In 2017, a twenty-year-old man was driving recklessly at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour when he crashed his car, killing himself and his two teenage passengers. Two of the victim’s parents claimed Snapchat’s speed filter, which displays a speedometer overlaid on a video, encouraged this kind of behavior and the company should be held liable. The case was initially dismissed, saying essentially that the company can’t be held liable for user generated content, roughly in line with the kinds of protections social media companies have held under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has now overruled that first decision, saying Section 230 doesn’t apply in this case because the flaw isn’t in the content that was uploaded to the social network but the design of the app itself. Adi Robertson, reporting for The Verge:

The parents claimed many teenagers believed — and that Snap knew they believed — they’d get a secret achievement for hitting speeds of 100 miles per hour. Snap countered that no such achievement existed and that it was just providing a tool for users to post their own content, an action mostly shielded under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The Ninth Circuit didn’t rule on whether Snap was liable. But it concluded that it wasn’t protected here by Section 230, which prevents sites and apps from being sued over what users post. Instead, it said the lawsuit “presents a clear example of a claim that simply does not rest on third-party content.” The company “indisputably designed” the reward system and speed filter, which allegedly created a defective product. “In short, Snap, Inc. was sued for the predictable consequences of designing Snapchat in such a way that it allegedly encouraged dangerous behavior.”

The distinction here is subtle but important and I think it’s a good sign that the government is finally starting to add some nuance and a more sophisticated understanding of how technology is actually used and shapes our everyday lives. This case in particular is a good distinction between the kind of protection Section 230 is meant to provide and the responsibility we should expect from tech companies. Snap’s absurd defense that it was providing a speedometer tool is laughable to anyone who considers how Snapchat is actually used.

Social media, as we broadly understand it, has been with us for a decade-and-a-half now and it’s clear we’re living with a tyranny of what Gianpiero Petriglieri calls the “unprepared overachiever”.

Unlike the insecure overachievers that corporations favor, unprepared overachievers have no patience to ponder the implications of their work. Whereas the former long for approval and try to be perfect, the latter favor data and do not hesitate to try things out. They move fast and break things, and if what they broke turns out to be of value, they apologize and pledge to do better next time. Failure, after all, is learning in disguise. Isn’t it?

These unprepared overachievers, which is really just another way of saying high-functioning sociopaths, include not just executives like Snap’s Evan Spiegel, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Twitter’s Jack Dorsey but VCs like Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel, who fuel this limitless ambition, damning all consequences.

For years, preternaturally young tech moguls, brimming with an unchecked faith in their own naive view of the world, built unimaginable fortunes and seemingly unassailable influence with basically zero pushback from their peers, government, media, or users. That tide may finally be slowly turning.

News from the pasta world continues to delight and intrigue, this time with a bit less drama.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created a “dynamic noodle” that actually changes shape, from flat to three-dimensional, as it cooks.

Each new pasta design starts out flat and unassuming, but bounces and swells into three dimensions when boiled. In a paper published Wednesday in Science Advances, the researchers say the flat-to-plump pasta is not only fun to make, but uses less packaging, has a smaller carbon footprint and cooks faster than traditional dried pasta.

Rather than extrude the pasta through a die, it’s first flattened out and then stamped with strategic patterns that cause the shape to transform as it cooks. There’s some theorizing about how the more efficient pasta could be used in emergency situations or in the space station, but really it’s just cool to make flat things not flat.

The nerds at Carnegie Mellon aren’t the only ones having fun with semolina. Dan Pashman, host of the Sporkful podcast spent three years developing a new pasta shape that could be speared with a fork and also effectively hold on to sauce. The result is cascatelli (inspired by the Italian word for waterfall), which America’s Test Kitchen writer Kate Bernot says helped her reconsider her relationship with pasta more generally:

Cascatelli’s true culinary contribution is that it has spurred home cooks — myself included — to think differently, and more deeply, about pasta.

Despite pasta’s ubiquity, most of us don’t think critically about which shapes we like best and why.

“When we talk on The Sporkful about a food in great detail, one of my favorite reactions that I’ll get is people will say, ‘I never knew I had such strong opinions about that,’” Pashman says. “When cascatelli came out, it caused people to interrogate their own opinions and experiences with pasta shapes and to start to realize like, ‘Oh my God, yes, spaghetti does suck.’”

