Bluesky is a decentralized Twitter clone that was catalyzed by Jack Dorsey, but is actually being deployed and run by Awesome Woman CEO Jay Graber. It’s the one I sent that snotty text about two weeks ago, saying it was bereft of anything interesting except dessert pictures and rude comments about 80083, remember that? That’s when I was like, oh wow, Notes is the next hot thing! And then I joined Mastodon and I thought, “well. This is fine. A little slow, but I’ll try it. Maybe we don’t need a new Twitter.”

And then the good folks at Bluesky sent invite codes to all the Twitter power users and journalists and it was like coming home. I spent a disturbing chunk of time yesterday just refreshing the feed and watching it all develop in real-time and sent texts like, “get on Bluesky AOC just joined and everybody is bullying Jake Tapper and this is the most fun I’ve had in years,” and then the community spontaneously named the posts “skeets” (sky + tweet, get it) and you could actually just feel the palpable relief of having a place to post that wasn’t under the baleful, unpredictable glare of either Elon or the army of new blue-checks whose awful hateful responses keep showing up first on all kinds of tweets. It. Was. Wonderful. I even tweeted about how great it is and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s among my last tweets ever.

It felt like sweet, snarky, wild, throw-your-bra-away freedom. And I realized … I do need a new Twitter. Maybe it isn’t a net positive for humanity, but as I said, I love it. It re-wired my brain and I want the hot takes and the constant stream of new! new! new! and the personalities and the memes and the wild ranges of experience and opinions and the dopamine hits yesterday were hitting with almost physical force. I am thrilled. This is what I was missing.

Now, of course, it’s sort of a battle of the witty comments as the power-user self-declared shitposters compete to see who can get famous fastest. That’ll be exhausting for a couple more weeks, and then it’ll probably get a little ugly when everybody rushes in before there’s even a block button. There will be angst and moderation fights and purity tests over whether it’s sufficiently decentralized and all of the growing pains of a social network and maybe it won’t even work at all! I don’t know! I don’t even want to overcomplicate it with all this thinking! I only know that for that brief, shining moment, Twitter as we knew it before was reborn, and goddamn if it didn’t feel like some kind of miracle.

Watching:

Can confirm, The Diplomat on Netflix is so totally worth it. I got there a little late, just started it last night, but I can tell you that after a long day goofing off on Bluesky, I had planned to do some work once the sun went down and it cooled off in Oakland some, and, well. Instead, I watched the first three episodes and am certifiably obsessed.

Still have not started this season of Succession. Is it just me?

Oh and also, the NBA Finals, which is taking up a lot of time, and can we all agree that Round 1 has almost been a little too exciting? I’m almost hoping the next round is a little less interesting, because I want to go to bed earlier. And this leads me to another observation:

F*ck horror movies. Horror movies are a thing again, and I, for one, am not happy, because I am a giant chicken, and live sports are the only time I really ever see live commercials, which, at the moment, means tons of damn horror movie trailers and I demand a content warning! NOT COOL! Kids are watching! And their giant chicken moms!

Reading:

A lot of things are on my shelf right now, including this (thanks, John P., for recommending your actual textbook from MBA school!):

And there are the sci-fi reads I mentioned recently, as well, but here’s the straight truth. A new audiobook in the Gray Man series came out and that’s all I’m doing until it’s done. I joked to my son that I might have to shut down the company until I’m done listening to it, and that was before Bluesky came out! Paging the focus fairy!

Weekend entertainment:

In case you missed it, I was on Daily Tech News Show with my cohost-for-life Tom Merritt, alongside Sarah Lane and Justin Robert Young, and we geeked out on data center energy consumption, haptic feedback in VR, and when you even need to bother upgrading a smartphone anymore.

For patrons of the show (I am one!), the extended show has a long conversation about how, let me just say, I do not love the converging storylines that are: low birth-rate panic, rapidly spreading abortion bans, and technological innovations that just make it easier and easier for people to get pregnant and have babies well past the time their bodies have suggested that they stop. If only there were some kind of fiction to imagine where this might all lead.

