I'm following with somewhat vague interest the various legal battles Apple is currently involved in. Reading their response to the EU's DMA makes me sad. Not for the company itself. I honestly could not care less about the company. Nor for the people who run that company. I'm sad because the pursuit of endless growth is such a mind cancer. It consumes and distracts everyone. If you're an artisan, creating amazing objects is your end goal. Ideally, you want those objects to last forever. And if they don't, you want to do such an amazing job that once something is broken beyond repair, people will come to you again and ask you to make something new, rather than buying from someone else.
Apple makes amazing products. I bought the laptop I'm typing this 9 years ago. It still works fine. Sure, it's slow compared to my new machine but I can use it to do calls and write blog posts. And that's great. I love it. I was happy to give Apple my money back in 2015. But you know who's not happy? Apple. Apple is not happy that I bought a laptop in 2015 that was so good that it is still working fine 9 years later. And it's also not happy that I bought a phone more than 4 years ago that still does all the things I need it to do. Because they need to make money. More money. There's no end state here. "More" has no end state. At some point, a company like Apple will inevitably run out of people willing to buy their stuff. Because it's unreasonable to expect people to upgrade phones, laptops, screens, watches, tablets, virtual-ski-goggles every damn year. And so what do they do? They move into services. Music, movies, games, fitness, storage. You name it. But those also can't grow forever. Because guess what? There are other companies out there doing the same.
But they can't stop. They're a public company. If they're not growing enough it means they're failing. Forget that they make amazing products that can last decades with no issues. Forget that they're an almost 3-fucking-trillions dollar company. If they're not growing enough, stock goes down and that's no good. Because remember, there's no finish line here. They can't just be happy with their size. They can't be happy with the idea of employing thousands of smart people and creating amazing products. No, they have to keep growing. And sooner or later, this mind cancer becomes malignant.
Don't get me wrong, this is not just an Apple issue. It's an issue with any big company. It's an issue with everyone who can't accept that they reached their end state.
Cory Doctorow famously coined the enshittification term to describe the sad trend of online services going to shit over time. I don't think that's just an online services issue. It's a societal issue related to the pursuit of endless growth. And if you think about it, it's a deeply human issue. It's what happens when you can't say stop. No matter what you're doing, it can be something positive or negative, if you can't say stop, bad things will happen. Try to go for a run, and don't stop. Ever. Or try to drink water, and don't stop. Ever.
But it's our fault. Our as a society. We celebrate when Apple becomes the first trillion-dollar company but we don't celebrate when someone says "You know what? I think I have enough".
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RSS — EmailIn the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play games. One of those game was called "Battle Chess". A Chess game were pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15 turns at the easiest level.
For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to the harder level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even to manage a few draws.
Was it a bug in the game?
Even as a young teenager, I quickly understood the reason. With the setting set to "hard", the game would try a lot harder to find a good move. On my 386 processor, without the mathematical coprocessor, this would take time. Several seconds or even one minute by turn. During that time, I was thinking, anticipating.
With the easiest setting, computer moves would happen immediately. I knew I had all the time I want but I was compelled to move fast. I could not take the time while the other side was immediately reacting to my moves.
The world we are living in is that same chess game on the easiest setting. Everything happens immediately, all the time. White-collar work can now be summarised as trying to reply as fast as possible to every single email until calling it a day and starting again in the morning, a process which essentially prevents any deep thinking, as pointed by Cal Newport in his book "A world without email".
As we don’t have the time to think anymore, we masquerade our lack of ideas with behavioural tricks. We replaced documents with PowerPoints because it allowed lack of structure and emptiness to look professional (just copy paste the data of the last PowerPoint you received in a text file and see by yourself how pitiful it is. PowerPoint communications at NASA were even diagnosed by Edward R. Tufte, author of the "The cognitive style of PowerPoint", as one of the causes that led to Space Shuttle Columbia’s disaster).