Pashman’s opposition to spaghetti comes from its slipperiness, the difficulty of saucing it well and getting it onto your fork — he thinks most people would agree spaghetti is a suboptimal shape, if only we thought about it.

I’m pretty sure I spied a bite of cascatelli in the first episode Waffles and Mochi, but don’t start planning a cascatelli party just yet: shipping times for the new shape are currently twelve weeks.

Ordinarily, a former president deciding to take up blogging wouldn’t exactly be news, or it might be as an addendum to an announcement of an outreach strategy coinciding with a new foundation or some other meaningful form of post-presidential statesmanship.

Of course, Trump was never much of a statesman and his long-promised media network has now started to materialize in the form of a completely generic web page styled to look like a 2009-era also-ran social network, if it were designed by a fresh-faced Liberty University grad. Ever since Trump was neutered by Facebook, Twitter, et al there’s been an ongoing guess as to what his outlet of choice might look like, whether it would be working himself up into a soaked lather with the My Pillow guy on OANN or joining his fellow racists over at Gab. Paying his failed campaign manager millions of dollars for the equivalent of a Wordpress theme built by fiverr is, like so many things Trump, shocking but not surprising. Hilariously, and also not surprisingly, are the nearly two months of pathetic id-posting already seeded to the site. (One can’t help but wonder if anyone actually told the big guy the site wasn’t yet public when he started proto-tweeting back in March).

Trump’s blog is, one’s gotta admit, a platonic ideal for such a soulless creature, a gaping maw for his unedited bile that ends, naturally, with a call to sign up to once again get scammed, shamelessly.

For a while now, there’s been a meme about the dynamics of the Republican party orienting itself towards “an audience of one” — whether it’s supplicants praising dear leader on Fox News or the state of Arizona’s pathetic recount efforts. The entire goal, it seemed, was to be granted the gift of a single tweet that could change fortunes and make — or destroy — political careers. It’s a testament to many things (a plurality of Americans’ commitment to white supremacy among them), primarily Trump’s limitless ego and constitutional lack of shame.

For wrangling the internet in ways they never could, the media anointed Trump as some kind of savant, but his real power was much more atavistic. Less wunderkind than carnival shrieker, Trump used social networks to create a funhouse mirror that reflected back on himself.

The tech companies that comprise social media, after helping to put him in the White House and spread his dangerous and hateful lies for years, finally took away his ability to manipulate the endless panopticon of obsequious asskissers vying to play to that singular audience; now the reward isn’t a tweet that will be breathlessly reported on but a memo DICTATED BUT NOT READ, texted to the loyal faithful. He’s back in the only way he could be.

The saga of Nuzzel comes to its inevitable conclusion: getting built into Twitter proper. I was genuinely surprised to see media people lamenting this as I thought it had happened years ago (Nuzzel had earlier been acquired by newsfeed app Scroll, which is the company that Twitter is scooping up).

I was an early fan of Nuzzel and, for certain stretches of time, it was the primary way I navigated Twitter. Mostly, it was a personal revolt against Twitter’s algorithmic timeline, something I still lament but have ultimately given in to. For a certain generation of Twitter user who didn’t care about Twitter’s goals of increasing engagement, a combination of using lists of followers plus an app like Nuzzel was a way to keep what was good without fully succumbing to Twitter’s black box.

If you never tried Nuzzel out, the ingenious bit was it generated a feed comprised solely of links from the people you followed. By default, a link had to appear from multiple followees in order to show up in your feed and, unlike the algorithms that drive social media, you could tweak those to your own personal liking.

Media people loved it and Nuzzle was able to build topic-driven reports as well as a newsletter curation product. Obviously, that level of nuance and fiddling makes for much more of a niche product than the sort of general purpose news firehose that Twitter provides, but it’s always been a solid, well-thought out product. I’m glad to hear there are plans to keep the ideas that Nuzzel germinated in place, post-acquisition.

