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A generation ago, small, independent operations defined the entire industry. Today, the businesses of beef, pork, and poultry slaughter are all dominated by four giants at the national level. But that greatly understates the problem, as in many regions, a single corporation holds a complete monopoly. Two firms, Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America control as much as 80-90 percent of the milk supply chain in some states and wield substantial influence across the entire industry. As our Food & Power website details, the story is much the same in food-processing, egg production, grain production, and produce farming.

Monopolists have captured control over many lines of manufacturing as well. Corning, an American glass manufacturer, sells 60 percent of all the glass used in LCD screens, and Owens Illinois holds a near monopoly over market for glass bottles in the US. Rexam, a British company, holds a dominant position over the international supply of bottle caps and pharmaceutical bottles.

Hospital corporations across America have also been buying up physician practices in recent years. Hospital ownership of physician practices more than doubled between 2004 and 2011, from 24 to 49 percent. In drug stores, meanwhile, the pending takeover of Rite Aid by Walgreen’s would reduce the market to two giants, along with CVS.

Pharmaceutical companies have been merging at a record pace in recent years, and drug makers often use their concentrated market power to raise the prices of generic drugs, such as Digoxin, Daraprim, Naloxone, and standard vaccines.

Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators. Maytag also controls the Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, and KitchenAid brands and holds a dominant position over supply of Sears Kenmore products.

The FTC successfully blocked a proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, but the market is still highly concentrated after Office Depot’s 2013 acquisition of Office Max. Collectively, the two firms control 69 percent of the entire office supplies market.

China’s vitamin cartel controls 100 percent of the market for U.S. Vitamin C, which is also known as ascorbic acid and which is used in almost all preserved foods.

For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself. The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.

Google’s product managers are each charged with finding ways to increase the profitability of their little corner of the googleverse. That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block. What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get. Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible. That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits. The exec who decided to save money by reducing the stringency of phone number checking for business accounts didn’t announce this in a company-wide memo. When you’re eating your seed-corn, it’s imperative that you do so behind closed doors, and tell no one what you’ve done. Like any sleight-of-hand artist, you want the audience to see the outcome of the trick (the cost savings), not how it’s done (exposing every searcher in the world to fraud risk to save a buck).

Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies: https://killedbygoogle.com/

the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit." And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape." Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Israel’s intense bombardment of Gaza began on Oct. 7 in response to a surprise attack by Hamas that killed roughly 1,400 people in Israel. Since then, Gazans have found that nowhere is safe, as homes, mosques, schools and hospitals have been struck. More than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed since the strikes began, according to the Gaza health ministry.

On Saturday, two Israeli projectiles hit the same hospital that was struck on Tuesday night, damaging the fourth floor, which housed a diagnostic center and the ultrasound and mammography units, the hospital administration said. However, the Israeli military denied that it had struck that area on Saturday.

Sameh said he and his family fled their home in Gaza City fearing that it could be in danger from Israeli rockets, and went to stay with an aunt. But then they grew concerned that her home was under threat as well, so they came to the hospital.

Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation right now, with fake accounts, straight-up lies, confident-sounding assertions based on old videos, and people who spent 20 minutes Googling about something trying to correct reporters, academics and researchers who have spent years covering Israel, Palestine, and wars of all kinds.

An explosion at a hospital is not unlike the debate that broke out about precisely how many Israeli children were beheaded or burned alive after Hamas’s attack. Journalistically, it is important for us to get this story right. Morally, the finer details are in some ways not the most relevant. This explosion, whether it was the result of an Israeli rocket or not, has still left rescue crews collecting bodies and remains in a charred parking lot. And while everyone was arguing about who to blame this incident on, Israel did bomb a school run by the United Nations, killing six people. And the situation in Gaza is increasingly desperate.

They killed over 1,500 Hamas fighters in the initial battle. They have flattened dozens of buildings in Gaza — including schools, housing, and health centers. At least 19 journalists have been killed, a sign of how wide-reaching the violence has been. Israel has, in all likelihood, killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians — and the number may already be in the thousands. They have displaced one million people. Senior Hamas leaders are being killed left and right. They’re clashing with protesters in the West Bank, where the resulting violence has also killed people. They are rallying support from allies in Europe and the United States.That is the response. A lot of the commentary assumes Israel should pursue a strategy of uprooting and destroying Hamas, which implies that what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. But as the U.S. learned in launching a full-scale attack to destroy al-Qaeda, what follows could well be worse. And as I wrote earlier this week, Israel should be careful not to repeat the same post-9/11 mistakes the U.S. made. Israel’s response has already been violent, and it’s been forceful, and it’s been severe.

