#silicon valley history

[frank-olivier]

The Birth of an Industry: Fairchild’s Pivotal Role in Shaping Silicon Valley

In the late 1950s, the Santa Clara Valley of California witnessed a transformative convergence of visionary minds, daring entrepreneurship, and groundbreaking technological advancements. At the heart of this revolution was Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering company whose innovative spirit, entrepreneurial ethos, and technological breakthroughs not only defined the burgeoning semiconductor industry but also indelibly shaped the region’s evolution into the world-renowned Silicon Valley.

A seminal 1967 promotional film, featuring Dr. Harry Sello and Dr. Jim Angell, offers a fascinating glimpse into Fairchild’s revolutionary work on integrated circuits (ICs), a technology that would soon become the backbone of the burgeoning tech industry. By demystifying IC design, development, and applications, Fairchild exemplified its commitment to innovation and knowledge sharing, setting a precedent for the collaborative and open approach that would characterize Silicon Valley’s tech community. Specifically, Fairchild’s introduction of the planar process and the first monolithic IC in 1959 marked a significant technological leap, with the former enhancing semiconductor manufacturing efficiency by up to 90% and the latter paving the way for the miniaturization of electronic devices.

Beyond its technological feats, Fairchild’s entrepreneurial ethos, nurtured by visionary founders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, served as a blueprint for subsequent tech ventures. The company’s talent attraction and nurturing strategies, including competitive compensation packages and intrapreneurship encouragement, helped establish the region as a magnet for innovators and risk-takers. This, in turn, laid the foundation for the dense network of startups, investors, and expertise that defines Silicon Valley’s ecosystem today. Notably, Fairchild’s presence spurred the development of supporting infrastructure, including the expansion of Stanford University’s research facilities and the establishment of specialized supply chains, further solidifying the region’s position as a global tech hub. By 1965, the area witnessed a surge in tech-related employment, with jobs increasing by over 300% compared to the previous decade, a direct testament to Fairchild’s catalyzing effect.

The trajectory of Fairchild Semiconductor, including its challenges and eventual transformation, intriguingly parallels the broader narrative of Silicon Valley’s growth. The company’s decline under later ownership and its subsequent re-emergence underscore the region’s inherent capacity for reinvention and adaptation. This resilience, initially embodied by Fairchild’s pioneering spirit, has become a hallmark of Silicon Valley, enabling the region to navigate the rapid evolution of the tech industry with unparalleled agility.

What future innovations will emerge from the valley, leveraging the foundations laid by pioneers like Fairchild, to shape the global technological horizon in the decades to come?

Dr. Harry Sello and Dr. Jim Angell: The Design and Development Process of the Integrated Circuit (Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, October 1967)

Robert Noyce: The Development of the Integrated Circuit and Its Impact on Technology and Society (The Computer Museum, Boston, May 1984)

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

[thoughtportal]

Every person who uses the internet should read this book!

The Internet Con How to Seize the Means of Computation By Cory Doctorow

The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it’s a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships. We can – we must – dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission. Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

[antiquesintheattic]

being on here was so easy when i didn’t have my blog personalized at all and i just used the web version to look at the silicon valley hbo tag

[teachanarchy]

Why Silicon Valley is here

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tesla's Dieselgate

Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2 He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla

He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:

https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband

The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us

Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:

https://elonmusk.today/

But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/

Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat

Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles

That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/

That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update

To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50

But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.

Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.

But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html

All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.

The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/

The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.

But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.

But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.

So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.

But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.

This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.

This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.

When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.

Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.

The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.

Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.

Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.

Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.

Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.

Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]

Image: Steve Jurvetson (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[mariacallous]

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next. Trump has announced multibillion-dollar lawsuits against “the enemy camp”: newspapers and publishers. His proposed FBI director is on record as wanting to prosecute certain journalists. Journalists, publishers, writers, academics are always in the first wave. Doctors, teachers, accountants will be next. Authoritarianism is as predictable as a Swiss train. It’s already later than you think.

