throwaway82388

Peerless stylist of his generation, a serious thinker, and somehow managed to be fun alongside all of that. I haven’t kept up with his novels since Yellow Dog, but could recommend each and every one I’d read for something, even the duds were brimming with verve and original ideas. A major loss.

Whether the acting party is a friend or an enemy distinguishes the guilty from the blameless. Anything can be rationalized post facto. It’s the bedrock principle of contemporary politics and it’s breathtaking to witness.

I’m fairly certain that I’ve yet to visit an upper middle class household without a high end gas range, albeit hooded. Surely this disproportionally affects the foodies and amateur chefs of the world.

Plenty of think tanks and NGOs are on it. Google “personal carbon quota”

Vibe shift is just another term for a change in elite aspirant opinion. The vibe is localized to highly trend conscious social and professional milieus. These scenes are often regarded as a cultural vanguard, but are in fact often detached from the majority of the population, and are less harbingers of broad shifts in public opinion, and more simple reporters on their own microclimates. That is all to say, the hard numbers might not materialize for some time, if at all, and not for the reasons presently stated.

I think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.

I was politically conscious for his presidency (and a few more before it), and you make a good point or two, but I’d take issue with this characterization of the Bush years. His presidency was dynastic. He was a member of the political establishment, and a governor of Texas. He campaigned as a compassionate conservative, “a uniter, not a divider”. He (clumsily) spoke Spanish. “Global sourcing” accelerated during his presidency and he was a proponent of free trade. He was “a guy you’d want to have a beer with,” but his populist appeal didn’t extend beyond a superficial level, being photographed in cowboy clothes clearing brush on his ranch. His administration was made up of radical Nixon-era neocons with a handful of moderates who lent it credibility (Rice and Powell particularly). 9/11 of course radically altered history and enabled their worst excesses. A costly illegitimate war, naked cronyism, and a massive curtailing of civil liberties that remains to this day. Without a doubt the most destructive presidency I’ve witnessed.

He was not at all pugnacious, although, like Trump, the outrage he inspired was partly due to his lack of presidential decorum and sophistication. He put his foot in his mouth. He was a national embarrassment. But his image was that of a born-again Christian, with an upright moral posture. Quite a distance from the verbal pugilist who made ridiculous threats to celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell.

The Democratic opposition saw his election as illegitimate—the Pat Buchanan vote, hanging chad Florida controversy. Worth remembering. Not the first and certainly not the last disputed election.

I’d describe Trump and Musk as similarly adapted to the attention economy. But it is a similarity of style, as you said, and not necessarily politics.

While Bush II was far from the inventor of executive dissimulation, his administration did have a uniquely dysfunctional relationship with the truth. But truthiness was coined by Colbert, a brilliant critic of that administration, to describe things that aren’t true but feel true. It’s regrettable, but increasingly over the last five or six years, that term could be applied with similar frequency to claims made on either side of the aisle.

There are only two sides in the culture war. Any free-thinking criticism of one side places you in or aligns you with the opposition.

“If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Intelligent commentators mocked the famous George W. Bush line when he uttered it. But a decade and a half later and it’s the prevailing sentiment among many of the same people who ridiculed it.

Paul Krugman wrote recently that Elon Musk has “gone full MAGA.” The press will tell you what they can get away with. And right-thinking readers will uncritically accept it, for the most part. Trump was good for news traffic. My guess is that Musk is similarly good for business, judging on how many journalists seem to be on the Elon beat. I expect to read and hear a lot more of this for as long as that remains true.

There are a few responses people have found useful to misdirect and shut down conversation around this topic. Nothing burger, and the claim that it was about revenge porn, are strong signals that this is one such stock response.

It’s disappointing how the commenting postures surrounding culture war issues curtail curiosity, the spirit of inquiry more generally. A now naive-seeming but widely held assumption about the information revolution was that the instant availability of primary source material would lead to more informed public debate. It’s now apparent to me that knowing how you’re supposed to feel, and what others think, are more important— at the very least more useful— than any naive interest in trying to interpret the messy reality.

It does depend on the details. In special fields, like medical software, regulation might alter the market—although code even there is often revealed to be of poor quality.

