Reading list
Shortform reading
This is an incomplete list of the shortform reading (and listening and watching) I’ve been doing lately.
Anthropic and OpenAI Have Begun The Subprime AI Crisis
The AI bubble popping will not be one single event, but a succession of smaller ones, and I believe this situation is one of them.
#artificial-intelligence · #enshittification · #tech-industry
It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.
Yet my — and I'd imagine your — frustration isn't borne of a hatred of technology, or a dislike of the internet, or a lack of appreciation of what it can do, but the sense that all of this was once better, and that these companies have turned impeding our use of the computer into an incredibly profitable business.
#better-web · #enshittification · #tech-industry · #technology
FTC Chair Lina Khan: The Better Offline Interview (Podcast)
FTC Chair Lina Khan joins Ed Zitron to talk about competitiveness in the tech industry, controlling the cloud giants, and what should give you hope as we head into 2025.
The Invisible War (Podcast)
In this year's two-part finale, Ed Zitron enumerates the damage being done to billions of people by the growth-at-all-costs Rot Economy - and why you need to have solidarity with your fellow user.
Why wouldn't people crave change? Why wouldn't people be angry? Living in the current world can be absolutely fucking miserable, bereft of industry and filthy with manipulation, an undignified existence, a disrespectful existence that must be crushed if we want to escape the depressing world we've found ourselves in. Our media institutions are fully fucking capable of dealing with these problems, but it starts with actually evaluating them and aggressively interrogating them without fearing accusations of bias that will happen either way.
The truth is that the media is more afraid of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer’s voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, and no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power.
I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
#better-web · #bluesky · #enshittification · #fediverse · #social-media
We can fight back by bookmarking a web page or sharing a piece of art unsanctioned by our For Your Page. To do that we must get out there and raw dog that open web.
Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain (Podcast)
The open web is still there. It's still being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing, and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a future Google competitor (it is not SearchGPT), I think that, I don't know, we could find it again. I think that there could be if these companies were realigned so that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet. There is plenty of original, human-created content out there. It's just that Google and Being and all of these sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing us it and we have to search for it through social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough to build a following because all of the algorithms people are built to rely on are broken now.