2025-09-01 03:21:10
Vivaldi has taken a bold stance against the growing trend of integrating agentic AI into web browsers. CEO Jon von Tetzchner argues that embedding artificial assistants turns web exploration into passive consumption, threatening the diversity and vibrancy of the web. Vivaldi pledges to prioritize human curiosity, autonomy, and privacy over hype, focusing on personalization and resisting Big Tech’s push toward AI-driven browsers.
Unless AI enhances user autonomy without privacy risks or diminishing the open web, Vivaldi says it won’t adopt it, vowing instead to keep building a browser for those who value exploration and independence.
I get what von Tetzchner is saying, but I’m a little more positive about the idea of agentic browsers. Using something like Comet or Dia has actually increased my use of the web over apps, because having AI integrated into the browser is just useful.
Case in point: earlier today I checked out the list of upcoming rugby matches on TV and asked Comet to look through the page and put all the games into my calendar. It did it easily and quickly, which was a decent little time saving. That kind of automation seems to be useful. Summarising web pages, less so.
If AI in the browser can be occasionally useful, how about AI in your fast food ordering system?
Taco Bell is re-evaluating its use of voice AI at drive-throughs after rolling out the technology in over 500 locations. While AI has processed millions of orders, customer reactions have been mixed – some dislike glitches or the impersonal experience, while others try to exploit or troll the system. Of course they do, and somewhere inside that system is FREE TACOS.
Part of me admires them for trying it, and another part just wonders what they hell they were thinking.
If most of the US-based AI companies are frothing at the mouth in an effort to out-talk each other on how close they are to general intelligence and true AI, China appears to be taking a somewhat different approach.
The key word is pragmatism: rather than chasing something that may be impossible, Xi Jinping is apparently pushing applications as being the most important thing. It’s going to be a fascinating few years as the different approaches play out.
If I didn’t know that he hadn’t read a book in his life, I would take Donald Trump for a student of history. Or at least that part of history which focuses on how empires can use economic power to get their own way politically.
The latest target is the Digital Services Act, Europe’s flagship piece of policy which regulates online platforms operating in the EU. The act aims to create a comprehensive framework to hold digital services accountable for content moderation, algorithmic transparency, and online safety.
Platforms must implement risk management systems, handle user complaints efficiently, and provide data access to authorities. With fines of up to 6% of global turnover for non-compliance, the DSA aims to create a safer digital space while protecting users' fundamental rights – a bold regulatory approach that has become a flashpoint in international tech policy.
But none of that matters to the US government, which, according to Wired, has been furiously writing to the tech giants demanding they ignore some of the DSA’s key provisions, particularly around encryption.
I’m not a fan of all the provisions of the DSA, but the EU has the right to determine its own laws, just as the US does.
I’ve seen the word “enshittification” applied to many things which it doesn't really fit.
Enshittification, as defined by Cory Doctorow, describes the three-stage decline of digital platforms: First, they attract users with good deals and service. Second, they leverage this user base to attract businesses, gradually worsening the user experience. Finally, once users and businesses are sufficiently locked in, they degrade the experience for both, extracting maximum profit while providing minimum value. This downward spiral continues until the platform ultimately collapses under its own dysfunction.
The most perfect example of enshittification in action? I'd argue it's Booking.com.. Like most enshittified platforms, it started out as a fantastic service, but now the majority of Booking.com's revenue comes from hotel commissions, while consumer experience has deteriorated as hotels are pressured to pay for better placement and engage in various deceptive practices.
But Booking.com has a challenger in the race to be the perfect encapsulation of the concept. Peleton-wannbe Echelon pushed a firmware update to its exercise bikes that forced users to connect to Echelon’s servers for the equipment to work and locked useful features behind a costly subscription. This update broke compatibility with popular third-party apps and offline use, upsetting customers who’d bought for device openness and flexibility
Right to repair advocate Louis Rossmann, offered a $20,000 bounty to anyone who could jailbreak and unlock Echelon exercise bikes. And someone did just that.
But of course, it’s illegal to release that code. That’s right: you might think you own that flash exercise bike, but if you tamper with it in any way, you’re basically breaking the law. Which is, of course, why you’re way better off just getting a dumb bike in the first place.
You’ll probably guess from what I’m writing about this week that I’m not a complete AI-refusenik. But there are areas where AI means creating the ultimate “computer says no” culture, making it possible for the people who deliver vital services to simply shrug their shoulders and blame algorithms.
Take, for example, the use of AI in delivering council services. Now there are applications where machine learning, in particular, can be helpful. Councils generate tonnes of data, and machine learning can offer insights which it might take humans years to spot, helping improve service delivery.
