Just a fantastic essay by Emily Segal & Martti Kalliala, written back in March at the start of the pandemic, that brilliantly captures so much of the era roughly bookended by the financial crisis and, well, now. The experience economy, an ultimate endpoint in globalized capital and internet-flattened culture that generated a ton of wealth but didn’t really build anything to last, is dissolving.

Framing it as a lost generation seems dire, but it’s clear the effects of this year (and who knows how much more beyond) are going to be real and lasting. The inequality that already exists between rich and poor kids is only going to widen.

It remains deeply shameful that as a country we prioritized opening restaurants and bars and nail salons and barber shops over schools.

Now the hard work can begin.

Earlier this year, I saw some polling that Trump had actually seen a small but measurable increase in support from Latino voters. This struck me as not only some kind of fantasy but actually impossible, or maybe some kind of error. The election is days away and this increased support appears to have endured and it’s likely more Latino voters will cast a vote for Trump in 2020 than did in 2016. Understanding that dynamic is going to be vital for Democrats going forward.

Ed Yong, in The Atlantic:

As November nears, the coronavirus is surging again, with cases rising to record-breaking heights for the third time. To control the pandemic, changes are necessary, but Trump has proved that he does not learn from his mistakes—perhaps the most costly of his failings. If he is reelected, he will continue on the same path, and so will the coronavirus. More Americans will be sickened, disabled, and killed. Donald Trump is unchanging; the election offers an opportunity for the country to change instead.

We often have spirited conversations about the issues of the day at dinner. A few weeks ago, our son (age 6) asked a question that still continues to wreck me in small and large ways: “Does Donald Trump know he’s doing these bad things?”

I have no idea what Donald Trump knows or thinks but one thing has been crystal clear since even before he ran for president: the man is wholly incurious, incapable of empathy, and ossified to the core. It is simply who he is. He doesn’t learn from his mistakes because he’s incapable of doing so. The cost of that inability is borne by the world.

Margaret Sullivan digs in on the wide discrepancy between actual news, news from left leaning sources, and blatant right wing agitprop. No surprise, conservative news outlets are thriving on Facebook due to a combination of working the refs, conspiracy theory peddling, and cultivating relationships with Facebook’s leadership, starting with Zuckerberg. There’s a reason the vast majority of the top stories posted to Facebook are from right wing agitators with zero news value.

I personally never bought into the idea that Zuckerberg or the Newsfeed were politically neutral — algorithms are reflections of the people who build them — but there was a time that Facebook could at least argue they were attempting to remain disengaged from the broader political context of the content they were promoting. After 2016, Facebook had an opportunity to finally take some responsibility for their platform. Instead, they did the easy thing and leaned into the world that Trump had exploited. The result is QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and increased prominence for griefer trolls like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.

Update: Brian Feldman, writing over at Motherboard, notes that right-wing conspiracy peddling aligns almost perfectly with Facebook’s incentives.

What does it say about Facebook that common-sense policies—intended to ensure the safety and dignity of all of the site’s users—would, according to its own stress tests, disproportionately impact conservative publishers? If politically-neutral measures intended to reduce harm on Facebook impact right-wing publishers and users more than left-wing ones, is that Facebook’s fault? Or does it point to an overarching alignment between Facebook’s incentives and the style and structure of right-wing media?

Facebook won’t fix the problem of right-wing media on its platform because that is the platform.

BeOS was such a curious thing — a ground-up, brand new operating system optimized for “multimedia” and the internet, launched in the mid 90’s by some former Apple folks. I bought a boxed copy at the university book store when I was an undergraduate and booted into it alongside Windows (NT!!) and Red Hat Linux (the late 90s were wild kids). I genuinely loved BeOS — it was fast and unique and had a decent browser but no other real software to speak of, which was a real challenge in the time before everything could be accomplished with a browser.

Without an ecosystem of third-party software it couldn’t find an edge between Windows and the then-actually-beleaguered Mac. BeOS promised a “clean slate” that was developer friendly but it was just foreign enough, not to mention a platform with no real user base, that it wouldn’t gain enough traction to sustain. And even though it had a POSIX compatible shell, it wasn’t actually Unix underneath, so it didn’t fit with the emerging Linux ecosystem either (Unix applications were able to be ported over, but it wasn’t just a simple recompile). After Apple purchased Next instead of Be to replace the Classic OS, the IP bounced around and some of the tech ended up in a few internet and media appliances that are still in use today. The open source Haiku project has re-implemented and expanded on the core BeOS functionality.

I have no idea if this is something they’ve been publishing since 2016 but it’s an incredible … “resource” doesn’t feel like quite the right phrasing, maybe “accounting” of just how terrible Trump has been as political figure. The categories alone are damning — “Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, and Bullying” and “White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia” being the most egregious, though “Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice” and “Trump Family Business Dealings” will be just as important to prosecute.

Ryan Avent is a smart fella (you should sign up for his newsletter) who writes about economics, politics, culture, etc. for The Economist. This thread (yes, the irony that it’s on Twitter not a blog is not lost on me) outlines a lot of why I wanted to start blogging again.

I don’t have any kind of formal rubric in mind or anything, but I’m trying to post less on the platforms and take the space that blogging allows. Avent does a great job of covering some of the historical particulars as well as a bit of analysis.

One piece I think he’s missed is that blogging was also dying as mobile was ascendent, and there was never a great mobile substitute. Because mobile demands better user experiences than the web at that time was accommodating, it left a big opening for Twitter and Facebook.

It’s still kind of true today that there’s not a great way to blog on the most personal computer we own. The golden age of newsletters might be approaching that, but they feel too siloed whereas blogging is open but still owned by the writer. I’ve strung together a process to make this machine work, but it’s in no way meant for civilians. Strikes me as an opportunity.

I love the MTA and I love nerdy web things and I love maps, so of course I’m intrigued by this new real-time version. It’s … ok. Pretty slow and the trains themselves are hard to find on the actual map. It also seems this is veering a little too hard on the wrong side of CivTech — I tend to prefer robust and well supported APIs from government that anyone can build on top of.

And now, a digression.

The Times article quotes Sarah Meyer, and lists her job title as “chief customer officer at New York City Transit”. It’s always bugged me, both as a resident and even when I just came to town to visit, that the MTA refers to riders as “customers”. It’s a tiny thing, but that one word says so much about how we treat essential municipal services in even progressive places like NYC.

The MTA is not a business and I am not a customer. I’m a citizen. I’m a rider. I’m a person. By deciding to adopt this language of commerce for the services they provide, the MTA (and it’s not just the MTA) is playing into the kind of anti-government rhetoric that ultimately makes it harder for them to do their jobs. And it would be pretty easy for them to simply not do that.