Welcome aboard 🫡

I’ve tried it all: modals, banners, rewording it, … and, like, I get it. If I contributed a few bucks to every worthwhile thing, I’d run out of money quickly. There actually is one at the bottom of every post right now, though it’s quite small, because I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter.

Also, to be clear, I didn’t mean to complain or anything. I just wanted to explain the reality of the ecosystem as it currently exists, to the best of my knowledge.

I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you’re then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that’s more independent, but you’re still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.

I’ve been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site’s popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I’m the #1 google result for “anticapitalist tech:”

But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I’d have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I’d have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don’t know my exact conversion rate because I don’t do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That’s a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.

Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there’s fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it’s very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It’s really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.

Glad to hear it!

Totally agreed. I didn’t mean to say that it’s a failure if it doesn’t properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they’re making is that they don’t realize the root of the problem that they’re trying to solve lies in that tension.

The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community.

Again, couldn’t agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That’s a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.

This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you’re not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.

I’ve written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we’ll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.

Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.

Investment giant Goldman Sachs published a research paper

Goldman Sachs researchers also say that

It’s not a research paper; it’s a report. They’re not researchers; they’re analysts at a bank. This may seem like a nit-pick, but journalists need to (re-)learn to carefully distinguish between the thing that scientists do and corporate R&D, even though we sometimes use the word “research” for both. The AI hype in particular has been absolutely terrible for this. Companies have learned that putting out AI “research” that’s just them poking at their own product but dressed up in a science-lookin’ paper leads to an avalanche of free press from lazy credulous morons gorging themselves on the hype. I’ve written about this problem a lot. For example, in this post, which is about how Google wrote a so-called paper about how their LLM does compared to doctors, only for the press to uncritically repeat (and embellish on) the results all over the internet. Had anyone in the press actually fucking bothered to read the paper critically, they would’ve noticed that it’s actually junk science.

Haha I was actually paraphrasing myself from last year, but I’ve seen that because lots of readers sent me that article when it came out a few months later, for obvious reasons!

I completely and totally agree with the article that the attention economy in its current manifestation is in crisis, but I’m much less sanguine about the outcomes. The problem with the theory presented here, to me, is that it’s missing a theory of power. The attention economy isn’t an accident, but the result of the inherently political nature of society. Humans, being social animals, gain power by convincing other people of things. From David Graeber (who I’m always quoting lol):

Politics, after all, is the art of persuasion; the political is that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was the King of France, I would in fact become the King of France; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim.

In other words, just because algorithmic social media becomes uninteresting doesn’t mean the death of the attention economy as such, because the attention economy is something innate to humanity, in some form. Today its algorithmic feeds, but 500 years ago it was royal ownership of printing presses.

I think we already see the beginnings of the next round. As an example, the YouTuber Veritsasium has been doing educational videos about science for over a decade, and he’s by and large good and reliable. Recently, he did a video about self-driving cars, sponsored by Waymo, which was full of (what I’ll charitably call) problematic claims that were clearly written by Waymo, as fellow YouTuber Tom Nicholas pointed out. Veritasium is a human that makes good videos. People follow him directly, bypassing algorithmic shenanigans, but Waymo was able to leverage their resources to get into that trusted, no-algorithm space. We live in a society that commodifies everything, and as human-made content becomes rarer, more people like Veritsaium will be presented with more and increasingly lucrative opportunities to sell bits and pieces of their authenticity for manufactured content (be it by AI or a marketing team), while new people that could be like Veritsaium will be drowned out by the heaps of bullshit clogging up the web.

This has an analogy in our physical world. As more and more of our physical world looks the same, as a result of the homogenizing forces of capital (office parks, suburbia, generic blocky bulidings, etc.), the fewer and fewer remaining parts that are special, like say Venice, become too valuable for their own survival. They become “touristy,” which is itself a sort of ironically homogenized commodified authenticity.

edit: oops I got Tom’s name wrong lol fixed

Am alternative approach that may interest you: https://theluddite.org/#!post/reddit-extension

We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn’t want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don’t even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn’t have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.

It’s very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.

This has been ramping up for years. The first time that I was asked to do “homework” for an interview was probably in 2014 or so. Since then, it’s gone from “make a quick prototype” to assignments that clearly take several full work days. The last time I job hunted, I’d politely accept the assignment and ask them if $120/hr is an acceptable rate, and if so, I can send over the contract and we can get started ASAP! If not, I refer them to my thousands upon thousands of lines of open source code.

My experience with these interactions is not that they’re looking for the most qualified applicants, but that they’re filtering for compliant workers who will unquestioningly accept the conditions offered in exchange for the generally lucrative salaries. It’s the kind of employees that they need to keep their internal corporate identity of being the good guys as tech goes from being universally beloved to generally reviled by society in general.

Whenever one of these stories come up, there’s always a lot of discussion about whether these suits are reasonable or fair or whether it’s really legally the companies’ fault and so on. If that’s your inclination, I propose that you consider it from the other side: Big companies use every tool in their arsenal to get what they want, regardless of whether it’s right or fair or good. If we want to take them on, we have to do the same. We call it a justice system, but in reality it’s just a fight over who gets to wield the state’s monopoly of violence to coerce other people into doing what they want, and any notions of justice or fairness are window dressing. That’s how power actually works. It doesn’t care about good faith vs bad faith arguments, and we can’t limit ourselves to only using our institutions within their veneer of rule of law when taking on powerful, exclusively self-interested, and completely antisocial institutions with no such scruples.

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.

Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.

All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.

When it snows and the roads are icy, what’s supposed to happen? What’s the plan for getting around, for getting to work, for getting to school? […] Are we suggesting that colder climates just shouldn’t be populated?

This line of questioning is really important, and it’s why I think there’s no addressing our devastation of the environment without digging deep into the assumptions of our society.

Society, as we understand it today, requires all of us going to work and school every day, no matter the weather, otherwise it doesn’t work. We can’t live like that. It just doesn’t work. We exist in the world, and our attempts to pretend like we are somehow apart or above it, that our daily lives shouldn’t be impacted by it, are destructive. We just can’t be in such a hurry all the time.

So yes, when the weather is bad, we need to slow down, focusing our efforts on our highest priority infrastructure, like ambulances, with everyone else taking a beat, or even pitching in. To do that, we need to rethink our society, because as things stand now, I agree with you, that’s not really possible.

This is why I think degrowth and socialism are the only human way through the climate crisis. Capitalism is a death cult of infinite growth that forces each of us to contribute to our own destruction every day because we have to get to work to live every single day.

Sorta… the second does some pretty thin analysis, and the refers right back to the same report, of which i am skeptical considering they were just caught bending the truth in their favor.

We need a robust and publicly accountable third party investigation. I fear we don’t have the political and institutional infrastructure to do that, and it’s going to be like how even just 50 years ago the FDA regularly was letting dangerous shit fly that they absolutely should’ve caught and that companies were straight up lying about.

Both of those links rely on the same self-reported data by Cruise… We’ll see, I suppose! Happy to be proven wrong. I live on a frozen hilly dirt road, so realistically, for me, it’s not going to happen.