A stray thought about ChatGPT:

It’s a cliché generator. A truly impressive cliche generator.
(1/x) I was reading @ibogost’s Atlantic piece yesterday.

A few paragraphs in, I thought to myself “man, he’s kinda phoning this in.”

Then there was the reveal. He used ChatGPT to write the intro. Once he started writing in his own voice, you could *tell*.

theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

The #TwitterFiles are just fan service for aggrieved conservatives who exist in the Fox News Extended Universe. This entire installment from Taibbi is just “ZOMG senior Twitter leaders met with government agencies to identify threats?!? And they considered CONTEXT when evaluating high-profile strategic communications?”

…man, you know that’s just a description of competence, right?

Shadow-banning is good, actually.

There should be more of it. You can basically divide content moderation into two buckets.

You can develop ratings for each individual utterance or you can rate the speakers.

November 1994: @wired covers the Hackers on Planet Earth conference.

The opening keynote speaker and serious-adult-in-the-room is Robert David Steele.

“Even though Steele seems sincere in his desire for ‘free’ information, others in Washington may be less benign.”
(1/2) Wikipedia is a great resource for sussing out the trajectory of these figures.

Steele in 1994 told WIRED he had ambitions of becoming Director of National Intelligence. What happened next? Where is he now?

The answer? Hmm…

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Da…

The thing to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop story was that it was SUPPOSED to be the Trump campaign’s “October Surprise.”

Mainstream media and social media were supposed to take the bait and focus on the appearance of scandal for the last weeks of the election.
(1/x) They didn’t take the bait. The New York Post story was shunned. Social media platforms treated it as manufactured propaganda with questionable sourcing.

And conservative elites have been PISSED ever since.
(2/x)

An early thought on the ChatGPT hype:

I keep people hearing this will upend higher education — “No more take home essays ever,” etc.

I think that’s obviously wrong.

What this *will* upend is the underground market for cheating on tests. ChatGPT is at or very close to the writing level of an average undergrad pulling an all-nighter to complete an essay on readings they only skimmed.

Plagiarism detection software isn’t going to catch this stuff. That’s a real problem.

One thing I’m genuinely flummoxed by concerning Elon’s “everyone be hardcore” ultimatum:

Why would an engineer be working at Twitter if they wanted to live the startup lifestyle?

(Thread) One of my all-time favorite @WIRED articles is “no exit,” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus.

It’s the best portrait I’ve seen of the insane hours/stress/risk in startup culture. He compares it to the more sane lifestyle of tech workers at big, established firms.

wired.com/2014/04/no-exi…

I'll be writing something longform on this topic later this week, but this is a legitimately big deal and shouldn't get lost as everyone gawks at the ongoing social media car crash.

https://twitter.com/transparenttech/status/1592553405725429760?s=20&t=tihWcczIBfGSJ4vnN_NIPA

A major lesson from the past 5-10 years is that the social media platforms cannot responsibly monitor themselves. The incentives are all wrong.

If our knowledge of platform effects and behavior are limited to what the platforms selectively share, it's always gonna go bad.

This Election Day is a test.

For 50 years, extreme conservative jurists dreamed of overturning Roe v Wade. For 50 years, they worried that there would be electoral consequences.

They've determined the electorate doesn't care. About rights, about policy, about anything.
(...) If they're proven right -- if this midterm election goes the way midterm elections of this sort usually go (President's party loses a lot of seats) -- then the conservative Supreme Court takes a dangerous lesson to heart.

Some predictions for week 2 of Elon-Twitter:

-the new Twitter Blue rollout will be a disaster. Signups will be meager (Only QAnons, Elon fanboys will, and reporters who work at @theinformation).

It’s going to turn out there was no demand for verification among the user base. -the new verification system is going to be treated as an attack surface by spammers and scammers.

There will be at least 2-3 high-profile events — impersonations, hacks, viral misinformation stories — that become the focus of reporting.

What I like(d) about Twitter, and what I’ll look for from whatever comes next:

I joined Twitter in 08 or 09. The thing that mattered in those early days was that ties were unidirectional (following), not bidirectional (friending).

