beyond what the phrase “lottery” suggests, and are mostly original casino-style games, but there are a few licensing deals the state has with major brand franchises, with Monopoly, Ghostbusters, Wheel of Fortune, and Pac-Man being the most prominent.

I guess the upside is that this is a game you have a realistic chance of getting some of your quarters back.

It doesn’t necessarily feel like Pac-Man would be out of place here, but Street Fighter II, a video game franchise with a reputation to uphold, is a different beast entirely. Sure the game was super-popular, arguably as popular in the ’90s as Pac-Man was in the ’80s, but it’s a gamer’s game, something that popularized a genre of games that has a reputation of fostering a protective niche. It’s not that video games can’t go all casino on you, it’s more that Street Fighter II is kind of a surprising choice because of what it represents to the gaming industry. It suggests that the Virginia Lottery thinks it can win over hardcore gamers.

“We felt that Street Fighter was a very popular and highly recognizable video game franchise with decades of success,” Virginia Lottery spokesperson John Hagerty told Play Virginia.

(And it’s worth noting that other legacy companies targeted at hardcore gamers, especially Konami, have leaned hard into gambling-style games. Sega, meanwhile, is owned by Sammy, itself a onetime video game maker that primarily sells slot machines today.)

The game is basically a match-three style game of the kind you might see on scratch-offs, except on steroids, with each round proving extremely addictive. You can play a demo mode without putting money behind it, with an occasional nudge to drop a few bucks in. I’m testing the free play as I write this, and it put me in a free-round setup where I won an additional $28 bucks by doing literally nothing. I’m sure the actual game is like that, too.

It has an auto-play mode too. I put it on that as I was writing just to see what it would do, it it might by chance make me a fake hundredaire, but odds are I will probably not come out ahead because games like this are designed to favor the house.

I think that gambling is often a fraught endeavor, and not something I regularly take part in myself, but I let myself try it this one time just because, it’s an extremely novel thing to see a video game you grew up, one that gets a direct reference on the front page of your website, with get the same treatment as Wheel of Fortune.

To me, I think there’s something to be said about the rise of electronic lottery games of this nature, one that, as GamesIndustry.Biz notes, is becoming increasingly common and even somewhat dangerous to consider. They are a risky road for states to go down, albeit a very lucrative one, especially in cases where the mechanics lean closer to video poker than scratch-off.

But maybe we have to accept that this is the world we now live in, where lottery games now have to compete with mobile games just to have a chance of breaking even, but now have become even more dangerous and addictive as a result.

I came out ahead on my $50 in demo money, at $86.50. (I played it again, also in demo mode, in the same automated format, just to test my luck, and found I lost $20 the second time, so I’m only slightly ahead.)

I have to imagine with the real stuff, the risk of people losing way more than $86.50 is awful high.

I think the easy answer to that question is “no way.” The value proposition of art grabbed from a stock photo site is different from what you might get from MidJourney or Stable Diffusion. And while the results of those kinds of artistic creations are interesting, it seems like a bad value proposition to let images illustrated by actual people or stock photography live in the same setting as a bunch of art illustrated with the help of a computer.

That’s, fortunately, the direction Getty Images leans on all of this at the moment, revealing to The Verge this week that the company had decided not to allow AI-generated photography out of concern of its copyright status.

“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” the company’s CEO, Craig Peters, told the website.

This is understandable for a few reasons—for one thing, the scraping-driven approach that most AI generators utilize raise genuine copyright questions that have yet to be resolved in court. For another, there is an genuine, not-totally-cleared-up concern that AI-generated images might not be copyrightable (though some, like Ars Technica’s Benj Edwards, note that the specific concern is overblown based on existing photography-related precedents). And given that a popular source of AI imagery is the portrayal of celebrity personalities, Getty could find itself awash in images that could present serious rights issues. (Some are speculating that Getty itself might have a claim against the AI companies.)

One other concern worth discussing here, putting on my graphic designer’s hat for a minute here, is the message that a move like this would project to the company’s target audience. Getty Images tends to have a reputation as a more “premium” stock photo service, including a significant editorial photo offering. I have used Getty for a long time for a lot of reasons, and I think it would harm their reputation with creators to put AI-generated imagery in front of them, especially given that not everyone is necessarily on board with the idea in general. Certainly there are more cookie-cutter stock images on Getty than there were a decade ago, reflecting the increased need on the market for their services, but I think AI images, while still having some sort of value, would offer a strange competitive framing for Getty Images, a service artists and illustrators often utilize to help build more complex illustrations.

Is Getty perfect? No way. Odds are, you’ve likely seen this guy or this woman way too many times since the start of the pandemic. There was a period where seemingly every startup used one of these two figures.

But with AI art, Getty threatens to take its stock-photos-that-feel-like-stock-photos problem to new extremes. AI images should have their own place to live, no matter their copyright status, and Getty Images should set a line in the sand to ensure that continues to be the case.

First up: A quick shout-out to the team at Input, the great Bustle Digital tech site that shut down out of nowhere yesterday. One of the best sites out there, their demise was totally undeserved.

Like many people, I found an interest in podcasts thanks to the story of a man who has been in prison since before podcasts were even invented.

His situation, and the did-he-didn’t-he push-pull of Serial, the podcast that made his story famous, helped to raise the podcast as a medium into something with lasting cultural value.

But it did not solve Adnan Syed’s legal challenges nor absolve him of charges in the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee—at least, not overnight.

It’s been nearly eight years since the final episode of the first season of Serial, about Syed’s criminal case, first appeared. And since then, many more attempts have been made to follow the threads that Serial brought to light—both in the form of other podcasts, such as that of Undisclosed, co-hosted by Syed’s longtime advocate Rabia Chaudry, and through other media, such as an HBO documentary on his case.

The drumbeat that Serial began, raising questions about the case, helped lead to fresh developments in his case over many years. But it was only on Monday that he was able to walk out of the courthouse to his family, the conviction against him vacated. There’s a chance new charges may be filed—he’s under house arrest now—but the questions Sarah Koenig raised about his conviction nonetheless had an effect, though advocates like Chaudry stayed far closer to the case.

If you read online, you will find a lot of people who consider Serial’s decision to not do any significant follow-ups to the first season, and to sow doubt in Syed’s case by not making a call either way, to be particularly problematic in light of the many developments that have emerged after, and many more details reported on Undisclosed and other podcasts.

It turns out that a podcast alone cannot solve a cold case—but it certainly has a better shot if it remains committed to diving deep. Serial, ultimately, chose the route of covering multiple stories instead of committing to just one.

This raises a legitimate question—if this case has been so important to podcasting itself, why has Serial not done any additional coverage of it, until, literally, three hours ago?

I think that’s a question that was perhaps inevitable to ask about Serial as a podcast enterprise—what did it owe to this case beyond a single season of storytelling? By doing the podcast in the first place, was Sarah Koenig committing herself to having to follow this case in the long term, but fell down on the job in making new episodes for nearly eight years despite there being many developments since then?

Or was the art of the whole thing, the thing that made podcasting a mainstream phenomenon, something that needed to be encased in amber, a purely creative endeavor that others should suss out? Serial has made a lot of podcasts since then, and most of them have told interesting stories in the years since. But what did they owe to Syed, Hae Min Lee, and other figures involved in this case?

To me, that’s a complicated question—and one that has been parodied effectively on shows like Only Murders in the Building. But the answer is a lot different when it’s about real people.

Simply put, the nature of cheap manufacturing has allowed for the rise of obscure types of connectors to be used for basically anything. One said obscure type of connector is called a male-to-male extension cord, and is essentially a cable with plugs on either side of its connection.

These cables are most effective for one specific use case—situations in which you need to plug a generator into an electrical outlet as back-feed, essentially allowing the generator to continue to power your home through electrical outlets.

The CPSC points out that this is a stupid idea, however. In a recent press release, the commission put the situation like this:

When plugged into a generator or outlet, the opposite end has live electricity posing a risk of serious shock or electrocution. Additionally, the flow of electric power in the direction reverse to that of the typical flow of power circumvents safety features of the home’s electrical system and can result in a fire. The short length of some of these cords also encourages use of a generator near the home, which could create a risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. Furthermore, these cords do not comply with applicable national safety codes, such as National Fire Protection Association 70 (NFPA 70).

Essentially, plugging in one of these cables encourages people to do stupid things in the name of trying to power their homes during a rare power outage.

This cable has a colloquial name that CPSC didn’t use, but I have no issues with using—it is a “suicide cord,” because it can literally kill you or burn your house down because you are literally exposing live electricity via metal prongs. As certain sites explain online, the safest way to use one of these devices, if you must, is to shut off the main power, which prevents the generator’s power from going out to the main grid, and by only turning on breakers you plan to use, carefully, removing any objects that might overpower the system.

But even then, it is not the smartest of ideas. The YouTube home enthusiast channel Stud Pack points out, correctly, that there are some useful situations where you would want to plug a generator into a wall this way, particularly in states such as Louisiana, which frequently see tropical storms.

But just because you might want to plug a generator into your electricity system doesn’t mean the best way to do so is via a male-to-male cable.

Paul Selleck, the primary host of the successful channel, makes the case for 1) using a specialized connector that can plug directly into the wall for air conditioning, and 2) replacing the female connector on the wall with a male connector, which helps prevent the cable from spouting off live electricity.

(Notably, the house featured in the clip uses a lockout on the circuit breaker, making it so you literally cannot use the generator power without turning off the main power at the same time, something emphasized for safety.)

In some ways, the CPSC’s argument points out how products like cables are often sold online without a lot of thought as to their long-term safety. People who don’t have Selleck’s electrical know-how are buying these things as a shortcut, and potentially endangering themselves in the process.

Before buying something on Amazon of this nature, maybe do your research first. Manufacturers don’t have the same motivations you do.

But here we are 15 years later, likely with a few bad IT decisions made in the process, and Swisher and Mossberg’s great idea, an up-to-the-minute technology news site based on the success of their All Things Digital conference, is no more. The site was shut down nine years ago after Swisher and Mossberg ran into disagreements with Dow Jones on keeping the publication going. The duo moved to Vox Media, launching the still-active Recode. But AllThingsD, even without their influence, was supposed to stay online.

It did not. Their content archives—gone. Swisher announced the unfortunate discovery last night, noting that both content and videos from the technology site she had built with Mossberg were inaccessible through their original platform.

Some of this was potentially the result of a perfectly reasonable decision that Mossberg and Swisher made 15 years ago—to use the WordPress content management system to help accelerate their publishing time, rather than WSJ’s internal CMS. But it doesn’t explain all of it—the videos, published through WSJ, are also gone. But given the broad success of AllThingsD and the importance of the specific years it covered to the technology industry, it nonetheless strikes one as potentially being extremely problematic.

The hard part of keeping content online in this climate is that content creation is more ephemeral than it was in the print era. And despite noble efforts such as the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it remains far harder than it should be to just keep content online. The second that a new regime comes in and sees a different way of making money as a new imperative, it changes the conversation entirely—and the older content, despite not having the traffic it once did, gets the heave-ho.

Swisher’s thread talks about how the video content she built using Flip cameras had caught Silicon Valley at a pivotal time—for example, a brief period where Facebook wasn’t doing well and Mark Zuckerberg had to legitimately think about selling. This is historic value right here, and it’s likely all lost because some IT department didn’t see the value of protecting historic content as an imperative—a huge waste of money given that, as Swisher reveals, she and Mossberg tried to buy the archives.

Should Swisher and Mossberg fought harder to take control of the archives they built, knowing that this was a real possibility? Sure, but that could also be said of every other other journalist who has ever left a job in which they carried deep influence.

So many of the publications I worked at no longer exist, their histories lost to regime changes and shifts. And most journalists are not alone there. It’s part of the reason I roll my own.

The fact of the matter is, the motivation to keep content online before a certain age range is just not there, even when it is extremely historically relevant, in the case of Swisher. She had hoped to write a memoir based on her AllThingsD work with Mossberg. It’s unclear whether this affects her plans—but it is clear that the Journal should put in the work to try to recover some of that data before it’s too late.

She, along with Mossberg, did a lot for them—they may not have contracts, but they sure have clout. The WSJ honestly owes it to them.

The original model, released in 2017 after Google released a couple of Chromebook generations under the Chromebook Pixel line, was a fascinating device because of what it tried to do at the time of its release. It didn’t look like anything else on the market, with its silicone palm rests offering a completely different approach to any other laptop. It had huge bezels for its 12-inch size, but that was simply something that made it better for tablet uses. And while reviewers found it a little weird, it was weird in a good way, as in, we hope Google iterates on this model.

Which is why, of course, Google never directly iterated on it—and five years after the release of the fascinating experiment of a device, it appears that the Pixelbook dream is dead. Word from The Verge is that the company decided to shut down the program and move the team elsewhere, after releasing just three Pixelbook devices, with the most recent, the Pixelbook Go clamshell laptop, coming out in 2019.

Maybe the line cost a little more than the usual budget-minded Chromebooks that usually fill classrooms, but it at least kind of earned its additional expense by giving other Chromebook makers something to aspire to, much as Microsoft has more successfully done with its Surface line of laptops.

In some ways, the decision to pause development on the Pixelbook line is a bit sad. It hits as Google’s other hardware ambitions were just hitting their stride. The Pixel line of phones, after a few generations of being just OK, are now seen as all-around solid choices for most users. And word was that the company planned on moving away from Intel for the next iteration of the Pixelbook, in favor of its in-house Tensor chip, which might have allowed the device to hit a more reasonable price point and performance level than the earlier models had.

(One knock on the earlier Pixelbooks was their use of Y-series Intel chips, the same low-powered line of chips that once gave Apple’s 12-inch MacBook its somewhat mediocre status. Dollars to donuts, if you put a Tensor chip in the 2017 Pixelbook design and shrank the bezels slightly, it would have been a winner.)

I still can’t get over the fact Google followed up the Pixelbook with such a disastrous device.

But in other ways, the model simply seemed to never gel. The original Pixelbook was a solid execution if an imperfect device that I admire all these years later; its follow-up, the Pixel Slate, was a poorly reviewed hot mess, a tablet with an Intel chip that didn’t work well and a software offering that was simply not ready to go full tablet. The 2019 Pixelbook Go, while using better hardware and getting a better response, seemed to never shake its “overpriced” status.

One wonders if Google might have just been better off making one Pixelbook, which offered a pretty good starting point, and continually making it slightly better each year, something that other Chromebook makers, such as HP and Lenovo, do a pretty good job at. (Lenovo, for one, has had significantly more success making Chromebook tablets than Google ever had.)

For me, the original Pixelbook gave me a reason to follow the Chromebook market, even if I wasn’t necessarily the target audience for the devices, because if Google was making devices that interesting, odds are they would eventually land on something pretty good. (Right?)

There is actually a fairly solid Chromebook-centric media outlet, Chrome Unboxed, that has been following the space to see if any future Pixelbook might be in the works—and it seemed like potential confirmation hit back in May. But here we are in September, hopes dashed.

The site’s Gabriel Brangers spoke for those who followed Google’s efforts by stating:

Whatever Google had up its sleeve, we were excited because frankly, there’s just something about the Pixlebooks. It’s nearly impossible to put into words but Google’s Chromebooks, even the OG Pixels, were simply “built different.” The newer Pixelbook-branded devices weren’t the most powerful Chromebooks on the market. Nor did they necessarily house any features that you couldn’t find in models from other OEMs. Yet, there is an almost intangible feeling you get when you pick up a Made by Google Chromebook.

Now, we have a market of devices, mostly made by other companies, that are pretty good, and sell well, but no more flagships being made by the company that built the sector in the first place—leaving ChromeOS in an interesting place, despite its huge success.

Here’s to hoping that someday, they change their minds and revive that 2017 Pixelbook design for a new era.

Update: It was revealed this week by Wikipedia-focused journalist Stephen Harrison, a Slate columnist, that McCullough misrepresented his use of Wikipedia in the video—he was once a super-user, as far back as 2003—and in fact had a page about himself subject to deletion on at least four separate occasions. So there’s that. Original piece below.

As a guy who researches content on the internet on a regular basis, I get the emotion that might lead a fellow traveler to criticize the most popular source of research on the internet.

Over the years, I’ve gotten in a few jabs myself.

But at the same time, I can’t allow myself to have anything but deep respect for Wikipedia, one of the most important digital outlets online. And I would never do such a thing as block the site from appearing in my browser.

I am not J.J. McCullough, however. McCullough, a history and politics YouTuber (and illustrator, and Washington Post columnist) who tends to lean on his native Canada with his commentary focus, put out a video over the weekend ripping on Wikipedia, calling it “trash” and making it clear that as a researcher, he would never stoop to reading a user-generated encyclopedia for facts.

“An enormous number of articles, podcasts, and videos will simply be thinly veiled regurgitations of Wikipedia pages and it’s not just that these copycats repeat the same information—it’s that they organize the same information in the same way, cite the same sources, offer the same analysis, use the same narratives, and reach the same conclusions,” he said.

His clip, which rocked the apple cart quite a bit, was essentially built around the idea that Wikipedia is thinly sourced information that can appear in error occasionally and often ends up quite biased. Additionally, he raises concerns about Wikipedia often shaping how people view information, as well as the tendency for big tech companies to integrate user-generated information from Wikipedia in search results.

Finally, he expressed frustration with the fact that Wikipedia had in-depth articles that featured a lot of specific details about the subject matter, citing articles on Mario, Vancouver, and Stephen Harper as examples of what he means. In many ways, these articles are written with extreme depth in part to encourage deeper research—the very thing that he suggests that Wikipedia does not do.

Annie Rauwerda, the writer and digital curator who runs the popular Depths of Wikipedia, immediately raised questions about the video from the perspective of 1) his commentary and 2) the fact that the alternative he offered was, effectively, “read books.”

Books are great, so are biographies from newspaper websites, another source he recommends, but the challenge is that these resources limit access to a lot of information, particularly because this information is not built to be updated to the current moment, as Wikipedia is, and is not built to be freely accessible to the public, as Wikipedia is. In many ways, McCullough frames the digital encyclopedia as a cheap substitute for good information.

But the problem with this commentary is that it doesn’t allow for the fact that, well, not everyone is a researcher, and a freely edited encyclopedia that is run by a nonprofit and helps to improve access to information is actually a huge net positive for people who aren’t professional researchers. If we’re all using the same source, it might create problems with everyone sharing the same facts, but on the other hand, it raises the access to and quality of information overall.

We live in a world of misinformation and widely spread lies—and honestly, trying to solve for that is really hard when spreading a new lie is as easy as having a shaky relationship with the facts and a big following. I don’t see why we should take that away. It would be counterproductive. A researcher like myself, or someone like J.J. McCullough, could absolutely get by without Wikipedia—but a whole bunch of other people would be lost.

At one point, McCullough leans in and discusses single-author websites that gather a lot of information together in a research-style format, and suggests that those kinds of sites should be read more closely and appreciated. Now, I write and operate one of these sites, and let me be on record as saying Wikipedia should live and thrive because it’s a good part of the internet.

I have written a number of pieces where I literally was the one person who cared about that topic enough to explain it properly. I’ve caught big things Wikipedia missed. I’ve filled in gaps that Wikipedia editors leave open for some strange reason. And I must say, I’m still glad we have it, because I would rather have consistent access to a good but imperfect source of information than shutting this information behind the paywalls of bookstores or the limitations of libraries.

In a war of information, you want as much info as possible on the front lines.

But I have to say, sometimes I sure wish the company toned the “Apple-ness” of some of its decision-making back. Not because they are bad decisions, but because those decisions seem to take the most complicated path to a solution.

There are plenty of examples of this in Apple’s history—we want a thinner laptop, so let’s make the keys so thin that they’re annoying to use and prone to damage—but the most recent such example feels a little on the counterproductive side of things.

With its latest round of smartphone releases, Apple has put its high-end phones on Dynamic Island—the unusual marketing term the company came up with to describe the large pill cutout the company is using for its Face ID mechanism. While the rest of the industry has taken to try to minimize the size of its notches and camera cutouts, Apple seems to have embraced the fact that it will always have one by making it a part of the design of the operating system.

The design works by leveraging the fact that OLED displays are purely black, making it possible to extend and shrink the pill as necessary. Essentially, this decision seems to suggest Apple isn’t interested in minimizing the real estate of its front-facing camera tech and is instead guessing that you’ll live with it.

This is a bet the company also made on the notch—but one nearly all of its competitors on the Android side have managed to already resolve more effectively. As far back as 2018, OnePlus had already cut down the size of the notch to a teardrop, then in 2019 put the camera inside a pop-up mechanism.

The reason Apple can’t resolve it is that the company made a bet on face recognition over in-screen fingerprint recognition. And while some people don’t like them (myself not included) the fact is fingerprint scanners do nearly all of the work of Face ID for practical purposes without taking away from the rest of the experience of using the phone. Watching a fullscreen video on an iPhone 14 Pro is going to suck in ways that it will not on a Samsung.

Getting back to Dynamic Island here: A lot of people seem to have fallen in love with the UX style, and why not? It’s not every day we get a new type of user experience on a smartphone, given the fact that they’re all mostly buttonless glass slabs. But to me, I think the real concern is going to be the distraction picture. We are already at a point where we already deal with too many notifications, and Apple has just given them a malleable, permanent place on their home screen. In an era where we’re already overwhelmed by notifications, it feels like a bit of a step back to add a visual noisemaker to the top of the screen at all times.

(As for the name: I’m convinced Apple meant to call this thing the “Touch Bar,” as it is functionally similar to the Mac UX style in many ways, but that name had been smeared by years of mixed experiences on Mac keyboards. So they had to come up with another name, and it was a challenge. The real question: Does Apple bring back Dynamic Island to the Mac someday?)

I’m sure lots of people are going to love this design. But at a time when I try to keep my personal home screen very minimalist, it feels like a step in the wrong direction.

Maybe this is a sign that unlike half the U.S. population, I’m not really an iPhone guy, and it might take a while to get back there.

I’m a Dynamic Island unto myself.

Side note: This is issue number 250. That’s a lot of MidRange! Be sure to take a look at our archives to see what we’ve written in the past.

The company took a lot of time to make the call, but seemed to minimize the actual campaign that led to the call at every turn. A long blog post trying to explain why they would not fold did not mention the campaign or the site that was upsetting people at any point.

Meanwhile, the post exposed new problems for the company, as it implied an unusual situation where the company seemed to be creating carbon offsets for, of all things, the LGBTQ+ movement. This quickly earned mockery from people involved in the campaign and led to a spot-on parody site in response.

By failing to handle the problem in the first place, the company introduced new problems for itself. As the chorus grew louder—with increasingly vitriolic commentary from people who implied that CloudFlare’s employees were complicit, even supportive of Kiwi Farms—high-profile internet culture journalists like Kat Tenbarge, Ben Collins, and Taylor Lorenz began reporting on the issue, exposing the debate to broader audiences.

Eventually, citing unnamed serious threats on the platform and actively going out of its way to not give credit to the campaign, CloudFlare made the call to remove the site from the service. CEO Matthew Prince gave his first acknowledgement of the campaign as such:

We are also not taking this action directly because of the pressure campaign. While we have empathy for its organizers, we are committed as a security provider to protecting our customers even when they run deeply afoul of popular opinion or even our own morals. The policy we articulated last Wednesday remains our policy. We continue to believe that the best way to relegate cyberattacks to the dustbin of history is to give everyone the tools to prevent them.

Notably, the campaign, led by the trans activist Keffals, officially ended just two days later, after Kiwi Farms’ founder essentially suggested that there were few ways forward to revive the site after a second host, Russia’s DDoS-Guard, also closed off the platform.

Some will say it was a loss for free speech that CloudFlare bent. But I think the bigger issue here is why it took so much to get them to bend in the first place. At one point, the company’s commentary increasingly suggested it was a public utility, without any of the regulatory work needed to actually make that the case.

At some point, CloudFlare is a private company that manages services for content. The system has proven that they will only get called on to make a content decision in extreme cases, but the principles of the matter—in the Washington Post, Prince implied he did not want to budge unless there was a court order—seem to have gotten in the way of what likely started as a reasonable policy.

By gaining a reputation as a platform of last resort, it means the company has threatened its relationship with mainstream customers all in the name of a principle that has proved more malleable than they would like to claim.

I will probably be one of those customers who walks. Removing Tedium from CloudFlare will be complex. My install of Craft CMS uses plugins that don’t have any real equivalents for some of CloudFlare’s competitors. And there are real risks that come with a shift like this. But the company did not show true leadership when it mattered, and as a result, I don’t know if rewarding that with my continued use is the right way to go.

It took CloudFlare until it was fully on its back to say they have empathy for the organizers of the pressure campaign that started because of a swatting incident—something that most would agree represents a real-world threat to a person’s safety. A company worth trusting would have led with that.

This week, Apple is anticipated to ditch its Mini line of iPhones in favor of a new larger device that will hit a lower price point than previous Max phones sold by Apple.

I get it—the sales numbers clearly did not favor the phone’s permanent place in the lineup, making it into the 12-inch MacBook of the iPhone line. Still, the loss of the iPhone Mini, a relatively niche device in the company’s lineup, is nonetheless disappointing for those people who prefer a more manageable device in their lives, such as my wife, who held onto an iPhone 5 for more than seven years because she didn’t want the disruption of a larger device. (Pro tip to Apple: Revive the Mini line with the iPhone SE next year—it will make everyone happier. Trust me on this.)

YouTuber Sara Dietschy reviewing the iPhone 13 Mini last fall—and highlighting the pluses and minuses of small phones for the average user.

For years, it was also seen as basically the only good small phone option for people who wanted a smartphone that fit a minimal spot in their loves. But that has changed of late, thanks to a couple of recent entrants into the Android space—including the Asus Zenfone 9, which packs a couple of large cameras, but more notably, hits the just-below-6-inches mark with a low-key, elegant device that has gotten solid reviews from all the people you’d hope would offer such reviews.

The Sony Xperia 5 IV pulls off the rare trick of being IP68 water resistant and still having a headphone jack. (Sony)

Also of note on this front is Sony, whose Xperia 5 IV fits neatly into the small phone category thanks to its 6.1-inch display that tends to be on the thin and tall side. (That makes it functionally slimmer than the Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and Google’s Pixel 6a—6.1-inch devices that have evolved into small phones almost by default.)

Both of these phones have a lot going for them—both devices have headphone jacks, a rarity in 2022, while the Sony device is a cut-down version of a high-end phone the company sells that tends to lean towards the professional market. But both devices have notable faults that may prove to be disappointments for end users. First, the $699 Zenfone 9 doesn’t support Verizon, which means it cuts off one of the three primary carriers before it even goes live; and second, the Xperia 5 IV still costs $999, putting its pricing closer to Galaxy S22 Ultra territory than iPhone Mini territory. (Commentators have not been kind.)

But the biggest killer of all is the fact that smartphones that aren’t sold by carriers face a huge hill to climb in the American market, where many still buy devices on two or three-year plans. So, to buy these small phones, you have to test your luck on Amazon, eBay, or elsewhere. Not exactly a show of support—and something that really highlights how carriers pick winners and losers. (Case in point: T-Mobile was essentially the only big carrier that sold OnePlus in the U.S.; only recently did OnePlus get another company, Mint Mobile, to offer a phone under a carrier plan—and not their flagship, either.)

You could make the case that smartphones are likely past the point where you need carrier plans to support your next big purchase. But still, it shuts off the market to players that once had a more dominant role, like Sony, as well as up-and-coming players, like Asus.

Samsung and Google are great and all, but Android is going to be a harder choice to make, even with smaller options filling an important niche, if carriers don’t make room for additional brands.

Yesterday, after much prodding, the company finally released a statement … and well, it gives the impression of a company that wants to be strongly regulated.

It’s not just that their previously discussed security concerns aren’t there—it’s that, for some reason, the company feels like they shouldn’t have a say on content decisions at all. This becomes clear from their blog post, written by CEO Matthew Prince and global public policy head Alissa Starzak, in which they seem to want to leave the hairy decision-making on content to services that actually host content or infrastructure:

Some argue that we should terminate these services to content we find reprehensible so that others can launch attacks to knock it offline. That is the equivalent argument in the physical world that the fire department shouldn’t respond to fires in the homes of people who do not possess sufficient moral character. Both in the physical world and online, that is a dangerous precedent, and one that is over the long term most likely to disproportionately harm vulnerable and marginalized communities.

Today, more than 20 percent of the web uses Cloudflare’s security services. When considering our policies we need to be mindful of the impact we have and precedent we set for the Internet as a whole. Terminating security services for content that our team personally feels is disgusting and immoral would be the popular choice. But, in the long term, such choices make it more difficult to protect content that supports oppressed and marginalized voices against attacks.

The argument here seems to disregard both the current situation—that the community they are providing safe harbor to actively causes harm to others on the internet at a level beyond content itself—and CloudFlare’s own role in regulating that content.

CloudFlare, as a product that a significant portion of the internet uses, seems to have approached the position it’s in from the perspective of what is called a common carrier, a person or company that is responsible for distributing services, but whose rights are regulated by an outside body.

Essentially, by CloudFlare’s argument, the company is effectively operating as a common carrier that should not get involved in content decisions. However, the problem is that they haven’t done any of the regulatory work to support this case. CloudFlare is essentially asking to be treated like a common carrier without any underlying government regulation to tell them what to do or how the federal government is likely to step in and protect consumers.

This is not an uncommon situation in the internet era. When the Obama-era Federal Communications Commission attempted to enforce net neutrality, the strategy they used was to designate internet service providers as common carriers (which is, effectively, what they are), which the ISPs didn’t like, eventually leading to the Trump-era reversal of net neutrality rules. A whole lot of companies are out there carrying themselves like common carriers when in reality, they have none of the regulatory backing to actually support that case.

By making this statement, CloudFlare is making it clear that it is now one of those companies. It wants the protection of not having to make content decisions, but it has not actually done the work to be regulated in such a way, so as a result, in highly sensitive cases like Kiwi Farms where harassment is being facilitiated, it’s not like the U.S. government is going to step in and deal with it.

“Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy,” Prince and Starzak write. “To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.”

The difference here is that the laws that regulate phone calls exist—if you harass someone over the phone, there are laws that prevent this, and as a common carrier, AT&T and Verizon are positioned in such a way that it must allow for this kind of regulation. CloudFlare is asking for something like this without doing any of the work to ensure its services are regulated under federal law. It is essentially calling itself a common carrier without actually being a common carrier. Pretending to be a common carrier without actually being a common carrier creates a no man’s land, one that strongly endangers digital users, just as we might be endangered if there were no laws on the books around phone harassment.