But of all the examples of cheap and convenient beating quality: photography, film, music, et al, the many industries that digital technology has disrupted, newspapers are more analogous than builders. Software companies are publishers, like newspapers. And newspapers had entire building floors occupied by highly skilled mechanical typesetters, who have long been replaced. A handful of employees on a couple computers could do the job faster, more easily, and of good enough quality.

Software has already disrupted everything else, eventually it would disrupt the process of making software.

Anyone who has doubts has to look at the price. It’s free for now, and will be cheap enough when openai starts monetizing. Price wins over quality. It’s demonstrated time and time again.

That stereotypical insecure sportscar owner is certainly real. But not every one of them is insecure. Some just feel like they’ve won and deserve the spoils. And of course there are far more variables than I listed. I was just making some sweeping generalizations. I’ve met both. Old money, true to stereotype, tend to drive inconspicuous cars. I’m not old money, but I do the same.

A few weeks ago, no one would have predicted a major Google service going down before Twitter.

The question about cars is largely one of personality. Who drives bland cars? People who feel social pressure to not stand out, possibly who feel powerless, or who appreciate anonymity. Who drives flashy cars? People who feel important, who feel in control of their own circumstances and image, who think of themselves as iconoclastic.

I enjoyed the observations in this essay, but I missed the answer to the question in the title. I have a few thoughts in that direction.

Neutral colors like greige are fitting for our hypernetworked, hyperconformist age, where eccentric behavior, unconventional views, and standing out generally get you odd looks at best, surreptitiously filmed and socially shunned at worst. Being boring is an aesthetic survival mechanism, and entirely apt. As is the flimsy built environment.

Clothing is subject to fashion cycles so rapid, why would anyone make anything to last when it’s likely to be discarded and replaced in a year anyway?

Another banal observation, but architecture is subject to survivorship bias. Most of the mediocre buildings of the past have long since been demolished and replaced. We’re mostly familiar with successes. But the fact that buildings today are generally cheaper, uglier, and flimsier is true. And yet, people were making the same observation 100 years ago. And for decades before that.

General aesthetic degradation has been a more or less continual process since industrialization. It’s put more goods in the homes of more people, and the price is more uniformity and more ugliness. And it is relative. Our ugly present environment will possibly be an aesthetic high water mark to future generations, as midcentury aesthetics, derided for their ugliness in their time, seem to us today.

Google seems to be holding back due to AI safety concerns, and the problems inherent in doing anything at Google scale. I’m curious to see if potential market competition will change that.

I enjoy Rao’s writing, but he has a tendency to overindulge the occasional (and not particularly funny) mean-spirited joke, as well as over-stuffing his essays with half-formed ideas and references to his other work. His frequent insights make it worth it. He doesn’t seem afraid to occasionally get it spectacularly wrong. I admire someone willing to work out their ideas in such a public way.

As a milquetoast center-right op ed columnist for the Times, Brooks is a favorite target of a certain ideological bent (journos and bloggers who use twitter). And some of the criticism is deserved, but it often has the flavor of off-putting, personal vitriol. And Brooks has had a few decent pieces. His book Bohos in Paradise, although fairly dated, is recommended, and includes a few sharp and entertaining observations.

That sounds like a bad experience, but it’s not universal. It’s challenging to understand a platform from our individual vantage points (without access to internal dashboards), particularly on a network with between 2–3 billion MAUs. And if your personal interests are elsewhere, and your generational cohort is underrepresented. I’m an ‘elder millennial’ who got Facebook when it was still only for edu domains, and I’ve grown older with the service. I just briefly checked in with mine and within the last 24 hours I can see at least a dozen updates (all with decent engagement) from family and friends, some distant and others close. Babies being born, kids doing kid stuff, holiday posts. Pretty typical, particularly at this time of year. All that is to say, it’s all a function of your real world network. If I were the age I was when I started using Facebook, I’d probably find it desolate and boring, too.

But I would say ‘fairly durable’ is an apt description of an 18 year old service still operating at its scale. Exciting, maybe less than it once was. But fairly durable, certainly.

I regretted the Twitter comparison as soon as I reread my comment. I was thinking in broader terms — apps where the bulk of users follow creators and not personal contacts tend to grow and sustain very differently. But it’s so obviously most similar to YouTube, from a user perspective, it’s an accelerated YouTube experience.

