Andrew Raff

Over the last week, I can’t look at the news without thinking about kakistocracy

The Trump transition 2.0 is a very different clown car than the first Trump transition. In 2016, it seemed like Trump never understood the scale and scope of the Federal executive. For him, nothing could require more personnel or skill than running a New York real estate business. In 2024, a universe of MAGA loyalists, opportunists, and true believers are ready.

As with all things Trump, they just keep throwing things out to see what sticks. I think it’s crucial to remember that none of this is a single multi-step plan (do A to then do B to do C to then do D). Rather, they will try all of the things as much and as loudly as possible, see what sticks, and then move on to the next thing.

The “throw all the shit at the wall” tactic works through obstructions and fatigue as much as careful planning. Trump successfully avoided trial in three of the four criminally cases against him by lucking into a compliant ally in Judge Cannon in the federal documents case, which slowed the process down enough to get Trump to the election.

This throw everything at the wall and see what sticks approach is how Trump is trying to fill his cabinet: reward the true believers who stick with him (Elise Stefanik), the friends from TV who will loyally help purge the disloyal (Pete Hegseth), and the heavily compromised whose loyalty can be secured (Matt Gaetz).

Even where the appointments are within the realm of typical Republican quality, like Marco Rubio for State, there are potential Trump loyalty issues underlying them. Elevating Rubio to Secretary of State would clear a seat in the US Senate for an appointment by FL governor Ron DeSantis until a special election in 2026. It appears that the Trumpworld is pushing Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump to fill that seat. While Rubio is not the most independent-minded maverick in the Senate, he’s not going to be as loyal as family.

The two most dangerous appointments announced so far appear to be Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services and Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Gaetz has experience in the Justice Department only as the subject of an investigation. His appointment seems to be the least palatable to Senate Republicans and unlikely to succeed. But leading with this lead-weighted trial balloon may clear the path for smooth appointments for the even more loyal Todd Blanche as Deputy AG and John Sauer as Solicitor General.

RFK Jr. for Secretary of HHS is likely the compensation for the support as a third-party candidate/endorser. For all of the issues with Big Pharma having influence over policy, I can’t imagine that drastic cuts to basic research funding will satisfy industry. I would be surprised if this goes through.

But having key lightning rods who are clearly unsuitable for the roles to which they’ve been nominated might help clear paths to appointments for the even more dangerous. Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard seems to have bonded with Trump as fellow Russophiles.

Aside from nominating flawed candidates, the appointment process is also testing other theories of ensuring loyalty to Trump rather than the United States. First, eschewing FBI vetting.

Most dangerously, the Trump team is floating the idea of making all of the cabinet appointments as recess appointments, so that the Senate does not get to use its oversight power before appointing cabinet members. If the Senate does not simply acquiesce, the Trump team has floated the idea of using the never-invoked Article II, Section 3 authority to settle disagreements between the House and Senate about when to adjourn to force the Senate into adjournment and make recess appointments. A compliant Speaker of the House could be a willing ally in this plan. Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare: Will the Senate even get to vote on Trump’s bizarre national security nominees?

It’s not one thing, or another. It’s all the things, all the time to try to wear us all down and get as much authoritarianism and grift as the system will allow.

Whether Jimmy Carter’s malaise, HW Bush’s recession, and the pandemic chaos in 2020, the one-term presidencies in my lifetime are all defined by economic downturn or the perception of economic downturn. 2024 appears to be no different. And this is not just an American phenomenon, but globally, incumbent parties were resoundingly rejected by voters unhappy with the status quo, both on the left (like the Democrats in the US) and the right (e.g. the Tories in the UK).

Every governing party facinig election in a developed country this year lost vote share:

Here in the US, aside from noticeable inflation, a number of pandemic-era anti-poverty measures were simply allowed to expire.

As a result, US child poverty nearly tripled between 2021 and 2023.

I suppose that it makes sense economic opportunity is something that binds Americans together. That’s why most of us are here, isn’t it? Our United States traces our organizing principles down to a bunch of colonizers who realized that they could just settle here and take advantage of the natural bounty. That grew and expanded. The market for cheap labor started by enslaving people, but even before it was abolished, the dream of prosperity started bringing waves of immigrants into the country seeking a better life with more economic opportunity. Yes, many Americans immigrated here because of the democracy and freedom to escape repressive regimes and be able to speak, practice religion, and associate freely, but generally when we say that they came for a better life, we talk about the economic opportunity. Immigration was the engine that fed cheap labor into the system and allowed generations of immigrants come to America and build better lives for themselves and their children.

In this 2024 election, the more informed a voter was, the more likely they were to vote for Harris. Reuters/Ipsos found a correlation between believing in misinformation and voting for Trump:

Engagement with information is also tied to engagement with campaign activities. This is why the energy, enthusiasm and attendance gap at the candidates' rallies was so stark. More Harris supporters were highly engaged. Trump won the low-engagement voters by a huge margin. They’re not going to hear him speak for 3-hours. But these are the voters who are impacted by the economy and are voting for change. Even though they lived through the first Trump presidency, they still voted for “change” without scrutiny to the basic concepts of candidates' economic plans.

Informed voters are motivated by concerns like democracy and protecting people’s rights to bodily autonomy. Low-information voters are motivated primarily by their pocketbooks. Low-information voters come out for presidential elections but not midterms. So the anti-Dobbs wave that I expected to combine with anti-insurrectionist indignity to drive this election with righteous fury never existed. This is a small fire burning fiercely, but not an uncontainable wildfire. Ezra Klein: The Democratic Blind Spot That Wrecked 2024

In the swing states where the Harris campaign spent the most resources on getting its message out to voters, they performed better than in safe states where they invested fewer resources.

Everyone wants things to be better. We may have honest disagreements on what we mean by better, but if you look at the policy proposals on their own, the more popular policies are not the ones offered by the more popular candidate.

Unfortunately, becoming a well-informed voter was far more difficult than it should have been in 2024. This is all Craig’s fault. Before widespread internet use, the local news business relied on classified listings and advertising to fund journalism. Craigslist and other online job listing and marketplace platforms were all simply better and far more useful than classified ads in newspapers. The media has survived through community-supported efforts, consolidation into larger conglomerates, or patronage from billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff. But, at the same time, conservative activists continue to fund a vibrant and active idealogical echo chamber. Nothing with comparable scale or purity exists on the left. Conservative media continues to cast the mainstream moderate news media like the New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post as the left-wing media.

Algorithmic social media is also imbalanced. The social network formerly known as Twitter amplifies right-wing messages and misinformation. Meta’s platforms default to minimizing political content and amplifying content that is easier to sell advertising against. Who, except from Bytedance and the CCP, knows what TikTok’s algorithm prioritizes?

The billionaires who funded the Trump campaign got great value. They will not have to contend with a potential wealth tax. Rather, they will get rewarded for their patronage and continue to fund the foundations that support the conservative thinktank and media environment.

One of Trump’s unique political skills is his ability to read an audience and give them what they want, regardless of whether he directly contradicts himself or promises the clearly impossible. However, while Trump offers many contradictory statements, after living through one Trump presidency, I think it is clear what his top priorities will be: rewarding his loyal supporters, punishing his enemies, deporting as many people as possible, and making sure that he gets a cut of the profit, all of the glory, and deflecting blame onto anyone else. The conservative donors and backers will get their tax cuts, they will get their government contracts, and they will get their conservative judges.

Tariffs are not a sound economic policy. But they are an ideal policy in a transactional presidency. Exemptions from tariffs could be used to incentivize friendly behaviors. Tariff policy can be used to punish non-compliant businesses that rely on imports. Of course, none of this is regard to the actual economic impact, which will devastate small businesses across the country.

