In April of 2010, Steve Jobs wrote an open-letter titled “Thoughts on Flash”¹, where he outlined with typical Jobsian gusto and directness why Apple would not be supporting Adobe’s Flash player on iOS. At the time it caused a small controversy, in part because it was a skirmish between tech companies, and in part because many media companies were dependent on Flash for video and other interactive content, while also starting to figure out what kinds of experiences to build for the then-brand-new iPad.

In hindsight, Jobs’s letter marked a major inflection point for the company. “Thoughts on Flash,” intentionally or not, laid out what you might call the Jobs Doctrine; as Apple has proven over and again, they’re always going to act first in their own self-interest, second to do what’s best for their customers, and on behalf of the their developers and other partners where it makes strategic sense.

This may sound obvious today, but it’s worth reflecting on how different tech was a decade ago, not to mention Apple’s place in it. In April 2010, the top of the line iPhone —indeed the only iPhone they sold — was the 10-month-old 3GS (it would be another year before the iPhone 4, a singularly perfect product, was released) and the iPad had just been unveiled alongside news partners promising a new vision for the media business.

Putting Adobe on notice represented a true turn of fortune for both companies. I have my doubts if there was ever much truth to them, but there were perennial rumors throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s that Adobe might stop building Mac versions of their software and focus solely on Windows. Again, it’s difficult to recall there was a ever time when this would have been considered a threat to what is now the richest company in the world, but it wasn’t so long ago that such a move could have proven existential for Apple². The Jobs Doctrine was a direct result of Apple’s beleaguered period and his letter signaled the company that represented his life’s work would never be put it into a position of reliance like that again.

This past Thursday, while the rest of the world was obsessing over a Reddit brigade upending the stock market, Tim Cook spoke at the Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference, where he once again took aim at what he called the “data-industrial complex”.

In demeanor and temperament, Cook could not be more different than Jobs, but his directness and clarity are very akin to those of his mentor and friend. Beyond his echo of Eisenhower, Cook held nothing back, labeling some tech companies “peddlers of division” and “trackers and hucksters looking to make a quick buck”. He didn’t need to mention names, anyone who’s followed the industry at all knows Cook is talking about Google and, in particular, Facebook.

Cook made a strong moral case against the internet’s current dominant business model, saying “if we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated and sold, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.” It’s clearly something that animates Cook personally, far beyond a spat between businesses.

Of course, this isn’t a mere moral crusade for the CEO of the world’s most valuable company. Cook is providing much-needed global authority after a years-long vacuum of anything resembling leadership, but he’s also staking out a position for technology that humanizes and features that enhance people’s understanding of their tools. Nor is this an extension of the Jobs Doctrine — Apple’s business is doing just fine with our without Facebook. Cook has articulated a vision of a world where people have control over how their data is collected and used.

Facebook’s defenders, or at least those critical of Cook’s take, point out that Apple’s business gives them the luxury of opting out of the thornier side of online advertising, that Facebook provides a service used by billions of people every day, they’ve allowed new types of businesses, and they have a right to make money. Mark Zuckerberg made that exact point, albeit hamfistedly and without convincing any of his critics, by claiming his giant tech company is actually standing up for the little guy.

Cook’s response is, again, simple and straightforward: “If a business is built on misleading users, on data exploitation, on choices that are no choices at all, then it does not deserve our praise. It deserves reform.” And saying Apple is being disingenuous because they don’t have an ad business (well, certainly not a very effective one) is missing the point — Cook clearly doesn’t believe that’s a business worthy of his company and he’s taking responsibility for not going down that path and for giving his users tools to avoid being swept up as well.

It remains to be seen just how much this particular move by Apple is actually going to hurt Facebook’s business, which just reported stellar earnings, going forward. Most people, when you ask them, will say they care about their privacy or online data, but clearly not enough to actually stop using Facebook’s services. Apple may be responsible for some of the headwinds Zuckerberg referred to, but, as I’ve noted before, Facebook has a Trumpian ability to avoid accountability. I still believe Cook and Apple are doing the right thing and hope it’s effective but don’t see much impact on Facebook in the long run.

Indulge me in one final thought experiment: imagine it’s possible to grant Cook and Zuckerberg even more power than they, billionaire CEOs of two of the most recognizable corporations on earth, already have. Imagine, with a snap of their fingers, they could solve the biggest problem facing their respective companies. What might that look like?

For Cook and Apple, I imagine it would be something like shifting their manufacturing out of China, if not entirely, then certainly distributing to anywhere from South Korea, Taiwan, or India, to Mexico or even back to the United States. Cook’s moral standing would be stronger and he might also feel compelled to speak out against the Uyghur persecution or China’s anti-democratic crackdown in Hong Kong or have stood stronger against our own home-grown proto-authoritarian instead of gifting him a Mac Pro.

Ultimately, the core of Apple’s business — building computers, mobile devices, and supporting services — would remain unchanged.

And how might Zuckerberg alter the universe to favor Facebook? Would he simply ether, Thanos-like, those who use his creation to plan insurrections or facilitate genocide? Would he seek to change the hearts and minds of conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers who disseminate lies on a global scale? Would Zuckerberg recognize his leviathan is and has always been a machine for propogating right-wing media and finally tune the algorithms to cut down the rage and noise?

