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In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
#pfas #tech #ecosystem #Environment #microplastics #neverforgivethem #AI
on Thu, 1PM
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I promise you, everything that's happening makes sense. It all feels so chaotic, so utterly, offensively stupid, so disconnected from reality that it's hard to understand how Meta can run a terrible company with decaying services that's also wildly profitable, or how Meta, Microsoft and Google...
on Jul 2
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Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At
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The Words of Ed Zitron, a PR person and writer.
on Apr 16
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Before we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable
on Dec 4
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Soundtrack: Post Pop Depression - Paraguay I haven't wanted to write much in the last week. Seemingly every single person on Earth with a blog has tried to drill down into what happened on November 5 — to find the people to blame, to somehow explain what could've been done differently,
on Nov 14
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At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job...
on Nov 1
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Last week, Prabhakar Raghavan was relieved of duty as Senior Vice President of Search, becoming Google's "Chief Technologist." An important rule to follow with somebody's title in Silicon Valley is that if you can't tell what it means, it probably doesn't mean anything. The most notorious...
on Oct 22
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You Can't Make Friends With The Rockstars
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You cannot make friends with the rock stars...if you're going to be a true journalist, you know, a rock journalist. First, you never get paid much, but you will get free records from the record company. [There’s] fuckin’ nothin' about you that is controversial. God, it's gonna get
on Oct 17
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OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after
on Oct 2
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Buried in the 8000 words I wrote last week was a worrying story — that Microsoft considered drastic measures to free up capacity in its US-based servers for GPUs to power the AI boom. In an email shared with me by a source from earlier this year, Microsoft's senior leadership team
on Sep 28
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Soundtrack: Masters of Reality - High Noon Amsterdam I have said almost everything in this piece in every one of these articles for months. I am not upset, but just stating an obvious truth. The current state of affairs effectively pushes against the boundaries of good sense, logic and reason,
on Sep 26
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None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
on Sep 17
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Last week, Meta revealed (in a motion trying to dismiss an FTC anti-monopoly lawsuit) that Instagram made an astonishing $32.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021. That figure becomes even more shocking when you consider Google's YouTube made $28.8 billion in the same period. Bloomberg...
on Sep 8
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Matt Stoller Explains Monopolies
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The latest episode of my podcast Better Offline is a conversation with Matt Stoller — America’s leading voice on monopoly and antitrust matters, and a thoughtful and prolific writer. You can find Matt on Twitter here, and his newsletter here. It was a timely conversation. At the start of August,
on Aug 28
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Last week, in the midst of the slow, painful collapse of the generative AI hype cycle, something incredible happened. On Monday, a Federal Judge delivered a crushing ruling in the multi-year-long antitrust case filed against Google by the Department of Justice. In 300-pages of dense legal text,...
on Aug 13
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Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
on Jul 29
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Rot Economics - An Interview With MIT's Daron Acemoglu
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Want to listen to this interview instead? Download the latest episode of Better Offline! You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you can insert an RSS feed. Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing Daron Acemoglu — one of the world’s most important and
on Jul 25
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Soundtrack: EL-P - Tasmanian Pain Coaster (feat. Omar Rodriguez-Lopez & Cedric Bixler-Zavala) When I first began writing this newsletter, I didn't really have a goal, or a "theme," or anything that could neatly characterize what I was going to write about other than that I was on the computer and that
on Jul 20
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I feel like the tech industry is currently in the midst of the most bizarre cognitive dissonance I've ever seen — more so than the metaverse, even — as company after company simply lies about their intentions and the power of AI. I get it. Everybody wants something to be excited about.
on Jul 17
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The Internet Is Already Broken
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My personal inbox, as it stands, is largely useless. Of the 100 emails I can see at a glance, two of them are things I asked for — changes to a profile, an order receipt – and the rest are adverts from companies that I have absolutely unsubscribed from.
on Jul 9
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A week and a half ago, Goldman Sachs put out a 31-page-report (titled "Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) that includes some of the most damning literature on generative AI I've ever seen. And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been
on Jul 9
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Last week, Apple announced “Apple Intelligence,” a suite of features coming to iOS 18 (the next version of the iPhone’s software) in a presentation that FastCompany called “uninspired,” Futurism called “boring,” and Axios claimed “failed to excite investors.” The presentation, given at Apple’s...
on Jun 25
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Silicon Valley's False Prophet
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Like this newsletter? Subscribe to my podcast Better Offline - this week we've got a two parter digging into Sam Altman, with a deeper dive featuring Tom Dotan of the Wall Street Journal (Part 1) and Ellen Huet (Part 2, airing Friday.) I think you'll love the back-catalog too! The
on Jun 24
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If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two parter that further expands on the Rot-Com Bubble, coming out Wednesday and Friday. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at the core of every issue that I've ever written about.
on Jun 4
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In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12.37 billion dollars of which was pure profit. Though the company no longer reports daily active users, it now uses another metric: “family daily active people.” This number refers to “registered and logged-in users of one
on May 28
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Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
on May 21
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The People Deliberately Killing Facebook
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Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now algorithmic nightmares that constantly interrupt you with suggested content and advertisements that consistently...