The transactional presidency will likely apply to all aspects of the executive branch. Trump-friendly states could get disaster relief quickly. Unfriendly states could be left to suffer.

After hollowing-out the administrative state, and appointing hundreds more anti-regulatory Federalist Society judges to the federal courts, abandoning support for other democracies as a core value of international relations*, and four more years of greed writ large on the national psyche, this will never be the diverse, entrepreneurial, and free country that it could be. Where we attract talent from all over the world to make a good life for everyone in this country.

Any failure to make intelligent choices about policy will create disastrous long-term effects. In particular, not addressing climate change will cause more people to suffer from natural disasters. Without intelligent and empowered regulators, an administration willing to provide opportunity to seek profit by working with AI accelerationists seems like the mostly way that AI could lead to problems. However far away true AGI may be, we are much closer to automated decision-making that could have devastating effects if used without thoughtful intent, oversight or understanding. Further eroding the public health system will only hasten the next pandemic and ensure that it is even more destructive than Covid-19.

Defunding education is likely to mean that lower tax states will struggle to fund public schools. Public education was crucial to building the strong middle class of the 20th century. As a result, it’s plausible to see a scenario where high school education is made optional and more teenagers are sent out into the workforce to take the low-wage work that were vacated as a result of Trump’s mass deportations. That’s also good for ensuring a continuing supply of Republican voters in the future.

Trump supporters see a need to Make America Great Again because everyone who is not a billionaire is being left behind by society in some way. But the Trump plans will not help more Americans get ahead. Instead, these plans try to address this pain by inflicting it on others. Instead of feeling better through success, feel better only by knowing that someone else is feeling worse. As people, we should all try to do things to make each other’s lives better that way we all win. Instead of healing the world, they are merely passing pain down the chain to the more vulnerable. Immigrants and transgender people are the most obvious targets for these actions. Local law enforcement will likely feel empowered and encouraged to act with more violence and cruelty, even if such actions contravene the official state and local policy. The most vulnerable among are the easiest targets and will suffer the most.

This is the future that we have chose. May the odds be ever in your favor.

Some other good analysis: emptywheel: Two Elections: “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check”

Daniel Drezner: My One Post-Mortem About the 2024 Election

The Paris Olympics has been one of the best in recent memory and a wonderful set of sports to bring people together.

With the exception of the water quality for the triathlon swim in the Seine, Paris has used existing and temporary venues around the city to great effect. It feels like less of a boondoggle than many previous Olympics.

Some of the new sports added this year are solid additions. Sport climbing is interesting. Breaking exceeded my low expectations and is fun and entertaining. Gymnastics might be better if it had more one on one duels like breaking.

I’m not sure that I’d ever seen Rugby Sevens before, but it’s a great, watchable, fast, fun sport, with quick play, constant action, little downtime, and short games. Ilona Maher is deservedly one of the breakout stars of this year.

Of the sports that I follow more closely, both of the road cycling races were exciting. Kristen Faulkner’s win was not only unexunexpected, but tactically clever and thrilling. Remco needing a bike change (without being able to tell the team car about it over race radio) was a tense moment full of adrenaline. (Between two Olympic golds and a podium at the Tour, he’s had a pretty good month!)

NBC has finally recognized that viewers want to watch events live, as they happen. Good sporting events don’t need to be interrupted by human interest clips packages to be interesting. Understanding the personalities and the stories that brought some of the best athletes in the world to compete add to the drama. Streaming has enabled Peacock to do both. By making all of the feeds available live, they’re able to meet the simple demands of sports fans (watching the events as they happen). The primetime network coverage can include all of the packaging. Who would have predicted that by 2024, Snoop Dogg and Flavor Flav would become cuddly Olympics mascots?

For having a feed of things on and jumping around to highlights, Gold Zone was a great way to dip in and out of events. Somehow, Peacock got the balance largely correct for the Olympics (unlike the Tour de France).

One downer is the fact that the Olympics, like France, and the rest of the world has essentially just given up on doing anything to prevent the spread of Covid, which is a significant failure. Since Covid is likely to cause persistent long-term damage, the number of athletes who were allowed to and chose to compete while infected may have significant consequences for them. You can’t blame the athletes because there’s no public health leadership discouraging or preventing.

In the wake of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, it looked like Trump was done. Democrats and Republicans condemned inflammatory rhetoric and violence. Yet, even though that was enough of a visceral scare to Congress to bring a second impeachment against Trump, there were still enough. Republican Senators who didn’t support conviction.

During the Biden administration, efforts to hold Trump accountable and ensuring mechanisms to prevent a future authoritarian executive were stymied. During the last Congress, Democratic control of the Senate was tempered by Manchin and SInema’s maverick positions kept the filibuster in place. The Republican party has primarily stood for opposing whatever democrats propose, more than any actual policies. Protecting democracy not being something that Republicans would be willing to do, even if it had the potential to keep the sitting Democratic president in check.

Trump-friendly courts have issued rulings that lay the foundation for a system where TFG is above the law and prosecutors do not have the authority to pursue TFG. Trump was dealt the most favorable hand possible with Judge Cannon’s selection to preside over the classified documents trial where she’s been able to to slow and scramble the prosecution of that case enough to avoid any pre-election trial, if not any accountability. The Supreme Court not only managed to delay the trial in the January 6 prosecution, but also created a system where a President has broad immunity over any official act.

So much of our system is based on norms, rather than laws. Sometimes, the law has been adapted to codify norms, such as the 22nd Amendment. During his presidency, Trump tested the bounds of the ways norms and regulations constrain the application of power. After Trump realized that his base doesn’t care if he acts “Presidential” or not and conservative think tanks have spent the last few years drafting a blueprint for applying power to bring about a white Christian nationalist theocracy, there is no reason to believe that a second Trump presidency will be anything but a disaster for anyone who isn’t a white supremacist or be willing to play ball and do business with the kakistocracy.

And now we stand on the precipice of a dangerously close election. Joe Biden is a fine President, but this is a job that visibly ages the people who serve in it and Biden is the oldest person to serve as President. And whatever the causes (fatigue, illness, stutter, dealing with a loud narcissist across the stage) it was not a reassuring performance. (His appearances over the last couple of weeks have been reassuring.)

Trump will pull the US out of NATO and align with Putin and Orban. Trump will unreservedly support whatever Netanyahu wants to do in Gaza. I’d suspect that it is highly likely that results in the current hostilities in Ukraine and Gaza to break out into larger regional wars and an isolationist, anti-immigrant Trump administration standing back and standing by while a Russia-EU war or a regional conflict in the Middle East. Anti-abortion laws will restrict women’s rights to bodily autonomy. A post-Chevron regulatory state will favor whoever the administration decides in in favor.

It is frustrating to think about potential stakes of this election and fear that all that Democrats have to offer to counter the end of America is “donate money” and “vote harder”! And since there appear to be no institutional responses left to save the day, all that we can do is vote. I believe that there are significantly more people in this country who oppose Project 2025 and support women’s rights to control their own bodies than who support Trumpism, but the stakes are high and the consequences dire.

This year’s Oscars included a number of major nominees adapting high-profile books (or toys). Oppenheimer was a masterful adaption of a long biography and yet somehow managed to find the right version of the story to tell within its 3-hour running time. In contrast, Killers of the Flower Moon was a well-made film, but at more than 3 hours, was far too long. Yet, it was also far too short. Instead of being a deserving Best Picture nominee, this same cast and crew could have made a 6-8 hour limited series that would have won every Emmy. It also would have been able to develop more of the characters and tell a more complete version of the story. That said, I look forward to reading the book to learn more.

After 2 episodes of 3 Body Problem, I am pleasantly surprised. I read the books and enjoyed them – but they tend to focus more on the concepts than the characters (the concepts are big). Since this is Benioff and Weiss' second take at adapting a nearly impossible to adapt nerd-loved book series, I think everyone is a bit cautious. A Song of Ice and Fire sprawled beyond Martin’s ability to wrap it up in any coherent way. The Game of Thrones TV series did a very good job of adapting those books by streamlining – until it fell flat after getting ahead of the books when they were streamlining and adapting notes and outlines). Three Body Problem (and the other books in the series) are full of huge ideas, but not necessarily huge character moments. Hopefully, this series will achieve its ambitions over its full run. But considering the lukewarm critical reception, I am pleasantly surprised. I think that Netflix’s single day release schedule could limit discussion and conversation. Being able to talk about and think about a show for a week is part of the enjoyment of the medium.

I was surprised last week to see an ad for the limited series adaption of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres Friday March 29 on Showtime/Paramount Plus. I’d vaguely remembered that the Amor Towles novel was optioned, but hadn’t heard anything about its release before. A limited series should be the right form for adapting this, which takes place over a sprawling time period with the breaks making for opportunities for episode breaks. This is a wonderful book and the preview looks promising.

How the tables have turned from the 1990s, when Apple’s share of the computer business was so marginal that the DOJ filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft. Now, the DOJ has filed an antitrust case against Apple alleging that it uses unlawful anticompetitive practices to protect its monopoly in premium smartphones.

United Sates v. Apple, Inc.

Apple fervently believes that any useful activity that happens on its platforms could not exist without its platforms and is entitled to a cut of that activity. Yet some of the same features that Apple uses to provide a good platform experience are also the ones that the company is embracing and extending its control over its platforms for anticompetitive purposes.

But just as Apple believes that it deserves a cut of what developers earn using Apple platforms, the DOJ takes credit for Apple’s success. The iPod succeeded because it was available to Windows users, thanks to the “pathclearing antitrust enforcement case, brought by the United States and state attorneys general, against Microsoft opened the market and constrained Microsoft’s ability to prohibit companies like Apple from offering iTunes on Windows PCs.”

The complaint calls out five situations where Apple has used its control over app distribution or control of access to certain private APIs in iOS to suppress some technologies: *Super apps *Cloud streaming game apps *Messaging apps *Smartwatches *Digital wallets

While these may be the five areas that have the most evidence supporting anti-competitive behavior, these likely are not the areas where consumers and developers suffer the most harm.

Apple offers no benefit to consumers by prohibiting game streaming apps and making it more difficult for other smartwatches to integrate with iOS. Other GPS and smartwatches have second-rate options to integrate with iOS than the Apple Watch.

But it is arguable that Apple actually supports the privacy and security of its customers by controlling access to SMS and NFC hardware. Users who take a phone number from iOS to Android suffer from iMessage continuing to hijack the behavior of messages sent to a registered phone number. Allowing users to let different services take over handling SMS messages could be even more of a mess. Yet, the fact that iMessage is the default makes it difficult for iPhone users to switch to a different cross-platform act and it definitely locks users onto the iPhone to avoid bouncing back to green bubbles.

Requiring all NFC payment transactions to route through Apple Pay instead of letting banks directly access the system hardware does give Apple a part in every tap to pay transaction through iPhones. But as a user, requiring that all payment access flow through the system wallet does feel like a reasonable way to secure those transactions.

But, super apps? Really? Do consumers actually want to interact with bloated, cross-platform apps that may not have strong privacy controls or user experience? Isn’t this just creating future opportunities for anti-trust enforcement against super app platforms?

Two areas where Apple does use its market power and the App Store’s role as a gatekeeper to harm developers and consumers are the anti-steering provisions and the use alternative payment methods for in-app purchases. (The complaint only calls this out with regards to super-apps and other digital wallets, not app developers generally). Developers are prohibited not just from using alternative subscription and payment methods in apps distributed through the App Store, but even prohibited from providing information to direct users to purchase subscriptions on the web, except for the limited category of “reader apps” (in other words, other services with enough market power that Apple needs them on its platforms). Except for the limited exemption to reader apps, developers are not just required to use Apple’s payment processing, but developers cannot even suggest to users how to purchase services on a website.

How many other companies are able to run Oscar-winning film and TV studio/streaming service (and Fitness+) essentially as a front? Do these actually move the needle on services revenue or merely reputation-launder the 30% revenue cut it takes on in-app purchases in iOS apps?

Also, since this was filed in the District of New Jersey, perhaps I’ll get a chance to do some live reporting…

Some actually thoughtful and interesting commentary: Sara Jeong, The Verge United States v. Apple is pure nerd rage “The only thing that’s missing is a tirade on how ever-increasing screen sizes are victimizing me, a person with small hands” (co-sign)

Casey Newton, Platformer, The Department of Justice comes for Apple “The more different experiences an app enables, the harder it is for Apple to evaluate it for security, privacy, and other concerns. Ultimately, I’m not convinced that consumers are harmed by having to download different apps for different purposes.”

Lauren Feiner, The Verge, ‘Even stronger’ than imagined: DOJ’s sweeping Apple lawsuit draws expert praise “Still, the details of the case will be challenging to prove. One key fight will likely be over what the relevant market is — a common area of contention in antitrust litigation.”

John Gruber at Daring Fireball: “Superiority is exactly what made the iPhone what it is — superior hardware, superior software, superior integration. Even a superior retail experience. Not only is the DOJ’s take on the iPhone’s success a complete misunderstanding of the actual market dynamics for phones, it’s flabbergastingly insulting.”

Andy Hawkins, The Verge, Apple CarPlay is anticompetitive, too, US lawsuit alleges “The inclusion of CarPlay, as well as digital key functions through Apple’s Wallet feature, came as a surprise to some analysts, who say that the DOJ may be misunderstanding the utility and functions of the phone-mirroring system.”

Jason Snell, Six Colors, U.S. versus Apple: A first reaction “What happens when that collides with a product that has extremely high customer satisfaction ratings? Those of us in the know are well aware of all the ways that Apple plays hardball, and understand that the company is so powerful that really the only way it will be convinced to change its ways is under threat of government intervention. But will American iPhone users feel like the government is on their side, in taking on an American tech giant that makes a product they actually enjoy using?”

For the first year since the Academy expanded the Best Picture category to 10 nominations, I actually watched all 10 nominated films before the Oscars. And in a year where there were a number of excellent films, my main takeaway was that the system of naming one winner in each category is fundamentally broken.

Instead of treating one winner and a number of losers, the Academy should think of the Oscars more like the Peabody Awards, where it honors the various achievements. The ceremony could give some films or individual achievements additional recognition or palmares, but could give each recognized film, performance, and craft some level of recognition.

In a year like this, where the stupendous Oppenheimer cast a shadow over everything else, this would help provide more attention to other deserving films. Being able to say, provide a top-tier award to both Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone, and secondary recognition to other lead actresses would allow for more equitable recognition of awards.

The way that this should work is that each category would have up to 5 nominees (or 10 nominees) for Best Picture. Categories would not be padded out to have 5 nominees in each, but films would need to have a certain amount of recognition to obtain an Oscar recognition. Further voting from the recognized films would allow additional recognition for extraordinary or outstanding achievements.

This wouldn’t necessarily help films like Killers of the Flower Moon that should have been an 8-hour miniseries instead of a 3+ hour film. (Seriously, the story of Killers needed more room to breathe and demonstrate the amount of time passing. It could have told the story more fully, developed all of the characters much better – particularly among the Osage community as a miniseries. That series would have wrapped up every Emmy Award).

But this would allow voters to recognize films like Oppenheimer that are outstanding technical achievements as well as perfect, normal-length films, like the exquisite Past Lives and not force voters to choose between films with astoundingly bonkers elements like Poor Things and broadly popular (yet far deeper than necessary) Barbie. And having tiers would allow the best achievements to have a full-size, real Oscar, while the recognized films at lower tiers would get miniature statuettes.

While I’m sure the entertainment media would hate losing the straightforward narrative of winners and losers, this system would more fairly recognize the fact that even receiving a nomination is an honor. But the upside of seeing more speeches and more positivity would probably make more people like more films.

About a year ago, as I realized that Twitter was no longer going to be the public space for conversations and connecting to communities and ideas, I set a goal of writing more on my blog. I failed.

I planned out a series of posts linking to creators independently making great writing, criticism, podcasts, recipes, videos, and other online multimedia. A few days into the year, my web host’s security scans informed me that malware invaded my Wordpress installation. I cleaned it up, looked into alternatives, and migrated my blog over to Hugo hosted on Firebase. The Hugo site is very fast, but publishing the site relied on Github actions. I looked into using Orbit, which I had setup to work well enough with Git on my own computer, but spent a little time trying to figure out how to run it as a Cloud Function to add a way to post from MarsEdit, but didn’t get far. After another malware infection, I deleted my Wordpress installation, but never fully set up an alternative and did nothing.

Eventually, I learned that Micro.blog is not just a way to aggregate hosted feeds into a social experience, but a complete solution aligned exactly towards how I think about blogging. It’s simple, straightforward, and offered at a fair price. It offers all of the blogging features that I need (a place to host a blog and post from MarsEdit or a mobile device). But even more importantly, Micro.blog is designed around the concept of owning one’s own social posts and being part of the broader community. And it works with its own app and MarsEdit so that I can post from any computer, iPad or phone (even though most would still be on my computer).

Hopefully, ActivityPub can be the basis for more of the internet to be able to interact with more of the internet. At The Verge, David Pierce elaborates why it could be a net good: 2023 in social media: the case for the fediverse: “It doesn’t make sense that we have a dozen usernames, a dozen profiles, a dozen sets of fans and friends. All that stuff should belong to me, and I should be able to access it and interact with it anywhere and everywhere.”

Anil Dash is optimistic that the internet is about to get weird and become more creative and less centralized.

I spend a lot of time and energy thinking about how we use new technology and the internet to create and communicate. Professionally, my work is based at the intersection of the arts, technology, intellectual property, and privacy. But, I realize that not everyone cares as much. They put their mental energy into other things, and I want to learn about those things from them. Social media has been a great force at democratizing access to a publishing platform to make that easy. And not everyone cares so much about that.

Using three platforms to try to connect to the same networks of people I was plugged into on Twitter is a lot more work. Since I like aspects of each of my connections on these networks, I try to use all three, which means I use them all less and the experience is worse, because it’s more disjointed, and not in an easily divisible way – how my Twitter community overlapped across many different communities was what I appreciated the most. None of the successor platforms are individually as complete as pre-sale Twitter.

Bluesky is currently the experience that’s most like early Twitter. Early Twitter was great because the universe of people who wanted to participate was small enough that it didn’t yet have all of the problems that come with scale. Bluesky has this great clubby feeling, and its webapp is super-fast and simple. There are a few things that Bluesky does very well, like the ability to design and share custom algorithmic feeds and its use of domain names for identity.

Mastodon is where the people who care most about the ownership and control of their online social experience. Unfortunately, this leads to far too much mansplaining and demands on how to use the Fediverse correctly. While the app ecosystem around Mastodon is very good (Ivory, elk.zone, Mammoth), it also has the worst out-of-the-box experience. At least signing up on the Mastodon website or app now defaults users to Mastodon.social instead of requiring users to pick a survey. The Mastodon web and mobile apps are just fine, they’re not great, but the third-party client experience is first-rate.

Threads is by far the easiest sell for most people who are plugged in enough to online community to want to participate, but not so concerned about the methods. It has the scale and the ability to acquire users through Meta’s other enormous mainstream platforms, Facebook and Instagram. This is going to be the easiest place for most people to write publicly on the internet. And frankly, that’s enough for most people. And there are people from that group of the most who I want to connect with.

People who are attentive to the world are aware that Meta does not have the best track record. Erin Kissane, Untangling Threads: “I think it’s a common misconception that Meta just kinda didn’t handle content moderation well. What Meta’s leadership actually did was so multifaceted, callous, and avaricious that it was honestly difficult for even me to believe.”

As much as many Fediverse denizens want to stay insulated from corporate social media, it seems likely that there will be a Fediverse equivalent of Gmail – a very large service provider that is easy and reliable enough for the mass market. If Threads does go all in with ActivityPub and fully join the Fediverse, it will dwarf the rest of the network in scale.

While it might seem that the best case scenario is to be able to interact with people who want to use Meta’s tools without having to directly use Meta’s services, Meta already collects information about people who do not use their products. In a federated world, content moderation becomes a federated challenge requiring collaboration between the connected platforms. Mastodon server administrators – some of whom are old enough to remember AOL joining the internet back in the 90’s and starting the eternal September – are not unjustified in fearing the amount of work that a federated Threads may make difficult.

So I am hopeful that the next phase of the internet makes it possible to have a single feed with posts from the people and publications I want to read and a way to post my mediocre thoughts out into the world, to wherever a person or two wants to read them.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been cooking far more than I did before. I enjoy cooking as creative work that also has the practical side effect of providing sustenance for life. Trying new techniques, wanting to make specific dishes, and just being more interested in the process and results, I also spend a lot more time reading cooking material on the web.

One site that I keep coming back to is the indispensable Smitten Kitchen. Deb Perelman has been blogging recipes regularly for more than 16 years and written three cookbooks, all from a Manhattan apartment kitchen. but what makes Smitten Kitchen stand out in the world of recipe blogs fighting for SEO and food TikTok trends, are good taste and continuous improvement.

In many ways, reading recipes is a lot like reading film or theatre criticism. All critics have biases, preferences, and tastes. There is no empirically correct way to judge art. So, when reading reviews, it is important to know the critic, know where they are coming from, and understand whether a rave means that you are likely to love or hate a particular work. Without a critical read on criticism, it’s hard to get value out of them. Cooking is similar. Some people prefer sweeter, saltier, spicier, or blander food than you do. And there’s nothing wrong with different tastes. And even if there is objective good and bad, sometimes it’s not about the best, but about connecting with memories of a particular experience. While some things may be objectively better than others, sometimes best isn’t the goal. No one in their right mind would argue that a Budweiser is the best beer in the world, but for the right situation, there can be nothing better. So understanding the preferences of a critic or recipe writer are necessary to be an informed reader.

Simply, Perelman’s preferences tend to be similar to mine – or at least coming from the same frame of reference, so I find them very easy to place.

But what I find most impressive about Smitten Kitchen is Perelman’s consistent commitment to keeping the site up to date. The more that you cook a recipe, the more you will find how subtle tweaks can improve a recipe (or make it worse). When she revisits recipes and concepts, she also links old posts back to the new ones and keep the site coherent and consistently evolving.

Smitten Kitchen is an invaluable resource, so go buy Deb’s books so that she can continue to publish vast amounts of great recipes and ideas for free.

Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web Appreciating the Indie Web: DC Rainmaker Appreciating the Indie Web: ATP Appreciating the Indie Web: Kottke.org Appreciating the Indie Web: Lift Blog

As we get into Apple product launch season, I should share my thoughts on the Apple Watch Ultra, now that it is no longer new.

I have never liked wearing watches. But I also like data and convenience, and so wear an Apple watch. Before the Ultra, I wore the Apple Watch Series 5 (44mm) for everyday use, but mainly the a Garmin Forerunner 935 for sporting activities (running, hiking, skiing, and sometimes biking). The Ultra is a more capable watch than the Series 5, but certainly not a perfect device.

Apple Watch is a very impressive platform. If nothing else, a quick glance to notifications and quick access to data is often useful. The quality of taps from the Taptic Engine quality is elegant but effective. The notifications on the Apple Watch are subtler, more polite, and just more elegant – but no less effective – than the vibrations on my Garmin watch. Fitness tracking is effective. But the killer app for Apple Watch is authentication. Using Apple Watch to unlock my Mac is faster than entering a password. It feels like at least half of my work is just authenticating into applications and responding to two-factor authentication requests.

However, Apple Watch Ultra is a chonky chonkster. The Ultra dwarfs the 44-45 mm Apple Watch Series. But, compared with the Aluminum or Stainless steel Series, the Titanium Ultra is surprisingly light. When first wearing it, I was very pleasantly surprised that the Ultra doesn’t feel as heavy as its looks would suggest. But compared with the 36.5g of the aluminum Series 5, the 61g of the Ultra is significantly heavier. This is not very noticeable during normal wear. The trail loop band is a significant improvement on the sport loop, which has been my preferred Apple watch band. But the weight of the Ultra is noticeable enough that I can’t wear it comfortably to sleep every day. With the Series 5, I used the watch for sleep tracking more often for comfort. But battery life was a significant challenge with the Series 5, making it difficult to use for sleep tracking. The Ultra has the battery life for it, but it’s just too big to wear comfortably to sleep.

The size of the Ultra is also noticeable with shirt and jacket sleeves. Where the rounded edges and thin profile of the Apple Watch Series allows it to sit comfortably under any sleeve, the bulk and straight edges of the Ultra gets caught up far more often. The design of the buttons, with the crown guard supposedly protecting the digital crown and menu button on one side and then the action button on the left, results in random button pushes from unintentional interaction with sleeves and gloves far more often than the sleeker and thinner Apple Watch Series.

But, the reason why the Ultra is so much larger than the other Apple watches is it’s best feature – battery life. The Apple Watch is a highly power-constrained product. Under normal usage, the Apple Watch Series lasts a full day, with little margin to spare. As it closed in on its third service anniversary, my Series 5 was barely lasting through a full day. Doing any exercise activity that used the GPS would run through enough battery that it required multiple charges per day. The battery life, more than any other factor, was my main reason for upgrading last year.

The Garmin 935, in contrast, is a battery champ. Under similar use, it could run for days without a charge. For GPS fitness tracking, it comfortably lasts long enough that I can go for a weekend full of activities without worrying about recharging.

For sports usage, the Ultra has some advantages, but still lags behind Garmin. The Ultra is much faster at acquiring GPS signal (which, to be fair, may also be improved on newer Garmin watches). It may be that the Apple Watch is no faster at acquiring the signal, but it just starts recording a workout immediately and uses motion data to work backwards from signal acquisition. The Ultra supports running power natively. My no-longer new 935 only supports running power with a Connect IQ app and external hardware. More recent Garmin watches (including the 255/265, 955/965, epix 2, and Fenix 7) now offer native running power with or without external hardware. App Store apps are generally much better than Connect IQ apps.

Otherwise, the Ultra is fine on its own, but a significant step back from Garmin’s state of the art of 2017.

And while the breadth and quality of the third-party software for the Apple watch vastly outstrips what is available in Connect IQ apps, the Garmin ecosystem integrates the ridiculous number of battery-powered connected devices that cyclists may use. Garmin watches can send heart rate data to an Edge cycling computer or the Edge can act as an external display for watch data, such as during the bike leg of a triathlon. In addition, a power meter is a highly useful data sensor. Real-time power and heart rate data is very useful for more effective training and racing. This year, I’ve been cycling more than anything else. And, like every hobby of mine, there are more and more gadgets A typical ride involves connecting heart rate, power meter, radar, and electronic shifting to a Garmin GPS computer. While a Garmin watches or a dedicated Bluetooth or ANT+ heart rate monitor can send heart rate data to the head unit, the Apple Watch can’t broadcast heart rate data.

Not connecting this specialized device ecosystem makes the Apple watch feel like it is stuck in a silo (not like the Apple TV+ show, Silo) instead of part of a community of sensors. Fortunately, this is set to start changing in watchOS 10, where the Apple watch will be able to connect to bluetooth power meters, including for Fitness+ workouts.

The most annoying omission is gloves. The Garmin Forerunner 935 has no touchscreen. That’s a huge advantage for the Garmin. While I have some touch-screen compatible gloves, I do enough outdoor activities in cold weather and have various gloves and mittens that are not touchscreen compatible. While the Garmin watch can do everything with its buttons and doesn’t require touch, the Ultra can’t even select and start a workout without touching the screen. That’s absolutely ridiculous. After all, the Ultra has the same number of physical controls. Garmin watches generally have 5 buttons (on the 935, Light, Up Down, Start-Stop, Back). The Ultra also has 5 physical controls (Action button, side button, Digital Crown press, Digital Crown scroll up, Digital Crown scroll down). Yet, without turning on optional accessibility settings, there is no way to select a workout to start without taking a glove off, letting a hand get cold, and touching the watch screen.

However, Apple has demonstrated meaningful commitment to accessibility. After running through the Settings menu, there is a feature called Assistive Touch that allows for a number of watch controls to be done by using gestures on the watch-wearing hand that are recognized. It does work even with bulky gloves on. So it is possible to use Apple watch without touching the screen. It is not as intuitive as touching the screen, which is why Garmin is also adding touch screens to its newer, fancier GPS watches.

Thinking about the various things that I use Apple Watch to do: Respond to 2FA codes, see notifications, control smart home devices, track general activity, track sleep, track workouts and activities, most of these are done equally well or better on the Apple Watch Series as on the Ultra. And for tracking workouts and outdoor activities, the Ultra’s battery life makes it viable. I have confidence that the Ultra will last throughout a multi-hour day of biking or skiing without thinking about it. I wouldn’t try running an ultra-marathon with the Ultra, though. While the battery life is a factor it’s mainly because I wouldn’t try running an ultra-marathon for any reason. That’s far more hardcore than I am.

So what I would like to see in future watchOS software updates is support for broadcasting heart rate over Bluetooth and continued improvement non-touchscreen navigation. For hardware, a titanium-cased watch in a size between the svelte 45 mm Watch Series and the chonky 49 mm Ultra would be ideal. The Ultra doesn’t look too large on my wrist, but I would love a battery/size compromise somewhere between these two – especially if the rumored process improvement for the Watch SOC makes it more power efficient.

Ultimately, the largest limitation on these tiny computers is power. Apple tries to balance responsiveness, computing power, features, sensors, and size and weight against battery capacity. And Apple has tried to offer just enough battery capacity to power an Apple watch through an average day of use for most users. Expanding that power envelope is the best feature of the Ultra, even if the rest of its capabilities have yet to catch up.

Victoria Song, The Verge: Who is the Apple Watch Ultra really for? “While I’ve loved using the Ultra this past year, I don’t think this is as much a smartwatch for adventurers as it is for… Actually, I’m still trying to figure that out.”

Ray Maker, DC Rainmaker Apple Watch Power Meter Support: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been cooking far more than I did before. I enjoy cooking as creative work that also has the practical side effect of providing sustenance for life. Trying new techniques, wanting to make specific dishes, and just being more interested in the process and results, I also spend a lot more time reading cooking material on the web.

