Newsletter: Blame the tech industry for the rise of authoritarianism. Blame a news media handicapped by a deference to power and a fear of bias. Blame the fact that our digital lives are unchecked ecological disasters.

Something must change.
wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-fu… Why are we surprised that people don’t trust the media after years of them telling regular people that the economy is good, that their problems aren’t real, that the things that make them suffer are in their heads - and it's their fault things suck?
wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-fu…

Newsletter: Microsoft is a cult driven by “The Growth Mindset,” a psuedo-science that informs recruitment, hiring, firing and promotion decisions, all while instructing employees and managers to generate performance reviews using hallucination-prone AI.

wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi… When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he rebuilt their culture around a flimsy psuedo-science called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job performance is judged.
wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi…

Newsletter: OpenAI is a bad, unprofitable business, with most of its revenue coming from premium subscriptions, and only 27% ($1bn) coming from people licensing its technology, suggesting that the generative AI industry is much smaller than we thought.
wheresyoured.at/oai-business/ In the last week, OpenAI has lost their CTO and Chief Research Officer, all while trying to raise a $6.5bn+ round for a firm that loses $5bn/yr. They're so desperate they're raising from SoftBank, a VC famous for losing billions on terrible investments.
wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

Newsletter: The tech industry has its own growing commercial real estate bubble - the Software As A Service market is in decline, over-leveraging unprofitable generative AI in a desperate - and failing - attempt to restart growth...but it isn't working.
wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-… The silent, powerful market-driver of the tech industry is the Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) industry, where swaths of the economy have outsourced their infrastructure to the cloud. Its core business model is making you trade convenience for freedom.

wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-…

Newsletter: A subprime AI crisis is brewing. Most of the tech industry has bought into a technology sold at a discounted rate, heavily-subsidized by big tech. If it collapses, the cascade effect could savage both startups and public companies alike.
wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ OpenAI is untenable. They're raising $6.5 billion at a $150 billion valuation for a company that burns $5+bn a year, and are so desperate for money that they’re both trying to get rid of their non-profit designation *and* raise from the middle east.
wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

Newsletter: the AI bubble is close to bursting, with Big Tech losing $2 trillion in market cap as everybody wakes up to the mediocrity of generative AI. Here’s a comprehensive guide to how everything might fall apart - and how little time OpenAI has left.
wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/
Last week was dire for the AI bubble, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon getting spanked for spending tens of billions of dollars on generative AI with little revenue to show for it, and on Friday, multiple media outlets ran a story on the bubble popping.
wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

Newsletter: Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI.

wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altma… OpenAI as it stands cannot survive. To go longer than two years, it will have to raise more money than anyone has ever raised, and to go further will need productize a totally different technology to GPT, and reduce costs by thousands of percent.
wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altma…

This week's newsletter: It's time to call BS on generative AI and demand that companies like OpenAI actually provide useful, helpful software, and actively reject the growing coterie of hucksters using AI as a marketing tool to get media headlines.
wheresyoured.at/put-up-or-shut… The tech industry is currently in the midst of the most bizarre cognitive dissonance I've ever seen — more so than the metaverse, even — as company after company simply lies about what's possible with the "power of AI."
wheresyoured.at/put-up-or-shut…

Newsletter: Goldman Sachs has called BS on Generative AI, and I believe that it's time that everybody follows suit - generative AI is unreliable, unsustainable, requires an entire rebuild of America's power grid, and is most decidedly not the future.
wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/ Goldman Sachs recently issued a report called "GenAI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?" savaging the industry, with GS' Jim Covello saying that there's limited upside, and that it's incapable of solving the complex problems that would make it worth it.
wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/

okay, you want an example of how bad Google is?

