It’s a muthafucka Don’t you know? They’re talkin' ‘bout Nuclear War

Even by the standards we’ve come to expect from this utterly insane political season, this story about the DNC being hacked by Russians truly boggles the mind. The matrix of financial and political connections between Russia’s authoritarian leader and our own would-be tyrant takes the story from conspiratorial to increasingly hard to deny. And then Trump, unable to resist the political theatrics, inviting a hostile state to launch a cyberattack against a government official is just surreal. (If you haven’t yet watched Zero Days, let me implore you once again to do so.)

It’s not just the attack vector (cyberwar!) but how Trump and his supporters seem to be embracing the hack as a way to attack Clinton politically without seeming to pay any political price in our post-fact era. Nixon had to resign for trying to bug the DNC, and here’s Trump asking Russia — RUSSIA — to play the role of his White House plumbers.

This is only the latest in what has been a series of completely unbelievable moments in what should be a serious, sober, and proud time. I don’t expect any of this to improve between now and election day.

Conventional Coverage

Putting aside the putative messages coming from the conventions, there’s plenty to write about the medium. Having spent several quadrennial summers preparing for election season (and always Olympics at the same time, who planned that?), I know them to be utterly thankless affairs. So much preparation and anticipation for a few days of coverage that’s so quickly forgotten.

What struck me this year is how little has really changed in how the conventions are covered. A lot of that owes to the fact that these are highly scripted affairs made for an era of television, now augmented by everyone yelling at the TV via social media. The Trumpstravaganza, true to its message of populism, was aimed more at Twitter and Facebook, while the Democrats seem to have completed their transition to the new old guard and really honed in on made for TV moments.

Owing to several factors — being on the west coast, having a toddler — I watched none of the conventions live and managed to catch up a little bit late at night. And I found myself wanting the same features I’ve wanted for the last 2 or 3 elections now. The ability to replay my Twitter stream as I watch a video from earlier that night is the most obvious one I still can’t believe no one has even tried.

Twitter was more focused on live video, which is fine, but time shifting is 15 years old now. I don’t much care about a random stream filled with hashtags next to a live partner video embed, I want to know what my friends said about the speech from 4 hours ago.

Twitter Moments continued to underwhelm. The conventions really should have been a stake in the ground for Moments, something that should have been a showcase. Instead, it just felt like meme fluffing GIFs with the occasional headline all wrapped in an interface that manages to confuse more than inform. In between the two conventions, Twitter unveiled new marketing “to express what we’re for and what we’ve always been”. Hard to ignore that ten years on Twitter is no closer to answering this.

In the end, I found Andrew Sullivan’s liveblogs (blogs! in this day and age!) were my preferred way to catch up.

Back to the Past’s Future

Verizon, who bought AOL a few years ago, bought Yahoo for not quite $5 billion. Recall that Microsoft was willing to pay $44.6 billion 8 years ago. (I realize this comparison is unfair because Verizon is only buying Yahoo’s core business, not the other $40 billion held in companies like Alibaba).

This whole thing feels like Verizon is trying to back into being a modern internet powerhouse by buying up the internet powerhouses of old, for cheap. You can almost see the pitch deck "Imagine if Yahoo and AOL hadn't been run into the ground over a decade or so and had the power of Verizon's infrastructure!" The answer, it seems is content, or perhaps from an era when Yahoo mattered, eyeballs.

Marissa Mayer gave it her all at Yahoo and the story there is pretty short: sinking ship with new captain still sank. Her strategy of acquiring lots of talent and trying to build new mobile apps wasn’t a bad one, per se, it just ran into the reality of building media on the internet.

Yahoo has the distinction of having pioneered but failed to capitalize on both search and social networking (Flickr, del.icio.us, and Upcoming provided all the nouns and verbs for what Facebook eventually owned) and then valiantly tried catching up to mobile after that battle was already won.

It might be a fun thought exercise to imagine if Yahoo had had the wherewithal to provide a drop-in replacement of Google’s services to Apple after that acrimonious divorce. Though, I suspect that even if Yahoo had been able, Apple had firmly decided that building their own services stack was the way forward.

In the end, I guess this is just what a mature company starts to look like in late-captialism. Verizon is a 30 year old company that was spun off from the breakup of 100 year old company that needs to show growth. Conglomeration is the model that these beasts seem to know. GE makes lightbulbs and MRI machines and jet engines. 3M makes scotch tape and post-it notes and water purifiers and about a billion other things. Yamaha makes keyboards and bathroom fixtures and motorcycles. Even our most modern, innovative corporations aren't immune, with Google reorganizing itself so that it can be the search engine and self-driving car company.

Sidebar

• Some good news! The world is actually getting better (despite the sometimes apocalyptic tone of this newsletter, I truly believe that in my heart). If it seems like everything’s gone to hell, that’s only because our information about the world is getting better argues Ray Kurzweil. And this is a good thing because we can only make things better when we know what’s making them bad in the first place.

• How a plucky little transit app in Montreal made better transit maps than Google or Apple. Hail Anton! Related: how Charles Kao invented fiber optics ahead of Bell Labs

• An urbanist reaction to (as seen last week) Elon Musk’s Master Plan Part Deux: Does Musk understand urban geometry. This post skips over the part where Musk says he wants to build autonomous, solar powered busses as well as cars, but it’s a good read. So much of what’s being sold to us as the future of cars won’t actually work so well in cities and may actually make them worse.

• This compendium of neologisms coined by Douglas Coupland in his seminal Generation X is great. Coupland still feels ahead of his time.

• Buzzfeed goes deep on … Enya? Do Millennials even know how to orinoco flow or what Crystal Light is? Anne Helen Petersen is a gift and this is a characteristically wonderful piece, even if you think you don’t care about Enya or Irish castles.

• The site where Tamir Rice was shot by police in Cleveland is now memorialized as a Pokéstop.

• Apple buys Carpool Karaoke. This is fascinating to me, as someone who knows very little about how late night television works. For instance, it didn’t even occur to me that what I’d considered a segment of a talk show could even be purchased outright, but I suppose everything is for sale at the right price. Seems like a good enough fit, especially when James Corden is rolling around in an Apple car in five years. And to those of us who continue to find Apple Music a bit of a headscratcher, well, it sure looks like they’re doubling down.

• Data analysis on 67 years of Lego sets.

• It’s like Soylent but for housing. You remember Soylent, the proto-Slimfast shakes our moms drank in the 80’s marketed at twenty something white men too busy crushing code to digest. Apparently, the company’s CEO bought a patch of the LA hills and plunked a shipping container on top of with windows and solar panels as some sort of experiment in off the grid living (despite not actually living there). Of course he didn’t bother going through the process of creating a home in a community like everyone else in the world does, he just showed up and expected it all to work.

• Everybody hates Facebook (well, not investors, presumably). Frederic Filloux on Facebook’s publisher problem. And Scott Galloway pegs Zuck’s army as a frenemy minus the friend.

• Google uses their own DeepMind tech to cut the power bill at their data centers by 15%. I’m genuinely starting to believe machine learning isn’t being hyped enough.

• David Chang wants to put the meatless Impossible burger in your face. I have this half-baked theory that we’re only going to see more of this from big chefs and elite restaurants, even the ones (like Chang) who brought us a resurgent, meat-laden version of New American cuisine sometime around the mid-aughts. Like farm-to-table and organics before it, meatlessness is going to be a cultural signifier that will exist at the intersection of hippie environmentalism, hipster urbanity, and yuppie classism. And there will be a Trumpian counterforce that digs in despite the overwhelming evidence that simply eating a little less meat is pretty much better for everyone. Because this is the way we live now.

• I was fully prepared to roll my eyes at this New York magazine interview with Kara Swisher talking about what’s wrong with tech journalism. Happy to say I was wrong, definitely worth a read.

• The Times visits Google’s Alphabet’s moonshot base, X labs. And sure enough, there’s Astro Teller in his rollerblades.