It sounds like Nuzzel will get integrated into Twitter’s plans for subscription newsletters, which seems like an ideal fit. A “Nuzzel signal” built into a newsreader that highlights posts from people you follow or links that have been surfaced by your curated lists would be really useful and a welcome alternative to the opaque algorithmic feed.

If you were around in the early days of blogging, you probably know what it means to get “dooced” — essentially, to get fired for blogging about your job or coworkers. Back in 2002, it was a somewhat novel thing to be dooced, whereas now it has become part of how we navigate our lives with no real distinction between online and off.

Still, the world continues to be a beautiful and surprising place full of wonder and amazement. To wit: an Italian gangster was arrested thanks to his distinctive tattoos appearing on his cooking channel on YouTube:

Marc Feren Claude Biart was always careful to hide his face in his Italian cooking tutorials, filming the YouTube videos while laying low from police on a sandy beach in the Caribbean.

But Biart, an alleged member of southern Italy’s powerful ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate, had failed to obscure his tattoos on tape — a clue authorities say they used to track down the mobster in the Dominican Republic.

Alas, the channel doesn’t appear to be live any more.

I have something of a weird, though maybe understandable, relationship with cars. I’m far from a car geek but I know my fair share about how they work and what differentiates one from the other; I can identify models from a glance.

I genuinely like driving and being able to get around quickly and easily. I also think cars are one of the more destructive human inventions, have utterly destroyed far too many cities, and that not enough people take the responsibility of driving seriously. Cars, I’d probably argue, are fine, but car culture is terrible.

This fall, we moved out of the city and needed to buy a car. I hadn’t owned a car in a decade, and bought my last car five years before that, so I went fully down the rabbit hole of what it means to be a car owner these days. I was thinking I’d come away with a late-model electric or plug-in hybrid, ended up buying my first-ever brand new car, a more traditional hybrid.

Probably the biggest change from the last time I bought a car was using a mix of online services to find the exact model I wanted, four states away, and then completing the deal entirely over text message. I first saw our car about thirty minutes before handing over a certified check and then driving it off the lot. It took about a month to fully trust the rear-view camera, and I dig CarPlay more than I thought I would, but overall it’s still … a car.

Maybe I’d feel the shift a bit more if I’d gone fully electric and plugged my car in instead of refueling it, but even fully electric cars still have most of the same problems as their internal combustion brethren. They still create traffic, take up too much of the space that should be dedicated to housing or parks or bike lanes, and still crash and kill people with impunity. A vision of the future where every gas-powered car goes electric isn’t exactly utopian.

So it’s interesting to see other modes developing, like the rise of tiny electric cars in China. These golf-cart-like cars exist in a legal gray area that don’t benefit from subsidies or battery innovations as much as they do from being incredibly cheap and easily built thanks to the local modular supply chain:

Having decided that the future of mobility is electric, the Chinese government has subsidized sales of standard electric cars since 2010. With close to 1.18 million sold in 2019, China accounts for just over half of electric-vehicle sales globally. Bill Russo, founder and CEO of advisory firm Automobility Limited, sees a “steady and solid rise” in China’s electric-vehicle sales generally. The country has set a top-down target for electric vehicles to make up 40% of car sales by 2030, and Russo thinks they’ll have no problem hitting this goal. Tiny cars, which first began appearing in the early 2010s, have more than double the sales of regular electric cars but have never benefited from subsidies. Nor do advertisements for them air on television — instead, they appear on Kuaishou, a short-video platform popular with people living outside China’s big cities. Alongside streamers selling plums by the thousands, and others telling viewers what long-haul trucker life is like, drivers show off their tiny cars. Su Hua, Kuaishou’s founder, has long maintained that his app’s users are not “cool,” unlike those on Douyin, the TikTok predecessor popular with China’s urban elite. Rather, they are ordinary — the kind of people who might be in the market for miniature cars.

As they don’t technically require licenses, tiny cars tend to be popular with migrant workers, who struggle to pay for driving lessons and other car-related costs. The elderly, too, find tiny cars attractive since, up until October of last year, people over 70 could not apply for a driving license in China. They’re also convenient for anybody who wants a car to pick up groceries or their kids from school: No tiny car is longer than 1.5 meters, and their speed tops out at between 40 and 56 kilometers an hour. They’re for the short trips of daily life, not for traveling from one side of the city to another.