Not a single link on this page is to the actual Beekman Hotel. They're all random reservation portals you've never heard of. This is basically a huge con on Google's part where they force hotels to pay to sponsor links on their own searches. Note that The James has paid to sponsor theirs, but the Grand Hyatt hasn't, making a link to "" the top result. guestreservations.com

Newsletter: Tech's hyper-growth era is ending. Almost every major web platform has seen traffic declines since 2021, and the industry is getting desperate as it realizes there aren't any massive new markets left- and generative AI isn't the next big thing.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble Sometime in 2019, things changed in tech -things got iterative rather than innovative, and tech began trying to sell us half-baked concepts that only helped VCs get rich - cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and now generative AI that lacks any real utility.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/

This week's newsletter is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg and his internal growth team have spent over a decade repeatedly and intentionally making Facebook and Instagram harder and more dangerous to use in the pursuit of perpetual growth.

wheresyoured.at/killingfaceboo… One might wonder how Mark Zuckerberg, as CEO of Meta, is able to get away with running Facebook and Instagram into the ground - and the answer is he can never be fired, thanks to Sean Parker advocating for him having three out of five board seats in 2004.
wheresyoured.at/killingfaceboo…

Today's newsletter is the story of how Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's former head of ads - led a coup so that he could run Google Search, and how an email chain from 2019 began a cascade of events that would lead to him running it into the ground.

wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki… In February 2019, Google's ads and finance teams called a "code yellow" on search, because revenue was slow and - seriously - people were not asking Google enough questions. Ben Gomes, then head of search, refused to make Google Search worse for profit.
wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-ki…

I think we really are underselling how cooked Facebook is. This is a 17,000 member group called "Facebook complaints center" made up of people that post like they recently got a concussion





You have banned me for absolutely no reason and I demand a bloody answer

This week's newsletter: Tech has looted the internet, making every platform actively hostile to the user, turning Facebook, Google Search, Instagram into products that no longer provide a service while making them hundreds of billions of dollars.
wheresyoured.at/the-great-loot… Together, Instagram, Facebook and Google make ~$300bn in revenue a year, but have abdicated any duty to their users, offering not a "service" but as many ways as possible to interrupt the user to push them into doing things that make the company money.
wheresyoured.at/the-great-loot…

Today's newsletter: I believe we're reaching peak AI, and that the industry is going to crash to Earth as enterprises and consumers realize the limits and lack of utility of ChatGPT and co.

And it's all thanks to Sam Altman's empty hype cycle.

wheresyoured.at/peakai/ In a WSJ interview from last week, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati felt lost, failing to give many specifics about OpenAI's new text-to-video platform in one of the worst exec interviews I've ever seen. And I think it's because it's trained on YouTube and Facebook.
wheresyoured.at/peakai/

Today's newsletter: We're watching the internet die as it gets overwhelmed with content built to be popular with algorithms, much of it generated by AI, crowding out stuff created by humans. Ironically, this is also an existential threat to generative AI.
wheresyoured.at/are-we-watchin… The Reddit IPO is the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. Sam Altman and Steve Huffman made $180m+ off of millions of users' unpaid labor.
wheresyoured.at/are-we-watchin…

This week's newsletter is about how idiotic executives are killing the media by trying to turn beloved outlets into high growth startups that make content for algorithms rather than readers.
wheresyoured.at/the-anti-econo… Modern business is being choked by a growth-at-all-costs ideology that prioritizes revenue and market share over sustainability and human capital. The markets are disconnected from real production, and the result is a weaker economy that enriches idiots.
wheresyoured.at/the-anti-econo…

This company is totally screwed. Elon isn't going anywhere and they all got swindled. This rocks. Burn in hell for funding this guy

https://twitter.com/ericgplatt/status/1707502866166886829

Also didn't Elon say Twitter is growing? Looks like they're losing daily active users...concerning.

Today's newsletter has a simple message: Elon Musk is a dangerous nation-state-level actor using his massive wealth and power to influence elections, wars, and markets. We must nationalize SpaceX and Starlink and put a stop to billionaire despots.

wheresyoured.at/p/elon-musk-is… Elon Musk cut off Starlink in Crimea as a means of influencing an armed conflict. He is a private citizen who has amassed enough power to help dictators continue their invasions - all so that he can continue buying Russian aluminum and feel important.
wheresyoured.at/p/elon-musk-is…

Sir that is bullshit, according to my source “you”

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…

https://twitter.com/walterisaacson/status/1700342242290901361

Walter Isaacson is a worm! He’s going to try and walk this back under pressure from Musk! You are watching history being rewritten! Isaacson is a disgrace! What shit did Steve Jobs get changed after he threw a tantrum I wonder