But in much lighter conversations, Tom and I also, with the help of producer Rich Stroffolino, made another absolutely delightful episode of It’s a Thing, discussing noods, Mixue boba and ice cream, the return of malls, and how that Rusted Root song “Send Me On My Way” is apparently the required instrumental intro to any TikTok featuring cute animals or other heartwarming material. Required, I tell you.

Please enjoy any and all and thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing. Please tell a friend!

• Jeff Shell: Back in 2020, the CEO of NBCUniversal actually fired the vice chairman because of an affair gone badly. Over the weekend, though, Shell himself was abruptly booted because of an “inappropriate workplace relationship.”

• Don Lemon: Abruptly departed CNN, a few months after he was demoted to a morning show for saying that Nikki Haley was “past her prime,” and saying that in fact, all women, are past their prime once out of their 20s and 30s. But it’s not just that; he reportedly has a long history of workplace sexism.

• Tucker Carlson: Out in the wake of a nearly $800 million settlement with voting-machine maker Dominion, downplaying democracy, trying to sanitize the January 6 insurrection, white nationalism, and so on. All possible reasons. Maybe it got too awkward having to explain to MAGA voters how Carlson’s texts reveal that he despises Donald Trump. Could be that.

  But what if … and hear me out. What if it’s also this:

In one of the suits, [former producer Abby] Grossberg accused Carlson and Fox of sexism and harassment, alleging his show's workplace was replete with examples of misogyny. Her lawsuit claims, among other things, that mocked-up photographic images depicted then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "in a bathing suit revealing her cleavage" and that staffers were polled — on two separate occasions — on which of two female candidates for Michigan governor they would rather have sex with.

We may not know for a while, but I’ll just say that there were worse offenders than Carlson in the Dominion broadcasts. A settlement that big will make any network nervous about any lawsuit, for sure. But I do have to wonder if Carlson’s more specific problem is … as it so often is … the women.

@realm5ollyJeff Shell, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon all actually have the same thing in common: it's the sexism, stupid. #tuckercarlson #donlemon #metoo

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Oh, and CNN, looks like you’ve got some openings. Call me!

But here’s the thing. I am legitimately sad and angry about Elon ruining Twitter. I loved it and visited it every day for 16 years. YEAH! For real! I got on This Hellsite in 2007, at the behest of one Veronica Belmont, who at the time, was still the producer and emerging talent on our lil’ old podcast, Buzz Out Loud.

I finally took it up in May of 2007. I was on maternity leave, and I figured 140 characters was the absolute max I could handle, and it was true. But Twitter quickly became a lifeline of consumable fun and communication and news. I loved it and I met people on it and I participated in a global community that was, at times, absolutely magical. It made sports and Oscars watching more fun and yeah, then it got pretty terrible and toxic but it was still like breathing for me, like muscle memory every single day.

Then this a**hole came along and bought it. For his ego and his politics. It’s not a grand plan, it’s not some genius business move. He shot his mouth off and got stuck with a $44 billion whoopsie and it’s just that stupid and lame, which makes it somehow so much worse. He’s been a disrespectful jerk to the people who built Twitter and the people who use it, and it sucks. And I’m mad. And I miss it. And I’m allowed to feel that way, and I know I’m not alone. He broke this thing, personally, because he felt like it, and leaving aside that it’s a disturbing fact of Adventures in Extreme Wealth, I don’t want to pretend like I don’t care. I do.

And ok, let’s talk about the blue check thing. Tom Merritt and I were reminiscing about how we got our blue checks on the same day back in the ‘aughts, and we talked about it and we laughed because we didn’t know why it had happened, but ok, then, thanks, I guess?

There’s a lot of talk now about how people didn’t “earn” their blue checks and it doesn’t make anyone “better” than anyone else, and complaining about losing it is silly and elitist. You know what? Screw that, too. The blue checks were a recommendation engine—which is just about the most foundational thing on the Web.

In a sea of information, people and algorithms and Yelp reviews and share buttons and even likes are the literal basis of how we sort. You can hate it if you want. You can say it was capricious or the mechanisms for the recommendations were arbitrary. Sure, fine. I’d challenge you to prove whether blue checks were handed out more arbitrarily than any single thing Elon has done since.

