Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

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The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”

Fourth in a series. Previous installments: 

The Standard, Part 1 

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The Standard, Part 1 – The End and The Beginning

A good place as any to lose your company.

Note: Third in a series. First post, second post.

The Oak Grove cemetery in Tisbury, Massachusetts encompasses roughly ten acres of rolling woodlands and narrow dirt roads. Its 1,800 or so headstones date back two centuries, making Oak Grove a relative newcomer as New England graveyards go. I’ve been visiting this sacred, spectral spot on the island of Martha’s Vineyard for nearly five decades. Half my family is buried there. 

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The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

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Headless Marketing

Yesterday I wrote a piece about the AI-driven “white collar recession,” which felt to me like a bunch of bullshit marketing. This morning as I perused my morning paper I came across this extraordinary example of exactly what I’m on about. The image above is an ad in The Information’s morning tech news roundup.  It’s an undisguised appeal aimed at marketing professionals, playing directly to their fears that they’re about to be replaced by AI. The solution, of course, is … “Head” – the “world’s first AI marketer” which, the company claims, is “not a tool, it’s a new species.”

This kind of claptrap is clogging up any reasonable dialog about the role of AI in our economy. On its home page, Head claims to be “hired” by more than 50,000 companies – hey, that’s a lot! But just a bit of legwork reveals Head is … well, the word “questionable” comes to mind.

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Is AI the “Big Bang” or Merely a “Turning Point”? Much Depends on the Answer

According to scholar Carlota Perez, one of tech’s most revered theorists, society regularly goes through technology-driven “revolutions.” These structural cycles can take fifty years or more, and are defined by core technologies which shape life as we know it. Her list of previous cycles include the Industrial Revolution; The Age of Steam and Railways; The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering; and The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production.*

Back in the early 2000s, Perez has identified the Internet (more formally, ICT, or “information communications technologies”) as the dominant technological force driving our current age. Perez’s framing has been a favorite of pundits ever since – and has played a central role in the debate as to whether a much-hyped “Next Big Thing” – crypto, the metaverse, quantum computing – is merely a feature of an ongoing revolution, or the starting gun to an entirely new age.

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Free the Database of Intentions: Could Google Thrive If It Gives Away Its Data?

Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered, and every path taken (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the key stuff). I’ve tracked this extraordinary artifact since 2003, and have come to believe that Google’s control over it has become a inhibitor to innovation and flourishing in our society.

The US government – yes, even this one – agrees with me. In the nearly three decades since Google first launched, the company has gone from champion of the open Internet to established monopolist whose principle business is protecting its profits. With the advent of consumer AI, that principle business is imperiled. Google is protecting a revenue stream that it must understand is no longer defensible, either by law or by practice.

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How On Earth Will OpenAI Hit $129 Billion in Four Years?!

Chart The Information

I’ve been traveling for the past week, and ignoring the news as best as one can while on the road. But when The Information posted this doozy of a story – OpenAI Forecasts Revenue Topping $125 Billion in 2029 as Agents, New Products Gain – I made a note to myself: Grok those numbers, and see what on earth is going on.

By the time I got home, Ed Zitron, currently the tech world’s most fervid antagonist – had beat me to it. Zitron dissembled The Information’s reporting, noting that the piece takes “great pains to accept literally everything that OpenAI says as perfectly reasonable, if not gospel, even if said things make absolutely no sense.”

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Should AI Write Our Fiction?

I’m going to try to write something difficult. I don’t know if I’m going to pull it off, but that’s kind of the point. This is how writers improve: We tackle something we’re not sure we can do. Along the way, I am committing a minor sin in the world of writing – I am writing about writing.

But wait, don’t bail, here’s a topical tidbit to keep you engaged: I’m also going to write about AI, and who doesn’t want to hear more about that?! My prompt, as it were, is “Audience of One,” a post by Mario Gabriele, who writes the interesting and hyperbolic newsletter The Generalist. Gabriele’s optimistic prose focuses on venture, startups, tech, and tech culture. I find his work thought provoking and sometimes infuriating. “Audience of One” falls into the latter category.

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Zuck Lobbies Trump: Optics No Longer Matter

There is so much…sh*t flooding the zone of late, it’s hard to grok it all. But when the CEO of one of the richest and most morally questionable companies in tech’s history leverages his access to lobby the President of the United States, and it’s just yet another WTF headline, well, it bears comment.

Mark Zuckerberg, the third richest man in the world, visited President Trump, the 700th richest man in the world. His goal? To get the President to call off Meta’s impending antitrust trial, one that could go very poorly for the company, both because of the evidence and testimony such a trial would bring the public light, and because one of the possible remedies would be breaking up Meta entirely.

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