Jay Hoffmann

As Ek makes clear, even the COVID pandemic can be put to use by Spotify’s strategy, as can the death of an existing medium for music, “linear radio” (more commonly known as “radio”).

The business model of the Internet is interesting. There is no rule, for instance, that tech companies “move fast and break things.” Nor that growth at all costs is a reasonable goal or that a simple exchange of payment for goods or services is not possible. And yet, business on the Internet often follows the path of Spotify rather than Bandcamp.

There is an interesting history of both platforms in this piece (one tidbit: Bandcamp’s success came, in part, from people searching for music plus the word “limewire,” but opting to go to Bandcamp’s site and just paying for it. People want to pay for their music, seems to be the lesson, they just want it to be easy). But it is also a commentary on the ethos of popular web platforms. A world in which a company like Bandcamp, with its focus on tangible things like people and music, will never be able to compete with Spotify, with its focus on users and audio.

In the wake of Trump’s defeat, analysts have pondered whether his brand of populism might represent the conservative future. But this misunderstands his role. There is no discernible Trumpism independent of Trump himself.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, former Romney advisor Oren Cass offers an alternative view on the future of conservatism, one that I don’t think other conservatives will be quick to embrace, but one that I think could have a future as the GOP moves from a majority party to a minority party fighting to exert control.

Crass draws heavily on the most traditional of conservative thinkers, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke, throughout the piece. What’s interesting to me is that he seems to think that conservatives have a place in the modern labor movement. Citing Adam Smith’s notion that “the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity, and fall with the declension, of the society, on the contrary, it is naturally low in rich, and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin,” Crass believes that the labor movement’s embrace of the worker against the unregulated capitalist is, in fact, not incompatible with what conservatism could look like.

I’m not saying I could ever find myself among the conservative movement, I doubt I could. But one that stands lockstep with the labor movement would be… hard to avoid.

And maybe here, we do have an aesthetic counter to the wallflower non-style of Big Tech: a raging messy semiotic meltdown of radicalizing (if absurdist) meme culture where the only ideological no-go zone is the liberal center.

• Caroline Busta

A really fascinating look at the counterculture of now and the future, whereby the youth (those pesky Gen Zers) have realized that the hegemonic forces of dominant culture are a splintered and fractured and contradictory mix of tech and culture from all sides, as opposed to the kind of Nixon era monolithic forth of the hegemony of our parents. And so, this group engages in an imagined alternate universe (climate change collapse, Bitcoin) where our digital infrastructure enters its heat death, and is replaced by something different. All of this, while engaging with one another on the very platforms that they hope to see collapse.

But it does help to explain some of the newer platforms coming to the surface, Substack, Discord and the link. They are, by design, anonymous, smaller, randomized, and restricted by design. There are many old timers like myself that are looking to the past, a more nostalgic and personal web. But the future of the web may look something that intentionally obfuscates as a way of makeshift gate keeping. In other words, platforms like Substack and Discord add friction to engaging with them, be it through actual monetization or decentralization, and this keeps people out. Busta calls this the “dark forest” of the web and it is the only way that the counter culture is able to fully resist the attention economy.

Ezra Klein at his new editorial home in the New York Times on the contradiction of a conservative, progressive California:

There is an old finding in political science that Americans are “symbolically conservative” but “operationally liberal.” Americans talk like conservatives but want to be governed like liberals. In California, the same split political personality exists, but in reverse: We’re often symbolically liberal, but operationally conservative.

At a certain point, progressive Americans, myself included, are going to have to realize that an equitable future will require change in their own backyard. I hesitate to say it will require sacrifice, because this is not a zero-sum game and the stakes are not that high.

San Francisco is about 48 percent white, but that falls to 15 percent for children enrolled in its public schools. For all the city’s vaunted progressivism, it has some of the highest private school enrollment numbers in the country

Take credit for what CSS has done. Don’t say: “Web standards did this” Do say: “We’ve set up a system that will automatically format the page whenever you update it.” Let the client think you’re smart and give you more business… Show don’t sell

– Jeffrey Zeldman I was doing a bit of research on the Web Standards Project and stumbled upon this old bit of advice from 2002 from WaSP co-founder Jeffrey Zeldman. The argument hasn’t changed, even if the priorities have. If you are trying to convince clients that it is in their best interest to improve performance, or accessibility, just remember to show, don’t sell.

