Trump’s impeachment trial ended in the only way it really could. On Saturday, I was shocked by a push notification declaring the trial was coming to a sudden close after a brief skirmish over calling witnesses; once that initial shock wore off, I found myself in the familiar place of not being at all surprised that a man whose entire professional life was one long grift once again escaped accountability.

Despite a clear and bi-partisan majority voting to convict, enough Republicans hid behind bullshit about process and procedure instead of simply doing the right thing. It was, after all, a foregone conclusion that the trial would end in such a shameful display of how one man reshaped an entire political party to serve his ego.

Between the election last November and January 6, I’d resigned myself to thinking of the lame duck president as a loser with waning power who would be facing any number of criminal trials. The Trump insurrection changed all of that and showed just how dangerous someone so criminally stupid could be when granted not just the hard power of the federal government but the influence and a megaphone.

Margaret Sullivan details how the spectacle was a “moment of truth” that wasn’t:

It was this pervasive culture of lying that made it politically untenable for so many Republican senators, in the end, to vote their underdeveloped consciences. The muscles had atrophied, if they ever existed.

For if they voted to convict, their constituents — far from giving them credit for doing their patriotic duty — would turn on them. Perhaps viciously. Perhaps violently. And with the incitement, no doubt, of the twice-impeached president.

Sullivan ends more optimistic than I am — that the evidence is overwhelming and damning, and “even though the truth didn’t prevail, some of it managed to see the light of day.” I was angry there weren’t witnesses, though I’ve cooled a bit on that and am resigned to Congress needing to get on with the work in the face of total intransigence (Daniel Goldman, former lead counsel on the House Impeachment Inquiry made some good points about the futility of calling witnesses).

David Frum, someone whose politics are quite apart from my own but who’s been a constant and consistent anti-Trump voice, thinks Trump still lost and is going to keep losing. Even without an impeachment conviction, Trump still faces some number of civil and criminal trials. Given that Frum’s former boss managed to escape any kind of accountability in the interest of “moving on”, I’m not exactly optimistic we’ve learned much.

If this site has a beat, beyond “stuff I find interesting”, it’s roughly tech and media, which just so happens to intersect my actual career. As such, I’ve held John Gruber’s Daring Fireball in high regard for as long as it’s been a going concern — our interests obviously overlap and I will instantly cop to often poorly imitating his pioneering style¹.

Gruber rarely breaks news, even given his well-placed sources inside of Apple, but is instead a sharp and incisive analyst and critic. It’s a vital role, and Daring Fireball is a premier example of how a fractured internet media landscape can help drive accountability, not just contribute to division.

Beyond standbys like “claim chowder” and deciphering PR speak, Gruber’s most pointed and diligent media critique has been aimed at a two-and-a-half-year old cover story by Bloomberg Businessweek headlined “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies”.

The thesis of the reporting by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley is the Chinese government, which ultimately controls the supply chains of every major technology company in the world, has infiltrated hardware vendors and has been secretly inserting tiny chips onto circuit boards that phone home (well, phone back to China) with information that make those computers vulnerable to Chinese infiltration. The companies cited in the story — Apple, Amazon, and Supermicro — denied the claims absolutely.

From Gruber’s original post about Bloomberg’s story:

I see no way around it: either Bloomberg’s report is significantly wrong, at least as pertains to Amazon and Apple, or Apple and Amazon have issued blatantly false denials. You can, perhaps, chalk up Apple’s denial to it being written by Apple PR. I don’t think this would happen, but hypothetically this issue could be deemed so sensitive — either within the company or as a national security issue — that the people at Apple with knowledge of the situation lied to Apple PR. But in my experience, Apple PR does not lie. Do they spin the truth in ways that favor the company? Of course. That’s their job. But they don’t lie, because they understand that one of Apple’s key assets is its credibility. They’d say nothing before they’d lie.

It’s worth noting this was a huge story at the time and everyone, including Gruber, concluded that if the reporting was true, the implications were staggering. If the reporting was true.

Since the story was originally published, every company and government agency cited has denied Bloomberg’s original claim even more vehemently. Given that it’s been over two years and no independent investigation has confirmed the original story, it might be reasonable to assume Bloomberg would have issued a correction or retracted the story by now. In fact, Gruber has called for such a retraction with every link to bloomberg.com, to the point it’s become something of a running joke on the site.