The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fasts. After sending a letter, we had days or months to think before receiving an answer. Erasmus wrote his famous "Éloge de la folie" in several days while travelling in Europe. He would never have done it in a couple of hours in a plane while the small screen in the backseat would show him advertisements.
In 2012, the French writer Thierry Crouzet had one of the first recorded "online burnout". Being connected all the time with interesting strangers and interesting ideas to which he wanted to reply quickly was too much for his brain. One night, he had a strong panic attack and decided to spend six months without the Internet, an experience he told in his book "J’ai débranché".
The instant feedback of permanent connectivity is clearly a bad thing. But the worst had yet to come. After the 2000s bubble popped and told us that Internet was not "magic money", the question became "how do we monetise the Internet?" A few idealistic geeks replied, "You don’t monetise it, it’s a non-commercial world." But geeks, as everyone, wanted or needed to be paid.
To earn money, they handed the reins of the whole new world they were creating to marketers. That’s it: hackers sold the Internet in exchange for a salary. Until 2000, marketers played along with the idea of selling the work hackers were doing. With one small problem: they oversold it completely, diving in the geek fantasy that, soon, everybody would be on that Internet buying stuff online.
In the 2000s, nobody but geeks wanted to spend their life behind a huge radiating screen. Marketers suddenly waked up to that reality with the dot-com bubble. If not everybody wanted to be on the Internet and nobody would buy anything on the Internet, there were two potential solutions: either monetising the fact that some people were already spending lots of time of the Internet or convincing more people to come on the Internet.
Surviving companies such as Google decided for the easiest one: monetising what people were already giving to the Internet: their time and attention. Advertising was, of course, already part of the web (mostly through the infamous "popups") but Google innovated by inventing a whole new way of exploiting attention: trying to learn as much as possible about users to show them the advertising they are more likely to click on. The whole story is told in great details in the book "Surveillance Capitalism", by Soshanna Zuboff.
Whether this "personalised advertisement" really works better than traditional one is up to debate. For Tim Hang, author of "Subtime Attention Crisis" and for Cory Doctorow, author of "How to destroy surveillance capitalism", the real impact on sales is negligible but as marketers think it works, they invest massive money in it, making the whole technology a very lucrative bubble.
But the real impact is undisputed : as long as someone buys it, it is really lucrative to sell the attention and all the information you could from consumers. As a consequence, the practice has been generalised and nearly every website, every app on the Internet is trying to get both. And they are very scientific about the process.
It is now considered as "normal practice" to try to get the attention and the data of your users, even if it doesn’t make sense from a business perspective.
Banking apps send notifications to show you their new shiny logo, good old e-commerce website ask their customers for the number of children they have or their income bracket. Even non-commercial personal blogs or some websites dedicated to privacy contain analytics software to track their users. Not tracking your users is harder than not! Every single vendor from which you shop, even a brick-and-mortar one, will bury you with their mailings.
One could assume that buying a new mattress is something you do only every decade and that the prospective market for mattress vendors is those who didn’t buy a mattress in the last five years. So why did anybody think that, right after buying a mattress, I would be interested in receiving news about mattresses every single week of my life?
The two consequences of all this are that our privacy is invaded as much as it is technologically possible and that our attention is scientifically captured as much as it is technologically possible. And, in both aspects, technology is "improving" as all the smartest minds in the world are hired to do just that.
While working at Google, Tristan Harris realised how much what they were building was in order to get the focus and the attention of people. He left Google to create the "Center for Humane Technology" that tries to raise attention about the fact that… our attention is captured by monopolist technologies.
The irony is palpable: Tristan Harris had a very good intuition but can’t imagine doing anything else than either "raising attention" through social networks or building technologies that would notify you that you should be focused. Let’s build yet another layer of complexity above everything else and raise attention so this layer is adopted widely enough to become the foundation of the next complexity paradigm.