Design got its seat at the table, developed a business mindset, became increasingly inclusive, and finally grew up. So much to celebrate and so much distance travelled, and yet design seems relatively passive and polite; acquiescent in a build-by-numbers assembly process.

I find myself returning to the same bit of circular thinking that Simon Collison describes in his post This used to be our playground. The web was more fun when it began. There was more experimentation, a friendlier atmosphere and creative approaches to design. Things are more, well, boring now. But, of course, the web is the plumbing for every major opeartional necessity on the planet. Its infastructure now, not a playground. But, Collison seems to argue, it can be both.

In any case, I think this is an excellent summation of the direction that a personal site can go, and the way in which we can reclaim a bit of our personal expression. It also happens to be a great jumping off point to lots of fantastic and inspirational links.

And we did a lot of work — Stacey Abrams, Latosha Brown, so many activists across the country in Arizona, Georgia, who built infrastructure — to convince people that they should give us one more shot to trust that the government will step in and do something that matters. We’ve got to deliver.

As I keep attempting to unravel the events of last week again and again, I find myself coming to it from so many different angles. Congresswoman Jayapal lends a brand new voice in a moving and stark interview with Rebecca Traister at The Cut.

She highlights some details I hadn’t previously known. They seemed to be aware of the threat, the representatives were given strict instructions and told to bring overnight bags. And there does appear to have been intentional oversights by law enforcement, the question is simply at what level and at what part of the system.

But even more so, Jayapal is rallying for hope. Not the hope of the Obama era, the boundless optimism of an egalatarian neoliberal future. Jayapal’s hope is with the people she represents. She believes that the voting public has put their faith in the government this one last time. And they better damn well do something with that chance.

The knowledge sector’s insistence that productivity is a personal issue seems to have created a so-called “tragedy of the commons” scenario, in which individuals making reasonable decisions for themselves insure a negative group outcome. An office worker’s life is dramatically easier, in the moment, if she can send messages that demand immediate responses from her colleagues, or disseminate requests and tasks to others in an ad-hoc manner

I find myself returning to this question a lot: can the United States ever escape its individualism? Should it? Most recently this came to mind in a small way, when I was reading over Cal Newport’s “Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.” The article is interesting for a number of reasons — as a history of Merlin Mann, 43 Folders and Gettings Things Done, and a critique of mechanisms of modern industrial “knowledge work” — but it illuminates this point rather well. Through our individualism, we have cultivated a workplace environment that incentivizes autonomy and personal efficency. A greater collectivism at work, thinking of others first, may lead to a less stressful, more productive workplace for everyone. But it is not something I think we can every truly do.

Part of what’s made Covid dangerous is that we got so good at preventing pandemics in the last century that few people before January assumed an infectious disease would ever impact their lives. It was hard to even comprehend. The irony of good times is that they breed complacency and skepticism of warnings.

Morgan Housel extracts lessons from the present moment by thinking like a historian rather than an analyst. For everyday people, there is a lot to learn from what we are currently going through. But it’s not how to manage a pandemic, it’s how society reacts to shared trauma.

I recently had a chance to go back and read Jane Mayer’s incredible profile on David Addigton, Cheney’s right-hand man during the Bush years. She outlines the power-play that Cheney and Addington engaged in, pulling from a Reagan era playbook to expand the powers of the Presidency to extralegal judicial rulings and commissions, and even to spying on U.S. citizens. An incredible read.

There’s a lot I like about Anna Wiener’s look at Moxie Marlinspike and Signal, and she frames it in a modern context couched in the beliefs of Marlinspike, who has done some great things. There’s a lot of strong assertions about privacy which are needed. But I was struck by this passage, which is kind of mentioned in passing:

What we didn’t necessarily anticipate, when everyone was so optimistic, was how little it would change things. The dream was always that, if someone in the suburbs of St. Louis got killed by a cop, immediately everyone would know about it. At the time, it was a sort of foregone conclusion that that would be enough.” “Enough for what?” I asked. “To prevent that from happening,” he replied, flatly.