longform

Norman Foster’s ‘Factory of Fine Design’ ⇥ newyorker.com

Ian Parker, the New Yorker:

To build a very large operation that still resembles a boutique one required decades of sustained control. Foster has controlled the work, and controlled his image, and controlled the images made by him: a Foster + Partners project will almost always have its accompanying Norman Foster sketches, often made retrospectively, rather than in the heat of design. They’ll be annotated by Foster, in a spiky hand that some of his colleagues have learned to imitate. These images may show a building’s future users spreading their arms above their heads, in a gesture of joyous abandon that it’s hard to imagine Foster ever having made.

I know I just wrote about the mistakes of idolizing business leaders. True enough, there are some pretty odious people named in this article, and some of Foster’s more aspirational qualities are called into question. This is a great profile nonetheless: well-written, comprehensive, and full of wonderful details.

Parker was, fittingly, also the author of a similarly comprehensive profile of Jony Ive, published ten years ago this month.

Century-Scale Storage ⇥ lil.law.harvard.edu

Maxwell Neely-Cohen, writing for Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab:

This piece looks at a single question. If you, right now, had the goal of digitally storing something for 100 years, how should you even begin to think about making that happen? How should the bits in your stewardship be stored with such a target in mind? How do our methods and platforms look when considered under the harsh unknowns of a century? There are plenty of worthy related subjects and discourses that this piece does not touch at all. This is not a piece about the sheer volume of data we are creating each day, and how we might store all of it. Nor is it a piece about the extremely tough curatorial process of deciding what is and isn’t worth preserving and storing. It is about longevity, about the potential methods of preserving what we make for future generations, about how we make bits endure. If you had to store something for 100 years, how would you do it? That’s it.

This was published in December but I only read it today. Here is the thing: I am going to read a lot of stuff this year, but I already know this is going to be one of my favourite essays. Well told and beautifully designed. Make the time for this thoughtful work.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age ⇥ thewalrus.ca

I loved this essay from Thea Lim, as published in the Walrus, about our quantified digital lives subsuming our reality, but I have a quibble with this otherwise excellent paragraph:

[…] What we hardly talk about is how we’ve reorganized not just industrial activity but any activity to be capturable by computer, a radical expansion of what can be mined. Friendship is ground zero for the metrics of the inner world, the first unquantifiable shorn into data points: Friendster testimonials, the MySpace Top 8, friending. […]

To the contrary, this is something we not only talk about with frequency, but usually with anxiety approaching a moral panic. I share those worries, for what it is worth; I am not sure it is a positive thing to have constant reminders of our social and physical performance. I am sometimes upset I do not scrobble my vinyl records with Last.fm, even though I also know this is very silly. Since I stopped wearing a smartwatch or any kind of fitness tracker, I am no longer recording health metrics and I feel healthier as a result. I track webpage views here and have a vanity search for the site URL because it lets me see when cool people have noticed something I wrote. Your experience may vary.

This next paragraph in Lim’s essay, though, is noteworthy:

And those ascetics who disavow all socials? They are still caught in the network. Acts of pure leisure — photographing a sidewalk cat with a camera app or watching a video on how to make a curry — are transmuted into data to grade how well the app or the creators’ deliverables are delivering. If we’re not being tallied, we affect the tally of others. We are all data workers.

We are all helping create webpage views, ad impressions, and video plays, all of which are reported to people who are ostensibly concerned with accuracy. But all of these stats lie. If one’s livelihood depends on what they report, it is hard not to see why they are taken so seriously, even if everyone kind of knows they are not real. We are all participants in this shared delusion.

Mother Earth Mother Board ⇥ wired.com

After I linked to Josh Dzieza’s long report about subsea cable repair, I got an email from Joshua Ochs who pointed me to Neal Stephenson’s 1996 essay, published in Wired, about the laying of the FLAG cable.

There is some poetry here. The only way I read that original article, published it, and then received that email is because of all of this infrastructure. I may be writing this on a laptop with no wires coming out of it, but that is not really how I am connected to the internet. Instead, one cable after another has carried my bytes.

