Two years ago, a shelf of ice half the size of Rhode Island calved from Antarctica, where the effects of climate change are being witnessed in some of the most profound and acute ways. Now, that iceberg is set to crash into the island of South Georgia, off the coast of the southern tip of South America. While it has shrunk in size over the years, the iceberg is still roughly the same size as the island it’s headed for.

The attorneys general of forty-six states, plus DC and Guam, have jointly filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Facebook over its acquisitions. Somewhat confusingly, the FTC is also filing a similar, but separate, suit.

During all the trials this summer, I found the anti-competitive angle a bit specious — I couldn’t see a resolution that would solve any actual problems, and the questions mostly seemed to point to solutions that were only going to make things worse (see: EU cookie compliance laws).

This feels like a right direction, if not the right call exactly. At best, it feels like the attorneys general are recognizing Facebook is a unique entity, and uniquely dangerous, which justifies a specifically focused remedy.

The thing is, though, Facebook has a Trumpian teflon veneer¹ to it and I’m not certain a loss for them at the end of the inevitable, long legal wrangling actually ends up making them pay the price for any anti-competitive behavior.

Take Instagram — the tale we tell about that acquisition is Facebook needed them to stay relevant but the fact is, Instagram needed Facebook’s infrastructure, particularly on the ad side, just as badly. For all the praise heaped on the Instagram founders over the years, there’s no guarantee they would have actually made a business out of their trendy app.

If Facebook is forced to spin them off as a separate company, the app still needs that infrastructure. To make it work, both technically and legally, Facebook could open up their infrastructure and resell it to Instagram as a customer — maybe that becomes a line of business for them or maybe it’s solely for one company, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing much changes other than a few thousand engineers have to spend two years building it all out.

And in the end, none of that does anything to address the structural problem of Facebook: they refuse to take responsibility for all the information pollution they spew into the environment.

The time to break this up was before it happened in the first place.

In her introduction to this piece, Tufekci sets it up as an exercise in sharpening an argument, specifically a piece she wrote for The Atlantic that Trump’s now-monthlong assault on the 2020 election is a style of a coup we should be paying closer attention to. She invited Cegłowski to write the counterargument, a style I frankly love, and he argues the election actually went relatively smoothly, that Trump’s bluster is something we should ignore (or, in the case of the complicit GOP, exploit for their own purposes), and the real problem facing the country now is a political one where the GOP is actually positioned to win elections outright.

While the setup here is something of a debate, and at the risk of sounding like a dreaded triangulating centrist, I might suggest they’re both right. Tufekci’s argument that what Trump is attempting is a kind of coup, if not an according-to-Hoyle coup d’état, is a warning obviously worth heeding because of the Overton window-shifting nature of the GOP’s illiberalism. One way to think of American conservatism as a whole is a kind of slow motion coup, that has spanned ideologies and even parties since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (or back to the very founding).

Cegłowski’s warnings, though, are more urgent and dire.

The lower down the ballot you go, the more unpleasant the results. State house majorities that seemed ours for the taking in Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania instead got redder. We couldn’t even flip two seats in the Minnesota senate, where Democrats control both the state house and the governor’s mansion, and Walter Mondale roams the earth.

We didn’t lose these state races because of gerrymandering, or lack of money, or any kind of Republican tampering with the electoral process. Our failure was political, and all the more inexcusable because it took place in a year when the opposing party had failed at governing so badly that it had racked up a body count. And still we couldn’t make the case.

As Zeynep points out in her essay, these newly-elected Republican legislatures will now have the opportunity to redraw Congressional districts based on the 2020 census. Even with no change in the vote, this redistricting process would net the Republican party a House majority in 2022. And we know from history that the midterm vote is likely to favor them. So not only can Republicans expect to win a House majority in 2022, but they have a fair shot at winning it with a plurality of the national vote.

I do think Cegłowski is a bit quick to dismiss the anti-democratic features and outright voter suppression that have aided the GOP for generations now (and which they will surely begin to ramp back up with bullshit claims of voter fraud aided by Trump’s post-election bombast), but overall believe he’s correct about the political challenges ahead.

Cegłowski has spent years organizing what should be close but winnable campaigns for Democrats across the country and keeps coming up short — he knows better than most the political challenges out in the real world, beyond the sniping on Twitter. And while it may make plenty of us angry to know the GOP can get away with — be rewarded even! — outright lying, collapsing democratic institutions, flaming an endless culture war, and dismantling the post-New Deal idea of governance at every opportunity, it’s hard to deny they’ve succeeded on nearly every front. His conclusions are a complement to Corey Robin’s: the Left needs to get its shit together or risk annihilation.