on May 20
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A few months ago, OpenAI showed off “Sora,” a product that can generate videos based on a short prompt, much like ChatGPT does for text or DALL-E does for images, and I asked myself a pretty simple question: "...how can someone actually make something useful out of this?" and "how
on May 13
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Thank you to Emily Shepherd for her hard work reporting parts of this story, as well as her assistance clarifying details related to GAMA and finding company documents related to Rabbit and Cyber Manufacture. In November 2021, a company called Cyber Manufacture Co raised $6 million for its...
on May 6
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Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the...
on Apr 29
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Amongst the sludge of AI-powered everything at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, a robbery took place. “Dudesy —” allegedly a “comedy artificial intelligence” with its own podcast — put out an hour-long “impression” of George Carlin, in which it had “listened to all of Carlin’s material”...
on Apr 27
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The Man Who Killed Google Search
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Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. This is the story of how Google Search died, and the people responsible for killing it. The...
on Apr 26
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Google has chosen to send a response to my article to Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable. Here is my response. (1) On the March 2019 core update claim in the piece: This is baseless speculation. The March 2019 core update was designed to improve the quality of our search
on Apr 26
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At the center of everything I’ve written for the last few months (if not the last few years), sits a cancerous problem with the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the concept...
on Apr 17
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Two years ago, I remember reading multiple people emphatically telling their readers that NFTs (non-fungible tokens) would change everything — that people “wanted” to own a unique digital object, and indeed that said uniqueness would make pictures of apes
on Apr 16
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As I previously warned, artificial intelligence companies are running out of data. A Wall Street Journal piece from this week has sounded the alarm that some believe AI models will run out of "high-quality text-based data" within the next two years in what an AI researcher called "a frontier research
on Apr 4
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Money can't buy happiness, but it can get you pretty damn close. As the second richest man alive, Elon Musk should be rolling electric coal down Rodeo Drive in a cybertruck, smugly aware of the fact that, despite what the haters say, he's kind of won. He took Twitter private,
on Mar 28
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Last week, the Wall Street Journal published a 10-minute-long interview with OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, with journalist Joanna Stern asking a series of thoughtful yet straightforward questions that Murati failed to satisfactorily answer. When asked about what data was used to train Sora, OpenAI's...
on Mar 18
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Are We Watching The Internet Die?
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Sometime this month, Reddit will go public at a valuation of $6.5bn. Select Redditors were offered the chance to buy stock at the initial listing price, which it hasn’t announced yet but is expected to be in the range of $31-34 per share. Regardless of the actual price,
on Mar 17
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Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it...
on Mar 10
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Google Should Fire Sundar Pichai
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In a 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai (who has received over a billion dollars in stock grants alone over the last few years) said that “there has to be a dialogue of respect on both sides” in the modern workplace. Just under a year-and-a-half later,
on Mar 9
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As I wrote a year ago in The Rot Economy (and as I argued on the first episode of my podcast Better Offline), I believe that both public and private markets have become decoupled from the concept of "good business," ruled instead by a hunger for the eternal growth of
on Mar 2
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Episodes 1 and 2 Out Now Hello everybody! A short newsletter today to announce the launch of my new podcast Better Offline - my new tech show from iHeartRadio and Cool Zone Media. It's a weekly exploring the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society - and interrogating the
on Mar 1
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Please scroll to the bottom for news on my next big project, Better Offline, coming this Wednesday! Last week, Sam Altman debuted OpenAI's "Sora," a text-to-video AI model that turns strings of text into full-blown videos, much like how OpenAI's DALL-E turns text into images. These videos —...
on Feb 23
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The Apple Vision Pro: A Review
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I’ve spent a lot of time with the Vision Pro, turning my experience into both the newsletter you’re reading and one of the first two episodes of my upcoming iHeartRadio podcast Better Offline. I wrote the majority of this newsletter on the Vision Pro itself, though as you’
on Feb 12
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How Tech Outstayed Its Welcome
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Last week, Apple opened pre-orders for the Vision Pro, a $3500 “spatial computer” that is its first real “new” thing since the Apple Watch, and arguably its most notable release since the iPad or iPhone. Ming-Chi Kuo, one of the few truly reliable Apple analysts, estimates that the Vision Pro
on Jan 30
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Amongst the sludge of AI-powered everything at last week’s Consumer Electronics Show, a robbery took place. “Dudesy —” allegedly a “comedy artificial intelligence” with its own podcast — put out an hour-long “impression” of George Carlin, in which it had “listened to all of Carlin’s material”...
on Jan 23
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Editor’s note: Platformer has announced it will leave Substack and be moving to Ghost next week. Casey did the right thing. The following story ran January 11 2024. At the end of a newsletter back in 2022, I retold a story shared by Michael B. Tager about a situation in a crust-punk bar, where...
on Jan 21
From wheresyoured.at
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Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it...
on Dec 18, 2023
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Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Sorry! Last week, dressed like a destitute bombardier, Elon Musk delivered a stark message to advertisers: don’t want to advertise on X?
on Dec 5, 2023