Category: Newsletters

Before we get started, let’s agree that Elon Musk’s promises about full self-driving on the Tesla have been figments of his ketamine-addled imagination, if not an outright fraud. Musk first promised FSD in 2016, almost a full decade ago, and it is barely any closer now. His then-Twitter account almost 10 years ago was full of hype about features like “Summon,” where a Tesla owner across the city could click a button in the app and their car would autonomously leave the garage and drive across town, something that still hasn’t arrived. Is it because Musk refuses to use LiDAR, which literally every other self-driving car maker uses, and has stuck to trying to get cameras and algorithms to do it alone? Possibly. Regardless, the fact is that a Tesla still has problems making it onto highway exits or detecting when lanes are closed, and it routinely cuts other drivers off. In other words, Tesla self-driving is a pale imitation of what Musk has been promising for years, to the point where there are multiple class-action lawsuits about it.

That said, however, I think there’s ample evidence that self-driving cars — even the somewhat flawed ones we have now — are an unambiguous social good. They are so much better than cars driven by human beings that it doesn’t seem fair to even compare them. It’s like arguing that toasters are better than jamming a piece of bread on a stick and holding it over a fire, or that anaesthesia is better than telling someone to bite a bullet before you operate. If it were possible to flick a switch and make all cars self-driving, it would be incumbent on us to flick that switch as quickly as possible. To get a sense of why I believe this is the case, Waymo — Google’s self-driving car startup — recently released statistics on the accident rate of its cars, of which there are more than 2,500 in five cities. As of June this year, Waymo cars had driven almost 100 million miles and had 90 percent fewer crashes causing serious injury, and 90 percent fewer incidents involving pedestrians (Tesla also reports accidents but with much less detail).

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In the late 1990s, when most people just about had an email address and the smartphone with even one G, never mind five of them, was just a twinkle in a mad inventor’s eye, the internet was still regarded by many as the preserve of the nerd. Most of the record industry either treated it as an irrelevance or, with the advent of Napster and other streaming services a few years later, a threat. But Jagger was an early adopter, or at least he was someone who spotted the internet’s potential while others retained suspicion. Jagger is also a cricket nut. So when he discovered that nobody was planning to broadcast the Akai-Singer Champions Trophy — a relatively minor one-day tournament in December 1997, featuring England, Pakistan, India and West Indies — these two interests converged. So he formed a company and broadcast it himself. (via the NYT)

Some scholars believe the Wizard of Oz is an allegory for the move to a gold standard in 1873

In a 1964 article, educator and historian Henry Littlefield outlined an allegory in the book of the late-19th-century debate regarding monetary policy. According to this view, for instance, the Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard, and the Silver Shoes (Ruby slippers in the 1939 film version) represent the Silverites’ wish to maintain convertibility under a sixteen to one ratio. Hugh Rockoff suggested in 1990 that the novel was an allegory about the demonetization of silver in 1873, and that the City of Oz earns its name from the abbreviation of ounces “Oz” in which gold and silver are measured. The cyclone that carried Dorothy to the Land of Oz represents the economic and political upheaval, the yellow brick road stands for the gold standard, and the silver shoes Dorothy inherits from the Wicked Witch of the East represents the pro-silver movement. When Dorothy is taken to the Emerald Palace before her audience with the Wizard she is led through seven passages and up three flights of stairs, a subtle reference to the Coinage Act of 1873. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes cradled in a crescent of psychopathy around Seattle’s Puget Sound? Fraser thinks the master key is to be found in the fact that the area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and her subjects were reared in their murky shadows. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes of her crazy wall, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma’s children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. (via the New Yorker)

Spotify changed its randomness algorithm to make it less random but it feels more random

