I couldn’t tell you the first time I read this seminal piece from James Fallows, but it’s one I return to occasionally, especially during election years. As someone who, like Fallows, is generally sympathetic towards the media, it is as sharp a diagnostic of how to do better things as it was nearly 25 years ago.

Really excellent insight from Josh Marshall about why tech platforms are so difficult to control. The analogy to the negative externalities generated by nuclear (and fossil fuel) power is really apt. I’ve been trying to articulate a core argument against the current generation of what we call tech and it largely comes down to a refusal to be responsible for the work they do. This is a succinct and well put version of that.

Update: Marshall followed up with a full post on Talking Points Memo that includes a great bit at the end about why new management wouldn’t fix this.

Lotta good stuff here, starting with “the Library of Congress Labs”.

They used a bit of machine learning to make the images — drawings, maps, charts, photographs — from over 150 years of newspapers searchable.

When Nigeria shifted trials to be held virtually, this was somehow the case they started with.

In theory, court proceedings over the internet should be more open and fair. The reality of access to justice will, of course, be much more complex.

Almost all of these are uniformly terrible an unusable and I miss them tremendously. See also the gallery of Audion faces and accompanying podcast episode.

Improv for InVision. Nifty!

Microsoft has dropped their bid to acquire the social media company of the moment and now it looks like Oracle will figure out a deal where they provide data services for U.S.-based distribution. It’s unclear what happens to the rest, and it seems like control of the product and algorithm are likely to remain with Bytedance, in China. There are, at least, a few good tweets.

Beyond the day-by-day news, two things strike me about where this is landing. The first is there are a bunch of takes that seem to imply that Oracle “won” this deal due to its coziness with the Trump administration. It’s clear there’s a quid-pro-quo happening here, but I’m not sure it’s as simple as Larry Ellison throwing a fundraiser so the government threw the deal their way. I’m sure Oracle is happy to provide cloud services for a hot startup, but there are plenty of reasons this deal makes no sense. What seems just as likely is Oracle is the one providing cover for Trump, who can then reassert himself as a very stable business genius, and in exchange Oracle gets a leg up on some lucrative government contracts.

What’s most distressing about that, beyond the clear oligarchical corruption, is in order to go through all this, Ellison and the top execs at Oracle must think there’s a good chance Trump wins re-election. I don’t think Ellison is any kind of a delphic sage (you’re welcome for avoiding the obvious pun here), but he is a smart fella with plenty of inside access. Let’s hope he’s wrong about which way the wind is blowing and this entire affair becomes a textbook example of why doing business with autocrats is thoroughly anti-American.

The other thing about this whole catastrophe is just how perfectly emblematic it is of everything that’s wrong with not just Trump’s genuinely terrible approach to government but also his entire worldview. I tend to agree there is a good reason to be skeptical of TikTok from a national security perspective based solely on the fact that it’s parent company is a de-facto part of the Chinese Communist Party¹. Everything about else about this, though, truly sucks, as only it could when Trump is involved. But for Trump, that’s exactly the point — all of the drama, the needless posturing, the grossly transparent transactional hectoring between economic superpowers and trillion-dollar companies — it’s all good for Trump as long as he gets to be in the middle of it. What a disgrace.

Among the more feverish (though increasingly mainstream) wings of conservative true believers, there has been a years-long, inchoate conspiracy theory that posits, among many other things, a group of global elites are at the center of a child trafficking ring. Pizzagate and QAnon are manifestations of this paranoid worldview, with QAnon metastasizing into a “collective delusion” (or even more terrifyingly a Nazi cult) particularly among broad swaths of Trump voters, administration officials, and members of congress. I doubt that Trump himself has thought very deeply about it, beyond what fragments pass through his fetid view during Fox News binge-fests or his ego-scrolls through twitter desperate to find something to retweet, but that hasn’t stopped the president from abusing his power to fuel our own Reichstag flames.

I mention this in the context of this Guardian piece because one of the many Trumpian psychoses we’ll spend years trying to recover from is projection and this story typifies it. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Trump supporters have convinced themselves that Hillary Clinton and George Soros are a part of some global child trafficking scheme when Trump himself spent decades at the center of a legalized system that saw girls as young as fourteen abused by rich and powerful men. At the very least, he profited from the pageants and agencies that facilitated obviously abusive behavior, he strolled through backstages where teenage girls where getting dressed, and he has been credibly accused of sexual assault by no fewer twenty five women, many of the assaults occurring during the time when he was running these shows.

None of these obvious facts matter to the cult of personality that will once again rise up to cast their vote for this man to lead the country because they have settled on their own truth. When I think through how we might begin to rebuild from the disaster of Trump’s illegitimate reign, this is the fact that stops me cold. Trump will some day no longer hold official office, though I’m certain that even when he does leave the White House he’ll refuse to abide by the unspoken rules of past presidents and will rally his supporters in a way that he’ll be able to maximally profit from no matter the damage it does to the country. Even if the Republican party continues its devotion to Trumpism, many of the policies he championed will be reversed and we will move forward with some progress.

Conspiracy theories have, of course, long preceded Trump and the right wing of American politics has suffered a paranoid style for generations. Every new form of mass media has further amplified an atavistic human need to make sense of the world and protect our own egos — QAnon is the natural outgrowth of information age reach being fueled by platforms like Facebook taking absolutely zero responsibility for what they’ve built. History suggests after this dark period, our understanding will adjust and we will shift and incorporate the new media reality; the continued existence and influence of Fox News reminds us the shift will not always be towards progress. The collective delusion is here to stay.