Category: Joints After Midnight & Rants

The University of Peers and Elders

For the past ten or so years I’ve harbored a mostly secret desire to return to graduate school. Part of this is because I’m a frustrated academic – when I was a senior in college, I seriously considered the PhD program in Anthropology at Berkeley, thinking I’d write a masterful ethnography of the nascent technology industry. But I was put off by a doctoral candidate’s admonition that, should I choose her path, I “better get used to eating ramen for the next seven years.” 

Instead I went to work covering the tech industry as a reporter, then pursued a Master’s in Journalism, also at Berkeley. Despite its status as a two-year program replete with a thesis, journalism at Berkeley – or anywhere – happens to be one of the least academic fields of study possible. I did write a rather lengthy (and quite dry) paper on the future of publishing as it relates to new digital technologies. But by the time I was finished, all I really wanted to do was start a magazine. 

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Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

This is not the network standard we’re looking for.

Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.”

Here’s what I said back in January:

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How Is AI Changing Search? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New data highlighted in Casey Newton’s Platformer newsletter codifies what most of us have already assumed: AI chatbot usage is starting to reshape search. And when search changes, so does the Internet as we know it. Unfortunately, the data lacks a fundamental denominator, and as such, only serves to feed the signal-free hype cycle we’re currently in.

The data comes from Adobe’s Analytics platform customers, and it paints a fascinating if incomplete portrait of how consumers conduct their online research. Yes, traffic from AI chatbots has risen more than 1000% since last summer, but….on what base? Take a look at this chart:

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Tech Used To Be Magical. Why Isn’t It Anymore?

I’ll ask you kindly to get the fuck off my lawn now.

I’ve been pondering something for a while now, but have held off “thinking out loud” about it because I was worried I might sound like a guy yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. But f*ck it, this is my site, and I think it’s time to air this one out: Technology isn’t delivering on the magic anymore. Instead, it feels like a burden, or worse.

For decades, digital technology delivered magical moments with a regularity that inspired evangelical devotion. For me, the very first of these moments came while using a Macintosh in 1984. Worlds opened up as that cursor tracked my hand’s manipulation of the mouse. Apple’s graphical user interface – later mimicked by Microsoft – was astonishing, captivating, and open ended. I was a kid in college, but I knew culture, business, and society would never be the same once entrepreneurs, hackers, and dreamers starting building on Apple’s innovations.

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When Tech Gets Too Big To Fail

I opened my annual predictions last week by noting that the technology industry had leapfrogged finance as the most powerful political force in the business world. But the news today that Meta is all but abandoning content moderation in favor of a decidedly Trump-friendly “let them say whatever the f*ck” approach has prompted me to revise that sentiment a bit.

It’s not that Tech has overtaken Finance. It’s that Tech has…become Finance. It’s become the most rapacious, amoral, win-at-all costs industry in the world. Consider:

  • Meta not only abandoned its content moderation practices (which, in turn, will allow it to supercharge its business model), it’s also building AI engagement chatbots aimed at juicing its bottom line, hired a Trump loyalist (and proponent of violence as entertainment) to join its board, and elevated a Trump devotee as its head of policy and communications. The company has pulled out every possible stop to ensure it profits from the next four years of Trump rule.
  • The global financial system is now dominated by the stock performance of tech companies. Nine of the top 10 S&P stocks by weight are tech companies. The entire S&P 500 is, in the words of one economist, “simply NVIDIA in drag.” When this is the case, finance becomes beholden to tech; now it’s tech companies, not banks, that are “too big to fail.”
  • The CEOs or founders of OpenAI, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Ripple, Robinhood, and countless others have given large sums of money to Trump in recent weeks. It’s difficult to see this payola as anything more than bribes and down payments meant to protect Tech’s position in a new world order built on … Tech.
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Apparently, Brand Safety Is Dead. That’s Good For News, No?

SHOT.
CHASER.