If you have not read it before, I think you should set aside some time for it. But do note: it is over forty thousand words. You should still read it. Also, there are parts of it which have not aged well — from predictable cultural perspectives, to a comparison made of the demise of the Library of Alexandria which will make you double-take the dateline. And I recommend spending time with the whole thing because it is amazing.

Tim Maly, writing for Nieman fifteen years after its publication:

The dot-com world’s dangerously myopic narcissism was visible to those with the right kind of eyes, and “Mother Earth Mother Board” is 42,535 words of emergency optical surgery. Stephenson wants to show you that everything’s been done before, only crazier.

The essay is apparently a legendary work but, as with so many critically lauded things, it escaped my field of view. If you have time this weekend, do not let it escape yours.

Deep Sea Cable Repair Technicians Keep the World’s Communications Afloat ⇥ theverge.com

Josh Dzieza, the Verge:

[…] It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixing faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”

I bet this essay appears on a good many best of lists at the end of the year. It is tremendous. Necessary reporting well-told and richly illustrated. Normally, I find these kinds of high production value presentations more distracting than they are helpful, but this is exactly the opposite. A wonderful exploration of the kind of quiet profession that makes core parts of life possible for everybody else.

Plagiarism and You(Tube) ⇥ youtube.com

Harry Brewis is back with a four-hour examination of plagiarism on YouTube. Yeah, it is a big one; I watched it in two parts because I needed to charge my headphones, because that is the world in which we now live, and it effectively monopolized my lazy Sunday.

Its subject matter is a little inside baseball — I do not watch nearly enough YouTube to know any of the creators examined — but it is a thoughtful look at what plagiarism on YouTube is like and a particularly damning exposé of one person specifically. It is extremely long but it kind of needs to be in order to accommodate examples in a fuller context.

As you may expect, there is a part of the conclusion which touches on generative media tools: how they can be used to disguise plagiarism in text, and how they themselves are farming the broader works of others. I found this interesting as I have been writing about intellectual property and generative tools a little bit. I am not sure if Brewis’ presentation of copyright is correct — that is to be determined — but it does seem like these tools do something more akin to plagiarism than strict copyright violation. Attorneys at Heer Law — no relation, as far as I know — note that plagiarism “is an ethical offence — rather than a legal offence — and it does not necessarily encompass copyright infringement”. That feels right to me as a description of what something like ChatGPT does in producing something nominally original.

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge ⇥ tylervigen.com

If you have not yet read it, Tyler Vigen’s story about researching the reason for building one specific pedestrian bridge over one stretch of a highway in Minnesota is — hand on heart — as good as everyone says it is, and I recommend spending the time with it and its many notations. A full mystery, told fully.

Inside the SolarWinds Breach ⇥ wired.com

Kim Zetter, Wired:

As summer turned to fall, behind closed doors, suspicions began to grow among people across government and the security industry that something major was afoot. But the government, which had spent years trying to improve its communication with outside security experts, suddenly wasn’t talking. Over the next few months, “people who normally were very chatty were hush-hush,” a former government worker says. There was a rising fear among select individuals that a devastating cyber operation was unfolding, he says, and no one had a handle on it.

In fact, the Justice Department and Volexity had stumbled onto one of the most sophisticated cyberespionage campaigns of the decade. The perpetrators had indeed hacked SolarWinds’ software. Using techniques that investigators had never seen before, the hackers gained access to thousands of the company’s customers. Among the infected were at least eight other federal agencies, including the US Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, and the Treasury Department, as well as top tech and security firms, including Intel, Cisco, and Palo Alto Networks—though none of them knew it yet. Even Microsoft and Mandiant were on the victims list.

Zetter’s thorough investigation into the circumstances of the 2020 SolarWinds breach — including her previously reported story about the FBI’s foreknowledge — is worth your time. It is also a reminder to me that the circumstances of Bloomberg’s Supermicro story, another supposed supply chain compromise, remain mysteriously uncorroborated and without similar on-the-record journalism.