Being distracted all the time prevent us from having any ideas and understanding. We need a catchy slogan. Instead of reading a three-page report, we prefer a 60 slides PowerPoint, containing mostly stock pictures and out-of-context charts.
We have valorised the heroic image of the CEO that comes in a meeting and tell engineers, "I have ten minutes left before my next meeting. Tell me everything in five and I’ll take a billion dollar decisions."
In retrospect, it is obvious that taking good decisions in that context is nothing more than rolling a die. Funnily enough, it has been proved multiple times than every high-profile CEO is not better than a random decision algorithm. But, unlike algorithms, CEOs usually have charisma and assurance. They may take a very wrong decision but they can convince everybody that it’s the right one. Which is exactly the definition of a salesman job.
In "Deep Work", Cal Newport tries to promote the opposite stance, the art of taking the time to think, to ponder. In "The Ideas Industry", Daniel Drezner observes that long, subtle and complex ideas are more and more replaced by simplistic slogans, the epitome being the famous TED conferences. In 18 minutes, people are sold an idea and, if the speaker is a good salesman, feel like they’ve learned something deep and new. The mere fact that you could learn something deeply enough in 18 minutes is an insult to all the academic world. Without surprise, the same academic world is seen by many as boring old people spending their time writing long articles instead of making a catchy slogan to change the world.
Most monopolies were built by removing choices. You could not buy a computer without Microsoft Windows. You could not visit some websites without Internet Explorer. You can’t find a phone without Google in a shop (Google pay many billions dollars every year to be the default search engine on Apple devices). And if you manage to remove Google from your phone, you will lose the ability to run some apps, including most banking apps. Most apps even check at start if Google services are installed on the phone and refuse to start if it’s not the case. If it’s really hard not to use Google, it’s by definition a forced monopoly. Similarly, it is very hard to avoid Amazon when shopping online.
There’s one exception : Facebook. There’s nothing forcing us to go to Facebook or Instagram. There’s nothing forcing us to spend time on it. It’s like we have choice. But it seems we haven’t.
Why is this? Why are we playing one hour of what was supposed to be five minutes of a stupid smartphone game instead of reading a book? Why are we spending every minute awake checking our smartphone and replying to mundane chitchat, even if we are in the middle of the conversation with someone else? Why are we compelled to put our life and the lives of our children at risk just to quickly reply while driving?
Because of the way the human brain is wired. Evolutionary speaking, we are craving for new experiences. Learning new experiences, good or bad, may help your chromosomes to survive more generations than others. We get that famous "dopamine rush", described in great details by Liberman and Long in "The molecule of more".
Each time there’s a notification, each time there’s a red bubble in some part of the screen, the brain acts like it’s a new vital opportunity. We can’t miss it. A study showed that the sole notification sound was enough to distract a driver as much as if he was texting while driving. Yes, even without looking at your phone, you were distracted as much as if you did (which is not an excuse to look at it).
The brain has learned that the phone is a random provider of "new experiences". Even in airplane mode, it was demonstrated that having the phone on your desk or in your bag degrades heavily your attention and your thinking performance. Performance went back to normal only when the phone was put in another room.
That’s it, the only way to not have any temptation is not to have the phone at arm reach. The aforementioned French writer Thierry Crouzet told me once that it was very difficult to focus on writing when you know you only have to move the word processor window with the mouse to go to the Internet. On the web, writers’ forums are full of discussions about "distraction-less" devices. Some, including your servitor, are going back to old typewriters, a paradigm described as a true resistance by Richard Polt in the excellent book "The Typewriter Revolution".
One may even wonder if the epidemic of "electro-sensitivity", feeling bad or being sick when exposed to wifi or similar wireless emissions, may simply be a psychological reaction to the overstimulation. It has been observed that the symptoms are real (people are really feeling bad and are not simulating) but that, in double-blind controlled environment, the symptoms are linked to the belief of wireless emissions (if you simulate a blinking wireless router without emitting anything, people feel bad. If you have wireless emission but tell people it’s disabled, they will feel better).