Reading this piece, I was reminded of a certain despair¹ I felt in the immediate aftermath of this year’s election, when it was clear Biden had won but had not officially been called. Other than Trump’s loss, the outcome was actually pretty great for the GOP, which held the Senate, gained seats in the House, and expanded victories across state and local legislatures. The Trump-led GOP, despite four years of outright incompetence, failed governance, and blatant discrimination against literally every minority in the country, managed to actually improve their share of the vote among every demographic except white men. Imagine predicting in 2016 that Trump would would have lost support among men without a college degree and increased his support among Black or Latino voters. The realignment that 2016 hinted at seems to have solidified, into what Cegłowski astutely shows as a bifurcation into “two disconnected public spheres”:

One of these spheres comprises the world of Fox News, talk radio, the Sinclair media empire, highly ideological local papers, and the Qanon stuff your uncle watches on YouTube. The other sphere is the world most of us inhabit, the world of NPR, the New York Times, cable news, and what used to be called the mainstream media.

These two worlds are aware of each other (this is not an argument about “epistemic closure” or “filter bubbles”), but in the same way that rival religions or sports fans are aware of each other. You don’t get to mix between them—you have to pick a side.

These worlds are also not morally equivalent. Helped along by Trumpism, the Republican public sphere has severed its connections with reality in a way that is not true on the Democratic side. They have also adopted transgressive political norms, including loathsome incitements to political violence.

This is a stark renunciation of Obama’s hope and change politics, or even the more pragmatic belief that the shifting demographics of the country would mean a natural leftward shift. Instead, there’s real work to be done to bridge those divided spheres and build a better country while simultaneously fighting against a political party that has succeeded wildly by simply tearing down. Of course, that’s always been the work.

Obama was many things as president, but there’s no denying his was a singular intellect and temperament.

The amount you enjoy the entirety of this post by Zach Tellman may depend on how much you enjoy nerdy digressions about programming languages — I found those bits interesting but the technical nuances are skimmable.

Overall, Tellman has written the best takedown of Paul Graham since Maciej Cegłowski’s genre-defining “Dabblers and Blowhards”. Where Cegłowski relied on wit, humor, and his personal background as a painter and programmer, Tellman has written a precise and damning technical dismantling of Arc, Graham’s stillborn programming language, that equally serves to highlight Graham’s failure as the public intellectual he so desperately wants to be thought of. Graham’s reliance on intuition, Tellman makes clear, has served him poorly in both pursuits.

Graham doesn’t work through the consequences of his own model because the model doesn’t matter; what matters is sharing some things that feel right and true.

Graham, with the possible exception of the equally lamentable thought leader Marc Andreessen, is the person probably most responsible for contemporary Silicon Valley culture, with its adulation of “first principles” thinking and scorning of anything that reeks of premature optimization.

The problem with this ethos, which has so captured tech over the past decade and half, is how disastrously it plays out when tech comes into contact with the real world. Communities, cities, even national governments rarely hold up to the scrutiny of “first principles” because they’ve developed and warped and eroded and been rebuilt over time; obeying local laws or regulations, or thinking through the consequences of disruption, start to look like the dreaded “premature optimization” if you’re Uber or Facebook, flush with VC cash and aiming to dent the universe.

“Profoundly unserious”, as Tellman so astutely puts it, is the exact right descriptor not just of Graham but the legions that have come to build their fortunes in his wake. These fortunes, owing much more to good luck than solving some intractable world-altering problem, distort reality for the winners such that they think they actually have something novel to say.

Like Graham, too much of tech has no interest in engaging with or even understanding the broader world they are disrupting. What they fail to comprehend, and what makes them so unserious, is how their philosophy is the same justification used by tyrants for as long as civilization has existed.

The reality of what Uber actually is is settling in. Driverless cars continue their perpetual “five years off” trajectory and it seems like the company is going to simply continue exploiting structural weaknesses — in labor, in local and state governments, in the decidedly American rejection of mass transit — while they unprofitably limp along.

This is a pretty wild (and, from what I hear from my Bay Area friends, maddening) situation. Apparently, one of the routers in AT&T’s infrastructure had some corrupt memory, which was flipping bits (literally turning zeroes into ones or vice versa) and breaking people’s internet connections. And because the router in question only connected to some parts of the internet, only certain sites, like Twitter, were broken while others, like Google, loaded just fine.

It gets weirder — given enough traffic, some of the bitflipped packets even had valid checksums, so corrupted packages would come through as correct because the proper bit had been flipped on both the packet and the checksum.

I can’t help but think some of the assumptions we’ve carried with us for the past 50 or so years might need a rethink given the scale of the contemporary internet.