Inside the Exposure of Wirecard’s Fraud ⇥ newyorker.com

Ben Taub, the New Yorker:

It was against this backdrop [of the “golden age of fraud”] that German institutions supported Wirecard. The country’s traditional industry is in cars and energy systems — BMW, Volkswagen, Daimler, Siemens. Wirecard represented the nation’s challenge to Silicon Valley, its leap into financial technology and the digital era. “German politicians were proud to be able to say, Hey, we have a fintech company!” Florian Toncar, a German parliamentarian, observed. Wirecard’s rising stock price was regarded as a sign that the business was dependable, that its critics were clueless or corrupt. The German business newspaper Handelsblatt called Wirecard’s C.E.O. a “mastermind” who had “come across the German financial scene like the Holy Spirit.” But it was not regulators or auditors who ultimately took the company down; it was a reporter and his editors, in London.

[…]

“You cannot understand Wirecard if you understand Wirecard only as fraud,” Felix Holtermann, a financial reporter at Handelsblatt, told me. “It’s not a Potemkin village, it’s not a Bernie Madoff case.” According to Holtermann, who has also written a book about the company, Marsalek routinely “used his power to override Wirecard’s very, very small compliance department” to issue bank accounts, credit cards, and debit cards to Russian oligarchs who were on European financial blacklists. “Germany was, and still is, the money-laundering saloon of Europe,” he said. “Only the biggest washing machine broke.”

The story of Wirecard is outside my usual reading catalogue; I do not spend a lot of time on the Financial Times’ Alphaville pages. So it is unsurprising that I missed the initial cracks of this story as they were reported in 2015. In a way, I am glad I only experienced this for the first time through Taub’s article. It is staggering.

We Have Lost the Plot ⇥ theatlantic.com

Megan Garber, the Atlantic:

In his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the critic Neil Postman described a nation that was losing itself to entertainment. What Newton Minow had called “a vast wasteland” in 1961 had, by the Reagan era, led to what Postman diagnosed as a “vast descent into triviality.” Postman saw a public that confused authority with celebrity, assessing politicians, religious leaders, and educators according not to their wisdom, but to their ability to entertain. He feared that the confusion would continue. He worried that the distinction that informed all others — fact or fiction — would be obliterated in the haze.

[…]

These are Postman’s fears in action. They are also Hannah Arendt’s. Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators — the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century — Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

This is an unquestionably thoughtful piece that explores the seemingly agreed-upon phenomenon of citizens of the United States — in Garber’s terms, but I do not think it is limited to the one country — viewing society from an increasingly detached perspective. Instead of people and ongoing events, we see only characters in a storyline. I think it is very well worth your time and consideration.

But I think it is telling that Garber repeatedly references decades-old books and essays which say, more or less, the same thing. These are issues which society has grappled with for decades. Granted, public trust in government and institutional figureheads has been declining and, so, perhaps some people are filling in the mistrust with their imagination. It also feels forced, to me, to drag these well-trodden arguments into a more contemporary framing by using the word “metaverse”, which I am not sure entirely makes sense here despite Garber’s justifications.

That aside, I appreciate Garber’s updated exploration of the confused zone between what we consider the real world and what we treat as entertainment. The rapid pace at which studios option current events seems, to me, to be both a cause of this phenomenon as well as a product of it — all of those streaming services demand exclusive shows, and it is more exciting to watch a simplified and enhanced version of real life. I am surprised Garber did not cite the Social Network as an accelerant; I have noticed fictional events from the film being casually used when describing Facebook’s origins. People describe others as “real-life NPCs” and it can be hard to know when they are doing so earnestly or ironically.

One other thing; Garber:

The efforts to hold the instigators of the insurrection to account have likewise unfolded as entertainment. “Opinion: January 6 Hearings Could Be a Real-Life Summer Blockbuster,” read a CNN headline in May — the unstated corollary being that if the hearings failed at the box office, they would fail at their purpose. (“Lol no one is watching this,” the account of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted as the hearings were airing, attempting to suggest such a failure.)