In his landmark book "Digital Minimalism", Cal Newport offers a framework to rethink the way we use digital technologies. The central idea is to balance costs and benefits consciously, highlighting most hidden costs. Facebook might be free in the sense you don’t have to pay for it. But being exposed to advertising, being exposed to angry political rants, feeling compelled to answer, being exposed to picture of people you once knew and who seems to have an extraordinary (even if virtual) life is a very high cost.
Simply do the math. If you have 180 friends on Facebook, which seems to be a low amount those days, if your friends take, on average, 10 days of vacation per year, you will have, on average, five friends on vacation every day. Add to this statistic that some people like to re-post pictures of old vacations and it means that you will be bombarded daily by pictures of sunny beaches and beautiful landscapes while you are waiting under neon light for your next boring meeting in a gray office. By design, Facebook makes you feel miserable.
That’s not to say that Facebook cannot be useful and have benefits. As Cal Newport highlight, you need to adapt your use to maximise the benefits while trying to avoid costs as much as possible. You have to think consciously about what you really want to achieve.
This idea of digital minimalism prompted a revival of the so-called "dumb phones", phones which are not smart and which are able to make phone call and send/receive SMS. Some brands are even starting to innovate in that particular market like Mudita and Lightphone.
Ironically, they are advertising mindfulness and being focused. They are trying to catch your attention to sell you back… your own attention.
One of the consumerist credo is that the market will fix everything. If there’s a problem, someone will quickly sell a solution. As pointed by Evgeny Morozov in "To Save Everything, Click Here", this is not only wrong thinking. This is actually harmful.
With public money, we are actually actively funding companies and startups thinking they will both create jobs and sell solutions to every problem. It is implied that every solution should be a technological one, should be sellable and should be intuitive. That’s it: you should not think too much about a problem but instead build blindly whatever solution comes to mind using the currently trending technological stack. French Author Antoine Gouritin wrote a funny and interesting book about that whole philosophy he called "Le Startupisme".
The root cause is there: we don’t have any mental framework left other than spying on people and steal their attention. Business schools are teaching how to do catchy PowerPoints while stealing attention from people. Every business is at war with the other to catch your attention and your brain cycles. Even academy is now fighting to get grants based on catchy PowerPoints and raw number of publications. This was the raw observation of David Graeber: even academics have stopped thinking to play the "catch your attention game".
There’s no silver bullet. There will not be any technological solution. If we want to claim back our focus and our brain cycles, we will need to walkaway and normalise disconnected times. To recognise and share the work of those who are not seeking attention at all cost, who don’t have catchy slogans nor spectacular conclusions. We need to start to appreciate harder works which don’t offer us immediate short-term profit.
Our mind, not the technology, is the bottleneck. We need to care about our minds. To dedicate time to think slowly and deeply.
We need to bring back Sapiens in Home Sapiens Sapiens.
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When white nationalists met up in a small town in north Texas to take part in yet another fight night event, we set about locating where it took place.
Billed as the third in a series dating back to 2022, the event was hosted by white nationalist group Patriot Front. Last year, Bellingcat geolocated an event to a gym space in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
On March 8, 2024, a Telegram channel associated with US far-right extremist Robert Rundo posted eight photos of the combat sports event (Bellingcat is not naming the outlet to avoid amplification). The outlet promised that a promotional “documentary” film of the event would be “coming soon” and claimed the event took place in north Texas. In addition, the outlet claimed that Rundo’s far-right fashion brand was responsible for organising the event.
Bellingcat only needed the very first photo in the post, and a few minutes of web searching, to geolocate the event to a hall available for rent in Muenster, a town of fewer than 2,000 people in north Texas.
Here’s how we did it:
The first hint was the American flag.