Tiny cars are basically non-existent in the States now that most car manufacturers have exploited loopholes in emissions regulations that allow them to essentially classify “light trucks” the same as cars, and then market these monstrosities as safer and more aligned with the American lifestyle.

Even if we embraced smaller cars, they’re hardly a panacea to issues like traffic and street management. But it’s pretty easy to imagine a fleet of semi-autonomous electric cars, particularly in places built for such a thing (think The Villages), mostly taking over. Or urban design where you park your car on the outskirts of the city and are then instantly greeted by an electric cab or small bus that gets you to your destination quickly.

A giant container ship, you are no doubt aware, has been stuck in the Suez Canal for most of this past week, blocking passage between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It’s costing the global economy something like $400 million dollars every hour. In order to deliver the containers aboard their own ships, captains of non-stuck ships are charting courses around the Cape of Good Hope, which the Suez Canal was built to avoid; there will almost certainly be pirates. As of this writing, the ship is still stuck.

A giant container ship — one of the largest ever constructed — plugging up one of the great infrastructure projects of the 19th Century is, among other things, a not-so-subtle reminder of the chaotic interconnectedness of the world, the fragility of so much of the plumbing of our current state of capitalism, and chance to relearn some geography (for the first full day of hearing about the ship, I had placed it in the Panama Canal in my mind). It is also hilarious.

While the stuck ship isn’t exactly without cost, it feels like a story that we can at least enjoy without much guilt. I found myself agreeing whole-heartedly with Sarah Gailey — I like that the ship is stuck:

Furthermore, most of us share the opinion that it’s disagreeable, logistically, for the boat to be stuck. The boat being stuck is inconvenient. It’s a big disruption! Nobody can say it isn’t a big disruption. None of my distant relatives will get into arguments on The Face Website about whether or not the stuck boat is making a nuisance for lots of people. I like that.

Another thing I like is that we know exactly what the problem is that is making the boat be stuck. It’s a big boat, and it’s stuck. Sure, shipping and manufacturing and boats and canals have lots of connections to varied and sundry historical and sociological issues – but this immediate problem, in front of us, is a stuck boat, and we can look at that problem for precisely what it is. It’s not stuck for mysterious reasons related to a long history of humans cruelly exploiting other humans. It’s not stuck because a politician wanted money from an organization that profits from human suffering. It’s not stuck because someone pretending to be in favor of free speech is trying to promote hateful ideologies. It’s stuck because it’s big, bigger than the place where it is, and that’s why it’s stuck.

There are, of course, memes — intentional and otherwise. They are great.

This feels like the kind of story we deserve right now, in what are hopefully the waning days of a year-long pandemic, ongoing climate catastrophe, and global tilt towards authoritarianism. The ship didn’t spill millions of gallons of crude oil into the ocean, it didn’t even lose its cargo. It’s just stuck, and that’s annoying and inconvenient, but also kind of great.

What we call “cloud computing” these days is an umbrella term for a bunch of technologies that pool together processors, storage, databases, networking, etc. and makes them easy to use, deploy, and scale. The magic is mostly in the software that clusters together massive amounts of hardware, which is housed in huge, geographically dispersed datacenters. “The cloud” feels like a single abstraction of what we used to call servers, even if there’s no single cloud but a bunch of disparate services. The whole system is pretty remarkable and makes just about every part of modern computing possible.

The Solar Protocol project inverts a lot of the thinking of cloud computing and is building a platform with rather different goals:

This website is hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from wherever there is the most sunshine.

So much of modern computing infrastructure is all about optimizing for speed, either by physically locating hardware as close as possible to end-users or using AI to reduce the nanoseconds it takes to route packets. The Solar Protocol is kind of an inversion of these principles, picking servers based on where it happens to be daylight — you don’t need machine learning to derive the algorithm of where the sun is, after all. From the manifesto:

If intelligence is the capacity to synthesize knowledge as logic and apply that logic to make decisions, then the Solar Protocol platform relies on an intelligence that emerges from earthly dynamics: specifically that of the sun’s interaction with the Earth. Our lives have always been directed by a range of natural logics that emerge from the intermittent dynamics of our shared environment. Weather, seasons, tides and atmospheric conditions all dictate our behavior, enabling and constraining our movements, food production and cultures. Solar Protocol uses these logics to automate decisions about how the network operates and what content is shown at different times of the day. How can we learn or relearn to design with natural intelligence?