Spotify’s first iteration of its shuffle feature was dictated by a decades-old algorithm that generated unbiased randomness from a finite sequence of elements. Breathtakingly efficient, the Fisher-Yates shuffle was employed by Spotify to dismantle user playlists and reassemble them into new, unpredictable orders. From the developers’ perspective, the task of creating this feature was masterfully accomplished with just a few lines of code. From early users’ perspective, shuffle was a travesty. This discrepancy was bewildering for both parties, but mainly for developers, who had delivered a mathematically perfect version of randomness. Perfection turned out to be the problem. The algorithm captured a Platonic ideal of randomness instead of one compatible with the human mind. We presume that randomness must always be chaotic. However, as randomness is unpredictable, it will at times give the impression of order. (via the FT)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused the thing in acid. Unable to open the rock, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification. A scientist there said that after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites, and Hole’s rock was one of those two. He published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which he called Maryborough. (via ScienceAlert)

In the 16th century cadavers were embalmed with honey and then turned into medicine

A mellified man, also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources of the 16th century, which reports that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. The mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, the donor’s feces and even sweat would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor’s body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs, which would then be sold in street markets at a hefty price. (via Wikipedia)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

If you share a recipe for or photo of fried rice in China on November 25th, you may get a visit from the authorities. To understand why, you have to go back 75 years. North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched a surprise invasion into South Korea, hoping to unify the Korean peninsula. More than three years and as many as three million lives later, the two sides signed an armistice. One of the lives lost was Mao Anying, the oldest son of the chairman of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. His death has become a major moment in the narrative shared by Chinese dissidents today, who celebrate November 25 as China’s Thanksgiving Day. But because of censorship, those who want to mark the day do so by sharing a fried rice recipe or pictures of the dish. It’s a reference to the mythic story behind Anying’s demise, which says he was trying to cook fried rice, and the smoke from the fire exposed his position. (via Now I Know)

He popularized a famous Italian coffee pot and when he died he was buried in one

Renato Bialetti, the Italian businessman who turned an aluminum coffee pot into a classic global design, died last week at the age of 93. In accordance with his and his family’s wishes, his ashes were interred in an urn shaped like a large version of a Moka pot, the stovetop coffee maker he introduced to the world. Bialetti didn’t invent the Moka. He just made it famous. A man named Luigi di Ponti designed the appliance in 1933 and sold the patent to Renato’s father Alfonso Bialetti, an aluminum vendor. Sales lagged under the elder Bialetti, but Renato had bigger, coffee-scented dreams when he took over the business in the 1940s. He spearheaded a massive marketing campaign across Italy for the pots, which were branded with a charmingly mustachioed caricature—based either on himself or his father, depending on the legend you read. (via Quartz)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

My last Torment Nexus piece was about how weak the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta was, weak enough that it was thrown out by a federal court judge. But don’t take that argument as evidence that I am a Meta fan — far from it. It may not be a monopoly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful and in some cases actually dangerous. The one I have the most experience with is the situation in Myanmar, where Facebook ignored the signs that its platform was being used to promote violence against the Rohingya population in that country, and ignored them for so long that a United Nations panel came to the conclusion that the company enabled a genocide that killed thousands and left thousands more maimed and homeless. Did Facebook deliberately do this? Of course not. They’re not monsters (or at least not that specific kind of monster). Instead, they simply overlooked the evidence in front of them, or more likely decided it wasn’t important enough to get in the way of the platform’s growth and engagement goals.

Whenever something like this happens — not just with Facebook, but plenty of other tech companies — the response has become a kind of ritualized theater performance, a stylized exercise of going through the motions without any real outcome or change. In Meta’s case, it involves Mark Zuckerberg or some other functionary from Facebook or Instagram commenting in the press about something hateful or dangerous that its platform enabled, and then in some cases appearing before Congress, shamefaced and sometimes truculent about the said wrongdoing. Zuckerberg or his stand-in will say that they are sorry, and that they had no idea that (insert hateful or dangerous conduct here) was being enabled by the platform. At some point, months or even years later, it will be revealed that Facebook or Instagram knew exactly what was happening and chose not to do anything about it, or at least nothing substantive anyway.