In a Telegram chat discussing the event, one person commented on the presence of the large US flag hung in the building. Someone who claimed to have attended the event replied “it was part of the venues [sic] decoration so it couldn’t really be removed.” This led Bellingcat to assume that other public photos of the venue would likely have a large American flag hanging inside.
The second hint — and the one that led Bellingcat right to the venue — was a small detail on the table in the front of the image.
The letters ‘MVFD’ are visible on the table (though upside down), suggesting that the table belongs to a volunteer fire department (i.e., ‘VFD: Volunteer Fire Department’).
With this clue, Bellingcat then searched for ‘MVFD Texas’.
We found results for several towns beginning with the letter ‘M’ in north Texas whose fire departments used that abbreviation, and checked available images from these towns to see if anything resembled the venue seen in the photos.
Scrolling results from Muenster, Bellingcat noticed a photo of a similar-looking venue, including a similar ceiling, windows and two doors at one end.
Next, we searched for “hall Muenster Texas” and found more photos of a venue — Fuhrmann Hall at the Heritage Park Events Center, a venue available to the public to rent.
We were able to match the the large American flag, the ceiling, the air conditioners and the light fixtures and doors to the images posted in Telegram.
Thus, Bellingcat was able to locate the Patriot Front event to the Fuhrmann Hall located an hour’s drive from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.
Bellingcat contacted the Heritage Park Events Center and asked them whether they were aware that they had rented their facilities to representatives of a far-right network. We had not received a response at time of publication.
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The post Open Source In Short: Geolocating a US Far-Right Fight Night appeared first on bellingcat.
Last night, just before I was about to go to bed, I had a sudden thought: There has to be a way to determine who Lineup Publishing is.
The acquirers of Deadspin, the once-beloved-now-beleaguered sports site whose legendary initial run was destroyed the day that the new CEO of the equally beleaguered G/O Media felt the site needed to “stick to sports,” may be the biggest mystery in all of media right now. G/O owner Great Hill Partners gave few details about the acquirer, which bought the brand and the archives, but not the team.
Very strong “oops, we forgot to build the website” energy.
The domain for this company was purchased a mere five days ago. There are literally no details on this firm other than a very basic WordPress landing page. It was such an unlikely situation, and such an obscure company, that AdWeek initially mistook the purchaser for another company with the same name.
And so, this brain thought I had last night took me to some of the weirdest, spammiest corners of the internet, in a general obsession with the idea that there has to be a way to weed this out. Next thing I knew, it was 3AM and I had written a massive thread on Bluesky breaking down random spam blogs and casino marketers. While I do not have an answer as to who Deadspin’s new owners are, I do have some interesting takeaways from this journey that may lead to the answer.
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Here’s what I found:
The detail I found which could give away the game: The discovery that kind of broke things open for me came down to the domain’s IP. For some reason, the company took the step of locking down the site’s DNS records, but did not put the site behind a security tool like CloudFlare, which would have hidden the site’s IP address. The result was that it was very easy to trace the site’s IP address to the company Cloudways, a Maltese website host that’s owned by DigitalOcean. Cloudways gives each customer its own dedicated IP address, which means that, unlike a smaller WordPress host, Lineup Publishing should be living on a single server, by itself, unless the site owner used a proxy to add a secondary site. And lo and behold, there was one other site on the IP address, and it was … a Finnish casino splog.
This extremely spammy website shares an IP address with Lineup Publishing.
Now, nothing against Finnish gamblers, but this is actually a very telling detail. Offshore countries or territories in the Mediterranean, particularly Malta, Cyprus, and Gibraltar, are known as online gambling havens, and the website had numerous references to Maltese-operated online casinos targeting the Finnish market.