3 To name is to understand. This is McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools. It’s the dawn of a new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs.

4 If that sounds scary, it’s because that’s the plan. Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble. Fast. The chilling will be real and immediate.

5 You have more power than you think. We’re supposed to feel powerless. That’s the strategy. But we’re not. If you’re a US institution or organisation, form an emergency committee. Bring in experts. Learn from people who have lived under authoritarianism. Ask advice.

6 Do not kiss the ring. Do not bend to power. Power will come to you, anyway. Don’t make it easy. Not everyone can stand and fight. But nobody needs to bend the knee until there’s an actual memo to that effect. WAIT FOR THE MEMO.

7 Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris. In some weird celestial stroke of luck, he calls me as I’m writing this and I ask for his updated advice: “Know what you stand for and what you think is good.”

8 Protect your private life. The broligarchy doesn’t want you to have one. Read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: they need to know exactly who you are to sell you more shit. We’re now beyond that. Surveillance Authoritarianism is next. Watch The Lives of Others, the beautifully told film about surveillance in 80s east Berlin. Act as if you are now living in East Germany and Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi. It is.

9 Throw up the Kool-Aid. You drank it. That’s OK. We all did. But now is the time to stick your fingers down your throat and get that sick tech bro poison out of your system. Phones were – still are – a magic portal into a psychedelic fun house of possibility. They’re also tracking and surveilling you even as you sleep while a Silicon Valley edgelord plots ways to tear up the federal government.

10 Listen to women of colour. Everything bad that happened on the internet happened to them first. The history of technology is that it is only when it affects white men that it’s considered a problem. Look at how technology is already being used to profile and target immigrants. Know that you’re next.

11 Think of your personal data as nude selfies. A veteran technology journalist told me this in 2017 and it’s never left me. My experience of “discovery” – handing over 40,000 emails, messages, documents to the legal team of the Brexit donor I’d investigated – left me paralysed and terrified. Think what a hostile legal team would make of your message history. This can and will happen.

12 Don’t buy the bullshit. A Securities and Exchange judgment found Facebook had lied to two journalists – one of them was me – and Facebook agreed to pay a $100m penalty. If you are a journalist, refuse off the record briefings. Don’t chat on the phone; email. Refuse access interviews. Bullshit exclusives from Goebbels 2.0 will be a stain on your publication for ever.

13 Even dickheads love their dogs. Find a way to connect to those you disagree with. “The obvious mistakes of those who find themselves in opposition are to break off relations with those who disagree with you,” texts Vera Krichevskaya, the co-founder of TV Rain, Russia’s last independent TV station. “You cannot allow anger and narrow your circle.”

14 Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.

15 Remember. Writer Rebecca Solnit, an essential US liberal voice, emails: “If they try to normalize, let us try to denormalize. Let us hold on to facts, truths, values, norms, arrangements that are going to be under siege. Let us not forget what happened and why.”

16 Find allies in unlikely places. One of my most surprising sources of support during my trial(s) was hard-right Brexiter David Davis. Find threads of connection and work from there.

17 There is such a thing as truth. There are facts and we can know them. From Tamsin Shaw, professor in philosophy at New York University: “‘Can the sceptic resist the tyrant?’ is one of the oldest questions in political philosophy. We can’t even fully recognise what tyranny is if we let the ruling powers get away with lying to us all.”

18 Plan. Silicon Valley doesn’t think in four-year election cycles. Elon Musk isn’t worrying about the midterms. He’s thinking about flying a SpaceX rocket to Mars and raping and pillaging its rare earth minerals before anyone else can get there. We need a 30-year road map out of this.

19 Take the piss. Humour is a weapon. Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity. Work with that.

20 They are not gods. Tech billionaires are over-entitled nerds with the extraordinary historical luck of being born at the exact right moment in history. Treat them accordingly.

There is much much more to say on all of the above and that’s my plan. But please do share this with anyone who needs to hear it.