The auteur director is an appealing idea, as it romanticizes the ‘great artist’ by equating them spiritually with their work. Despite its flaws, it can be a helpful way of looking at the impact a director has not only on their own films, but on the movement with which they’re associated. After all, it’s nearly impossible to think about the French New Wave without Godard, or the American New Wave without Scorsese. Auteur directors come from across the globe and across time, but there is one critical disparity in the mechanics of authorship, and that is its exclusivity. The apparatus of authorship is one which acts against a sense of collectivity—you cannot feel special if you are just one of many artists operating within the same framework.

Ironically, it is the directors who have become most synonymous with their own personal ‘brand’—like Anderson or Tarantino—who are most obviously borrowing from other films. Successful collagists nearly supersede their original influences.

When you’re young, everything feels like it’s happening for the first time, and this is presented as the main reason to be invested. In a culture that is so obsessed with nostalgia bait, I somehow find it hard to believe that we’ve yet to find a way to market curation. We are in a golden era of collage, but we tend toward the ahistorical in a way that feels distinctly linked to the myth of American exceptionalism. There is no shame in carving out a spot within a larger tradition; the alternative seems to be incredibly lonely.

The crisis in the Middle East is a knotty test of our humanity, asking how to respond to a grotesque provocation for which there is no good remedy

The anxiety in Tel Aviv is palpable, peaceful though it seems, while Gaza is an inner ring of hell and probably on a path to something much worse.

What are we to make of the Biden administration’s call for an additional $14 billion in assistance for Israel and simultaneous call for humanitarian aid for Gazans? Defensive weapons for Israel’s Iron Dome system would make sense, but in practice, is the idea that we will help pay for humanitarians to mop up the blood caused in part by our weapons?

Biden called for America to stand firmly behind Ukraine and Israel, two nations attacked by forces aiming to destroy them. Fair enough. But suppose Ukraine responded to Russian war crimes by laying siege to a Russian city, bombing it into dust and cutting off water and electricity while killing thousands and obliging doctors to operate on patients without anesthetic.

Here in Israel, because the Hamas attacks were so brutal and fit into a history of pogroms and Holocaust, they led to a resolve to wipe out Hamas even if this means a large human toll. “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” declared Giora Eiland, a former head of the Israeli National Security Council. “There is no other option for ensuring the security of the State of Israel.”

I particularly want to challenge the suggestion, more implicit than explicit, that Gazan lives matter less because many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas. People do not lose their right to life because they have odious views, and in any case, almost half of Gazans are children. Those kids in Gaza, infants included, are among the more than two million people enduring a siege and collective punishment.

But memes also have a serious side, according to researchers looking at modern forms of communication. They are a language in themselves, with a capacity to transcend cultures and construct collective identities between people. These sharable visual jokes can also be powerful tools for self-expression, connection, social influence and even political subversion. Internet memes "are one of the clearest manifestations of the fact there is such a thing as digital culture", says Paolo Gerbaudo, a reader in digital politics and director of the Centre for Digital Culture at Kings College London. Gerbaudo describes memes as a "sort of a ready-made language with many kinds of stereotypes, symbols, situations. A palette that people can use, much like emojis, in a way, to convey a certain content".

"We see the replication of mundane reality in many forms of art," says Idil Galip, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the Meme Studies Research Network. "Even going back to, let's say, Hellenic times, you've got something like tragic theatre, that takes things that happen to you that are upsetting and real-life and makes them into comedic things, which is what memes do." With the arrival of the internet, however, memes have become a more tangible phenomenon that can be observed as they grow, spread and mutate. "In a way, it's like internet users paving the way for academics to look at memes more scientifically," says Limor Shifman, a professor of communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Researchers at Facebook showed in a study in 2014 just how widely memes posted on the social media site can spread and evolve. In one example, they found 121,605 different variants of one particular meme posted across 1.14 million status updates.

Shifman's definition of memes, now widely used in the field, describes them as "a group of texts with shared characteristics, with a shared core of content, form, and stance". Broadly, "content" refers to ideas and ideologies, while "form" to our sensory experiences such as audio or visual, and "stance" to the tone or style, structures for participation, and communicative functions of the meme.

Memes tap into collective consciousness online and have been referred to as digital folklore – or "Netlore". "We can see not just the new ways people do things or the new ways people express themselves in public but also some of the themes, some of the anxieties or desires people have. All of these complex issues are reflected in things like memes," says Gerbaudo.  But for an idea to become a meme, it needs to be shared. Most successful internet memes – in that they spread wide and far – share a few key attributes. "Usually the most viral, most loved memes are memes that are about things that are very recent in public memory," says Galip. But often they are also "something that was important to many people", she says. "Viral memes usually appeal to the most common denominator. So you don't have to necessarily be embedded in internet subculture to understand what it's saying. And the final thing I think is, it's the most basic thing but it's very hard to replicate, is that it should be fun to look at, and fun to share."

Memes also have an uncanny way of capturing a feeling, experience, or state of mind which resonates with people, depending on the "niche-ness" of the meme. One small recent study found that people with depression rated depression-related memes as more humorous, relatable and shareable. The researchers suggest memes elegantly portray the experience of depression which some may find hard to vocalise. And because they are highly relatable among people with depression, they could offer the perception of social support and emotional connection. The findings echo those in other studies that have suggested internet memes can contribute to the formation of a collective identity among marginalised groups such as the LGBTQ+ community or among disparate networks of people, such as those who have been conceived with donated sperm or eggs.

"Niche memes are not meant to go viral," says Galip. "They're meant usually to create things like in-group belonging, something that kind of strengthens a sense of identity."

One perspective put forward by Joshua Nieubuurt, who studies misinformation and disinformation at the University of Maryland in the US and the University of Okinawa in Japan, is that memes can be regarded as a modern digital equivalent of the propaganda leaflet. He points to the way memes have been used to support or undermine arguments for Covid-19 restrictions and vaccinations, using humour and sarcasm to delegitimise the stances of people on either side of the debate.

Online, memes are important facilitators of communication, belonging, and digital activism, that can both unite and divide us, depending on who we are and how we participate with them.

"This format of communication is here to stay because it's a very stable way of expressing your individuality and your communality," says Shifman. Gerbaudo notes that memes are already evolving – branching out more into video sharing. "TikTok videos are memetic in character," he says. "They respond to challenges, which have a certain format, where people need to kind of play with a given, pre-established set of interactions."

These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.

Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.

In fact, the whole point of digital gardens is that they can grow and change, and that various pages on the same topic can coexist. “It’s less about iterative learning and more about public learning,” says Maggie Appleton, a designer. Appleton’s digital garden, for example, includes thoughts on plant-based meat, book reviews, and digressions on Javascript and magical capitalism. It is “an open collection of notes, resources, sketches, and explorations I’m currently cultivating,” its introduction declares. “Some notes are Seedlings, some are budding, and some are fully grown Evergreen[s].”

Rather than presenting a set of polished articles, displayed in reverse chronological order, these sites act more like free form, work-in-progress wikis. A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren't strictly organised by their publication date. They're inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren't refined or complete - notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They're less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we're used to seeing.

It harkens back to the early days of the web when people had fewer notions of how websites "should be.” It's an ethos that is both classically old and newly imagined.

digital gardening is not about specific tools – it's not a Wordpress plugin, Gastby theme, or Jekyll template. It's a different way of thinking about our online behaviour around information - one that accumulates personal knowledge over time in an explorable space.

Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time. Everything is arranged and connected in ways that allow you to explore. Think about the way Wikipedia works when you're hopping from Bolshevism to Celestial Mechanics to Dunbar's Number. It's hyperlinking at it's best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

Joel focused on the process of digital gardening, emphasising the slow growth of ideas through writing, rewriting, editing, and revising thoughts in public. Instead of slapping Fully Formed Opinions up on the web and never changing them.

However, many of these no-code tools still feel like cookie-cutter solutions. Rather than allowing people to design the information architecture and spatial layouts of their gardens, they inevitably force people into pre-made arrangements. This doesn't meant they don't "count,” as "real” gardens, but simply that they limit their gardeners to some extent. You can't design different types of links, novel features, experimental layouts, or custom architecture. They're pre-fab houses instead of raw building materials.

Gardens are organised around contextual relationships and associative links; the concepts and themes within each note determine how it's connected to others. This runs counter to the time-based structure of traditional blogs: posts presented in reverse chronological order based on publication date. Gardens don't consider publication dates the most important detail of a piece of writing. Dates might be included on posts, but they aren't the structural basis of how you navigate around the garden. Posts are connected to other by posts through related themes, topics, and shared context.

Gardens are never finished, they're constantly growing, evolving, and changing. Just like a real soil, carrot, and cabbage garden. The isn't how we usually think about writing on the web. Over the last decade, we've moved away from casual live journal entries and formalised our writing into articles and essays. These are carefully crafted, edited, revised, and published with a timestamp. When it's done, it's done. We act like tiny magazines, sending our writing off to the printer. This is odd considering editability is one of the main selling points of the web. Gardens lean into this – there is no "final version” on a garden. What you publish is always open to revision and expansion.

You're freed from the pressure to get everything right immediately. You can test ideas, get feedback, and revise your opinions like a good internet citizen. It's low friction. Gardening your thoughts becomes a daily ritual that only takes a small amount of effort. Over time, big things grow. It gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you.

Gardens are imperfect by design. They don't hide their rough edges or claim to be a permanent source of truth. Putting anything imperfect and half-written on an "official website” may feel strange. We seem to reserve all our imperfect declarations and poorly-worded announcements for platforms that other people own and control. We have all been trained to behave like tiny, performative corporations when it comes to presenting ourselves in digital space. Blogging evolved in the Premium Mediocre culture of Millenialism as a way to Promote Your Personal Brand™ and market your SEO-optimized Content. Weird, quirky personal blogs of the early 2000's turned into cleanly crafted brands with publishing strategies and media campaigns. Everyone now has a modern minimalist logo and an LLC. Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming. It's less performative than a blog, but more intentional and thoughtful than a Twitter feed. It wants to build personal knowledge over time, rather than engage in banter and quippy conversations.

If you give it a bit of forethought, you can build your garden in a way that makes it easy to transfer and adapt. Platforms and technologies will inevitably change. Using old-school, reliable, and widely used web native formats like HTML/CSS is a safe bet. Backing up your notes as flat markdown files won't hurt either.

Creative research is all about collecting the dots. It’s more common to think of “connecting the dots” but the truth is that you can’t connect the dots you can’t see. And we can only hold a tiny number of things in our brains at once. So a space for collecting (and organizing) the dots is a crucial foundation for thinking, creativity and more:

collect raw material, then think about it. From this process comes pattern recognition and eventually the insights that form the basis of novel ideas.

“You can re-sign your lease, but I have to raise it by $250 a month because I realized there was a bigger number your rent could be,” Turley informed his tenant of six years, attributing the rent increase to a need to keep up with the rising numbers he could envision. “Look, you’re a good tenant and all, but I thought of a bigger number and that puts me in a bind. Did you know that $2,850 is larger than $2,600? Most tenants don’t concern themselves with things like that, but as a landlord, I always have to be adjusting my leasing requirements to match the larger amounts that happen to come to mind.”

RIOT’s musical prowess is mostly self-taught. At 10, RIOT (born Ephrem Lopez Jr.) learned everything there was to know about loops and arrangements; at 15, he got his first DAW (digital audio workstation) and mastered Reason Studios, a music production software that remains his go-to.

“It's funny because Hype was just trying to call me a lyricist. I wouldn't consider myself a lyricist. Obviously, lyrics go into music and I do think about them and I do be having bars in my music but they're just super simple,” she says. “I want them to be digestible, I don't want them to fly over people's heads and they never catch it. I want people to hear it right away and be like, ‘OK, that was cute.’ But it's also fun at the same time.”

Ice is keenly aware of the comments made about her, but she isn’t interested in thoughts from nameless, faceless figures. In fact, she’s figuring out what internal rest looks like. Right now? It means she’s seven days into creating a workout and reading routine (her trainer just gave her James Clear’s bestseller Atomic Habits), taking frequent social media breaks and keeping her phone perpetually on DND (do not disturb), even putting me on to iPhone’s sleep mode. “It’s like super DND,” she giggles. “Very, very calming.”

So, aside from the people in her corner, whose opinion does she care about? “The critics,” she admits. “Because they actually study music and care about it. So I feel like I’d rather hear their opinion. ​​I'm more interested in that because at least it’ll be paragraphs explaining why they feel that way and I'll be able to understand the person better versus just one little hateful ass comment from a private page. At least there's an author and a face attached.”

Ice is leading a new class of women, including the likes of Kenzo B and Maiya the Don, who are changing what the drill scene looks and sounds like in New York, and appealing to an audience beyond its borders

The shift is happening in tandem with Latin music’s continual crawl further into the mainstream as pop’s leader in revenue and pace of growth. However, Ice has helped recenter hip-hop in mainstream culture and pop charts. Her take on the genre and unexpected rise might have been the reason why so many people had something to say about her landing the final slot on a Complex list ranking the best 50 New York rappers of all time.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.

Your best thinking is when you are fully engaged in the stuff in front of you, connecting it to other stuff—and finding your unique perspective amongst it all.