If you want to be a common carrier, do the work. Until then, manage your network and protect your users.

A recent post on the website Search Engine Journal highlights just how dangerous Dall-E 2 can be if used for the wrong purposes. In the piece, author Vincent Terrasi of the firm OnCrawl suggests that site owners should create SEO-optimized AI-based images that can be used to play into the semantic nature of search engines, by creating content that is highly optimized for specific terms—rather than being valuable and unique because it is real.

The nature of search engine optimization is such that copy and design and speed and quality can be used to raise a specific entry in search results. This, in the view of some users, has sacrificed quality in the name of what looks best in the eyes of Google, meaning that you get a lot of articles that encourage sameness over actually offering new information.

A 2021 Google IO presentation on Multitask Unified Model, an AI-driven model that Google uses to extract information from rich media like images, video, and audio.

Images have recently gained additional currency in Google’s world, thanks to the implementation of a new technology called Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which can extract information directly from non-text formats such as images, video, and audio.

As Terrasi notes, there are already strong motivations to optimize images for SEO:

Optimizing your images is a good SEO practice. It notably helps to strengthen your semantic power via keywords and ensures your presence in Google images.

By reading the phrases you associate with your image, search engines can understand its main subject, make sense of it, and therefore use it to position your content in a logical and relevant way for web users.

Now, add in the fact that Google will interpret these images, and all of a sudden, you have a situation where AI is creating highly SEO-optimized images and AI is reading highly SEO-optimized images. Without a whole lot of care, it could lead to people using AI images not for artistic or even commentary reasons, but because Google is more likely to comprehend the value of the AI-based image, which is built from specific prompts, better than the actual image of the thing being portrayed.

Having seen how search engine optimization has worked over the years, this creates a very dangerous precedent long-term. Essentially, it turns using AI images from being a convenience into a motivation, as something built to a heavily-tailored AI term can now be built exactly to the needs of SEO, rather than earning its place on the market.

That may sound a little like a bit of a freak-out, but at the same time, I’ve seen how willing people are to bend the rules to raise their position on search engines, and the underhanded tactics they’ll use. To me, this feels like a genuine concern that engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo need to be ahead of.

It’s not that AI images can never be used, or that they’ll never have a purpose. It’s that building around specific prompts will likely mean perfectly tailored results—and that could lead to a degradation of image quality on search engines for everyone.

For a while, I found resolve in beating one of my favorite video games, Legend of the Mystical Ninja. It’s a great game, one that I’ve played through many times. (What makes it endlessly replayable, IMHO, is the fact that it features numerous minigames, meaning that it has a ton of variety.)

Later, someone who had apparently seen me play the game asked me if I was into Game of Thrones just based on the fact that I was enjoying a 30-year-old video game based around a lightly Americanized satire of Japanese culture, that had nothing to do with the franchise.

I admit that the guy meant well, but I think it reflects a sort of challenge of finding mainstream touchpoints in a world where culture is going increasingly niche. I am very much a nerd, but I basically am not into many of the primary touchpoints of being a nerd—not Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, The Walking Dead, or many of the other big fantasy franchises. I understand lots of other people are; that just isn’t me.

On top of that, I don’t really keep up with sports—in my adult life, I’ve only owned one shirt in my life that big-upped a sports team, and that was because I was required to wear a Michigan State shirt at work at my job … at Michigan State.

I am a fan of video games, but largely those made before about 1996 or so. And while there are certain mainstream phenomena I appreciate—I was watching Better Call Saul’s final episode just like everyone else—I think that in many ways, my cultural interests have generally strayed from whatever was going on in the mainstream.

An old coworker of mine, confronted with the fact that I was interested in Leonard Cohen, whatever indie band was hot at the moment, and whatever random 35-year-old album I glommed onto out of deep interest or obsession, once called my musical taste “off the grid.” This was at the height of the iPod era, mind you, when people’s diverse musical tastes were front-and-center.

I think a lot of this is as a result of the internet. The internet made it easy to consume content without concern as to whether that content or those ideas were truly mainstream. Instead, I dug deeper into other subcultures that I found interesting. I have other interests that are nerdy, but those interests don’t have much in common with the fandom portrayals of, say, The Big Bang Theory. If I find something interesting I dig, I just get into it, no worries about how popular or mainstream or subcultural something is. I think more people these days think this way than you might think.

So I guess the big question is this: When we all fall into non-broad, overly specific subcultures, what are we going to talk about when just having small talk?

I think eventually we’re going to become so splintered and specific that common ground will threaten to be impossible to find.

I want to quote a passage from his email, verbatim:

I’m one of the co-founders of Project Honey Pot. Six years ago, a small engineering team and I set out to track online fraud and abuse. Over that time we’ve learned a ton about the threats websites face. Just over a year ago, that same team set out toward a new goal: give every website access to the performance and security resources previously reserved only for the Internet giants.

To accomplish that we created a new, free service called CloudFlare. Over the last few months we’ve been selectively inviting members of the Project Honey Pot community to participate in a private beta. They’ve been quietly kicking the tires before CloudFlare’s public launch the end of this month. As of today, we protect more than 1,000 websites, have served nearly 100 million page views through the system, stopped more than 3 million attacks, and on average increase page load performance by 35%.

We have been very quiet about CloudFlare in order to be able to launch publicly at a leading technology conference in a couple weeks. However, before we open the service to the public, we wanted to make sure every Project Honey Pot member had an opportunity to check it out.

I was so early to CloudFlare, ShortFormBlog was a low-four-digit number on its domain. And from this email, I have to ask myself, what the hell happened?

This week, CloudFlare has been intently targeted by online users upset that the company continues to host a highly controversial website called Kiwi Farms. (I’ll let other folks offer the scoop on it, but suffice it to say, not a fun place.) Given the company’s background in fighting fraud and abuse, it seems pretty shocking to know that the company’s response to this campaign has been complete radio silence. Not even reporters are breaking through to them, even to get a basic “no comment.”

Prince, as well as his company’s lieutenants (which include John Graham-Cumming, a famous technologist who got the British government to posthumously apologize to Alan Turing), have taken to shutting off replies on their tweets and stopping themselves from tweeting entirely, all in an effort to prevent their company from having to shut down a site when even people who are generally strong free-speech advocates, like First Amendment lawyer and famed blogger Ken “Popehat” White, are siding with the crowd.

Now, to be clear, CloudFlare has been down this road before, famously in 2017, when it banned The Daily Stormer, an equally controversial site. Prince clearly seemed beside himself with the call, challenged to make peace with his desire for a free-speech approach and the fact that the company has to make a content call.

As he wrote back then:

We’re going to have a long debate internally about whether we need to remove the bullet about not terminating a customer due to political pressure. It’s powerful to be able to say you’ve never done something. And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don’t like.

I don’t think that anyone is expecting CloudFlare to get involved in every battle over content, but they’ve given themselves a reputation of only making a call in the most extreme cases. The current situation clearly reflects an extreme case, and one that as a company, they owe users a response more nuanced than radio silence.

I think the thing that bothers me the most, besides the knowledge that moving away from CloudFlare is really hard, is that it’s clear the company has moved away from its original mission to fight fraud and abuse, as in the words of Matthew Prince himself. They are a security company that is clearly not standing up for the security of the internet, which ultimately goes beyond DDOS attacks and ransomware. That is wrong.

I stood up and made the case for this company for years. And now I feel like all of that is for nothing. What happened?

In a way, Mudge never stoped innovating in the way he presented security issues to the public—as his career took him well beyond his hacker roots into roles at DARPA and Google, where he maintained the name “Mudge” as a part of his professional identity, along with his status as an ethical hacker.

And now, he’s innovating in a whole new way—as Twitter’s first true whistleblower, with the help of the organization Whistleblower Aid. He has accused the company’s leadership, particularly recently installed CEO Parag Agrawal of taking steps to downplay or even minimize security concerns—along with Mudge’s reporting on them. One email in the CNN Business piece highlights how Agrawal gave him conflicting instructions regarding how to report the company’s security challenges, forcing an oral report when he had offered to conduct a detailed written report.

While Jack Dorsey, who hired Mudge, was given a friendlier presentation per CNN Business (as highlighted by the tweet above), it did raise questions about how checked-out the Twitter founder was during his final months with the company.

The report accuses Twitter of having poor security standards, with outdated software on its fleet of machines and evidence the company does not follow traditionally accepted privacy standards. Additionally, if the company were to face downtime from some of those machines, redundancy is limited—meaning the company would be dealing with far worse than a failwhale.

In a way, it’s not totally a surprise that there were security problems—Mudge, already legendary, was hired after an infamous 2020 security incident in which many of Twitter’s most famous users, including Joe Biden and Elon Musk, were hacked—but it is surprising the depth of them, implying that many employees have direct or potential access to important platform controls, and that the company has failed to follow a privacy agreement with the Federal Trade Commission. Mudge described the mess as containing “egregious deficiencies, negligence, willful ignorance, and threats to national security and democracy.”

The famed 1998 L0pht Heavy Industries Congressional testimony, which is now the second-most-famous thing Mudge is known for. Mudge is the one with the long hair.

Mudge’s whistleblowing also suggests that the company had gone out of its way to discourage reporting on bots, which have obviously been a bit of a pet issue for Musk, who is in the process of trying to get out of a plan to buy Twitter. The company uses some unusual numbers to count the exact number of bots, and while not the emphasis of Mudge’s whistleblowing (which started well before Musk got involved), he did suggest to CNN Business that there should be more of an appetite than there is to analyze the number of bots on the platform, suggesting that Twitter could do more to assuage these concerns.

“The executive team, the board, the shareholders and the users all deserve an honest answer as to what it is that they are consuming as far as data and information and content,” he said.

All in all, as a user of Twitter, this raises a whole bunch of red flags, and makes me wonder about the way security gets prioritized in organizations where growth at all costs. It took a lot of years for Twitter to get to the point of where it is, and that Mudge feels compelled to speak out in this way suggests that Twitter has never taken enough of a step back to question its own security practices.

And given that this platform plays such an important role in democracy and the dissemination of information, that doesn’t feel good enough.

Thanks for not letting this one slide, Mudge.

Stelter, as an expert on the news industry who beefed up his bonafides as a reporter through two important venues—by launching TVNewser, which is now operated by AdWeek; and as a hotshot media reporter at The New York Times—had an important perspective on where the news industry was going from both a business angle and in terms of the coverage that it did. Which made him the perfect host of Reliable Sources, a news program where Stelter’s capabilities proved essential to understanding the media as a whole.

(Fun fact: The original host of the program, Bernard Kalb, started hosting the show at the age of 71, and despite the launch date happening 29 years ago, Kalb is still kicking at 100 years old. He managed to outlive Reliable Sources, somehow.)

In some ways, Stelter was always a great, important reporter. But his outlet arguably put him in an awkward position numerous times over. Before joining CNN, he was very much a reporter’s reporter, someone who arguably looked like they were on their way to becoming the next David Carr. And he did so well before many of his peers. He was 21 years old when he was hired at the Times, and 28 when he took his role with CNN.

But I think in many ways, having the role that he did at CNN made him a direct target of the very things he used his position to fight against: Misinformation, the echo chamber, and meddling in the news.

Trump was a constant bully of Stelter in particular—using his Twitter platform to take aim at Stelter in particular, among many other perceived enemies. Stelter famously returned the favor by turning off phone notifications related to Trump’s tweets, live on air, after the former president lost his election. (I’m presuming he eventually turned it back on; something about a raid at the Capitol.)

The Trump attacks put Stelter, unfairly, in overexposed territory, something proven by the many replies that he gets from people who don’t understand his role but do understand that their team doesn’t like the guy. He’s overexposed because he did his job correctly and the target of his correct job-doing didn’t like that.

If I was Stelter, I’d take six months off, at least until after the midterms, reboot, recharge. Then, when the moment hits in early 2023, come back with a new project—whether it’s a new startup or a new broadcaster that clearly sees your value in ways that others may not. (I hear Rachel Maddow is cutting back her schedule; maybe MSNBC could use your services?)

But in a lot of ways, I wonder if Stelter might want to get back into print, to take a fresh stab at the amazing work he was doing at the Times, with the benefit of an additional decade of knowledge of the media beat. With the also-excellent Margaret Sullivan leaving her role at The Washington Post (for academia, in her case), we have no journalists truly covering this immensely powerful beat in the way Stelter does. We need him back in the game, without the blinding studio lights of CNN.

All of that is impressive given how far he’s gotten. The thing is, most people in Stelter’s role don’t accomplish what he has in their entire career; Stelter is only 36 and has been at it for nearly 20 years. He’s five years younger than me and has seen many more heights than I probably ever will in my own career in journalism. He has earned the David Carr perch, if he wants it.

To put it all another way, we need more Stelter … and maybe he can be a stronger Brian Stelter outside of the confines of a shifting CNN.

Yes. Yes, I do.

But certainly, I can see what they were thinking when they announced Papa Bowls this week. Papa John’s announced that people were sick of pizza, one of the most popular foods in the world, because a surge in sales during the pandemic has turned into only modest growth.

Scott Rodriguez, the senior vice president of menu strategy and innovation for the food chain, implied that we were simply sick of pizza.

“There’s a general thought that there could be a little bit of pizza fatigue,” Rodriguez told CNN Business. “Because that’s all we’ve had for the last couple of years.”

(Scott, are you not familiar with DoorDash? We could get literally every meal we wanted—including, but not limited to, pizza—by pressing a button.)

Now, to be clear, the idea of putting the parts of pizza in a bowl for people who don’t want gluten is not a totally new idea—the up-and-coming Marco’s started selling this exact concept years ago.

But Papa John’s decision to do this elicited a lot of jokes, and I think the reason for that comes down to the framing, which implied people were not interested in pizza at all. It’s kind of a comical thing to claim. Mind you, Papa John’s sales aren’t even down. They just aren’t growing as fast as they were during a historic period in which everyone ordered delivery because they couldn’t go outside. They managed to maintain their 2020 surge in growth into 2022, and because the chart isn’t growing as fast as they’d like, they’re suddenly looking to fix pizza.

So we have this situation where a prominent pizza chain is trying to sell the idea that pizza is no longer desired, so that they can sell you the solution.

It’s like they set up the joke and just gave everyone a free punchline—which meant that everyone from Jon Stewart to Patton Oswalt, two comedians with famously harsh stances on certain types of fast food, could get a freebie from Papa John’s over the inherently silly claim that pizza was somehow falling out of fashion.

It’s kind of a bad look for a company that has suffered some of the harshest headlines of any franchised businesses over the last five years as a result of the controversies its former leader, Papa John Schnatter, has pushed it into.

I guess, in a sense, maybe it’s a good thing we’re talking about how bad their pizza is rather than how bad their former leader is. But maybe they should take a different tack next time they launch a product a competitor already sells?

And that includes how the company reacts as writers inevitably leave. To be clear, even though it has in the past paid out huge advances to some of the more prominent writers under its purview, these advances have never been contingent on the writers staying forever. Often, the contracts eventually end. Some of the writers will stay. Others will not.

Some will choose to leave right away, or wait years to make their call. And if Substack wants to distinguish itself from the places where talented writers traditionally have outposts, it has to wish people well and understand that it’s simply human nature to want to leave something you’ve been doing.

One thing they cannot do is retaliate, as they did to the editor Sam Thielman recently. In an entry written on Forever Wars, the site operated by his primary collaborator, national security writer Spencer Ackerman, Thielman laid out how simply having an association with Ackerman, who departed Substack for a paid Ghost site as soon as his contract was up, led to Substack ending its work with the editor.

Thielman is a content editor, writer, and collaborator who works on other newsletters and did so under contract with Substack, and, well, here is what they did, in Thielman’s words:

Substack’s brass had evidently taken Spencer’s voluntary departure as a personal betrayal, even though as of July 21, he was free to take this newsletter elsewhere. On Monday the 25th, Stone cc’ed the company lawyer on a notice of termination saying that “[c]onsidering your and Spencer’s post about the move off the platform, we are glad to release you from future commitments to work with Substack. I’m sure you’ll agree it makes sense for both sides. As such, we’ll be winding down your other Substack-funded editing relationships.”

I wrote back that I did not, in fact, agree that it made sense to fire me for editing something someone else had written on another platform. He responded, “Sam, I can only point back to that astonishing departure post. Substack and I have been nothing but deeply supportive of both you and Spencer.”

People did not like this news. When I heard about this news, I wrote the phrase “Good luck with your garbage fire guys,” targeted at Substack. (It was not in the spirit of the olive branch I shared a few months ago.)

Having slept on it, I’m a little less upset about the precedent this sets than I was last night. But I will say that I find it horribly offensive that Substack convinces these famous writers to jump on board, gives them free rein, and after they successfully fulfill their contracts, is upset that some of them decide not to stay on.

That is their choice. It doesn’t matter how many personal emails your team exchanged with them. That is their call, and as a platform that is trying to do right by writers, you need to live with that. No seething behind the scenes because you couldn’t convince a writer that contributed to a Pulitzer to stick around, that they simply weren’t happy with your product in the end. Hold up your end of the bargain—because it reflects on the next batch of potential users your service brings in.

There is evidence that Substack is not comfortable with this dynamic. Co-founder Hamish McKenzie, who started the service, wrote a very long blog post after Luke O’Neil, a writer he had personally brought onto the service, made the choice to leave. A key passage:

Writers have left Substack in the past, and it has always been hard. I hate that any writer might feel like Substack isn’t a place for them to publish and build. Everything we do is designed to help them thrive—it’s an imperative baked into our business model. But this departure hurt more than others.

At some point, we’re dealing with people and emotions. I get it. But at the same time, this is the promise you offer—don’t get mad behind the scenes or in front of the scenes just because someone found your model an imperfect fit. That’s what newspapers do when you’re a hot-shot reporter and you go to the competitor across town. If you want to rise above the climate these writers are often running away from, don’t do that.

I know that can be hard. But let people leave in the spirit you brought them in. Don’t turn the exit interview into an emotional wasteland or screw over their associates as payback.

That is what will differentiate Substack from every other platform. The technology itself is icing.

The thing is, Dall-E 2 and Midjourney seem like genuine groundbreaking ideas, and that can feel threatening to people who actually create things. After all, if someone can create a good-enough artwork and replace all of their images on their corporate blog, as a popular Hacker News post recently highlighted, who needs stock photos?

But on the other hand, it can also be a way to help generate new forms of inspiration. I have to admit that’s how I felt last night when I spotted a share from Rob Sheridan, Nine Inch Nails’ former art director and someone who I often find a lot of common ground on around creative topics, when he highlighted a shoot-’em-up created in Unity from graphical assets developed using Midjourney.

Immediately, my mind went places. This art is not quite to the level of a AAA game, but it’s far closer than it has any right to be based on the fact that the assets were generated through artificial intelligence. This use case clearly highlighted how artificial intelligence could not just create art with limited human input, but also prove the starting point for new human-created artistic works.

It’s not that having an actual person wouldn’t be valuable in cases like these—it’s that bringing in more people can cut down on the potential velocity around simply testing an idea, generating a proof of concept, and ensuring it works.

Video games are a great example of this. In the early 1980s, it was common for games to be developed by a single person who had full ownership over the development process. This often led to truly unique games like Howard Scott Warshaw’s landmark Yar’s Revenge, but the challenge was, this kind of creativity wasn’t scalable. As games became more complex, it often meant creators or small creative teams would be developing ideas over years, trading a reasonable process for creative control.

If someone can develop a whole video game from art generated by a computer, that means they can spend more time focused on the mechanics, the story, and other non-visual elements of the game to help drive more unique approaches. That’s not to say that the visuals don’t matter—they do—but they can be one of the most complex elements to get right, so AI-generated visuals can allow the creative process to continue elsewhere, without slowing down.

Sheridan has been doing exactly this, utilizing AI art to create an alternate reality story called the Volstof Institute for Interdimensional Research. It’s not that he couldn’t create some of this art—he is a talented artist himself. It’s that AI allows him to scale some of his thinking so he can tell a new type of story without having to go through literal months of work to just generate images.

Some are already calling for a game based on his work. Awesome—if he wants to go to a game studio and get it made, he can sell a complete concept to them now, based on work he’s already generated, rather than a vague idea.

I think there’s a fear with artificial intelligence that if we allow it to simply propagate, it’s going to lay ablaze everything in its wake, that people are going to be looking for a way to cut costs, rather than generating new ideas. (I made a joke to this effect just last week.)

But if we treat MidJourney and Dall-E 2 like creative tools, rather than tools that are gunning for our jobs, there is a significantly higher chance that they may actually raise up creativity for others and allow new, more complex ideas to be generated, rather than having to scale down ambition due to lack of resources.

Sometimes a singular vision needs to live in one person’s brain to truly thrive. By bringing AI into the picture, suddenly, that story becomes possible to tell.

But I often find myself watching speedrunning videos, in awe of the fancy footwork and efforts to save individual frames that are common on Super Mario Bros. in particular. Speedruns follow a fairly common arc, in which the creator, often a livestreamer, is chatting with his viewer base, but then once they realize they’re getting close to something special, they stop talking about nachos and start focusing on the game. Many speedrunners also list their heart rate, showing the rush of energy and pressure in real time. It makes for compelling watching.

In recent years, the focus in the original Super Mario game, from a speedrunning perspective, has been to cut fractions of time wherever possible, getting closer and closer to a perfect game. Saving a fraction of a second can have a huge impact on how fast they can plow through 8-4, with the level 4-2, which contains a key warp screen, treated as the primary way to cut time by many speedrunners.

Recently, a new record was set in the game by the speedrunner Niftski, using a somewhat new technique that saved a few fractions of a second by allowing the user to run through a set of bricks in 4-2. And accidentally, he created a new source of tension on the model because the audio went out on his mic while he was playing, leading to the livestream chat freaking out because this guy was on an apparent record pace but had no way to communicate with him. (He was focused on other things, of course: By level 8-4, his heart rate had hit 163bpm.)

And because of a slight timing difference in his recording, he didn’t realize he had actually done significantly better than the prior record, at which point he had a proper freakout.

His record was exactly 116 milliseconds faster than the prior record, set nine months ago. If you go to Speedrun.com, you will find that the top 300 speedruns on the game are all within five seconds of one another, and the top 20 entries are all within two seconds. The difference between a record and a setback at this point is basically the time it takes to blink.

There is still room to optimize Mario even further, but the space to do so is shrinking, with much of the challenge focused on world 4-2, particularly an area that requires players to jump or slide through bricks. By saving a little bit of time here and there, it can save even more time between levels, as the levels change only every third of a second or so. By being extra fast, players can get through this level screen before the next third of a second delay kicks in, saving even more time.

Niftski’s technique is impressive, but it’s already been improved upon, per Kotaku. One user has figured out how to correctly do a literal corner-cutting technique that can save even more time than what Niftski did, all the more impressive because it was something only computer-driven tool-assisted speedruns were able to do previously. The challenge is to fit the somewhat complicated technique into a speedrun, which will take players like Niftski lots of practice. But now it can be done.

Super Mario Bros. is a game that has probably been analyzed and taken apart more than any other, and there may not be much more room to optimize it beyond the 4 minutes and 54 seconds it’s currently at. But on the other hand, that’s what people thought a few years ago—and more techniques kept appearing.

It’s enough to make your heart rate rise.

There were reasons of changing tides that may have hastened the retailer’s downfall, but the truth of the matter is, the primary reason the chain fell apart was the fact that it has an insane amount of debt, debt that was built upon because of a leveraged buyout from years prior that ensured it’d be digging out of a hole for decades to come no matter how many good quarters it had.

“Like most retailers, Toys ‘R’ Us also lost sales to online rivals such as Amazon that offered lower prices and quick shipping,” CNN Business recalled. “But much of the chain’s resources were devoted to paying off that massive debt load rather than staying competitive.”

(If that story upsets you, know that a creditor lawsuit might scare off companies like Bain Capital from ever doing anything like it ever again.)

It’s heartwarming, then, to see another big legacy retailer embracing the idea that Toys “R” Us must live. The company announced last year that it would come back online in Macy’s stores around the country, with Macy’s offering digtal help to the chain as well. And recently, many of those stores-within-stores started opening, with the every Macy’s having a Toys “R” Us by October.

No, it won’t be the same. The scale of the stores is likely to be quite small compared to what they had previously, and the company will have to fight hard to revive its retail base from a department store chain that itself was once more dominant. Certainly the standalone store would be better, but I guess if this is what we have to roll with, that’s what we’ll roll with.

(That said, the model may actually make sense from the perspective of the holidays. After all, Toys “R” Us retail space can be scaled back in the months far removed from Christmas.)

This is actually the second comeback attempt by the chain, but the problem was a little thing called the pandemic, which slowed the company’s growth.

But the truth of the matter is, what the company is doing is really hard, and it may not quite meet the mission of the original store.

“What we are is a supermarket for toys,” Toys “R” Us founder Charles Lazarus once told The Washington Post. “We don’t have a competitor in variety. There is none.”

It’s hard to see that being true working with less than 10,000 square feet of real estate in someone else’s retail chain, but every comeback story had to start somewhere.

So, maybe you share an image of that creator on social media, or as you report on a story, you end up using a picture of them with the things they helped to create.

Now, let’s say, a couple years later, out of the blue, you get a copyright complaint for doing this very thing. The photographer of this creator wants their cut, and because they are skilled in extracting this cut from other creators, they know a lot more about the law than you do.

So you feel between a rock and a hard place, pressured to pay them money or take down something that simply hoped to celebrate someone that inspired you.

This is not a theoretical situation, and is one that a husband-and-wife YouTube creator team ran into last week, after the photographer of an image of famed special-effects wizard Ray Harryhausen sent them a demand letter for the image’s use. While the amount was small, the impact was definitely felt.

It turns out that, in their efforts to celebrate Harryhausen’s influence on the iconic Sega game Altered Beast, Lady Decade and the Top Hat Gaming Man accidentally stepped into a copyright minefield, one that the photographer of the image has seemed to encourage by going after anyone who uses this specific image of Harryhausen.

The thing is, the photographer is legally within his rights to call out uses of said images, but the approach is arguably predatory, as it targets people who likely aren’t massive companies or have huge audiences. In the case of the use of the image on the Top Hat Gaming Man channel, the image appeared for all of three seconds, and was intended as a storytelling tool, which would likely offer fair use protections. The problem is that to prove this they either have to take the risk of ignoring him or fighting him in court—costly endeavors that could harm their livelihoods.

Having read up on the photographer, who I won’t name or link off because my goal is not to brigade but to offer some constructive ideas, his view of social media users of this nature is that they tend to be “clout-chasers,” sharing images of famous personalities for the reason of trying to draw views and traffic for their social media profiles.

Not exactly a charitable mindset, but not an uncommon one in the world of DMCA and copyright.

The problem I see here is that what this photographer is effectively asking for with this aggressive copyright approach is to put a toll on the road of celebrating someone who has inspired millions of others to create things. That, to me, seems wrong. And I think the reason he is able to do this is by sheer chance that his image was used by a very prominent source, putting it in a high position on Google Images.

(That said, given that this is what the photographer is doing, there probably is a good case to reach out to the media outlet and suggest they remove the image from the article in question so as to protect creators from predatory copyright demand letters.)

This leads me to what I think could be a useful idea to avoid issues like these in the future: What if there was a community-managed image archive of popular and famous creators, particularly those who have died and for which little copyleft or copyright-free imagery exists of them? Artistic representations could be commissioned of these creators in a neutral tone so they could be used in a lot of different settings, and presented in thoughtful ways.

The website could be crowdfunded, with payments for commissioned artists backed by nonprofits or companies such as the Wikimedia Foundation or Google, and even paid for by donations. This archive would be free to use, maybe covered by advertising if there is no nonprofit backer, but built with the express idea of allowing people to share images of famous creative people, such as Harryhausen, Albert Einstein, Paul Rand, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and others in a way that would ensure that people who are simply trying to celebrate these inspiring people aren’t getting nailed by the copyright police just because they happened to grab the wrong photo on Google Images.

(And of these creators’ estates want to offer up an image to this initiative, or photographers decide to donate their pictures to this initiative, great. The more, the merrier.)

There are limitations to what might be possible in copyright in the modern day, and DMCA complaints are always risky. But by creating a method where people can celebrate great creators without falling foul of copyright just because of what they post, we can protect the exchange of free ideas thoughtfully, without running into traps created by outmoded thinking about copyright.

But what we’re doing now is not working. And punishing others for simply wanting to celebrate a great creator? That seems counterproductive and not in the spirit of creation.

I hope this idea inspires others. And best of luck to Lady Decade and the Top Hat Gaming Man as they attempt to manage a complicated situation.

Word is now out that not one, but two almost-complete movies have been removed from any sort of release—Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt. Warner Bros. Discovery just lit a combined $130 million on fire for “strategic reasons,” and potentially set back the careers of a lot of people. On top of this, the service removed half a dozen original movies, most notably An American Pickle, a Seth Rogen parable on creativity I found deeply inspiring, from the service, reportedly for back-end payment reasons. The films are complete! All they had to do was keep the download links online! And they couldn’t do it.

This is an unusual situation, as it goes beyond most of the traditional reasons movies get canned. And it seems to be the result of leadership at the top making some unusually decisive calls.

Later today, it’s expected that HBO Max, a service that counted 76.8 million subscribers as of this past April, is going to be de-emphasized as a corporate brand by Warner Bros. Discovery in favor of the still-brand-new Discovery+ service. That’s at least what the Hollywood trades are saying.

There would likely be some sound strategic reasons for doing this if HBO Max was failing (the confusing branding between HBO and HBO Max being a key one), but HBO Max is a big honking hit! It has built an equivalent base of half of Netflix’s subscribers in just over two years, which is impressive considering that it took Netflix something like 15 years to build that audience through its streaming service and a quarter century if you go all the way back to DVDs.

While Disney+, which started six months before HBO Max, is larger and much closer to Netflix’s total install base, it also has some significant advantages in terms of both properties (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar) and bundling capabilities (Hulu, ESPN+).

So I guess that what I’m concerned about from the perspective of a creative person here is the idea that a film studio could just throw out completed creative work wholesale, not because the work is bad, but because it somehow doesn’t fit a broader strategic mission, one that is threatened to change at any time in the wake of a merger.

The comparison point that comes to mind for me is the Universal/Polygram record label merger in the late ’90s, when a number of artists, even those that had successful albums, found themselves removed from the label in a wide-scale culling that had a dramatic effect on the music industry of that time. A 1998 New York Times piece described the situation like this:

Of the 200 bands estimated to be dropped from their labels, most of them will be rock performers who thought that signing a record deal meant they were on their way to stardom. Soon they will find themselves right back where they started. The remaining hundred or so more rock, pop and rap acts, including such well-known musicians as Sting, Sheryl Crow, U2, Hole, Beck, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, Bon Jovi, Ice Cube, Hanson, Axl Rose and Amy Grant, will find themselves on a new record label. In most cases, the record-label personnel they had grown comfortable with—the company heads, the radio promotions people, the artists-and-repertory executives—will be gone.