And in my efforts to follow the money, I found the eventual SEO payload for this site hiding in an unlinked page buried on the Finnish casino splog’s domain. And that led to …
The unexpected discovery which might explain Google Groups’ closure: Buried in the links on this casino splog, I found a bunch of URL redirects that led to, of all things, a Google Groups post on Usenet. The post featured text in Swedish (not Finnish) that promoted a specific casino affiliate site, which was was also hosted on Cloudways. (By the way, Cloudways, despite Digital Ocean’s ownership, has its main office in Malta.)
The spammy blog above linked to this Usenet post on Google Groups numerous times.
Google Groups recently shut down the ability to post new content, and the fairly recent threads I found hinted at why they did. It appeared to be conversations between bots about online casino sites flooding different unrelated Usenet groups. Essentially, Google Groups may have been suffering the effects of generative AI. Even the avatars were Midjourney specials.
With that in mind, no wonder Google decided to close off new posts. Spammers were apparently turning Google Groups into yet another spamming medium. But that’s an aside, really, in light of the real story …
The speculative thread that makes this interesting: While we won’t know what, exactly, Lineup Publishing has in store for Deadspin now that Jim Spanfeller and Great Hill have agreed to sell it, we do know that this affiliation hiding in its hosting might speak to a broader trend in sports journalism in 2024: The piggybacking of sports brands with online betting.
Sports Illustrated, a similarly gutted media empire, is now associated with a betting platform. Barstool Sports was at one point owned by Penn Gaming in an attempt to build a sports-betting brand, only for Penn to sell it back to Dave Portnoy because Dave Portnoy proved too toxic. Penn upgraded its media partner to, of all companies, ESPN.
This is a bit connect-the-dots, but the publishing firm is very close to the island headquarters of a major U.S. sports-betting operation.
And these betting platforms are actually known to be associated with offshore havens. BetMGM, for example, is part-owned by Entain, a sports-betting company based in Gibraltar. And betting platforms with American presences, like Bet365, have offices in Malta. (Bet365’s offices are about 3 kilometers away from Lineup Publishing’s supposed home base, in fact.)
Deadspin did not have this sort of affiliation before its recent sale, but the apparent Maltese ownership would be a great inroad to add such an affiliation. I can’t nail down who would be interested, but the cloak of secrecy its owners have thus far taken raises serious questions for fans of the site, which it should be pointed out, has nearly two decades of archives, including some legendary stories.
Even if there’s a legitimate goal for launching Deadspin as a premium news site, there are still questions to raise. One discovery I made in the midst of all this is that another site with a long digital legacy, Salon, was recently sold to another Maltese company with apparent interests in the online gaming affiliate business—it is currently hiring for an “iGaming account manager,” a fancy way of saying “online casino marketer.” Salon is not going to become a platform for betting, to be clear, and Find.co does appear to be a legitimate business that, to its credit, kept on Salon’s entire team.
But I do think that it offers an interesting window through which to see the Deadspin acquisition—what if Deadspin is there to lend legitimacy to an online betting site or a casino affiliate network? We already have signs that its new owners appear to have a not-so-savory toe dipped into that market. The lack of information creates a vacuum within which we’ll have to see this site.
At a time when not even Deadspin’s own primary vendor, a wire service that is flooding the website with reams of zombie content as we speak, can reach the new owners of this once-famous website, one has to wonder: Was its former owner willing to sell it to anyone?
They may claim they have standards. But what we’ve learned in the last day and a half doesn’t seem to suggest it.
The first step to solving your cloud-storage problem is admitting you have a problem. The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel, to his credit, just took that step.
Over the weekend, I watched the famed music documentary Dig! for the first time, and it is as good as everyone says it is, mostly because of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, whose cult hit “Anemone” is above. Dandy Warhols singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor implied in the film that while his band might become more famous in the moment, BJM would be more important over time. I think that’s starting to play out.
Breaking my no-NYT rule because of a very important story that they published about car companies selling owners’ data to insurers. The story, by Kashmir Hill, is good enough to change laws.
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And I promise, I won’t do a follow-up to this unless it turns out that my speculation is 100% correct.