Yesterday, Bloomberg published what seemed to be a coda to the original hidden microchip piece, again by Robertson and Riley, with the throwback headline “The Long Hack: How China Exploited a U.S. Tech Supplier”. The piece again returns to a claim that feels like a huge and obvious problem for our hyperconnected world: the vast majority of computers today are made in China, a dictatorship with draconian control over its own populace, and the Chinese government is inserting nearly-impossible to detect hardware on circuitboards to hack governments and giant corporations. But there’s still no actual proof of this happening, which makes the theory little more than a conspiracy.

Gruber’s assessment is scathing:

It’s a 4,000-word exercise in journalistic sophistry. It creates the illusion of something being there, but there is nothing there. The only good purpose this report could serve is as source material for a class on critical thinking.

As is this point-by-point fisking (source) by cybersecurity analyst Matt Tait, which expertly breaks down how Robertson and Riley simply failed to do the kind of basic journalistic due diligence a story like this requires. As Tait notes, the entire saga seems to have stemmed from an unrelated 2016 incident where Apple terminated its relationship with Supermicro over a security incident with their server firmware, mixed with some other rumors and wargaming exercises across various government agencies about how China might infiltrate computers.

What’s baffling is the degree to which Bloomberg has doubled, tripled, and septupled down on this story over the years, despite no actual physical evidence of any hidden microchips. Given the degree to which misinformation, not to mention active disinformation, shapes our world these days, one would hope any media organization with a reputation to uphold would guard against such deception. Until they issue a retraction, I expect the asterisks on Daring Fireball to continue.

The framing of this piece by Sejla Rizvic for The Walrus is about generational warfare on TikTok, and while there is a tasty paragraph bagging on Instagram-preening millennials who need to read something other than Harry Potter, it ends up being so much more about the age of algorithmic intimacy, currently defined by TikTok.

This intimacy may also be the reason for Gen Z’s generational allegiance. Where millennials were cloaked in mostly faceless anonymity online (on LiveJournal, Tumblr, Twitter) or highly curated photography (Facebook, Instagram), Gen Z’s digital life is dominated by the near-constant production of images and videos of themselves (Snapchat, TikTok), creating a very different relationship between them, their peers, and the rest of the world.

Rizvic, who defines herself as a millennial who came of age at a time where online and offline were still distinct spaces, explores how the generation that’s never been offline and is now entering adulthood has created a new type of intimacy beyond the cynicism of perfectly coiffed social media feeds.

The same algorithm that powers TikTok’s uncanny ability to serve up this intimacy is, of course, not without peril. Philosopher and theorist Byung-Chul Han notes that this “compulsion for transparency flattens the human being itself, making it a functional element within a system”. On a very personal level, TikTok, like social media before it, seems amplify the ideals and neuroses of the culture; on a more macro level, the black box algorithm remains a risk that we would be foolish to simply ignore.

The logic goes something like this: cops, who for obvious reasons don’t like being held accountable by the communities they are ostensibly serving, are looking for ways to “hack” livestreams and videos that get posted to social media. Because tech companies have adopted draconian copyright policies, galaxy brain thinking might lead the kind of cop who wears a Thin Blue Line facemask to believe playing Sublime’s “Santaria” while ignoring a citizen complaint would be enough to have a livestream taken down.

Clearly, Beverly Hills’ finest ain’t got no crystal ball either, since the sad attempt to avoid responsibility doesn’t seem to actually work. Dexter Thomas, writing for Vice:

Fair doesn’t seem to be up-to-date on his social media copyright policies, however.

In May of last year, Instagram clarified its policies on including music in livestreams, and began to advise people to only use short clips of music, and to ensure that there is a “visual component” to videos—“recorded audio should not be the primary purpose of the video,” the company said. Instagram declined to comment on this specific video, however, a spokesperson told VICE News that “our restrictions take the following into consideration: how much of the total video contains recorded music, the total number of songs in the video, and the length of individual song(s) included in the video.” Under that rubric, Devermont’s video should be fine, since it’s just one song, and is purely incidental.

Apparently, not even a song by the famously litigious Beatles was enough to get a stream taken down.

The American Right can’t seem to sort out where they stand on abusing copyright for extralegal purposes. The Bush administration famously looped pop music and even the Barney theme in a misguided attempt to break prisoners, leading some to ask whether Donald Rumsfeld owed them royalties. There’s a long list of musicians who have asked Republicans to stop playing their songs at campaign rallies.