These questions are much harder to reckon with because, unlike Apple’s herculean task of rebuilding a supply chain, Facebook’s challenges seem an order of magnitude harder. And even if it were possible, what remains is still … Facebook. They would continue to be a business that relies on surveilling their users and feeding them content via black-box algorithms, paid for by equally opaque ads. Facebook’s problem is endemic to what it is, it can’t be excised any more than we could separate a soul from a body.

Like everyone this week, I was obsessed with the GameStop story and how a group of Reddit day traders seemingly came out of nowhere wreak havoc on the stock market and take down short-selling hedge funders. I’ve been collecting dozens of links and have thousands of words in a post that will never leave my drafts because by Friday a switch just flipped for me; I was done with this iteration of the cycle we seem to be stuck in, at least for the time being.

GameStop felt compelling because it captured, or at least seemed to, so much of this exact moment in a way that for a few days was powerful and provocative. Are stock indices now as useless as political polling? Is all of this as incredibly stupid, yet funny, but also as dangerous as it seems? Doesn’t it feel good to dunk on Twitter blowhards and hypocritical tech CEOs? How much does CNBC continue to suck? Yes, but after a few days it just felt as exhausting as everything else.

John Herrman, writing in the Times, gets at a lot of this anxiety:

So what’s the joke, exactly? For The_Donald, one “joke” was that a bunch of self-described losers could help Donald Trump become “God Emperor.” (They were happy with “President.”) For WallStreetBets, the “joke” was that a group of self-described losers (their preferred real descriptors are unprintable) could rig the financial system in their own favor. The punchline was GameStop, and tens of billions of dollars in actual market activity.

The bigger joke, shared by these communities and plenty of others, is, well, everything. Everything is a farce and a fraud, and the surest, or at least most available, way to get ahead is to treat it as such. This is a profoundly nihilistic worldview, and one that in plenty of other contexts might meet hard limits, or come with terrible costs.

Candidate Trump was a joke, right up until Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech. Everyone knows the kind of abusive asshole that claims he’s “just joking” as some kind of defense against his being an asshole; the internet has long enabled that as a form of trolling that’s now spilled out into the world.

Brian Feldman sees a kind of novelty in a return to a more actively engaged internet, where shitposting at least beats being washed over by algorithms.

The front page of r/WallStreetBets is dominated by shitposts and memes and rallying cries (the associated Discord is largely unhelpful for anyone trying to learn anything as well), but to better understand the subreddit, I recommend looking at a section of it known as “DD,” which stands for “due diligence.” These posts vary in comprehensiveness, convincingness, and tone, but the best ones harness publicly available info that nobody outside of the finance industry and serious retail investors ever pays attention to. It’s tough to shitpost your way through a due diligence assessment. The DD posts read a lot like (how I remember) the crowdsourced research into the cat-bin lady did: blunt, casual, occasionally tasteless, but still, accurate or genuinely striving to be, using info that’s not tough to find online if you know where to look (or are really motivated).

Absent the infinite number of motivations caught up in the Gamestop rally (profit, justice, instability, laughs), it’s this dynamic that is most interesting to me. The modern internet is one of complacency, letting aggregators and algorithms bring stuff to you, rather than seek it out. It has made the internet worse in many ways. But I tihnk what makes the r/WallStreetBets story so novel is that it’s a lot of people doing research, plumbing data, looking for patterns, in addition to talking shit. Aside from the stuff specific to the finance industry, the Gamestop story is about people on the internet making a deliberate effort to seek out information, rather than waiting for a system to deliver it automatically. It’s the increasingly rare story of people being active in substantial ways — which then kicks off countless, mindless Robinhood transactions.

If this has all got you down, don’t worry: there are Dril tweets.

This is fantastic, overdue news that will make it faster, easier, and safer for (some) New Yorkers to get into lower and central Manhattan. It’s worth celebrating but should’ve happened years ago and desperately needs to be expanded to serve the millions of New Yorkers who exist north of 60th street.

Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Winnie Hu reporting for the Times:

The bikes lanes are the latest victory for cyclists and transportation advocates who have increasingly pushed Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat in his second term, to chip away at the entrenched car culture that has dominated the city’s more than 6,000 miles of streets.

During the mayor’s tenure, city transportation officials have built more than 120 miles of protected bike lanes as part of the city’s efforts to create 1,375 miles of bike lanes, creating the largest urban network in the nation.

De Blasio’s leadership on transit issues and reducing cars in the city has been, frankly, pretty poor; his administration has done the bare minimum to expand access. The pandemic was a massive opportunity to recalibrate the city’s streets for more equitable access and the city completely blew it — if anything, cars are more prevalent (time will tell if this trend sticks around or if people realize owning a car in the city is too much of a pain in the ass).

And huge kudos to Transportation Alternatives, whose multi-decade push for better streets went completely unmentioned in the Times piece, for their Bridges 4 People plan that laid the groundwork for making this happen.

These are pretty raw interviews and outtakes that went into making the published episodes. The archive is incredibly well built — fully searchable, with interactive transcripts, keywords, and citations for researchers.

Just check out this interview with David Bowie from 1997 — the hair, the feather, the casually poised cigarette. Or Herbie Hancock gushing about Quincy Jones writing eight movie scores in one year.