It is remarkable how hard it is for a business to simply last a decade. To do it at the scale of the incumbent apps is astounding to me.

While TikTok is growing quickly, we still don’t know its long term potential, how ‘sticky’ it is. I’d predict it has a trajectory more like Twitter and less like Snapchat. But it could well become a YouTube. All we can do is wait and find out.

I’d bet a solid majority, like it is on any social platform. Most users don’t post or engage.

Biggest predictor for Facebook and IG use among my sample of friends is whether they’re married and have families, or in many cases, pets. In my sample, many own homes or property. Not where the growth is, but not worthless from a revenue standpoint.

One thing is clear: the problem—the problems—are too multivariate for any one solution. Programs like these are triage, the root causes are distant and largely unaddressed.

That is a reasonable assumption, however, many opioid users deliberately use fentanyl.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09553...

I’m far from bullish on meta long-term, but reporting like this would have you believe that nobody uses Facebook, and that Instagram is soon to share its fate. Optimists that they are, tech reporters overweight growth to absurd extremes. Maybe reporting on youth trends brings out the insecurities in all of us—you’d rather not look clueless in front of your two cool friends in their early 20s than the 2 billion or so Facebook MAUs.

TikTok is a platform with huge growth potential. IG is perceptibly declining. But Facebook has proven itself fairly durable, mostly to people outside tech and media bubbles. It’d be wise to not call it over just yet.

It’s an unpopular opinion but I find it all funny too, for the reasons you described. The degree to which people are experiencing self-righteous outrage over twitter is in direct proportion to how histrionic and annoying their personas are. Twitter may have had some fine contributors, but I think it was a net negative on culture, and encouraged shallow thinking and moral grandstanding.

And there’s an upside. If the people threatening to leave actually do, it will likely make the platform better.

I got to use one, and my impression was that it an expensive, impractical, heavy, underpowered machine with a low contrast lcd that made the cursor difficult to see when it was in motion. It was also cool, futuristic, like nothing I’d seen before. It was a novelty, people crowded around it.

But you’d have been better off lugging around an SE/30.

The most persuasive argument for Apple as trustworthy on privacy was weak: that because they didn’t monetize data as rapaciously as Google or Meta, there was less incentive for them to spy on users.

But once they introduced new privacy controls, they seemed to suddenly start investing more seriously in their own advertising network. That, and the encryption slight-of-hand with iCloud, makes the cynic’s case for them.

App telemetry, metrics, etc might get handwaved away with a sinister phrase, like “essential for improving user experience.” But placing trust in a company on privacy due to the relative lack of financial incentive seems hopelessly naive.

Twitter’s policy has always prohibited impersonation, but the immediate action is new.

As others have pointed out, this will become far more difficult to enforce as blue checks proliferate.

Twitter is a very successful product, but by most accounts a highly dysfunctional company. They have one hit product, the core microblogging service. It has evolved admirably. But new products and features introduced by Twitter have had chequered success, to be charitable. Promising acquisitions in growth areas (Periscope, Vine) have withered and died under their stewardship.

The value of their core product is not primarily technical but social and cultural, as has been pointed out ad infinitum (the “twitter clone” microblogging weekend project in new language/framework is a cliche). Musk does have the ability to quickly burn that cultural capital. But it’s too early to tell to what extent it will happen, and in what ways it will hurt the service.

Even the most outraged user claims are unreliable. Too many users get too much value out of the professional, cultural and social networks they’ve formed using Twitter. I’ve already read one gloomy, regretful account of migrating to mastodon. There’s a high probability that many of these users, who are loud but unquestionably in the minority, will eventually return after self imposed exile.

Whether the product itself will implode or degrade for technical reasons, very few are in a position to accurately predict.

Comparing Twitter to Atari seems unfair to Atari, a company that had success in several markets and that successfully innovated for a sustained period of time.

I think an instructive comparison may be Musk’s acquisition of The Onion staff, which (according to my memory of the incident) he did primarily out of spite. His attempt to launch a rival humor website with those writers flopped disastrously, and was quickly forgotten. It’s support for the argument that Musk will approach a cultural product with an engineering mindset. But it remains to be seen what, if anything, he learned from that experience.