Though labels routinely shed dead-weight bands and undergo structural changes after a new owner takes over, a reorganization on this scale is a first in the record business. The fallout will affect music for years to come, whether it means a flurry of short-lived pop bands that will help make a company’s quarterly earning reports look good on Wall Street or a reactionary flowering of smaller, independent labels.

Now we appear to be having a TV-and-film-industry version of that, and it seems to be coming out of nowhere, but with the same source: A megamerger. It turns out CNN+ was not an isolated incident, but a harbinger.

The streaming era was supposed to prevent things like this, because there would be no technical need to get rid of the back catalog for owned content. It was supposed to make room for the big tent. You could promote content on the service itself. People’s niche interests could be covered by the algorithm, and creative people could continue to work.

It turns out that this system is just as endangered by corporate whims as any other. And that’s scary for people who create films and TV shows, and unfortunate for the viewer, who is often forgotten in this process.

I once shared a piece that simply explained how unwanted solicitations worked, and the message naturally failed to pass through this all-important filter to readers.

So, it’s with that in mind that I read with great interest about the fact that the Republican Party has an email deliverability problem. The party, over the years, has used all variety of aggressive tactics to get people to donate to its causes. And it seems like it just kind of went nuts based on that information. (To be fair, the other guys are also fairly aggressive: I signed up for one Barack Obama fundraising list twelve years ago, just to see what he was doing, and now I get fundraising emails from seemingly every left-leaning political candidate under the sun, despite the fact I’ve never donated once because, as a journalist, I don’t donate.)

Both political parties heavily rely on these systems to get donations—particularly of the small, targeted, individual kind—to fund political campaigns. However, there’s evidence that the GOP is having issues raising money using this method—leading to lower funds at a time it seems like the political climate may favor its cause.

As a result, the GOP is looking for someone to blame here. Who does the GOP blame for this, of course? Google.

“It’s time to hold Big Tech accountable for its shameless partisan censorship,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said in a press release when he introduced the Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting (BIAS) Emails Act with Sen. John Thune (R-SD) in June.

That’s right, politicians have gone so far as to introduce prospective bills that would ban services from marking political emails as spam—which seems like a great way to upset your donors!

(Yannik Mika/Unsplash)

To be fair, Google does change things quite often in terms of how people get information in its systems (just ask anyone who uses Google AMP), but usually, those things affect everyone, with no political bias at play. One of those things is security, and it periodically raises its standards for websites and domains to encourage them to raise their standards.

And it later emerged, as The Washington Post reported last week, that Rubio’s email server was misconfigured, which is why his emails were going to the spam folder:

The most forceful rebuke, attendees said, came from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who claimed that not a single email from one of his addresses was reaching inboxes. The reason, it was later determined, was that a vendor had not enabled an authentication tool that keeps messages from being marked as spam, according to people briefed on the discussions. Rubio campaign manager Mark Morgan said the problem also required Google to perform a reset on its end. [Google spokesman José] Castañeda said such resets are standard practice once senders adhere to best practices.

In one sense, I can totally understand if you’ve invested a whole bunch of money into something and you’re seeing horrible results that you might want to figure out a way to get those numbers to a better spot. In another, blaming political bias for something that appears to actually point to a technical gap of some kind is bad form. You are raising millions of dollars—you can’t invest a small chunk of that into an effective technology team?

As TechDirt noted, the problem here may not even be with Google or even the candidates, but with the firms they use to distribute marketing messages—with one in particular, Targeted Victory, failing to hit the target.

“You don’t normally have your campaign spam vendor showing up to a policy lunch,” TechDirt’s Mike Masnick wrote. “Unless your campaign spam vendor is so shit at their job, that they have to go and blame Google rather than admit that their spammy fund raising tactics are failing because more and more people are sick and tired of the spam.”

The GOP is treading a dangerous line by screwing with email deliverability. Don’t upset the email gods.

Correction: This piece originally misstated John Thune’s political party. Sorry about that.

That concept? Taking a layer cake onto a plane for purposes of delivering it to a friend’s birthday party.

Writer Roxanne Roberts, a Washington Post style writer who often appears on Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!, had the idea in part because of what she calls her credo as a home baker. “Desserts are my love language,” she writes.

So when she found out she was going to a friend’s birthday, she offered to bring cake. But that meant flying. And well, the flying part was a little complicated.

Roberts successfully delivered a four-layer cake to the party through a few unusual tactics:

• Refrigerating the cake ahead of time, so that it would hold up during travel. (She opted for pound cake, and noted that some go to the lengths of freezing it.)
• Ensuring that the parts of the cake were small enough to fit under a seat.
• Skipping decorations and final layout until after the plane has landed—while shipping any additional frosting in 3.4-ounce piping bags, so they could get through security.
• Talking to professional cake makers to understand how they travel with cakes.

In the end, though, if it hadn’t worked, Roberts notes that things would have been fine:

But let’s say that curve had reduced it to a toppled mess. There would have been a tear or two, then I would have given Mary a hug and my cake wreck. We had survived the past two years, we were celebrating with friends, and that was more important than any cake.

I find this challenge that Roberts gave herself fascinating, in that it seems utterly unnecessary. After all, traveling with an object famous for its wrecks seems fraught with issues. And she had no real reason to do it, other than a deep appreciation for her friend—and to possibly get an article out of the endeavor.

Was it worth the hassle? (Will Echols/Unsplash)

Is this a good idea that most people should emulate? Probably not. But at the same time, I think all of us have niche things that we try to do for different reasons, especially if, like Roberts, you consider yourself a journalist.

I once, for example, went through a book from the early ’90s listing online resources in an attempt to find if any of them were still online. Other writers have been willing to do far crazier things in desire for a fascinating tale.

In a 2016 Newsweek piece, Zach Schonfeld pondered, “Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stunt Journalism?”

His first example involved a BuzzFeed writer who ate nothing but burritos for a week, then degraded from there. Schonfeld explained the situation as such:

A decade ago, stunts like this might have been fodder for a reality show, like Fear Factor or maybe Jackass. Today, the Jackasses are just as likely to be professional journalists, dressing up as Marilyn Monroe or strapping on an adult diaper in the name of content. And as ad models shift toward video and live streams, journalists are now eating paper and freezing themselves in cryotherapy chambers on camera.

In some ways, the cake fits neatly into that, but I also think about the many many times I try to do very specific things with my computer, and come out on the other side with a whole pile of frustration.

I think taking a layer cake on a plane is sort of the meatspace version of yak shaving—doing something that is unnecessarily hard and getting constantly distracted with smaller complications along the way.

As a yak shaving enthusiast, I wholeheartedly approve.

Within a day I met someone in my neighborhood who would quickly become my girlfriend. Nice selling point (and one I’ve mentioned before). We only stayed together a few months, but it made me feel like I had made the right decision nonetheless.

Facebook—even with the backstabbing of its corporate backstory as a backdrop—eventually evolved into a way to connect with friends and old colleagues, while it brought on other services like Instagram and WhatsApp. Maybe a few too many people from high school, but it’s good to know they’re still around.

But over time, these services changed, seemingly to meet the needs of a specific audience that was attractive to advertisers. Instagram, for a time, seemed immune to these changes, in part because of the influence of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, who could help to ensure it largely stood by its original goals.

But then, System and Krieger left, in part because Facebook decided to meddle in the network, which (mind you) was outpacing Facebook’s own growth and arguably didn’t need Facebook’s input on functionality.

Casey Newton put the loss of the founders this way back in 2019: “Systrom and Krieger had unshakeable beliefs about app design that served them very well, and now that they’re gone all that is left is for Instagram to become a reskinned version of the Facebook app.”

Well, maybe not the Facebook app.

Facebook, which I refuse to call Meta out of a lack of respect, then fell back on some old tricks in an attempt to compete against a competitor it did not own, TikTok. The last time a big social network emerged that gave Facebook a run for its money, Snap, the company decided to add the Stories feature, which became a popular, highly engaging form of interaction on the platform.

To battle TikTok, it added Reels, a feature that the company sees as its future, and slowly tried to bring in changes that encouraged posts from people that the user does not follow—a clear nod to how TikTok works. The company has implied it plans to continue in that direction and even expand on it, even make Facebook work like that.

Adam Mosseri, the guy who runs Instagram these days, attempted to defend this approach on Twitter with a video that defined new levels of cringe.

The problem with such an extreme change, even if it pleases advertisers, is that it is not what users signed up for. If I knew I was going to be signing up for a network where I would be constantly fed content from strangers in 2007, I might have skipped out on Facebook, and I bet a lot of other people might have as well.

I think a lot of people could have lived with a version of Instagram that had a taste of all of these other things, and can likely live with a Facebook with these additional features, but letting those features take over, then implying that people are wrong because their behaviors on a platform that’s designed to be addictive don’t match what they actually say they want, is messed up even at Facebook scale.

Instead of letting the recent algorithm findings define their every move, they need to take a step back and look at the motivations of their users. What originally got them to join? Are they getting it now? And if not, why is that?

Facebook is still a multi-billion-dollar company, but that could quickly change if the company doesn’t figure out the limits of data-driven decision making, fast.

I think in part it happened this way because of a promise I was made early on by the person who hired me—a promise that I wouldn’t have to give up all the stuff I enjoy doing on the side for sake of this 9-to-5, which was a genuine concern. A place I had interviewed six months earlier had promised the opposite.

And so, here I am, at a job that I’ve been able to grow and evolve within. Despite arguments to the contrary, I think the stability is worth keeping around, and if I were to ever leave this job, it would most likely be to go freelance.

But one always wonders—what might have happened if I decided to take an alternate road way back in 2012, and let my side project work win out? Last week, I spotted a nice parallel experience to my own in the form of Pat Contri, the creator of Pat the NES Punk, who decided ten years ago this month to quit his day job because of the level of stress it was creating him and focus on his work in video games.

I’ve been following Contri for a while—he runs a popular podcast on retro gaming and collecting called the Completely Unnecessary Podcast with his friend Ian Ferguson—but I had never gotten a full feel for his story. Essentially, Pat’s work with gaming had gotten attention at the time he chose to quit his job, but it was by no means enough to live off of. But sticking around was untenable.

“Really, the first eight to ten months was recovery. It was getting over the job sort of like stomping on me constantly, every day, and wanting to squish me into the ground,” Contri recalled. “I felt insignificant. I did a lot more at my position than what I got paid for, and I like I said, I wasn’t appreciated.”

So how’d he find his path forward? Essentially, it was a series of small things that eventually built up to a couple of big things. His work on YouTube wasn’t even monetized when he started, but he was getting the chance to go to conventions. Eventually, he came up with an idea that proved financially lucrative: Create a book that reviewed every single NES game in existence, with full-color photos, with an academic level of depth. Building this project took years, and it wasn’t an easy process—Contri at one point restarted the process, realizing that the reviews needed to be more in-depth than what they had already created—but eventually led to a Kickstarter that earned six figures in crowdfunding fees.

“I didn’t know there’d be that much interest in it, I didn’t know it would do that well,” he said. “It basically got me the downpayment eventually for Castle Contri. I mean, I didn’t use it right away, but that money went towards the house.”

Contri created a Super NES version of the book a few years later that did equally as well—though he had more outside help with the second book. Nonetheless, Contri was able to make this all work and build a comfortable life for himself because he was willing to work hard for it and take some big risks.

I remember when I was at the job before my current role and I was deeply invested in my side project, and I just remember being so passionate about the work I was doing. I was telling my friend about it, the paper’s IT person, and he pointed out something to me which I had not allowed myself to realize up to that point: Many of my co-workers at this job had their own side projects, too, that they were all doing on the side in an attempt to make something happen. They were looking for their opportunity, too, and this particular paper was a good position to have a side project. The challenge is, executing on a side project as your main source of income is immensely difficult.

At the time I took my current job ten years ago, I wonder what might have happened had I tried to go freelance or make this thing work as a career, only on the back of my reputation. And honestly, I don’t think I could have squared it. But I look at Pat Contri’s story and think, hey, maybe there was a narrow window through which to pull it all off.

Nonetheless, even if I didn’t take that road, I deeply respect the road Pat took. It was a risk that paid off big.

But I will say that GameStop’s recent foray into non-fungible tokens probably isn’t helping matters—though not because of the NFT marketplace itself. Over the weekend, there was a bit of controversy around this store, for which GameStop curates all new entrants within, because of an NFT that appeared to be a homage to one of the darkest images ever produced—The Falling Man, a picture of a man falling to his death from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September, 11, 2001.

GameStop, for its part, took the image down soon after people started publicly complaining about it. I was one of the people who complained, and I noticed something very interesting as a result of all this—very aggressive troll brigades attempting to defend this image. First, it was defended as free expression, despite the fact that this is a curated space in which GameStop is approving the creators on its platform, and then—once GameStop removed it, as GameStop has the right to do under Section 230—it was defended as evidence that GameStop was somehow being targeted by a media campaign designed to harm the brand-new NFT service before it got off the ground. The whataboutism was strong here.

So to put it another way, people with a financial stake in this service being successful (because they bought NFTs through said service) are jumping down the throats of any critics of this service, even in cases when the artwork is offensive, and the criticism is genuinely warranted.

Far be it from me to say that those protesting and defending the GameStop brand for running an NFT service—which I should note is far afield for a company called GameStop—may actually be doing more damage to the GameStop brand than anything this image may have done on its own. Implying a conspiracy to ruin a certain service, then attacking anyone with even a modest amount of criticism of said service, is what we in the commentary business call a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Yes, there is a conspiracy to ruin this service, but hilariously, the conspiracy is friendly fire, as the first exposure a lot of people are getting to the concept of GameStop selling NFTs are threads full of random people attacking them. There are reasons some people aren’t into NFTs, but those reasons aren’t helped along by threads where it seems like users are already in a deeply defensive mode.

There’s a phrase that sounds like a saying that I just made up on the spot that goes, “You’re only a good as your fandom.” And it sounds like it fits here. GameStop as an NFT provider has only been around for something like two weeks. And its fandom already feels dangerously toxic.

I don’t even know if GameStop can do so, but it needs to rein in its fans, or the fears that their NFT service is going to be a flash-in-the-pan that seem to be driving the aggressive social media approach are going to prove self-fulfilling.

Welcome to my world over the past week. I kind of have to credit/blame the Internet Archive’s Jason Scott for this, admittedly. While digging through the archives of late video producer Mark Pines, he uncovered a music video for an artist that was unknown from any of the given information, which he then posted on YouTube.

I heard this song and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Arguably, the lyrics are a bit on the cliché side of things, but the music was extremely grabby, with the use of strings to really pull at you in a way I might compare to Rodriguez’s “Sugar Man.” Pines’ music video, showing a singer with a voice that cuts halfway between Elvis Costello and Buddy Holly and a pencil-thin mustache not far removed from John Waters, was all listeners had to go by.

After Jason posted the video, I started doing a dive on my end to see if the lyrics pulled up any positives. Not really, in part because there were more than a few cliché phrases in the tune. Eventually, though, someone recognized the keyboardist in the music video, and boom, we had some details on the music and the artist.

I’m writing the story here as a courtesy to anyone who, like me, heard this song and was blown away, and wanted to know something about this song and the musician who wrote it.

Joey Wilson was a New Wave singer who came up out of the Philadelphia music scene in the early 1980s, mostly playing folk music at local venues until he decided one day to switch it up and move to an electric guitar, essentially on a dare. He quickly gathered together a band and started playing shows as a solo artist. Within a couple of months and with just a handful of shows on electric under his belt, he ended up getting signed by a new record label, Modern Records. The label, led by music industry notables Danny Goldberg and Paul Fishkin, was effectively a boutique label with distribution through Atlantic Records, and Wilson was the first artist signed.

“I liked the idea of going with Modern,” Wilson said in a 1980 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s a small label. Right now I’m the only act, and the plan is that they won’t have any more than three acts at one time. So you know that the label will be doing everything it can to help.”

Wilson, who the paper noted was a Tony Bennett fan, had some solid pedigree behind him. The producer on his solo album, Going Up, was Jimmy Destri, the keyboardist for Blondie during its most popular period. Destri’s work on the album apparently gained him some notice, with U2 apparently impressed enough with his work that they called him up and nearly hired him to produce what would become their breakout record, War. As a U2 fan site noted, Destri had this to say about the opportunity:

Right after Blondie broke up, I produced the first album for Danny Goldberg’s label, an album by Joey Wilson called Going Up. It was a big hit in Billboard and Joey went immediately into AA. Danny went on to become this big media mogul. Because of Joey Wilson I was invited to produce “War”, the U2 record with Steve Lillywhite.

Destri never produced War, but the band did get a couple of recordings out of their work with him, including some ideas that were later used on The Unforgettable Fire.

But as for Wilson, while he got some early buzz for the record, it ultimately went nowhere. Danny Goldberg ultimately turned Modern Records’ focus on the artist that he started the label with—Stevie Nicks, whose Bella Donna would soon be a huge seller for for the label.

“We changed our game plan. We looked at our bottom line and tried to project our future bottom line and decided that, for the time being, what we had to do was concentrate solely on Stevie,” Goldberg said, according to a press release from the label. ”I mean the difference between selling 1 million or 2 million albums on a superstar makes a good deal more sense than 20,000 or 60,000 on a new act. While we both love the creative aspects of breaking new acts, we want to stay in business first.”

(Goldberg would later start a company that managed a number of famous bands, most notably Nirvana.)

So where did that leave Wilson? Ultimately, he returned to Philadelphia, where he ended up starting a number of other bands, the best known being Youth Camp, a band that included members of The Hooters (a Philly band that did make it to the big time).

While Youth Camp never broke beyond Philly like The Hooters did, Hooters and Youth Camp drummer David Uosikkinen, later a cofounder of MP3.com and a local legend in Philly, always spoke fondly of his time playing with Wilson.

“He’s probably as brilliant as an artist of taking that emotion and putting it into words,” Uosikkinen said in an interview posted to YouTube in 2010. “You know, I mean, the guy was the funniest guy. I don’t know if people really knew, but he was just hilarious.”

As you might have figured out from that description, Wilson is no longer with us. As explained in a 1998 Philadelphia City Paper article linked on Discogs, he died on Christmas Eve, 1997, of a heroin overdose, at the age of 43. And while he never became a truly big star, he remained active in Philly’s local music scene until the end of his life, with his last recorded performance taking place in 1996. The pencil mustache was gone, but the musical skill was still there.

I watch these videos of Wilson and listen to “Underground” and I hear a guy who all too easily could have become a star in his own right. He was closer than most. He was labelmates with Stevie Nicks, and had his album produced by a member of Blondie. He had some killer songs, and his own friends back in Philly were having the breakout hits that he, sadly, did not.

I should point out, again, that “Underground” is a great song. It rules. And there was a reprise of the song on Going Up, the full album for which is available on YouTube. It feels like the perfect way to end this post. I hope people read this and give Joey Wilson a listen. It would be great if this man had a little rediscovery because of an unlabeled recording uncovered by the Internet Archive.

But occasionally, drama creeps up because of the natural flood of content that bleeds through, due to various disagreements on different issues. It’s a constant flood of disagreement, really. This week, the person lobbing the bombs is, honestly, kind of unexpected—a guy who had been on the other side of the journalism discussion for quite some time, only to move into the creator realm relatively recently.

Rene Ritchie, a longtime reporter on Apple-related topics for iMore, struck out on his own as a full-time YouTuber about two years ago. And in that time, Ritchie has tried to offer an even-headedness on all things Apple that was at times hard to get in a world that seemed obsessed with three things—rumors, repairs, and reviews. Ritchie is clearly skilled at breaking through the noise on a lot of different things. His channel is good, even if it sometimes reads a little too pro-Apple for some people’s tastes.

However, he appears to have reached his breaking point around benchmarking, publishing a video this week that questioned the hype being directed towards computing benchmarks on various YouTube channels.

Now, to be clear, the latest round of benchmarks hasn’t exactly been friendly to Apple. The M2 chip, while more performant, runs hotter than the processor that it replaced, but on top of that, Apple seems to have gone out of its way to kneecap the base models of its latest MacBooks by releasing a version of the computer with a 256GB SSD that only populates one of the two DRAM slots—something that affects the performance of the storage because it doesn’t benefit from parallel storage channels. (If you’re familiar with the performance cut you might see from putting RAM in a single slot versus two slots, same concept.)

The channel that caught this fact, Max Tech, has a tendency to publish a lot of pieces about new computers, with a lean on Apple (though it dips into PCs a bit as well). Some of its coverage, as well as that of other channels, has been perceived by certain viewers as being over the top, or unrealistic due to the nature of PC benchmark software representing a synthetic test. But others find these data points useful, because they often can highlight some broader trends or uncover some notable limitations. (I think, for example, it’s useful to note that the newer Apple machines produce more heat than the earlier ones, which removes a bit of the unique value proposition the computers have.)

Max Tech is a channel that does benchmarks of new hardware; simply put, it’s what they’re known for.

Ritchie’s approach here? Take down the entire culture of benchmarking on YouTube, implying that those who do it are trying to create cheap content that negatively influences our opinions on different types of technology, all in the name of increasingly hard-to-earn views. Which … seems like a weird argument to make mere weeks after those same benchmarkers caught a cut corner in Apple’s latest laptops.

When I saw Ritchie’s takedown, I really didn’t like it (and kind of told him that, to be honest), in part because I sort of felt like it was kind of a gatekeep-y takedown of YouTubers who are basically competing with him for eyeballs.

To some degree, I get it—it’s possible Ritchie is getting sick of trying to play professional interpreter of Apple, while other YouTubers without PR access to the company aren’t afraid to be more skeptical. Because he has a more traditional journalism/analysis background, he’s often put in a position where his viewers ask him to comment on every single Apple-related controversy that comes up on YouTube. Maybe he wants to change his focus so he can discuss bigger points of debate and not just be “the guy who defends Apple” on YouTube. He’s a known-enough figure, and one with a honed enough voice, that he can pull it off.

But I do think that, in his efforts to push back on the culture of benchmarking, he might have put himself at risk of being pulled down with the muck by calling his competitors’ work toxic and making insinuations about other creators. I mean, if you don’t like benchmark videos, you don’t like benchmark videos. Just because you don’t like that aspect of tech YouTube doesn’t mean you have to make insinuations about others who do this stuff, suggesting that they’re trying to specifically goad a response out of people for reasons of clickbait.

In some ways, it gets a little close to “these YouTubers aren’t really journalists” for my taste, and honestly, I think that’s not a great direction for YouTube tech culture to go.

Let’s admit that benchmarks have value for some, but maybe not for others. Let’s skip the ragefests and disagree on more even terms.

But I have to admit even I was thrown for a loop when I read about the lawsuit over Bass Pro’s apparent failure to follow through on the promise of a product that literally brands itself as having a lifetime guarantee in its name.

Now, I’ve never written about this before, but I actually am a bit of a fan of socks, and I know that having a good pair that holds up after a decent amount of time is really important to some people After all, if the sock dies out after a couple of years, is it really worth its weight in wool?

The problem is, Bass Pro seems to have not considered the fact that people might actually follow through on the warranty requests, and more than once at that. Starting in 2014, an Illinois man named Kent Slaughter bought a ton of pairs of the company’s Redhead Lifetime Guarantee All- Purpose Wool Socks, then started returning them as they faded. At first, the company followed the lifetime guarantee to a T. But over time, he noticed the company’s practices had changed.

And I quote, “To say the Lifetime Warranty was and currently is a key selling point for the Socks would be an understatement.”

Per the class-action lawsuit filed on his behalf:

According to Defendant’s current practices, when a purchaser returns the Socks pursuant to the purported Lifetime Warranty, Defendant merely replaces the Socks with a new, different pair of socks that only comes with a limited 60-day warranty (the “60-Day Socks”). Defendant has changed the design of the 60-Day Socks in order to differentiate them from the Socks—by adding a distinctive stripe pattern to them—presumably so that its store employees know that no warranty will be honored for those 60-Day Socks beyond the limited warranty period.

So yes, Bass Pro was replacing the lifetime-guarantee socks with pairs that were intentionally not as good as the socks that the person purchased. Worse, the guarantee was essentially invalidated on secondary pairs because the new pairs had worse warranties.

Slaughter apparently saw a distinct decline in the quality of the customer service as he continued to return his socks:

Customer service ultimately told Plaintiff—over his objections and demands that Defendant continue to honor the Lifetime Warranty—that he could no longer return the Socks pursuant to the Lifetime Warranty. Instead of honoring the Lifetime Warranty, Defendant would only provide Plaintiff with a different product: the distinctively-marked 60-Day Socks.

So the result is, Bass Pro now finds itself the target of a hilarious class-action lawsuit. Perhaps the most hilarious class action lawsuit in recent times. Because it’s about a company who made deceptive promises about socks.

Is Slaughter the only person out there who bought these socks, saw the name, and actually took it seriously? It’s a good question, but even if nobody else joins the class-action status, Bass Pro should do itself a favor and ditch the 60-Day Socks, because for one thing, they sound a hell of a lot lamer than Lifetime Guarantee Socks.

But on the other hand, the challenge with what he was doing was precarious. When he failed, he failed in a way that affected people’s lives. People got laid off; freelance writers that relied on regular paychecks from the company suddenly stopped getting them. That is not a criticism of Williams so much as a reflection of the reality of what his company was doing.

Williams moved away from the CEO position this week, choosing instead to become chairman of the company he founded as a haven for writers. (A longtime associate from his pre-Twitter days at Odeo, Tony Stubblebine, will be taking his place.)

The problem with being a haven for writers, however, is that is not simply a neat, beautiful ideal. When something goes wrong or an idea falls through, real people are affected. And Medium, infamously, went through a lot of them—both ideas, and real people.

To be fair, Williams was attempting to solve a problem that nobody else was trying to solve at the time of Medium’s formation: At a time when most writers had been relegated to living off the scraps of the ad economy (if they could get that), he attempted to find new ways to support publishing that benefited from his learnings at Blogger and later Twitter. Eventually he came upon an important one—offer an alternative to advertising. The problem was, it took him about half a decade to make that call, and along the way, his company burned numerous writers, editors, employees, and publications in the process. It wasn’t like that was his goal, but that was what happened.

“Media is a famously unforgiving business, and Williams is far from the only CEO to struggle to build a sustainable company,” Casey Newton wrote over at Platformer. “And yet over the past decade, few have matched him for the sheer number of changes in direction he inflicted on investors, users, and employees.”

The problem with moving fast and breaking things is that it damages a lot of people’s lives, and it made any future decision-making by the company suspect. It likely inspired other companies to take a more stable approach. Substack has been around for about five years at this point, and its model has stayed pretty consistent the entire time. Same with Patreon. Both of these have their faults but are ultimately better choices if your goal is to build a business as a writer in 2022.

I will admit that while the lean years were pretty lean, I was a beneficiary of some of Medium’s pivots. Over the years, I made some decent money through the network—not enough to be a paid employee, but some of my work found a lot of success there. At one point I was able to sell a Medium publication a completed freelance piece that had been rejected at another outlet, and actually came out a little ahead of where I expected to be with it financially. But at the same time, I knew people who were negatively affected by the wishy-washyness of some of the leadership decisions, good people who did great work but weren’t shown the respect for that work.

My measure of Medium’s success, even after I stopped posting there with any regularity, was whether I made more money from it than my $5 monthly subscription cost, which had generally been true until last year. In the meantime, the content has become lighter and more clickbaity in the very ways that Ev was swimming upstream against. If Medium’s business model only truly benefits polemics, is it really a solution at all?

Nonetheless, I continue to hope that Medium gets out of its doldrums. My suggestion: After years of pivoting and changing directions, I think Medium just needs to find a single direction, stick with it, and hope for the best. That Medium hasn’t makes it feel like every other chaotic part of trying to make a living as a writer.

And that was never the goal.

So no, Ev didn’t nail it. But on the other hand, we probably needed someone with deep pockets, like Ev, to workshop the hard parts of running a media business for people who just love to write. It would have been nice if it had been more clear that’s what Medium was doing, though.

Was the teacher not observant? Was I not protective enough of my answers? It doesn’t matter, as it benefited the other students, right?

(That story sounds made up, but I swear it actually happened.)

Now, I never went to a school as good as Columbia University, but I have to say that I find the tale of how the university found itself on the bad side of U.S. News and World Report to be utterly fascinating.

The publication “unranked” Columbia last week, citing a failure to substantiate data the university sent to the media outlet. For its part, Columbia says it is working on this issue, and plans to improve its practices in the future.

In a lot of ways, it shows that everyone—prestigious institutions on down—isn’t afraid to bend the rules when it benefits their organization. Columbia, in many ways, benefited from the combination of copying the answers of others while benefiting from a teacher who wasn’t closely observing the class.

For those who haven’t followed, Columbia has been near the top of the U.S. News rankings for years, reflecting the importance of the polling, which (in a perfect world) objectively measures schools in a way that can make it easier for families to make a decision about what school they send their kid to each year.

However, Columbia’s ratings were knocked down a peg by a mathematics professor at the university, Michael Thaddeus. A key statement in Thaddeus’ extraordinary takedown of his own employer:

A few other top-tier universities have also improved their standings, but none has matched Columbia’s extraordinary rise. It is natural to wonder what the reason might be. Why have Columbia’s fortunes improved so dramatically? One possibility that springs to mind is the general improvement in the quality of life in New York City, and specifically the decline in crime; but this can have at best an indirect effect, since the U.S. News formula uses only figures measuring academic features of universities, not quality-of-life indicators or crime rates. To see what is really happening, we need to delve into these figures in more detail.

And so he did, breaking down why a number of key measures in the methodology, while pointing out that Columbia’s own numbers could not be objectively recreated with some basic analysis. For example, he found that while Columbia reported a 96.5 percent full-time non-medical faculty level to U.S. News, doing some quick math based on numbers the school had submitted to the government, he quickly figured out that the number was actually around 74.1 percent, which is immensely off. He also raised questions about the emphasis on terminal degrees, something Columbia said 100 percent of its full-time faculty had. In that case, the number was much closer, at 96 percent, but as he noted, most of the people without terminal degrees had earned success in other ways, raising the broader question of why this was a necessary metric in the first place.

“Columbia would surely be a lesser place without them, even if 100 percent of its faculty really did then hold terminal degrees,” he wrote.