But summarising social worker case notes about children with special educational needs really isn’t one of those cases. Part of the point of reviewing notes is to fix more into the memory of social workers, and to help them see patterns and points which they might not have noticed at the time. It’s a human business – not one which we should leave to machines.
One of the characteristics of authoritarian regimes is their ability to quickly control markets and companies. Donald Trump has very quickly mastered this, probably because threatening people was, and is, the way he does business.
The FT has published a long piece on how leading figures in American business and finance have largely remained silent in response to Trump’s series of aggressive interventions in the financial system and private companies.
There’s a deep layer of hypocrisy at work here. While corporate leaders were quick to criticise progressive mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s economic proposals in New York, they have offered only muted or indirect objections to Trump’s actions, such as firing a Federal Reserve governor, taking stakes in companies like Intel, and pressuring currency and industrial policy.
This restraint is attributed primarily to fear of political retaliation and the greater power wielded by the president compared to a city mayor. Many in the business community believe that private persuasion is preferable to public criticism, although there is zero evidence that has actually paid off. Meanwhile, financial markets have shown little reaction to Trump’s moves, focusing more on rate signals than on the long-term risk to U.S. economic institutions.
Some industry voices and intellectuals have condemned Trump’s actions as “socialism” or dangerous interventionism, but most prominent business leaders and Republican lawmakers have avoided direct confrontation. Despite misgivings, self-interest and short-term market optimism have contributed to the broader “calculated silence” of the corporate elite as the rules of free enterprise in America are fundamentally abandoned.
Have you ever hung out in a local Facebook group? if you have, you will have noticed there is a very strong theme of nostalgia. People are forever reminiscing about the good old days, when children played safely in the streets, people left their doors unlocked, and everyone knew their neighbours. This form of uncritical nostalgia – sometimes called "rosy retrospection" or "nostalgic bias" – ignores the negative aspects of the past while selectively emphasising the positive.
Now AI tools are joining in, amplifying this distorted view of history. Chuck Jordan highlights a recently-viral video which aims to capture the mood of the 80s, with veiled criticism of the present, while really doing nothing of the sort.
This AI-enhanced nostalgia is particularly dangerous because it comes with an artificial veneer of authenticity. It's feeding into a political narrative that suggests everything was better in the past – and could be again if only we returned to "traditional values." When you can recreate your rosy-tinted memories and share them, the truth of the past is going to be hidden.
A sad milestone in blogging history: TypePad, one of the pioneering blogging platforms that helped shape the early blogosphere, is shutting down. Launched in 2003 by Six Apart, TypePad offered a more user-friendly alternative to existing platforms with its emphasis on customisable designs and powerful publishing tools.
In its heyday, TypePad was the platform of choice for many serious bloggers, journalists, and publications. TypePad was my middle-ground between the Blogger era and installing my own Wordpress. In its day it was great.
Thankfully, the only TypePad blog that I still read is moving to Ghost. Phew.
I think Terence might be baiting me 🙂
Good article, though. I think the underlying question is not “should we attempt to keep vulnerable people safe from scams” but “who should be charged with protecting people from scams?” To my mind, that’s definitely not huge corporations that could – and will – use that power to generate profits that would have made Rockefeller blush.
2025-08-26 01:37:03
First off, a quick apology — I’ve been under the weather. Most of last week was spent offline, recovering from what was likely a mild case of covid. I tested negative twice, but with the virus constantly changing, who knows what that really means.
Anyway, normal service should now be resumed… fingers crossed anyway.
This week Google released a study which “proved” that the water and power usage of Gemini is teeny weeny and definitely nothing to worry about. Only one problem: the author of at least one of the studies which the company cited said its report “spread the wrong message to the world.”
Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside, accused Google of “just hiding the critical information”. In other words – surprise! – the company has been highly selective about the data it’s used in order to create a positive view of its AI.
Greenwashing is nothing new, but I can’t remember a recent example where a business released what purported to be independent data about its AI systems. Expect much, much more of this in the future.
Remember when the good folks at Meta got caught inflating video engagement numbers? Remember how it took publishers down a rabbit hole of “video first” content which cost them a lot of money, and many people their jobs? Of course you do! And you wouldn’t think Meta would do the same thing again, would you?
Well of course it’s going to do the same thing again.
Where last time it tried to fool publishers, this time it’s retailers that have been the target. A whistleblower has claimed the company artificially boosted the numbers for performance of its Shops ads. It by included shipping fees and taxes in sales figures, subsidised ad auctions, and applied undisclosed discounts, making the ads appear more effective than they were. It also tried to get around Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) rules. ATT, introduced in 2021, has cost Meta billions of dollars a year in revenue – money which the company was getting from abusively monitoring the behaviour of people.