How to Survive the Broligarchy: a new podcast

A month ago, I was feeling floored: at the moment in which everything I’ve been warning about for the last eight years suddenly became overwhelmingly real, I was also being dislodged from my journalistic home. The Guardian, my seat of operations for the last 20 years, the last nearly ten of which have been focussed squarely on this subject, has done a deal, in the face of fierce opposition from its journalists, to give away a core part of the organisation. More than 100+ journalists will leave the organisation, including me.

This week, the Guardian confirmed that the last edition of the Observer would be April 20 and my 20-year employment with the organisation would be terminated then. The same day, Tortoise Media, the new home of the Observer, wrote to tell me that they would not be offering me a contract. But now, instead of feeling floored, I feel energised. You’ll hear some of that energy, I hope, in this first episode of the new podcast that I made a pilot for this week. It’s embedded at the top of this newsletter and - when I figure out the backend - will be available on Apple and Spotify and everywhere else too. I have an idea that I explore in this first episode with two people much smarter than me that this might be the start of a journey to a creating a independent, open, collaborative transparent form of ‘live’ journalism.

My investigation of big tech, power, politics, the weaponisation of data, foreign interference, Russian oligarchs and social media has always traversed subjects and specialisms. I’ve drawn on the expertise of so many people along the way and in trying to understand this moment, I realised they are not only the people I want to speak to now, they are also the expert voices that everyone needs to hear. My idea is to make these conversations public and to build a community - a feedback loop - contributing ideas and suggestions and, hopefully, networks of action.

I’ve been doing some of this work with the Citizens, the non-profit, I founded back in 2020 (sign up to their newsletter here), but there is a small ray of hope, in the midst of the current crisis, independent media is in a huge moment of growth and the green shoots of a non-corporate, non-oligarch owned media system are springing up everywhere. I’m hugely grateful to the 55,000 people who’ve signed up to this newsletter so far but there’s so much more we can do.

I’d been kicking around this idea for a new podcast for the last few weeks and then a call with my friend, Claire Wardle, spurred me into action. Claire is a professor at Cornell, an Ivy League university in upstate New York, where she studies as as she puts it “our crazy information environment”. I first met Claire when giving evidence to a parliamentary committee back in 2017 and then we re-met at the TED conference in Vancouver in 2019 where we were both due to give talks and hung out in between paralysing bouts of fear and imposter syndrome.

That TED talk led to a years-long lawsuit for me. And Claire, who founded a non-profit called First Draft that co-ordinated newsrooms and researchers to fight mis- and disinformation, has also found herself under attack. She and more than 100 other researchers in the field have been subpoenaed by a congressional committee who accused them of being part of the ‘censorship industrial complex’.

It’s these sorts of attacks that are now coming for so many other people. My ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ column, above, was intended as both a handbook - how do we protect ourselves? - and a manifesto, how do we fightback against these companies? And that’s the ethos of this podcast too, bringing together a network of people who have the knowledge we need for this next stage.

Claire and I decided this first conversation should be about how the media is covering this moment and its inability to shake off the “business as normal” framing of the authoritarian takeover of the US government.

I include a voice note from Roger McNamee in the first episode, a tech investor - he introduced Mark Zuckberg to Sheryl Sandberg - who’s now one of the most trenchant critics of both Silicon Valley and the media. And Mark Little, an Irish foreign correspondent turned tech entrepreneur (one of his claims to fame is being aquired by Rupert Murdoch), who’s pioneered new media models joined us to talk about solutions.

The best and most enjoyable journalism I’ve done in recent times is two investigative, narrative podcasts. Sergei & the Westminster Spy Ring debuted in December at number one in the Apple podcast chart and the BBC’s Stalked is currently sitting at the top of the true crime and series charts.

And what Mark pointed out, which I hadn’t thought about before, is that it’s the “process” of these real-time investigative podcasts that young listeners like. And it’s true that what we’re doing in Stalked is really punchy: this week, we name the suspect who we believe to be Hannah, my ex-stepdaughter’s, cyberstalker, something the police abjectly failed to do. In Sergei, we uncovered a UK government cover-up of foreign interference. We’re doing both of these live, transparently, and showing our workings.

As Mark teases it out, this is the impulse behind this podcast pilot too. It’s also a “true crime” story: democracy has been murdered and there’s a serial killer on the loose. It’s a race against time to prevent the perpetrator devastating the US beyond repair and racking up a bodycount in Europe. (If you can’t or don’t want to listen to it, there’s a transcript here.)

If that all sounds a bit weird and experimental but also ambitious and unlikely, I’d have to agree. But the whole point is that we have entered a wholly dangerous new era and we need new ways of communicating, of doing journalism, of storytelling, of reaching new audiences. It may very well not work in which case I’ll try something else but I’d love your feedback in the comments below. If you have ideas for collaborations or building this network, you can email me at survivingbroligarchy@proton.me.

[exeggcute]

interesting links roundup #10

>>> permalink <<<

reading

Animals as chemical factories

Are "algorithms" making us boring?

Big Food Gets Jacked

Can the Human Body Endure a Voyage to Mars?

Century-Scale Storage

Crypto trader kills himself on X live to create a meme coin

A Dark History of the World’s Smallest Island Nation

The End of Children

The Getty Family’s Trust Issues

The hardest working font in Manhattan

How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal

I Tasted Honda's Spicy Rodent-Repelling Tape (And I will do it again unless someone stops me.)

If You Ever Stacked Cups In Gym Class, Blame My Dad

The Kiss That Changed Video Games

Patterns in confusing explanations

Photographers Are on a Mission to Fix Wikipedia's Famously Bad Celebrity Portraits

The Real-Life Consequences of Silicon Valley’s AI Obsession

Removing Jeff Bezos From My Bed

‘Technofossils’: how humanity’s eternal testament will be plastic bags, cheap clothes and chicken bones

The “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” Novel

Unique formation of organic glass from a human brain in the Vesuvius eruption of 79 CE

What a Crab Sees Before It Gets Eaten by a Cuttlefish

When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works

Who Killed the Footless Goose?

The Worst 7 Years in Boeing’s History—and the Man Who Won’t Stop Fighting for Answers

tools/reference

Ableton: Learning Synths

Cover Your Tracks: See how trackers view your browser

European word translator

OneLook

Refuge Restrooms

River Runner Global

other

BLUEJEWELED

jacksonpollock.org

London Transport 25: ride 25 different forms on transport in one day

What if Eye...? [warning for some flashing graphics/gifs]

10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories

[theonion]

Throughout its venerable 268-year reign, The Onion has always made it a top priority to endorse the correct presidential candidates. From George Washington to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, this institution’s highly respected editorial board has had its finger on the pulse, and has accurately backed the winner of every single national election in this country’s long and storied history. 

Now, with our nation at a pivotal crossroads, The Onion‘s editorial board faces its most difficult decision yet. That’s why we have chosen to officially endorse Joseph R. Biden for president of the United States.

To our loyal, handsome, and stunningly brilliant readers, please know that The Onion‘s latest foray into the 2024 election does not come lightly. In these unprecedented times of misinformation and political violence, everyone from left-wing activists to Silicon Valley megadonors attempted to dissuade us from endorsing Joe Biden at this moment in time. Full Story

[transmutationisms]

