Links that interest me and maybe you
While we were staying at Otter Lake near Smith’s Falls, I went out one night for a paddle and came across a mother loon sitting on a nest, and the next morning when I went out to take a look, there were mom and dad paddling along with the wee loon — he started out riding on her back, but then he set off on his own.
Ryan Broderick writes in his newsletter Garbage Day about an NFT event in New York City and what it says about the future of crypto
I’ve read about a bunch of different use cases for NFTs — party passes, hotel reservations, concert tickets, video game earnables — and in every instance the only thing an NFT version of that specific product would accomplish is a wildly unstable and inflationary secondary market. The guys at NFT NYC this week basically want a world run that’s run entirely on eBay.
They think that they can all become Jordan Belfort by adding unregulated bidding wars to everything we buy online. They see themselves as savvy enough investors that in a world of constant digital price gouging that they could still come out on top. And they see NFTs as a literal ticket to an exclusive club of culture and wealth.
The co-founder of Kickstarter writes about how paying too much attention to the scammy aspects of crypto risks overlooking the potential benefits of the blockchain
Few words are as divisive as “crypto.” Say it and half the room walks away out of principle, a smaller group hisses in disgust, and a last group leans in, some closer than feels comfortable if you’re honest. Hearing someone explain crypto can feel like being trapped in a bewildering dream with no way out.
The politics associated with it are no simpler: It’s simultaneously hyper-capitalist, with an extreme focus on market prices, and quasi-socialist, offering communities of people programmatic distribution of ownership and voting power.
Crypto is seen as a scam machine. Any Very Online person is routinely exposed to the latest crypto duping, with its freshest scams gleefully aggregated in Web3 Is Going Great, each incident dumber than the last. Even the stuff that isn’t a scam seems tasteless at best, and idiotic to most people. Few look at a Bored Ape and see six figures of value. They see six degrees of delusion.Blindly dismissing any project that touches a blockchain because it shares the same plumbing as crypto is like missing the forest for the logging industry. So long as everything that touches a public ledger is vilified as a scam and part of some dystopian future, the number of responsible people and teams who feel inspired to thoughtfully explore projects that see beyond the constraints of our Web2 systems will be limited.
To change that, we need a better way to talk about this space. We need to distinguish between crypto as a specific set of experiences and products, and the wider possibilities that can and will emerge from shared public ledgers. With time and maturation, different categories of products and use-cases can emerge.
Helena Fitzgerald writes in her newsletter Griefbacon about how summer is great but it also objectively sucks in a number of ways:
Everyone is so excited about summer and everything is so obligated. It’s so much harder to have fun at a party that everyone aggressively insists is the best party ever than at one nobody cares about. Summer always has to be the best party; summer has main character syndrome. Summer thinks every story is about summer, and is always changing the subject back to itself.
Summer is a try-hard, showing up to a wedding in a bikini, getting too drunk and getting you kicked out of your favorite local bar. Summer is the seasonal version of trying to have a conversation with someone who’s on coke, and it’s the feeling of being so tired that you can’t actually fall asleep. It’s obvious and sweaty and too fast and too slow at once, and everybody wants you to love it and be happy about it, which makes everything bad about it worse.
From an interview with Tyler Cowen:
The thing about Twitter — is Twitter an engine or a camera? This prevailing view is that . . . I say social media broadly, but Twitter specifically because it’s where the elites are — the intellectual elites, the social elites. The prevailing wisdom on Twitter is that it’s primarily an engine. It’s changing behavior for better or worse. I actually tend to think it’s at least as much a camera. It’s like a giant X-ray machine.
via this interview
Half a century ago, the British government forcibly removed 2,000 people from a remote string of islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean. They’ve never stopped struggling to return. The expulsions were part of an international bargain, though not one that the 2,000 people of Chagos had any say in. The short version: For many years, the archipelago was a faraway administrative appendage of the British colony of Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa.
When Mauritius sought independence, in the mid-1960s, Britain decided to keep Chagos for itself. It did so primarily to sequester one of the atolls, Diego Garcia, for use by the United States—part of a global American ambition, at the height of the Cold War, to establish military outposts in strategic places. Chagos itself was nowhere, but it was equidistant from everywhere: Draw a long line from Madagascar to Indonesia, and another from India to Antarctica, and stick a pin in the blue at the intersection.The catch for Britain was that under international law, the archipelago could be separated from Mauritius only if it had no “permanent population.” — via The Atlantic
This is a poem called “Don’t Hesitate,” by Mary Oliver
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb
The following is an excerpt from a piece of literary fiction by Jess Zimmerman in Catapult magazine
This final exam will count for 40 percent of your course grade. In the space below, please provide an example of each listed cognitive bias.
Reactance
When I thought you didn’t want me, I would have done anything.
Attentional bias
Everyone on the department website has an official headshot, except you. (I looked. Of course I looked.) Instead you have a snapshot taken near dusk, near winter, your jacket zipped to your jaw. The buttery light from a streetlamp pours molten down your face; you are lifting your chin against a sudden wind that blows your hair back. Who took this picture? You aren’t looking at her. You’re looking off to the left.
