John Semley, Defector:

At a very basic level, commodity fetishism is fine, and probably pretty normal: a way of declaring, “Here is my stuff that I like.” It can be an expression not only of personal curatorial habits, but of taste, and identity. But commodities conceived along the line of Record Store Day exclusives push this to an extreme. Their use-value is practically nil. They are only commodities. And as far as statements of taste and identity go, they announce only “I am a big-time commodity fetishist!”

It is truly remarkable to me how pliable we all are even when we know these tactics. We know this is why smartphones come in different colours every year, and why there is the very notion of a “limited edition” even if that edition numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

To repurpose or recontextualize Goodhart’s law, when something becomes the product of attention, it will eventually lose the reason for that attention. Record Store Day began in good faith, which has been taken advantage of to, in 2025, sell Post Malone’s Nirvana livestream on vinyl for $37. Be quick — there are only seventeen thousand copies available.

Rakhim Davletkaliyev:

Overall, consistency, user control, and actual UX innovation are in decline. Everything is converging on TikTok — which is basically TV with infinite channels. You don’t control anything except the channel switch. It’s like Carcinisation, a form of convergent evolution where unrelated crustaceans all evolve into something vaguely crab-shaped.

There is an element of this critique that feels very now and may become outdated, as TikTok’s relevance could perhaps fade with time, but platforms wresting control from users and foisting decisions upon them is a long and ongoing trend. To wit, here is Davletkaliyev:

Even the “New” section [in Netflix] is meaningless. It opens with a “For You” row (huh?), then “Continue Watching”, followed by generic “Popular in ” rows. It feels like YouTube search: ask for something specific, get a few hits, and then a flood of unrelated “popular” and “recommended” content.

The screenshots preceding this paragraph show Netflix’s homepage in 2012. The subtitle on the page reads “Based on what you like, we’ve filled it with personalized suggestions JUST FOR YOU”. The first row of items is “Popular on Netflix”. These are superficially similar qualities to those Davletkaliyev complains about in Netflix today.

If you scratch a little deeper, I think the version today feels different for two reasons. First, Netflix has a lot more original media; instead of a page filled with movies and shows you recognize, it is now full of Netflix-branded material. Second, Netflix is just one of many services prioritizing recommendations and suggestions, and perhaps this feeling accumulates to the point where none seem to be serving our interests. Davletkaliyev’s other example is Spotify, but it could just as easily be Apple Music. I use it very simply, yet I feel as though I am fighting with its home screen. I have to use entirely separate apps — MusicHarbor and Record Club — to learn about new releases from my favourite artists. If I dip into one of the suggestions and then go back to the home screen, the whole thing usually refreshes and shows me entirely different suggestions. It is all just one big fight with large business interests.

Want to experience twice as fast load times in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock: 2.0× Faster Web Browsing in Safari

As an efficient, high performance and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances – delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

By cutting down on ads and trackers, common news websites load 2× faster and browsing uses less data while saving energy and battery life.

Rely on Magic Lasso Adblock to:

  • Improve your privacy and security by removing ad trackers

  • Block all YouTube ads, including pre-roll video ads

  • Block annoying cookie notices and privacy prompts

  • Double battery life during heavy web browsing

  • Lower data usage when on the go

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers, and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

Kyle Chayka, of the New Yorker, wrote a pretty good profile of Bluesky and its CEO Jay Graber recently which, as it turns out, is his third in what is now a set of articles about the post-Twitter services trio. On Mastodon in November 2022:

Users who want to have a lively, varied experience on Mastodon have to put in effort, too. On Twitter, you log in to your account and are immediately thrust into the melee of the “global town square,” for better or worse. On Mastodon, you can start accounts on as many servers as you like but you have to log on to each one in turn, as if each were its own separate social network. The server your account is hosted on is embedded in your username (mine is @chaykak@zirk.us) and becomes a kind of home base. Mastodon offers various feed configurations, from a “local” one that shows only posts from accounts on your server to a more bustling admixture of all the users you follow across any server. There’s a tool called Debirdify that can tell you which Twitter users you follow are already on Mastodon. But Mastodon’s built-in friction and fragmentation make it harder to communicate with many people at once. You can peer into servers you don’t belong to, like a curious tourist, but you won’t be able to post to their feeds.

This is a strange interpretation of how Mastodon works. It is technically correct but irrelevant; there is no need for someone to have accounts on multiple servers as they all communicate over the same protocol. You do not need a Gmail account to send a message to a Gmail user, for example. But I think it illustrates the perceived complexity of the service while, unfortunately, doing little to clarify it.

Do not get me wrong — I like Mastodon a lot. It is the post-Twitter service I use most often. But it reminds me a lot of something like Usenet or mailing lists while the others remind me of forums. It has a little more technical overhead and a few more quirks. If you are sent a link to a post on another server, for example, and you want to boost it, you have to go find it from your own server. It remains a clunky process.

Next up, Chayka wrote about Threads in July 2023, shortly after it launched:1

[…] It is currently impossible to see posts solely from followed accounts; Meta executives promise that a chronological feed is in the works, but, as on Facebook and Instagram, that feature is unlikely to be the default. As a result, much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter — posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians. The Threads feed rarely appears in a chronological order and often serves up disparate posts from the same account in a row.

Even though Meta has made many changes to Threads in the interim, it still feels like a pretty hollow place. Jon Passantino, of Status, attributes this “lifeless” feeling to “Meta’s antagonistic relationship with power users” — an “indifference toward those powering the platform”. Perhaps.

I think the problem is simpler: Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel. It has all the attitude of a corporate retreat and the energy of a midsize rental car. That is simply the vibe Meta brings. No amount of power users can change that.

Finally, on Bluesky. This is the second such article published by the New Yorker about the platform; the first was in May 2023, but that one was shorter and not by Chayka, so it does not fit the theme I am setting. Chayka:

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line — just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

A punk rock attitude is not really compatible with being a corporate executive — only to the detriment of the latter — yet Graber and Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko are the closest I have felt to that spirit. I hope I am not wrong about either of them. I feel like these two platforms can coexist without either one needing to win or become absorbed in the drama of the other. I am a little disappointed to read the two “discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol”. I think it is fine to keep them entirely separate, but it makes sense to me for the two to be compatible so long as they retain a spirit of openness and portability.


  1. This article ends:

    […] What I still miss is the dependable simplicity of Twitter, the digital Brutalism of two-hundred-and-forty-character bursts of news in a constant stream. Neither Twitter itself nor its competitors have lately been able to capture that energy.

    This appears to be a reference to Twitter’s character limit, but that was 140 characters before becoming 280. One could make the argument the latter character limit is inclusive of Chayka’s example, but that is clearly not what he is going for. One would think that is something the New Yorker’s famously rigorous fact-checkers would ask about. ↥︎

Birgit Mueller, Chris Danis, and Giuseppe Lavagetto, of the Wikimedia Foundation:

Since January 2024, we have seen the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content grow by 50%. This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.

Given the sheer volume of stuff scraped by A.I. companies, it is hard to say how much value any single source has in generating material in response to an arbitrary request. Wikimedia might be the exception, however. It is so central and its contents so expansive that it is hard to imagine many of these products would be nearly so successful without it.

I do not see the names of any of the most well-known A.I. companies among the foundation’s largest donors. Perhaps they are the seven anonymous donors in the $50,000-and-up group. I suggest they, at the very least, give more generously and openly.

Alexander Lee, Digiday:

A year after leaving Substack in early 2024, newsletter writers are making more money peddling their words on other platforms.

Across the board, writers such as Marisa Kabas, Luke O’Neil, Jonathan M. Katz and Ryan Broderick — all of whom exited Substack in early 2024 following the publication of an open letter in December 2023 decrying the presence of politically extreme voices on the platform — told Digiday that they are receiving a higher share of subscription revenue after making the switch from Substack to rival newsletter services such as Ghost and Beehiiv.

That these services are less expensive for writers is distinct from subscriber growth. Substack’s network is surely a subscription driver, but that becomes less important as a writer’s popularity grows and people begin spreading their work in other ways. Beehiiv and Ghost are a little more old-fashioned — which is not necessarily a bad thing: they focus on providing a specific service instead of trying to be a social media company. But that means more self-promotional efforts by less established writers.

I needed cheering up after the last post. Sorry about that.

Jen Simmons, of Apple’s WebKit team:

While support for pretty shipped in Chrome 117, Edge 177, and Opera 103 in Fall 2023, and Samsung Internet 24 in 2024, the Chromium version is more limited in what it accomplishes. According to an article by the Chrome team, Chromium only makes adjustments to the last four lines of a paragraph. It’s focused on preventing short last lines. It also adjusts hyphenation if consecutive hyphenated lines appear at the end of a paragraph.

The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps.

Where many in my profession get excited for new APIs to make web apps more capable, this is what brings me similar joy. Maybe more. I love to see any typography improvements on the web which I, in my finest fuddy-duddy fashion, still regard as a primarily document-based environment.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

These articles are good exercises but they are also total fantasy. There is no universe in which Apple snaps its fingers and begins making the iPhone in the United States overnight. It could theoretically begin assembling them here, but even that is a years-long process made infinitely harder by the fact that, in Trump’s ideal world, every company would be reshoring American manufacturing at the same time, leading to supply chain issues, factory building issues, and exacerbating the already lacking American talent pool for high-tech manufacturing. In the long term, we could and probably will see more tech manufacturing get reshored to the United States for strategic and national security reasons, but in the interim with massive tariffs, there will likely be unfathomable pain that is likely to last years, not weeks or months.

Apple itself is already attempting to make its manufacturing less dependent on factories in China, specifically, but it is a slow transformation over years, and not necessarily in a single direction. Notably, it is not moving production to the United States, instead working with Foxconn to build factories in India, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Not only do these countries have lower labour costs and proximity to parts sourcing countries, they also have higher population densities permitting a greater workforce near a factory. Foxconn’s ridiculous con of a U.S. factory for “AI 8K+5G” was built on farmland outside a village outside Wisconsin’s fifth biggest city. Total population of the entire county: 197,727. That is less than the workforce of just one of Foxconn’s factories making iPhones.

Anyone who has spent time digging into the supply chains of just about any industry is probably similar parts amazed and disgusted by what they find, and rightfully so. It strains my ability to understand anything to know a device as precise as a smartphone can be made at scale, about as much as I am also baffled when I see Walmart selling a pair of jeans for less than $20. The only way this is possible is at a huge human cost. This happens far away and — in a way beneficial to the name brands involved — at third-party factories, subcontractors, or a component business deep in the supply chain. But this human exploitation is not relegated to over there; it happens closer to home too.

I think it is fair and correct to support greater diversification of manufacturing, including to rich countries. What bothers me is how much of the discussion I have seen concerns the dollar value of a hypothetical made-in-the-U.S. iPhone, and how little focuses on higher labour standards no matter where a product is made. Workers’ rights are not what U.S. tariffs are ultimately about. But the exploitation is ours. We, the richest countries in the world, go into developing nations and extract from their people and environment the products we want for the incredibly generous lifestyle we have. Some factory owners have become very rich in being able to meet our demands; many people have not. And then we just move on. Now the U.S. is punishing everyone around the world for partaking, necessarily, in an entrenched global system of trade. Maybe iPhones get more expensive later this year, and maybe that means we buy fewer. The human and environmental cost will be similar. But we will still buy them.

Hugo Lowell, the Guardian:

According to three people briefed on the internal investigation, [the Atlantic’s Jeffrey] Goldberg had emailed the campaign about a story that criticized Trump for his attitude towards wounded service members. To push back against the story, the campaign enlisted the help of [Mike] Waltz, their national security surrogate.

Goldberg’s email was forwarded to then Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes, who then copied and pasted the content of the email – including the signature block with Goldberg’s phone number – into a text message that he sent to Waltz, so that he could be briefed on the forthcoming story.

Waltz did not ultimately call Goldberg, the people said, but in an extraordinary twist, inadvertently ended up saving Goldberg’s number in his iPhone – under the contact card for Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council.

Then, when Waltz went to add Hughes to the Signal chat, so this goes, he instead added Goldberg. Presumably, this is related to Siri suggestions. This version of events sounds plausible to me, if a little too perfect, but stranger things have happened.