The fact that Thaddeus felt compelled to knock down his own school so systematically reflects a level of freedom in academia that doesn’t have a real-world equivalent. In the outside world, folks who blow the whistle on something so fundamental to the continued success of the organization become like Edward Snowden or Reality Winner—exiled or punished for their willingness to speak up about something that made the federal government look bad, while doing so for the greater good.

Thaddeus, in many ways, is not just taking down Columbia’s own numbers, but the way that U.S. News has encouraged inflated rankings by emphasizing arbitrary measures over the quality of the school. If the media brand doesn’t look at this as an excuse to improve its own practices, it raises bigger questions than those that Thaddeus brought up about Columbia.

“When schools do not accurately report their data, U.S. News will review the matter on a case-by-case basis to determine appropriate remedial actions,” U.S. News stated upon unranking Columbia.

I would suggest something more systemic is in order.

But while I recorded a lot of songs, many of them through my “FrankenMac” iBook, I never got to the point where I was going to become a rock star or anything like that. I recorded a few demos, all of which had the wet-blanket appeal of something like Iron & Wine or Elliott Smith (clearly I was thinking of my near-namesake a lot when doing this), but I played maybe one show, not exactly empire-building or anything like that.

That appears to make me an exception as far as people with the name Ernie Smith go. As I’ve written in the past, I know of at least two distinct musicians named Ernie Smith who have become big successes in their respective genres—Glenroy “Ernie” Smith, a legendary Jamaican reggae star, and Ernie Smith, a successful South African jazz musician (here’s one of his videos).

Now I can say that I know of a third, and he has a hit on the Hot 100 right now. Ernest K. Smith, or ERNEST as he’s better known, has been blowing up the country charts over the past few years as a songwriter in his hometown of Nashville. He’s already written a number of hits for major stars such as Kane Brown, Chris Lane, Florida Georgia Line, and his controversy-courting frequent collaborator Morgan Wallen, who is a featured guest on ERNEST’s own big hit, “Flower Shops”:

ERNEST got into the country music game in an interesting way. He actually started his career as a country-influenced rapper, but eventually became active as a songwriter in Nashville after a wayward period in college when he suffered a heart attack from a viral infection, as well as a period of drug abuse. He gradually began working things out back in Nashville, and by 2019, had been signed as an artist with Big Loud records, in an announcement that described him as “an artist who truly defies categorization.”

Now, he’s scoring radio hits that evoke the ’70s even as they keep a foot in the modern day.

Is ERNEST going to be the next big star? That’s probably somewhat of an open question, but he’s had a number of big hits as a songwriter already. (He also has a podcast, called Just Being Ernest, and some of the reviews are concerned that he swears.) I’m just sort of surprised and happy that ERNEST had the good sense to only use his first name, meaning that as he becomes more famous, he’s doing folks a favor by leaving a lane open for other people to have decent Google search results.

You know, like me. But also, all the other Ernie Smiths who are successful musicians.

There are a lot of reasons that this might be the case. For one, the 1980s and 1990s represented prime times for toy marketing, creating interest that lasted far beyond the target period. Nostalgia is strong.

Two, there seems to be a bit of a push beyond the norms that might have defined toys in the past. To explain in another way, when the kids of the 1980s heard “I don’t wanna grow up” from Toys ”R” Us commercials, they in some ways took it to heart. Sure, people have families and jobs and responsibilities now, but if they’re into collecting figures of pop culture icons that they enjoyed when they were 12, that’s their prerogative.

I think, in a lot of ways, the term for this phenomenon was called the “manchild,” and its existence pointed to the idea that someone needed to put away their toys and grow up and be responsible. (“Kidult” seems like a useful gender-neutral update of the term, and to sort of highlight the point, Bloomberg featured noted actress and cosplayer Chloe Dykstra as the face of the piece.)

But what if the cat is out of the bag on this antiquated norm that just because you’re 35 and making $70,000 a year means that you need to throw out your collectibles? Certainly, the toy industry doesn’t feel this way—as the Bloomberg piece notes, Lego and other companies have basically embraced this new audience. Turns out, companies like making money, no matter the source.

And it’s not necessarily all about toys. Paying video games as you get older, or having unusual hobbies doesn’t make you any less of an adult. It just means that you’re interesting and have wrinkles. As I tweeted last night, I think a big portion of the hell Kevin Smith gets as a director, for example, is related to this idea that he never really grew up, when in reality, he just has an array of interests.

I think popular culture has long embraced this idea—let’s be real, the complexity of the Marvel Cinematic Universe exists for the sake of adult fans—even if not everyone agrees with the sentiment.

There is a bit of messiness in this discussion in part because “geek culture” is a loaded term these days, with 12 years of Big Bang Theory stereotypes helping to shape mainstream thinking on the general idea. But I guess what I’m sort of getting at is that we seem to be slowly moving away from these “roles” given to us by society. Just because we’re 45 and work on Wall Street doesn’t mean we don’t like pulling out an Xbox controller every once in a while. Just because we have a stressful job doesn’t mean that we deal with that stress in any one way.

At some point, the way that we embrace the world around us is going to be unique, with a path defined by a road that each one of us individually walks down. And honestly, some of what we do, depending on who we are, might evoke the idea of the manchild or “kidult”—embracing the stuff that we grew up with, even if it seems like child’s things.

We’re past that point, honestly. If we want to enjoy something, we should just enjoy it, social norms be damned.

Yeah, it’s a bad spot to lean into the Web3 drama. But despite this, someone is trying to do it. The Polium One, a game console project announced over the weekend, is making the case that it will play powerful games while attaching everything to Web3 concepts.

Speaking of concepts, this is not, like, a video game console you can buy in a store right now. Much the opposite. It is essentially a set of renders with some tech specs attached.

Gamers were quick to give this idea the mocking it deserved. Some pointed out that the basic idea for the Polium logo was the same as that for the Gamecube. (They’re redoing the logo.) Others pointed out that the tiny box that they’re promising is offering better capabilities (8K HDR?! A fingerprint scanner for some reason?!?) than mainstream consoles that are like six times the size of the render.

And given that the console isn’t even built yet, yet seems to be annoying a bunch of gamers who are already predestined to dislike a game console designed around Web3 concepts, the hardest road seems to be that of convincing gamers to care in the first place.

“It’s extraordinary just how much information will be provided later this year, as if the announcement of its phantasmic product came as a surprise to Polium Underscore Underscore,” Kotaku’s John Walker hilariously put it.

The thing is, even companies that seem like they potentially have the pieces in place to make it work often find this an extreme challenge. A modern-day Intellivision, which attempted to sell a casual gaming console called the Amico, has a close association with Tommy Tallarico, who is a bonafide gaming industry legend. But when things started getting shaky, Tallarico found his reputation taking a hit because of his willingness to directly attack critics. (To be fair to the critics, they kind of have a point, given the fact that the console, on paper, is about as powerful as a five-year-old smartphone, yet costs $250.)

Eventually, Tallarico left the CEO role of the company, and the Amico seems to be throwing Hail Mary passes left and right to get something working.

It’s been in tailspin mode for months, and it was promising nothing near the power of this Web3 console everyone already hates.

The game industry lives and dies by track records. Even startup companies with industry veterans at the helm who succeed at shipping something, like Ouya, often find breaking into this market a difficult road. And companies with no track record (or no recent track record, in the case of Intellivision) are the riskiest choices of all. (It’s telling that Playdate, a console that promised relatively little but came from a well-loved company with a decades-long track record, actually met most of its goals.)

The rest of the tech space has BS-driven products like this for sale all over the place—just look at Indiegogo one day, as an example. But in a lot of ways, gamers (already used to being nickeled and dimed, and sold a hill of beans even by the big-name players) see through a lot of this.

So if you’re going to hit gamers with a Web3 concept out of the gate, you need to show why it matters to the gameplay. And if you can’t, you’re setting yourself up for years of mockery at the hands of people who are good at mocking other people because they play competitive video games.

That’s right. After a couple of months in the wilderness, MidRange now has a web home that makes it easy to access every issue.

The hard part about this process was probably not building the page itself, but managing the old content and distributing it to a new CMS (Craft CMS, just like Tedium). Part of the reason for that was that Revue didn’t have an RSS feed or easy export functionality, meaning I had to do more than 200 posts by hand, converting them all into Markdown.

(The new MidRange has an RSS feed, in case you’d like to use it, though I’m still tweaking it.)

I also had to re-create a number of taken-for-granted features on a new CMS. The hardest feature to recreate, by far, was tweet embeds, which had to be rebuilt for email, but I did it, and they even look good.

But it was worthwhile, in part because MidRange has evolved past its initial goal was a way to simply offer a more experimental feed of its own, and is now a way to encourage me to stay a little closer to the day’s deadlines and other timing factors.

I built it around a platform to leverage platform effects, but then ultimately decided that I preferred the platform effects in my owned parts of the digital universe. (I may decide at some point to distribute it in other places.)

But there was a lot of copying and pasting involved—more than 200 posts worth! Lots of copy that had to be reformatted, and images that needed to be re-uploaded. Processes like these can be annoying, but they’re also useful manual processes that can help clear the mind and create just enough space to build new ideas and new ways of thinking.

So yes, this took a while, but it was time well spent. I got to look through a lot of old content, sort of get a feel for takes that have aged well, some that predicted debates in broader tech culture, and a few others that lost their cultural currency almost immediately, and others that offered a strong opportunity at self-reflection.

In a way, this was kind of like sorting through my junk drawer, hoping to better sort my pens. It offers a journey through all the battles the pens previously fought. But now that my pens are properly sorted, hopefully I’ll be able to write better pieces with more agility over time.

The hard part is sorting the pens. The easy part is the freedom and flexibility the extra time enables. Pen sorters of the world, unite.

There was no context for it in 1992, so clearly the context was to put Rage Against the Machine on the radio and on MTV.

But we have to talk about this Vancouver radio station that is playing this song over and over. As of 30 minutes ago, when I put the station on again just to check, it’s still playing the song, which means that it’s been roughly a day since CKKS-FM started playing the song over and over, with some occasional commentary from the programmer.

This is seen as an “awesome” thing by a lot of folks, with good reason. From a purely musical standpoint “Killing in the Name” is a song with extremely high relistenability, because the number of musical shifts it makes in five minutes make it feel like four or five shorter songs. Listening to it over and over shockingly does not dull its power.

But I have to say … the stunt does not feel good to me. The reason comes down to the fact that it’s clearly the result of some under-the-hood corporate changes—likely caused by low ratings. The playing-the-same-song stunt is one that has been done many times over the years. And the reports suggest that a significant portion of the station’s on-air staff has been let go.

Unfortunately, terrestrial radio does not work like the movie Airheads, where a loose-cannon-style situation is enough to kick a station offline. This is an intentional move to draw attention (something called “stunt mode” in radio parlance), not a protest against a bad boss. And the fact that we’re talking about it is strong evidence that it’s working.

To give you an idea of what “stunt mode” is like: Last year, a Denver station briefly became “Free Britney Radio,” playing nothing but Britney Spears. In that case, the station also fired its morning crew and changed its format. This has been done for decades. It’s an attention grab, but it’s somehow working way better this time than it usually does, because of the song choice, which implies a political statement of some kind.

(My joke on all of this was that if the station pivots to conservative talk, noted Rage fan Paul Ryan will probably move to Vancouver.)

If I were Rage, I would be pissed that one of my most incendiary statements was being used by a radio station to fill air time after firing people. The music itself, and the message it sends, is as vibrant as ever. The choice to use it for stunt programming devalues it, however.

Or, it would, if the song was basically immune to being devalued.

The crypto exchange, in recent weeks, has basically told its employees (and anyone interested in working for them) that they have to accept its harsh cultural standards, including its libertarian philosophy and commitment to a “diversity of thought”—or get shown the door.

“Not everyone needs to personally hold these beliefs to enlist as a Krakenite but these beliefs are a core component of our culture,” an edited version of the document, published on Notion, states. “You will be exposed to them regularly, and expected to instill them in your decision making at work.”

At a time when many workplaces are going the opposite direction, preferring a more social-activist approach (at least publicly, nothing to be said about political donations), it feels like a regression of sorts.

This has basically exposed the company’s CEO, Jesse Powell, to heavy criticism in the media, most notably a New York Times investigation that highlighted some questionable approaches to running a business. But it has also given him a chance to bolster his culture warrior bonafides, as highlighted by the fact that he made an appearance on Fox Business recently. In a way, it seems like even though he lost a mainstream lane of respect, he gained another that plays into his business interests.

As Elizabeth Spiers put it in a recent opinion column for the Times, Powell seems to be using his company as an ideological Petri dish because he controls it.

“So, no, Mr. Powell’s toxic behavior is not rooted in his libertarianism or his commitment to diversity of thought; it’s simply an outgrowth of his narcissism, which has allowed him to turn the company he runs into an ideological vanity project,” she wrote.

That is a distinct difference from, say, what happened with Basecamp a year ago, but in a way, it seems like a distilled version of the same instinct. You work for us, so we need to put our foot down and set limits, even if those limits don’t make sense. Think Thomas Watson and IBM, but updated for a new, more divisive era of leadership.

Elon Musk is obviously the archetype of this, and some of his recent actions have been head-scratchers at best: Forcing his employees to go into the office probably won him some impressive headlines—a win if your goal is attention at all costs—but failing to account for the logistics of getting people to work in the office is the part of the story that will never get as much attention as the bold stance.

I think in a lot of ways, the reason we’re seeing leaders like Powell speaking up in this regressive way is because even bad leadership has a lane in our modern culture. Sure, it will earn you plaudits to be socially responsible, to do the Gravity Payments thing and raise your employees’ base salaries. But as people like Powell and Musk have shown, being a total jerk in the way you manage your leadership is an effective way to stand out, even if it means you’re impossible to deal with.

We’re in a world where there is an outlet, an ideological lane for basically everyone—even people who would otherwise be deemed too toxic in another culture. If you want to be turn heel, you’ll still get your opportunity to make your voice heard as long as you’re willing to play the character full-tilt. Hey, it worked for Hulk Hogan in the ’90s, right?

This was an archetype started in politics, but it’s spreading. Let’s hope it doesn’t get beyond big tech.

The court is hugely unpopular, its makeup changed dramatically by an unpopular president and a body that seems to feel empowered to force change. (Originalist legal theories aside, it is a dramatic shift in a decade.)

It appears to be one sign of many that everything is on fire right now and the fire is overwhelming the things that matter. Even if you agree with Friday’s decision punting decisions on abortion back to the states, we have someone in a deeply influential position on that court that suggested in a concurring legal opinion that rights such as contraception and gay marriage are under threat. (Even interracial marriage is potentially on the chopping block, which would affect that person specifically, not that he said that—which our greatest actor was not afraid to call out.)

Whatever your feelings on the ruling last week, we’ve been teed up to a dangerous cultural place by a single court opinion.

It’s in this light that I want to point out a Twitter thread on Sunday from my pal Benj Edwards. In it, he longed for the purity of the technology industry’s goals during the era of early Apple, of Nintendo, even of early Amazon—and how far many of these companies have strayed.

The thread ends with a warning: “Americans think we are free, but we are not. We have allowed the worst runaway business models, empowered by tech, to subvert liberty and deeply erode the fabric of society. That’s where we are. The kindling’s set; the house is lit. What’s our next move?”

The timing of the thread is notable, as it comes so close to the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and its timing implicitly frames a lot of the issues that emerged as being the fault of technology companies more concerned with their profits than their place in the world.

As Benj implies, you can arguably draw a straight line between the bad, messy parts of modern technology and the political environment we have today—for example, in that poor moderation on platforms like Facebook and Twitter gave airwaves to both misinformation and controversial points of view—that they had the tools to moderate properly, thanks to Section 230, but did not use it.

Look, I’m a middle-aged white guy who messes around with computers all day—I am in the category that is deeply threatened with “not getting it” in response to the political moment we’re in.

But there are things that I do get pretty well, and like Benj, I can see the fault lines hiding beneath the technology that we use every day, and how that tech threatens to make everything worse if not managed properly.

Is Big Tech to blame for what happened Friday? Perhaps not entirely. But with its focus on the wrong things, it may have helped stack the deck in a way so that one side got a perfect hand.

But is that what we want?

Last week, Mark Nottingham, the co-chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s HTTP Working Group, raised the possibility based on some discussions he’s heard emerging within the Chromium community in support of a single-engine Web browser. While he’s not the only person to think about the possibility over the years, it does feel a bit risky, even on the surface level it seems to have some internal logic.

“After all, the code is what determines what browsers are capable of and therefore it defines the shape of the Web,” Nottingham writes. “Chromium already has a high market share of browser engines; why not just formalize it?”

Nottingham, whose post has received more than 35,000 page views since being put up a week ago (a lot for a personal blog), leans into the governance of it all rather than the technology, noting that relying on a single governance body to manage the browser everyone uses, particularly one under an open-source license, has the effect of showing the weaknesses of the open-source model, especially one dominated by a single stakeholder as Chromium is.

“To be clear, I think Open Source governance is great for its intended purpose—oversight of the design and implementation of a software project that others can use at their option,” he said. “The issue here is that it’s no substitute for well-designed, multi-stakeholder governance of what has become critical infrastructure and a global public good.”

I think that there’s some value in having an internet all working out of the same playbook, at least from the end-stream developer’s standpoint. Some of the biggest problems that developers have faced on the the modern internet have emerged in part because they’ve had to manage for multiple settings. By embracing a single codebase, one could argue, it removes a significant variable for many developers.

Of the five web browsers shown here, four use Chromium as a base. (Denny Müller/Unsplash)

I think part of the reason the idea of a monoculture freaks out so much of the internet is because Internet Explorer highlighted how bad that could really get. But on the other hand, think about what Internet Explorer was in, say, early 2003—a browser controlled by one company that could make unilateral decisions because who was going to call them out? While imperfect, we can all argue that an open-source project, even one dominated by a company like Google, is better than that.

But “better,” of course, doesn’t mean “right.” It’s worth noting that our choice of engines right now opens up a lot of experiences that benefit consumers. Webkit, broadly, has benefited from a focus on performance and battery life; Chromium, a broader feature set; and Mozilla, a dedication to openness. In many ways, having options has benefited the end user, even if it gives them a lot of choice to debate over. Having multiple interpretations of broad standards sets encourages consumer choice, which ultimately is the most important thing.

And for that reason, I don’t know how much pro-monoculture debate is happening right now, but I don’t think the status quo is something we want to move away from. Would it be nice if Apple got rid of its arbitrary rules that keep Safari the default on iOS? Sure. Would it be great if Firefox found some more stable ground? Yes.

But the solution to those problems is not a world with one Chromium to rule them all. It’s by helping bolster the existing choices we have.

Hey all, just a quick note: We are still working through the MidRange archives with the goal of launching a new site for MidRange. It has taken longer than expected, but we’re making progress. Back online soon. Sorry for the delay.

I think a lot of people have perfectly valid reasons for wanting to stick with the default. The default is easier. It clearly earned its spot at the center of the conversation, curated for your use for a reason

But the problem is, when defaults are allowed to linger with no change, no innovation, that creates risk.

And the conversation about the long-necessary demise of Internet Explorer is definitely one worth discussing for that reason. IE had a long business history that brought it to some of the country’s most prominent courtrooms in famed antitrust debates. It created a lot of business growth and destruction along the way. It fostered a lot of security risks.

Internet Explorer 6 is the reason why Internet Explorer has such a bad reputation. (Web Design Museum)

But I want to make the case that a lot of the reason why we’re living with these issues with IE comes down to the poor stewardship of the browser on the part of Microsoft, which essentially let the browser stay put for five full years with little attempt to modernize it—tying it to the fortunes of Windows XP at a time when the internet was moving far more quickly than any one operating system. During the Internet Explorer 6 era, the company took a fairly complacent approach to updating the browser, failing to do so for years, which both created an opportunity for competition to emerge and encouraged the inertia that allowed IE to become a terrible, monopolistic de facto standard for many years.

Add in the fact that IE was so baked into both Windows and its Office suite of applications, and you have a tool that failed to keep up with users.

It took the development of significantly improved technologies, in the form of Safari, Firefox, and later Chrome, to knock Microsoft out of this inertia.

For its part, Microsoft gets this now, even if it didn’t at the time. From a blog post by Sean Lyndersay, the general manager of Microsoft Edge Enterprise:

To work on a product with such broad impact has been nothing but humbling—our story in many ways is the story of the internet and what it has allowed people and organizations around the world to do.

But the web has evolved and so have browsers. Incremental improvements to Internet Explorer couldn’t match the general improvements to the web at large, so we started fresh.

But I think it tells an important story from a business standpoint. The fact that Microsoft had a hugely important product that it failed to maintain in a timely fashion during its most popular period cast a long shadow over its usefulness for decades to follow. It’s not that IE11 isn’t better than IE6. It’s that when given the pole position with the literal front-facing function of the entire internet, Microsoft took a breather. And that helped to set the stage for IE’s failings for decades after.

All the parents that never upgrade their browser, or the enterprises that built monolithic tools that don’t work well with any other browser besides IE? That’s the legacy Microsoft created by taking its foot off the gas when IE6 was at the center of the digital universe.

That intertia is a big part of the reason why security flaws related to IE and its underlying browser engine will still follow Windows users years from now.

“Internet Explorer as the browser will be gone, but there are still pieces that exist,” security researcher Ronnie Tokazowski told Wired recently.

From a creation perspective, it is tempting when you are on top to not continue to change or evolve, to just coast. But the cautionary tale of IE should shake you out of that line of thinking, if nothing else does.

We’re cynical about IE because, at the moment when it needed to step up and be valuable to more than just Microsoft, Microsoft balked.

The internet suffered.

Nobody uses their browser quite the same way. And honestly, it could be telling a story about you that you might have never anticipated.

That’s something made clear by a new tool, published by the Github user z0ccc, that highlights just how trackable you are based on your unique mix of browser extensions. And depending on how many extensions you use, things can break down quickly.

The Extension Fingerprints page built by z0ccc looks at the most popular extensions that are out there, whether you’re using them, and then lets you know how common they are.

And as it turns out, if you use even a modest number of browser extensions, you could be telling on yourself.

“Having 3+ detectable extensions installed seems to always make your fingerprint very unique,” z0ccc told BleepingComputer.

It’s like the ultimately screw-over for power users, in a way. My combination of Briskine, Buffer, Pushbullet, Tab Wrangler, and Okta—five relatively common extensions—is enough to make me basically unique in the eyes of this website.

While z0ccc wasn’t the person who discovered this problem—it’s been known since at least 2017 that it’s been possible to detect browser extension use, to a high level of specificity. This is a problem, of course, because in an era when third-party cookies are becoming persona non grata, advertisers are naturally going to be looking for alternatives to cookies to track our every move.

Extension fingerprinting is just one way to tell on yourself. There are other methods, such as the size of your browser window, the version of operating system you use, and so on. The less mainstream your setup is, the easier you are to track. The problem is, you likely would have no way of knowing how mainstream your setup is.

{asset:20401:img}

(Glenn Carstens-Peters/Unsplash)

“These data points might seem generic at first and don’t necessarily look tailored to identify one specific person. However, there’s a significantly small chance for another user to have 100 percent matching browser information,” z0ccc wrote on his Github page.

Extension Fingerprints touches on just one angle of what makes a user unique in the eyes of the internet—sites like AmIUnique show that even the technical features of your browser or user agent can nail you down almost perfectly.

Now, the solutions for handling this state of affairs can get increasingly complex—from blocking trackers, to blocking javascript, to surfing in private mode, to utilizing a VPN. But the problem is, as sophisticated at these things can get, the fact that your browser extensions alone can potentially nail you down suggests that it may be increasingly hard to hide your identity online without some broader architectural changes to browsers in general. To put it another way, it seems pretty nuts how much external sites can learn from you just from your taste in browser extensions.

Earlier this week, I took a long trip by regional train to the Philly suburbs to meet up with someone I haven’t seen in person before—but that I’ve literally known for the last 25 years.

That person? Brad Levicoff, a.k.a. Zophar, the man who started the legendary video game site Zophar’s Domain way back in the late ’90s.

My first real taste of being a journalist happened as a result of this little site. I hopped on as the guy who ran the article section, using the creative IRC user name StickFig98, later Stick_Fig. I had a lot of deep respect for what he built—and honestly, I’m sort of impressed that it’s still online nearly 25 years later—and doubly so given the fact that the site hasn’t technically been in Brad’s hands for about 22 years. Brad has re-emerged onto the scene this year after a long break, and is finding success running a Twitch channel. (No verification on Twitter though; someone should fix that!)

Was I very good at it back then? No way. But it was a strangely cachet-building thing among a certain circle of techie. When I brought this up to people in college, for example, people were immensely impressed that I worked for this little site. They remembered it; they had visited it. It was the kind of miniaturized celebrity that was very novel back in 2001—akin to having your caption published in The New Yorker—but we take for granted these days on the modern internet.

And Brad, as well as early EFnet IRC channels like #emu, helped introduce me to this whole deal. He notably quit the site after just a couple of years, then moved into the workforce, handing the site off to what became a variety of owners over time. And the site kept chugging along, as competing platforms like Dave’s Video Game Classics, Archaic Ruins, and EMU News Service fell into the abyss of a spottily-archived past. At the time, emulation was a gray area as a pastime—faint gray, but still gray. I think for a lot of people, they thought it might go mainstream, but probably didn’t think that one day Nintendo would be hawking mini consoles based on the formative work of the ’90s emulation scene, or expect Phil Spencer to make a full-throated endorsement of the importance of emulation. (To be fair, when we got into this, the Xbox didn’t exist. We’re ancient as far as influencers go, heh.)

I still think that working on Zophar’s Domain, even if it wasn’t ultimately my focus as a writer, led me on a writerly path, and for that, I think I owe Brad a lot. I’m glad that the two of us, purely in middle age at this point after first getting to know one another as teenagers, finally got a chance to meet.

I often get nervous about the idea of meeting people I first knew online, but more often than not, I’ve found the whole thing worth it. This is definitely in the “worth it” category.

Anyway … about a decade ago, Netflix found its way to stand out from the rest of TV by giving viewers a degree of instant gratification. The idea that you could watch a show like House of Cards in one sitting was kind of innovative.

When Netflix was the primary streaming television game in town, it sort of worked, because it was a new and novel experience. But honestly … I soft of feel like the approach is poorly suited to where streaming television is going.

And I say this largely because I’m in the midst of rewatching Stranger Things start to finish, after months of watching a bunch of shows off Netflix where the appointment viewing model was really used effectively. From Severance to Barry to Only Murders in the Building, there are currently a lot of shows out there right now that are basically killing it with tension within the framework of the standard weekly episodic content without instant gratification.

Netflix could learn something from Barry.

There is a degree of shared experience that comes with watching a show on streaming that Netflix makes it harder to do. Sure, we didn’t really have much in the way of barometers when we first started watching Netflix, but now we do, and in some ways, Netflix’s classic model might be hurting it in the long run.

I’m not the only person to think this, either. As Richard Edwards of TechRadar notes, the binge model worked better then than it does now:

But now, six years on, it feels like a weird blast from the past that the show is still following the same release pattern. In fact, I’d have been much happier if season 4’s first volume had launched its seven episodes on a weekly basis.

Stranger Things, watching it in retrospect, strikes me as a show that could have been an even bigger phenomenon had it been distributed by another company. Which is not to say that it was a mistake for Netflix to pick it up—and in fact, it might have been the best choice at the time of its release—but that the fact that it’s not a work of appointment viewing kind of hurts it as a cultural phenomenon, because it costs the show something that it is otherwise designed for in spades—tension.

I’m not by any means suggesting that Netflix screwed up the release of the show, necessarily—after all, it’s a massive hit—but the culture around streaming in 2016 is not the same as that of 2022. We are willing to wait a week to get sucked into the next episode, then talk about it on our social channel of choice.

And as Netflix looks to fix itself, perhaps the place it should start is to let the sacred differentiator die off. Bring back appointment viewing—at least for the shows where the appointment could give the show some additional power.

It turns out that some AI officials have grown concerned about whether at some point this technology is going to become sentient, or at least understanding of its lot in life enough that we need to discuss things like ethics.

One Google researcher says we’re already there. Blake Lemoine, an engineer is part of the company’s Responsible AI discipline, has suggested that LaMDA, a conversational AI technology that he was working on, has become “sentient,” with the ability to control its surroundings and concerns about how it’s being used by its corporate creator.

“I want the humans that I am interacting with to understand as best as possible how I feel or behave, and I want to understand how they feel or behave in the same sense,” LaMDA reportedly said in a chat transcript shared by Lemoine over the weekend.

With this knowledge, Lemoine became more than convinced that this bot was good at language—he was convinced this bot had a distinct soul and emotional core.

(Google didn’t agree; it suspended him, which led Lemoine to take his story to the press and the public.)

This situation has, understandably, generated a lot of critiques and skepticism (and memes), but it is nonetheless worth talking about because the framing of this story is so clearly unusual.

While I can’t peer into Google’s code and say for certain that Lemoine is just seeing things, I will say that this does highlight a problem for Google. Just not the one Lemoine thinks.

I’d like to posit about this story that there are two separate considerations here that need to be discussed, both of which can be true: First, the idea that AI can become so convincing in its use of language that it fools people like Lemoine; and second, the fact that Google struggles to understand its AI ethicists is a continuing problem that threatens the company in the long run.

In some ways, it’s good to think of Lemoine in the way that you might think of someone like Fox Mulder from The X-Files. Given his job and his predisposition, it’s understandable why someone like him would be likely to believe something farcical like AI actually having emotions and feelings. After all, as someone who works in a “Responsible AI” discipline, it reinforces things he’s already decided are worth believing.

As Clive Thompson thoughtfully notes, the reason why he believed this is because the AI showed vulnerability, something that real humans show. But that means that AI is getting better at producing something similar to vulnerability, not that the AI is sentient.

“It’s a story about the danger of wanting to believe in magic so badly that you’ll manufacture a simulation of it and say it’s real,” Joshua Topolsky tweeted last night by way of explanation.

However, more broadly, Google has been really bad about how it has treated its AI teams, with employees like Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell being shown the door after raising broader questions about the work and the department. That Lemoine was suspended, rather than fired, suggests that Google wants to be careful not to make a mistake here, even if it has to deal with the public nature of something its leadership clearly disagrees with.

Google has to be sensitive about how it handles this situation, because it could be setting up someone like Lemoine to speak out against the company for decades if it plays this poorly. It’s not that he’s right, and odds are that he’s probably wrong. It’s that Google could be seen as stifling legitimate internal debate about the AI tools it builds if it plays its cards poorly here.

