Old-Style Blogging Should Be New Again!, & BRIEFLY NOTED
For 2022-11-27 Su
FOCUS: Old-Style Blogging Should Be New Again!
So says John Scalzi:
John Scalzi: How to Weave the Artisan Web: ‘Everyone should start blogging again. Own your own site. Visit all your friends' sites. Bring back the artisan, hand-crafted Web. Sure, it's a little more work, but it's worth it. You don't even need to stop using social media! It's a "yes, and" situation, not a "no, but" one…. 1. Create/reactivate your own site, owned by you, to hold your own work. 2. When you create that site, write or otherwise present work on your site at least once a week, every week. 3. Regularly visit the sites of other creators…. 4. Promote/link the work of others….
Now, why should we bring back that artisan, hand-crafted Web? Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a site that’s not run by an amoral billionaire chaos engine, or algorithmically designed to keep you doomscrolling in a state of fear and anger, or is essentially spyware for governments and/or corporations?…. Yes, it will take some work…. It’s an actual project. But look at this way: You have just spent years building an audience on a platform someone else owns. Why not take a little time to do it for yourself?…
For my own site, I use WordPress…. Not every one needs or wants their own site, and that’s fine. But if you don’t want to bother with creating your own site, you can still decide to visit the sites of people who create them, and not just stay within the bounds of Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok, etc…
A very, very nice call to action by a very skilled and eloquent writer. He is, of course, at some level, completely correct. But calls to virtuous collective action need to be carefully crafted to not ask more of the audience than it will be willing to deliver. In this case, that means that we need to have an accurate theory of what caused the Fall of the Blogosphere in the first place. Why did the audience—and, yes, the creators too—succumb to the Siren song, and wind up doomscrolling through clickbait so that their glued-to-the-screen eyeballs could be sold to advertisers convincing them that the worse is actually the better product as they sell their fake diabetes cures and crypto grifts?
When I talk to people, they shrug and say "attention economy” and “human rapid, response, dopamine loops”. Some of them then go on to say: we hope that Apple's advertising tracking transparency will save us all by putting enough sand into the gears of the advertising-attention machine that we humans can then escape from it. After all, when humans are given a choice, the overwhelmingly do not want advertisers to be able to hack their brains not necessarily for their benefit. The revealed preference is that people do not want this at all.
But “Help us, Tim Cook! You are our only hope!” is a very weak reed to rely on here.
ONE IMAGE: Consider What Having This Stuff in Your Twitter Timeline Would Do to Your Brain:
No, Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world—he has very large positions in a few companies (most of) which are traded on the market as meme stocks, and the slope of the demand curve is correspondingly steep; thus any attempt to diversify would see most of the supposed wealth evaporate; and the appropriately discounted present value of expected cash flows is far below the claimed headline wealth number.
But he is a very rich man. And he is self-brainwashing himself into idiocy via his participation in the attention social-media economy.
I confess I would not have had that on my bingo card a generation ago!
ONE VIDEO: Finally, a Decent Star-Wars ‘Quel:
MUST-READ: For Many, Believing in Consequentialism Has Very Bad Consequences!:
As I sometimes say, while consequentialism is certainl true as a philosophical doctrine, the consequences of people’s believing and acting on it are very frequently destructive and dire:
Matthew Yglesias: Black Friday mailbag: ‘he main claims associated with Effective Altruism continue to be true and are not significantly undermined by the revelations about Sam Bankman-Fried…. He wasn’t a meaningful funder of global health or animal welfare…. I also don’t think these events should influence our thinking about consequentialism as a philosophy except insofar as they confirm… doing deceptive schemes “because it will have good consequences” generally fails…. I have significantly less confidence in the wisdom and integrity of certain high-profile EA leaders and the institutions they run…. This is a big blow to EA as a set of human institutions rather than as a set of abstract propositions….
Having a broad base of donors turns out to be intellectually healthy compared to relying on a whale who becomes, in effect, too big to fail. The upshot of this needs to be re-engagement with the older idea that even without giving your life over to full-time work in some special EA cause area, you can contribute meaningfully to making the world a better place by being thoughtful and generous…
Oþer Thing Þt Went Whizzing by…
Very Briefly Noted:
Noah Smith: China's pivot is a bit of a mess: ‘President Xi Jinping has made a remarkable pivot, recalibrating… Covid controls and the harsh crackdown on real estate developers…. When we take a closer look at this pivot, we see that not all is going according to plan…
David Singh Grewal: A World-Historical Gamble: The Failure of Neoliberal Globalization - American Affairs Journal The year 2022 was not supposed to see the threat of nuclear conflict among major powers and the return of war to the European continent...
Sam Freedman: YIMBYs, NIMBYs and the Battle for the Soul of the Tory Party: ‘Three internal Tory rows this week neatly illustrated the thesis of my last piece – that the government is trapped in a doom loop by its own voter coalition. Helpfully they were on the three topics I discussed in that piece: Brexit, immigration, and planning…
Stephen Diehl: Stephen Diehl: Crypto is the ‘commoditisation of populist anger, gambling and crime’“Cryptocurrency is a giant scam, although a complicated scam . . . ” So begins Stephen Diehl’s diatribe... blogging about crypto’s failings. That won him a following — but also harassment, including death threats. “The past three years have been hell,” he says, naturally shy. “It’s not easy being a crypto sceptic”...
