When Is a Torched Waymo More Than a Torched Waymo?
The moves of some Los Angeles protestors could be the start of something far bigger. Welcome to the techlash.
tech-industry
The B2B Trap: How Silicon Valley is Funding its Own Extinction
Let me be blunt: Silicon Valley Founders and VCs have completely lost the plot. The evidence is overwhelming, and the consequences are…
Software Is Beating The World
Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it started with a blog.
Elon Musk attacked my article accusing him of gaming Twitter's algorithm for more attention. In some ways, it gave him exactly what he wanted.
In Zoe Schiffer's book "Extremely Hardcore," she describes a Super Bowl-related tweet flop with Elon Musk ordering engineers to change the algorithm.
Ultra Hardcore | Ben Tarnoff
To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a
It’s All Bullshit | JS Tan
The tech industry is supposed to be the cradle of innovation—but it’s become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity.
If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?
The compulsion to launch new projects in order to scale the corporate ladder has become so ubiquitous that employees call it the LPA cycle: launch, promo, abandon.
As one Google employee posted on Hacker News: “You cannot get promoted beyond a certain level in this place unless you ‘launch’ something big. So what do you get when you add all of these perverse incentives? Nine thousand, eight hundred and eighty-three chat apps.”
As a result, management is forced into a vicious cycle of upselling their team’s importance in order to be allocated a higher headcount, meaning they then have to come up with new projects to justify the new headcount. The more workers there are, the more important the work must be, and the more important the work is, the more people must work on it.
This model of innovation is also the reason Google employs more people than it needs, according to the employee, who added that because the company may never “strike it lucky [again] . . . they have to settle for attempting to starve potential competition of talent.”
Where industrial firms extract profits from the gap between value produced and what workers get paid in wages, internet platforms rely foremost on rents, which generate profit on the basis of existing property, intellectual or otherwise.
However, if in aggregate, profits are generated through extractive practices that do not require the labor force these companies have built up, what leverage do these workers have? The obvious answer is that they can withhold future profits by halting the creation of new products and revenue streams. But even this won’t work if the projects they work on are bullshit.
How Telegram became the center of the internet
The encrypted messaging app collapses distance, offering unparalleled access to war and conflict.
Opinion | I’ve always loved tech. Now, I’m a Luddite. You should be one, too.
The clothworkers of the 1800s had the right idea about how the benefits of innovation should be shared.
The Last Page Of The Internet | Defector
Gradually over the last decade, Reddit went from merely embarrassing but occasionally amusing, to actively harmful, to—mainly by accident—essential. As the platform that swallowed niche message boards, it became home to numerous small communities of surprisingly helpful enthusiasts, and grew into a repository of arcane knowledge about, and instantly available first-hand expertise on, a staggering […]
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information.
From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup
A spreadsheet on ad platform Xandr’s website revealed a massive collection of “audience segments” used to target consumers based on highly specific, sometimes intimate information and inferences
The file, which was linked to from a public page on Xandr’s website, contains 650,000 rows of data, each containing the name of an audience segment, the name of the supplier of the data behind that segment, a supplier ID number, and a segment ID number.
They also sometimes contain a hierarchical taxonomy, such as “Lifestyle > Visitation > Recent Retail Visit by Shopper > Lululemon.”
Abolish Venture Capitalism
Venture capitalists have supercharged surveillance, immiseration, and dispossession. Why should we trust them with so much power over the economy?
Elon Musk threatens to reassign @NPR on Twitter to 'another company'
The TikTok Ban Isn’t About National Security. It’s About the Global Dominance of US Tech.
After decades of justifying tech expansion on the basis of free speech, US policymakers threatening to ban Chinese-owned TikTok are now changing their tune. The about-face reveals their real objective: preserving the dominance of American tech capitalists.
How A Mysterious Tech Billionaire Created Two Fortunes—And A Global Software Sweatshop
Two decades ago, Joe Liemandt became the
youngest member of the Forbes 400 by building
a software juggernaut. He’s quietly bigger than ever, with a far darker model.
In the 1990s Liemandt was the golden boy of enterprise software
Others say Crossover is running the cloud equivalent of a software sweatshop.
Disgruntled employees be damned—the pool of skilled workers in emerging countries appears to be bottomless.
The Incredible Tantrum Venture Capitalists Threw Over Silicon Valley Bank
Remind me why, exactly, these guys have so much control over technological innovation?
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
Or how, exactly, platforms die.
Saving Kids from the Street
We were always told that the internet would bring about a new era…
Watch a VC use my name to sell a con.
Normally I just ignore navel-gazing tech-industry articles like this, but people keep sending it to me, so I guess this guy is famous or something. Michael Arrington posted this article, "Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining" which quotes extensively from my 1994 diary. He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to ...
‘Call Me a Scammer to My Face’
Madison Campbell is determined to get DIY rape kits into survivors’ hands, no matter who tells her it’s a bad idea.