I wrote about this ages ago back when I gave a damn about media.

It's very simple: US journalism (unlike other Western countries) adopted 'objectivity' as a standard, less because of moral probity, and more because Macy's needed unpolarizing content across a large audience.

https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1765779171383325070

The NYT lead that trend in the late 19th cent., going against the default of partisan content paid for via subs, opting for ad revenue instead.

Most media followed suit, maintaining 'objective' (really, middle-ground) coverage to pay the bills.

wired.com/story/journali…

I'm as excited about AI as the next guy (and even more excited these days), but I think AI people are being a wee bit delusional (on two levels) about how the whole AI builder vs. publishers with training data saga will play out.

Many celebrate this:

biia.com/japan-goes-all… Do we really think that AI builders (in the West) will be able to get away with egregiously copying and using copyrighted materials (and make money off of it!) with zero recompense?

This is from the Stability/Getty Images suit. The AI even reproduced the watermark!

90% of the disconnect between the West and Israel is Israel still living in the capital 'H' History of ethno-nationalist struggle and war, and the West having resigned itself to the Fukuyaman End of History: life as virtue-signaling LARP, and the UN/US/EU as the global HR dept.

https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1733339018220216802

They raped our women, took our children hostage, and murdered our elders, so we flattened their cities, killed or captured their fighting men, raised our flag and prayed to our God on their land.

This was the entirety of human history. The Torah recounts the story many times.

I was in Israel shortly after the recent Hamas attacks, going everywhere from the scenes of the atrocities, to the preparations for war, to the techies in Tel Aviv supporting the war effort.

Thread with both text highlights and on-the-ground photos.

tabletmag.com/sections/israe… Our story begins with your humble correspondent having rifles pointed at him by jumpy reservists as he tried to enter Mefalsim, one of the kibbutzim brutally attacked on 10/7. A few words from my driver and an Israeli press pass cooled things down. South Israel is a war zone.

Debate at an AI dinner last night. Everyone floats their shaky theory about morality and the AI bots. I point out there's a lack of overt religious reasoning here, and one guy confronts me:

Why are humans special? If the AI has sentience, why should we treat them differently? "Judaism would say tzelem elohim (the image of God) sets humans apart, which is basically saying humans possess an intrinsic and transcendent good that exceeds the material."

"But that's ridiculous. I don't believe in God."

Our latest @spindl_xyz case study is out!

Do quests, the Web 3 native ad unit, actually work?

Tl;dr: Yes! They absolutely can.

blog.spindl.xyz/p/do-web-3-que… @spindl_xyz What is a quest?

Like many things in Web 3 marketing, it's a reboot of a Web 2 practice: quests are like the offerwalls of old where users got free virtual goods for engaging with a game or app.

@layer3xyz, @Galxe, @QuestN and @rabbithole_gg are all good examples.

Read this over shabbat. Learned two surprising things:

1. Just what a touch-and-go affair the founding of Singapore really was, and how it all could have come to nothing. Also, how desperately poor and fractious the city-state was on its founding.

amazon.com/Third-World-Fi… 2. The early Singaporean military was advised by Israelis, who were codenamed "Mexicans" to hide their presence from neighboring Muslim countries who would have objected to their presence.

The scrappy Israelis were a contrast to British advisors, who mostly focused on snappy… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

"What is going on in Israel now has passed from the realm of the political to the metaphysical."

What's fascinating about the Israel ruckus is that it's over one of the deepest tensions in Judaism, that between universalism and particularism.

tabletmag.com/sections/israe… One of the biggest gaps between Christianity and the Judaism it sprang from is universalism: the belief in a tribe-less brotherhood of man.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Birthday dinner: steaks with José Andrés. As a side note, @chefjoseandres is doing God’s work with his @WCKitchen.

*Every* border crossing on the Polish/Ukrainian border I visited had one of his kitchens feeding refugees tasty meals.

I'm usually very much *not* on the 'tech people need to read more books outside tech' train, but by golly, a lot of these AI prognosticators need to read something that jars them out of the view that human life is nothing but a series of engineering problems. Not because there's some inherent value in 'the humanities' (however defined), but because it makes you ill-suited to understanding the impact of technology on society writ large.

