Nothing new from me beyond the dish this week. I’ll write up big transactions when they happen, and I should have a board game review up next week, although the game I’m targeting I have yet to play, so we’ll see. EDIT: Hey, we got a trade last night, after I’d scheduled this post, so here’s my writeup of the Jonathan India-Brady Singer trade.
If you’re looking for me on social media, you’re most likely to find me on Bluesky and Threads. I’m winding things down on Twitter, just posting links there, and I locked the account due to the change in the blocking policy. You can also subscribe to my free email newsletter.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: This Esquire first-person longread on what it is like to be homeless in America in 2024 is beautifully told and especially important given what is to come. It should end up on the shortlist for a Pulitzer.
- And in a related story, Harvard magazine looks at the causes of our housing crisis, led by the lack of affordable housing (and of any will to build it) along with draconian zoning laws that pull the ladder up behind existing homeowners.
- Florida State Rep. Rick Roth (R) is a farmer turned politician who long fought attempts to crack down on immigration, but turned into an anti-immigrant hawk in 2023 – hurting his constituents but not him. Funny how that works!
- An Israeli student who shared four photos of the country’s attack on Gaza right after the Hamas attacks of October of 2023 found herself in prison for violating the country’s laws on “incitement” and her prospects for a career all but ruined.
- Trump’s new candidate for Attorney General is Pam Bondi, to whom his foundation donated $25,000 while she was investigating the foundation as Florida AG. She then closed the investigation. Is that a bribe? Do we want an Attorney General who may have taken a bribe, and changed her actions as a result of it?
- A police chief in West Virginia raped a teenager and then paid her $100 to cover it up, according to this investigative piece from the Washington Post.
- At least seven Oklahoma school districts refused to show the state’s school superintendent Ryan Walters’ video promoting his Christian nationalist, pro-Trump agent to students, as he attempted to mandate. Walters spent millions of dollars on “Trump Bibles,” paying twenty times the cost for a regular Bible just to curry favor.
- Our political system is horribly broken – and, more importantly, voters believe it is. Democrats have to change their entire strategy to reflect this.
- Carole Cadwalladr of the Guardian offers 20 tips for surviving the coming “post-truth” world and potential autocracy.
- The eXodus: The Guardian will no longer post on X. This month, the site has lost users at the highest clip since Elon Musk took the site over. Truthdig makes the case for abandoning the site. Writer John Paul Brammer did the same. Meanwhile, Bluesky is exploding; my follower count has more than tripled in two weeks, and as a result I’m much more active there than anywhere else. Brian Kirby, a longtime marketing professional with a focus on children’s literature, argues that X is already dead, as a huge number of its accounts are inactive, so publishers should leave it.
- Startup Character.AI is hosting chatbots that groom users who indicate that they’re underage. I’m about as far from a Luddite as you can get, but the public applications of AI so far all suck. And they use too much energy.
- Roxane Gay writes, “Enough.”
- Some mainstream media outlets, including the usually reliable NPR, have already begun sanewashing the anti-vaccine loon RFK Jr, writes Benjamin Mazer in the Atlantic, who also says we should call him what he is – a crank.
- The New Republic’s Melody Schreiber writes that we can expect fewer vaccines and more E. Coli outbreaks under a Trump/RFK Jr administration – and that was before COVID denier Jay Bhattacharya’s name came up as a possible head of the NIH.
- Meanwhile, influenza H5N1, commonly known as bird flu, may have mutated to become more transmissible to humans. Great timing.
- Children who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 are much more likely to develop the life-threatening reaction MIS-C after infection, according to a new study.
- ProPublica reported on two maternal deaths that resulted from Georgia’s draconian abortion ban, using documents obtained from a state committee on maternal mortality. The state then fired the entire committee.
- Oliver Darcy interviewed The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about the Big Tech oligarchs who support and enable Trump.
- North Carolina state Sen. Danny Britt (R) responded to a constituent who raised concerns about the state’s abortion ban by telling her to “move to China” or Russia or Venezuela. As of Wednesday, I haven’t seen any apology or restorative action from Britt or his office.
- GQ interviewed Richard Gadd on what life has been like since Reindeer Baby burst on the scene and swept the Emmys.
- The Seattle Times reports on the effort by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe to restore the Elwha River by building logjams to help undo over a century of damage wrought by humans.
- Ken White, aka Popehat, wrote about one of his own cases, defeating what he called “the most purely evil and abusive SLAPP suit” he has ever seen. A 21-year-old Stanford student named King Vanga was charged with gross vehicular manslaughter for a car accident that killed two people. He then sued the family members of the deceased for defamation because they contacted the school with the details of the criminal case. Really.
- Board game news: Fort Circle Games, publishers of Votes for Women and The Shores of Tripoli, has a new Kickstarter up for the SCOTUS-themed game First Monday in October.
- Board game designer Kory Heath, whose games include Zendo, Blockers, and this year’s hit game The Gang, took his own life this week at age 54. Boardgamegeek has a memoriam to Heath and links to other tributes.
- I’ve mentioned the death of board game evangelist Amber Cook a few times now. She left behind a 6-year-old son, and there are several fundraising efforts to try to help provide for his future, including a huge bundle of RPGs available for just $25, over 90% of their aggregate list prices.
Filterworld.