The blue check said, “This account makes good content. You might like it. It’s not the only account making good content. Maybe there’s something we, at Twitter, have missed. But if you’re looking for a visual shorthand for Some Shit You Might Like, this blue check is it.”

And I’ll tell you what, and I’ll die on this hill: I did make good content. I did it for free, for fun, for validation, for promotion, to talk to my friends, to work out feelings and thoughts and opinions, to share other good content that I thought would be worth reading. All kinds of reasons that had nothing to do with being an elitist jerk and had everything to do with participating in an experiment and a community that was fun, and wonderful, and rewarding, and interesting.

I was part of what made this site valuable in the first place—as was everyone who was on it before this guy came in and started acting like everything that came before was garbage. We built this. We did. And so yes. I do think it’s galling that he’s taking away blue checks and trying to blackmail people into paying for them and yes, I do take it personally because my blue check was right. I made good content for the hellsite for almost TWO GODDAMN DECADES. And I won’t be doing it anymore.

Ok. I feel better. Sort of. Not really though because my god. What an asshole.

While I’m already mad and sad …

I’m also heartbroken about the Oakland A’s leaving Oakland for Las Vegas. I’ve been going to A’s games for almost 25 years. I’ve been taking my kid to A’s fireworks games since he was an infant, and I’ve got a lot more A’s gear than Warriors gear, and I still get excited when I see Stomper at a school playground or the Oakland marathon or wherever else. This sucks.

But the truth is, the A’s have been assholes, too. In fact, I just read that it was the A’s lease that may have prevented the Oakland Raiders from improving the Coliseum, partially prompting their move to Las Vegas. Now, sure, easy for Mark Davis to say, and big grain of salt there. But the real crux is this: every professional sports team that has left Oakland has asked this beat-up, underestimated, flightless bird of a city for hundreds of millions of dollars, minimum, to make them stay.

Oakland had already come up with $300 million to help out the A’s owner, a Gap heir who’s worth something like $2.4 billion, and he balked when we couldn’t get $180 million more. And I know it’s probably more complicated in a million different ways, but the city said no and I’m fine with it. (Plus, owner John Fisher has spent years tanking the team in ways Mark Cuban could only dream of, driving down attendance and interest, and then making it seem like it was the fault of Oakland citizens for not caring about their team no matter what indignities he inflicted on them. How Elon of him.)

It was the same with the Raiders, who ran away with a $189 million taxpayer loan and also demanded something like $600 million from Oakland. The Warriors tried to run away from about $140 million in bonds that Oakland and Alameda County raised to help pay for arena renovations, but a court stuck them with at least $40 million of it.

And much has been made of how the Warriors self-financed their stadium, but there’s no way they weren’t asking Oakland to pay for improvements or a new stadium as a condition of staying. And as it happens, San Francisco also refused to finance the new stadium, but the Warriors were able to rustle up a sweet deal on land from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a massive Chase sponsorship, and other tailwinds from tech-rich San Francisco.

Either way, fine: I’m glad neither Oakland nor San Francisco spent any or any more taxpayer dollars enriching a basketball team, no matter how much I root for said team. Because sure, a professional sports team might give us a nice Saturday at the ballgame and a shared sporting experience and fun Stomper sightings, but it doesn’t do much for the city proper. Economists are pretty much unanimous on the fact that paying for sports stadiums almost never works out in favor of taxpayers, almost always works out better for the team, and you can bend over as far as you want, but the team might still up and leave for a bigger public bond. Sports is a business, and business doesn’t love you back.

So good job, Oakland. Focus on the potholes and the smash-and-grabs. And as for the A’s? Have fun being surrounded by fans of the opposite team, which is apparently the fate that’s befallen the Raiders in Las Vegas. HARRUMPH.

Happy distractions

Viewing: I just heard about this new show on Peacock called Mrs. Davis that sounds just weird enough that I am definitely in. I also showed my son the original Independence Day, his first viewing, and that’s a rewatch that just never gets old.

Reading: I started re-reading Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age—if you’ve read it, you’ll recall that the subtitle is, “Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.” I keep thinking about the Primer, which is basically just a super-advanced ChatGPT. It’s a personalized educational tool that provides a constant stream of information, education, guidance, Neo-in-the-Matrix like plug-in education like martial arts, that kind of thing. A personal agent, that knows all and can retrieve all and can be a constant companion and teacher.