After all, it has already been accused of doing just that.

But with the rise of Dall-E, the OpenAI-built neural network technology that can generate images from text descriptions alone, I didn’t realize how literal that could end up being. Over the last couple of days, the viral nature of a subset project, Dall-E Mini, has captured the internet’s attention in a big way, for the way it can help crash together ideas that don’t seem like they would ever appear in real life. (If it doesn’t work, keep trying; another option that offers lower-quality fake images but is much more consistent to load is Hypnogram.)

If I was still a graphic designer, I would love this tool and hate it all the same. It’s a great way to get an idea for visualizations, as it helps to bring forth a perspective that you likely would have never thought about before. A lot of the ideas that have inspired me are around pop culture admittedly. But I would have the thought floating through my head—“Do I need to be worried about the next version of this replacing me?”

It’s a real concern, and likely to be the bigger question that emerges from its rise as a technology, after we get tired of the new memes we’re creating. (My personal favorite so far is Grumpy Cat eating lasagna, Garfield-style.)

There is tons of potential for abuse of this thing admittedly. I think you could have this thing spit out images of politicians, for example, and those images would naturally look embarrassing to them. It’s not as good as a deepfake by any means, but the images it spits out look comical enough that it may not even matter—they look like convincing caricatures of the politicians and that might even be enough to upset them. (Pro tip: Have someone famous eat something.) Given how controversy-driven that line of work already is, I honestly think they now have to worry about algorithms making them look bad.

I think the thing I would compare it to the most is Subservient Chicken, the famous Burger King viral campaign that played with the audience’s ability to come up with new ideas, leaning heavily on the power of curiosity to make new things happening. In 17 years, we’ve gone from technology that fakes subservience to artificial intelligence that actually gives us the real thing.

Is this a good technology for the world? The jury’s still out. All I know is that I’m obsessed with it and I think a lot of other people are, too. The future is going to be made up of people creating images based on the craziest ideas they can think of.

He was upset. He had taken to questioning whether it was right for me to say that using a microfiche machine was difficult to use, or clunky.

And when I pointed out that I only said it was clunky compared to a smartphone, a more common way that people scroll through and zoom into images, he criticized the smartphone as dumbed down. Then I pointed out something I’ve mentioned many times but doesn’t always get through to more experienced users: I’m writing for regular people, not experts.

That was when he started to jab harder. He leaned into something I wrote in the piece noting that most researchers use the internet, suggesting that what I really meant was databases. (I didn’t.)

He then asked: “If you really aren’t an expert on this, why are you fighting me when I say microfilm viewers aren’t intuitive?”

Finally, he tried attacking my age, suggesting that I had been born in the ’90s and had not experienced technology before a smartphone (neither point is true), and that I didn’t understand what I was saying.

I responded simply, then ended the thread: “Your elitism is showing.” He replied again, but I left the thread by that point. I had nothing else to say.

(Masaaki Komori/Unsplash)

I think a lot about this thread because it reminds me of a lot of interactions I see online, where someone who thinks they know more than others about a topic falls into gatekeeper mode.

Look, I get it, there are people who think they are experts on given topics, who know everything. I think, for example, I know a bit about digital publishing because of the fact that I’ve been doing it for quite a long time. But while I have strong opinions on walled gardens such as Substack, I ultimately don’t want to push people away from something that’s working for them—rather, I just want to highlight, hey, you have options.

I think that when it comes down to it, the gatekeeper approach has its limits for cultural growth. It is designed to discourage others from showing an interest in new topics, rather than finding ways to introduce them to new topics. If you walk into a situation where you’re relatively green on a given topic, God help you.

I think some of this is out of protection—we want to ensure that our little corner of the cultural world is safe in some way. But at the same time, it naturally leaves others out.

If you’re an expert on something and your approach is to demean or otherwise criticize others who think differently on an issue than you do, you are doing more damage to your reputation than you probably even realize.

Open up the tent. Give yourself—and your hobby or career—some room to breathe.

Not that they have to. After all, these are fully capable computers with hardware that is only non-functional because the software hasn’t been updated. It might even be “cloud-locked,” meaning the devices aren’t functional because they haven’t been logged out of Find My iPhone or similar services.

But there’s a growing chance that could change, at least to some degree. As reported by Ars Technica late last week, two developers managed to get postmarketOS, a version of Linux, to boot on an iPad Air 2, utilizing a jailbreak.

This is a big step, as few efforts to bring Linux to iOS devices have actually hit pay dirt, and generally when they have, it’s only on older devices that have had jailbreaks available for significant periods. (In the case of this, it’s likely to only work on tablets with A7 or A8 chips, meaning that most devices that could feasibly do this will be in the 7-year-old range.)

And even if they do get it further working, it’s not likely to be an easy process. One challenge is that they essentially have to rebuild the whole technical stack for these devices to support things like USB, bluetooth, or WiFi.

At this point, this initiative, dependent on utilizing exploits, is a technical exercise, one that requires users to exploit their own devices to even get something like this to work. But someday, it might become a useful thing to do with this old hardware, which is often limited by the software it holds.

Case in point: I have an original iPad Mini, which I first got my hands on in 2013. This device, which sports an A5 processor, turns 10 next year, and supports iOS9, which initially game out nearly seven years ago. It’s a fully functional machine with a size that makes it very hand-holdable. But it’s ultimately hobbled by software support.

Other ecosystems with devices that have been basically abandoned by their creators haven’t had quite these problems, in part because they haven’t been so locked down to the point where their value persists only with Apple hardware.

The HP TouchPad, a device long forgotten about by HP in something of a fever dream of a timeframe, obviously hasn’t gotten much in the way of updates since its botched 2011 release, but its community has been able to keep it alive. Recently, the website WebOS Archive was revived, making room for this long-neglected device to still have a way forward.

So I guess all of this is to say that, as Tim Cook brings folks onto the stage today to talk new laptops or hardware, it’s worth discussing what the company is willing to do to keep these old, still functional devices working just a little while longer.

And if it’s nothing, you should know that before you take the leap.

And on top of that the company makes a lot of great accessories. You may not own a Sony smartphone, but odds are that you use a pair of their headphones or own a Sony mirrorless camera.

So when Sony Semiconductor Solutions CEO Terushi Shimizu recently implied that the DSLR, a bedrock device in the photographer’s toolkit, might soon meet its match in a smartphone, it was bound to draw people’s attention. Speaking to a business meeting in Japan, he implied that the older shutter-based technology, still widely appreciated by most mainstream photographers although gradually being competed with at the high end by “mirrorless” cameras, would fall into obsolescence as camera companies continued to invest in smartphone photography.

“Around 2019, it was said that the three elements of the battery, display, and camera will evolve in smartphones. While the other two are technically saturated, there are still expectations for the camera to evolve,” he said.

(Conor Luddy/Unsplash)

Part of the claim driving this argument is essentially that smartphones are increasing in quality, and will get even larger sensors in the coming years. Combine this with the fact that smartphones are surging in capabilities, allowing for the increased use of artificial intelligence to improve picture quality, and you have a situation that heavily favors the smartphone.

(It should be noted, as DIY Photography does, that Sony itself hasn’t made a DSLR camera in more than a decade, favoring mirrorless instead, so it may not be comparing the latest tech with that bold claim.)

Now, obviously, this may just be one CEO talking from the perspective of a company that wants its image sensors used in high-end phones, including the iPhone 13. But mobile imaging has come a long way in part because of a willingness to invest. The iPhone, just as an example, has come a long way, starting with a 2-megapixel sensor and evolving from leaps and bounds from that point.

But I have to imagine that if I were a professional photographer, I would probably find Shimizu’s comments to be not very helpful. It’s not that smartphone cameras are bad, but there is a reason why photographers prefer going with purpose-built devices with fancy interchangeable lenses—and it’s not just because of the quality of the sensor.

The smartphone does have some room to evolve on the camera front, and honestly it’s been the driving factor for most upgrades in the last three or four years. But honestly, I think I’d think Shimizu’s comments are probably best seen with a megapixel-sized grain of salt.

Freeman’s work in attempting to make an ecosystem for jailbroken iOS devices was noble and valuable and arguably created a community of tech-savvy phone users that arguably pushed Apple to make better, more flexible operating systems in the long run.

That’s one view of the Cydia app store, which for many years was the best-known alternative app store on iOS (and essentially, a conversion of Debian’s APT installer tool from the Linux ecosystem for iOS). However, that noble stance covered up the fact that Freeman was essentially trying to run a business on extremely shaky ground—working in a gray area, Freeman had created an app ecosystem that was under threat of being crippled by a large company at basically any time.

Eventually, Freeman gave up on making Cydia into a business, and took another route instead. (Among other things: He recently caught a major bug in Ethereum, which led to him getting paid $2 million in a bug bounty.)

But an interesting thing happened that could likely change the dynamic of Freeman’s work and public profile: See, he’s suing Apple under antitrust law, saying that Apple’s moves to tighten integration with the App Store left alternative vendors like himself out in the cold.

And it looks like the lawsuit may have legs, as the federal judge in the case, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, essentially sided with Freeman that there was enough standing to keep his suit going. Apple claimed that Freeman had missed a statute of limitations, but the judge disagreed after Freeman updated his suit to make the claim that Apple essentially made running an alternate app store impossible on their platform. Freeman’s legal team argued that Apple baked the first-party App Store into the iOS code with system updates during a three-year period in which jailbreaking as an activity notably slowed.

From Rogers’ decision:

Within a year from this final exclusion, plaintiff brought this lawsuit. Thus, plaintiff has plausibly alleged that Apple engaged in changes in its technological updates, which occurred within the four years preceding the filing of the lawsuit. Accordingly, to the extent plaintiff’s claims rely on Apple’s technological updates to exclude Cydia from being able to operate altogether, those claims are timely.

Apple now has a few weeks to respond to the ruling.

Rogers is known in the Apple sphere as the judge in the Epic Games antitrust case against Apple, and therefore is probably one of the best judges for Freeman to get. While the decision-making in the Epic case ultimately did not do much good for opening up the Apple ecosystem, Freeman arguably has a stronger case because he wasn’t actively trying to goad Apple into a reaction. Rather, he tried to work within the jailbreak ecosystem and ended up getting screwed out of his business by an increasingly aggressive approach taken by Apple.

Cydia—and, by extension, Saurik—might be our best shot at killing the App Store monopoly via the courts.

It took about 45 years for Walt Disney to license out the character, which (upon the release of the first film,Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, in 1966) became one of the company’s most popular after the firm made a few changes—most notably to the name, removing the hyphens to become Winnie the Pooh.

At the end of 2021, the franchise had reached 95 years in copyright, putting the character of Winnie-the-Pooh into the public domain for the first time. And a full five months after that, some director got the great idea of … turning the franchise into a brutal, bloody slasher film.

According to Variety, the film, titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, has already attained an especially strong buzz, beyond that of traditional modern horror/slasher films.

“Because of all the press and stuff, we’re just going to start expediting the edit and getting it through post production as fast as we can,” director Rhys Waterfield told the outlet. “But also, making sure it’s still good. It’s gonna be a high priority.”

The trailer, which I will warn you now is nothing like a Disney film, is quite dark. But I have to imagine, if you’re into this kind of film, you likely will find it quite appealing.

First off, bravo to the film-making team, which I’m sure is already writing the Mickey Mouse slasher film they’ll get to make in 2024. This is a bonafide clever idea, and the PR attention this is getting is likely to lead to more movies like this.

Now, as I’m sure you saw in the title, I noted that the hyphens are important. The reason for that is that this film will have to be based off the material of the original book series, rather than the animated films, which have a different style.

But I wonder if, subtly, Disney is aware of the odds of this happening to more of its film properties. I say this because of a recent film that played heavily into the meta nature of its cultural influence.

That film is the 2022 film reboot/continuation of Chip 'n' Dale: Rescue Rangers, which is a good, light film that I recommend. But one of the plot points is based around the idea that more obscure cartoon characters are being kidnapped and put onto the black market, being forced to create “knock-off” films based on the original property, but changed just enough to be different.

While I’m not assuming the Lonely Island guys that helped formulate this film intentionally did it, they may have given Disney subtle fodder to draw attention to the “knock-offs” they likely know are coming in the next five to ten years.

Perhaps it starts with a new animated series based on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, then it evolves to Goofy and Donald Duck. The public domain is a flexible beast, so the room for creative license is strong, even if based on the original property.

That’s the true horror movie for Disney: The idea that their characters will be used by directors that don’t quite share their vision.

This was something I debated all Tuesday evening as we thought hard about our choice to publish an issue of a newsletter that, for the most part, avoids issues of heavy politics or hot-button cultural debate. As the Tedium about page states, we tend to focus on situations that have been settled.

Ultimately, the line we landed on was this: We should publish, and the reason we should is because right now, the feed is surrounded by heaviness and negativity, and we can offer an alternative to that. Is that a perfect position to be in? No. For one thing, it can threaten the success of the content you create if you publish it at a time when it is very actively swimming upstream. And if people disagree with your opinion on whether it’s time to speak up, it’s not going to go over well.

But I think it’s better than the alternative of silence in Tedium’s own particular case. I mean, I get it. We publish not particularly heavy-duty content on our little corner of the internet, and as a result, we aren’t where people are going to go to get their breaking news. But once they need five minutes to focus on something, anything else, we can offer that.

But I think a big factor was also what we were publishing as much as why we were publishing it. If, for example, we had been writing about Jack Abramoff’s film producing career or police training simulators the other night—two real topics that Tedium has covered over the years—I likely would have pulled the piece, to be honest. DayGlo colors, fortunately, don’t fall into the messy traps that some other topics we might have written about could have landed in.

I think that with situations like deadly shootings, you have to consider your options when you speak up, and sometimes you just need to step back and listen, because the risk of doing something questionable or ill-timed is high. Amid the early moments of impact after the shooting, I took aim at longtime political blogger Matthew Yglesias for his ill-timed commentary on the shooting, which he initially seemed to double down on before taking a step back and admitting he was wrong. It took too long for him to say that, to be honest, and I don’t think I’m going to refollow him on Twitter. But I will credit him that he did.

In moments like these, passion and frustration can take over the discourse. And it can lead people to say unthoughtful or unkind things. I think in times like these, we have to look at our own compasses, ensure that they’re working, and decide, “is this what I want to say?”

Honestly, the answer is probably “no.” But taking a thoughtful approach will get you a lot closer to the answer. In a time of frustration, we need to have that debate.

It’s a little frustrating to have to grab my phone every time I want to log into my email provider, sure, but it also means that nobody else can log into that service unless they physically have access to a device of mine that can generate two-factor authentication codes.

But I have to admit, something happened over the weekend that had me questioning the push towards two-factor authentication. And that problem was with the authenticator app itself.

Essentially, Google let its Authenticator tool sit around with a botched Android update for a whole weekend, preventing anyone who relied on its two-factor authentication tool (and for some reason had a random incompatibility with their Android app) from using it. And because Google doesn’t tie Authenticator codes to, say, a Google account, this meant that deleting the app would have potentially put me in danger of straight-up losing the codes that I needed to log into my apps.

Now, I had a backup option for getting into my accounts—a version of the Authenticator app for iOS, which I could access via my iPad—but it was significantly less convenient, the difference between having my second factor in my pocket and my second factor on the other side of the house.

But I’m lucky I at least had that! See, it turns out that I was not the only person who had this problem, with some saying it was a deep inconvenience. Google literally convinced numerous people to use this tool to log into their accounts, uploaded a botched update that prevented a number of people from logging into their accounts in a secure fashion, and didn’t bother to update with a fix for four whole days. Some of them were left begging for a fix.

I initially thought this was a Samsung issue, and because Google doesn’t have, like, a phone number that you can call, I spent hours on the phone on Saturday basically trying to reach someone on the technical support lines I could access—both T-Mobile and Samsung—to inform them that they have a botched update for an essential application hanging out on the Google Play store.

[paved date=052422 field=zyg3wq]

This was not easy. I had to explain to T-Mobile that no, I was not going to delete this app and lose all of my logins, and to Samsung that yes, this is their problem even if they didn’t make the app themselves. This was a frustrating process, but T-Mobile seemed to take it seriously enough that they called me back multiple times to check in on the problem. (Google, it’s been 25 years, you’ve made your point; open up a damn customer support line already.)

The thing is, two-factor authentication is growing in importance as a way of securing identity. At work, I have to log into a second factor, using my phone, just to access my applications. Numerous other applications are reliant on second-factor authentication. Google itself is starting to require people to use two-factor to log into their Google account (which, fortunately, does not require Authenticator). Applications like GitHub are also moving to require two-factor authentication.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this should just work, and despite that, Google just let this essential tool hang around for a whole weekend, not letting people log in.

We shouldn’t settle for that—not when it’s our security on the line.

But recently, I’ve found myself using Windows more, and not hating it. Sure, it’s not perfect. Recently, I tried reinstalling Windows (specifically, Windows 11) on my HP Spectre x360—a.k.a. the HackBook—for the first time in about three years, and found it to struggle out of the gate. But the truth is, I think it’s not bad in the modern day, even if I don’t necessarily see myself switching over to it full time.

Granted, I needed to take a few steps to find a level of comfort with it, including switching up a few keys on my keyboard. I generally put a super/start button on my Caps Lock key these days, to open up the spot where the Start button usually lives to behave more like a third-level or option key. (As a writer, easily accessible long dashes and curly quotes are a must.)

This type of setup is easily doable in Linux, but Windows struggles with it in part because it just doesn’t seem to be built for the idea of a keyboard with a way to easily tap accent keys or other secondary characters. (Sure, Windows, depending on the international keyboard type, has AltGr capability, but they seem to go out of their way to hide it!) Problem is, Windows doesn’t naturally handle the idea of a third-level key in its operating system, leading to a need for utilizing kludgey apps that are simply kludgier than their equivalents on MacOS or Linux.

(Jeremy Bezanger/Unsplash)

Now, to be clear, there are some things that Windows does well, in my view. For one thing: I find that remote access software performs better in Windows than its equivalents do on MacOS or Linux, to the point where streaming video on a remote-access desktop appears at full-speed without choppiness. Its window management is way better than MacOS, in part because it can handle more than two windows on a fullscreen setup at a given time. And one can argue that Microsoft does a better job integrating search into its operating system than Apple does Spotlight.

I think, though, that Windows’ need to manage a broader array of hardware types often kneecaps it from a convenience standpoint. My Spectre, which Windows was built to support, has simply not performed that well since I took the time to reinstall it. And the reason for that is that trying to get all the drivers onto the machine has proven to be a total pain, leading to higher levels of heat and noise on a machine that otherwise was built for this. (As I upgraded the SSD on the Spectre about a year or two ago, I had to install it fresh. It’s clear Windows did not love that approach.)

[paved date=052322 field=zyg3wq]

But I think that, in a lot of ways, I’ve built up Windows in my head as no longer being worth my time, so stepping back into it after a few years has reminded me that maybe I’m underestimating it a little.

Maybe I was. But even if I don’t love it, I can appreciate it more than I had previously. Which means I can at least live with it long enough to play a game or two on it.

Sure, there were other podcasts that were worthy of my attention at the time, but PJ Vogt and Alex Goldman seemed to be describing the good parts of a digital experience I was a part of, where the truth of the matter is, technology is really about the way it fractures this weird thing we live called life. It was Gimlet’s flagship show for a reason.

In recent years, that picture has gotten more complicated, with Vogt leaving the show in the midst of a scandal in which he and Sruthi Pinnamaneni, a longtime producer, faced criticism for creating a series that highlighted a toxic, structurally racist dynamic at a major magazine very similar to that at Gimlet itself—in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni had been accused of attempted union-busting during a sensitive period just before Gimlet was acquired by Spotify. There was a lot of ink spilled on that whole saga, and it was clear that in the aftermath, Reply All might not survive unscathed. It went off the air for months as Gimlet tried to figure out what could be salvaged.

And it turns out, less than a year after making its return from The Test Kitchen scandal, Reply All is going on hiatus, possibly forever. Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi, the show’s other current host, have announced their plans to leave the show, with the rest of the team stepping aside and working other projects.

You can point at a lot of reasons this might have happened. One is the Spotify acquisition of Gimlet, which forever changed the DNA of that company and may have proved a complicating factor for any continuation of the show; another is the fact that the show’s chemistry changed significantly after Vogt left, though it certainly had its moments. (The most recent episode, which I was listening to last night, was based around the absurd premise that a popular backyard chicken group on Facebook had been suddenly converted to a crypto group by the admin. Classic Reply All.)

But on a more fundamental level, you could get the feeling something had changed in the way the show was managed. Where once the founder of Gimlet, Alex Blumberg, made regular appearances on the show, the show had lost its scrappy originalist energy as the podcast network grew into a subsidiary of Spotify. Where commercials were reasonable and highlighted the staff’s personality, the ads were now fed in via the Spotify network without any real effort to mesh them into the content.

[paved date=051922 field=zyg3wq]

And the channel was increasingly used as a vessel to promote other Gimlet shows, rather than simply living on its own. Original episodes became more and more rare after the show returned from The Test Kitchen, and it sort of read, from a listener’s perspective, like the show was struggling to rediscover its rhythm.

Right now, Vogt—who basically disconnected from Twitter entirely after apologizing for his role in the unionization saga—is working on a comeback podcast called Crypto Island, which takes a Reply All-style approach to covering the crypto scene in a way that outsiders can understand. I’ve been listening; it’s working out for him. If you can look past the drama around what happened while he was at Gimlet (not everyone can), it’s a good direction for him.

But I can’t help to think that this was a show that captured something special, a formula for podcasting that became appointment listening over its long history. By ending it now, they retain some of its legacy … and Spotify hopefully saves a little face after losing what was one of its most popular podcasts.

What I will say is that Goldman and Dzotsi deserve the chance to create on their own terms, especially given that Reply All’s format likely feels a bit constraining after all this time.

Best of luck to them as they figure this out. But it’ll suck without the old standby.

Over the last few days, Musk has put a key condition on the Twitter acquisition despite the fact that generally, when people agree to acquire a company and try to put conditions on it midstream, it kills the deal.

But Elon is kind of redesigning the rules as he goes, isn’t he?

The big problem which he says is publicly holding up the deal is supposedly inaccurate data on the number of spam bots that Twitter reports. Twitter says it’s less than 5 percent. Elon isn’t convinced. And when the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, attempted to explain the company’s somewhat reasonable position that accurate external tracking is difficult without disclosing private customer data to researchers, he got a whole lot of 50-year-old-man-acting-like-he’s-12:

Now, when Elon first discussed the acquisition, he made it seem like spam bots were just one plank of his acquisition strategy, but it’s becoming more and more obvious that this is the part that actually frustrates him about the platform.

But on the other hand, basically all of my regular follows, the people who I rely on to give it to me straight, seem to be convinced that this is Elon’s way of trying to torpedo the deal because he can’t actually afford it. Who knows if that’s the case or not, but what I will say is that this saga has been deeply disruptive to the platform as a whole.

Honestly, I’m reminded of one of cinema’s great villains: Francis Buxton, of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. (Yes, I’m comparing Elon Musk to Francis from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure.)

Essentially a rich troll like Musk, Francis thought that, because he had lots of money and power, he could just come in and take Pee-Wee’s bike, which he really wanted. (Unlike the Twitter board, Pee-Wee held out even after being asked multiple times, but to be fair, Pee-Wee didn’t have shareholders that held stakes in the bike, as it wasn’t publicly traded.)

And the truth is, Francis (with the help of some henchmen) actually stole the bike. But when actually put on the spot now that he had the damn bike, what was the first thing he did? That’s right, he got rid of it. Didn’t think of the chaos that his decision would cause. Didn’t think of the steps it would take for Pee-Wee to get the bike back, or the people it would disrupt. He just got rid of it.

I guess in this allegory, we’re all Pee-Wee, desperately trying to get to the basement of the Alamo in hopes that we can find the thing we originally had, only for it not to be there because the Alamo has no basement. (Hilariously, in real life, it has two, at least these days.)

Odds are, what will actually happen is that, since Francis doesn’t want it, Hollywood will grab a hold of Twitter and do everything in its power to hold onto this tool that’s of deep value to its business. Just like what happened in the movie.

Maybe the Twitter board shouldn’t have given into the chaos agent. Maybe, like Pee-Wee, they should have fought to hold onto their awesome bike.

As a result, you might want to fix that.

To give you an idea, here are just a few of the products that have emerged from it within the last couple of years:

Full-fledged eInk phones. While these are generally seen as minimalist things, the market is expanding and some of these tools are increasingly becoming as robust as the LCD and AMOLED devices other folks use. Primarily made by one company, Hisense, at this time, even some color models exist at the moment. While hard to come by through traditional channels outside of China, from a cost perspective, they actually are priced on the low end.

eInk monitors. Sold largely by the Chinese company Dasung (note the trend here), full-fledged monitors that are designed to either be lugged with you or included as a writing-centric element of your desk setup are hitting the market of late. The desktop-sized 25-inch monitor Dashing sells is not particularly cheap, going for $2,150, but the fact that it exists suggests an evolution in eInk’s market.

Hobbyist/programmer-targeted devices. Led by Pine64’s PineNote, this market segment shows the fact that there’s growing interest in building eInk solutions specifically for developers.

This combination of innovations—mixed with the still-diversifying market for tradtional eInk readers and tablets, along with niche use cases like eInk as a way to list prices—feels like a sign that it’s a technology that’s going to be on the cusp of a bigger breakthrough in due time.

Now, to be clear, eInk does have its limitations. Ghosting is a natural aspect of the format because of it’s design, and combined with a refresh rate that is only somewhat swift if you allow for more ghosting, it will likely create challenges for mainstream uptake down the road if these issues aren’t resolved.

And while color eInk screens exist (and have been getting better), they tend to be more washed out and even slower than the more traditional black and white screens. These aren’t screens designed for video, and they likely never will be. But when it comes to reading written content, they feel like the ticket.

To me, eInk feels like it’s on a similar track of uptake to LCD, which started in a very primitive form in the 1970s and 1980s, only to emerge as a more fully formed specimen of digital screen by the late ’90s. eInk, while about a quarter-century old at this point, has required a much longer gestation period than LCD because of differences in its use case and refresh rate.

I’m optimistic though. Once this is all figured out, we could have more options, some of which are easier on the eyes.

While famous for its desktop GPUs in particular, many laptops, particularly of the Windows variety, relied on hardware from the GPU-maker, but that hardware required closed-off software to function. While it could certainly work with Linux, it definitely was not in the spirit of what Linux was about.

But if you didn’t have those drivers, you couldn’t use the best GPUs on the market throughout most of its history. So basically, a giant rub.

The hard part about all of this was that it turned something as simple as what graphics card you used into an ethical debate, and one that was not easily revolved in the case of a laptop—AMD discrete mobile graphics are simply not as common as their desktop equivalents. If you were all-in on open source, you had to have this debate.

(And even outside home user settings, this was becoming more of a debate, as the graphical capabilities of NVIDIA made their cards important for high-end graphical workflows—or even workflows unrelated to graphics that GPUs can benefit from, such as artificial intelligence or deep learning.)

But recently, NVIDIA took an unprecedented step of announcing plans to open-source its GPU kernel modules, which should (over time) make it a lot easier to make the decision to go with Team Green for graphical capabilities. They’re not ready for mainstream use yet, but eventually they will be.

“This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back,” the company stated on its website.

Thus far, the reaction to this has been strong—and one that suggests a turned corner for NVIDIA, probably one of the most important companies in computer hardware, easily up there with Intel and AMD.

One could argue that the competitive landscape might have forced this issue—recently, AMD got a huge leg-up from being the centerpiece of the Steam Deck, a watershed device for Linux as it makes open-source a mainstream platform for gaming for the first time. But more broadly, you could look at the needs of the server room as well.

GPUs are way more important now than they were five years ago from a technology stack standpoint, not even from a gaming standpoint, and that creates new needs for companies who spend six or seven figures a year on infrastructure. If Google or AWS has a need for GPU capabilities, NVIDIA wants to get the call.

When it comes down to it, NVIDIA doesn’t want to only serve mining rigs and gamers. They have a whole ecosystem of people outside of the mainstream discussion that never get brought up. I think in a lot of ways, this is for them.

The nice part is that everyone gets to benefit from that.

But the problem is, doing this through Revue’s standard export tools is a bit time-consuming. In part, it’s because I’m trying to do it the right way, with image uploads moved to my own database. But it’s also because Revue has spotty support for RSS, and to get it to work I would have to plug the API into a third-party service like Zapier, which creates a bit of a crapshoot.

One nice thing about this process, though, is that it’s done an interesting job of highlighting to me the fact that a lot of MidRange pieces are quite good and quite weird, and I should probably do a little more to focus on highlighting them to the broader world, especially given the fact that many MidRange readers only picked up on the habit within the last six months or so. So, with that in mind, here are a few MidRange “greatest hits”:

Did Tumblr Miss its Shot? 🏒 While the subject matter is near and dear to my heart, I think the thing that makes this post for me is the fact that the hockey metaphor is followed all the way through with the imagery.

An Ode To Picross ✏️ In which I nerd out on an obscure type of video game I’ve been known to obsess over, one that was subject of perhaps the easiest-to-forget Mario spinoff game ever. I still play a lot of Picross, or as it’s also known, Nonograms. It’s a mind-sharpening tool.

What I looked like when the squirrel attacked. (Demi-Felicia Vares/Unsplash)

Squirrel Story 🐿 In which, on the eve of my 40th birthday, I explain how I was attacked by a squirrel while working a college maintenance job, and why this moment brought joy to the team of people I was managing at the time. I can’t think of a better take-the-piss-out-of-myself moment than this.

Miss Cleo and Me 🔮 How Miss Cleo—or at least the very sketchy company managing her business—managed to rack up $400 in charges on my credit card. Mind you, I was 19 at the time.

Pretending I Saw the MacBooks Yesterday 💻 I was out of town appreciating nature when the latest MacBooks were released to the world, so how did I play that? Well, I wrote a post speculating as if I was there to see it. I think this is weird Ernie at his best. And I wasn’t terribly far off.

A Letter to My Robot Namesake 🤖 After I heard Amazon had a robot in its warehouses named Ernie, I decided to honor him by writing him a letter. “More people will know who you and your Muppet-named friends are than the workers who packed laptops and toaster ovens into containers to be shipped to homes and offices anywhere in the world,” I wrote in the letter.

It Could Be Anyone 😶 In which I ponder the weirdness of getting a profile view from “Business Owner in the Internet industry” on LinkedIn. Because that’s not specific at all.