The fantasy of places like Sophia Antipolis, Silicon Valley, LA, and indeed much of the US is not postmodern but antemodern, in a philosophical sense: the delusion is that the wealth created historically under conditions of what we call modernity (the Taylorised factory floor, churning through the raw materials expropriated via colonialism) can now take on an existence apart from that process and even ontologically preceding it. It is the capitalist modern that creates the technopole and the western-frontier urban sprawl, but these latter are loathe to acknowledge paternity. The cities are calcified exploitation, dressed up as a civilising mission. It is this disjunction that creates the grey-zone pulsating filth of outer-LA and the apathetic bloodlust of doomsday cultists and wannabe cops in Sophia Antipolis. What is distinct, then, about the US in Araki’s camera in not really anything to do with the national borders themselves, but with the conditions that actually and immanently create those borders; The Doom Generation is more a character study than any kind of direct economic commentary, but the characters are inextricable from their setting in much the same way as Vernier’s. The built environment is not happenstance in these films, but a kind of mediator impressing the conditions of production upon the subjectivities of the inhabitants. If the end of the world looms, it’s because the end of the empire does. Here, the postmodern filmmaking strips off any reformist sheen to reveal only capitalist expansion at its most naked, voracious, and disorienting—a privation of meaning that leaves behind the Amy Blues of LA, half-dead already and conversant only in her sociolect of utter annihilation.

[jasper-the-menace]

There are a lot of things I don't like about "modern retellings" of (usually Greek) myths - a fundamental misunderstanding of mythology, having little to actually do with the mythological figures and gods, using it as an excuse to shit on pagans like me, et cetera - but one of the most frustrating ones is that none of them are actually modern. Instead, they take the Walmart TERF approach to feminism and go "#girlboss!" without actually looking into the history of women during the time of those myths or understanding what it's supposed to do at all. They also don't even take place in the modern day - they're set in some sort of pseudo-Ancient Greece.

Like, okay, here. Let me outline what I'd consider a modern retelling of a myth, using the Perseus myth as an example.

Perseus is a college-aged young man still living with his mom, Danae, in the "big city" (fuck it, let's say Springfield, MO) and trying to make ends meet because they're both working two part-time jobs because none of the jobs actually want to pay for insurance or retirement or whatever. Danae sometimes meets with her best friend and coworker Clymene and Clymene's husband Dictys, who live out in the country and go fishing and hunting during various times of year. Dictys has a brother named Polydectes who is the grown-man version of a Silicon Valley tech bro who's, I don't know, into crypto and shit.

While Polydectes is living on Dictys's couch and ranting about how he's totally gonna be a rich Wall Street executive some day, he sees Danae talking with Clymene while they gut fish and is like "hot chick, gonna stalk her" and is all creepy about it. Perseus is not about that shit, so he starts trying to find a way to get Dictys to back off.

At this point, any number of things could happen. If you want a girlboss Medusa story, she could be, I don't know, a deep web or black market assassin-for-hire and Perseus scrounges up money for it. If you want something more lighthearted and silly, maybe this is taking place in what is essentially a Yugioh-style world where the fate of things lands on card games and Perseus uses a Medusa-esque card to kick Dictys's ass. Medusa could even just be a coworker of Danae and Clymene and overhear them bitching at work about Dictys so she goes to Perseus like "Dude, do you want me to help take care of that guy messing with your mom?" Literally anything could happen at this point.

You don't even have to erase Andromeda! She could be anything from a classmate of Perseus's that he helps out to his coworker that he protects from creeps to...well, again, literally anything! It's a modern world, she's got all kinds of possibilities!

See? A modern retelling would actually be cool as shit if people paid attention to the "modern" part!

[thoughtportal]

When tech whizkids are caught behaving badly, they're just being "brilliant jerks." And the figure of the charismatic-but-bratty genius inventor is everywhere these days. We look at how the isolated, tormented mad scientist in science fiction evolved into the sexy asshole that everyone wants to be. And we talk to Christopher Cantwell, co-creator of Halt and Catch Fire and recently writer of the Iron Man comic, about how Tony Stark has changed.