Andrés Velasco: The Unbearable Uselessness of Crypto: ‘Thanks to FTX's collapse, the world may have woken up to the grim reality that the crypto "industry" is nothing but a get-rich-quick lie, wrapped in hype, bobbing on an ocean of libertarian technobabble. Will anyone do something about it?…
John Scalzi: ‘Honestly life on Twitter has gotten much better since I switched to DGAF blocking. Be mildly annoying to me? That's a block. Look at me wrong? Blockeroonies. Like a post from a racist shitbag and I see it? Blocktown, population you. It's glorious…
Josh Marshall: “Love the way Trumpers have transformed this term… “Alpha”, to the extent the term has any meaning, is the guy who the other guys get behind. Girls are into him. Charisma. Big man on campus, etc. For Trumpers it's become a guy who makes sure you know he totally only eats …steaks… and sits around at the sports bar—no women, just guys—…and complains abt how everythings bullshit...
Duncan Black: Sure, Sounds Good, Run With That: ‘Washington Post reporters don't have to pass on gibberish "excuses" as if they were factual, but that's objectivity, baby: Josh Dawsey: “A lot of Trump people… aghast at the dinner with Ye and Nick Fuentes…. He lives in Florida, with little traditional vetting and staffing.” Um, uh, it's a staffing issue. Sure, chief, gonna write that one down.
¶s:
Matthew Klein: How to Get Recent History All Wrong: ‘A new book identifies—and misunderstands—the structural forces behind today’s geopolitical chaos: The past few decades have not been kind to the democracies of the North Atlantic…. Could the West have realistically avoided any of this? Or was it always going to be helpless in the face of “structurally driven shocks, the effects of which have cascaded from one place to another and between the geopolitical, economic, and domestic political spheres,” as University of Cambridge professor Helen Thompson puts it in Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century?… If specific politicians and technocrats—and the intellectuals who influence them—make mistakes, then there is hope. The world has the potential to learn from their choices and do better in the future—or at least make new, different mistakes. If not, then the most it can aim for is the peace of mind that comes from understanding that there are no alternatives…
Louis Ashworth: Exploring Elon Musk’s Semaformantics Because somebody has to, we suppose: ‘Tesla’s Elon Musk and Semafor’s Ben Smith have been having a fight on Twitter, a website the former owns. (Alphaville sighs, looks out of window, considers life choices, begins typing.)… SBF believed he or some part of his empire held $43mn of Twitter on November 10th…. Musk says SBF… could not have held a Twitter stake beyond October 28th…. Explanation a) Musk is broadly correct, but made an error: SBF did roll over a (small) stake. However, that position may now have been completely closed, meaning SBF does, now, own “0%”…. Explanation b) SBF… thought he’d rolled over a chunk of Twitter stock but actually forgot to do it because he was busy playing League of Legends…. Given Musk is trying to make this whole thing about journalistic ethics, it is probably within his power to completely clear things up here if he wanted to. That’d be cool…
Jane Yoon: Lex in-depth: the cost of America’s ban on Chinese chips: ‘The new US technology rules will hurt China’s chipmakers. But they will also add to inflationary pressures on many products: These sweeping new rules could have unintended consequences that are just as far reaching…. Washington wants to thwart China in its aim of producing advanced semiconductors, bearing the shorthand definition of 3-14 nanometre (nm) process technology…. Advanced chips and the factories making them have become a substitute for arms and armies in the east-west stand-off because they are a critical component of our modern lives… the foundation of next-generation technology from self-driving cars and 5G internet to cloud services and artificial intelligence. However, American policymakers are unlikely to have fully appreciated the corollary of splitting the world semiconductor supply chain in two: far higher costs for western manufacturers and their customers. The advice “dig two graves, before you set out” applies to anyone bent on revenge…
Sam Freedman: Doom Loop: ‘UK budgets and fiscal statements are an elaborate game in which governments pretend to be fiscally conservative and the markets pretend this is credible. Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng refused to play.... Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak have played the game perfectly.... By putting on the expected performance he allowed himself to deliver a statement that was in fact not very conservative at all.... Given the context and the constraints of Tory party politics Hunt did about as well as possible. His ritual dance of pretend fiscal conservatism gave him the space to uplift benefits in line with inflation; raise some key areas of public spending over the next two years; and limit immediate further tax rises to the rich and energy windfalls.... It felt like being told to calm down by someone who’s just totalled your car…
Gillian Tett: How magical thinking enabled the rise of FTX — and led to its fall: ‘I got chatting to some crypto evangelists… the joys of decentralised finance…. What about the exchanges?, I asked…. More, not fewer, concentrations of power…. FTX…. Concentration of power, coupled with a lack of oversight, has caused massive customer losses, because funds were funnelled around with no accountability…. Peering at the wreckage, we need to ask not just how FTX created an $8bn hole in its balance sheet but also why these dangerous contradictions were ignored for so long. Why did so many have a blind spot?… Humans… are wired to embrace… mystical explanations for things we do not understand; we need hope in a scary world. Digitisation has not changed that…. Contradictory creation myths are found in most professions…. But the FTX saga shows how… doublethink can have hugely damaging repercussions…
To be honest, the main thing preventing me from setting up a traditional blog is that I get more attention when I post on social media, and I like attention. If I could be guaranteed a certain number of readers for each post, I'd do it.
Andor exceeded my expectations.