Congress overrode Trump’s veto of the defense authorization act with an overwhelming bipartisan majority, the first veto override of his disastrous presidency that mercifully ends in 19 days.

One part of the bill is this anti-money laundering regulation that will mean the United States is no longer the easiest place to hide money in the world.

An historic anti-corruption measure ending anonymous companies in the United States became law on Friday, capping a more than decade-long campaign by transparency advocates, after both Chambers of Congress voted to override the president’s veto of the annual defense bill. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition, which led the organizing effort, praised the enactment of the Corporate Transparency Act, which was included in the National Defense Authorization Act.

Our World in Data has a comprehensive look at why the cost of renewable energy has decreased so dramatically over the past decade and what it might mean for our ability to combat climate change and build a more equitable energy infrastructure. The 89% drop in the cost of photovoltaic solar is hard to fathom.

The article has a full explanation of the history of photovoltaics, a roughly 70 year journey from powering satellites to the cheapest form of energy on earth. Basically, as we built more solar generating capacity, our understanding increased, we got better at it, making it cheaper, allowing us to build out even more capacity, learn more, and so on in a virtuous cycle.

Even better, energy storage (like batteries) also follow the same learning curve as renewable energy generation; the more we make the cheaper it gets (current battery tech will start to hit some hard limits as we exhaust our supply of, say, lithium, whereas solar energy is essentially limitless. All the more reason to keep researching new storage solutions!)

Fossil fuels don’t have the same virtuous cycle dynamics, however — there’s a hard limit on how cheap, for example, coal can get, and we’re already there. This is even true for natural gas, which has gotten cheaper thanks to an increased supply from fracking, but doesn’t have the same long term virtuous learning cycle we see for solar.

All told this is fantastic news and points to a huge opportunity to build out a more resilient, cleaner, cheaper global energy infrastructure. Another post, also from Our World in Data, broadly outlines the two-fold problem of energy today: 1. a lack of low-carbon sources and 2. a lack of access to any energy. The first is a problem primarily of high-GDP countries¹, who have had enough cheap (but dirty) energy to become rich in the first place. The second affects low-GDP countries who haven’t built out the energy infrastructure. The opportunity here is to raise the living standards of countries with low GDPs while moving everyone to renewables.

One last meta, media point: I’ve been spending a lot of time with Our World in Data this past year, specifically their pandemic data sources. What a fantastic site! As they note on their motivations page, there’s a gap between what gets reported on a day-to-day basis and a broader analysis of the massive amount of information that shapes our world. In this instance, the data point about renewables may have provided a suitable peg for a traditional story, but it’s not the kind of story that fits into a typical news cycle. Our World in Data is working to make sure those gaps are filled.

From The New Yorker in 2009:

Hip-hop feeds on the aggression of post-pubescent males. And Dumile draws on the aggression of a particular type of male who came of age in a particular era. When he claims to “eat rappers like part of a complete breakfast,” when he challenges other m.c.s to battle for Atari cartridges, when he yells “Zoinks!” mid-rhyme, he’s signalling those who grew up with Saturday-morning cartoons and “The Dukes of Hazzard.” For his listeners, his references—“Good Times,” popping wheelies, karate classes—evoke lost innocence, even when the topic is grim.

My childhood could not have been more different than Dumile’s (or Coates’s) but we’re roughly of the same generation and his music, with its pop culture throwbacks and nerdy sidetracks, always felt close. I didn’t discover MF DOOM until 2003 or so, as he was cementing his prolific genius, and it subtly but definitively altered my view of art, creativity, and hip-hop. DOOM was truly inimitable, a singular artist. Rest In Peace.

Also from this week’s New Yorker, Anna Wiener reports on Substack and the kind of media the newsletter platform portends. I really appreciate the historical perspective here and the way she ties the rise of desktop publishing, not just blogging, to the current trends of self-publishing online.

Overall, I think Substack is on the right path, and Wiener’s piece does a fantastic job of covering where the service is a good fit (“Substack tone”) and some of its challenges, particularly around moderation and the culture war that tends to subsume all media.

Wiener ponders whether Substack’s vision is the media future we actually want, which might sound like a bit of an echo of the question that haunted the blogs we now pine for:

Readers of magazines, newspapers, and many Web sites, which publish established writers alongside emerging ones, automatically encounter new voices; on Substack, the most successful newsletters are almost always written by people who have already cultivated an audience at traditional publications or built up a following elsewhere. (I learned about “Maybe Baby” via the Instagram Explore algorithm.) Many of these writers, like Yglesias, consolidated their reputations in the previous two decades, as bloggers, before leveraging that work into book deals or columns at traditional outlets; now, having built large followings, they are working as free agents. Substack is a natural fit for the influencer, the pundit, the personality, and the political contrarian. It’s debatable whether this represents “a better future for news.” But it’s great business for Substack.

…

But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want. A robust press is essential to a functioning democracy, and a cultural turn toward journalistic individualism might not be in the collective interest. It is expensive and laborious to hold powerful people and institutions to account, and, at many media organizations, any given article is the result of collaboration between writers, editors, copy editors, fact checkers, and producers.