The whistleblower complaint, brought by former product manager Samujjal Purkayastha, claims these practices inflated return on ad spend (ROAS) by up to 19% and misled advertisers, especially after Apple’s 2021 privacy changes reduced Meta’s access to user data.
Oh and don’t forget that recently a California jury ruled that Meta violated the state’s wiretap law by collecting sensitive health data from the Flo period-tracking app without user consent, for targeted advertising.
This is a company that just can’t help itself: it wants to avoid being bound by any rules which stop it from violating user privacy, even if it means calling in The Big Orange One to battle governments on its behalf. Crooks appealing to crooks. Whatever next?
The recent spate of sex toy-throwing incidents at WNBA games are acts that aren’t so much protest as pure provocation, designed to go viral rather than make a point – the point being that women are sex objects. But it’s also connected to the rise of meme culture, fuelled by platforms like TikTok and shaped by the logic of viral web series like Skibidi Toilet, creating a climate where disruption is its own reward.
Underlying this spectacle is what the author calls the death of shame, a cultural shift where the humiliation of acting stupidly no longer sticks to the perpetrator, but to the target. The article draws a direct line from the rise of shameless public figures to a generation raised on irony, unable or unwilling to distinguish between trolling and activism.
The result is a society addicted to performance, where attention is the only real currency and even acts of humiliation become viral content. As the author puts it, “Donald Trump’s most enduring legacy isn’t a policy but a persona as the shameless troll who made humiliation a political strategy.” In this world, everything is bait, and the line between rebellion and ridicule no longer exists.
The first generation of students who have never worked without AI are just about to enter their final year. Ian Bogost takes a long look at them, and how AI poses problems and questions for higher education more broadly.
After reading this I started wondering whether the issue with AI isn’t really about what it’s good for – it’s what are humans good for? I would love to live in a world where all of the drudgery in life is taken care of by machines, where people work for pleasure rather than for money. Fully automated luxury (gay) space communism, and all that. Where, to tackle the worries of those students, you study not because it’s the gateway to a job, but because you want to do it.
Capitalism, of course, can’t ever get to the point of a world of leisure. The point of capitalism – which is often lost on people – is the division of the world into the people who own capital, and the people who have to work for a living. One vision of a post-capitalist world, that held by the tech bros, does away with the people who work, replacing them by machines, machines which the tech bros own. In this view, the only people who get that fully automated world of luxury are them.
You may have noticed that agentic browsers – ones which can take actions on your behalf on websites – are the hip thing that every company seems to be making. I’ve been playing around with a couple (Perplexity’s Comet and The Browser Company’s Dia) and they’re interesting. I can see the point – who really wants to spend an hour researching hotels for a business trip? – but they’re about as reliable as most first generation AI products.
So it’s really not a surprise they are susceptible to scams, to a degree that’s likely higher than most human beings. All code has flaws, and vulnerabilities, and unlike those of humans they are 100% replicable. Use a flaw in an agentic browser and it will work on every instance of that code. Find a method which works on one human being, and you can never guarantee that it will work on every other.
How serious is this? Well… at the moment, not very. Agentic browsers are in their very, very early days, and none of them are all that good or that widespread. If you’re using one, you’re likely to be experimenting rather than using it on your day to day work.
One of the things which has changed in my lifetime is the generalised worship of people who shuffle money around as “successes”. It kicked off in the 80s, of course, when Reagan and Thatcher turned the world into a paradise for obscure neoliberal economists.
Anil Dash notes something that should be obvious: someone who moves money around is not the same as someone who actually makes stuff. Sure, they can enable creative work: but they don’t actually do it themselves.
And yet the people who seem to be running the world right now do exactly that: shuffle bits. We laud the idea of “passive income” (which mostly means making money by having money) without actually considering the morality involved. It’s weird, and I don’t like it.
He liked it. A lot. And he realised that Chinese EVs pose an existential threat to Western car makers.
Chinese companies like Xiaomi have a lot of advantages over US car makers. First, they’re market entrants, which means they don’t have the dead weight of their existing models or the profit margins they make. Second, of course, production costs are lower. And third, they have a government which is supporting them, rather than one which is wedded to the primacy of the gas guzzler, and even attempting to stop states enacting their own emissions mandates.
Of course, it makes sense that the Minister for Science, Innovation and Technology would be a bit enthusiastic about tech. It comes with the territory. But you would hope that there would also be a degree of healthy scepticism about big tech companies, at least from a Labour minister.
