This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. It's a shorter email because of illness. Luckily, nothing much happened over the last seven days.
Did I miss something? Let me know!
Can J.D. Vance's Populist Crusade Succeed?
[ Matt Stoller ]
"So what does Vance think? He is in agreement with the views of a rising set of younger conservatives, populists like Sohrab Ahmari and Oren Cass, who assert that libertarianism is a cover for private rule, most explicitly in Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. It is flourishing of the family that animates this new group, not worship of the market. At Remedy Fest, Vance was explicit in his agreement with this notion, saying “I don't really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity, we have to be worried about it.”"
An interesting analysis of JD Vance's economic ideas - at least as described here, I'm actually not in disagreement with some of them. The free market is cover for private rule. Lina Khan is doing a great job.
I'm highly unimpressed with his backers Andreessen and Horowitz's ideas, which are tied up with military might and a self-interested misunderstanding of what happened in relation to the downfall of the USSR. The idea that Elizabeth Warren "hates capitalism" is nonsense. It's a very thin defense drawn from their particular mode of capitalism coming under threat of regulation.
The trouble is, as I've described, all the social policies that go along with it. Sure, try and influence both political parties to be beneficial to your businesses all you want. (I think it's myopic, but whatever.) But if you throw mass deportations, military policing of our cities, and fascist reconstructions of government in the mix, you'd better be ready for the repercussions.
[ Link ]
Taboola + Apple News? No thanks
[ Om Malik ]
"Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy."
This move says a lot about modern Apple, but more than that, it likely says a lot about the performance of Apple News.
For many news publishers Apple News pageviews are a multiple of the reads on their own websites: it's a serious source of traffic and impact. The fact that Apple is finding itself having to make changes to how it makes revenue on the platform means that the mechanism itself may be under threat.
It's never a good idea to put your trust in a third party: every publisher needs to own their relationships with their communities. The pull of Apple News has been irresistible, and Apple has seemed more trustworthy than most. This may have been a false promise, and publishers should take note.
[ Link ]
News CEOs and the Question of News Experience
[ Richard J. Tofel ]
"I think some of those choosing these new business leaders themselves forgot about the special nature of the news business. It won’t be enough, for instance, at least in most cases, for someone who aspires to run a news organization to recognize the importance of the role of the press in democratic governance—although that ought to be essential."
"[...] More subtly, a CEO without news experience may not grasp how large of an asset is newsroom morale, or how much sapping it may cost an enterprise. Such issues can become particularly tricky in a unionized environment— especially one in which there are no profits over which to haggle, either because the organization is a nonprofit, or because it is no longer profitable."
Dick Tofel was the founding general manager of ProPublica , and generally knows a thing or two about the news business.
There's a line to walk here: there's certainly risk, as Tofel describes, of picking a news CEO who is not familiar with the news business. At the same time, as I've previously lamented, the industry needs an injection of new, outside ideas . It's certainly true that the CEO must deeply understand how news works, but they also can't be to afraid to change some of those dynamics - as long as they're cognizant of the position and responsibility that journalism holds in a democracy.
Any CEO needs to be very aware of organizational culture and morale. Many news CEOs are hyper-focused on their journalism (which is good!) at the expense of thinking too deeply about culture (which is bad). Hopefully any good incoming CEO would be an expert at building culture, although most of us know that this often isn't the case.
It's complicated, in other words. But journalism is at least as important as it's ever been, and getting news leadership right is crucial.
[ Link ]
Ethicswishing
[ Robin Berjon ]
This is somewhere between a call to action and a wake-up call:
"If you wish to be moral, you have to also pay attention to whether what you're doing actually works. And the best way to do that is to set up a forcing function for it: that's what checks and balances do."
"[...] Imagination isn't just a trite word to make your heart glow in pulp-class young-adult dystopia — imagination is the ability to depict justice, to see what we ought to aspire to. It is not a gift but rather a skill to hone."
There is an inherent question here about how you can create binding systems that enforce ethical standards - but also, how you can determine which ethical standards actually lead to the outcomes you want to establish.
I think there's a lot here that can be addressed through more distributed equity. As Robin says, "anywhere a powerful entity operates it is at risk of unethical behavior and therefore must be held in check by a control mechanism". One system of control - insufficient in itself but I think still necessary - is to ensure that power is spread among more people who are more connected to the effects of that power.
Distributing equity literally means handing over the means of production not just to workers but to those impacted by the work, reconnecting the decisions to their consequences. I don't know that you can have ethical tech that is motivated by centralized power. As Robin implies: so far, it hasn't worked.
[ Link ]