Garber notes reasons the hearings actually drew large audiences. She does not mention one other explanation for that: the Committee hired former ABC News producers to make it more compelling for television viewers, and they leveraged connections to put it in prime time slots. It is fair to portray this as a way to turn dry scraps of testimony and a confusing series of events into an understandable storyline. A more cynical read is that these producers treated real life as entertainment fodder. As this essay suggests, the line has fully blurred.

Inside the Investigation That Took Down AlphaBay and Hansa ⇥ wired.com

Andy Greenberg, author of “Sandworm”, has a new book out called “Tracers in the Dark” about the new investigative techniques to find criminals who use Tor and cryptocurrencies. Over the past month and a half, Wired has dripped out a lengthy excerpt from the book. The final part was published this week and I spent today reading the whole thing in full.

It leaves much to think about. There are huge ethical questions with unsatisfying answers. For example, Hansa was secretly operated by Dutch police for about a month before it was shut down. But when Greenberg asked investigators whether they had any qualms about facilitating thousands of drug sales, they seemed to give it little thought.

Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary look into a large and expertly coordinated investigation of a modern-day drug market kingpin, well narrated by Greenberg. I was a big fan of “Sandworm”, and I am looking forward to this book becoming available for me at my library.

Matt Levine’s Crypto Article ⇥ bloomberg.com

Perhaps you, like I, have previously attempted to untangle the dense vocabulary inherent to the “crypto” or cryptocurrency or “Web3” space. Maybe you have read Kevin Roose’s guide in the New York Times, or a version of Roose’s essay edited to add context and remove puffery on Molly White’s website, or Rusty Foster’s explanation of Terra; maybe you watched Dan Olson’s video. Maybe you, like I, have done all of those things and only wish there was something much longer to ingest.

Well, good news: the current print issue of Bloomberg Businessweek has been dedicated to a single essay by Matt Levine about how all of this came to be. Yes, it is very long. But it is a Matt Levine piece, so it is also very readable, entertaining, and clearheaded. This is not a critique of the crypto space, nor does it promote those efforts. I am not sure it is truly neutral; nothing is. What it is is a self-contained encyclopedia of that entire world. Good luck.

The North Korean Government’s Many Digital Heists ⇥ newyorker.com

Ed Caesar, the New Yorker:

North Korea’s cybercrime program is hydra-headed, with tactics ranging from bank heists to the deployment of ransomware and the theft of cryptocurrency from online exchanges. It is difficult to quantify how successful Pyongyang’s hackers have been. Unlike terrorist groups, North Korea’s cybercriminals do not claim responsibility when they strike, and the government issues reflexive denials. As a result, even seasoned observers sometimes disagree when attributing individual attacks to North Korea. Nevertheless, in 2019, a United Nations panel of experts on sanctions against North Korea issued a report estimating that the country had raised two billion dollars through cybercrime. Since the report was written, there has been bountiful evidence to indicate that the pace and the ingenuity of North Korea’s online threat have accelerated.

According to the U.N., many of the funds stolen by North Korean hackers are spent on the Korean People’s Army’s weapons program, including its development of nuclear missiles. The cybercrime spree has also been a cheap and effective way of circumventing the harsh sanctions that have long been imposed on the country. In February, John C. Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for the National Security Division of the Justice Department, declared that North Korea, “using keyboards rather than guns,” had become a “criminal syndicate with a flag.”

There are elements of this report that I do not love,1 but it is an extraordinary look at the effects of an advanced persistent threat actor whose motivation is almost solely financial gain. American and Israeli governments collaborated on malware for espionage and hardware destruction in Iran; the Russian government unleashed Petya and NotPetya to attack Ukraine in an act of war; “Five Eyes” governments share the Warriorpride espionage framework (PDF) for smartphones. But none of these countries’ governments seem interested in siphoning cash just because they can. North Korea, sanctioned internationally and with limited resources, needs money and has invested in a world-class digital subterfuge team to get it.