One site that I keep coming back to is the indispensable Smitten Kitchen. Deb Perelman has been blogging recipes regularly for more than 16 years and written three cookbooks, all from a Manhattan apartment kitchen. but what makes Smitten Kitchen stand out in the world of recipe blogs fighting for SEO and food TikTok trends, are good taste and continuous improvement.

In many ways, reading recipes is a lot like reading film or theatre criticism. All critics have biases, preferences, and tastes. There is no empirically correct way to judge art. So, when reading reviews, it is important to know the critic, know where they are coming from, and understand whether a rave means that you are likely to love or hate a particular work. Without a critical read on criticism, it’s hard to get value out of them. Cooking is similar. Some people prefer sweeter, saltier, spicier, or blander food than you do. And there’s nothing wrong with different tastes. And even if there is objective good and bad, sometimes it’s not about thee best, but about connecting with memories of a particular experience. While some things may be objectively better than others, sometimes best isn’t the goal. No one in their right mind would argue that a Budweiser is the best beer in the world, but for the right situation, there can be nothing better. So understanding the preferences of a critic or recipe writer are necessary to be an informed reader.

Simply, Perelman’s preferences tend to be similar to mine – or at least coming from the same frame of reference, so I find them very easy to place.

But what I find most impressive about Smitten Kitchen is Perelman’s consistent commitment to keeping the site up to date. The more that you cook a recipe, the more you will find how subtle tweaks can improve a recipe (or make it worse). When she revisits receips and concepts, she also links old posts back to the new ones and keep the site coherent and consistently evolving.

Smitten Kitchen is an invaluable resource, so go buy Deb’s books so that she can continue to publish vast amounts of great recipes and ideas for free.

Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web Appreciating the Indie Web: DC Rainmaker Appreciating the Indie Web: ATP Appreciating the Indie Web: Kottke.org Appreciating the Indie Web: Lift Blog

Is blogging about blogging the lowest form of the art? While there are some writers who can do it well, this is not so interesting. I’m working on migrating off of Wordpress to something that doesn’t require quite as much attention and maintenance to keep secure. 

So this is a first test of using Hugo as a site generator to publish instead of Wordpress.

While training for my second triathlon, I started to understand the value of data and started to look into getting a GPS watch. And then, being cheap, avoided getting one for a while. But when I was looking into triathlon tech, one site that I kept reading was DC Rainmaker. Ray Maker started DC Rainmaker as an adjunct to his triathlon hobby while having a career in tech. Then, during the next few years, sports technology exploded, thanks to computers getting smaller and cheaper and more connected, while athletes got more competitive and data-driven. 

Maker took DC Rainmaker full-time, and it is an essential resource for anyone interested in sports and technology, particularly people into endurance sports. In addition to comprehensive reviews of individuals products, comparisons of categories, and an expanding YouTube channel, DC Rainmaker is an essential resource. His reviews have guided me in acquiring the various sports tech, including GPS watches, heart rate monitors, power meters, a smart trainer, bike computer and random things. None of these make me faster or better at biking, running, swimming, hiking, and skiing, but at least I can track everything on Strava. 

_Can we talk about power meters for a minute? I’ve heard talk about how useful they are, but I only acquired one this year. And they are, in fact, great and useful. The feel of cycling effort can be deceptive — shallow hills and headwinds are two things that can have a huge impact on the speed resulting from a given effort. A power meter confirms whether you do have that extra spring in your step or just have a fast tailwind. _

DCRainmaker is not merely a data. Maker shares insight into his life as an expat in Amsterdam, schlepping things around the city in cargo bikes (and even racing in a cargo bike criterium!) He goes on ridiculous expeditions to really test the limits of products, like a multi-day expedition in the Alps. He has the time to notice that published specifications may not match the actual dimension measurements of smartwatches with optical heart rate sensors. With press credentials to the Tour de France, Maker used his access to scout out which power meters and bike computers each team was using — and how some riders have different bike computer preferences. And then the same for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

Traditional print media couldn’t allow this level of detailed nerdery. Thanks to technology, athletes are more informed about their performance than ever before. Thanks to DC Rainmaker, athletes are more informed about their technology’s performance than ever before. 

Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web

Sure, the Accidental Tech Podcast is another hours-long podcast with three middle-aged white men talking to each other about technology. But it’s also the best example of the genre. 

Spiritually, ATP is a tech version of Top Gear, whether done by intention or not. After all, ATP started from a car podcast, which became taken over by the tech talk, because software developers Casey Liss, John Siracusa, and Marco Arment know much more about tech than they do about cars. But, like Top Gear, each of the three ATP hosts is a character. John expects perfection, is willing to go to great lengths to find it and get backups. Marco is willing to try to spend his way to solutions, while Casey is willing to accept a level of brokenness in his technology life. Filtering Apple tech stuff through this lens is informative and entertaining. 

ATP is persistently consistent. They publish one episode a week, **every **week. With 517 episodes since episode 1 was posted on February 7, 2013, they are on track to publish 520 episodes by the time of the show’s 10th anniversary. I can not believe that they’ve been doing this for 10 years, which is a theme of this entire Appreciating the Indie Web series (that I’m old). 

Not every segment of every episode of ATP is worth listening to — they can get rambly and long. But the three hosts have thoughtful and informed opinions on tech platforms, and more interestingly, the marketplace and market power of the large tech companies. While I’m sure there are plenty of standout segments, I certainly don’t have any bookmarked (see again, the power of consistency).

One reason that ATP is worthwhile is the host’s willingness to acknowledge their privileges and correct themselves when they are wrong. It is far too common for middle-aged white men to retreat into their own wrongness and dwell there. 

Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web

Jason Kottke is good at the internet. His blog, Kottke.org will turn 25 years old this year. He pioneered many of the features that we take for granted across the internet.  And it continues to be one of the absolute best reads on the internet. (Along with his newsletter). Even more impressively, he took a break. You may be thinking, “what’s the big deal, you’ve taken years off of blogging?” Sure, but unlike me, Kottke is good at it, and he’s a professional. Kottke.org is member-supported (I am a member). So, taking a hiatus from an ember-supported site was a risky move. But this is not just admirable, but should be an example. 

In the US, we don’t respect vacation enough, and we don’t have the social support infrastructure (like public health insurance) to allow people to take meaningful breaks between jobs or any type of sabbatical. Employers rarely support meaningful sabbatical programs, but we should treat that as an essential retention tool. It’s very easy to get burnt out and not have a way to take a pause to be able to come back to do better work. 

Let us all learn from Kottke: not just in terms of interesting links, but in being able to step away for enough time to grow. 

I love skiing, but also while growing up skiing and hanging out around the ski patrol with my dad, who was a volunteer ski patroller,I appreciated the operations of ski areas. Ski lifts are complicated, useful, and cool looking pieces of technology. But I didn’t really have a huge interest in lifts as anything other than a way to easily get uphill to ski down. 

Lift Blog is somehow both a classic independent comprehensive passion project web site, industry news resource, and generally interesting for skiers. It is a project of Peter Landsman, who works in the industry as a lift crew supervisor at Jackson Hole. But what makes Lift Blog special is not just the industry knowledge, but Landsman’s passion about lifts. Last year, he completed personally visiting all 2,381 ski lifts in the United States. The industry had one of the busiest years of capital investment and installed 66 new lifts in North America in 2022 and Landsman will be traveling to photograph each of them. 