Of course, it’s possible this has nothing to do with copyright at all and is just another example of cops refusing to do their jobs.

Writing about John Perry Barlow’s declaration of independence from dealing with the hard problems of humanity last night, I was reminded of this conversation between Barlow and bell hooks for Shambhala Sun magazine, published in 1995, six months before his manifesto.

I’ve probably read this half a dozen times over the years, it sucks me in every time I come across it. Barlow is such a white-guy Buddhist¹ and I’m always reminded of hooks’s compassion and insight. Take this exchange about alienation caused by what we used to call “the ‘net”:

bell hooks: I’ve been involved with a project called “Digital Diaspora,” and a lot of what people fear about computers is that they will simply intensify this privatization and alienation from body and spirit that you’re talking about. Do you see that?

John Perry Barlow: We’ve already been separated by information to an alarming extent. The difference between information and experience is that when you’re having an experience, you’re in real-time contact with the phenomena around you. You’re able to ask questions with every synapse in your body of the surrounding conditions. What I’m hopeful about is that because cyberspace is an interactive medium in a human sense, we’ll be able to go through this info-desert and be able to have something like tele-experience. We’ll be able to experience one other genuinely, in a truly interactive fashion, at a distance.

bell hooks: One of the things I think about is what it means to be communicating when you’re not aware of the specifics of who people are. You can’t respond to their looks, which are so central to the mechanisms of domination in our society. We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

John Perry Barlow: There’s something problematic here, and I go back and forth on it all the time. I want to have a cyberspace that has prana in it. I want to have a cyberspace where there’s room for the breath and the spirit.

bell hooks: Well, that’s what I haven’t found, Barlow.

Barlow’s jabbering on about “info-desserts” and “tele-experience” and hooks is cutting to the heart of matters we’re still dealing with today. As in so many things, I can’t help but think how different the world would be if we’d listened more to Black women.

I’m probably being overly critical, this is a small part of a much broader conversation that is often quite insightful.

One of the very, very minor inconveniences of 2020 — the great bucatini shortage — may finally be coming to a close. De Cecco, whose bucatini was being held up by the USDA due to a lack of fortifying iron, has solved their deficiency.

Rachel Handler tried to get to the bottom of the conspiracy but the executives at De Cecco kept their focus on the pasta. This truly is a delightfully wholesome interview.

So who do you think sold you out to the FDA?

GC: We are busy providing the highest quality of pasta in the market. So to your point that you raise in your article, we don’t know if this was a maneuver from our competitors. And to be honest, we don’t care. We don’t do this kind of thing. We are busy giving the highest-quality pasta to our consumers. We want to believe it was a random search from the FDA, and, glass half full, I am glad they let us know about this issue and we corrected it.

So you’re saying you don’t know? You have no idea?

GC: Not only that, I don’t know if it was a tip-off, and even if it was, personally I don’t care. We are busy providing our mission, which is providing the best, highest-quality pasta. We don’t care. We know these things happen in the market. We personally don’t do these things, but if they do, let them. It’s sad to think about wasting time doing something like this when you could have better service to your clients. I’m not interested in knowing if there was somebody behind this plot.

(A very special thanks to my friend Paul Kafasis for letting me know about this important update.)

John Perry Barlow died three years and one day ago, at the age of seventy, having lived a rare and singular life. Anyone familiar with him knows the drill — cattle rancher from Wyoming, poet, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, over-user of the prefix cyber.

Twenty-five years ago today, Barlow dashed off an email to some friends, colleagues, and conspirators decrying the signing of the Communications Decency Act as some kind of shackle on his beloved cyberspace. Calling it “A Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace”, Barlow was firing a shot, of sorts, or at least staking a claim for not just a new frontier but a new kind of social contract.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

The decades have not been kind to the declaration — who even says “cyberspace” any more, or thinks of the internet as a place that is, or could be, separated from people. The distinction between IRL and online has blurred to the point of uselessness.

Joshua Benton has performed a thorough fisking for today’s anniversary, and Andy Greenberg’s takedown for Wired from 2016¹ is also worth a read. It’s not just in hindsight that Barlow’s thesis looks weary — essayist Reilly Jones wrote a thorough rebuttal that same year, which is far more prescient than the Californian Ideology and techno-utopianism of dotcom boosters.