  1. For example, Priscilla Moriuchi, who is now at Harvard and was previously at the NSA, said in an interview quoted here that “North Koreans understand criminality”. It sounds like Moriuchi means the North Korean government and its agencies, not North Korean people generally, but this imprecision frustrates me because it implies that an entire country’s population is criminally-minded. ↥︎

The Internet Does Not Let You Forget ⇥ wired.com

In Wired, Lauren Goode wrote about how the apps and services she uses will not let her forget about the wedding she cancelled:

[…] The internet is clever, but it’s not always smart. It’s personalized, but not personal. It lures you in with a timeline, then fucks with your concept of time. It doesn’t know or care whether you actually had a miscarriage, got married, moved out, or bought the sneakers. It takes those sneakers and runs with whatever signals you’ve given it, and good luck catching up.

[…]

I want a chisel, not a sledgehammer, with which to delete what I no longer need. I don’t want to have to empty my photo albums just because tech companies decided to make them “smart” and create an infinite loop of grief. That feels like a fast path to emotional bankruptcy, a way to “rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should,” as the writer André Aciman put it. “To feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste.” There it is: What a waste. Not wasted time, even if that is also true; that would be too cynical. A waste of potential joy.

This essay is a phenomenal exploration of coping with our decreased agency over our memory.

One of the Google engineers that Goode interviewed for this story explained that they implemented their Memories feature because, in part, many pictures were not viewed after they were taken. It seems that few people considered that, sometimes, we do not want to see those photos again — or, if we do, that we would like to do so on our own terms.

The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen ⇥ texasmonthly.com

It’s a Friday before a long weekend and I kind of unloaded in the two earlier posts today. Sorry about that. Here’s something a bit lighter, from Katy Vine in Texas Monthly:

Agent Reed didn’t know what to make of Fosdick and T. R.: First these two guys crash into the Gulf of Mexico together, then each flies into this tiny airport within days of each other, and two weeks later, T. R.’s jet bursts into flames. The more Reed dug, the more certain he became that the Citation fire was just one piece of a grand scheme.

The T.R. character in this article seemed to model his life on James Bond, but I think he comes across more like Sterling Archer. Just, you know, not nearly as funny. A remarkable story for your weekend read.

The Pandemic Is a Portal ⇥ ft.com

Arundhati Roy, writing in the Financial Times:

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

[…]

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

There are two clear lessons I hope we draw from this situation that, months ago, I would find unfathomable. The first is that we desperately need competent, transparent, and humble leadership at all levels. I feel somewhat lucky in that respect, but not entirely so; I understand that not everyone is so fortunate.

The second lesson that we should learn is that we need to care for the wellbeing of one another long before we are forced to do so. It should be abundantly clear that even small vulnerabilities are exacerbated when they are tested.

The “normal” that I hope we return to is one in which we are once again free to travel, gather as friends, go to shows, eat and drink at new restaurants and bars, and spend more time together. But that should not mean going back to underpaying people in positions that have always been vital; we should not underestimate the strengthening qualities of good governance, public research, and civil service.

In Pursuit of Increased and Diversified Revenue Streams, Google’s Internal Culture Eroded ⇥ wired.com

Nitasha Tiku, Wired:

All of those precepts sent Google’s workforce into full tilt after the travel ban was announced. Memegen went flush with images bearing captions like “We stand with you” and “We are you.” Jewglers and HOLA, affinity groups for Jewish and Latinx employees, quickly pledged their support for Google’s Muslim group. According to The Wall Street Journal, members of one mailing list brainstormed whether there might be ways to “leverage” Google’s search results to surface ways of helping immigrants; some proposed that the company should intervene in searches for terms like “Islam,” “Muslim,” or “Iran” that were showing “Islamophobic, algorithmically biased results.” (Google says none of those ideas were taken up.) At around 2 pm that Saturday, an employee on a mailing list for Iranian Googlers floated the possibility of staging a walkout in Mountain View. “I wanted to check first whether anyone thinks this is a bad idea,” the employee wrote. Within 48 hours, a time had been locked down and an internal website set up.

