Thread by @antoniogm

The 2021 Pull Request Year In Review is here!

Last thoughts on Apple, Judaism, Miami, Cuba, everyone I interviewed, all the viral posts, thoughts on present and future technology....in one over-long post.

Begin thread!

thepullrequest.com/p/annus-horrib…

What to say about my former employer and most valuable company in the world?

I abandoned forever the bohemian shenanigans of the writing and media life … but somehow the shenanigans found me.

From loyal Apple employee to combatant within 24 hours.

No catalog of 2021’s top tweets would be complete without the opening salvo in the AGM/Apple media battle, my five-point summary of the manufactured brouhaha.

https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1393335063480131585

In the end, the whole thing went down like an Israeli war: lopsided, risky, and short.

Beyond my petty dramas, the story was significant as it was the first in a series of internal employee revolts that rocked Apple, from statements on Palestine to going back to work.

The world is now run by a Zoom room of hollow people—scared shitless of Twitter and Slack threads—wincing from hard realities in favor of performative posturing, shambling feebly around institutions a greater generation once built … including and especially Apple management.

'How odd of God,
to choose the Jews.'

'Not so odd,
the Jews chose God.'

The other big event was my (ongoing) Jewish conversion, which resulted in one of the viral posts of 2021.

thepullrequest.com/p/why-judaism

Contemporary liberalism has one goal: to free the individual from any unchosen obligations.

The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life.

I did lots of Jewish podcasts and got lots of writing invitations after ‘Why Judaism?’

But my proudest moment was a rabbi saluting this bumbling convert’s rumination on the religion to which he had dedicated his entire life.

MIAMI BABY!

This one tweet sparked a Miami tech wave that has yet to recede, and has only grown more overwhelming.

Pull Request was of course instantly there...

https://twitter.com/francissuarez/status/1335037068108554241?lang=en

I interviewed Miami mayor (and my former middle school classmate) @FrancisSuarez in the earliest days of the Miami exodus.

It's been fascinating to watch both him and the city assume a previously unimaginable place in the tech mind.

thepullrequest.com/p/how-can-i-he…

@FrancisSuarez I also interviewed one of the first San Francisco exiles and one of the most fervent Miami fans, @rabois, about his reasons for moving.

First....but not the last.

thepullrequest.com/p/drum-major-o…

@FrancisSuarez @rabois "Miami is among that set of curious characters: the urban entrepôt. To most Americans Miami might mean beaches and bling and palm trees, but in Latin America it’s something else altogether: a combined bolthole, bank and bazaar."

My thoughts on Miami:

thepullrequest.com/p/next-year-in…

Y Cuba...que sufre y espera.

A country mired in 60 years of totalitarian communism finally got internet-connected smartphones, and all hell broke loose.

The biggest protests since the end of the Cold War were sparked by a Facebook video.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-contrare…

For the first time, outsiders could see the reality of Cuba: the boot stomping on the face of the Cuban people, rather than tired rhetoric about the revolution.

Suddenly, there was no denying a reality that Cubans have known for decades.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-invisibl…

I also spoke to former FCC Chairman @AjitPai and current FCC commissioner @BrendanCarrFCC about what it would take, technically and politically, to run unfettered Internet to Cuba.

Wifi balloons are involved!

thepullrequest.com/p/running-inte…

BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN

A huge (and costly) part of Pull Request is interviews with my pantheon of intellectual heroes.

Here's a roll call of my highlights from 2021:

I speak to very few people in Silicon Valley, much less VCs, who possess a wide-ranging intellect and who can contextualize the utter weirdness of our world into the bigger picture.

@pmarca is one of them.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-man-whos…

@pmarca Despite his writing for @nytimes, one of my incurable intellectual crushes is @DouthatNYT, whose recent memoir 'The Deep Places' I read in one sitting.