I forgot that it’s also this sort of bonkers collection of super-wild nanotech stuff, global overthrow, Stephenson-esque millions of pages … I’m not 100% sure I’m going to keep going with it, I just wanted to make sure I remembered the Primer part properly, so that’s what I can name my eventual AI assistant. You’re never too old for a Young Lady’s Primer, after all.

And you may recall that earlier this week, I announced my new side-hustle podcast, Futureverse, where my friend Ramanan and I interview climate sci-fi authors. Well, that caused my friend Brad Berens (who writes a very good newsletter on Sundays!) to tell me that he actually wrote a science fiction book called Redcrosse! I downloaded it immediately and will very likely be dumping Neal for Brad.

Things:

Speaking of side-hustle podcats, I don’t know how many of you know about my other decade-old side hustle, the It’s a Thing podcast. But it’s the perfect Bits and Bobs recommendation (see? We all do it), so I thought I’d start including the things that are things this week in the B&B drop just as a teaser. This week:

The Boston Birk, exotic sodas, liberica coffee beans, and crochet-on-a-plane challenges.

Full episode here, if you like. Ok, there. We ended happy. Enjoy the weekend!

Like all good newshounds, I have a protracted morning routine that spies and folks in the news business call “getting read in.” Reading in, for me, involves clicking on all or most of the breaking news alerts that came in overnight, between 6 and 100 newsletters, headlines from Artifact News and, usually, a stop on Twitter.

But today, my last stop on the reading-in tour was actually Substack. Specifically, it was Notes, the Twitter clone that’s gotten so much attention lately because, well, Elon Musk banned Substack over it, which literally caused some not-insignificant number of people to go, “huh, wow, maybe I should check that out!”

I was lucky enough to be invited to the private beta, so I’ve been using Notes for a few days now, and now that it’s available to everyone, it’s only gotten richer and more interesting. Meanwhile, Twitter has only gotten more boring, hostile, and ineffective.

Some of this is my fault, of course: I tweeted something about B*tco*n mining the other day, so RIP my mentions forever (way more than usual, though, ouch!). Some of this is the algorithm changes: on my Twitter feed, there is only one topic and there will apparently only ever be one topic, and that topic is AI and OpenAI and ChatGPT, and did you know OpenAI has an API!? Oh, I did. There are no other topics in my Twitter feed, after all.

Finally, some of it is utility: my tweets simply don’t have the reach they used to. I will not speculate as to the reason, other than the ones about my Substack newsletter, where I definitely know the reason. I only know that the view count is down, the interactions are down, and the overall engagement is down.

As a result, considering that Twitter is a) not fun, because everyone’s yelling at me all the time, b) not interesting, because the variety of tweets I see by default is zero, and c) it has virtually no value as a promotional outlet on top of (a) and (b), I didn’t even make a conscious decision not to open Twitter today. It just did not occur to me.

And that is how irrelevance occurs. Slowly at first, and then all at once.

Also, while I know there have been some worries about Substack due to its recent public fundraise, which caused a lot of speculation that it may not be doing well, financially, Substack is kind of killing it as an everything app, at least for publishing. This thing is a media company in a box! Think about it:

• Custom domains = it’s your homepage

• Newsletters, including monetization = it’s your writing business

• Podcasts = it’s your audio platform

• Subscriber chat = it’s Discord

• Notes = it’s Twitter (but smaller, which is actually great!)

As others have pointed out, like Ed Zitron in his latest hilarious and too-true romp, Substack is appealing to exactly the audience that’s been so obsessed with Twitter for so long: journalists, editors, writers, and content creators. Plus, unlike Twitter (certainly in its current form and arguably before), my interests are actually aligned with Substack’s interests—the more money I make, the more money the site makes. That makes me feel a heck of a lot better than being on Twitter these days.

Also, not for nothing, the actual best thing for the news business is Elon breaking Twitter beyond repair. It’s been the national assignment desk for way too many years, and it’s been an artificial bubble that whole time—not to mention doing way too good a job of making reporters scared of their own replies, and tailoring their content accordingly. I hope NPR and PBS actually do leave Twitter, and that others follow, for the sake of reporters lifting up their heads and seeing the news outside their windows.

Ok, enough about that.

Aurora update

I didn’t see any Northern Lights in Alaska. Bad luck with space weather, it just wasn’t a busy week in the geomagnetic sense (although I guess I should be grateful every week there’s not a new Carrington Event, thanks for that reminder, Bill W.).

One of the nights I got up at 2:30 am, I did see an unearthly glow behind a whole lot of clouds, but mostly I just saw clouds. But that’s all right. I had a great time with family and busted out my snow pants for the most hardcore Easter egg hunt I’ve ever been on. And like I said, this solar activity isn’t even supposed to peak until 2025, so there’s time to try again.

Viewing:

Extrapolations on Apple TV+. As promised, I watched the four episodes of this series that are out so far, and like The End of the World is Just the Beginning, it’s not a good one for those who aren’t equipped for hard truths. I’m finding it annoyingly unsubtle, and I prefer the stripped-down bittersweet doom of Clade, or the more smoothly integrated futurism of Years and Years (which is one of the best future dramas I’ve watched maybe ever).

All that said, though, I don’t want to be too critical here; I’m in favor of anything that illustrates what our world is likely to look like in the coming decades. Storytelling is how we imagine and survive the future that’s coming, and hopefully, decide to avoid it. So in that regard, I’m glad Extrapolations is a bit of a punch in the face. We could use it.

Also, no, I haven’t watched Succession yet. Look, I’m a little busy trying to start a company over here, people!

EV of the week:

Last week I wrote about how Teslas, at least in the Bay Area, are starting to be the Uber car of choice, which seems kind of appropriate, given how generic and ever-present they are. I sometimes tell people we live in the EV future here, since Teslas have long since stopped being special, and every EV is represented here in the Bay. I’ve seen Rivians and Lucids, I see lots of other Polestars lately, the Mustang Mach-E is all over the place, the Kia Niro EV and the EV6 are starting to make appearances, sometimes I see a BMW iX or a Jaguar E-Pace. I’ve even seen a Ford Lightning or two.

But far and away, the car that’s popping up like superblooming California poppies lately, is the Hyundai Ioniq5. I know at least two people who bought this car recently and I’m seeing it more than almost any other EV all of a sudden. It’s probably some combination of Streisand effect and supply chains suddenly shaking loose—but it might also be that the Ioniq5 is an actual 5-seat SUV that starts at just under $42,000 with just over 300 miles of range, and is legitimately great by all accounts.

Whatever it is, it’s working, and it’s putting a lot of other carmakers to shame (hi, Honda, Subaru, Volkswagen, etc. etc. etc.). I haven’t gotten to drive one yet, but I’m hoping I’ll get my chance soon, because while I’m still loving my Polestar 2 like fire, I’m starting to get … I can’t believe I’m saying this … Hyundai FOMO.

What a world.

I’ve been obsessed with this aurora-hunting thing for several weeks now, ever since I brought up how the Northern Lights are a thing back in February. And I’m lucky enough to have family in Alaska, so even if the Kenai isn’t the most likely spot for aurora viewing, I’ve seen them here once before, and free is free (the Montana-to-Alaska pipeline is strong).

But the funny thing is, almost everyone I’ve told about this wild jaunt up north has not heard about the fact that the sun is hurling radioactive matter at us like a mother-trucker right now. I don’t know what’s happening in your algorithms, but mine is all, “hole in the sun the size of five earths” “stealth” coronal mass ejections, more X-class flares already than in all of 2022, and Northern Lights activity visible as far south as New Mexico. NEW MEXICO!

And solar storms are pretty wild, turns out. Apparently, last February, Starlink launched a fleet of 49 satellites right into a solar storm and they got caught up in the space weather and flung back into orbit, where they burned up and died. Snarky side note from Phys.org:

The loss of the Starlink satellites cost the company millions of dollars. The company elected to launch, even though the space weather community warned about the effects of a geomagnetic storm.

Yep, that tracks. Anyway, apparently more of this is expected because the sun is in an 11-year cycle of increased activity that’s set to peak in 2025, and in between, we can expect a little bit of weird electronics behavior, maybe the occasional flight disruptions (because it can interfere with GPS navigation), danger to satellites launched by companies too cocky to listen to scientists, and, apparently, some awesome Northern Lights viewing. Plan your upcoming vacations accordingly, and wish me luck!