If you want to understand where the zeitgeist is headed in Silicon Valley, you have to study The Information, the clubby, well-sourced favorite read of Valley oligarchs. The publication made its reputation by commanding lofty subscription prices back when nearly all tech news was free; it now enjoys multiple revenue streams, including advertising, events, and a “pro” version for $750-$999 a year. I’ve been a subscriber (of the “regular” variety) for years, and I probably always will be.

That said, every so often The Information runs a story that is so clearly aligned with the interests of the plutocracy it begs to be called out. “Advertisers Retreat From Social Media Policing” is its latest entry in this category. The piece opens with a stupendous straw man: “For several years, a favorite tactic of progressives agitating against social media and conservative news outlets has been pressuring marketers to pull their ads.”

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Technology, Humanity, and the Existential Test

I’m still digging through some of the pieces I posted at the now defunct NewCo Shift, and found this piece, adapted from a talk I gave at the Thrival Humans X Tech conference in Pittsburgh back in September of 2018. I was alarmed by trends that I saw intensifying – a push by the tech industry to deregulate their power, the growing influence of private company algorithms on public domains, the rise of autocratic politics and “technocapitalism.” Six years later, it feels like I could give this talk again today, nearly word for word – and it’d be even more relevant. 

—

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What’s SearchGPT Really About? Moving Past the Training Data Dilemma.

This morning we awoke to one story dominating the tech news landscape: OpenAI is “expanding into search,” launching SearchGPT, a prototype that appears to be a direct competitor to Google (and Bing and Perplexity, not that they really matter). But despite the voluminous coverage, my initial take is that once the hype cycle passes – I give it a day or two – OpenAI’s true goal will emerge: fixing the optics of its approach to training data.

The company doesn’t have the resources to take on Google on its core turf. So why announce SearchGPT now? This is speculation, but I’d wager it’s because the company is in a perilous place. It built its business – one that could lose up to $5 billion this year – by scarfing up the entire Internet, mostly without permission. It’s facing a serious backlash from both established publishers and governments. In response, it’s been busy cutting deals with as many partners as it can, and this search prototype feels driven by those optics.

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Wrestling With The Gray Lady

Find the Search button…

The other day my wife and I heard a report on our local public radio station that mentioned the Biden Administration’s American Climate Corps (ACC) initiative, a new program seeking to recruit 20,000 young people into jobs on the front line of the climate crisis. Modeled on Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the program is a signature element of Biden’s response to what anyone with a pulse knows is the most pressing issue of our day: we’re destroying the planet through misguided economic incentives.

But despite the fact that the ACC was launched with much fanfare last Fall, my wife and I had never heard of it. We have three young adult children whose future feels in doubt because of climate change, and they’d never heard of it either – not a good sign for a program that hopes to recruit tens of thousands of people just like them. All five of us feel like we’re reasonably well informed. I mean, we read The New York Times, don’t we?

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Mine, Mine, All Mine

The original MusicPlasma interface. Author’s musical preferences not included…
  1. No Longer Mine 

When I write, I like to listen to music. Most of my first book was written to a series of CDs I purchased from Amazon and ripped to my Mac – early turn of the century electronica, for the most part – Prodigy, Moby, Fat Boy Slim and the like. But as I write these words, I’m listening to an unfamiliar playlist on Spotify called “Brain Food” – and while the general vibe is close to what I want, something is missing.  

This got me thinking about my music collection – or, more accurately, the fact that I no longer have a music collection. I once considered myself pretty connected to a certain part of the scene – I’d buy 10 or 15 albums a month, and I’d spend hours each day consuming and considering new music, usually while working or writing. Digital technologies were actually pretty useful in this pursuit – when Spotify launched in 2008, I used it to curate playlists of the music I had purchased – it’s hard to believe, but back then, you could organize Spotify around your collection, tracks that lived on your computer, tracks that, for all intents and purposes, you owned. Spotify was like having a magic digital assistant that made my ownership that much more powerful. 

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