The present day imagination for the internet has been enabled by an energy regime that relies on lethal fossil fuels. And the result? An online culture that valorizes speed, self expression through ever larger media and data-driven intelligence that is requiring more and more energy. Machine learning for example, requires enormous datasets typically collected through private efforts in online digital surveillance that collect every click, keypress, view and page scroll you might make. This data is then used to train models used to automate decisions about what content to show you. These energy hungry technologies are only made possible by extractive energy systems and labor practices.

(Happily, the software is open source and the hardware is relatively cheap and easy to acquire.)

I was reminded of a similar project by Low Tech Magazine a from few years ago (the Solar Protocol credits Low Tech Magazine for the inspiration) that also involved a solar-powered web server, with the limitation that sometimes the server was just not online. It’s a radical notion, in an age when everyone expects any piece of information to be available at any moment, to simply not be there. A sleep cycle for data.

There’s something of an ongoing debate around cryptocurrency at the moment, driven in part by the sudden meme of the NFT art market, about the massive environmental impact of blockchain technology. These protocols that allow for a distributed, decentralized internet are exciting, but they come at a massive cost and unsustainable carbon output. They could learn from a little natural intelligence.

The past few weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of the spate of attacks that appear to target Asian Americans, particularly in parts of California and New York. The reporting has been inconsistent and localized, the connections and motivations often seem circumstantial, and the fact the perpetrators tend to be Black complicates the telling in a country where discussions involving race are always fraught and taboo. The usual characters and set pieces we trot out — bad apples, no angels, etc — fail utterly while the water of structural racism we all swim in but refuse to acknowledge remains.

As I sought to understand just what was going on, I knew if there was one person who would be able to cut through, it would be Jay Caspian Kang. His piece for the New York Times today is a hard and necessary read and didn’t answer questions so much as force me to ask better ones.

Over the past month, as reports of attacks on Asian-Americans, particularly Asian-American elders, have circulated, a new generation of scholars, writers and celebrities have tried to figure out not just what to do, but what exactly is even happening, and how to discuss it.

The public conversations, which have focused on rising xenophobia and what it means for a largely professional class of Asian-Americans, reflect, in many ways, the legacy of the scholarship following the 1992 riots. One can feel the understandable desire to reroute the conversation to safer and more familiar conclusions. The conversations also reflect a disconnect between the people on all sides who experience the violence — who are often working class — and the commentariat.

A generous and brilliant writer, I’ve found Kang to be a kind of snarky Virgil¹ the past few years while I try to navigate the endlessly upending culture. It’s a role that he seems to often lament, particularly when it comes to, well, helping people like me understand the nuances of race in America beyond the simplistic stories we tell ourselves.

Kang sees a particular danger in what’s happening with these attacks, how they get talked about, what gets left unsaid in particular, and the opportunities our continual failings leave open for more Trumpian attack vectors. Reactionary nationalism may be an primary feature of white supremacy in America, but it’s by no means exclusive.

These are not sophisticated questions, but they are being asked over and over again. My fear is that these attacks will also accelerate a trend already underway. Roughly one-third of Asian-American voters supported Donald Trump in 2020, a figure that represented a seven point increase from 2016. As Asian-Americans once again ask themselves where they fit in the country, champions of law and order like Mr. Zhao will provide simple, compelling answers.

They will not care about the decades of efforts by courageous Asian, Black and Latino organizers to build solidarity between working-class people in the Bay Area and nationwide, nor will they care that the people who have been attacked appear largely to be from the working poor and will certainly bear the brunt of an escalation in racial conflict.

Electoral politics are not everything, nor should they be the basis for how we think about ourselves and how we relate to others. But these past months have also shown the limits of the rote progressive language about race and its assumption, in practice, of a binary between Black and white Americans.

As I consider why I’ve struggled to understand, or maybe contextualize, what’s happening with these attacks, I return (embarrassingly) to Baldwin. “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”