NFTs in particular were the point where I went "oh, there isn't even a *pitch* for an upside, they're just demanding everybody take this money-making machine they've presented practically no beneficial or fun or even logically coherent applications of seriously"

It's not like there was a time I fully loved or trusted lots of companies, but the metaverse and NFT boom was probably the moment I fully lost interest in a massive chunk of what they were doing on even a "there's big problems but I see the basic appeal" level.

There's also the impact of MeToo on the tech industry starting around that time, which made a lot of individual people in tech look a lot grosser during a period where that was considered bad — Travis Kalanick stepped down even before that movement in 2017 for instance.

2018 was also the year of controversy over Project Maven which was one of the first really well-known "modern consumer tech goes military" incidents, and Project Dragonfly which started positioning tech companies as more authoritarianism-friendly.

It's also the year after Facebook got linked to the Rohingya genocide and Whatsapp to lynchings in India, which just about everyone in tech media covered at the company response to.

It's a lot harder to cover the next big exciting thing when big incumbents buy it up and smother it immediately. It's a lot less fun to talk to tech guys that are seething with contempt for everyone. It's a lot less fun to cover products when the pitch is "you'll find a use for it, probably."

I see a million tech moguls complaining that media coverage has become "anti-tech" like some kind of spontaneous vibe shift, and regrettably few wondering if, maybe, the issue is that a bunch of the tech industry became less worthy of being positive about over the past several years.

the coolest storage medium. I wish we were passing around minidiscs all the time

curtis sliwa is basically an escape from new york character already

Corruption trickles down. A society where corruption at the highest levels is blatant, normalized, and winked at tends to become a society in which ordinary people are not only dishonest, but view honesty as a trait of saps and fools too dimwitted to see how the world works.

An indie survival horror game def doesn't disprove the thesis, but I will say Amnesia Rebirth was an interesting attempt at this.

I've seen speculation this is ragebait, but I think that underestimates the extent to which this was unironically a vibe when I started covering tech 15 years ago. The owner of X wants to set women back by about 150 years, so relatively speaking, a decade and a half isn't so bad.

having enjoyed The Ritual as a pretty decent folk-horror movie I did not expect the book to be 200 pages of almost unbearably oppressive The Terror-style creepiness followed by one of the weirdest incidents of tonal whiplash I've ever read

In a saner world I would be putting this energy toward criticizing corporate revolving doors and the like but here we are

My case for would be Dan Bongino, who *did* leave his podcast to join the FBI and became so miserable he quit.

I feel like we agree, I just want to target removing the incentive for podcasters to go into policy

To be clear the main goal of the podcast ban would not be stopping people wasting time making them, it'd be weeding people who mainly want to be influencers out of nuts-and-bolts government roles.

A tweet from RFK Jr. reading "Coming soon, the secretary kennedy podcast," with a thumbnail of RFK Jr.

Fully think American governance would improve by 20% if we banned appointed officials from having personal podcasts.

Twitter a deeply strange and haunted place these days

A screenshot of a Verge quickpost reading: "PSA: I am not Sam Altman’s sister.But apparently when you write a story about something, sometimes your profile photo comes up in the image search results for it, and a major X account doesn’t bother clicking through to figure that out." Followed by a tweet of X account Coinvo posting a picture of author Hayden Field (who is not Sam Altman's sister) in a post about Sam Altman's sister filing a sexual abuse lawsuit against him.

ladies and gentlemen, the x information ecosystem www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

i
cry
when angels deserve to dieeeee

This may be unfair stereotyping but I wonder how much of the epilogue discourse is that booktok leans romance-heavy so they only know epilogues as the tacked-on "and then we got married and had babies" scene.

I assume you've been introduced to the "I only read the dialogue because that's where things in a book happen" folks

It feels *deeply* like the interpretation of somebody who's filtered the Bible through Left Behind and general LaHaye-style evangelicalism, despite the fact that afaik he's never mentioned them.

this would 100% rule

I feel like I'm too lazy and egotistical to really follow a cult leader but give me some floating gender-related stochastic terrorism thing and I'm a sitting duck.

hey what's up guys welcome back to Reviewing The Library of Babel, today's book is AAAAAAABAAAAAAAAB

I'd love to get over this because honestly my sense is Weir defines "politics" as "soviet agitprop level didacticism" and is also just sort of trolling a little, but it's tough for me to get excited about his stuff when there are so many other books out there.

The irony of Andy Weir popping out over the years to repeatedly insist he has *no* politics and *no* worldview and his books are *purely* well-crafted entertainment with *nothing* to say is that he makes his own work sound so boring I've been put off ever reading it.