[…]

In his short, off-the-cuff remarks to the packed courtyard, Pichai called immigration “core to the founding of this company.” He tried to inject a dose of moderation, stressing how important it was “to reach out and communicate to people from across the country.” But when he mentioned Brin’s appearance at the airport, his employees erupted in chants of “Ser-gey! Ser-gey! Ser-gey!” Brin finally extricated himself from the crowd and shuffled up to the mic, windbreaker in hand. He, too, echoed the protesters’ concerns but tried to bring the heat down. “We need to be smart,” he said, “and that means bringing in folks who have some different viewpoints.” As he spoke, a news chopper flew overhead.

And that was pretty much the last time Google’s executives and workers presented such a united front about anything.

Tiku presents a deep, well-investigated look at an increasingly toxic internal culture as executives pursued morally-challenged money making opportunities.

Fast Software, the Best Software ⇥ craigmod.com

Craig Mod:

It feels — intuitively — that software (beyond core functionality) should aim for speed. Speed as a proxy for efficiency. If a piece of software is becoming taurine-esque, unwieldy, then perhaps it shouldn’t be a single piece of software. Ultimately, to be fast is to be light. And to be light is to lessen the burden on someone or some task. This is the ultimate goal: For our pocket supercomputers to lesson burdens, not increase them. For our mega-powered laptops to enable a kind of fluency — not battle, or struggle — of creation.

This essay speaks to me on a gut level; I’m sure many of you will have a similar appreciation for it.

Mod’s essay is positive and delightful. I will say — in a more negative and grouchy tone — that slow software invariably irritates me, in a very thousand cuts kind of way. I use Windows at work and I wince every time I click on the Start menu and have to wait for the second-long superfluous render-blocking animation to play. Some of the very slow animations in tvOS make me feel the same way — for example, when exiting the screen saver. Don’t get me wrong — animation adds expected polish — but it should not be an impediment.

Slow software feels imprecise and untrustworthy. Fast software feels implicitly more reliable and cared-for. I have a top-of-the-line iMac; not only should I not feel sluggishness in any day-to-day task, everything ought to feel instantaneous. I wish this were a higher priority for all software firms at an organizational level. For me, at least, it determines what I use.

Uber’s Path of Destruction ⇥ americanaffairsjournal.org

Hubert Horan, American Affairs Journal:

Above all, Uber argued that its business model and technology were so innovative that it had created an entirely new industry (“ridesharing”) based on entirely new business concepts (the “sharing economy”). It insisted that it was a “tech company” selling sophisticated software, and could not possibly be compared to taxi companies. In fact, however, Uber carries people from point A to point B, just like taxis have for a hundred years. The “tech company” claim was really an attempt to get people to ignore its huge losses, since tech companies like Facebook had quickly grown into profitability. The “software” claim was designed to justify preventing its drivers from getting the labor law protections employees are entitled to, based on the argument that they were totally independent entrepreneurs who had freely chosen to purchase Uber’s superi or software products. Furthermore, nothing in Uber’s business model is actually being shared. The only meaningful economic distinction between “taxis” and “ridesharing” is that the latter avoids regulations that traditional taxis must still obey and depends on billions in predatory investor subsidies.

Uber’s claim that its growth resulted from customers freely choosing its superior service in competitive markets is fundamentally false. Competitive markets use price and profit signals to help allocate resources to more efficient uses. Uber grew because its years of billion-dollar subsidies totally distorted those signals, and allowed it to drive more efficient producers out of business.

About a year and a half ago, I linked to a couple of pieces arguing that Uber’s most impressive revolutionary gesture would be if the company functioned as a long-term business. They have lost — and I’m going to write this out in full and italicize it — fourteen billion dollars in the last four years. Horan’s analysis of Uber’s performance to date is second-to-none, and he’s reasonably skeptical of attempts to distract from the company’s mismanagement and losses through the invocation of autonomous vehicles.