A friend came to visit us at the lake recently, and they wanted to go and see a nearby “ghost town” called Balaclava. I had never heard of it before, but it turned out to be just a short drive from our place. So we headed off to Scotch Bush road near Dacre and there it was — not technically a ghost town, I don’t think, since there are still people living there. But it does have a great old abandoned lumber mill that dates back to the 1850s or so (although much of it was apparently destroyed by fire and rebuilt in the 1930s).
Behind the lumber mill is a tall, rusted tower that sits on a foundation of river rocks, with the remains of a wooden chute leading to the mill. This was apparently the first sawdust furnace in Ontario, and it was reportedly built because the owner of a grist mill down the river from the Balaclava mill sued the owner in 1911, claiming the sawdust being dumped into the river was fouling up his grist works. According to some reports, this was also the first environmental lawsuit in Ontario.
Continue reading “The ghost towns of Balaclava and Newfoundout”
Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
On June 9, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell—two Wall Street Journal reporters who cover the major digital platforms—reported that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, was “re-examining its commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as being familiar with Facebook’s plans. The potential loss of those payments, the Journal reporters wrote, was “prompting some news organizations to prepare for a potential revenue shortfall of tens of millions of dollars.” The Journal story echoed a report published in May by The Information, a subscription-only site that covers technology; in that piece, reporters Sylvia Varnham O’Regan and Jessica Toonkel said Meta was “considering reducing the money it gives news organizations as it reevaluates the partnerships it struck over the past few years,” and that this reevaluation was part of a rethinking of “the value of including news in its flagship Facebook app.”
Meta wouldn’t comment to either the Journal or The Information, and a spokesperson told CJR the company “doesn’t comment on speculation.” But the loss of payments from Meta could have a noticeable impact for some outlets. According to the Journal report, for the past two years—since the original payment deals were announced in 2019— Meta has paid the Washington Post more than $15 million per year, the New York Times over $20 million per year, and the Journal more than $10 million per year (the payments to the Journal are part of a broader deal with Dow Jones, the newspaper’s parent, which is said to be worth more than $20 million per year). The deals, which are expected to expire this year, were part of a broader system of payments Meta made to a number of news outlets, including Bloomberg, ABC News, USA Today, Business Insider, and the right-wing news site Breitbart News. Smaller deals were typically for $3 million or less, the Journal said.
The payments were announced as part of the launch of the “News tab,” a dedicated section of the Facebook app where readers can find news from the outlets that partnered with Meta (higher payments were made to those with paywalls, according to a number of reports). The launch was a high-profile affair, including a one-on-one interview between Robert Thomson, CEO of News Corp.—parent company of Dow Jones and the Journal—and Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta. Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, wrote for CJR that the meeting was like “a Camp David for peace between the most truculent old media empire and one of its most noxious disruptors,” and wondered how much it had cost for News Corp. to forget about its long-standing opposition to Facebook’s media strategy. The event was “a publicity coup for Facebook; it tamed the biggest beast in the journalism jungle,” Bell wrote.
Bell is not the only media industry observer to note that Facebook’s payments to media outlets have felt more like a marketing ploy than a sign of a deep and abiding commitment to journalism. “The correct way to view Google and Facebook’s actions, I believe, is through the lens of PR,” wrote Josh Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab, a year or so after the launch of the News tab, when Google announced something very similar. “The troubles of the news business are a major PR problem for these companies, who — however fair they or anyone else thinks it is — get blamed for its ills.” The move to pay media companies did seem like a rather dramatic shift in Facebook’s viewpoint: a little over a year before the launch of the News tab, Zuckerberg seemed to be skeptical that paying the media for content was something worth doing. “I’m not sure that makes sense,” he told Vox, during an interview in 2018, after being asked about a proposal from Rupert Murdoch that the social network should pay “carriage fees” for news content.
As Benton and others have noted, the decision to pay publishers—after years of refusing to do so, despite repeated complaints—came amid rising pressure, from legislators in multiple jurisdictions, aimed at getting Google and Facebook to compensate the media industry for the harms allegedly done to it by the digital platforms’ control of online advertising. That kind of pressure has been a fairly constant drumbeat in the industry for the past 15 years or so, after publishers in Spain, France, and Germany started pushing for legislation that would compel Google to pay for reusing content from news sites. A desire to quell this kind of legislation was part of why Google launched what became its Google News Initiative, in which it committed to pay publishers $300 million for training, internships, and other partnership arrangements. Facebook made similar kinds of commitments with its Facebook Journalism Project, which launched in 2017.
The pressure on Google and Facebook to pay publishers ramped up with the passing of legislation in Australia in 2021, which forced platforms to sign licensing deals with media outlets or face arbitration. Both companies eventually signed a number of deals with publishers (although there was criticism that smaller outlets were left out), and other countries such as Canada and the UK are expected to pass similar laws soon. According to the Journal, Zuckerberg has been “disappointed” by these regulatory efforts, which have reportedly “damped [his] enthusiasm for making news a bigger part of Facebook’s offerings.” And Meta has apparently noticed that “fewer people have been clicking on links to news articles since President Donald Trump left office,” according to The Information. The company also appears to be much more focused on promoting short-form video—as a way of competing with TikTok, the popular video-sharing platform—than appeasing publishers, which could leave even large media players out in the cold.
Here’s more on Facebook:
Other notable stories: