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Ben Thompson: Narratives. Two bits from this. First…

When it comes to the good of humanity, I think the biggest learning from Twitter is that putting together people who disagree with each other is actually a terrible idea; yes, it is why Twitter will never be replicated, but also why it has likely been a net negative for society. The digital town square is the Internet broadly; Twitter is more akin to a digital cage match, perhaps best monetized on a pay-per-view basis.”

Note that @benthompson and @notechben are still active as of this afternoon. Despite that “whichever way the wind blows” opening section about Twitter, it’s worth reading through the self-quoting all the way to the end, for this…

In the end, the best way of knowing is starting by consciously not-knowing. Narratives are tempting but too often they are wrong, a diversion, or based on theory without any tether to reality. Narratives that are right, on the other hand, follow from products, which means that if you want to control the narrative in the long run, you have to build the product first, whether that be a software product, a publication, or a company.

Yep.

Sort of related, I finally read that “savior complex” piece of…content. The kicker is a wild ride…

Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

SleepBaseball.com. “Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio is a full-length fake baseball game. There is no yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes.” Haven’t tried this. Available wherever you get your podcasts, which means you can listen to it at 2x speed and fall asleep twice as fast.

A secretive spaceplane just returned to earth after 2.5 years in orbit. I’m sorry, what? A secretive spaceplane?

Brent Simmons: After Twitter. “Everything you might build that had to do with communication, reading and writing and otherwise, was compared to Twitter or somehow in relation to Twitter, even when unasked for, and Twitter was the enormous factor in that equation.” Can relate.

Sunday link dump. Blockquotes FTW.

JoAnna Novak with a masterful essay in The Paris Review, connecting Taylor Swift’s 10 minute All Too Well with poet Joe Brainard’s memoir I Remember.

Brainard’s writing is akin to the visual art he made: friendly and image-drenched and nonchalantly funny, kind of telescopic in a diaristic way that’s relentlessly present in its anaphora, and also sometimes sort of sexy. I find myself thinking about Joe Brainard whenever I listen to “All Too Well.” Swift sings the word remember eighteen times. And then there’s the third verse, which begins by conjuring her ex-lover in a childhood photograph, a seemingly ordinary boy with glasses.

Rosencrans Baldwin: Los Angeles after it rains. Turning hydrangea into an adjective is such a flex.

Los Angeles is different after it rains. It’s windy and brightly blue, it’s hydrangean. The next morning, the buildings glow, as if by getting wet, with all the dirt washed off, they’ve become more porous and able to absorb light. Basketball courts and tennis courts are puddled until about lunch.

Mike Hale’s review of the new season of The Crown in the Times, which gets to the core of the challenge in telling the Charles & Diana story. “History is, in general, the enemy of good storytelling.”

Morgan resorts to the same shallow, sentimental notions of love gone sour and family inflexibility that were the stuff of public mythmaking. The idea of practical calculation is floated but rejected with regard to both Diana and her rival, Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams), presumably because the Princess Di story has to be a love story. But even as Morgan is telling us that’s what it is, it doesn’t feel like that’s what it is. The type of story that would really make sense of Charles and Diana would very likely have to be a wilder, harsher, more corrosive story than “The Crown” can afford to be. Such a telling would probably trigger the supposed guardians of historical accuracy to an even greater extent than Morgan’s fictionalizations already do. History is, in general, the enemy of good storytelling, and Morgan can’t be blamed for putting words in people’s mouths; his characters are his, not ours, and many of the show’s best moments are those characters’ stirring, wholly invented lectures on one another’s bad behavior.

Tom Breihan at Stereogum on “Crazy in Love”. I love his ongoing series The Number Ones, where he’s reviewing every Billboard #1 hit from 1958 to the present. I don’t read all of them, but I definitely read this one.

“Crazy In Love” didn’t suddenly surge into existence; it came out of the same pop-industry process that’s produced virtually every other song that’s appeared in this column. But “Crazy In Love” is the kind of dizzy alchemy that can only happen when everyone involved in that process is operating at peak capacity, when they work together to make something that positively levitates.

Rachel Handler: Bed Habits. Long sleep diary, trying to find some clarity about blue screens. The lede is the best part:

Here is an incomplete list of things I need in order to fall asleep at night: a room that sustains 70 degrees without the help of air-conditioning; complete darkness and total voidlike silence save for a shockingly loud white-noise machine placed directly next to my head; five pillows (one under my head, one under my chin, one between my knees, one directly on top of my face, one sitting on top of my chest); a completed to-do list; a clean apartment; a clean conscience; the knowledge that everyone I love is never going to die; assurance from a Russian official with total security clearance that they aren’t going to incite nuclear war; universal health care; and a fan.

Dan Pfeiffer: Why Extremism Trumped Inflation in ‘22. I loved this bit about why Democrats were so surprised about the midterm results:

We have political PTSD scars from a shocking loss in 2016 and an almost as shocking near loss in 2020. Despite losing often, Republicans pound their chests and prance around. Despite winning the popular vote in every election but one since 1988, Democrats mope around doing an Eeyore impression.

The Generalist: The Casino and the Genie. Mario Gabriele comes to terms with FTX and SBF.

Historically, I’ve seen crypto as a debaucherous hackathon. Sure, some off-color activities might take place here and there – some light gambling, for example – but it is fundamentally a sector defined by what it is building. Over the past year, I’ve learned that not only is this wrong, it’s perfectly wrong. Crypto is not a hackathon with a little betting; it’s a casino where spontaneous entrepreneurship occasionally breaks out. The emphasis I’d assumed should be inverted, flipped on its head.

Matt Webb: The Minecraft generation meets property law and AI-synthesised landscapes. Voxels, voxels, voxels:

I know there are 3D edit tools that allow precision, but I feel like fine control is maladaptive in this situation. You want to be able to make something gorgeous, and easily, and have full creative expression. That’s what voxels provide, plus the application of AI which - thanks to the prompt - has all the almost-infinite variety of latent space.

For obvious reasons, Substack Chat is interesting.

Today we are launching Chat, a new space for writers and creators to host conversations with their subscribers. Chat is a community space reimagined specifically for writers and creators— it’s like having your own private social network where you make the rules. Writers set the topic and the tone for every discussion, and can turn the feature on or off at any time.

This FTX story is just fucking bonkers. Jessica Lessin’s coverage is spot on. “I would like to know whether Sequoia, SoftBank, Ribbit Capital and all the others who poured money into FTX knew about Alameda’s FTT holdings or even wanted to ask. You would think some of the smartest private tech investors in the world would have been looking into the issue. Even a modicum of diligence could have uncovered that huge potential liability. I wonder whether they also asked questions about FTX’s solvency, because yesterday Bankman-Fried said the exchange could cover the billions in redemptions that Binance’s move triggered. Today, it couldn’t.”

Matt Levine on FTX is a good read. “Is FTX worth tens of billions of dollars, if it can get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press? Maybe! Will Binance buying it allow it to get through this week of heavy withdrawals and negative press and return to profitability? Probably! Is Binance paying FTX tens of billions of dollars for its equity? I would be very, very, very surprised!”

Ed Zitron: The Death of a Statesman. “To really hammer it home: this is an incredibly bad situation, because this industry desperately needed Sam Bankman-Fried to keep being the respectable gentleman of the cryptocurrency world. Having SBF attend events with Bloomberg and say smart things about the economy was useful, because it suggested that there were executives in this industry that could both legally visit America and not commit massive amounts of fraud.”

Sean Garrett interviews Ashley Simon for Mixing Board. Sean’s an old colleague from Twitter; Ashley’s a more recent colleague from Medium, both are fantastic humans. And I loved this conversation. “I don’t know very many people, and I’m putting myself first here, that actually know how to live with failure and feel okay about it. Personally, I always still feel like something is wrong with me, or that I haven’t worked hard enough, smart enough, or whatever the case may be.”

Simon Willison: Mastodon is just blogs. That’s cool and all, but “get that kid a Mastodon!” is even worse than “get that kid a blog!”

Gordon Brander on “Thinking Together” and how we’ve hit an information scaling threshold “The cost of forking realities has dropped below the Coasean floor, and there’s little incentive to merge realities. We fractally fragment understandings, then algorithmically amplify the confusion to maximize engagement. The most effective coordination mechanisms left seem to be memes and conspiracy theories.”

Dave Troy: Elon and Jack are not “competitors.” They’re collaborating. The absolute hottest of takes, in the form of a FAQ. “Q: So this is why Musk seemingly ‘overpaid’ for Twitter? He and his backers want to use it as a tool of information warfare, to kill off the dollar and help usher in Putin’s ‘multipolar world?’”

Screenplays.io is amazing. Here’s Better Call Saul, Season 6 Episode 7. “Lalo peels off the waders, revealing his usual clothes underneath. He wipes his hands with a towel, then slips on a pair of FLIP-FLOPS (even though we may glimpse his LOAFERS, along with a coat and a bag of other clothes, inside the trunk).” I need to start reading more screenplays, if only for the all caps props. (Via Recommendo, which is gonna have to move off Revue!)

Robin Sloan’s reflections on his Spring ‘83 protocol. “The opportunity before us, as investigators and experimenters in the 2020s, isn’t to make Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram again, just ‘in a better way’ this time. Repeating myself from above: a decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.”

Joshua Barone profiles Steve Reich on his 86th birthday. “Reich’s sound is by now central to the history of American classical music — and modern art more generally.”

Jesse Grosjean’s Bike outliner introduces some nice affordances for rich text editing. Small details, well executed. The cursor tail is a really clever solution to a challenging UX problem.

Westworld is over. Some violent delights, a not so violent end.

Meanwhile, I had no idea that Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy were executive producers on the Amazon production of William Gibson’s The Peripheral. I’m two episodes in so far and it’s working for me; I loved the book. This quote from Nolan in the Times nails the experience of reading Gibson’s prose: “Gibson basically just takes you and he drowns you. He just holds you all the way under in the deep end, and it’s that moment where you’re trying to adapt to a new atmosphere and you either do or you don’t.”

The Adobe and Pantone Color Apocalypse: Frequently Asked Questions. Excellent FAQ about how colors can’t be copyrighted, but Pantone’s swatch book can, what happened in Adobe products, and, of course, an answer to this F’d A’d Q: “What if I wanted to make my own Pantone swatch libraries and distribute them? With blackjack and hookers?” (Answer: “You’d be playing with fire, that’s for sure.”)

Matt Haughey uses Google Collab and Stable Diffusion to generate a bunch of wild profile pics of himself. I like the feather head one.

ArtNet on the opening sequence for Season 2 of HBO’s The White Lotus. I liked the 90 second intro more than the rest of the episode? But I’ll keep watching, obviously. Meanwhile, The Vow Season 2 is just as boring as Season 1…but I’ll keep watching, obviously.

Choire Sicha: “It’s an exciting moment for text delivery methods that are not tweets. Perhaps I will make all my mistakes in this ‘email’ venue going forward? The Twitter situation is evolving quickly.”

WaPo: Why daylight saving time is worse for your body than standard time. Really lovely animation that illustrates what would happen if we went to daylight savings time permanently. “Living chronically out of sync with our internal clock puts us at an increased risk for sleep loss, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, mood disorders and even certain types of cancer.”

Julie Powell, of Julie and Julia fame, dies of a heart attack at 49. I read and loved her blog at Salon in the olden days; the movie was delightful (esp. the cameo from Amanda Hesser). “Blogging made it possible for Ms. Powell to reach readers on a relatively new platform and in a new kind of direct language.”

Halide’s Sebastiaan de With on the iPhone 14 Pro camera. Of a piece with Julie Powell, I love obsessively in-depth reviews like this, even if I care about or understand maybe 10% of it. “Above all, I found a soul in the images from this new, 48-megapixel RAW mode that just made me elated. This is huge — and that’s not just the file size I am talking about. This camera can make beautiful photos, period, full stop. Photos that aren’t good for an iPhone. Photos that are great.”

Nicheless.blog. “Nicheless is a micro-blogging platform for raw, unfiltered thoughts. It’s like long form Twitter, minus the status games.” I don’t know if this will be “the thing” but I like that it’s “a thing” and that there are more and more of these small purpose-fit social things out there, pushing things either backwards or forwards in time.

Simon Owens: Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy. A friend texted me earlier this week and asked if we had ever thought about sharing ad revenue with creators when I was there. Owens’ piece isn’t a bad explanation…even though sentences like “they’d just need to set aside a fixed percentage of their monthly revenue and then distribute it based on the level of engagement generated by their users” make my blood boil. Pro tip: never use the word “just” when writing about things like this.