Enter Peter Kyle, a man who claimed he would “advocate” for Amazon when the online retailer was having issues with the government’s own competition regulator. He’s notably enthusiastic about AI, wanting closer partnerships with the USto “boost” AI investment. No doubt, some kind of lobbying job is his once his political career is over.
But it seems that even he wasn’t swayed by the idea that the government should hand over a few billion pounds to give everyone in the country access to ChatGPT Plus. Well at least he didn’t accidentally buy a bank.
Margaret Boden has died, at the age of 88. Maggie was one of the founders of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, which was a big influence on AI as a discipline. I met Maggie a couple of times at conferences back when I was a student, and she was a incredibly smart person. Her book The Creative Mind was a big influence on me, and I would recommend anything and everything she wrote.
R. F. Kuang has a new book coming out, and this profile in The New Yorker is a great read. If you haven’t read Babel you definitely should.
2025-08-04 03:52:14
Let’s start with something a little doom-laden: how societies collapse. How “civilisations” meet their ultimate end isn’t just an academic exercise, for two reasons. First, with climate change starting to bite, it’s easy to see how we could be near some kind of existential crisis.
But there is a second reason. Hang around in the right-wing echo chambers (caution: wear biohazard suits) and you will hear constant comparisons to every man-child’s favourite subject, the collapse of Rome. Rome, they insist, got soft: it lost those traditional Roman virtues of manliness, family and hard work and replaced them with Greek/Egyptian/delete-as-appropriate effeteness. Now it’s time to reimpose some discipline, get rid of people with piercings and rainbow hair, and all will be well.
Thankfully we have better ideas of how societies collapse, such as those contained in Luke Kemp’s new book Goliath’s Curse. Kemp argues that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes societal collapse. Elites extract more and more wealth from people, and society becomes more fragile because of it. Conflict, corruption, poverty, lower health and environmental degradation follow, and eventually some kind of shock – war, disease, disaster – cracks the whole thing apart.
Just as Egyptian priests and god-pharoahs claimed to be able to perform miracles when the country was on the cusp of collapse, so do today’s tech bros try to tell us that we’re on the cusp of AI which will solve all our problems and make everyone rich.
And that is why I’ve started off with this story: because I want you to consider everything I’m about to write within that context.
You will be shocked, shocked I tell you, when you find out whose business appears to be immune from the excesses of DOGE. That’s right – Palantir, owned by the execrable Peter Thiel, has seen its welfare payments… sorry, “contracts” boosted by $113m since the start of the year.
And I guarantee that if Trump ever “looks at” birthright citizenship, the German-born South African-raised American Thiel will get some kind of special license to stay a citizen. Funny how these things work, eh?
I spent a lot of the 90s on Usenet arguing with libertarians. As a philosophy PhD student, it was obvious that Ayn Rand, the immigrant welfare recipient so beloved of nativist believes in a small state, was just Not Philosophy.
Rand is politics for people who want simple answers and want to be told they, as individuals, are the most important thing in the world. In other words, it’s philosophy for teenage boys.
It’s no surprise then that Peter Thiel is a fan – so much so that one of his many little rat holes for billionaire ill-gotten gains is planning to produce a film not only of The Fountainhead, but also the utterly woeful Atlas Shrugged.Hopefully it will do about as well as that other fanatic-funded atrocity Battlefield Earth.
Up until maybe 2020, tech was exciting. I don’t mean that technology itself was exciting, or at least not any more exciting than it has always been. I mean that the world of tech was seen as a place that was making the future a better place.
Electric cars! Rockets! Portable communicators like in Star Trek! And – importantly in our neoliberal, only-capitalism-works world, people were getting insanely rich from it. Not just rich: richer than almost anyone has ever been in the history of mankind, and all from bits, not atoms.
People like our good friend Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk were seen almost like supermen, saving the world and making our lives better in measurable ways.
And then something happened: in the hyper-mediated world of the COVID lockdown, it became obvious they were a bunch of stupid, venal, douchebags. But they were also radicalised, and Sam Freedman has written a great article on how people like them are particularly susceptible to radicalisation. But the biggest thing is probably that, after years of being lionised, they suddenly faced criticism. And they couldn’t take it.
Hence retrenching into their own information bubble, one which is driven by conversation (podcasts are a particular favourite) rather than being questioned by anyone who disagrees with them or simply wants to examine what they know critically. They can dish it out – but they can’t take it.
Good news! Apple is finally allowing iPads to get repaired, by supplying parts to third parties. Bad news! The parts are insanely expensive:
Clark points out that a new charge port for an iPad Pro 11, a part that goes bad all the time, costs $250 from Apple. Aftermarket charge ports, meanwhile, can be found for less than $20. “It’s a very basic part, and I just can’t see any reasonable explanation that part should be $250 from Apple,” he said. “That’s a component that probably costs them a few dollars to make.”