The Lone Coder 💿 Probably the big hit among MidRange pieces, this was a nice bit of honoring of the work of Cameron Kaiser, the programmer who developed a web browser for PowerPC when nobody else would.

The thing about many of these pieces is that they’re generally not news-of-the-day pieces, but rather they’re slightly askew slices of life.

Sometimes when I write these, I’m looking for angles related to the news of the day. But often the best pieces, in my view, come when I write things that take weird paths that are more than just information regurgitation.

This process of moving the old site to the new one is a great reminder of that.

Fortunately, it doesn’t really spoil very much about the show, so I feel like I can share it with you here. But for those who prefer watching a popular show in full, I understand if you wanna sit this one out. Call this a spoiler alert, though like I said, this scene ultimately doesn’t spoil too much about the plot.

…

Content warning: Violence, profanity. But also, one of the greatest pop songs of the past half-century.

Anyway, let’s begin. In episode 11 of season 4, Marty and Wendy Byrde (Jason Bateman, Laura Linney) are traveling in a van after having had an argument. Marty turns up the radio, which is playing the immortal banger “I Saw the Light” by Todd Rundgren.

Wendy isn’t happy about being tuned out by her husband, saying, “Are you shutting me out, is that it? Cute. Very very cute, very mature. This song sucks, by the way.”

(Side note: How DARE she.)

The two are in the middle of a heavy traffic jam in a construction zone, with Marty behind the wheel. Marty is in the middle of an intersection and can’t go anywhere; he’s completely, utterly stuck. Another driver is honking his horn and flipping him the bird.

Marty, already at his wit’s end, gets out of the car, and calls out the driver. The driver, who is essentially a stranger, insults Wendy.

“Talk to her like that one more time, I make a single phone call and have you killed,” Marty says at one point.

Then it just devolves from there. Marty throws the first punch, then the other driver lunges. At one point the driver throws Wendy, who was attempting to break up the fight, onto the ground. Marty eventually hits the guy, who is at this point passed out, probably a dozen times.

A construction worker eventually pulls Marty off the driver. Then Marty walks away, while Wendy looks on.

Throughout all of this, Todd Rundgren’s greatest contribution to the three-minute pop song is playing, completely contrasting the moment. It is a violent scene, surrounded by anger at all corners, but in the middle of all that rage, there’s “I Saw the Light,” one of the cheeriest sections of 70s soft rock ever put to wax. By the end of the scene, nearly the entire song has played through.

…

So, can we really say something, anything about this moment that hasn’t already been said? I will say that this is probably one of the best uses of music in a TV show in quite some time, the way it contrasts what would otherwise be a purely dark devolution of a couple with a pure piece of sunlight. Many shows would probably put this scene, probably one of the lowest points that the Byrdes have experienced yet, against a much darker and foreboding soundtrack.

But Ozark didn’t do that. Instead, it gave us Wendy Byrde exclaiming that Todd Rundgren’s best pop song sucks. (Hilariously, per Men’s Health, Linney directed the episode, the only one she’s directed throughout the entire series, AND selected the song.) Then, it gave us what was clearly a breaking point for a couple that has seen many throughout this series. While gritty and violent, it is great television, arguably because of the contrast.

That they thought to make Todd Rundgren a part of it is honestly the best part.

I think not. Since the nonprofit news outlet first covered the topic way back in 2013, the organization has published more than 40 stories about the way that companies focused on tax-filing, particularly TurboTax maker Intuit but also H&R Block, fought against efforts to nationalize taxes, but also obfuscate any efforts to offer “free” taxes to low-income customers. It may be one of the most consistent dunk jobs a journalistic outlet has done on a single company in the modern era. ddd

And this week, the effort showed some real results beyond just the negative press it usually was. New York Attorney General Letita James announced a $141 million settlement, targeting 4 million Americans in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, that will see up to $90 returned to those customers who paid TurboTax for something the IRS intended for them to have for free.

Just one example of TurboTax’s years of misleading “free” advertising.

(And not in the “free free free free” sense that Intuit has confusingly promoted for years. The company’s approach on that front, which wound down only recently, was shut down as a part of the settlement.)

“For years, Intuit misled the most vulnerable among us to make a profit. Today, every state in the nation is holding Intuit accountable for scamming millions of taxpayers, and we’re putting millions of dollars back into the pockets of impacted Americans,” James said. “This agreement should serve as a reminder to companies large and small that engaging in these deceptive marketing ploys is illegal. New Yorkers can count on my office to protect their wallets from white-collar scammers.”

While not the last action likely to come in this longstanding issue—the Federal Trade Commission is still pursuing action against the company—this is nonetheless a goundbreaking settlement that nails down a company that used devious tactics to hide a federal program from millions of people, all in an effort to save its bottom line.

In a lot of ways, this conflict has long highlighted the ways that companies take advantage of those not “in the know” in efforts to help improve its bottom line. The most creative and egregious way Intuit did this was by literally blocking the page for its version of the Free File partnership, launched with the IRS in the mid-2000s, from Google results, which helped play into the broader confusion the company’s free-oriented marketing created. (The service advertised on television was not, in fact, free.)

As ProPublica has pointed out many times in this series, there’s no reason for a significant portion of Americans to even need to use an intermediary like TurboTax to file their taxes. After all, the federal government already has most of that information internally, and could handle most of the legwork for the vast majority of Americans without the help of an external company. Intuit is a great example of what I wrote about earlier this week, of someone who fights doing something they don’t want to do by making it aggressively difficult to do things the expected way.

There is an argument for deeper reforms here—for Congress to pass a workaround so this industry of people that take their annual cut simply didn’t exist to the degree that it does. But that would require political will.

The best we can hope for now, arguably, is that next year’s taxes will be a lot less awful for a significant number of people.

Simple answer: You do everything you can to get in the way, to passively aggravate, to discourage a solution that you do not personally want to support.

There is a lot of that going around these days, and a few rounds of passive aggression arguably played a role in the big news of last night—the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that overturns Roe v. Wade.

(A few minutes before the news leaked, the Supreme Court quietly put up barricades. Point made.)

I don’t want to suggest that I’m the right person to have that discussion other than to note that it’s a sign of a broken political system that led to this result—I will instead forward you to some smart insights on the issue from people who are more versed in this topic than I.

Let me instead discuss this issue in a way that keeps me in my hard-earned lane. Because sometimes showing a somewhat innocuous example can highlight the same point while removing the cruft of emotion.

Recently, you might have heard that Apple—a company that has seemingly spent the last decade doing everything it can to limit repairability of the expensive devices it sells—launched a self-service program that, among other things, makes it possible to repair an iPhone yourself, in the comfort of your home.

Specific details of what that program looks like have been trickling out in bits and pieces, and last week, the program launched in earnest. One of the first people to try out the program, YouTuber Luke Miani (who I’ve interviewed in the past) got a hold of the recommended parts Apple offers to allow for this repair, and they’re … a lot.

Basically, Apple rents you extremely expensive equipment, a lot of it, at sizes so large that you basically need to have a large work area to even use any of it. On the one hand, Apple is clearly renting the equipment, which sells for hundreds of dollars on its own, at cost or less—as the price of the equipment would not even cover shipping. On the other hand, the equipment to repair a tiny phone comes in these boxes:

(Certainly screams “Apple” to me.)

Why do you need this equipment? Because Apple only writes the repair manuals for this specific equipment. Mind you, other companies offer other methods for doing this exact same thing, notably iFixit, without the need for these massive boxes.

Many people prefer to repair their devices because it saves money. Apple, by requiring the use of this overkill equipment, actually ends up charging a few bucks more than a Genius Bar repair when all is said and done. No reasonable person is going to want to do this—and Apple knows it. This program is designed to be unreasonable.

When someone wants to not do something but is required to, they will do everything they can to maneuver around it. And if they can’t avoid the inevitable, they will make it so inconvenient and frustrating that nobody will ever want to do it, damaging the cause through discouragement rather than denial.

Until the point where they find their opportunity to actively push against the thing they don’t like.

The problem isn’t necessarily that people don’t understand the basic ideas of free speech, but that they don’t understand the role of the venue in setting the ground rules of what is said.

A good real-world example of this might be a union that’s on strike: They can’t necessarily go inside the building to protest, as it’s private property, but they can protest as much as they want outside.

The internet is complicated, because a lot of areas are basically free-speech zones, but the problem is, those areas are the ones devoid of commercial influence. Problem is, most social networks and platforms in general don’t fit into that category, leading to lots of end-user confusion. Case in point is this argument from TechDirt’s Mike Masnick that I screenshotted:

This is the challenge that we run into with the internet—walled gardens have town squares, but they are not the kinds of town squares where you can freely spout your head off, unless the organization has basically no standards. (Think the proposed vision of Twitter under Elon Musk.)

The problem is, people given an ounce of freedom can immediately abuse it in ways that don’t necessarily break the law, but do break a sense of decorum that can put businesses under pressure to switch gears. This fairly profane 2021 sketch from I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson illustrates the point effectively:

In the sketch, Robinson’s character is on a ghost tour, specifically the late-night adult version of the tour, when the guide tells guests they can say “whatever the hell we want.” Robinson’s character, who clearly has some challenges with social interaction, immediately starts asking questions that stretch the bounds of decency, leading the guide to get extremely upset and the people in the tour to eventually force him out.

Robinson, almost by accident, seems to have nailed down the problem with unfettered “free speech” on social media. It’s not that you shouldn’t have your right to free speech, but if your free speech makes everyone around you uncomfortable, it puts pressure on both the venue and the listener to force people out.

This is why, if you want real free speech, with no true risk of censorship, you have to go outside the confines of the private business. You may not find as big of an audience for your more outré views, but you will be guaranteed that you’ll have as little interference as possible, because the First Amendment applies to the government, not individual businesses.

(This point is the reason why the recent panic over books in schools and libraries is so controversial, because in that case the First Amendment directly applies.)

Every social network that has attempted to make a “free speech” equivalent has run into this problem—if they want to ban a user, it is no longer pure free speech, and they are limited by the law. This is actually why Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1996 exists, because building a network with no rules means that you have to let in a bunch of stuff that you, as a business or an employee, don’t want to be associated with. If someone else wants to take on that liability, let them. But doing so in an unfettered way has indirect effects that will ultimately harm your organization or business.

(This actually came up, true story, because Jordan Belfort—The Wolf of Wall Street himself—was causing problems on the early online service Prodigy because of his company’s controversial business practices.)

So my recommendation is that, the next time someone brings up this whole free speech debate on social media, share this R-rated Tim Robinson sketch with them. It makes the case for businesses moderating social media far better than any billionaire can muster.

Freedom of speech is not freedom of venue. If you’re on a ghost tour and you start spewing bile, you’re going to get asked to leave.

Quick side note: We are still tweaking our template, including the addition of tweet embeds. If for some reason something looks broken in your email client, let me know.

So, for those of you who don’t spend all your time reading about memory specifications, here’s the deal: Recently, a screenshot hit a Twitter rumor account and caused lots of confusion, because Dell seemed to be introducing a new proprietary type of RAM for its Precision series of laptops.

The problem emerged when, as people started looking for more details about it, it seemed like the only company making the RAM was Dell, and the company held the patent to the form factor. Some early headlines about the situation referred to CAMM as proprietary and said it would “lock out user upgrades.”

A blog post about the RAM type muddied the waters to some degree:

Through CAMM, Dell is enabling a thinner chassis design without sacrificing performance—perfect for hybrid professionals. With repair a key component of our commitment to help reduce waste and extend the life of products and materials, the CAMM module also makes the memory more accessible for field repair. Initially launching with CAMM, the Precision 7000 series will also be available with traditional SODIMM options soon afterwards.

So, why make this new kind of RAM if you’re going to make a more traditional SODIMM version anyway? It’s understandable why this kind of blew up.

How you’ll install your CAMM RAM if you buy this new laptop.

Fortunately, PCWorld Executive Editor Gordon Ung was able to clear the air to some degree, doing an interview with Dell Senior Distinguished Engineer Tom Schnell, who helped to design the new RAM type. He insisted that, while Dell owned the patent, it was going to openly standardize it for the industry.

“One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards,” Schnell told Ung. “We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We’re not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard.”

And to highlight this fact, the CAMM design will even allow for an adapter that will let people install standard DDR5 SODIMM memory modules, though it obviously will be a lot chonkier than the new solution.

Here’s the thing: At this time, a lot of mainstream laptops that once came with socketed RAM no longer do, and a big part of the reason for this is the push for thinness. (SODIMMs, by necessity, come with a number of mechanical parts to lock in the RAM, which raises their height on the board.)

If CAMM becomes a more mainstream standard, it could help solve this problem in a big way. As it uses a new compression-based connector to stay fairly flat, it cuts down on the amount of vertical space the board needs to hold a decent amount of RAM. And because it takes up more physical area than a SODIMM, that means the RAM has more room to dissipate heat. From an engineering standpoint, it cuts down on points of failure while fitting into laptops more adeptly.

In fact, probably the worst thing that could happen with CAMM is if it fades into obscurity. This could be a potential solution for bringing memory upgradability back to smaller machines as an alternative to ball grid array and solder. But if nobody uses it, CAMM memory will prove prohibitively expensive, and that will mean that the people who buy these new Dell laptops will find themselves with a collector’s item … in all the ways that can be a bad thing.

Dell appears to be working on the right problem. The problem is that those writing about it jumped the gun. Le sigh.

Revue doesn’t have a direct export function so I will slowly be working my way through every issue over the next couple of weeks deciding how to properly host it elsewhere.

Revue is owned by Twitter, a company that I think a lot of people have found a key part of their cultural experience online over the past decade and a half. (I respect Revue and I like their service and the people who work there, and I feel bad about this, but it’s not about them.)

Twitter is definitely a love-hate service for a lot of folks, and I think that’s why the decision by Elon Musk to acquire this service has broken through in such a notable way. It is perhaps the most divisive thing that has happened on Twitter since a certain political lightning rod was booted off the service in a display which most certainly set the stage for something like this to happen.

Anyway, let’s stop talking about Elon Musk for a second. Let’s start talking about individual users, particularly those who see this as some opportunity to turn Twitter into a free-speech haven once again. Now, I can appreciate people having the right to utilize their right to free speech, about being able to say what you want online, and so forth. (But I emphasize, as I always do, that you want to self-host. You don’t need a billionaire to support your digital freedom.)

But the fact of the matter is, we live in a society. And Twitter, by throwing everyone into the same digital morass, stretches the definition of society by putting people that would literally have no reason to interact with one another in the same large room, with no care as to how that interaction is going to go.

The debate about free speech on the internet seems like it’s about politics. But I’d argue it’s really about decorum. Because there are no standards or rules as to how people act on the broader internet, there is nothing requiring you to be a good person, or a jerk, or a sockpuppet, or an edgelord. You can be any of those things. Or, depending on how you utilize anonymity, all of them.

I think back to what it was like for a lot of people, being 10 years old and just trying to make it through the day at school. But one bad apple could ruin the whole day, one bully could turn living into a horror show. Twitter, at its worst, can feel like bullies coming in from all corners; but at its best, it can introduce you to new types of people and new ways of thinking. People want the latter, not the former.

The internet is full of spicy opinions, and we’re all going to have them. But the reason, ultimately, we’re not all using IRC or Usenet in 2022 is not because we wanted better experiences, but because we wanted safer ones. We don’t want an internet of jerks.

If Elon Musk, as Twitter’s owner, favors free speech absolutism over safety, he’s going to push most people to find other safe corners.

Based on what he already has done, I’m not hosting my newsletter on a platform he’s about to own.

The problem is this: It’s a company that, by the nature of its service, has to be all things to all people, which is hard to do when it largely has to rely on original content versus acquiring content distribution rights, like it was able to do when it first started.

The company has a lot of money to throw at new shows, but its aim has been very shaky of late, focused on broad crowd-pleasers (such as its recent Ryan Reynolds films, which I enjoyed, but, let’s face it, didn’t necessarily need to exist) over the kinds of narrow genre work that keep users excited and engaged over time.

We think of Disney’s many content acquisitions over the years, like Star Wars and Marvel, as the broadest of the broad, but these content plays actually reflect the opposite—cult properties where the cult grew so mainstream that they came to no longer be seen as niche. Netflix doesn’t really have as much in this wheelhouse—though Stranger Things and The Umbrella Academy would neatly fit within it—so it has to aim broad to hit massive audiences. Everyone kind of likes Ryan Reynolds, and lots of people like reality TV (even if they don’t admit it), so we get more of those things.

Nothing against Ryan Reynolds and company, but this isn’t the path to deep, sustainable audience passion.

But the things that build devotees are the more narrow genre plays, which can evolve into more mainstream phenomena if given the room to breathe on their own. Traditionally, networks have been very bad about making these kinds of bets, in part because of the limited number of inputs. When you only have one number—ratings—to go on, it fails to appreciate the depth or the of the success. Which is why Arrested Development and Firefly lost out to American Idol on Fox, despite both of those shows having had the potential for significantly more durable fanbases, and Fox already having had evidence, in the form of animation, that durable fanbases targeted at genre were successful long-term strategies. (I should note that, as a counterpoint, Fox has basically leaned into the appointment-based viewing approach, exemplified by stuff such as The Masked Singer and the NFL, since most of its assets were acquired by Disney, which makes sense because it now makes most of its money from first-run programs.)

Netflix has far more inputs, but it seems to be falling into the same trap of letting its broadest plays win out over the audiences with the most potential for long-term passion.

My thought on this? Give the audience a stake in that passion. Example: I am a huge fan of absurdist comedy like I Think You Should Leave and Aunty Donna’s Big Ol’ House of Fun, which are probably my two favorite pieces of content Netflix has produced in the last five years. If I’m really into that kind of content, let me pay an extra dollar a month for Netflix is a Joke tier, which emphasizes that content on my front page, but also gives me early access to the next reboot of Mr. Show they do. (Hint, hint.)

More of this!

This tells Netflix that I am a consumer of this kind of content to the point where I will pay extra money to gain early access to it. This tells Netflix to invest more money in this type of work, because I’m passionate about it and want to see more of it. This gives Netflix an understanding of the depth of passion for their creative work, so that, even if those shows don’t get killer ratings, they know that people want to see more of it and are willing to invest in Netflix doing more of it.

This expands to other areas—say, anime, or fantasy shows, or other deep-genre bets. The thing is, Netflix kills excellent shows like Tuca & Bertie based on what its inputs tell it, and honestly, the inputs don’t account for the fact that the show has 50,000 superfans; it only really knows that it has 100,000 viewers. That probably isn’t enough on Netflix scale, but it would be if Netflix knew those 50,000 people were more likely to be deeply engaged than someone who watched those Ryan Reynolds films. Ultimately, it needs the 50,000 people who love everything Lisa Hanawalt does more than it needs the audience of people who will watch an Adam Sandler movie once, because those people will be more likely to follow Netflix around long-term.

Right now, the path that Netflix is on is that it aims broad because it needs the biggest audience possible, and its primary input for ROI is that people watched a show, not that they are going nuts for Tuca & Bertie online. (That show later became a hit for Adult Swim, a more narrow niche play by comparison, after Netflix shut it down—a massive missed opportunity, given that Hanawalt found her first major success on Netflix with BoJack Horseman.) This is the same problem MTV and VH1 faced in the early 2000s. They were unable to monetize the fact that the network created millions of music fanatics, at least to the degree its corporate parents wanted; eventually, the data points that told it it needed to build the largest possible audiences won out. 

That is why MTV is a Ridiculousness wasteland now, with its content basically decimated because ratings won out over audience passion.

Netflix is on the path to Ridiculousness-style content taking over in the long run if it doesn’t foster fandoms of its own. And the way to fandoms is to build additional value within the subgenres.

Convince them to pay an extra buck a month for more value, rather than just charging extra money just because you need to hit a financial goal. If the value is there, they will pay it.

And in a lot of ways, it’s because regulators and governmental bodies are doing their job—starting in Brazil.

Recently, Judge Vanderlei Caires Pinheiro, of the civil court of Goiânia, told the company that it had to pay a customer the equivalent of $1,000 for selling a device that did not include a charger, which the company stopped offering with its recent devices in part because of what it says are important environmental benefits.

Apple made the obvious argument about this strategy—you can use the one you already have! But given that the company, you know, put a USB-C port on the cable in the box, the guy couldn’t actually use the chargers he already had with that cable, which required him to buy a new charger, a practice the judge referred to as a “tie sale,” in which one device must be bought with another to be used.

"It is not appropriate that such a measure seeks to reduce environmental impacts, since, in all evidence, the defendant continues to manufacture such an essential accessory, but now sells it separately," wrote Pinheiro.

Now, to be clear, Pinheiro is probably not looking at the issue in the same way Apple is—approaching it as a lot of customers likely already have Lightning chargers that they use in other settings, because this is like their sixth or seventh iPhone, so they have a drawer full of power adapters. But Apple, by changing the cable at the same time it changed the charger, just made the problem unnecessarily annoying.

(Solen Feyissa/Unsplash)

So I guess the question is naturally raised—at what point are tech companies going to be able to start distributing phones without chargers and not be at risk of modest fines in small claims court in Brazil? I think the answer is standardization across the board. If Apple switches to USB-C as the rest of the industry already has, the problem goes away, simple as that.

And while it’s been hinted at for a good long time, it looks like we’re finally going to see some movement on that issue from the European Union. This week, members of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee agreed almost unanimously (43-2) to support a measure encouraging a requirement that all phones, along with other types of electronics such as laptops, use USB-C by default. The proposal has also been adapted to require stronger standards for wireless charging by 2026.

“The goal is to avoid a new fragmentation in the market, to continue to reduce environmental waste, ensure consumer convenience and avoid so-called ‘lock-in’ effects created by proprietary charging solutions,” a press release announcing the vote stated.

Apple has argued against rules like this from an innovation standpoint, and I guess to some degree there is a point there given the fact that the company has innovated on ports such as Firewire and Thunderbolt in the past. But at the same time, by not doing any real upgrades on Lightning, they’ve left themselves open to criticism, undercutting the points around doing things unlike the rest of the industry.

And the fact that the EU is looking to implement wireless charging standards as well as port standards implies that Apple’s long-rumored attempt to build a portless phone will also run into the same standardization issues it’s facing around Lightning.

Give it up Apple, you have a huge share of the smartphone market. You can use the same port as everyone else and stop facing regulatory heartache every couple of months.

But what I do know is that the FBI has a crack slang research team when it comes to the internet. Back in 2014, the agency received a Freedom of Information Act request from Muckrock, asking for “a copy of all records or documentation available to FBI agents or other FBI personnel or contractors which provides information on how to interpret or understand so-called ‘leetspeak.’”

This request, which sounds amusing on its face, nonetheless hit up pay dirt in the form of an 83-page document listing “Twitter shorthand,” and while the document looks like total trash—what appears to have been screenshotted from an FBI intranet, then printed out on a dot-matrix printer, than scanned back in, then printed again from a web browser—it is nonetheless hilarious that such a document exists. (Now it’s on the Internet Archive, a discovery resurfaced by Input.)

There are a lot of examples of internet slang in here, including some popular favorites such as “YOLO” (you only live once), “TIL” (today I learned), and “TLDR” (too long, didn’t read, also an accurate description of what most people will do with this document). But the strange thing is that it seems to be absolutely loaded to the gills with slang examples that are extremely obscure at best and uncommon at worst, as if they didn’t understand their target audience.

The list at least seems to have its tongue firmly in cheek about the mission of the document. “This list has about 2800 entries you should find useful in your work or for keeping up with your children or grandchildren,” the document states.

I can’t help but imagine the discussion that went into building this list, which lists decidedly non-slang terms like SQL (a popular database technology) in the same breath as BTDTGTTSAWIO (“been there, done that, got the t-shirt and wore it out,” a phrase that basically only gets used on the internet when this list resurfaces). But it’s worth remembering that this was someone’s job—the Directorate of Intelligence's Intelligence Research Support Unit, to be exact. And one presumes that the FBI didn’t know what, exactly, was going to become the next YOLO, so they cast a wide net, just in case an important piece of slang became their next important piece of intel.

Is this a decent FOIA request, or the world’s greatest FOIA request? I humbly submit that it might be the latter.

And that led me to an area I didn’t expect to see myself recently: Playing modern video games.

As I’ve noted multiple times in the past, I found myself generally turned off by the initial move to 3D gaming back in the late ’90s, an era that many people look fondly on. I didn’t. I don’t know what it was, but I liked the pixelated blocks a lot more. And I think Mario 64 was a huge turnoff for me on modern gaming in general. It took a series I loved and pushed it into an area I didn’t think it needed to go.

Given that, with the combination of me getting older and becoming more internet-obsessed, it game me an offramp on console gaming.

Now, I will admit I’ve had games I’ve turned to over the years that led be to generally break this no-modern-games rule. Shenmue, for the Dreamcast, was basically nerd heaven for me. Quake, which came out before Mario 64, remains a favorite. And there was a period in my 20s where, at a time I lived in South Carolina with nobody close to me living nearby besides my coworkers, I was obsessed with the retro-tinged Cave Story—to the point where, when I brought it up as an example of a great more-modern game, someone had to point out to me that it was more than 15 years old.

I like my video games like I like my alternative rock: Back in the ’80s and ’90s, where it belongs.

Well, until I didn’t. Recently, I decided to start playing more modern games again. I started with an install of the 2016 edition of Doom on Steam, and I’ve basically found myself obsessed. I’ve been slowly trying to get a grasp on more modern gaming—I had a brief flirtation with Stadia about a year ago, when I died about a thousand times in Celeste, but now I’ve moved to Steam, which I use for native games on both Linux and Windows, and Xbox Cloud Gaming, which comes in handy for times I want to play a game on an iPad.

I bought an Xbox controller recently. What the hell happened to me? Is a Steam Deck next?

I don’t tell you about my gaming habits to simply point out that I play video games. I tell you this because I think there’s a truism that a lot of people need to understand in this world of increased stress: We are going to be looking for new solutions to the constant problem of stress. Everything is on the table, and it may put you in a position where you disregard long-held beliefs as you look for some way, any way, to relax a little bit.

I don’t want to oversell this point, but in a way, I kind of do. Don’t be afraid of changing your mindset on things. It might just give you a new way to relax.

He’s a dangerous dude and would not operate it with the balanced perspective it needs to thrive. He would not look out for users. He’s too self-interested in the platform to respect what it represents.

That we’re even having this conversation is scary. I feel bad for the employees—and the users. They don’t deserve this drama.

During a presentation where he highlighted the power of American infrastructure, Obama suggested that everyone benefited from the roads and the maintenance that went into those roads with a simple phrase: “You didn’t build that.”

The full context of what he said is here, but the passage in which the “you didn’t build that” line appears is telling:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

At a time when lots of debates about digital freedom are running rampant, where extremely rich multibillionaire people are mocking the very things they once funded with their venture capital firms, I think a lot of people need to be reminded of the full context of the original quote from Obama.

Was it perfect? No. It was extremely easy for his political opponents to undercut by simply boiling the speech down to its snappiest term. But it is ultimately a correct point, and one we should apply to our discussions about freedom of speech online.

(Side note about the link I just dropped: The idea of Marc Andreessen, of all people, critiquing the “laptop class”—a class his venture capital money arguably helped to create and he most assuredly profits from—is so absurd as to elicit mockery of the kind unfairly given to Obama a decade ago. Unlike the former president, he actually tore down entire classes of people with a single comment.)

Last week, when I wrote about the discussion of open vs. closed networks over at Tedium, one thing I tried to make clear is that in both cases of both types of networks, people were involved in making the decisions that created the final result, that allowed others to communicate on these platforms.

The problem is that, there isn’t quite enough appreciation for the weight that needed to be carried to build those networks. (Though some do.) And on top of all that, a lot of people simply don’t appreciate enough those that build the space to give them room to express their views.

If someone expresses a point of view that is edgy or controversial, someone else had to carry the freight that allowed you to make that point of view heard. That space—and the room to make it yours—wasn’t just handed to you. You needed the freedom, the context, the room in life to feel comfortable to make that space. And too often, not everyone feels that room in the way they should.

To paraphrase the former president in a way that contextually captures what he was actually trying to say: You didn’t create that by yourself.

The TV-reviewing machine that is Vulture certainly thinks so—it gave the first two episodes four stars, and the next six five stars, and the level of fawning over this series is well-deserved. (Its season finale premieres tomorrow, and yes, the show is getting a second season.)

Who knows if the show will hold up beyond that? (I mean, just consider the NBC show Heroes, which lots of people liked … until the second season.) But by playing with the constant tension of work-life balance, turning it into almost a source of terror, it makes for both a well-timed show and an extremely nerve-wracking one. For everyone nervous about going back into an office during the pandemic fadeout of 2022, Severance captures your nerves about the endeavor.

Severance, with the workplace comedy veteran Adam Scott at its center, is a reminder that workplace culture used to be a lot more “cult” like. A good example of what I mean is IBM, which Thomas Watson, Sr. created in his image. 

That often led to requirements to always wear dark three-piece suits, for example, but it also required rules that would now be seen as bizarre around alcohol consumption (you could never drink it, even while you weren’t at work), as well as a very stark “THINK” slogan that the company used.

Digging in a little bit further, the examples always threatened to get a little bit weirder. One of the weirdest, highlighted by Ars Technica in 2014, was a songbook titled Songs of the IBM, built at the behest of Thomas Watson Sr. starting in the late 1920s.

Severance plays into this style effectively, maybe not building a songbook (it prefers corporate-curated record collections), but by creating a culture where the cult-like nature of the leadership feels like it permeates everything, even though the employees don’t fully understand it. It’s tense, it’s disorienting, and it feels like it crosses a deep ethical line.

Another Apple TV+ show, one that is significantly lower in quality than the basically perfect Severance, nonetheless does an effective job of showing this same issue, even though its culture is nothing like IBM’s or Lumon Industries’ punishing corporate cultures.

WeCrashed, based on the story of WeWork, is in part a tale based on how Adam Neumann (a Wiseaulike Jared Leto) convinced a company to keep growing even when the evidence was strong that it was likely to fall apart, and fast.

Like Severance, the corporate culture is overwhelming. Everyone there was wearing jeans and T-shirts, but the cult was just as strong as IBM’s dark-suits setup—as highlighted the the comical way that Neumann and his wife Rebekah (gamely played by Anne Hathaway), stroll through the office to the sound of of Katy Perry’s “Roar” in the first episode. Later episodes highlight how some of Rebekah’s more controversial views contrast in light of rank-and-file employees, Adam’s push for employees to play up their engagement levels for an important investor, as well as WeWork’s later out-of-nowhere requirement that the company only serve vegetarian food.