(1/x) I was a grad student at that point. What Twitter was really good for was that I could follow the authors who impressed me.

Twitter became a curated news and discussion feed. I could read the links they posted, to their own work and to work that impressed them.
(2/x)

This is an... interesting reinterpretation of the causes and consequences of the techlash.

I think Yglesias is basically right about the downstream consequences, but I think he's seriously misremembering what the previous decades of tech coverage were like.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1588190763413868553

NYT and the rest of the tech press started to turn critical and investigative several years after (as Marc Andreessen put it) software ate the world.

They started treating Silicon Valley as a current power-center, rather than as the upstart inventors of The Future.

Sigh.
I've read the new Bret Stephens climate piece.

It is... on-brand for him.

Here's the moral core of the article: "it seemed churlish to say no."

Given 6,300 words to reflect on the defining crisis of this century, his key insight is that one ought never appear churlish. He uses that word, "churlish" twice in the piece.

Stephens, ever the moral scold, wishes us all to know that he has reflected upon the climate crisis and come to understand that it is real and it is now.

He has done so because he was asked *politely.*

One of my biggest worries about the future of politics is that, as objective conditions get worse, the stories told by authoritarians become more appealing.

Their rhetorical strategy is to claim governance is simple - just kick out the crooks and idiots.
davekarpf.substack.com/p/will-the-cli… On the other side you have, essentially, defenders of liberal technocratic government.

Governance is difficult and complicated. There are rarely simple or easy solutions to our problems.

This has the benefit of being *true*, but it is terrible messaging.

One problem I keep running into w/ the “Vote Harder, nothing else matters” set is that I think they are severely lacking in catastrophic imagination.

We don’t know what the democratic breakdown would look like. It’d be terrible though. So we just don’t consider the possibility. (This also applies to mainstream journalism, of course.)

Interesting thread.

And/but, it really calls to mind some of the similarities between the big, splashy tech nonsense of 1999/2000 and 2021/2022.

https://twitter.com/schrep/status/1527520245362982912

The obvious analogy is the dotcom commercials in the 2000 Super Bowl and the 2022 Super Bowl.

(Really tempting the fates there, eh cryptobros?)

I could assign this screenshot as the final exam assignment in a disinformation class.

The Bad Actor here isn’t the Babylon Bee (they’re just unfunny). And it isn’t Twitter either. For those who don’t know the Babylon Bee is the latest conservative attempt to do comedy.

It’s what The Onion would be if the Onion wore polo shirts with popped collars and shouted “DO YOU KNOW WHO MY FATHER IS?” at random people on the street.

This is the final week of class in the History of the Digital Future seminar that I teach at GWU.

The main theme that my students learned from 30 years of internet history?

“Big money ruins everything.”

Today it reads like a warning.
#WIREDarchive The trouble with the 90s web isn’t, I think, that it was commercialized.

It’s that Netscape went public for SO MUCH MONEY, setting off a five year financial boom, which in turn set up insane valuations that could never be justified.

The scale of the money was ruinous.

The IPCC: “we need a whole-of-society mobilization in the next decade to decarbonize and prevent global collapse. This must be priority 1 for everyone with any type of power.”

Silicon Valley: “We burned down 2 rainforests teaching a neural net to draw pictures. Does that help?” Also Silicon Valley: “the future is going to built on distributed databases of jpeg receipts. It requires more computational power than several nation states.

After we make a trillion dollars from this idea, we’ll fund some carbon offsets or something.”

I don't think Elon Musk is actually going to successfully buy Twitter.

But if he does, it'll kill the site -- not because the left will leave in protest, but because Elon Musk's idea of "good twitter" is just going to be a crappier product. Twitter is already perfect for Musk. He can steal memes and call people "pedo guy" and manipulate stock prices and distract attention from bad news about his business ventures to his heart's content.

Just gonna freelance some honest, new taglines for substack…

Substack: please compare us to Clubhouse. We look really good compared to Clubhouse. Substack: it’s just a blog, a payment system, and an email distribution list stapled together.

…But, um, *innovative.*