I have to confess I had not heard about the phenomenon of “996 working” till I read Patrick McGee’s Apple in China (strong recommend, if you haven’t read it already). It’s essentially working 9am till 9pm, six days a week, and it’s become a symbol of labour abuse in China.
Of course, the techbros love it. Just as they look at the dystopian world of Neuromancer and see an aspiration rather than a warning, so they look at 996 and see it as a model for work, rather than something that violates even Chinese labour laws and has sparked protests.
But it’s OK, we can replace all those burned-out workers with child labour, right?
A timely reminder from Cory Doctorow that many of the challenges we face today in terms of enshittification just can’t be solved switching your tech allegiances:
My book on Enshittification is coming out in a couple of months, and the early reviews are already coming in, and they are gratifyingly glowing. But there's a trend in these reviews, a caveat that reviewer after reviewer has raised: my book is "short on individual solutions." You're goddamned right it is. Because this isn't an individual problem, it's a systemic one. Sure, live the best life you can, making the best choices you can. But don't kid yourself that this is fighting enshittification.
You can’t solve the problem of social media platforms which lock you in just by moving as an individual to Mastodon. You can’t solve the problem of Google by switching to Kagi. These things may all make your life as an individual better, but they won’t solve the systemic problem.
The big tech platforms long ago realised that media companies are, by and large, suckers. Build a presence on Facebook and get loads of traffic! Pivot to video and make millions! And, the longest-running scam of all, Google loves you and will always send you traffic!
Not, it seems, anymore. Now, finally, it seems that publishers are getting the message and building their own audience. It’s about time.
Life persists. Perhaps one day the descendants of these little creatures will inherit the land from us.
2025-07-14 02:50:51
You are probably already aware of the EU’s (slow) moves promoting data sovereignty, and of course China’s efforts to ensure it has independence from western tech. But they aren’t the only parts of the world worried about a US data hegemony. This article looks at efforts by the likes of Nigeria, India, South Africa and Vietnam to push big cloud providers to keep data within their countries.
The driver is understanding that data is itself a resource, and, in the words of an economist at the World Bank, “the concern is that economic benefit only goes to big platforms that are often not located within that country.” In the age of AI-driven extraction that is, of course, even more true. (Via Ben Werdmuller)
Actually he didn’t, but this is exactly the kind of click-bait headline that British publishers – mostly local news sites – have learned to use to attract traffic. For those who don’t know him, Martin Lewis is an extremely well-respected financial journalist who has written a huge about how ordinary people can save money. He’s often on TV, and has a great reputation for giving sound financial advice.
A reputation which the bastions of churnalism have jumped on to create all kinds of stories, knowing that putting Lewis’ name and picture on a social teaser is guaranteed to get clicks. This interview with Lewis is a great piece of insight both into the practice (and it’s so corrosive to real journalism) and what it’s like for the man himself.
One part of being a gatekeeper under the DMA is that you have to hold public workshops which allow interested parties to ask questions about your DMA compliance efforts – and Apple’s took place at the end of June.
The introductory presentation sounds like an entirely predictable basket fire, with Apple spending its time saying how great it is and taking potshots at the European Commission. Apple managed to swerve many of the questions, which seems to violate at least the spirit of these events.
Perhaps most interesting were the responses about browsers, and I didn’t realise quite how bad Apple’s new system for allowing rendering engines is, or how they are clinging on to a privileged position for Safari. Anyone who wants to ship their own browser engine has to release it as a new app: it can’t simply be an update to an existing app. And, if you’re using age restrictions on the phone, no other browsers at all can be used by anyone under the age of 17. Apple is “looking at” this – but there’s no timeline for a change.
In other words, it’s yet another example of Apple’s failure to engage in good faith with the process of DMA compliance. Once again, its attitude is that of a child whose parents are taking away the Xbox. Grow up, Cupertino.
I mean, if you’re finding it tricky to raise finance because your chatbot thinks it’s Hitler, why not just shuffle a chunk of money you acquired from the government into your AI business? Nothing wrong with a little shell-game capitalism if you’re the world’s richest man! I mean it won’t be too long before investors realise that Starship is a bust and can never achieve what it’s supposed to, at which point the only chance SpaceX has is remaining the effective monopoly supplier of rockets to the US. Which, given the Great Orange Dictator’s current feelings towards Musk, might not be as safe as it once was.