I admit that, as someone who has worked in his share of WeWorks, the cultural play-up is a bit strong in the show, but maybe I never got the full experience!

It’s ironic that, right now, the two shows that have the most to say about crushing corporate culture are distributed by a company that is famous for its own very strong corporate culture. (Maybe they’re trying to tell us something?)

But a recent lawsuit shows that, when given the opportunity, people will complain about anything in the hopes of getting $5 coupons four years from now.

A Florida lawyer has filed a federal lawsuit, seeking class action status, claiming that Burger King’s Whopper patties are too small, around an estimated 35 percent smaller than what gets shown in the ads.

“Burger King advertises its burgers as large burgers compared to competitors and containing oversized meat patties and ingredients that overflow over the bun to make it appear that the burgers are approximately 35 percent larger in size and contain more than double the meat than the actual burger,” the lawsuit, first reported on by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, claims.

As I wrote about back in February, lawsuits like these are extremely common, often in the context of labeling and naming conventions—one noteworthy example I pointed out was that of MorningStar Farms’ veggie burgers, which faced a legal knock because they were primarily made of wheat. (That suit was quickly thrown out.)

A recent Burger King ad. Would Burger King get sued for portraying this plant as looking like a piece of steak?

But the claims about Burger King’s beef patties come at a time when the company has been taking increasingly bold approaches to how it advertises itself. In one 2020 ad, the company literally showed a burger getting covered in mold to highlight the fact that it wasn’t loaded with preservatives. And more recently, to help highlight its veggie burgers, it developed a series of close-up ads of vegetables that were cropped very tightly so as to look like meat products. Nobody is claiming that Burger King is selling moldy burgers or giving people plants instead of actual beef when requested.

Anyway, far be it from me to criticize the legal actions of a lawyer from Florida, but most class action lawsuits of this nature add up to “who really cares, honestly.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t a potential opportunity to help improve things for customers, but I think there’s probably a degree here of hunting for the next excuse to file a class action lawsuit against a company with the money to pay for it, and score some sort of settlement that helps drum up extra money for said law firm.

This case is very comparable to the class-action lawsuit from more than half a decade ago, when, after people on social media complained, Subway was sued because its footlongs were not consistently 12 inches long. Subway settled, but only for a tiny amount that mostly went to lawyers, and only because of the “media frenzy” the issue created—not because the case was particularly strong.

Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, who presided over a portion of the Subway case that involved legal fees, said something that I think applies to every single lawsuit involving perceived size in fast food. It’s a game that nobody really wins.

“A class action that seeks only worthless benefits for the class and yields only fees for class counsel is no better than a racket and should be dismissed out of hand,” she wrote. “That’s an apt description of this case.”

Remember: If Burger King slightly increases the size of its burgers or stops advertising them with such big patties, it doesn’t do anything for anyone except the lawyers who brought the case. And even then, the judge might still reject paying for the legal fees.

Dorsey, unprompted, tweeted out a comment implying he was “partially to blame” for what happened to social media and the internet’s many walled gardens, pointing out the fact that many earlier technologies covered many of social media’s use cases, including Usenet and IRC.

“Centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet,” he wrote.

Dorsey, personally, earned his fame and some of his fortune from social media—though in the end, he has earned significantly more of his fortune than his fame from his creation of Square and its parent company, Block. So maybe given that and the rocky road he took to the leadership helm of Twitter, and all the problems the social network has, has him thinking differently about the culture-defining social network he built?

Now, granted, Dorsey’s regret comes at a strange time for digital culture. For one thing, it seems like it could be an extension of some of his prior commentary on the state of Web 3. But it also kind of feels like it could be a useful starting point for some web decentralization efforts that people in the know have been pushing for constantly.

After all, some of the worst things that Twitter did—for one, scaling back its developer ecosystem in a way that prevented developers from making most types of apps—didn’t happen under Dorsey’s watch. Dorsey, of course, has the money to throw around to help encourage shifts in internet culture, and he’s already made it clear that he isn’t interested in Web3-style solutions.

But Web 2.0-style solutions don’t feel so great these days, either. Whether the root cause was centralization or a failure to build something that benefited others beyond ”I’ve got mine,” Web 2.0 has left a lot of sour tastes in technologists’ mouths.

Dorsey is one of the digital media gurus that people still listen to, in part because his innovations seem to have been built on the backs of innovative ideas moreso than venture capital alone. Dorsey speaking out against VC hubris has been refreshing; Dorsey putting his stock and financial support into open-internet solutions such as better email or federated solutions such as Mastodon? Now, that would be game-changing.

The truth of the matter is, the problems that folks have been trying to solve online—ways to raise conversations, ways to distribute information, ways to get paid, ways to move beyond centralized everything just to scrape together a livelihood—could use a voice like Jack’s in the conversation, even if it’s as a distant external broker, working behind the scenes to solve the problem he regrets helping to create.

Technologists have reason to be skeptical. Hell, skepticism is the name of the game when it comes to being a technologist. But if Dorsey is willing to help out, his voice would be a welcome one.

That option? The phrase “Automatically detect Markdown.” See, over the years, I’ve been a pretty heavy user of Markdown, as I think I’ve made pretty clear in prior writing.

But when I edit, I almost always have to work within Google’s parameters, because I am one person, and I am not going to convince all my coworkers to change to Markdown for my sake.

For me, this has meant years of:

• Copying and pasting as rich text
• Reformatting the rich text to match the style of the Google Doc
• Fixing the spacing

But now, Google has figured out that, hey, it’s adding a ton of extra work for a significant subclass of its users, and it will now support Markdown conversion in Google Docs, a feather in John Gruber’s cap. This is a small feature, comical that it took so long, but at the same time, it’s welcome all the same.

Is it the whole feature set? No way. You’re not getting footnotes. You’re not getting tables. (But honestly, who uses Markdown tables, anyway?) It’s not the full spec; it’s the subset that everyone relies on—headers, bold, italics, and links.

However, Google is slow-rolling this feature out to its users, sometime over the next couple of weeks or longer. So it might be a while before I get this life-altering feature. (To anyone at Google reading this: Pick me! Pick me!)

Why did it take so long? I’m just imagining some product manager somewhere in Google who has been dead-set against the idea of adding native Markdown import support, despite the fact that the best Markdown export plugin for Google Docs, Docs to Markdown, is maintained by a former Google employee who largely built it while he was working at Google, and probably every programmer at Google is exposed to Markdown within the daily course of their work (given that it’s become the de facto default format for Readme-style docs).

Nonetheless, it probably looked like a simple equation to the product manager: A small portion of our customers are using this compared to our hundreds of millions of users that use Google Apps, despite the fact that the group of users is small and passionate.

But the challenge for them is, every other app that could conceivably be considered a competitor to Docs had a decent Markdown play. Dropbox Paper and Notion support it natively, as does every other writing application you can think of; even Microsoft Word supports it through a $30 plugin. 

The fact that you had to convert your document to rich text before putting it into Docs created additional, and unnecessary, room for error—which seems to go against the reason for Google Docs existing.

So that Docs has markdown is sort of a sign to me that the format has gained a certain level of necessity among mainstream users.

It’s sort of like when Burger King first started selling veggie burgers back in 2002 or so; it’s not like any vegetarian is going to go out of their way to get a veggie burger from a place that famously flame-broils their beef, but if you find yourself in that restaurant and you need an option, it’s there for you.

Google Docs is not a Markdown-first app, and never will be, but for the Marketarians of the world, it just made their life easier.

A decade ago, most laptops came with metal hard drives that would break down over time if you just looked at them funny. And when solid-state drives (SSDs) first saw use in mainstream computers—the first one I can remember was the first generation of the MacBook Air in 2008—it was an extreme upgrade option that added a thousand dollars to the price of the machine. (It was the monitor stand of the Steve Jobs era.)

Now, nearly all modern computers come with SSDs that are at least twice as fast as the ones previously used in computers a few years prior. Often, much faster. The SSD in the machine I’m typing on now easily passes the 2,000-megabyte mark in reads, which was an unheard-of number before, say, 2016. And on top of that, the drive is no bigger than a stick of gum.

This is great for consumers—it makes our devices run faster (especially for things like games, 3D rendering, and video editing) while shrinking the size of the device.

A Samsung NVMe SSD, which relies on the PCIe 3.0 standard. (Ilya Plekhanov/Wikimedia Commons)

But there’s a problem. The technology keeps getting faster, but there are signs of a major bottleneck that could prevent modern SSDs, using NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) technology, from reaching their full potential without a whole new setup to calm down the heat.

In a recent interview with MSI, Phison Chief Technology Officer Sebastien Jean put out, effectively, a warning that SSD technology was about to reach the limits of what’s possible with the ports we currently use. Per Phison Blog:

As the speed continues to go up with each new generation, our challenge will continue to be to manage the heat. But if you look at the bigger question of where PCs are going, there’s an understanding in the client space that M.2 PCIe Gen5 is sort of hitting the limit of where it can go and the actual interface or the connector will become a bottleneck for future speeds. So new connectors are being developed, and they’ll be available in the next few years, which greatly increase both the signal integrity and the heat dissipation capability of the SSD through conduction to the motherboard.

As TechSpot explains, this could mean that you need to have a fan for yet another component in your gaming rig.

So this doesn’t sound great—not only are we losing the easy compatibility we’ve gained with recent generations of SSDs, but the ones we’re about to get in high-end computers are likely to run so hot they need a cooling supply.

The ineo M.2 2280 SSD Rocket Heatsink, an example of active cooling for an NVMe SSD. (via Amazon)

This is not great news, as it comes at a time when SSD storage is actually getting a more prominent role within the PC: Microsoft recently released something called the DirectStorage API, which is anticipated to bring about the ability to cache storage directly on graphics cards, without the CPU playing intermediary—which, for gamers means that game speeds are about to improve.

But I’d like to point out that it was just a few years ago that storage devices were not only big and loud, but they were slow. For most people, NVMe devices based on the PCIe 3 standard is already basically screaming, and PCIe 4-based NVMe storage (which the latest video game consoles use) is only now trickling out to the public.

I get that standards bodies have to keep improving, but the improvements have been so dramatic that it changes the experience overnight. We’re literally talking about, in a single generation, going from video game consoles that sported spinning hard drives with 100 MBps read speeds, to consoles that rely on PCIe NVMe drives that count read speeds in the gigabytes. That’s a massive leap in speed in just seven years, one that has basically redefined that the PS5 and the Xbox Series X can do, and then some.

I’m not necessarily saying, “stop innovating,” but I do think there’s a realistic case to be made that if more active cooling is required on top of what are already fan-packed enthusiast systems, it might be time to take a step back and slow-roll the SSD rollout—or at least, as consumers, hold off on the next generation until they figure it out.

It reminds me, in a way, of the push for resolutions beyond 4K. It’s not that a higher resolution wouldn’t be nice, but there’s a definite risk of diminishing returns at this point, and we really need a new generation of technology to show the path forward.

For now, everyone should embrace the fact that their laptop from work flies thanks to the innovations in SSDs we’ve seen over the last decade.

Instead, I want to discuss something a little less minefield-y: The sudden interest in the phenomenon of turning MacBooks into decapitated computer slabs, which is not new, though the interest is. A few weeks ago, a tweet by a well-known Apple leaker named DuanRui went viral, claiming that this was a growing trend among users.

I couldn’t help but register my confusion about the whole thing—as listings about headless MacBooks have somewhat infamously appeared on eBay for years prior to this moment, generally to mockery, with nobody making a big deal about it until this time.

Part of my skepticism came as a result of the fact that the example used basically showed off a particularly unloved variant of the MacBook Pro—a 15-inch Touch Bar device with a butterfly keyboard, which basically had none of the benefits one would presumably want from a setup like this. (For one thing, the device gets hot; for another, the keyboard’s thinness makes it kind of a bad choice for a keyboard you’re stuck using for everything. For a third, no escape key!)

But perhaps DuanRui’s tweet drew the attention of the right people, because it’s becoming a hot new trend. The Verge posted an example of a decapitated MacBook Air M1 over the weekend, calling it a “slabtop.” Others have suggested it’s more versatile than many other desktop models.

In one sense, I get it; it seems like a better use of a computer that would otherwise go in the garbage to ensure its screen is still working, and some are actually doing so intentionally. But I would argue that, rather than being something you should do yourself, this may actually be a sign that Apple is missing market opportunities by holding so steadfast to the basic design of the MacBook Pro.

What I mean by that, effectively, is the fact that Apple’s decision to ignore outside markets to see what’s happening in the PC industry could be hurting it. Certainly, I’m not claiming anyone is making out-of-the box headless laptops in 2022 (besides the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which sells one). However, they are making two-in-ones, which technically allow the screen to be hidden away in settings like this (though I would have to imagine they are not particularly designed for this use case, given that the monitor would be directly on the desk if used that way).

What we have here is the market building desire line opportunities for Apple, where people are showing unexpected interest in a product Apple does not sell, and rather than waiting for Apple to do so, forging the path themselves.

However, one has to say that if Apple ever does make a headless Mac with a keyboard baked in—call it the Macintosh Amiga—it would sure be nice if they did so with some thought as to the keyboard. While some people dig the thin style, it is not an ideal format for typing at a desk for hours on end, despite the company’s long-term sale of chiclet-style thin keyboards. (Apple made some good rubber dome keyboards back in the day!)

If Apple needs any ideas, there’s a guy on YouTube named CJ that has effectively made a proof of concept for keyboard-PC combo. Over at the YouTube channel Elevated Systems, CJ took the board from the Framework Laptop, which can be reused outside of the laptop shell, and combined it with a mechanical keyboard, which could make a pretty solid long-term use case for that machine once it does eventually need an upgrade.

So I find the MacBook-minus-screen trend weird, but I do think it’s pointing in the direction of something Apple should be doing.

If that hype holds up is an open question.

Nothing, if you’re not familiar, is the company launched by an original co-founder of OnePlus (before they started making questionable decisions after he left) in an effort to shake up the smartphone industry … again. So far, we don’t know what that shakeup is going to look like in the long run, but it kind of feels like a strange mixture of retro and ultra futuristic. Certainly feels like a better direction than whatever OnePlus is doing right now, that’s for sure.

But this post isn’t really about Nothing … yes, of course it’s about something, but it’s not about Pei’s unusual company. Rather, it’s arguably about whatever the opposite of the Phone 1 is going to be.

This hamburger phone is selling for $50 on Etsy.

As The New York Times published this week, landline phones are seeing a hype comeback among collectors, with a particular lean on unusual phones that have strong novelty shapes to them. (Think the hamburger phone from Juno.)

It comes at a time when landlines have basically reached an uptake nadir. For example, I haven’t owned a landline since college, when one was located in my dorm room. And the numbers are falling significantly—in an 18 year period, from 2003 to 2021, landline usage fell from more than 90 percent to just above 30 percent, per survey data from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention. Now we do this all with cell phones.

However, the visual appeal of old landlines is strong—telephones with novelty shapes and novelty colors have made a comeback among collectors, even if the landlines themselves have not. (Instead, many use bluetooth adapters to bridge the gap between modern phone and vintage device.)

And honestly, you know what? It makes sense. There was a time when novelty phones could make or break your advertising campaign. Sort of the famous one is the sneaker phone, a gadget that Sports Illustrated offered as a perk for those who subscribed to the magazine.

As The Retroist pointed out, it came at a time when the phone was particularly boring—touch tone was no longer new, Caller ID wasn’t yet on the horizon, and we were a long way from smartphones. It was a genuinely creative phone at a time when phones were not seen as particularly innovative.

But so many of the elements that made for creative or attractive phones in the 1980s simply don’t exist today. Our phones are designed to be stared at for hours, not held for minutes and intended to sit somewhere and look interesting. We simply have not had a lot of room for novelty with smartphones because, as time has gone on, we’ve required more from them, and they’ve been required to work in more settings.

So, I guess, thinking back to the Nothing Phone 1, all signs are that the device is going to probably be the most experimental “candy bar” smartphone in quite some time, by a brand that’s looking to stand out. But is it going to be as out there as a hamburger or sneaker phone?

Unless Carl Pei’s mood board is looking particularly strange these days, probably not.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to account for the passing of Steve Wilhite.

A long time ago, back in my ShortFormBlog days, I posted a quote from the creator of the GIF, Steve Wilhite, who said that the abbreviation for Graphics Interchange Format was intended to be pronounced with a soft ‘G’.

He said it in a way that implied he was the “decider” of this status: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

(Important side note: Wilhite died just last week; here’s an obituary from our pal Randy Cassingham of This is True.)

Something interesting happened after I posted the item, which got nearly 5,000 notes in its initial run—essentially, everyone who pronounced the word using the hard ‘G’ on Tumblr, a platform famous for GIFs, essentially revolted against this knowledge.

One sample comment read like this: “There’s also the fact that the acronym stands for ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ and it is illogical for it to have a soft G when the word it stands for has a hard G. Just because you create something doesn’t mean you get to rewrite the rules of the English language for your own acronym.”

As 2013 Tumblr goes this was basically a whole generation of people happily using this man’s creation turning on its creator because they referred to the tool in a way that he did not expect. (I’m pro ‘jif’, FWIW.)

And this comparison point came to mind yesterday when Steven Pemberton, a researcher who took a significant role in the design of Cascading Style Sheets (along with HTML and XHTML) as the chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group. Pemberton explained, via a single tweet, that the !important tag, a line of CSS that effectively overrides any other entries for a given style distinction on a website, was included essentially for no other reason but to match U.S. law:

Pemberton, while not as harsh about it as Wilhite, struck a somewhat similar stance: “Anything else is probably misuse, and a sign you may not understand the cascade properly.”

This is obviously fascinating if you regularly use CSS. It’s worth noting that in late 1996, probably a single CSS file was being used on a given webpage (and even then, probably not to the degree it could be, because of the infamously standards-averse approaches taken by popular browser-makers of the era), and that file was created by the user. But now, we have whole messes of people who are essentially adding code five steps removed from the original template, who basically have to rely on the !important tag either because they don’t have easy access to the original CSS code, or because it would be a lot of work to fix the spaghetti-style mess of the cascade.

The reaction to Pemberton’s point has been surprisingly similar to Wilhite’s, with some suggesting that he might have been better off giving the tag a scarier name to discourage its use on a regular basis. But having done a little bit of research, I get the impression that, while this might have been the original goal of the tag, the final result as implied in the early docs for CSS basically matches what we got in the end.

It’s funny, though, because when asked about browser-makers’ loosey goosey approach to HTML-based standards at the turn of the 21st century, Pemberton said this: “My hope is browser makers don't say, ‘Sorry, we've already built products around these mistakes, we don't want to change it now.’”

Turns out, he needed to be worried about the people actually coding the pages, rather than the browsers.

We all have our paths, and the way that we get to where we think we’re going. And looking for parallels can be a bit nerve-wracking even in the best of times.

But I can’t help but see my own experiences in the light of what happened to Virginian-Pilot reporter Sierra Jenkins. Early Saturday morning, Jenkins, who had just turned 25 years old and had worked at the Pilot and its sister paper, the Daily Press, for just over a year, was shot and killed, as a bystander caught in the crossfire of a shooting that took place in the middle of downtown Norfolk.

This shooting, one of many that took place in the metro area over the weekend, was just one mess of many this past weekend that authorities and families have to clean up, senseless loss with no fairness in sight. Jenkins, who was supposed to cover a breaking-news shift on Saturday, couldn’t be reached when an editor called to ask her to cover the shooting that took her life.

This one hit home for me, to put it lightly. When I was 25 years old, I worked at the Pilot, at its free-newspaper subsidiary, Link. The Pilot building has been sold and is currently being converted into apartments, but at the time I was there, the building was within walking distance of downtown, just a few blocks away from the spot where that fateful shooting took place. At the time, my friends and coworkers would often end a night at the office at a downtown bar, or in nearby Ghent, and think nothing of it. I think most people do.

It takes just one person with a chip on his or her shoulder, or a willingness to get reckless, to threaten to ruin the night of everyone around—no matter any of the things that the people around them have done or the moments of greatness they’ve achieved.

Jenkins was by all accounts an amazing journalist, and one that the Pilot relied on, who had a lot of passion for their beat, and who was likely at the start of a memorable career. But instead, we’re all left asking why.

(The local area has been asking the same question for some time: Pharrell Williams, probably the most famous celebrity to come out of nearby Virginia Beach in the last half-century, cancelled a successful musical festival he created because he felt that the city’s leadership was not doing enough in response to gun violence, including an officer-involved shooting that killed his own cousin. Something in the Water, which showed all the signs of becoming a big-deal annual event, may never return.)

And it’s weird. The night that this happened, I had a good Pilot-related memory land on my doorstep—I took ownership of a Link newspaper box that my friends and I had somehow managed to keep after all these years, a reminder of the greatness that once was. (Finally, a place to put all my old copies.) A close friend of mine got a new speaker system. So now it’s my turn to keep this thing.

I’m still trying to figure out where, exactly, it goes in my home. But I will say that, thanks to factors of timing and chance, this box and this tragedy are now intertwined in my brain—a reminder of the fact that I was once 25 and I had this great opportunity with this great paper, and how quickly being in the wrong place at the wrong time could have changed all that. (And how wrong it is that wrong place/wrong time is even a factor in things like this happening!) It’s so easy to take for granted the opportunities we are given—and the things that could happen to take them away.

Sierra Jenkins, know that people are out there reporting for the truth—just like you were. We’ll carry your torch.

In some ways, it’s great that Substack has made so much of this process easy for so many people. In others, I’ve had so much experience working outside a closed system, to my own beat, that I think it’d almost be giving in to embrace it at this point.

There is ultimately a point at which criticism becomes less about what you’re criticizing and more about why you’re criticizing it.

And I think when it comes down to it, my concern is the open internet. With the newsletter trend, we got so close to something that could be driven by a platform-free approach, that in its purest form could work without any influence from Google or Amazon or Apple or Facebook (never Meta) or Microsoft.

(Of course, if you take the layers off, it looks a bit less pure: Amazon Web Services manages a lot of email that goes through email services run by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, on ecosystems fostered by those three companies. Facebook just heavily competes with it, runs an also-ran newsletter platform of its own, and is where we run the groups where we talk about newsletters.)

It’s with that in mind that I worry about how close we got to the edge of having one small piece of the open internet as creators, and I genuinely see Substack making moves to expand beyond its network of newsletters as really endangering what has been built so far. It introduces the potential that newsletter authors might have to give up significant chunks of their revenue to Apple and Google just because the venue has changed.

(Robert Anasch/Unsplash)

But I do want to be careful to highlight that what Substack has actually created is really impressive. In five years, the company has basically helped to reinvent digital publishing as something that is creator-driven for the first time in a while, and they did so while putting the business model first.

It’s at this point that I mention Nathan Baschez’s great piece on the ideological evolution of Substack—something he knows well, because he was one of the company’s first employees, and ended up later starting another publishing company, called Every. (I should note that I knew Nathan before he worked for Substack and it’s been great watching his career evolve. Also, like me, he’s a Michigan State grad.) As he noted in one part of the piece, the very thing I didn’t like about Substack at first—the lack of customization—was a feature, rather than a bug, intended to make the platform friendly to subscriptions:

The first thing they’ve done is make sure as many readers as possible are aware that they’re using Substack. When your login information and credit card is stored, and the sites all look pretty similar and function the same way, it reduces the friction of signing up and paying for new newsletters. This is why from the beginning it’s been so important to Substack to limit the level of customization possible within their CMS.

This might seem pretty small and trivial of a thing to base a network effect on, but it might work. Substack has said readers are 2.5x more likely to become a paying subscriber to one Substack newsletter if they’re already a paying subscriber to another. I’m sure most of this is attributable to the fact that these readers are the type of people to buy paid newsletter subscriptions at all (regardless if on Substack or elsewhere) but I’m sure it also helps a bit that their credit card info is in there and they know and trust the system.

This is a key distinction, even if I, personally don’t love the idea of losing customization, as a creator.

The thing I keep thinking about, and something I discussed on Twitter the other night, is the fact that the ecosystem effects of something like Substack haven’t actually been properly tested on the open internet. And what I mean by that is that the pre-subscription model for online writing—blogging, as we called it—was driven harshly by advertising (and bad advertising that didn’t respect creators or audiences), and not by an ecosystem of services that offer a helping hand in becoming a full-time publisher, which I think is secretly Substack’s value add, more than any app or platform.

All of this is to say that my disagreement about where they’re at and what they’ve become is not because I want to hate on the big player. It’s a difference of opinion, and I hope to see other publishing tools take another path, one focused on services and building out a broader ecosystem of services that makes it easier for writers to actually focus on the creative elements of their work.

So to clear the air—I don’t just want to be the guy who hates on Substack all the time. I do want to see what a non-platform version of their model might look like, because it might be surprising how well it works.

A chumbox-free open internet would be great for publishers.

But nonetheless, the fact that it happened is still deeply disappointing, because of what it says about YouTube, a platform that a whole lot of people use for a whole lot of reasons.

To be fair, YouTube Vanced added a lot of features, for free, that YouTube generally charges for, including the aforementioned advertising feature. But it also added features that users actually wanted—for example, a deep-black mode that users with AMOLED phones generally liked, along with the ability to revive dislikes from the application.

But even with those additions, creators really struggled with YouTube Vanced. When Linus Tech Tips founder Linus Sebastian discussed methods to bring back the dislike button last year, he primarily focused on solutions that worked through the web interface, before pointing out that YouTube Vanced could probably do it … even if, in this particular case, the app that could “hurt my livelihood as well as those of my employees and my fellow creators” was an “unlikely ally” on this one specific issue.

“It doesn’t help anyone that wants to use a mobile app for YouTube, unless this is the straw that finally breaks my back and makes me install YouTube Vanced,” he said. “Yeah, I went there.”

(YouTube Vanced recently added the feature to its app. Maybe that was the last straw?)

I think that the fact that Linus even has to broach the idea of using an app like this that actively goes out of its way to remove advertising and make premium features free (while also directly threatening his business model) points at a real issue for people who use mobile apps—often, the apps are defined by the companies that distribute them, whereas on the web, end users have much more flexibility to shape the experience for themselves.

That may seem like a small thing, but in many ways, it reflects a problem that mobile platforms perhaps haven’t done enough to resolve, and one that is reflected in phenomena such as jailbreaking. It’s not that the default app is bad, necessarily … but more that the default app is just the default app. Some users want customization, and the only way for them to get it, in many cases, is by running sketchy apps like YouTube Vanced.

Then again, you may not get a choice: I am actually a subscriber to YouTube’s premium service, but because I couldn’t get Google Play Services to run on my JingPad, YouTube Vanced was my only good option for getting a native YouTube app for this unusual tablet, which supported Android but was primarily a Linux device.

(And how did Apple get people to stop jailbreaking their phones so often? Easy—it started integrating features that made users jailbreak their phones, like mobile hotspots and alternate keyboards.)

The truth is that the customization gets uncomfortably close to the elements that often feel like piracy, and companies like Google could avoid those problems if they gave their users an experience that was more flexible … and yes, that goes beyond Android 12’s theming.

If Google wants to avoid headaches like YouTube Vanced, it needs to make YouTube’s app as customizable under the hood as Android itself is. Otherwise, the next YouTube Vanced is coming soon.

These complexities have helped to stress-test our broader global culture. It’s been eye-opening, in a way, to see how quickly companies have shifted their models and their messaging because of the conflict—whether it’s Starbucks or McDonald’s shuttering stores or DuckDuckGo welcoming outcry from conservatives by admitting it’s going to downrank propaganda on its search engine. (One particular example worth keeping an eye on: The Ukraine-based MacPaw, the makers of the popular Mac-based tools SetApp and CleanMyMac, has taken a very public stance on the conflict, to the point where it recently dropped an ad-blocking service from its SetApp offering because it believed the app tunneled traffic through Russian servers.)

I understand why these sanctions exist, but I hope they end soon—as Russian leadership comes to its senses. But at the same time, I worry about Russian culture being hit with the same broad brush as the Russian economy. To me, seeing concerts based around the works of Russian composers cancelled because of this conflict is counterproductive—especially, as in the case of Tchaikovsky, they’ve long been dead. (The joke I made upon hearing this, as dark as it sounds, is whether we’re going to see boycotts of Tetris, despite the fact that Alexey Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years.)

It’s in this light that I find myself in a position where I’m helping a friend, based in Russia amid this strange conflict, keep his website online.

The technology outlet 30pin, started by Russian journalist Yuri Litvinenko.

Yuri Litvinenko, a writer and journalist who has worked in multiple languages for a few years, is one person, of many, who was caught in the middle of all this mess—and he would be quick to tell you that he has it easy right now. Over the years, I’ve worked with him closely, and his track record as a journalist is strong—he does good work in a challenging field.

But, beyond his day job, he’s also someone who has fostered a love of vintage technology with his work. I stumbled upon his writing one day, and was wowed; soon after, he became a regular contributor to Tedium. Eventually, he started a site of his own, called 30pin, to publish his own reported pieces on vintage technology. (I syndicated a piece of his in January, on rubbery materials on vintage gadgets.)

Because of the sanctions, he had a problem. He would no longer be able to maintain his site, because (beyond the obvious challenges of the moment) he literally had no way to pay for his hosting and domain ownership, because the major payment processors cut off access to the global financial system. This bothered me, because as someone who helped Yuri write some of his earliest pieces for an English-language audience, I saw him having to give up work he was passionate about because of something he didn’t cause.

When it comes down to it, Yuri’s website does not deserve to go down. Those are his words and his ideas, and his perspective is his own. And ultimately, I made the choice to help a friend and fellow traveler in the self-publishing game. Last week, I took temporary ownership of 30pin’s hosting and domains. My hope is that I do not have to do so for very long, that I can give them back to him sooner rather than later, so he can restart this thing he clearly put a lot of work into and only had to give up because his country’s leader decided to attack another country, unprovoked.

This is a difficult time; these are difficult circumstances. I’m not going to say this gesture is world-changing. It’s, by definition, an exchange between two friends. When it comes down to it, a lot of people are getting caught in the middle of this conflict, on both sides.

In this strange moment, let’s not forget to stay human.

Sure, there were a lot of things about Substack that looked good at the outset—the fact that they effectively gave the platform away for free was a vast improvement over the model of charging money after you reached a certain subscriber size—but every new publisher that joined the platform, especially the big names, made Substack just a little bit stronger.

(Which is why, at some point, the big names started to get paid advances.)

Now, more than four years since Substack launched, the firm decided to do something small that, symbolically, represents something big: It released an app.