Teslas. Barf.

It’s actually an accident that there’s double El*n snark in here today, but considering all this absurdity about the blue checks, I’m not in the mood to tone it down, either.

But on the topic of “it’s a thing,” it is apparently a thing for Uber drivers to suddenly, en masse, at least in San Francisco and the Bay Area, be driving Teslas.

On its face, this makes sense: they all used to drive Priuses (Prii?), and many still do. But Tesla has been cutting prices at a pretty breakneck speed lately, and as of January, at least, you could lease a Model 3 for $399 a month. Uber (and Lyft) have committed to all-EV fleets by 2030, and Uber has been aggressively rolling out EV availability across the US.

This is great! Yay! I’m so glad! EVs for all, if Uber and Lyft are going to increase traffic on the road, the least they can do is reduce emissions by transitioning their fleets to electric, right? Also, there’s something about Teslas that feel sort of perfect for this task: they all look alike, like road drones at this point, and the idea of them just slowly migrating into fleets of taxis feels … right, somehow.

Except there’s just one problem. No one knows how to drive an electric car and the result is rampant, horrific, absolutely miserable carsickness. Well, at least if you’re me. But I know I’m not the only one.

Last week I had a day of meetings in San Francisco; I took an Uber from Oakland, and three more Ubers around SF and home from BART. All four were Teslas, and all four left me weak, shaky, and nauseous. And it’s not the first time: I got a Tesla on the way to SFO several months ago with a car full of people, and at one point, I thought we were going to have to do a vomit-comet pit stop on the Bay Bridge.

Here’s the thing: EVs drive differently, because of something known as one-pedal driving. Basically, the accelerator and the brake are the same pedal. When you lift your foot off the “gas,” the car slows itself, and will come all the way to a stop as long as you don’t depress the accelerator again. You can use the brake pedal to stop, you just don’t really need to.

It’s a driving mode that takes a little getting used to, because it’s not standard for a car to suddenly decelerate when you take your foot off the gas. And for passengers in an EV with a novice driver, it can be an absolute nightmare of herky-jerky, stomach-rumbling stop-and-go. On top of that, EVs (and Teslas in particular) can accelerate incredibly fast, which again, makes them super fun to drive but extremely terrible to ride in, especially in the backseat.

So, I beg you, Uber and Lyft, pair your transition to all-electric fleets with some driver training, even if it’s just helpful tips in the app. One-pedal driving is an art, and drivers should practice a lot before they start picking up passengers. And just because you can accelerate like a bat out of hell, maybe drivers should be advised not to do so when someone is in the back seat. Oh and on that note, if you’re prone to carsickness and a Tesla shows up, I recommend the front seat, hard.

Every big change comes with unintended consequences, and on the main, a transition to an electric fleet is far better than the alternative. But a little training will go a long way so that customers don’t rebel against their Tesla rides due to the overwhelming urge to hurl.

Viewing

Don’t judge me, or do, but I’m in love with Shadow and Bone on Netflix. I have a little bit of a YA soft spot, I admit it! Just about to start Season 2 and it’s guilty-pleasure escapism at its best. In case you’re wondering, yes, I have been advised to start Extrapolations on Apple TV and I will do so and report back, post-haste.

Reading

I don’t know if I recommend this, exactly, but I recently started listening to a book that’s ominously titled “The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.” (Thanks a lot, Dan!) I … mean. You know how for a minute everybody was super into Ray Dalio’s new thing, “Principles for a Changing World Order,” and before that, “The Fourth Turning,” and sort of whatever tells us that history has made it super obvious that we’re screwed and a period of massive change is upon us and it’s probably time to get the bunker and here’s why?

Ok imagine those two but with sort of a breezily brutal extreme confidence about complete collapse, including, apparently, China completely collapsing within a decade. I mean, say what you will for the geopolitical analysis, it’s a CORKER. If you’re prone to anxiety, I do not recommend. Interesting as hell, though.

Until next week (if we’re still here …), happy aurora-hunting!