A Dubai-based company which invested $100m in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company with links to the US’ First Family (of Crime) may not, in fact, exist. This story follows the money, and finds that there’s no real trace of Aqua 1 Foundation beyond a (possibly fictitious) Twitter profile and some crypto wallets which bought Trump tokens using exchanges linked to North Korean hacking and violating money laundering laws.
It’s really weird seeing the world’s largest democracy looted in real time.
I’ve used Proton’s products for quite a while. Their stance on privacy and security matches my own approach, and I’m glad to support them. Now, they’re taking on Apple in a class action lawsuit, seeking to end what they call anti-competitive behaviour in the app store.
One detail which is juicy: Apple rejected an update to Proton VPN in 2020 when the app description mentioned how it could be used to bypass filters in authoritarian countries. This description had not changed in the update – this was language that Proton always used. As Michael Tsai said the same year, “Apple’s highest principle is that Apple, not the user, decides what can be installed. And this makes it subject to governmental control.”
If you ever want to depress yourself, take a read of the UniUK Subreddit and browse through the posts from recent graduates. The job market is currently very tough indeed – and, it’s worth remembering, these are young people who have spent in the region of £60,000 getting on courses which, they believed, would help them walk into higher paying jobs.
Much of this is down to Britain’s moribund post-Brexit economy, as another example of how a vote which was largely landed by the old is screwing over the young. But AI is exacerbating the problem, as entry-level work – which is what graduate jobs always were, albeit at a higher level – gets automated out of existence.
This is, of course, going to cause massive long-term problems. The impact on business will be to deskill the workforce over a long period of time, as learning how to do the entry level work is a precursor for doing harder work later. I don’t think I would have been able to be a journalist without learning how to write a news story. Certainly, I wouldn’t have been a good one.
How fast will AI impact on the number of meaningful jobs? According to Adam Dorr, the majority of jobs will be done by machines within a generation. This, of course, is the end-state of capitalism: the reduction of the value of labour to zero, while all power lands in the hands of those who own capital – which means servers and AIs. For about 99% of the eight billion people on the planet, that means either a grim future – or revolution.
The 2008 financial crisis was driven by greed. The instrument which allowed that greed to burn the world’s economy was the subprime mortgage, a financial bet which allowed people who would otherwise have been left out of the housing market to aspire to own a home. Combined with financial deregulation, subprime mortgages were turned into financial instruments which made it hard for banks to lose money – until they suddenly did, and managed to persuade governments around the world to use ordinary peoples’ money to bail them out.
Subprime mortgages were financial opium for the people. A housing market that had been turned from being about owning your own home to being an investment in property required continually rising prices – but wages, in the neoliberal economies which had decimated the defences of ordinary people provided by strong unions, could never rise at the same rate.
Hence, broadening the availability of mortgages to people who could not really afford them. People who were gambling that house prices would keep going up, and that the toe-hold they had on “the property ladder” could be maintain. It was the kind of criminal endeavour which no one goes to prison for – because the victims were ordinary people, while the criminals were on the 27th floors of Wall Street and the City.
We are still feeling the repercussions of 2008 today. Governments like the UK have seen a decade and a half of austerity hobble economies and increase wealth inequality to an astounding degree. But importantly, we still see the impact of 2008 on the housing market: house prices have continued to rise, creating a massive gap between haves – who bought their houses in the 80s and 90s and now live mortgage free – and a new class who can only afford to rent and will never be able to buy.
In a sane market this would create downward pressure on house prices. With less people able to buy, demand should drop, and – law of supply and demand! – the cost of owning should fall.
But as with most things, here comes 21st century capitalism to make the situation worse. In Europe, the real estate market is being dominated by private equity and institutional investors buying housing. In Ireland, for example, nearly half of all housing built since 2017 has been bought by investment companies, crowding out individual buyers and maintaining prices. It’s insanity, driven by the same forces that are currently screwing over technology: greed, and rich people with no ties to communities.
And speaking of greedy rich people whose power comes from their ownership of capital rather than any discernable talent, here comes Marc Andreessen. Andreessen, who owes his career to government-funded research grants and being in the right place at the right time, told a group chat of his rich buddies that universities would “pay the price” for their efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Marc and his pals don’t like DEI, because it seeks to level the playing field. As mediocre white men who owe their riches to the advantages that mediocre white men enjoyed in the past, of course they’re against anything which increases competition. When Peter Thiel said that “competition is for losers”, he wasn’t just referring to competition between businesses. The mindset of the billionaire tech class is to ensure that no one competes directly with them, too.
2025-06-30 03:23:06
And I’m back! Thanks to a combination of busyness at work and personal time off, I had a bit of a break from sending this out. Normal service has now been resumed.