The distrustful and cynical voice deep inside me wants to think Waltz has been a source or contact for Goldberg, and that this is a neat way to keep that secret. There is no evidence for this. The White House’s explanation really does sound right. But try telling anyone they should trust the results of an internal investigation into one of the most dunderheaded security breaches in living memory — even surpassing the time when a couple of lawyers during the first Trump administration were blabbing within earshot of a New York Times reporter.

Ivan Mehta, TechCrunch:

OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.

This feels less icky to me than the acquisition of X by xAI, but still the kind of thing that makes me tilt my head like a confused border collie.

Tom Singleton and Liv McMahon, BBC News:

The government argued it would damage national security if the nature of the legal action and the parties to it were made public — what are known as the “bare details of the case”.

In a ruling published on Monday morning, the tribunal rejected that request — pointing to the extensive media reporting of the row and highlighting the legal principle of open justice.

“It would have been a truly extraordinary step to conduct a hearing entirely in secret without any public revelation of the fact that a hearing was taking place,” it states.

The public copy of the ruling (PDF) is kind of funny to read because of the secrecy rules around the technical capability notice. Presumably, this judge would know whether Apple had been issued this demand, but cannot say so. They therefore extensively refer to media reporting about the demand; in response to a request from U.S. lawmakers, they write of “discuss[ing] an alleged technical capability notice”, emphasis my own.

Ultimately, this decision is a rare bit of good news in the world of secret orders and demands to compromise encryption. At least we will know something about how it all goes down, even if it is buried in the language of hypotheticals and non-denials.

Do you want to block all YouTube ads in Safari on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac?

Then download Magic Lasso Adblock — the ad blocker designed for you.

Magic Lasso Adblock: YouTube Ad Blocker for Safari

As an efficient, high performance, and native Safari ad blocker, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers, and annoyances — delivering a faster, cleaner, and more secure web browsing experience.

Magic Lasso Adblock is easy to set up, doubles the speed at which Safari loads, and also blocks all YouTube ads; including all:

  • video ads

  • pop up banner ads

  • search ads

  • plus many more

With over 5,000 five star reviews, it’s simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

And unlike some other ad blockers, Magic Lasso Adblock respects your privacy, doesn’t accept payment from advertisers and is 100% supported by its community of users.

So, join over 350,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today.

I would like to make an amendment to an article I published last month comparing the risks of popular U.S. technology companies with concerns previously reserved for those from China. I wrote:

In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg lamented an apparently lost leadership by the U.S. in technology. “A decade ago, almost all of the major internet platforms were American,” he said. “Today, six of the top ten are Chinese”.

Incidentally, Zuckerberg gave this speech the same year in which his company announced, after five years of hard work and ingratiation, it was no longer pursuing an expansion into China which would necessarily require it to censor users’ posts. It instead decided to mirror the denigration of Chinese internet companies by U.S. lawmakers and lobbied for a TikTok ban. This does not suggest a principled opposition on the grounds of users’ free expression. Rather, it was seen as a good business move to expand into China until it became more financially advantageous to try to get Chinese companies banned stateside.

This is still true. But there is something else, too. The Foreign Affairs article I just linked to also mentions “Project Dragonfly”, Google’s attempt to build a China-friendly version of its search engine. News of this was broken in August 2018 by Ryan Gallagher of the Intercept.

Dragonfly was immediately condemned by Google employees and U.S. lawmakers. Sundar Pichai was hauled in front of members of the U.S. House of Representatives in December. But work continued in March 2019, and it was not until July that Google publicly confirmed it has ceased efforts.

I imagine the backlash would have spooked Facebook executives and could have been a factor in their own China project’s cancellation. But it is notable to me that both were terminated in the same year.

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, Foreign Affairs:

The global Internet will likely continue to exist in the form of shared technical infrastructure. But if U.S. companies persist in identifying with a U.S. administration that is hostile to Europe, it is likely that Europe will want its own companies and platforms to build technological fortifications against its former ally and protector. Chinese firms will try to expand in Europe, too, although they may also face greater public skepticism. Either way, the end result will be lower profits, weakened American innovation, and a more isolated and insecure United States.

I think the writers are positioning this as an argument to policymakers and leadership at tech companies — note again where this was published — so they have chosen appealing arguments for that audience. The opening of the essay repeatedly hammers the threat to the U.S. tech hegemony, as though that is an inherently bad thing. Fear not: the rest of this essay is far more nuanced than this suggests.