There’s so much about Barlow’s premise that isn’t just creaky or cringeworthy from the vantage of today, but basic facts are just wrong. He declares his precious cyberspace to be free of government because it stretched beyond sovereignty, a view he held decades later, when of course it was the government who built the infrastructure in the first place! And the very law that inspired his yawp in the first place has allowed the internet to flourish, largely free of (American) government interference.

The stakes in those early days were also incredibly low. Despite his lofty rhetoric, so many of the battles online were over things like copyright and DRM. To be sure, the EFF was right to resist the corporate influence of the internet, but the absolutism also allowed a new generation of corporations to take hold of the internet, now largely controlled by a very small number of unimaginably wealthy private companies.

Think of some of the mission statements of the household tech names — “to make the world a more open and connected place”, “to organize the world’s information” — or slogans like “the free speech wing of the free speech party”. These are direct descendants of Barlow and his fellow utopians, and while the world may be more connected it’s hard to argue we’re more free because of it.

Barlow’s admirers, or at least his defenders, insist the manifesto was really about possibility, a vision “for what an internet could be”. That’s certainly true but it doesn’t absolve anyone of the responsibility of what is. This idea that 25 years ago was some idyllic time — and I’ll admit I shared a great many of the techno-utopian fantasies — isn’t just wrong but it’s exactly backwards.

What Barlow was declaring wasn’t independence from the “giants of flesh and steel” but from the work of politics. He signed his email with his location at the time “Davos, Switzerland”, where he was literally partying with the global elite at the World Economic Forum. That kind of blinding privilege and ahistorical thinking is what we should be on guard against.

Bon Appétit is one of those food magazines with its own gravitational force — sixty plus years of pedigree, the largest of the old guard magazines still standing, a centerpiece of Condé Nast’s lifestyle empire. After weathering the media storms of the early 21st Century, they managed to successfully transition from the kind of newsstand standby thumbed through by Boomers in the grocery line to everyone’s favorite cooking YouTube channel, newsletter, Instagram feed, or podcast.

And then, in the summer of 2020, it all blew up. Editor-in-chief Adam Rapoport resigned after photos showed up on social media of him in blackface. The staff, particularly those who are not white, went public with details about a pervasively toxic workplace. The magazine issued a belated apology and hired Dawn Davis from Simon & Schuster and Sonia Chopra from Vox to help remake the culture of the magazine¹.

While the chaos blew up overnight, a toxic workplace like that doesn’t just happen. Reply All has released the first in a four-part series about what happened, going back a decade. It’s an incredible piece of reporting and critical listening, even if you think you’re the type who doesn’t care about the machinations of lifestyle magazines.

Virtual meeting software has, of course, become entrenched in our lives over the past year. Zoom has become a generic trademark that gets prepended to basically every activity that simply used to be something we did — Zoom happy hours, Zoom birthday parties, Zoom dates.

Meet.coop wants to provide the infrastructure without the corporate influence, leaning heavily on the values, and rhetoric, of open source and collectivism. I’m decidedly intrigued by this trend — see also the payments group Comradery and the co-op that wants to improve gig work.

The challenges before these groups are obvious pretty quickly — how do I get started is an immediate question you’re confronted with on Meet.coop’s website; in Silicon Valley speak, you might define it as a roadblock to finding the all important “product-market fit”. Even if this new trend of cooperatives has goals beyond making capital, venture or otherwise, or profit, they still need people to use their products.

Still, it’s certainly interesting that these apps are all infrastructure, and I think that’s a compelling place to start. The question of what comes next, meaning what should replace the small number of platforms that have subsumed the internet, is likely going to be one of new protocols that allow for the kind of decentralized internet that was the hope from its incarnation. Co-ops seem like they could be a compelling stopgap.

I can’t quite decide if a bill being promoted by Nevada’s Democratic governor Steve Sisolak to allow corporations to establish their own local governments feels more like a plot line thought up by Paul Verhoeven or J.G. Ballard.

The “innovation zones” would require corporations to own a sizable piece of unincorporated land and then grant them the ability to provide services typically reserved for actual governments, from levying taxes to chartering schools. As my friend Jason Roche noted, this didn’t exactly work out so well for 19th Century mining towns (see also: Upton Sinclair or “Deadwood”)

Of course, this could be an elaborate ploy to demonstrate what a self-evidently terrible idea it is to treat businesses and governments as the same thing.

Sisolak named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in an area east of Reno after the legislation has passed.

Alas.