On to the links.
A lot of the time when I think about how publishers adapted to the early internet era I end up saying something to myself: “what were we thinking?” The companies that moved slowly got nowhere. The companies that moved quickly ended up in thrall to traffic from Google and Facebook. Big publishers have vanished or become shadows of their former selves. Newspapers have struggled to avoid become “me too” trash that jumps on stories which are trending with no regard to their audiences.
But there is, I think, a kernel of hope. Companies like Perplexity and features like Google’s AI answers are driven by supplying information, answers to questions. And as I’ve written before, they’re actually pretty good at that. What they’re not good at is human judgment, human emotion, human empathy. That is where the future of human-made content lies. Knowing there is another human being on the other side of the screen, sharing something about themselves, something that goes beyond information.
Whatever the future of publishing, though, I doubt that Substack will be a part of it. As Ana Marie Cox works through, the company might be dominating the minds of journalists and writers desperate to have an independent income, but it’s also just not making money. And it’s difficult to see how its economics can ever add up without enshittifying the service it provides, first to users and then authors.
We have been here before of course. Medium was intended to be a platform which helped writers and publishers monetise their work, and like Substack it paid some pretty big writers to climb on board. That lasted a few years, and then the logic of economics took hold and the feast turned into famine.
So what does the future hold for writers and publishers? I don’t know, and at this point anyone who claims to know is really guessing. But I know that people will still want stories. They might just have to work a little bit harder to find the really good stuff.
Google, a company that knows the value of making nice noises while shanking entire industries, thinks it has the answer to all the publishing industry’s prayers. Or at least it would like you to think that it’s trying to help, which undermining the flow of traffic which keeps publishers afloat.
The answer, maybe, is Offerwall, which lets publishers add micropayments, surveys and signups to their sites – all methods of raising revenue which have been tried in the past and largely found to be wanting.
I don’t think I have read any technology story more depressing than that of Cluely, a startup which wants to help you cheat. What on? Everything. Job interviews, exams, you name it – Cluely will help you not do the work. And of course, Andreessen Horowitz wants in, to the tune of $15m or so. No doubt it will be worth billions.
This is a long and depressing read. But it’s worth reading till the very end, for the reminder that workers don’t have to blandly go along with this shit. Throw more tomatoes, even if they are virtual ones.
I don’t think there are many people on this side of the Atlantic who don’t see the need for Europe to build its own tech stack that’s independent of the US. Even US companies recognise this, as this long article about how Microsoft was forced to cut off the email of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court shows.
Against this background it’s been interesting reading Patrick McGee’s Apple in China, which I have just finished and highly recommend. I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to say that China’s model – deliberately developing its own independent technology capabilities – is one that Europe needs to follow. Whether there is the economic or political will, or even the understand that this is necessary, is another matter.
I’m a big fan of Graphene, the de-Google’d and more secure version of Android which anyone who isn’t using an iPhone should be considering. But there’s been one problem with it: contactless payments from almost every bank don’t work. Google Wallet… well of course that doesn’t work.
But Terence Eden has found a way, using the Curve app. Curve lets you add your bank cards to its wallet, and it works with Graphene, including using NFC. Neat.
Because what the world needs is internet-connected beehives powered by AI. Presumably there’s some kind of subscription too, service being where companies like this make their money. Good luck when the business goes bust.
Google’s carbon emissions are up, again, and of course it’s largely AI that’s driving them. The company’s sustainability report, though, claims this is outside it’s control, which is bizarre given it does, you know, have a choice.
But it’s OK, we’ll still be able to generate AI videos while the sea rises and crops fail.
William Kentridge. You’re welcome.
2025-06-09 04:14:09
I’ve been around the world of artificial intelligence since I was working on my PhD in the early 1990s, which means I have seen how, historically, AI research comes and goes.
The pattern is this: a new technique comes along which promises to be the big leap towards what is now usually termed artificial general intelligence (AGI), but back then was just called AI. A huge amount of effort is spent in researching it, and progress is made. Then, the promised leap to AGI just never appears. What we’re left with is often useful tech, but not the breakthrough everyone believed in.
I suspect that LLMs will follow the same pattern. The biggest difference between LLMs and earlier AI tech isn’t in its potential for reaching AGI, but in its existence in a business environment which rewards the hype cycle. We have oligarchies and monopolies seeking to use their incredible financial muscle to “own” markets. We have venture capitalists who have an interest in hyping a startup so it gets sold at the highest possible price. It’s perfect conditions for hype cycles around particular technologies, and this time it’s LLMs.
