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

Today's newsletter is about Reddit and the devil's deal of venture capital - and how tech is facing a reckoning, as startups that were never meant to grow as big as they have rip apart their businesses in search of an exit - or face certain death.
wheresyoured.at/p/techs-reckon… Reddit is the ultimate rot economy startup, raising $1.3bn for a business that has never turned a profit, that has no real path to profitability, and now is turning to desperate measures like charging for their free API to try and juice their numbers.
wheresyoured.at/p/techs-reckon…

Was excited to watch Rob Zombie tonight, except I’ve just heard he’s “gone woke” He’s changing the name of his movie to “house of 1000 genders”

Flink, who recently acquired Cajoo, will no longer be sold to Getir @david_j_roth i have some terrible news

Found a new hat in my Airbnb. High viz Bruno Mars @TriviumPaolo wearing this on saturday

one of the regular things i get asked about growing my newsletter is how I did it, and the answer is "i wrote a lot" and they regularly do not like that answer

https://twitter.com/mollymcghee/status/1659250824453783552

Like i dunno what to tell you. If you hate writing maybe writing isn't for you!

Today's newsletter is about Elon Musk's tragic kingdom of Twitter, and how his destruction of Twitter's moderation policy and corporate structure leaves new CEO Linda Yaccarino in an impossible situation that guarantees her eventual resignation.
ez.substack.com/p/musks-tragic… New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino joins a company that has been utterly broken, with Musk catering to the whims of reactionaries that, like him, believe in nothing other than their imagined sense of repression. And Yaccarino's ties to the WEF terrify them.
ez.substack.com/p/musks-tragic…

Guess he’s given up on pretending It’s so funny how Elon Musk has just fully given up on pretending not to be a huge piece of shit just as it becomes alarmingly obvious that he has no way of actually winning back advertisers

economic analysis: vegas has gone from relatively quiet to bumping in the last month. The economy is healing the ed zitron economic index is based on an analysis of my business plus a macroeconomic analysis of how bumping Las Vegas is. I don't need your fancy bloomberg terminal

Today's newsletter is about how executives want to use artificial intelligence to reduce the amount of humans they want to pay *and* distance companies from any responsibility to customers at all.
ez.substack.com/p/artificial-l… The Writers Guild strike continues despite hollywood losing billions of dollars of share value, because they are dead-set on reducing writer's rooms to one person and a machine, and in the process trying to reduce WGA membership and kill powerful unions.
ez.substack.com/p/artificial-l…

Today's newsletter is about how the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - along with media executives that never take part or interest in the creative process - is destroying creativity and the lives of workers in both the media industry and Hollywood.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap… The problem of everything I've been writing about is the pursuit of eternal revenue growth - the quality of a product is now subordinate to shareholder value, meaning that the people at the helm in the media are fully disconnected from production itself.
ez.substack.com/p/absentee-cap…

Today's newsletter is about the grim truth that Elon Musk is killing Twitter through his desperation for validation and attention, and a lack of understanding of the basic human concepts of likeability and popularity.
ez.substack.com/p/checked-out Wanting to be popular is natural, but requires either appealing to the masses or finding your niche of people. Twitter, for all its faults, lets you grow an audience even within a relatively small niche - but you do, on some level, have to earn it.
ez.substack.com/p/checked-out

Today's newsletter: Mark Zuckerberg needs to be replaced at Meta. He's a liar, and an ineffective, incompetent and directionless executive that cannot innovate or even ship successful products. He's going to run this company into the ground.

ez.substack.com/p/fire-mark-zu… Despite saying for years that the metaverse was the future of the company, Mark Zuckerberg has now diverted his energies to AI - he is a complete liar, and every single person who went along with his metaverse sham should be ashamed of themselves.
ez.substack.com/p/fire-mark-zu…