Not all of course, but many of these AI types are getting it *precisely* wrong.

Everyone would be a lot happier if you understood San Francisco isn’t a regular city you can judge by sane standards of governance or hygiene, but instead an urban Petri dish where every manner of wild experiment, political or technological, is allowed to run absolutely wild. The drug addict and the startup entrepreneur aren’t different or dueling visions of the city’s future: they’re both here to get their freak on and damn the consequences. They’re absolutely in tune with each other in what has become the spirit of the town.

Silicon Valley healthcare entrepreneurs won’t believe you when you cite that Spanish life expectancy is almost a decade a longer than American, despite the much lower GDP per capita and lower healthcare spend.

Until some looks it up on their phone. There are whole armies of incredibly motivated and well funded entrepreneurs who are building billion dollar companies to solve problems only Americans have (but think are universal).

Recently @aricoa sent me part of an obscure book published by the regional council of Galicia, Spain my family originated from.

It's a fascinating look into both my family and Spanish immigration to the New World.

It starts with Encarnación Luaces Fraga, my great-grandaunt... (Translations will be iffy, as the text is in Galician, which I can barely read. Letters are in Spanish, for reasons that will become clear.)

Encarnación was an arrestingly beautiful orphan from a poor part of Spain who got engaged with a wealthy Frenchman twice her age.

Today we're publishing the first in a series of case studies from @spindl_xyz on the realities of Web 3 user growth, retention and monetization.

The goal is to answer the question underlying Spindl's mission:

How do we get a billion people on Web 3?

blog.spindl.xyz/p/the-long-use… @spindl_xyz This study was done in collaboration with @0xPolygon, which launched a football NFT mint a couple weeks ago and used Spindl attribution to judge effectiveness.

This is the first real funnel analysis of Web 3 engagement, all the way from tweet to on-chain action.

Let's begin.

Given what's coming out of Twitter, and what continues to be the shit-show at Facebook (see @StevenLevy's latest on the Meta Oversight Board), I'm going to pull a shameless 'I told you so' and mention that some of us saw this coming years ago.

wired.com/story/inside-m… @StevenLevy My view here has been consistent: endowing platforms with the ability to censor speech was utterly misguided.

It would both be difficult in practice given the scale of these platforms, and inevitably captured by one political faction or another.
wired.com/story/want-fac…

You could write an episodic novel about the scenes in Brickell elevators.

This morning, Carrie-Fisher-in-Star-Wars lookalike in yoga pants with a fancy-looking dog gets on at floor 22.

Elevator stops.

(in Spanish)

"This elevator always has this spoiled tantrum." We are now stuck-in-elevator friends.

"You have to just not touch any of the buttons and wait." (Accent is Venezuelan.)

Me: "How long does it last?"

"Just a few minutes." Dog jumping around. "This guy wants to run because he finally slept for hours last night."

Whenever I see a Muslim at prayer in public I always check out his qibla bearing and see if it lines up with what I think is the correct Great Circle. Is this a thing among the Muslim faithful?

"Bro, I think you're off by like 10 degrees."

Qibla compass technology is probably so good it's no longer in debate (there are a hundred mobile apps for it).

Possibly heretical theory: rabbinical Judaism is a cultural Schelling point (and filter) for hyper-literate, disagreeable, neurotic (in the Big Five sense) people able to maintain OCD levels of religious practice over generations through exile and oppression. There’s a continuous peoplehood of course, and conversion hasn’t been a huge influx during the diaspora. But assimilation is necessarily a selection process. Who sticks around century after century?

Private equity guy in front of me on this flight is talking kind of a big game for sitting in premium economy. Someone who stole a deal from Chevron seems like he could do better than seat 16F.

<Establishing liberal internationalist virtue by trying to watch the US/England game in the World Cup.> match*, that's happening on a 'pitch,' with distances in meters and degrees in Celsius.

What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté. In Burnham’s formulation, this new managerial class would supplant the former business-owning bourgeois and even capital itself as the elite ruling class.

Most woke ‘labor’ scandals in tech are an entitled middle-management class at odds with founders.

a.co/d/582kzBh