The future bloggers wanted in the early aughts, with millions of sites sustained by … micropayments? ads? never materialized, but the style they pioneered ended up largely victorious. The newspapers and magazines that are thriving today have as much in common with last decade’s blogs as they do with the versions of themselves from a few decades earlier — what is today’s New York Times, with a styles sections headed by Choire Sicha, but the best bloggers plus the world’s best hard news and politics reporters (old news hacks will no doubt claim it’s the bloggers who took after them, which is both true and irrelevant). Ultimately, it’s probably ok that Substack is primarily for “the influencer, the pundit, the personality, and the political contrarian” since it will always be one platform among many on the web.

Beyond how they handle moderating the actual content¹, I see two business challenges ahead for Substack:

1. Untangle themselves from “the newsletter platform” and become something more general-purpose, that embraces the web and the individuality of their writers. I’m confident they’re working hard on this one and if they succeed, we’ll remember Substack as the newsletter platform the same way we remember Netflix for their red envelopes.
2. Sort out a new bundle. This is going to be much trickier — not only do they need to figure out the product but they’ll need to corral some percentage of writers, all of whom are free to take their subscriber lists somewhere else whenever they’d like.

Traditional media thinkers and critics want platforms like Substack to take on the full gamut of what traditional media has done, to report the hard news as well as the lifestyle and opinion sections. That bundle made sense for publishers at one time (and continues to make sense for publishers like the Times with large, international audiences) because the lifestyle section paid for the hard news but it’s been completely disintermediated by the internet. It would be fantastic if Substack were to fund the kind of journalism that holds power accountable, but I don’t think it’s a requirement.

I also definitely noticed a shortage of bucatini in New York this year, though my commitment to tracking down why isn’t nearly as great as Rachel Handler’s.

But it did not come back. Spring turned to summer (allegedly; there is no hard proof of time actually moving forward). Summer turned to fall. All the while we searched high and low for bucatini, at Whole Foods and Russo’s and New York Market and Key Food, our friends searching at City Acres and Food Town and Brooklyn Harvest, stumbling upon it only occasionally and then panic-buying it, then feeling bad for panic-buying it, then repeating the cycle.

The so-called gig economy is one of the more pernicious and despicable offshoots of the rise of 21st century tech. Unlike, say, disinformation and epistemological collapse, the solutions to the uberization of everything are more apparent. Strong worker protections are increasingly politically challenging but something we have a framework for.

Better still is owning the platform outright, collectively, rather than simply being a human endpoint controlled by a corporation with billions of dollars in venture funding. Owning the platform brings its own challenges — those corporations are using those billions of venture funding, after all — but I love the punk tech aesthetic of this story.

This episode of You’re Wrong About does a fantastic job of getting past the generational warfare (there’s also a good discussion about that very thing) and digs into why it is older Americans are uniquely vulnerable to conspiracy theories and disinformation that runs rampant on Facebook and finds its way to Fox News. The individual stories of how families and relationships are being destroyed by misinformation are terrible and sad, the sociological impact for the country is terrifying. The Trump years have shown our greatest challenge as a nation is epistemological, we’re going to need to understand how to more effectively counter an alternate universe built on deception.

Also worth reading is Michael Hobbes’s piece in HuffPo that was the basis for a lot of the episode.

I share some of the nostalgia, if not necessarily the wistfulness, of the passing of Flash as my friend Mike Davidson. Just seeing some of those hallmark names from the late-90’s and mid-00’s — Praystation, Natzke, WDDG, Hillman Curtis — is a trip to another epoch of internet culture.

Mike is right about Flash being a tremendous piece of transitional technology:

Flash, from the very beginning, was a transitional technology. It was a language that compiled into a binary executable. This made it consistent and performant, but was in conflict with how most of the web works. It was designed for a desktop world which wasn’t compatible with the emerging mobile web. Perhaps most importantly, it was developed by a single company. This allowed it to evolve more quickly for awhile, but goes against the very spirit of the entire internet. Long-term, we never want single companies — no matter who they may be — controlling the very building blocks of the web. The internet is a marketplace of technologies loosely tied together, each living and dying in rhythm with the utility it provides.

A lot of what I miss about Flash today is the zaniness, the goofy games and personal sites, the nonsense animations. So much of that got captured by platforms and turned into memes or influencer chum, which was probably inevitable as the internet continued to grow exponentially.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Jason Snell’s “20 Macs for 2020” series — enough that I belatedly became a Six Colors subscriber! Snell has such a keen sense of decades of the personal computer’s history, and Apple’s place in it, with each post a delightful throwback that doesn’t just rely on nostalgia.

I think he’s spot on with his number one pick (it really is wild to remember a time when everything was translucent plastic), my favorites were probably the original PowerBooks and the Titanium PowerBook G4.

Matt Webb originally presented this at ThingsCon, it’s fantastic as an expanded blog post. So much of the current tech epoch has made it difficult to imagine alternate futures and non-dystopias that aren’t fully captured by ever-expanding platforms. I want to imagine utopias again.