One of the examples of this that I am the most familiar with was when former Facebook staffer Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company’s behavior involving young and mostly female users of Instagram, in 2021. According to the thousands of pages of internal documents that Haugen took with her when she left the company — which were shared with the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, as well as with members of Congress — Meta senior executives knew from their internal research that Instagram was increasingly linked to emotional distress and body-image issues among young women. As Haugen described in an interview with me at the Mesh conference in 2023, she and a number of other staffers worked on ways of trying to reduce or even eliminate this problem, but time and again their work was ignored — because doing so might decrease engagement or interfere with Meta’s growth and revenue targets. So did Meta know? Yes. Did they care? No. Or, at least not enough to do anything about it.

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

After the 1913 death of Horace Vose, the traditional provider of the White House Thanksgiving turkey, numerous farmers sent animals to the president for Thanksgiving dinner. In 1926, a Mississippi supporter sent a racoon. Coolidge, who had never eaten raccoon and had no appetite to try it, kept the racoon as a pet and named it Rebecca. For Christmas, an embroidered collar was made for Rebecca, inscribed “White House Raccoon”. She enjoyed participating in the annual White House Easter egg roll. She was fed shrimp and persimmons, and eggs were a favorite. Rebecca was let loose in the White House and walked on a leash outdoors. At times, she could be mischievous and was known to unscrew lightbulbs, open cabinets, and unpot houseplants. She was known to nestle in Coolidge’s lap when he sat by the fireplace. (via Wikipedia)

The story behind Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin has a bunch of holes in it

Many know the story of Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Fleming left culture plates streaked with Staphylococcus on his lab bench while he went away. When he returned, he found that “a mould” had contaminated one of his plates, having floated in from an open window. He noticed that, within a “ring of death” around the mold, the bacteria had disappeared. Fleming immediately began investigating this strange new substance. He identified the mold as Penicillium rubrum and named the substance penicillin. A decade later, pharmacologist Howard Florey and biochemist Ernst Chain at Oxford would pick up where Fleming left off, developing penicillin into a life-saving drug and usher in the era of antibiotics. This is the kind of science story everyone likes. One of serendipity and accidental discovery; a chance observation that changed the world. But is it true? For decades, scientists and historians have puzzled over inconsistencies in Fleming’s story. (via Asimov Press)

Note: This is a version of my When The Going Gets Weird newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Meta was dismissed in its entirety on February 18th by Judge James Boasberg of the District Court for the District of Columbia. Just to recap for those who haven’t been following every bump and hurdle of this five-year case, the FTC first charged Meta with having an illegal monopoly and maintaining that monopoly via anti-competitive behavior in December of 2020 (I wrote about the lawsuit for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I was the chief digital writer at the time). The case was rejected the following year by the very same Judge Boasberg because he said the FTC had failed to prove that Meta had a monopoly over a distinct market (I wrote about that for CJR too). However, the judge gave the FTC a chance to re-file the case provided it came up with more evidence of a monopoly, so it tried to do so – and on Tuesday, the judge threw that case out just like he did the previous one, saying the evidence provided failed to prove the FTC’s case. From Politico:

Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp did not create an illegal social media monopoly, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, a decision that solidifies the future of the $1.5 trillion tech giant. Judge James Boasberg in Washington rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s claim that Facebook’s parent company monopolized the “personal social networking” market for connecting with friends and family. “As it has forecast in prior Opinions over the years, the FTC has an uphill battle to establish the contours of any separate PSN market and Defendant’s monopoly therein,” Boasberg wrote. “The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden: Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market.”

One of the key points in the FTC case – which was originally joined by a similar lawsuit filed on behalf of 46 states, although the latter was also thrown out by Boasberg in 2021 – was that because of its allegedly monopolistic position in the personal social-networking market, the company should not have been allowed to acquire either Instagram (which it bought in 2012 for $1 billion) or WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014 for $22 billion. According to the FTC, Instagram cemented Meta’s dominance over photo-related social networking, and WhatsApp entrenched its position in person-to-person text messaging – especially in non-US countries, since WhatsApp is free and when it was acquired many countries charged users for sending text messages. Meta, not surprisingly, pointed out that both acquisitions were approved by the Federal Trade Commission at the time they were done, but the FTC was unmoved. Here’s how the New York Times summarized the case when it was first launched in 2020:

Note: This is a version of my Torment Nexus newsletter, which I send out via Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. You can see other issues and sign up here.