The cracks, though, will inevitably appear – and the first one has come from the less than likely source of research at Apple. It’s not a hard paper to read, but the short version is that reasoning models – the adjuncts to LLMs which give them the ability to do multi-step reasoning – collapse badly on complex questions (as do unaugmented LLMs).
Broadly, I think LLMs are useful tech, particularly for some kinds of textual analysis and also for converting human language into machine queries. But that’s all: they’re not the solution which gets us to AGI. And they’re not worth the current hype.
If you want to build your own stress and anxiety levels, then I would heartily suggest reading 404Media’s article which compiles the views from the ground of teachers about the use of AI in schools.
Education is going to be changed dramatically by these tools, whether we like it or not. My biggest concern is that we’re letting this happen, rather than making it happen in a way which is beneficial to us all as human beings.
Barry Adams – one of the best SEO people in the world – recently posted on the impact of AI overviews and AI Mode on traffic from Google. Predictably, if you’ve been reading what I wrote over the past few years, it isn’t pretty: as Barry puts it “publishers need to focus on audience strategies that exclude Google as a reliable source… In the next few years, many publishers will be unable to survive.”
Honestly it’s grim out there, and I still think some publishers are hiding their heads in the sand. Yes, you can get traffic from Discover – but once Google has worked out how to make all the money in the world without sending publishers any traffic, that’s it – the long summer is over.
Some really sad news: Bill Atkinson, one of the early developers of the Mac, has passed away. I remember Bill mostly from his work on HyperCard, which was an amazing product. I built a lot of HyperCard stacks in the pre-web era, mostly to explore academic concepts, but also using it as a complete programming environment. When it gained the ability to read from the Mac’s serial ports, for example, you started to be able to use it for interfacing with equipment – I wrote a piece of HyperCard software which logged calls from a phone switch, for example. Fun times. Steven Levy has a great retrospective on Atkinson’s life and career.
John Gruber has a long article detailing his thoughts on the rumour that Apple Notes will be able to export Markdown files in its next release. Like John, I think of Markdown as a format for creating content which will ultimately live on the web (most of these posts are written first in Markdown, because I could never be bothered with HTML). But I would love to see the ability to export everything into Markdown – I’ve done this in the past using a variety of tricks, but it is always quite painful.
I find it really hard to have much sympathy for Reddit, which only exists because of the millions of contributions of individual users, in its legal battle to stop Anthropic from scraping Reddit content.
Bear in mind that what Reddit is doing here is selling its users content without any real consent. It’s claiming the right to sell something that, really, it does not own.
I’ve written before about how Starship, SpaceX’s heavy lifter, is a bit of a science fiction fantasy of how rockets should work. If you’re a nerd of a certain age, then you will remember pictures from covers of science fiction magazines showing tail-first landings on planets and back on Earth.
Starship is driven by that vision, but there’s only one problem: physics. To land on a planet, you need to lose momentum, as much of it as possible before you hit the dirt. There’s two ways of doing that: using an atmosphere to either aerobrake or parachute (or both); or using retrorockets to slow you down.
If you have an atmosphere, then the former is preferable for one simple reason: weight. If you use retrorockets, the fuel they need to land you safely has to be carried up with you, reducing the amount of useful weight you can carry to orbit.
And of course the more weight you’re carrying, the stronger everything has to be. Which, in turn, increases the weight of the vehicle.
This is the problem that SpaceX is running into, and, as Will Lockett explains, there is no way round it. Physics can’t be avoided, even if you are the richest person in the world, and no amount of software engineering-inspired iteration will dig you out of the hole that gravity puts you in. It’s like Musk’s fantasy of going to Mars, a ferociously difficult journey which would yield little more than a bunch of photo opportunities covered in red dust.
The wonderful Mic Wright – who has a book out which you should pre-order – has written a very telling article about the way that stories move from small local newspapers to bigger news networks. And, as Mic rightly points out, the majority of those stories are not even worth reporting about in the smallest of local papers.
Instead, they are there simply because they deliver clicks. There’s no other merit at all – just how important is it that a random woman was upset by a lack of “English” food on holiday? And yet this ended up in the Daily Mail, one of the country’s largest newspapers.
I don’t think I like this world of publishing much. And I always end up thinking it’s partly my fault. A lot of us early Internet people have these thoughts.
Ever wondered about why Steve Ballmer did the “developers, developers, developers” chant that time? You can find out in this interview, and also hear Ballmer talk about a lot of really interesting Microsoft-related history.
Some lighter shade of darkness: this is a wonderful look at the genesis of Marc Almond’s magnificent Torment and Toreros, not only a great album but one of the greatest. If you love drama.