John Gruber:

It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand. Throughout the entire COVID crisis, I don’t recall them changing their prices for anything.

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at… $1299.

This very astute point makes the excuse of inflation stand out even more when prices are increased.

Gianluca Guidi, et al., in a peer-reviewed article in Nature Communications:

[…] In this study, we located the 34 largest mines in the United States in 2022, identified the electricity-generating plants that responded to them, and pinpointed communities most harmed by Bitcoin mine-attributable air pollution. From mid-2022 to mid-2023, the 34 mines consumed 32.3 terawatt-hours of electricity — 33% more than Los Angeles — 85% of which came from fossil fuels. […]

To borrow a phrase: yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we solved a lot of Sudokus to buy drugs. Hodl, and so forth.

A little over a month ago, I had the misfortune of breaking both a fifteen-year record of intact phone screens and, relatedly, my phone’s screen. This sucked in part because I can no longer be so smug about not using a case, and also because I do not have AppleCare. I do have insurance coverage on my credit card. I had never gone through this process before, but it would turn out to be perfectly adequate.

There was some paperwork involved, of course. There was a fair bit of waiting, too. But I got paid in full for the repair. That is, while I had to put $450 up front, I ultimately paid nothing to fix my own accidental damage. For comparison, if I had purchased AppleCare when I got my iPhone 15 Pro, at $13.50 per month, it would have cost me over $240, plus $40 for the screen replacement itself.

I am not saying you should not buy AppleCare or extended warranties in general. Go bananas. In my case, I do not think it would have been worth $280 to save some paperwork and time.

This is also an example of how having a lower income makes everything cost more. There are usually minimum financial requirements for having a card with insurance like this, a level I thankfully meet. It allowed me to briefly shoulder the out-of-warranty repair cost and, ultimately, gave me a free repair. If I did not meet that threshold, I would have had to pay instalments of $13.50 just in case I dropped my phone. It does not seem right I paid nothing for this repair when someone earning less than I do would have paid so much.

Jake Bleiberg, Bloomberg:

Oracle Corp. has told customers that a hacker broke into a computer system and stole old client log-in credentials, according to two people familiar with the matter. It’s the second cybersecurity breach that the software company has acknowledged to clients in the last month.

Here is one more excerpt from the Financial Times’ reporting of the proposed TikTok America ownership, which I linked to yesterday:

Oracle, co-founded by Trump ally Larry Ellison, would secure TikTok’s US data as part of the deal, people said.

Like poetry, these two stories were published on the same day. Sergiu Gatlan of Bleeping Computer broke the news of this Oracle breach last month.

Hannah Murphy, et al., Financial Times:

Under the terms of the transaction, a group of new outside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Blackstone and other large private capital firms would own about half of TikTok’s US business, according to several people familiar with the matter. That US unit would be spun off from its Beijing-based parent ByteDance, these people said.

[…]

ByteDance would retain a stake at just below 20 per cent of the business, under the terms of the deal, in order to meet requirements in the US legislation that state that no more than a fifth be in the control of a “foreign adversary”.

A cool thing about this arrangement is how it will make everybody mad. ByteDance is still going to own a fifth of the business and it is possible, according to the Times, the U.S. business will still use its recommendation algorithm. But now the U.S. is also going to have majority ownership over one of TikTok’s most important and influential markets, continuing the dominance of U.S. social media companies. This solves nothing except the problem of a bunch of U.S. venture capitalists owning not enough stuff.

One question: will this cut off the U.S. version of TikTok from the rest of the world, exactly as the China-only Douyin is? Freedom, baby.

Alexander Martin, the Record:

Alongside the new Europol, the Commission said it would create roadmaps regarding both the “lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement” and on encryption.

The aim is to “identify and assess technological solutions that would enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner, safeguarding cybersecurity and fundamental rights,” said the Commission. The identification of such solutions has been the subject of much controversy when attempted elsewhere.

The Commission has released no details yet, and it is hard to know what to expect given that what they want is — as experts keep pointing out — not possible. This keeps happening and the outcome is always a worry. Either lawmakers are going to permit end-to-end encryption, or they are not — with the “not” being a very wide range of compromises and backdoors, to outright criminalization.