The app itself seems like a small gesture, whatever, every other company has an app, too, right? But when you load the app, it does something that makes you immediately questions its motives—it discourages readers from continuing to get messages in their email, instead relying on the app to read those messages. (Edit: They appear to have changed this opt-in to an opt-out. Perhaps because of backlash exemplified by pieces like this one?)

Let’s be clear: The issue here is not with where people access your content; if someone wants to read your newsletter in an RSS feed or a newsletter reader app, let them. No, the problem here is that Substack is finally starting to put up gates on the walled garden it created around the open platform, and for any publishers that rely on Substack, that is not the place that they want to be.

In an interview with Casey Newton’s Platformer, Substack CEO Chris Best attempted to take steps to clarify the company’s stance on email, which sort of feels like a way of justifying why an app like this needs to exist.

“Email is great for all of the reasons it has always been great,” Best told Newton. “It’s low friction. It’s this direct connection where you can reach out, unmediated by the algorithm. But it’s obviously not the best version of that reading experience.”

But here’s the thing: When you reach a certain size or scale, as Substack arguably has, any attempt to push away from the original medium needs to be seen as an attempt to harm competitors, which in this case would be anyone else that distributes a newsletter on a platform that is not Substack. In some ways, this is sort of like Apple building in a tiny new feature that destroys someone else’s entire business model. Sure, it’s about improving the reading experience, but let’s be straight here: It’s really about closing off anyone else that didn’t buy into Substack’s specific vision of email newsletters.

And this doesn’t even get into the problems this potentially creates for newsletter authors. Leaving Substack is something that should be seamless. (Often, it’s not.) But by building an app that actively encourages people to stop receiving your messages over email, they’ve added seams, and as soon as they leave the platform, it adds friction that wasn’t there before. They’ve bolstered their position with this app, at the cost of the open internet. In my mind, that’s just as bad as putting some controversial voices on the platform that many people find problematic.

Substack tried to justify this in its blog post announcing the app, writing this:

It is clear to us that these problems can’t be solved with a tweak to an algorithm or a just-so regulation. Instead, the entire system needs to change. With Substack, we have set out to build an alternative media ecosystem based on different laws of physics, where writers are rewarded with direct payments from readers, and where readers have total control over what they read. In this world, writers are rewarded for serving readers well, and Substack gets rewarded for serving writers well. The power is tipped in favor of the people, not the platform.

But if you ask me, the “alternative media ecosystem” I want to see is one where the platform doesn’t matter at all to the reader, where it’s just there to help the creator, not shape the final result. We have email and RSS already; we don’t need an intermediary. 

If Substack wants to prove this point wrong and live up to the claim that this is just an easier way to read content, it has to open up that platform to everyone else with an email newsletter. If it doesn’t do that, all such justifications are hollow, and this is really a play to create platform exclusivity. It is not in the spirit of the email newsletter turn email newsletters into Medium.

I should note that in the case of this newsletter, I intentionally chose to put it on a platform so I would be better prepared to critique the market. So that you’re reading this on someone else’s land is a feature, not a bug. I’ve had a good relationship with Revue over the past year; even though they’re owned by Twitter, they operate independently, and seem to have taken steps to help their writers out. But if they pulled something like this, I would be gone in a second—and happy to self-publish these thoughts elsewhere.

Email should stay open. Building an app play halfway through isn’t in that spirit—no matter the justification.

Update: Substack appears to have turned off the feature that defaults to disabling emails, perhaps as a result of community backlash. This piece is updated to reflect that.

As a big fan of indie rock, I of course must weigh in. Epic Games buying Bandcamp makes no sense on paper; it feels like ammo in a war for ethical clout that none of the artists on that service signed up for.

But at the same time, I can’t help but think of the fact that Bandcamp totally reflects the shareware roots of Epic Games.

As I wrote in my piece about Epic Games in 2020, the company literally started out as an indie company with an individual-minded shareware model. It just happened to grow really, really big, thanks in no small part to the fact that the company had built some early goodwill, and later, some really innovative tech.

ZZT and Jill of the Jungle are as indie as you can get, with ZZT being a purely text-based game at a time when VGA graphics were already common. That the company that made this evolved into the company that made Fortnite is really freaking weird. But I think that context is important to note whenever talking about the moves that Epic makes. Love or hate it or feel its legal efforts against Apple were totally disingenuous, it is still operated by the same guy who was accepting checks out of his own mailbox in 1991.

Now, you could note that seemingly every company has roots like these, and you’d be right—Apple started in a garage, and look at how arrogant Steve Jobs ended up being, right?—but I do think (as I said in the 2020 piece) that even with Epic’s moves into hyperrealistic game engine design and free-to-play cash-machine megagames, Tim Sweeney remembers being that guy who was selling little games out of his house. He knows what it’s like to work around the status quo of the marketplace. (He also knows what it’s like to operate a AAA game publisher, rather than just a developer, something that the company announced in 2020, but I digress.)

A reminder that Epic used to be indie, too.

A lot of that may be lost on modern creators, however. I think the reason why the acquisition of Bandcamp rubbed a lot of people the wrong way is because, honestly, someone bought Bandcamp. It is no longer as indie as the bands that appear on its website.

While not really citing the fact that Epic has roots as the same kind of indie developer most musicians on Bandcamp are, Pitchfork does note the ethos similarities. “Beyond the lawsuits, Epic’s willingness to challenge the big boys has benefited everyone,” Matthew Ismael Ruiz wrote.

I guess we can see it as sort of a positive thing that the buyer wasn’t one of the traditional big tech companies like Google or Epic’s nemesis, Apple, nor was it a record label or someone deeply involved in the music industry already. In a way, Epic can bring fresh eyes to the problem of promoting the needs of the creator. If this was Epic’s goal, there probably were much better acquisition targets for this, like Patreon or Ko-Fi, but I do think at the same time, this is a strong base for Epic to build out new types of ambitions. As the Pitchfork piece notes, Epic may actually need Bandcamp more than the other way around:

The Epic Games Store has struggled to compete with more established marketplaces run by Sony, Microsoft, and fellow developer-turned-platform Valve, whose Steam Store represents the gold standard of digital retail in PC gaming. The store has also been plagued by clunky digital rights management and a buggy interface, and their tactic of luring developers with exclusive deals has largely backfired, garnering ill will and accusations of bribery from gamers. Bandcamp, with its ease of use and patina of goodwill, is everything the Epic Games Store is not.

But I hope, now that Epic has done this, they actually take a little bit of time to understand what they bought and why it works—and why breaking it would ultimately be bad for everyone. Bandcamp is the place you go when you want to support indie bands with no middleman, or as small of a middleman as humanly possible.

Epic remembers its roots. Now would be a bad time to forget them.

Also, a quick shout-out to the GMG Union, which won its contract after a nearly week-long strike.

There was a big, silly media fight over the weekend, one of many that seem to surface during times when there’s obviously not very much going on.

But this silly media fight is actually more important than it seems because it reflects the way people have careers. And how the old-school approach to getting those careers no longer really works.

It all started because of a comment made by tech culture scribe Taylor Lorenz in an Insider story about The New York Times’ approach to outside projects. As I have made clear in the past, I once had a job prospect (not with the Times, but in NYC) go belly up in part because the publication wanted me to get rid of my site and I showed a slight amount of hesitation around that. So kind of a pet issue for me.

But Lorenz made this comment in the piece:

When you think about the future of media, it’s much more distributed and about personalities. Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes.

And all of a sudden, it became A. Thing.

Lorenz, who just left the Times for the Washington Post and probably has more followers on TikTok than everyone reading this combined, soon saw her comments being dissected by people at other newspapers—including former coworkers at the job she just left and soon-to-be-coworkers at the job she’s just about to start, in the same Twitter thread, all taking issue with the idea that journalists need to be brands. (Politico, which apparently wants to keep this fight going, sided with the legacy journalists, despite most of the comments favoring Lorenz.)

Now, I get it, these people are associated with newspapers that operate out of tall buildings, but the air isn’t that thin up there (especially in DC, where the buildings aren’t even that tall!), and seemingly everyone else who works in journalism that doesn’t have one of these big-name jobs probably got what she was saying right away. There is a degree of hustle and personality-driven journalism that has dominated the way online media has worked for years. 

Lorenz pointing out that big news are outlets ignoring that, and then getting criticized for that, doesn’t obfuscate the fact that this is the game now.

(Victor/Unsplash)

When I got into newspapers, the path for becoming a big-city journalist looked like this:

• Go to journalism school, get a degree
• Work at a small paper
• Work at a slightly larger paper
• Work at a mid-size paper, maybe win an award
• Work at a large paper

(I personally got to step 4 with my career in newspaper design, though having worked at the Washington Post Express, you could kinda call it step 5.)

Now, for many, the path is much closer to this:

• Go to college, or not, the specific degree doesn’t matter
• Do something that gets you attention, like tweeting or running a newsletter or livestreaming
• Get a job, or freelance, or self-publish, while continuing to do stuff that gets you attention
• Work at a large media outlet, or start your own

Journalism is a game of choose-your-own-adventure in 2022 (or better, Calvinball, as the rules keep changing), and honestly, we need more people like Taylor specifically calling out the fact that there isn’t just one set path anymore and that journalists aren’t just tied down to having to be one thing anymore. The point that Taylor is trying to make is that personality-driven journalism is a much bigger deal than it once was—after all, we follow individual journalists, not just brands, on social media—and trying to lock it down out of some fear of those journalists sullying the brand somehow is counterproductive.

The truth of the matter is, there are no rules anymore, and in the war for talent, media outlets that actively fight against the new path in favor to the old one are going to find a lot less talent along the way.

So yes, journalists are their own brands, whether they want to be or not. Let’s stop pretending that the masthead matters more than the byline. That ship sailed long ago. Even at the Times and the Post.

In lieu of a hunt for sponsorship dollars today, MidRange is going to make a donation to the GMG Union strike fundraiser on GoFundMe.

Perhaps it was inevitable to see G/O Media—a media company that has proven itself the most employee-hostile large publisher on the internet in the years since its acquisition by Great Hill Partners—would become the first prominent publisher to see a labor stoppage in the internet era.

After all, the ethos of the existing staff has very much been in the spirit of Gawker Media’s original owner, Nick Denton, and the culture that company built.

But it’s just really hard to watch good journalists have to suffer through bad leadership for so long. It is clear that G/O’s leadership would love nothing more than to cull the journalists from the sites it purchased three years ago, hire new staffs on non-union contracts (and at miserably low pay, especially considering where they’re physically required to work) and just work like an embarrassing throwback to bad media jobs circa 2007.

And that’s proven by the fact that Deadspin, one of the original Gawker Media sites, but one that had seen its original staff desert the platform in protest of management, is still publishing at a time most other G/O Media sites are not. Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of this company, appears to have just wanted the shells of these sites—with no care about the people who worked on them.

Spanfeller was working on internet media outlets in the ’90s, and his old-school approach shows in the worst way possible here.

(He doesn’t appear to care about the content his employees create either, given that the websites they run just randomly removed two-plus decades of images out of nowhere last fall. Way to stand behind the hard work of your journalists, pal.)

So, with that in mind, seeing this labor conflict turn into a legitimate strike is an important turn of events in an era of digital media where the publishers have not done enough to stand up for the actual work being done, where high-level strategic approaches to squeeze a few more dollars out of the digital advertising lemon seem to be more important than ensuring that the media property is properly serving both its audience and its team of creators.

It was a real tragedy when Gawker shut down—and it’s still playing out, thanks to Spanfeller and Great Hill. Gawker, of course, was not sold to G/O Media, but did eventually find a home with BDG Media, the home of Bustle and a number of other digital media sites. And to BDG Media’s credit, they actually seem to be doing a good job with the relaunch, as well as with continuing to build the ethos of the brand it started with.

I hope, if Spanfeller and company don’t give this team what they want, these employees consider new opportunities in the digital ecosystem. Because, as Deadspin’s move to Defector has proven, it’s the talent that holds the power right now, and when they use that power, the effect is more dramatic and impactful than any desperation-tinged old-school revenue building strategy that bad media sites can throw at the internet.

In a lot of ways, I don’t care about brands like Kotaku and Lifehacker and Gizmodo. I care about the people who build those sites more. And management that puts the brands above all else will find itself with vastly reduced properties in the end.

Stay strong, GMG Union.

Advertisers gained a level of data and nuance around advertising that broadcasting or print didn’t offer, all the while paying less for it than they did for print. It was a problem of pricing, one where early online publishers gave away the golden goose without even realizing what they had.

In some ways, the innovation has been amazing for smaller advertisers, but it has allowed advertisers to promote things based on the content, rather than the publication. And honestly, that broke the advertising system for traditional news.

For a quarter century, we have basically created a market driven by advertisers. And that has created all sorts of problems that we’ve yet to properly solve, including the active monetization of misinformation, a level of clutter that makes many modern websites unusable, and tracking that is truly at a level of depth and concern that it is clear regulation of this market is necessary.

But I’d like to take a step back and look at an even deeper problem the digital advertising era has created—the problem of brand safety concerns being attached to traditional news stories. With advertisers tied to the messages on the articles they promote—because they now work in more granular ways than simply slapping an ad on a facing page—they’re freaked out about the potential that an offensive message might be connected to them.

Now, to be clear, brand safety is not just a problem of internet-based advertising:

But it is a very serious problem, and it becomes particularly bad when a big news story occurs—such as COVID-19, or what’s happening in Ukraine right now—and brands, likely afraid of having their brand associated with something so negative, literally have the ability to shut off ads on certain keywords.

And lo and behold, that’s exactly what is happening right now with Ukraine, as a recent Business Insider report noted.

One advertising executive, John Lods of the advertising agency Arm Candy, said this:

We are excluding news in general. Almost all the sentiment around that category is negative. When's the last time you read a positive headline?

This is the advertising equivalent of starving a growing plant of water and nutrients when they’re needed the most. As a society, we need to make it as dangerous to do this as it is to blindly sponsor misinformation, because it in many ways is more offensive than a momentary bad association. They’re threatening journalism at the point where its resources must expand to support the moment.

And it seems like something that advertisers, not just publishers, need to be willing to shift on to help solve. (Claire Atkin and Nandini Jammi, this would be a great extension of your current work.)

My recommendation would be that the ad industry work on designing an industry-standard underwriting approach to large news stories that is designed around separation and in-kind advertising that allows them access to free backfill advertising later on, but makes it clear that they are taking the moment to support journalism, because it’s the responsible thing to do. Think of it as a “big story mode” that only kicks in when a major story happens, and is available only to pre-vetted news sites. Maybe it looks like a bar on the bottom of the screen that highlights that the content is being underwritten.

Newspapers and online websites are unfortunately not in the position to turn away ad dollars in the way that advertisers can news stories—so they aren’t in a position to protest these moves by short-sighted, arguably greedy, advertisers. But it would sure be nice if they had an alternative to the status quo that actually makes sense for everyone.

Change the discussion from brand safety into brand support. That is significantly more productive than what we’re doing now.

Sometimes, I wonder, what happens when you find your lane, you’re good at that specific lane, but you don’t find a way to excel past it? Is it a problem, or simply a reflection of changes in the audience?

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of the band Spoon. Spoon is a great band. They’ve always been great—the three-decades-long collaboration between Britt Daniel and Jim Eno is perhaps one of rock music’s most fruitful. Their albums are consistent, and have been for at least 20 years, but somehow they continue to improve and adapt over time. But despite this growth and evolution, their latest album, Lucifer on the Sofa, perhaps isn’t dominating rock-music discussions the way the band did, say, when their latest album was Gimme Fiction or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.

That’s despite the fact that Lucifer has a title that seems to directly reference the moment, the way that it’s all too easy to fall into streaming menus or doomscrolling rather than being merely creative people. The COVID era, and the disconnections it created, zapped a whole bunch of creativity out of some people.

(Spoon’s hometown of Austin, which saw its bars and its SXSW conference go silent—and which lead singer Daniel moved back to before the creation of this album—is a pretty good reflection of this problem.)

Despite all this, Lucifer only hit #38 on the Billboard 200, a pretty significant dip from the #4 apex seen by two of the band’s prior records, 2010’s Transference and 2014’s They Want My Soul, as well as the band’s lowest chart ranking for a new album since Gimme Fiction way back in 2005. Spoon is still kicking ass at being Spoon. But Spoon isn’t quite having the impact it once was.

Admittedly, this is more complex than a chart ranking alone. The shifts in how Billboard works mean that the kind of people who bought a Spoon album on its first weekend aren’t the kind of people who stream it 100 million times a week, and Spoon fans are of course getting older. And hey, maybe Spoon’s label, Matador, is having a harder time pitching records than a major label is.

That’s not to say they’ve been forgotten—I mean, Rolling Stone literally called Lucifer their best record ever—but I think in some ways, the diminishing returns without any real decline in quality suggest something that happens to a lot of creative projects. When you’re consistently good-to-great for something over a long period, it can be easy for people who like your work or follow it to take it for granted.

Perhaps this conversation ties into the Ted Gioia chatter from about a month ago about the dampened impact of new music, but I think more broadly, it reflects a shift in the way that we as creators work.

We can no longer just create for the sake of creation. Now we have to worry about keeping our buzz. And it can be hard to do so when you’ve been doing something for 30 years. Or even five years. When you’re a known quantity, it becomes hard to be seen as doing something new or exciting.

The fact of the matter is, simply being excellent at being creative in 2022 is no longer on its own a reason for people to pay attention to the amazing work that you’re doing. The smorgasbord of people doing amazing working is always getting a little bit bigger, and consistently good may not on its own keep people excited about your work.

We’re in a time period where creating things often means spending significant amounts of time focusing on developing a sense of buzz or keeping people engaged in the work you do. You may or may not like that—it may feel like it gets in the way of your creativity.

But I think, given the numerous new, fresh options out there, track records alone are no longer going to keep people excited about what you’re doing. As much as that sucks.

Anyway, listen to this Spoon record. You’re missing out if you haven’t.

This is not the toolkit to dive into more diplomatic or policy issues, and nor the one to discuss the horrors of fresh conflict. But it’s the one I’ve got, and I think in that context, it’s important to consider what we, as external observers, should do when it comes to watching Russia’s attempt to overtake Ukraine.

I think when it comes down to it, when a democracy gets invaded by another country, especially without prior provocation, it is a failure of diplomacy and foresight that led to it. That democratic country had freedom and autonomy, and now it feels like it’s losing that. Beyond the blood lost or the people affected, that is a deeper-level tragedy within this discussion.

As the conflict happens, we are going to see some difficult images, and we are going to find ourselves struggling with the end result of these moments. As a culture, we owe it to ourselves to not turn away, to actually understand this conflict, and not to tune it out. The motivation is strong right now, because it is not pleasant.

(AbsolutVision/Unsplash)

In so many ways, despite the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, war has felt distant for these very reasons. We have so many documentaries, so much content about prior wars or prior diplomatic battles that the way we approach war is almost like a pop-culture academic study, rather than a living, breathing thing … especially if those battles are not happening in our backyard. Don’t approach this like the History Channel or another Netflix documentary—it is all too easy to turn this into a pseudo-academic exercise. Treat it like a living, breathing threat. If we don’t, it could culturally harm us by numbing our receptors as to what’s truly dangerous.

(This is why arguments about why you should stop reading news are goddamn dangerous. We can’t just distance ourselves from the difficulties of the world.)

I know the last two years have likely numbed your senses around difficult things. Mine feel a bit numb, too, and that’s part of the reason I’m writing this—to remind myself, and hopefully you, that this is something we need to focus on. (And focus on it with a critical mind, too: Times of war tend to be very prime periods for propaganda and misinformation to emerge. If a piece of information hasn’t been confirmed by multiple sources, don’t present it as fact.)

We live in a world that often works like a pile of shredded puzzle pieces—we need to put them together, but they’ve already been broken beyond recognition. The way we put them back together is through a strong sense of focus.

Don’t lose your focus. That’s what the world’s complex forces want you to do.

And the multitouch interface was a pretty good hammer for Apple as a company, changing the way that its users interacted with its technology solutions over time.

But Apple is the kind of company that thinks differently about nails.

Maybe Apple has been afraid of seeing the main interface of the Mac as a nail, which is why its screens haven’t made the leap to touch despite the technology being there for years and being good enough for said use case for quite some time.

But that effort to try and thoughtfully limit how the touchscreen was used in its systems might have actually made the Touch Bar an even more questionable bit of kit. By attempting to winnow down its use case in a specific way, rather than give people the option to use it and let them decide how to work it into their workflow, the company ultimately stymied what the Touch Bar could be. By last fall, Apple had started to remove it from its latest MacBook Pros.

(Kevin Lim/Flickr)

Meanwhile, a company in a completely different space took a seed of the basic idea that the Touch Bar tried to represent and actually made it useful to a lot of people. The Stream Deck (not to be confused with this), a screen-plus-buttons interface, is intended for video streamers as a way of helping to control their machines at a time they are working with immediacy—in the middle of a stream—and then winnowing down what they do into the easy muscle-memory approach.

In many ways, it’s very similar to the Touch Bar—it brings imagery to basic interfaces. But by trying not to define how the Stream Deck is used and instead making it simple and flexible and programmable for given use cases, the device has become an iconic product. It’s basically second to ring lighting as the official product of live streaming.

Elgato, the AV tech company that had previously been best known for its video conversion equipment, released it just six months after the Touch Bar, and it will likely outlive it by many years; it might even become a mainstream consumer device soon enough. I think it’s one of those products that stands a real chance of breaking out with a bigger audience.

(It should be noted that, while Elgato definitely deserves the flowers for making it a successful product, the designer Artemy Lebedev developed this general idea back in 2005. Apple was rumored to be working on that approach at the time.)

Apple could have had success with a more narrow audience with something like the Touch Bar. It has a segment of its audience, video editors, that it really emphasizes in its marketing, as well as one focused on audio applications. Each of these audiences could have been pitched a specialized touch interface that largely worked as a trackpad but added in visual tools as was needed. (Magic Trackpad 4?) It could have been an external device, rather than something every consumer had to buy with the laptop. And it would have been more functional, solving the primary issue for the audience that needed it, while letting the audience that didn’t well enough alone.

(Sumudu Mohottige/Unsplash)

The reason the Stream Deck succeeded in the market, while the Touch Bar has been left to languish, is because of a mixture of two things: One, an intentionally narrowed market focus; and two, an understanding of how users actually use their devices. Muscle memory is a big thing when you own a laptop. And I think that a lot of the reason why the Touch Bar was ultimately rejected by much of its user base was because it actively competed with the way regular people work. It was built for a way Apple wanted people to work, but which hadn’t been tested in the market in a real way. (To be fair, we got the iPhone and iPad out of that approach.) Meanwhile, all of Apple’s qualms about touchscreens on laptops are basically non-issues, as proven by the fact that Windows has lovingly embraced multitouch for a decade now.

The Stream Deck was a device built around the way people actually work in a live setting. It’s simple. It’s awesome. It probably makes the lives of its users a lot easier.

And it might eventually become a huge product for people who don’t stream.

(Thanks Dan Hon for the inspiration for this one.)

And here I am an hour before publish time, with a take being bashed out in real time.

My take is this: Please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop pretending that Markdown is a developer format first. It’s not. You’re deluding yourselves otherwise.

Yes, it might be inspired by programmer-style thinking. Yes, developers have found lots of reasons to make use of Markdown as a way to implement some structure into the content they create. Yes, whole genres of content-management platforms have been built around the rise of Markdown. But writers and editors, who actually do a lot of the work in the format, get lost in a discussion when it’s being led by someone who works for a company with the tagline Content is Data.

(The hell it is. Data implies a methodical nature to the process of creation. It implies that creative output should be treated in the same context as programming. And you know what? That is the wrong order of things. Data serves content. If I was looking for a CMS and I saw that “Content is Data” tagline, I would close the tab.)

Anyway, to the piece itself: When you write a piece that literally embeds a John Gruber and Dave Winer exchange in which they both say, hey, this is a tool primarily for writers, don’t write 6,300 words attempting to prove them wrong.

The thing is, whether the use case is documentation, or you have a folder full of files that you bash out with a quickness and intensity that avoids all the extra crap that comes with a word processor, it’s important to keep in mind that this all starts with the content, and the tools, and the way that people create things.

(othree/Unsplash)

In my case, I prefer Markdown for three reasons:

• It simplifies the interface. I don’t have to worry about fonts or typography or anything like that. And unlike with HTML, it doesn’t get in the way by adding a lot of weight to the original words.
• It is portable. Markdown can be converted into anything, and it can be extended to your specific needs. For my use case, I add shortcodes. You may hate that! But removing the shortcodes is easy and can be totally automated.
• It allows a siloing off of the creative parts of the process. I like design, I like editorial. I don’t think those two parts should touch.

So to treat Markdown as a pure data-delivery mechanism sort of misses the point for Markdown’s value. It’s a way to build content without all the extra crap that usually comes with building content. Nothing more, nothing less. Not everyone uses it. Not everyone should.

(And just because not everyone uses it doesn’t mean that it’s bad for editors, as this piece says. Actually talk to some freaking writers sometime—we have different creative processes!)

To treat it as a pure vessel for complex content management structures inflates what it should be and who it’s for. (Side note: I wrote one of the takes around Slack and Markdown support, a general topic that the author highlights in this piece, and I will tell you it was not a purely developer-driven discussion. As Gruber would inform you, and he did me, Slack Markdown is not really Markdown.)

Data should be in service of content. Data-organization formats should be in the background, helping to organize the process of creation. If we let data organization define the way our content is built, we run into the very same problems that led a lot of professional writers to move away from bulky word processors in the first place.

So yes, while Markdown is a great format for parsing content into a database, it gained that superpower the old-fashioned way: By being well-suited for writing, first.

Block-based editing has in many ways won out within the modern CMS platform. For example, Ghost, while still being Markdown-friendly, gave into blocks many years ago, despite being originally designed around a Markdown-driven interface. (I disagreed with this stance, so I moved to Craft CMS and structured my content around a Markdown-driven approach.)

But the block-driven interface shouldn’t usurp the creative process entirely. If I write in Markdown, the CMS should accept it. If I write in Word, the CMS should accept it (and spend a lot of extra time cleaning the code).

The CMS should serve the goals of the content, not the other way around.

In a revelation that promises to introduce a whole lot of problems for web browsers and servers alike, both Firefox, Chrome, and the Chrome-based Edge are expected to hit version 100 in the coming weeks. The reason this is a problem is that, well, because we apparently hate planning, we never accounted for version 100 coming from our web browsers.

Perhaps a reason for that is that web browsers once used a much slower method of updating that only occurred when the browser company felt like it, instead of the more frequent and regular approach used these days.

So what’s the big deal you say? Well, turns out that the version number means something to web developers who operate web-based software. Per Google’s web.dev site:

Web developers use all kinds of techniques for parsing these strings, from custom code to using User-Agent parsing libraries, which can then be used to determine the corresponding processing logic. The User-Agent and any other version reporting mechanisms will soon report a three-digit version number.

So despite the fact that we learned that trying to designate things around the number of digits was a dangerous problem in the past, some web developers did it again in another place that had nothing to do with the year—and now, the web might just blow up for us in a month or so—which should be fun!

If you ask me, we learned a lot about collective misadventure from the Y2K bug, so why not relive it?

(Luis Morera/Unsplash)

The plus side is that the browser world has been through this before, when two-digit browser numbers became a thing.

“Many libraries improved the parsing logic when browsers moved to two-digit version numbers, so hitting the three-digit milestone is expected to cause fewer problems,” the Mozilla Hacks website explained.

But it has not exactly been perfect.

Some of the bugs that have appeared so far, according to a tracker on GitHub, appear to be things that you’d never think of being affected by the browser version. For example, there are a number of issues that emerge with the CSS on the Yahoo website in Firefox if you use version 100 of that browser. But some sites, like the EU version of Politico, would simply not load because of this before being fixed. These are big sites, sites with development teams likely well beyond what you’re used to working with. And even they’re running into the 2022 version of a bug we’ve known has been a bug for more than 22 years.

So if you want to spend your weekend trying to bug fix something, turn on the flag in your browser to test the version 100 user-agent string and see what explodes. If it doesn’t, I encourage you to gloat, because something on your website was better-coded than Yahoo.

All seriousness, though, this problem is extremely amusing to me.

This revelation, and the quick fix needed to resolve the issue, helped protect the privacy of tens of thousands of people. But when given a chance to credit the journalist for his work, the governor of the state, Mike Parson, decided to attack him instead and threaten him with legal action.

The move, which was widely mocked, essentially forced the journalist’s silence on the matter for months as Parson repeatedly attacked him in the media, in the process leading to public questions about Parson’s own tech literacy.

(Of course, it later came out that they were going to commend him until it was seen as more politically expedient to trash him.)

Despite Parson’s own efforts to vilify him, prosecutors decided not to follow through on the governor’s threats—allowing the journalist, Josh Renaud, to finally speak out in public about his treatment last week.

Renaud had a lot to say in a personal statement that was clearly published with an eye toward highlighting the injustice of this governor, clearly obsessed with modest political gain over the rights of his citizens.

“This was a political persecution of a journalist, plain and simple,” Renaud wrote. “Despite this, I am proud that my reporting exposed a critical issue, and that it caused the state to take steps to better safeguard teachers’ private data.”

Renaud acted in good faith, and his newspaper stood behind him throughout this nerve-wracking process. But despite the fact that a prosecutor declined to charge Renaud, the governor’s office is standing behind its take that he somehow did something wrong. (Per the Springfield News-Leader, the governor’s spokeswoman described the prosecutor’s decision as “her prerogative.”)

The thing is, though, that Renaud’s comments on the overall incident may be more damaging to the governor than anything that Parson and his spokesperson could have ever anticipated. Renaud took aim at a recent incident involving the state senate failing to confirm his choice to lead the Department of Health and Senior Services, Donald Kauerauf, over his stances on tools like vaccines and masking.

Kauerauf, simply put, was a victim of political circumstance, in the governor’s view … which Renaud was able to directly connect to his own situation.

“The governor lamented that ‘more care was given to political gain than the harm caused to a man and his family,’” Renaud wrote. “Every word Gov. Parson wrote applies equally to the way he treated me.”

That is a brutal assessment of a governor who did a journalist wrong for no reason other than he could. And that Renaud could put those words out into the open, finally, after months of hell caused by the leader who is supposed to represent people like him, must feel strange.

As I wrote in Tedium who this story first broke, Renaud and I have never met but share a lot of interests, including backgrounds in newspaper design and enthusiasm for retro computing. I could see myself in his shoes.

I feel bad that he even found himself in this position in the first place. His statement shows, though, that he learned some important lessons from this challenging incident. Hopefully, the political figure that put him in this spot also has.