In his new book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, journalist Kyle Chayka details the myriad ways in which we are thrust towards homogeneity in music, television, movies, books, and even architecture and travel because, in his view, of the tyranny of the algorithm. The book is more of a polemic than a work of research, filled with personal anecdotes and quotes from philosophers as well as observers of culture, and while Chayka is somewhat correct in that a small number of companies are now determining what people watch, listen to, and read, that’s always been true – it’s just happening now by algorithm when technology was supposed to democratize access to culture.
Chayka’s premise is sound on its surface: Major tech companies now depend on maintaining your attention to hold or increase revenues, and they do that via algorithm. Netflix’s algorithm keeps recommending movies and shows it believes you’ll watch – not that you will like, but that you will watch, or at least not turn off – thus keeping you as a customer. Spotify’s auto-generated playlists largely serve you artists and songs that are similar to ones you’ve already liked, or at least have already listened to, as I’ve learned recently because I listened to one song by the rapper Werdperfect that a friend sent me and now Spotify puts Werdperfect on every god damned playlist it makes for me. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and their ilk all use algorithms to show you what will keep you engaged, not what you asked to see via your following list. Amazon’s recommendations are more straightforward, giving you products its algorithm thinks you’ll buy based on other things you’ve bought.
Chayka goes one further, though, arguing that algorithmic tyranny extends into meatspace, using it to explain the ubiquity of Brooklyn-style coffee shops, with sparse décor, subway tiles, exposed wood, and industrial lighting. He uses it to explain homogeneity in Airbnb listings, arguing that property owners must determine what the algorithm wants and optimize their spaces to maximize their earnings. He is ultimately arguing that we will all look the same, sound the same, wear the same clothes, live in the same spaces, drink the same expensive lattes, and so on, because of the algorithms.
To this I say: No shit. It’s called capitalism, and the algorithm itself is not the disease, but a symptom.
Businesses exist to make money, and in a competitive marketplace, that’s generally a good thing – it drives innovation and forces individual companies to respond to customer demand or lose market share to competitors. These market forces led to the advent of mass production over a century ago, a process that depended on relatively uniform tastes across a broad spectrum of consumers, because mass-producing anything economically depends on that uniformity. You can’t mass-produce custom clothes, by definition. Companies that have invested heavily in capital to mass produce their widgets will then work to further expand their customer base by encouraging homogeneity in tastes – thus the push for certain fashions to be “in” this year (as they were twenty years prior), or the marketing put behind specific books or songs or movies to try to gain mass adoption. Coffee shops adopt similar looks because customers like that familiarity, for the same reason that McDonald’s became a global giant – you walk into any McDonald’s in the world and you by and large know what to expect, from how it looks to what’s on the menu. This isn’t new. In fact, the idea of the algorithm isn’t even new; it is the technology that is new, as companies can implement their algorithms at a speed and scale that was unthinkable two decades earlier.
Furthermore, we are living in a time of limited competition, closer to what our forefathers faced in the trust era than what our parents faced in the 1980s. There is no comparably-sized competitor to Amazon. Spotify dominates music streaming. Each social media entity I listed earlier has no direct competition; they compete with each other, but each serves a different need or desire from consumers. The decline of U.S. antitrust enforcement since the Reagan era has exacerbated the problem. Fewer producers will indeed produce less variety in products.
However, the same technology that Chayka decries throughout Filterworld has flattened more than culture – it has flattened the hierarchy that led to homogeneity in culture from the 1950s through the 1990s. Music was forced, kicking and screaming, to give up its bundling practice, where you could purchase only a few individual songs but otherwise had to purchase entire albums to hear specific titles, by Napster and other file-sharing software products. Now, through streaming services, not only can any artist bypass the traditional record-label gatekeepers, but would-be “curators” can find, identify, and recommend these artists and their songs, the way that only DJs at truly independent radio stations could do in earlier eras. (And yes, I hope that I am one of those curators. My monthly playlists are the product of endless exploration on my own, with a little help from the Spotify algorithm on the Release Radar playlists, but mostly just me messing around and looking for new music.) Goodreads is a hot mess, owned by Amazon and boosting the Colleen Hoovers of the world, but it’s also really easy to find people who read a lot of books and can recommend the ones they like. (Cough.) Movies, food, travel, television, and so on are all now easier to consume, and if you are overwhelmed by the number and variety of choices, it’s easier to find people who can guide you through it. I try to be that type of guide for you when it comes to music and books and board games, and to some extent to restaurants. When it comes to television, I read Alan Sepinwall. When it comes to movies, I listen to Will Leitch & Tim Grierson, and I read Christy Lemire, and I bother Chris Crawford. I also just talk to my friends and see what they like. I have book friends, movie friends, game friends, coffee friends, rum friends, and so on. The algorithms, and the companies that deploy them, don’t decide for me because I made the very easy choice to decide for myself.
So I didn’t really buy Chayka’s conclusions in Filterworld, even though I thought the premise was sound and deserved this sort of exploration. I also found the writing in the book to be dull, unfortunately, with the sort of dry quality of academic writing without the sort of rigor that you might see in a research paper. I could have lived with that if he’d sold me better on his arguments, but he gives too little attention to points that might truly matter, such as privacy regulations in the E.U. and the lack thereof in the U.S., and too much weight to algorithms that will only affect your life if you let them.
Next up: Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop.