The truly astonishing vaccines are upon us. You doubtless know someone who’s been vaccinated by now and hope abounds that by this summer we could start see what life is going to look like on the other side.

As incredible as the vaccines are, we always knew the hard work was going to be distributing billions of them. Even with all of the massive problems facing the U.S. — in terms of infrastructure, healthcare, and equity — the rollout is going … well it could always be worse.

One manifestation of America’s distribution problem is getting signed up in the first place. The scourge of federalism means there are at least fifty different websites for Americans to navigate, all built to different standards and levels of accessibility, struggling to stay up. The additional scourge of “public/private partnerships” means there are also the websites of pharmacies like CVS to track down for appointments, which often means people are constantly refreshing half a dozen websites at 2am trying to get appointments for their parents, like sneakerheads waiting for the next drop of Yeezys.

Diligent volunteers are pulling together open source websites that aggregate all this info, an effort that is as kind and hopeful and frustrating as it is wholly American.

There is, of course, a better way: a single, nationwide clearinghouse that anyone can log on to and find vaccination appointments, public or private, near them. Barry Patterson, writing for the blog of the government govtech consultancy Ad Hoc, lays it out:

A better way is for the federal government to provide a single COVID-19 vaccination website with consistent information about when people can get the vaccine, where, and at what cost. This website should go beyond providing accurate information to help people take action and sign up for a vaccination.

In our discussions with state governments and our explorations of the issues surrounding vaccinations, we’ve landed on a handful of principles that could shape a federal vaccination website and core features the website should provide on launch. These principles are grounded in our work creating action-oriented digital experiences for federal websites including HealthCare.gov, Medicare.gov, VA.gov, and more.

As Hoc’s approach is everything you’d want from such a herculean and important project — thoughtful, detailed, and built on real-world experience. There are even solutions to those built-in scourges of federalism and privatization, instead of just kvetching.

Yesterday, 2.2 million Americans were vaccinated, a record that I hope we will continue to build on. We should also be building infrastructure to handle the myriad problems of American healthcare, not just to tackle future pandemics but all sorts of problems, starting with a nationwide front door to how to get vaccinated today.

Can a delightfully low-fi, three-dimensional, spatial, customizable immersive space save us from the uncanny valleyness of Zoom conferences? Andy Baio wants to find out.

After the pandemic cancelled XOXO last year, I started attending a bunch of virtual events, mostly out of boredom and longing for connecting to other people.

Unfortunately, many of them were pretty uninspiring, basically just fancy webinars with breakout rooms for Zoom. Others were just livestreams with little room for social interaction beyond a global chat room.

Almost all of them left me feeling like I’d either sat through a long meeting or watched a long YouTube video. Was this even an event? Did I actually attend anything?

In so many ways, this really is a perfect project for Andy, and maybe only Andy could have built this having cofounded the beloved XOXO conference and promoted a truly indie vision of the internet for going-on two decades. Everything about this looks delightful, playful, thoughtful, fun, and just different from what you’d expect from today’s platform mediated internet — the kind of virtual event you might actually want to attend, as The Verge puts it. I love it.

The obvious comparison is to something like Second Life but it honestly feels more like Game Neverending, er, Glitch — in all the best ways. Or maybe the kind of virtual conference Shigeru Miyamoto might have designed.

From its founding through its very public reckoning in 2017, Uber completely upturned how tech platforms interface with the real world, in particular labor. They were so successful that uber became a stand-in for the glib euphemism “gig economy” and a spate of “Uber for X” (where x could be dogwalkers, grocery shoppers, or dry cleaners) startups followed in its toxic wake.

To Silicon Valley boosters and VCs, this was some kind of bold new re-imagining of work and they (once again) appropriated the language of progressivism to sell their story of worker empowerment and freedom. To anyone with an understanding of how capital has historically exploited labor, it looked like the same ole’ arbitrage exploiting weakened labor laws and the desperate austerity of the post-Global Recession economy, gilded with ascendent mobile platforms.

Uber is now an eleven-year-old company that has since replaced its awful founder CEO, gone public, expanded into other complementary services like food delivery, made a big acquisition, and generally avoided the drama that plagued the company just a few years ago.

They also hired one of their biggest critics¹, author and labor researcher Alex Rosenblat, to head up “marketplace policy, fairness and research”. Brody Ford first reported about Rosenblat’s hire for Bloomberg:

Rosenblat is best known for her 2018 book, “Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work,” for which she interviewed hundreds of drivers about their working conditions. The book highlights driver stories of pay disparities, pervasive surveillance and the lopsided power dynamics in algorithm-mediated work.

As an Uber employee, Rosenblat said her responsibility is to “get the company to take into consideration the experiences and point of view of drivers, especially at the product level” and that her work will be informed by past research.

The cynical take is this is a move to silence a detractor, or maybe just good PR, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Most of the more egregious claims against Uber’s labor relations — like stiffing them on tips or surveilling them — aren’t a requirement for Uber to succeed today; they were just as likely extensions of the wholly toxic culture that was bred from top of the company. There’s enough obvious stuff for Roseblat to address that she’ll be busy for months if not years.

The bigger question facing Uber, like so many platforms, is how to actually succeed as a business without exploiting the conditions that made them so successful. It’s clear the labor grift was meant to be a stopgap on the way to driverless cars, but Uber’s given up on owning that space outright and the dream of robot drivers remains out of reach for the foreseeable future.

The situation for Uber is less dire than, say, Facebook’s business model of surveilling their users, but Uber has also struggled with profitability since going public. I’m convinced it’s possible to build a ride hailing app that treats the drivers with respect. Probably not with the returns venture capital demands, though.

Last May, when the U.S. was approaching 100,000 deaths due to Covid-19, the New York Times printed the name of every person on their front page. It was a stark and unsettling visualization of the toll of the catastrophe.

This week, the U.S. passed 500,000 deaths and the Times once again sought to visualize something so incomprehensible, this time using dots as stand-ins for the names. The difference between the two front pages is its own kind of infographic, the shift from 100,000 names that filled up the entire page to indistinguishable points in a broad column down the middle.

The graphic this week is more informative, if that’s what we’re looking for, showing the ebbs and flows, the surges of the virus, and how it’s compounded in growth. It’s also too many, Francis Gagnon writes:

This graph is confronting us with the limitations of data visualization to convey tragedies.

Tragedies like COVID-19 deaths happen at the individual level. One death is a person who did their 2nd grade homework, helped their brother out of a ditch, broke up on New Year’s Eve, lied to their kids and then apologized. To their relatives, friends and coworkers, they are a full person. To a chart, they are a dot.

Gagnon is right, this really does hit the limits of what can, or maybe even should be visualized. Each dot is a person, a life, and there it is next to headlines about tennis and confirmation hearings. It’s effective at conveying information but fails to fully account for what’s ultimately missing — those 500,000 souls.

National Geographic used comparisons, but it felt almost glib to know the entire city of Atlanta or every U.S. Postal worker would be gone today. Reuters provided some of the emotional heft that was missing from the cold numeracy, overlaying actual lives among the dots.

At the start of my journalism career, I got tapped to build a memorial project for the first remembrance of the September 11 terrorist attack. It included a lot of archival coverage, bits that we’d never published before, profiles of victims, analysis of how much everything changed. It was a terribly emotional project to work on, less than a year after the world shifted irrevocably, with the usual deadline pressures — that’s very much the territory of working in news. We included a “database” of people, really it was just a CSV file of names of the nearly 3,000 people who were killed. I’d often go through them late at night and inevitably end up crying at my desk, alone in the basement of a tower in Chicago.

I’ve been a fan of Defector since the former Deadspin staff launched their seemingly brash experiment in a collectively owned media company last year. Margaret Sullivan, one of our sharpest media eyes, checks in how its going:

In a world of endlessly distressing media news, the Defector story is a bright spot and maybe a small miracle.

The staff remains small but growing, they recently put out a refreshingly humane freelancer policy written in partnership with the National Writer’s Union, and have enough subscribers to sustain their operations. And it was news to me the staff could choose to fire editor Tom Ley with a 2/3 vote.

It says a lot about the state of things that launching a subscriber supported blog owned by the writers and editors who produce it is seen as either doomed to failure or brave, or both. I’m optimistic about Defector and want to see them do well, not just because it’s an excellent site, but a model I hope works for others.

Last week, I decided I needed new pajama (er, “sleep”) pants — or rather it was decided for me when a rip emerged rather inconveniently along the left cheek. This sent me down a rabbit hole of searching and comparisons for an everyday item I might pick up in line at a department store on a whim. This is the reality of being slightly neurotic by nature paired with the fact that shopping sucks now.

These are cotton pants I sleep in, not exactly a lifesaving necessity. Apply these same dynamics to buying a protective mask during a pandemic, which is quite literally a necessity and lifesaving these days. Brian X. Chen decided to find out what happens when one sets out to buy an actual N95 mask online:

I recently spent hours comparing masks online and almost bought a pack of counterfeits on Amazon. Thankfully, I avoided falling into the trap and eventually found legitimate, high-quality masks from a trustworthy online retailer.

Along the way, I learned plenty about how to spot fraudulent mask listings and how to sidestep fake reviews.

It turns out a huge part of the problem is Amazon, which is still full of counterfeit masks being hawked by third parties gilded by fake reviews, a year into this. Amazon has obviously been a huge part of how people are coping right now but it’s completely shameful that they haven’t solved the problem of how to easily buy a mask that will work from a reputable source.

Of course it’s not just online retailers, as we’ve basically gotten zero guidance on what an effective mask even is — one of the many failures of a year of no real leadership.

If you want a mask, it seems like the solution is to buy direct from one of the manufacturers who spun up production at the beginning of the pandemic. I’m hopeful that the Biden administration will put the Defense Production Act into full force and send every American enough masks to get through the year.

As for my sleep pants, my wife finally got fed up with my dithering and ordered me a set from The Gap.

In February 2015, Senator James Inhofe stood on the floor of the United States Senate and argued that because it was cold outside — in February — global climate change could not be real. He brought a snowball with him as evidence. The previous month, Senator Inhofe had been made chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works when Republicans took the Senate following the 2014 election.

The senior senator from the great state of Oklahoma was rightly and roundly mocked for this asinine bit of stagecraft, bold only for its stupidity. Inhofe has a long history of climate change denial that’s representative of the GOP’s larger and more deliberate protectionism of the oil and gas industry, now morphed into its own front in the culture war.

Which brings us to Texas. A massive cold front — a “polar vortex” — descended on the entire Midwest, what’s been called a once-in-a-generation storm that includes freezing temperature, snow, and at least one snownado. The storm overwhelmed the power grid in Texas and left millions without power or heat.

Emily Atkin, writing in her excellent Heated blog, explains why this storm happened and why it may not be so once-in-a-generation because of climate change:

The polar vortex—or, rather, the jet stream—is drunk again, bringing frigid and dangerous Arctic weather to millions of Americans. And the situation is worse than it was in 2014.

It is worse in the strictly meteorologically sense. The extreme cold pummeling the U.S. right now is, according to Accuweather, “the most active winter weather pattern across the country likely since the mid-1990s.”

I remember first learning about how climate change would lead to more and more intense polar vortexes and thinking, glibly, how deeply ironic it was that global warming would be responsible for harsher winters in the very part of the world where climate change denial was most prevalent. It seriously made me question my disbelief in god and that maybe we truly were meant to suffer the whims of a cruel and vicious deity.

The situation in Texas, where at least 20 people have died, perfectly and succinctly offers a view of a fairly dire future. Climate change doesn’t just mean hotter summers but more unpredictable weather. We know this. We’ve known this for years and we’re already living it.

The kind of infrastructure we were good at building through the middle of the 20th Century was not built to handle this unpredictability — and it’s been failing anyway due to old age and forty years of neglect. There will be more failures on the scale of Texas’s power grid.

And when these systems fail, the failures will be exploited by cynics and craven idealogues, which will only make the core problems harder to solve. Imagine how much damage the outright lying on Fox News¹ about this storm — just this storm — has done.

This is a future driven by chaos, and the cycle only seems to be accelerating.

Trump’s impeachment trial ended in the only way it really could. On Saturday, I was shocked by a push notification declaring the trial was coming to a sudden close after a brief skirmish over calling witnesses; once that initial shock wore off, I found myself in the familiar place of not being at all surprised that a man whose entire professional life was one long grift once again escaped accountability.

Despite a clear and bi-partisan majority voting to convict, enough Republicans hid behind bullshit about process and procedure instead of simply doing the right thing. It was, after all, a foregone conclusion that the trial would end in such a shameful display of how one man reshaped an entire political party to serve his ego.

Between the election last November and January 6, I’d resigned myself to thinking of the lame duck president as a loser with waning power who would be facing any number of criminal trials. The Trump insurrection changed all of that and showed just how dangerous someone so criminally stupid could be when granted not just the hard power of the federal government but the influence and a megaphone.

Margaret Sullivan details how the spectacle was a “moment of truth” that wasn’t:

It was this pervasive culture of lying that made it politically untenable for so many Republican senators, in the end, to vote their underdeveloped consciences. The muscles had atrophied, if they ever existed.

For if they voted to convict, their constituents — far from giving them credit for doing their patriotic duty — would turn on them. Perhaps viciously. Perhaps violently. And with the incitement, no doubt, of the twice-impeached president.

Sullivan ends more optimistic than I am — that the evidence is overwhelming and damning, and “even though the truth didn’t prevail, some of it managed to see the light of day.” I was angry there weren’t witnesses, though I’ve cooled a bit on that and am resigned to Congress needing to get on with the work in the face of total intransigence (Daniel Goldman, former lead counsel on the House Impeachment Inquiry made some good points about the futility of calling witnesses).

David Frum, someone whose politics are quite apart from my own but who’s been a constant and consistent anti-Trump voice, thinks Trump still lost and is going to keep losing. Even without an impeachment conviction, Trump still faces some number of civil and criminal trials. Given that Frum’s former boss managed to escape any kind of accountability in the interest of “moving on”, I’m not exactly optimistic we’ve learned much.

If this site has a beat, beyond “stuff I find interesting”, it’s roughly tech and media, which just so happens to intersect my actual career. As such, I’ve held John Gruber’s Daring Fireball in high regard for as long as it’s been a going concern — our interests obviously overlap and I will instantly cop to often poorly imitating his pioneering style¹.

Gruber rarely breaks news, even given his well-placed sources inside of Apple, but is instead a sharp and incisive analyst and critic. It’s a vital role, and Daring Fireball is a premier example of how a fractured internet media landscape can help drive accountability, not just contribute to division.

Beyond standbys like “claim chowder” and deciphering PR speak, Gruber’s most pointed and diligent media critique has been aimed at a two-and-a-half-year old cover story by Bloomberg Businessweek headlined “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies”.

The thesis of the reporting by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley is the Chinese government, which ultimately controls the supply chains of every major technology company in the world, has infiltrated hardware vendors and has been secretly inserting tiny chips onto circuit boards that phone home (well, phone back to China) with information that make those computers vulnerable to Chinese infiltration. The companies cited in the story — Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro — denied the claims absolutely.

From Gruber’s original post about Bloomberg’s story:

I see no way around it: either Bloomberg’s report is significantly wrong, at least as pertains to Amazon and Apple, or Apple and Amazon have issued blatantly false denials. You can, perhaps, chalk up Apple’s denial to it being written by Apple PR. I don’t think this would happen, but hypothetically this issue could be deemed so sensitive — either within the company or as a national security issue — that the people at Apple with knowledge of the situation lied to Apple PR. But in my experience, Apple PR does not lie. Do they spin the truth in ways that favor the company? Of course. That’s their job. But they don’t lie, because they understand that one of Apple’s key assets is its credibility. They’d say nothing before they’d lie.

It’s worth noting this was a huge story at the time and everyone, including Gruber, concluded that if the reporting was true, the implications were staggering. If the reporting was true.

Since the story was originally published, every company and government agency cited has denied Bloomberg’s original claim even more vehemently. Given that it’s been over two years and no independent investigation has confirmed the original story, it might be reasonable to assume Bloomberg would have issued a correction or retracted the story by now. In fact, Gruber has called for such a retraction with every link to bloomberg.com, to the point it’s become something of a running joke on the site.

Yesterday, Bloomberg published what seemed to be a coda to the original hidden microchip piece, again by Robertson and Riley, with the throwback headline “The Long Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier”. The piece again returns to a claim that feels like a huge and obvious problem for our hyperconnected world: the vast majority of computers today are made in China, a dictatorship with draconian control over its own populace, and the Chinese government is inserting nearly-impossible to detect hardware on circuitboards to hack governments and giant corporations. But there’s still no actual proof of this happening, which makes the theory little more than a conspiracy.

Gruber’s assessment is scathing:

It’s a 4,000-word exercise in journalistic sophistry. It creates the illusion of something being there, but there is nothing there. The only good purpose this report could serve is as source material for a class on critical thinking.

As is this point-by-point fisking (source) by cybersecurity analyst Matt Tait, which expertly breaks down how Robertson and Riley simply failed to do the kind of basic journalistic due diligence a story like this requires. As Tait notes, the entire saga seems to have stemmed from an unrelated 2016 incident where Apple terminated its relationship with Supermicro over a security incident with their server firmware, mixed with some other rumors and wargaming exercises across various government agencies about how China might infiltrate computers.

What’s baffling is the degree to which Bloomberg has doubled, tripled, and septupled down on this story over the years, despite no actual physical evidence of any hidden microchips. Given the degree to which misinformation, not to mention active disinformation, shapes our world these days, one would hope any media organization with a reputation to uphold would guard against such deception. Until they issue a retraction, I expect the asterisks on Daring Fireball to continue.

The framing of this piece by Sejla Rizvic for The Walrus is about generational warfare on TikTok, and while there is a tasty paragraph bagging on Instagram-preening millennials who need to read something other than Harry Potter, it ends up being so much more about the age of algorithmic intimacy, currently defined by TikTok.

This intimacy may also be the reason for Gen Z’s generational allegiance. Where millennials were cloaked in mostly faceless anonymity online (on LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter) or highly curated photography (Facebook, Instagram), Gen Z’s digital life is dominated by the near-constant production of images and videos of themselves (Snapchat, TikTok), creating a very different relationship between them, their peers, and the rest of the world.

Rizvic, who defines herself as a millennial who came of age at a time where online and offline were still distinct spaces, explores how the generation that’s never been offline and is now entering adulthood has created a new type of intimacy beyond the cynicism of perfectly coiffed social media feeds.

The same algorithm that powers TikTok’s uncanny ability to serve up this intimacy is, of course, not without peril. Philosopher and theorist Byung-Chul Han notes that this “compulsion for transparency flattens the human being itself, making it a functional element within a system”. On a very personal level, TikTok, like social media before it, seems amplify the ideals and neuroses of the culture; on a more macro level, the black box algorithm remains a risk that we would be foolish to simply ignore.