If this man wrote IKEA furniture assembly manuals, I'd read them.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-empire-o…

@pmarca @nytimes @DouthatNYT I originally got to know @zeynep via her work on the political impact of social media. With COVID, she's become one of the leading public experts on the pandemic. This early interview is shortly after her first viral COVID pieces.

thepullrequest.com/p/a-journalist…

Following my post on the future of ads and privacy, I sat down with the two smartest names in mobile monetization, @benthompson and @eric_seufert, to talk about what Apple and Google are up to.

thepullrequest.com/p/ben-thompson…

One my other intellectual crushes is @holland_tom, who has written masterfully about how the Christian revolution remade the world, impacting even our supposedly secular world now.

Once you see the Christ figure, you can't unsee it.

thepullrequest.com/p/christ-and-h…

Whatever you think of CRT, @realchrisrufo has become a one-man media army on the topic. Nobody else has so single-handedly changed the national conversation around education than Rufo, all of it via writing and tweeting.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-race-for…

@realchrisrufo My conversation with prolific historian @nfergus felt like sitting by a fire with a bottle of smoky Scotch.

We covered everything from English choral music to Chinese totalitarianism to whether atheism will ever be popular and how many kids to have.

thepullrequest.com/p/niall-fergus…

When I read @benshapiro's book to see how canceled I'd get for interviewing him, I realized his 'radical' politics are those of a Boca Raton doctor, i.e., he's a conservative Orthodox Jew.

Instead, we talked about Judaism and how to win at media.

thepullrequest.com/p/ben-shapiro-…

@benshapiro One of the most prominent writers among religious conservatives is @roddreher, author of the rallying cry 'The Benedict Option'.

We discussed his latest book 'Live Not By Lies', the Christian roots of modern wokeness and victimhood, and (gasp!) Girard.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-lamb-of-…

Outside of the major themes and interviews, here's a highlight reel of posts:

My take on the Afghanistan debacle was the most viral piece of the year.

thepullrequest.com/p/we-are-no-lo…

My first public statement after the Apple brouhaha was understandably popular:

thepullrequest.com/p/bad-apple

In a bit of personal news, I moved to the high desert east of the Tahoe/Reno area, an adventure all its own.

thepullrequest.com/p/house-huntin…

I penned a paean of praise to my Tesla 3, which meant I had an army of Elon-haters in my mentions sternly declaring that absolutely, positively the car that routinely drives me over mountain passes for hours on end is not even remotely autonomous.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-soul-of-…

If you look at the thread above, you might think PR didn't start as a tech outlet. But tech there is!

My take on the revolution happening in ads and privacy, pushed by Apple and Google, putting all the data and computation used to track you on your phone.
thepullrequest.com/p/the-future-o…

This took a particularly odd twist when Apple announced a new content-policing system that sparked a backlash among users for precisely the ‘on-device’ architecture I discussed previously.

thepullrequest.com/p/hunting-pred…

As many have noticed, I've taken an interest in the Metaverse and Web3 recently. The little 'm' metaverse of an elective reality we're all disappearing into is already here.

thepullrequest.com/p/the-republic…

Finally (and forward-looking), as someone who's made my living selling human attention, I speculate as to whether ads will exist in Web3, and if they're worth saving.

thepullrequest.com/p/advertising-…

Religion, politics, media, identity, tech…they’ve all been grist for the Pull Request mill. Readers seem to like it based on feedback; possibly preffer it to yet another tech newsletter going on about the latest from a FAANG company.

So expect more of all of the above in 2022.

Culture and politics are downstream of economics, and all of it is downstream of technology.

Technology is the most vital and fertile sector of society right now ... undermining elites, eroding old institutions, and completely warping the Western worldview.

In the car of humanity, the liberals are stomping on the brakes to stop the dizzying technological change, while the conservatives look for a reverse gear that doesn’t exist. Technologists are the ones with a wild expression on their faces and flooring the gas.

That's us.

May we all arrive at whatever New Enlightenment awaits us relatively quickly, and with the car more or less in one piece.

Finally, I’d like think the various people who have made Pull Request possible.

For starters, @katiasobolski who does all the art.

Go check out her stuff:

katiasobolski.com

Then my editor Kevin Conley, who's come to terms with my 'just in time' delivery schedule.

Lastly, @hamishmckenzie and @cjgbest who *finally* convinced me to take Pull Request seriously as a full-time thing.

If there are any gaps in Pull Request, the credit is all mine.