Apparently, 79% of you opened last week’s newsletter. Let’s make it 80!

Culture Wars

“Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for. If they’re right — and that’s a big ‘if’ — I’m worried for Apple.” writes Marco Arment.

Coming on the heels of Google I/O, and before Apple’s own developer conference, it’s perhaps tempting to suggest that all will be revealed. But Marco is right to be worried because the problems he’s describing won’t be solved with a keynote, they’re systemic. As Ben Thompson notes, these are problems of culture or, as Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo says, “It’s hard to compete with an industry trend if you believe that trend compromises your principles.”

There’s a direct media analog here: many of the criticisms Apple is enduring now around their AI tech apply directly to their efforts to build new media platforms. The iPad was meant to revolutionize publishing, Newsstand was supposed to solve distribution and direct sales, iAds promised but never really tried to deliver an ad network for apps, and Apple News doesn’t appear to even be aware how social networks have changed news consumption.

This often gets talked about in terms of Apple’s DNA. That’s probably no big deal when it comes to news — selling ads just isn’t aligned with Apple’s incentives or values. Apple absolutely needs to compete on AI and the next generation of computer interfaces, though.

It’s certainly possible that Apple has been building their AI products in a very Apple way — quietly and behind the scenes. They acquired Vocaliq, presumably to make Siri smarter. The team that built Siri left Apple and has built a next generation virtual assistant that has learned to reprogram itself on the fly — Apple could probably afford to reacquire them.

Again, though, this may be a cultural blindspot. The Apple way works great when you need to spend years prototyping and building the next great hardware platform. It remains to be seen if it works for the pieces required for AI.

This is a story ostensibly about Apple, but you don’t need to squint too hard to see it’s also the story of mass media in the age of the internet. Change is inevitable and it’s inevitably hard.

Specific Deterrence

Tech billionaire Peter Theil funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker really has all the trappings of a Bond villain, and not even a good one. Josh Marshall of Talking Point Memo gets to the heart of why this is dangerous: “If this is the new weapon in the arsenal of the super rich, few publications will have the resources or the death wish to scrutinize them closely”.

This isn’t Thiel’s first foray into ethically dubious attacks on organizations he personally doesn’t care for. James O’Keefe’s atrocious ACORN “sting” was funded by Thiel. (Speaking of O’Keefe, The New Yorker exposes what an amateurish buffoon he really is.) He’s publicly lamented women’s suffrage as anathema to the free market.

Elizabeth Spiers, Gawker’s founding editor offers fascinating perspective as a journalist, entrepreneur, and sharp media watcher.

Wired’s response may be the sanest one.

Sidebar

• Elaine Welteroth is the new editor in chief of Teen Vogue, Conde Nast’s youngest EIC ever, and only the second African-American to hold that title at Conde.

• This week’s very important emoji news update.

• Fascinating read about one of the Grateful Dead’s contributions to tech and music: their Wall of Sound. The conversations with people involved read like a lot of the chatter around VR today.

• Javascript-based client-side A/B testing tools can slow down your site. Heisenberg uncertainty in action.

• Google continues to look for inroads in cloud services, currently dominated by Amazon’s AWS. Firebase, which Google acquired in 2014, could be the easy-to-usebackend for your web, iOS, and Android apps. If you’d rather not rely on Google, there’s the open source Horizon.

• The unintended side effects of transparency. ProPublica discovered people were using one of their databases to find doctors who are more willing to hand out opioids.

• How algorithmic feeds amplify conspiracy theories.

• Possibly the best use of AI yet: letting you know when to pay attention to a conference call

• Dean Baquet’s vision for the future of The New York Times.

• Accounting tends to make my eyes glaze over, but Facebook focusing more on GAAP earnings is interesting. Many tech companies continue to rely on non-GAAP earnings, largely due to stock-based compensation, which highlights a weakness amongst Facebook’s competitors (Twitter, for example, is still unprofitable according to GAAP). I’ve always hated how Silicon Valley gets away with non-GAAP reporting so this seems like a good development overall. More on stock based compensation, comparing Twitter and Facebook

• How to ask people to rate your app in a way that isn’t crummy

• There have been countless articles written about why the rent is too damn high in San Francisco. Eric Fischer did the yeoman’s work of combing through 70 years worth of San Francisco housing data to get a comprehensive look at the situation. As Michael Andersen writes, Fischer’s data reveals there are three factors that determine housing prices: the number of jobs, the number of places to live, and the amount of money people are paid. Adjust any of those variables and you can fairly accurately determine cost of living. Despite the depressing conclusion, I like this pair of pieces because they look at an issue that has been covered to death in a way that is truly new and interesting. Related: Manhattan couldn’t be built today.

• Postlight’s Riche Ziade on East Coast vs. West Coast is basically a definition of this newsletter via geography.

• There’s a narrative in the ride-hail battle that Lyft is somehow less evil than Uber. As the two companies' showdown with the city of Austin shows, though, this may be the narcissism of minor differences. Buzzfeed’s Doree Shafrir and Ellen Cushing on how Lyft tried to “pink wash” ride-hailing. Related: I continue to be impressed at how thoroughly Buzzfeed is covering the “gig economy” beat with a wide ranging, ongoing series of stories looking at how private, massively capitalized corporations like Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, etc. are reshaping the economy. I can’t think of a mainstream news outlet that has been as rigorous.

• There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the neutrality, and lack thereof, of algorithms. Whether it’s sorting our timelines or recommending more stuff to buy, computer programs bring all of the biases that humans pour into them. ProPublica has a disturbing story about software used to determine whether a criminal is likely to commit a crime again and — surprise! — it’s racist. ProPublica also wrote up how they tested the software.

You could be the first person to reply to one of these. Too long? Too short? 2 furious? Let me know!