While traditional ski media contracting, Lift Blog is a source of ski industry news, skiing news, all filtered through Landsman’s encyclopedic knowledge of lifts. Thanks to Lift Blog, I’ve learned about lifts in places that I didn’t even know had skiable hills. And, as cities around the world invest in ropeways for urban transportation, it’s also about transportation policy. 

Previously: Appreciating the Indie Web

. 

A new year’s resolution, at its best, is a great impetus to convert a goal to a habit, but is likely to fail if its too ambitious or vague. Last year, I set out to achieve a perfect month of closing my rings in Apple Fitness. (As I said, ambition is usually the enemy of success). But I also set that goal knowing that its not sustainable while having a meaningful activity goal – rest is necessary for performance. This year, as we watch a billionaire light money on fire to destroy one of my favorite channels for expressive communication, I, like many others, are interested in reclaiming the use of our own online spaces. 

They heyday of blogging in the 2000s encouraged more types of creative expression than the social media era of the 2010s. As we start to define the internet of the 2020s, I’d like it to include more personal publishing and a step away from centralizing communication within closed platforms. I am very enthusiastic about the Fediverse — at this point, Mastodon with Ivory are meeting a significant enough portion of the value I get from Twitter through Tweetbot. But a vibrant open web is essential for creativity. 

So, I start with this simple goal: write here regularly, defined as a minimum of 5 posts per week for the month of January.  

Since I going to accomplish that? The main way is through Appreciating the Indie Web — things that I like on the web (even if largely, but not entirely, on a platform like YouTube or Substack) that are independent projects. These are all sites that I subscribe to in RSS, including podcast feeds.

If there was one artistic medium that I engaged with the most this year, it was television. 2022 was a year with a huge amount of excellent programs. There is far too much good television for any person to see, so there are likely things that I missed. But here are a list of things that I enjoyed, arranged alphabetically:

Andor

Being a Star Wars fan has long involved expecting to be disappointed. For those of us who grew up with the original trilogy and its toys and then encountered the first new canon with the prequels during high school or college are inured to disappointment with any new Star Wars filmed product. Under Disney’s stewardship, nothing has been quite as bad as The Phantom Menace, but the Star Wars brand has not been a guarantee of quality. Rogue One, depicting events that moved right into the main action of Star Wars is perhaps the best of the films. In Andor, Tony Gilroy examines how an oppressive galactic regime can dehumanize (and the equivalent for other galactic species) people and how and why a resistance can form. The human reasons and costs for how the rebellion came to be has never really been explored in Star Wars, and Andor does it with a level of sophistication, nuance, and filmmaking that has never before been seen in this galaxy far, far away. 

(Disney Plus)

Bad Sisters

Somehow, Bad Sisters didn’t seem to have a lot of buzz and aired somewhat under the radar. It’s a murder mystery family dark comedy that invited speculation and conversation. Bad Sisters was funny and tragic and sad and weird all at the same time. 

(Apple TV+)

Barry

Each of the main characters in Barry occupies a very distinct world. Sally’s world overlaps with, but is very different from Gene’s. They occupy a very different reality from Noho Hank. Barry intersects with all of these, and the relationships across these different realities creates humor and drama and tragedy. I have no idea where the show goes after the season finale, which is exciting. 

(HBO)

The Bear

Restaurant kitchens have drama. Anthony Bourdain captured some of that in Kitchen Confidential, but the TV adaption of Kitchen Confidential didn’t translate. The Bear bottles that and also adds in family drama, loss, and emotion. Episode 7 (“Review”), done as a single shot, is one of the tensest and dramatic episodes of television this entire year. 

(Hulu)

The Dropout 

The Dropout TV series may only be the third best telling of the Theranos story, after The Dropout podcast and Bad Blood. It was also by far the best of the business fraud limited series of early 2022 (Uber, WeWork, Anna Delvey), with great performances from Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews. Who knew that 2022 would be the year of the Ebon Moss-Bachrach-aissance? As John Carreyrou in The Dropout, Cousin Richie on The Bear, and Arvel Skeen on Andor, he played distinctive roles in great series.

(Hulu)

Fleischman is in Trouble

When I started putting this list together, I had Fleischman as incomplete — potentially among the best, but wasn’t sure if it would hold together. It has an impeccable cast (including Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, and Lizzy Caplan), and it is narrowcasted to me, telling stories of Jewish New Yorkers (and exiles to suburbia) in their early forties struggling with relationships, class anxiety, and mental health. Until episode 7, we didn’t get any of Rachel’s perspective. I’m not sure if making the last episode almost entirely from Libby’s perspective work, so that Rachel’s story didn’t have further development. 

(Hulu)

For All Mankind

Season 3 of For All Mankind featured some of the most thrilling action sequences of the year, which were tense and stressful because of the life and death stakes. Unlike, say, Glass Onion, FAM created a billionaire space mogul who wasn’t obviously based on any particular real-life billionaire. And yet, this was an uneven season. The Stevens boys were two of the worst characters on television, with motivations that felt more forced than natural. 

(Apple TV+)

Hacks

Jean Smart deserves every accolade she’s earned for playing Deborah Vance.  

(HBO Max)

The Patient

The Patient starts from a ridiculous concept that shouldn’t work, yet it’s taken seriously and realistically. Produced by Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg from The Americans, The Patient uses methodical multi-episode storytelling like Breaking Bad and the Americans to spend a lot of time seeing how the two main characters interact with each other. This is also one of the more interesting Jewish stories that I’ve seen on television on how a divide between Orthodox and liberal family members’ practice can affect their relationships. 

(Hulu)

The Rehearsal

I don’t know if I ultimately liked the Rehearsal after the last episode, but I admire the ridiculousness and audacity of the concept and spending HBO’s money on building an exact replica of the Alligator Lounge. I’m not sure if there’s been anything else that’s asked as directly whether child acting is ethical.

(HBO)

Reservation Dogs

At or near the top of every critic’s best of list this year, Reservation Dogs is a wonderful and distinctive show. It is entirely unique by telling stories of people who television has simply ignored. Simultaneously funny, melancholy, sad, joyful, and cathartic, Reservation Dogs opens up a whole world of storytelling. 

(FX/Hulu)

Severance

If there’s one show that occupied the most space in my brain this year, it is Severance. The production design alone is good enough, even without the ethical questions and the great performances. I’m hoping to get a Music Dance Experience or Waffle Party this quarter. 

(Apple TV+)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks

Lower Decks has been the best Star Trek show in a long time, because it simply recognizes the ridiculousness in Star Trek and embraces it. Lower Decks starts from appreciating and loving Star Trek, taking its storytelling seriously, and finding the humor in it. Strange New Worlds is the best live action Trek in a long time. Unlike the other current Trek shows (Discovery and Picard), SNW remembers that at its best, Star Trek should tell episodic stories about exploration and inclusion, while being fun. Strange New Worlds, while being an unnecessary retread, is so good that it doesn’t matter that it just goes back to Captain Pike’s Enterprise. Anson Mount is a great space dad and Ethan Peck manages to play one of television’s most beloved characters in a way that feels connected to Nimoy, but without feeling like an impression or bad imitation. 

(Paramount Plus)

White Lotus

Television in 2022 is much less of a communal experience than in before today’s Peak TV era of streaming, and many great shows don’t feel like they have as much buzz as they should. The White Lotus, like Succession, is both critically acclaimed and buzzy. This second season had beautiful scenery, great acting, spectacular filmmaking, and plenty of drama. 

(HBO)

What We Do in the Shadows 

Baby Colin Robinson. This show continues to be funny, inventive, and delightful.

(FX/Hulu)

Incompletes

These are two shows that I’d expect to be on my list if I’d watched the episodes that aired this year. 

