Astead W. Herndon brings history and perspective to Senator Warnock.

I continue to be mystified the news of Russia’s attack on our government and telecom infrastructure, including tech giants like Microsoft, feels like such an underreported story. Of course, this kind of espionage is rarely exciting to most people even when the news is slow.

A great deal of the responsibility for the lack of a response belongs squarely with President Trump, who, when he even bothers acknowledging the attack, it’s mostly to deflect blame or falsely accuse China. Trump, who one year later still continues to fail at managing the response to the pandemic, is endangering all of us by also failing to effectively engage a known adversary on a 21st century battlefield. The best we can hope for at this point is to rebuild the attacked networks, investigate what happened, and prosecute those whose negligence failed us, starting with the President. My hopes aren’t high.

The Markup put their Citizen Browser project to work in the Georgia runoff election to see what happened when Facebook started re-allowing political ads. Newsfeeds got more partisan, misinformation re-appeared, and conservative news sources like Breitbart dominated. Democrats spent the most, but conservative news posts produced the most engagement.

A few things to note about this story: first and foremost, none of it is surprising. We know already that conservative news and opinion dominate the social network — most likely because the mechanics of Facebook favor outrage and conservatism is reactionary by definition. We also know that tweaks to the product that would reduce this effect are regularly shot down by politically aligned executives.

The sample size for the research for this story is also small, and under-represents Latino and self-identified Trump voters, as they spell out in the article. However, since Facebook doesn’t allow researchers access to their data, it’s the best we’ve got. This is good, important work from The Markup.

It’s not the least bit surprising, I did find it a little interesting that three media-heavy newsletters — Study Hall, Today in Tabs, and Deez Links — are running a home-grown classified ad system in their newsletters. The latter two are hosted on Substack, which seems to be fine with people supplying their own ads and fits generally with Substack’s ethos of trusting writers to know what’s best for their audience. It’ll be interesting to see if Substack wants to offer these ads themselves, which would obviously put them more on the incentives path that has caused so many problems for social media, or if they’ll leave that alone.

The classifieds approach that Study Hall built strikes me as pretty ideal. It’s a fairly niche audience — geographically centered in New York but not exclusively, lots of media people who would likely classify themselves as “very online” — and doesn’t rely on surveillance to be effective. As a reader who pays to subscribe to at least one of those newsletters, I’m even fine with these showing up in my feed, as they seem like other bits of media I’d be interested in, not some D2C product I’ve been retargeted to have follow me around the web. Imagine that.

Mike Dickerson, writing for Knock:

Many drivers under the Albertsons Companies umbrella are union employees, while Ralphs delivery is operated by Instacart and Target uses Shipt, a similar app. With this move from Vons and Albertsons, most shoppers in California will no longer have a unionized choice for grocery deliveries.

These layoffs are unsurprising after the passage of Proposition 22, which gutted worker protections while making it easier for companies to shift financial burdens onto newly-designated “independent contractors.”

This truly does lay bare how much of a race to the bottom the “gig economy” is.

I haven’t written Turbo Pascal in about 25 years, but do you ever really forget?

Like my colleague Bert, the vision of a dirtbag John Connor cracking an ATM with an Atari Portfolio in Terminator 2 left an indelible impression on me. Unlike Bert, I did not set out to recreate this important artifact 25 years later using an animated SVG or emulated DOS terminal.

Aaron Gordon, writing for Vice, about what the rehabilitation of the Farley Post Office with private office space means, and the triumph of “privately owned public spaces”:

The project’s backers have argued the private development was the only way to make it viable, and so it is either a smaller train hall with lots of office space or no train hall at all. But this, like many other aspects of urban development schemes, demonstrates a lamentable lack of imagination. The total cost, which includes funding from Amtrak, a federally funded agency, was $1.6 billion, a lot of money by any measure but hardly insurmountable for a project with local, state, and federal financing, and about half of the original Penn Station’s cost in inflation-adjusted dollars. Like so many other redevelopment projects in the city over recent decades, this whole project is not about palaces by and for the people. It is about “economic development,” and the people get a little something for the trouble of selling off a massively valuable real estate asset that we used to own.

And who is the lessee of the nearly 700,000 square feet of previously public space that has been so unceremoniously and garishly privatized? Facebook, of course.

Kate Conger, in the New York Times:

The new union, called the Alphabet Workers Union after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was organized in secret for the better part of a year and elected its leadership last month. The group is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents workers in telecommunications and media in the United States and Canada.

But unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.

Google has, in many ways, been representative the challenges that face this generation of tech workers. They have a large, very socially liberal and activist employee base that embodies many of the (at least purported) ideals of the Bay Area. At the management level, though, Google has struggled with managing explosive growth, how the company deals with government, and issues of diversity and inclusion. Google was where James Damore went off on his pitiful tirade about an “ideological echo chamber” and it’s also the company that recently fired Timnit Gebru for doing her job as an ethicist. The union, with 250 members (Google currently employs over 120,000 people) and affilication with the Communication Workers of America (who also represent unions at media orgs, like the Times), is a great start and one I’m happy to see.

Collective Action in Tech has a solid explainer about non-contract unions and what the Alphabet Workers Union is hoping to accomplish. This piece in Vice is also good and includes some additional background details about the CWA’s efforts to unionize tech employees.

The Washington Post got a recording of a phone call where President Trump pressures Georgia’s Secretary of State to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, two months after the fact and a few days before a historic special election where Georgians are electing both of their senators. Meanwhile, the pandemic continues to rage and there’s no national leadership or strategy for improving distribution of the vaccine.

There’s all the usual bluster and Trumpian bullshit on full display during the call, what strikes me as a little different is how truly desperate he sounds. He’s begging Brad Raffensperger to break the law — he sounds like a jilted boyfriend trying to get back in his ex’s good graces. It’s genuinely pathetic.

What an institution. There was a time when TAL was unmissable for me, I haven’t listened regularly in years mostly because my life is just different (work, family, etc).

Worth going back and taking in the fresh voice of Ira Glass from the very first episode. Featuring a truly beautiful story from none other than Kevin Kelly.