Nothing from me this week at the Athletic, although I should have at least two pieces going up in the next seven days.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the board game Little Alchemists, a streamlined version of the heavy game Alchemists that also works as a light legacy game, building you up over seven modules to a full midweight deduction game that you could play with the family.
I’ve been much more regular with my free email newsletter since taking some PTO in August, which I don’t think is a coincidence as it gave me some mental downtime after the crush of the draft and the trade deadline.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: The Guardian has the unbelievable story of how a UK’s Serious Fraud Office investigation into a global mining company called ENRC might lead to British taxpayers paying millions to Russian oligarchs.
- The New York Times has finally turned the same scrutiny it gave President Biden on current candidate Trump: Trump’s rambling, incoherent, forgetful speeches may be a sign of age-related cognitive decline.
- Why are so many evangelical Christians obsessed with beating their kids? You can call it “corporal punishment,” but that is child abuse.
- America Last? In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, then-President Trump sent scarce COVID tests to Vladimir Putin – and the two still appear to talk regularly even with Trump nearly four years out of office. How any so-called “patriot” can support this man is beyond me.
- Meanwhile, the head of MI5 says that Russia’s intelligence agency is trying to create sustained mayhem on Britain’s streets through arson, sabotage, and more.
- At least some of the Sri Lankan migrants who have been held in deplorable conditions for years on Diego Garcia will be allowed to resettle in Romania and potentially then in the UK.
- I’ve bought and read many sci-fi and fantasy novels under the Del Rey imprint, but until this week I didn’t know it was founded by Judy-Lynn Del Rey, a woman with dwarfism who became one of the most influential publishers or editors in the genre’s history.
- The online misinformation machine is just getting worse and worse, with threats now against FEMA workers and meteorologists from people who fall for fake info and images online.
- A Minneapolis elementary school student has measles. Vaccine mandates are under attack everywhere, but the outcome is going to be dead and disabled children.
- Israel attacked a shelter for displaced families in Gaza, killing at least 28. They claimed, as usual, that there were Hamas fighters there.
- UN investigators have accused Israel of deliberately targeting medical personnel and facilities in Gaza.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has threatened to prosecute stations for running ads supporting a pro-reproductive rights ballot question, earning a rebuke from the FCC. I thought this was the party of “free speech.”
- Another self-proclaimed “free speech” absolutist, Elon Musk has censored any mention on Twitter of the RNC’s dossier on JD Vance, and even banned independent journalist Ken Klippenstein for publishing it. Musk has gone full white nationalist in his own tweets and the linked story says he may be pumping up to half a billion dollars into the Trump campaign.
- Delaware is about to elect Sarah McBride as its at-large Representative, making her the first openly trans member of Congress. She’ll have to serve alongside people who question her right to live as a trans person, or to have basic human rights others take for granted. I’ve met State Senator McBride twice and have read her book, Tomorrow Will Be Different, which also has the story of how she became a widow at 2014 when her husband, Andrew Cray, died of cancer.
- One of my tweets appeared in this BuzzFeed roundup of jokes and criticism of Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA)’s comments on tampons and hurricane relief. The UN has ruled that access to sanitary products is a fundamental human right.
- A conservative think tank has said that Trump’s economic proposals would crash the U.S. economy – and Michael Hiltzik says they’re being kind.
- Trump invoked Nazi beliefs on eugenics when he talked about immigrants having bad genes in an especially unhinged talk on conservative radio this week. That Times article doesn’t get at the madness; this LA Times op ed calls him out more forcefully.
- Board game news: The Gamefound campaign for StarDriven: Gateway is fully funded and live for another two weeks; I know the publisher very well, but I also backed this game myself.
- The Kickstarter for Snow Planner appears to be a second printing along with an expansion of a midweight game that came out earlier this year from Japanese publisher 14games.
- I know nothing of this publisher, but the theme of Cerro Gordo Silver Mine, now up on Kickstarter, looks interesting and novel.
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.