Better Call Saul

Early on in the pandemic, I got behind on watching season 5 of Better Call Saul because it was heavier and more weighty than I had the mental energy to deal with, and am still just catching up, slowly. 

(AMC)

Atlanta

When Atlanta came back for a third and fourth seasons this year, I started rewatching the series from the beginning and am still just in season 2. 

(FX/Hulu)

 I don’t regret watching, but wanted these to be better:

House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon should be Succession with dragons, and it isn’t. It’s not as much fun as it should be. Yes, the Targaryens were terrible and brutal to each other and everyone else in the Seven Kingdoms, but Game of Thrones had a lot of fun. Bouncing the characters who were fun (Tyrion, Bronn) against the self-serious characters was a huge part of what made Game of Thrones work, when it did. While House of the Dragon did a better job of filling out Martin’s textbook summary into stories than Game of Thrones did with its last couple of season, House of the Dragon didn’t have enough light to balance the dark — and it had that one episode that was entirely dark and looked flat. Where Game of Thrones did it, there was a justifiable story reason. Here, it just felt aggressively unnecessary. 

Reboot

With this cast and creative talent, Reboot was very watchable. But it also never quite clicked. 

She-Hulk

I want to like She-Hulk. Tatiana Maslany is great, the supporting cast is excellent. The concept of law in the Marvel universe should be super-fun. And yet, She-Hulk has a lot of good elements, but they don’t come together into a coherent stew. I don’t know how much of it is the Marvel-ness, but it just needs to be more fun. 

After an interesting and dramatic couple of weeks over at the Tweet factory, I have many thoughts and feelings. Those have evolved from reinforcing my perception that TWTR, the company, was bad at making Twitter the service into a business, to optimistic schadenfreude about Musk being forced to pay TWTR billions of dollars to not own the company, and now nostalgia and sadness after the resignation of seemingly everyone at the company whose immigration status is not tied to their employment.

Note: I will use Twitter to refer to both the service and the ongoing company owned by Elon Musk and TWTR to refer to Twitter, Inc., the public company.

I started using Twitter in March 2007. While I don’t post that much (13 thousand posts in 15 years), I’ve always found it to be the best resource to connect with disparate, but overlapping communities. Twitter hosts conversations involving world-class expertise about every topic imaginable. I use Twitter in multiple communities — subjecting my copyright lawyer followers to privacy law thoughts, and all of them to my TV thoughts, and Mac nerd ideas and Garden Yeti content. I love seeing the overlap between those communities. While Facebook was the platform with the people who you know in real life, Twitter was the platform with the people who you want to know.¹

Twitter entirely supplanted blogging for me. I started posting on my website in the year 2000, which somehow is 22 years ago. And for at least the last 10 Just sharing a link — especially through a Retweet or quote Tweet is often easier and faster. Adding a thought to a stream of consciousness is easy. The character limit encourages brevity. Given the choice of expanding with more detail or analysis, I usually prefer to edit down for simplicity.

Just as I can’t believe that I’ve now used iPhone (15 years) for more than twice as long as I used non-smart cell phones (7 years), I can’t believe that Twitter largely supplanted other personal publishing for this long.

TWTR, the public company, was overall a force for good. While I was often frustrated with their choices that weren’t focused on making the service that I want (a reverse chronological timeline throughwa choice of native clients), under the leadership of Gadde, Twitter was a fierce advocate for freedom of speech around the world. A publisher needs enough scale to be able to control their entire infrastructure to not be subject to risk averse decisions made by service providers. Losing the support of a global-scale service to stand up to anti-speech regulations will likely have a detrimental effect on the freedom of speech under repressive or anti-democratic regimes.

From what I can see, Tweeps built a great culture that made TWTR a good place to work, where smart people could solve large problems and generally try to be a force for good in the world. Working at a smaller², mid-sized tech company, I very easily imagine myself being in the shoes of Twitter employees who are now stuck with the choice of leaving and preserving their work-life balance or keep working at the chaos factory to try to preserve the values that they built into the product.

But, at the same time, a post-Twitter internet might be better. Centralized services controlled by a single company are the antithesis of what makes the internet so magical. Common protocols that allow anyone to publish and develop and build new things are good for creativity and innovation. Replacing a centralized Twitter with a decentralized, federated social network should be, overall, a positive improvement. It can allow for more innovation and communities to adapt tools to their norms faster. That said, Twitter did themselves adopt most of the good ideas that the community developed, like #hashtags, @mentions, retweets, and quote tweets.

After the vast majority of Twitter employees accepted an offer of severance in exchange for resigning, Twitter users have been planning an exit. Mastodon, which seems to me to be a viable replacement for Twitter has seen a huge influx of new users. When I first set up a Mastodon account in 2017, it was a small set of very online, techie users. Since Elno closed his purchase of Twitter, I’ve seen a diverse group of people in multiple different communities join Mastodon and it seems on the verge of being able to replace enough of the value that I get from Twitter. Another nice thing about Twitter is that it’s a general purpose tool that can be used very differently depending on how users find it valuable.

Moving to a decentralized social network pushes the costs out to the edges even faster than the benefits. Mastodon is largely run by volunteers who run community servers, who don’t have a centralized infrastructure team to run a data center and handle incidents, or anything like the scale of ad sales and revenue. I’m looking into running my own host. After graduating college, I realized that I want to own my main email address. I’d like to do that for social presence, too. Hopefully, we will see investment so that it’s easy to get the equivalent of a Gmail or Google Workspace plan for managed Mastodon servers. But, Mastodon is better software today than Twitter was early on. And if it is where many Twitter communities go, the tools will follow. It Tapbots make clients like Tweetbot for Mastodon (Trunkbot? Tuskbot?), I will gladly spend a few dollars a month to control my social presence.

Also, can we have the conversation about whether a billionaire should be able to disrupt a platform that employed thousands of people and enabled millions to communicate? The TWTR board and management did the right thing as a public company to accept Musk’s offer to buy the company. The premium that Musk offered was an amount of shareholder value that exceeded the present value of owning shares of TWTR as an ongoing concern. Parag Agarwal maximized value for TWTR shareholders, which is the obligation of the board. Should corporations codify their mission and values into their charters? What could TWTR have written into their articles of incorporation or bylaws to require the company to value promoting, advocating for, and enabling individual people to speak freely around the world? Can a public company ever maintain those values and have large institutional shareholders?

I am not optimistic about the future of Twitter, in part because I think that Musk does not understand the scale and scope of the platform or trust the people who built it. But, mostly, I am pessimistic because I think that the platform Musk wants is very different than what I want. I do not want an online conservative echo chamber. I do not want to be in a community that allows and encourages hateful speech and does not penalize people who harass others. Effective online communities require forceful moderation to establish and enforce norms of good behavior. Metafilter works so well as a community because of its moderation. Reddit is so variable, because each Subreddit makes its own moderation choices. I remember the Usenet flame wars and have no desire to return to those days. (I don’t remember why rec.skiing.alpine blew up, but I remember that it did).

So, thank you to everyone who worked at TWTR to build Twitter and make it the place where I learned information, connected with my communities and the world, and experienced major world events of the last 15 years. While there’s still a slim³ chance that Twitter survives this era of chaos and doubt, I will be writing more in the Fediverse and here.

Also, if you use Twitter, do export your data in case anything happens to the site. Thanks, GDPR.

Footnotes

1. I do still belong to Facebook, I don’t actively use it regularly, though I do still actively use Instagram, even as I enjoy it less and less as the algorithm pushing Reels takes over the feed.
2. Depending on how many Tweeps chose to leave, we may now have a larger workforce than what remains at Elno’s House of Chaos and Tweets.
3. And growing slimmer every day.