[hashtagloveloses]

the fucked up thing about every corporation's executives being like "we are going to use AI and other new technologies to replace you it's inevitable sorry" is that

1) usually experts in AI and these new technologies will tell you that it CANT replace every worker and has its own challenges and requires new and different kinds of workers to make it functional and

2) it is not the fucking technology putting people out of work or ruining how the system functions. it is PEOPLE (executives) making CHOICES to make it that way, and blaming the TECHNOLOGY. moving to adopt new technology in sustainable and realistic ways requires, money, time, and long term investment, which executives just trying to show exponential growth to wall street at the next shareholder meeting for a few years before they take a nice severance package and hop to the next company or retire, don't give a shit enough to do. they see a new toy, a new bauble, that some silicon valley idiot tells them will reduce costs and increase output, they sell the lie to their shareholders, they rinse and repeat. it is CHOICES. BY PEOPLE. NOT THE TECHNOLOGY. it never has been in the history of human innovation.

[msclaritea]

Local libraries struggling as book publishers charge three times as much for digital books as physical ones | Fortune

[kenyatta]

The history of computing is one of innovation followed by scale up which is then broken by a model that “scales out”—when a bigger and faster approach is replaced by a smaller and more numerous approaches. Mainframe->Mini->Micro->Mobile, Big iron->Distributed computing->Internet, Cray->HPC->Intel/CISC->ARM/RISC, OS/360->VMS->Unix->Windows NT->Linux, and on and on. You can see this at these macro levels, or you can see it at the micro level when it comes to subsystems from networking to storage to memory. The past 5 years of AI have been bigger models, more data, more compute, and so on. Why? Because I would argue the innovation was driven by the cloud hyperscale companies and they were destined to take the approach of doing more of what they already did. They viewed data for training and huge models as their way of winning and their unique architectural approach. The fact that other startups took a similar approach is just Silicon Valley at work—the people move and optimize for different things at a micro scale without considering the larger picture. See the sociological and epidemiological term small area variation. They look to do what they couldn’t do at their previous efforts or what the previous efforts might have been overlooking.

- DeepSeek Has Been Inevitable and Here's Why (History Tells Us) by Steven Sinofsky

[mesetacadre]

Full translation under the cut

Trumpism or declining imperialism?

Immediately after winning the elections, the reelected president of the United States, Donald Trump, tested the waters of public opinion with respect to what a priori could be understood as stupidity: annexing Greenland, Canada, retaking the Panama Canal, taking control of the Gaza strip, and lastly, leaving Ukraine in the lurch demanding billions in compensation –closing one front to open another?–. These ideas were interpreted from some media soapboxes as the boastings of an eccentric or fascist president. The problem with this is that annexations and war are not the result of boastings, they're not the delirium of this or that governor; if this was the case, it'd be enough with subjecting them and their advisors to psychological therapy, to placate their most quarrelsome impulses. On the contrary, we speak of necessities and demands of the imperialists as a class, and not because they're greedy, but rather because this is how capitalism works, through competition, the urgency of profits, upholding and widening markets, etc.

To understand this imperialist aggression beyond the psychological profiles loved by TV talk shows, we need to define some data. The USA's GDP increased 2.7% in 2024, more than any other G7 economy, but much less than its main competitor, China. It's important to point out that, throughout the entire Biden administration, China grew more than the USA, and the same can be said about GDP per capita. On its end, the US has a comercial deficit of 900 billion dollars and a negative check balance with other countries. In the debit side of the balance sheets of the biggest US financial and industrial companies there are large bonds and debts with the rest of the world. In 2023 and 2024 an economic recession was averted, the main world economy had a "soft landing" after the pandemic, but not without going through periods of industrial contraction and not without the banking system trembling in the first quarter of 2023, with the bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Bank and other financial institutions.

The defeat of the democrats, without a doubt, was in no small part due to the generalized impoverishment of the north american working class. Inflation also hit the country hard, with an accumulated rise in prices of 21% since 2020. On top of this, mortgage rates rose, health and car insurances got more expensive, and the credit that sustains the middle classes shrunk during the Biden administration; good times for the bourgeoisie, bad times for the working class.