There’s a lot to be angry about with this story. The vaccines are being developed by private companies, who have pre-sold hundreds of millions of doses to world governments. That fact alone is something of an indictment of how our market-driven world works today but it is, for all its advantages and flaws, how the world works.

The Trump administration pre-purchased 100 million doses this summer — that’s enough for 50 million Americans since the vaccine requires two doses to be fully effective. The administration passed on the opportunity to purchase more doses and is now scrambling to get more, which may prove impossible since Pfizer has already pre-sold doses to other countries. The pan in pandemic means global, after all.

It’s the exact kind of colossal fuckup Trump has made a hallmark of his presidency — a complete self-own borne of his own rank stupidity, complete incuriosity, and total incompetence. He’s signing an executive order with basically no legal standing that will attempt to force Pfizer to sell the doses they’ve already pre-sold to other countries to the American government, in an attempt to cover up for his abject failure. It’s the kind of proto-fascism his base loves and will inject into their hate-filled veins instead of recognizing how much it’s literally killing them.

Moncef Slaoui, the top science advisor for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed”, said he has no idea what the president is talking about regarding the “America first” directive.

Thorp has a rare talent for bridging art, technology, sociology, and ethics in his work.

To live in data is to be incessantly extracted from; to be classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold and surveilled. Data (our data) is mined and processed for profit, power and political gain. Our clicks and likes and footsteps feed new digital methods of control. In Living in Data, Thorp asks a crucial question of our time: how do we stop passively inhabiting data, and become active citizens of it?

Thorp also made a gorgeous complementary reading list.

The political scientist Corey Robin has been very challenging for me, in a good way, since I first read his book The Reactionary Mind a few years back. I’ve returned to his thesis throughout the Trump years as a bit of grounding during what often felt like a hopeless and inescapable shift in American history.

In this interview with David Klion, Robin argues Trump is fundamentally weak in part because the weakness of the Left has given conservatives nothing to react to, and because, like Carter before him, Trump is presiding over the end of a political age with no ability to define what’s next.

Many of the attributes people decry in Trump and his followers were primary features of the conservatism I was describing in The Reactionary Mind (and got a lot of flak from liberals for so describing). To my mind, the comparisons between Trump and Hitler or Mussolini come from people who only began thinking about American conservatism and the Republican Party when Trump came along.

This does skip some parts of the culture that have changed and are unique, if not to Trumpism, then today’s Right: the rise and dominance of right-wing media (Fox News, talk radio, and local Sinclair news stations) in many parts of the country, the distorted reality bubbles driven by social media that have QAnon conspiracy theorists in Congress, the cult of personality that surrounds Trump specifically as his family continues to scheme and grift, the politicization of every part of culture coinciding with the nationalization of politics, and the Right’s full-scale culture war. I imagine Robin would point to historical precedents for these but what does seem unprecedented today is the way they’ve all merged into a new socio-political order that has elevated a kind of white, Christian nationalism as the culmination of the GOP.

Even if you don’t fully subscribe to Robin’s thesis, the notion of reactionism as a driving political force is certainly compelling. Robin argues conservatism is fundamentally reactive in nature, somewhat paradoxically given how they tend to define themselves, an argument that I tend to find compelling. Something I’ve found frustrating and disappointing from the Left these past few years is how reactive the broader political movement has become, a riff on the “Trump derangement syndrome” that Trumpists love to sneer about. Here, Robin argues we on the Left need to, essentially, get our shit together or risk being outflanked for much longer given the inherently conservative structure of the electoral system.

I found this piece from Charlie Warzel, about the nature of hard and soft of political vs cultural power to be a good complement to Robin. Cultural change by definition veers left and brings with it a great deal of influence, which conservatives either diametrically oppose to or attempt to co-opt (and sometimes both, which is why they come off as so phony and insincere). Trump has always wanted that kind of power but has never really wielded it — even as a gossip page regular or reality TV host, he was a funhouse mirror to the deficiencies of the zeitgeist. So much of the frustration at the heart of Trumpism can be seen as a reaction to still not having the kind of cultural cachet of, say, Obama. The end result has been to instead build out an alternate reality where what they think of as culture is all there is.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s election, pro-Trump media pundits bandied about the slogans “Conservatism is the new counterculture” and “Conservatism is the new punk rock.” But the pro-Trump media didn’t create a counterculture as much as a dangerous counter-reality — one that prods mainstream media organizations to push back harder to debunk the lies.

Virginia Heffernan offers a somewhat more optimistic view of Trump as a “pop-culture phenomenon, not an ideological one”, subject to the mercurial vagaries of fashion.