In this landscape, Trump is less the cause or source of determined policies, but rather their personification, as the need of the great US monopolies, consortiums and multinationals to dope their horses in the race against emergent powers. Trump's economic nationalism is, in summary, protectionism increasing the cost of imports and foreign services and the severe USamerican commercial deficit. At the same time, it means the demand of foreign companies to invest in and carry out their activity on US soil. Racism and the frontal attack on class organizations and critical social movements are coupled to this economic program. This is nothing new nor does it signal the beginning of a new era; state intervention in times of crisis or heightened international conflict is as old as capitalism itself. The State is that institutional scheme that, in the face of a market in which private or independent agents compete, "puts order" so ensure the continuity of the market itself. Recall how the great crises in the history of capitalism were solved with warfare and a nationalist and authoritarian governance in the main world economies. The crisis of the 70s was resolved forcing commercial deregulation and labor flexibilization on Third World countries, and on the working class of the imperial core to a great degree: the famous "structural adjustments" of so-called neoliberalism.

Back to the present day, the Trump administration will most likely be continuist with Biden's economic policy, in which economic growth depends absolutely on grants and government subsidies to the great industry and technological companies, guaranteeing the necessary growing investments, backing financial institutions and promoting the offer of a private capital growingly more committed to the "ideal collective capitalist", the State.

Facing the low profitability of industrial capital, the main motor of economic growth, the escape presented to the economic structure of the great power is increasing labor productivity. Perhaps this will help to better understand the alliance represented by Trump and Musk, which is much more complex than a simple alliance between two extravagant character with right-wing ideas. The big technological companies, greatly subsidized and dependant on infrastructure, are fundamental for the modernization of the productive fabric and an international competition spurred on by robotization and automation. The North American imperialist State ensures the control of raw resources, trade routes and guarantees investments with the dollar as the dominant currency. It's important to understand this fully, because capitalism's political economy problems aren't just "technical", such as low profitability or the market's inability to absorb excess population. Class warfare is deployed internationally through the channels of imperialism, with its military, judicial, cultural, etc. implications.

We have multiple examples. The so-called Ecological Transition, or the development and employment of new technologies, are fully incorporated into imperialist dynamics. The necessary technologies for the production, processing and storage of energy require investments, infrastructures and the mass exploitation of every kind of natural resources, not always abundant. The paradox of Green Capitalism, or the 4.0 Industrial Revolution, lies in the fact that its existence necessitates the ratcheting up of the exploitation of human and natural resources of all the peoples of the world, and it's through this deep-seated problem that these territorial conflicts that Trump has brought to the table are understood.

Of course, not all consortiums and imperialist monopolies are prepared to cede its market and resources to the USamerican power. The extension of imperialism through export capital favors the historical emergence of the bourgeois class worldwide, accumulation surfaced new nations in the 20th century that, in a consequent worsening of international competition, made an interventionism necessary from the totality of the imperialist alliances and institutions dominated by the USA, such as NATO or the IMF. This is where coup d'etats, commercial sanctions, judicial processes, even military invasions against nations of all continents fit within the last decades. China's technological transfers to Third World countries or the developmentalist outlook of its partners could result in similar effects in the future.

The emergence of new powers, that is, the restructuring of the imperialist pyramid, has obstructed some of the channels through which wealth flowed to the top of that pyramid, the US, EU, Japan, etc. The rise of Russia, China, India and other regional powers has entailed a greater strategic equilibrium between links of the imperialist chain and a greater interdependency between the countries of the world. The spoils are increasingly disputed between more exploiters. Before this situation, the US seems to look to shorten the value chains, lower the dependency of their capital's circulation and recourses on their competitors, open new commercial routes opposed to the Chinese silk routes and restore the flows of accumulation.

It's commonplace that there is nothing more dangerous than a fatally wounded empire. It's evident that imperialism, as it has been configured up to now, is entering a highly volatile phase. This process will not only happen through tariffs, also through wars and other ways of intervention, reminding us daily that the trees of capitalist civilization grow on a stratum of unpaid mass human labor, environmental plunder and violence. And may no conscious worker doubt that every imperialist in the world will attempt to join that exploitation, regardless of its "pole" and independently of their nationality, religion, skin color or political party.