This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos
[ Andy Kroll at ProPublica and Nick Surgey at Documented ]
"Project 2025, the controversial playbook and policy agenda for a right-wing presidential administration, has lost its director and faced scathing criticism from both Democratic groups and former President Donald Trump. But Project 2025’s plan to train an army of political appointees who could battle against the so-called deep state government bureaucracy on behalf of a future Trump administration remains on track."
It's not hyperbole to look at these as training videos to enact a heavily right-wing America: one that is subject to Christian nationalist ideas and seeks to squash dissent. They discuss how to eliminate climate change protections and erase decades of progress on race and gender.
At any rate, it's a fascinating view on a movement that, regardless of your political views, clearly seeks to re-make America. In that sense they're a little like something from a Philip K Dick novel - or, dare I say it, the Handmaid's Tale.
[ Link ]
50 years after Nixon’s resignation, some eerie parallels with Trump and the Egypt story
[ Dan Kennedy at Media Nation ]
"Four years ago, Boston lawyer and journalist James Barron wrote that the Watergate break-in may well have been an attempt to steal documents from Democratic Party headquarters showing that Nixon had taken $549,000 from the Greek government in order to help finance his 1968 campaign."
Dan Kennedy argues that there are parallels here with the story, reported a year ago, that Donald Trump might have partially funded his 2016 election campaign with an illegal contribution from the Egyptian government.
It does seem strange that the story hasn't been followed up on by either the press or the Democratic Party. What sticks out to me about Dan's commentary, though, is this:
"What makes a story stick is repetition — and without prominent Democrats coming out every day and giving journalists something to report on, it quickly withers away."
Should that be true? I'd hope that the press could find their own leads. Otherwise it, in effect, becomes a press release driven industry. I'm not disputing that it probably is true in reality, but I'd hope for a better dynamic.
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When split newsrooms work, and when they falter
[ Bill Grueskin in Columbia Journalism Review ]
"What’s most important is that a disruptive start-up not be placed at the mercy of the old organization—which might see the upstart as a competitive threat and attempt to have it shut down or cause it to fail."
"[...] Newsroom managers must figure out if their current staff is equipped—intellectually, emotionally, technologically—to handle the pace of change in the business."
Interesting reflections here on newsrooms that split in order to incubate future-facing innovation alongside their legacy businesses. It seems like a good idea to me, if you can afford it: a pro-innovation culture is likely to shed the bureaucracy and processes that may be present in an older business. (This isn't just true for newspapers vs "digital", whatever digital is: it's also true for businesses that are set in an older version of the web.)
The trouble is, as this article notes, that these innovative newsrooms are likely to be so successful that they end up re-merging with the main newsroom and falling under its control. At that point the culture of innovation tends to die, which is something anyone in the tech industry who watched Yahoo acquire startups in the mid-2000s will recognize clearly.
So what's the solution? I think there isn't one. It may be more effective for the innovative newsrooms to be spun off completely, so that they aren't so much parallel sides of the same organization as new organizations entirely, with a more complete ability to reinvent how they work. My guess is that this would extend far beyond new modes of content and audience engagement and extend to the experience of working itself. After all, that's exactly what happened in tech - an exploration that, depending on the organization, was often positive for tech workers. Some people in news describe tech workers as "coddled"; I'd describe it more as "free to invent".
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"Mastodon for Harris" is a Success Story for Fediverse Activism
[ Sean Tilley at We Distribute ]
"Following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 election, Democratic supporters have gained a massive influx of energy and support all over the Web. Hours after the president made his announcement, Heidi Li Feldman, a law professor emeritus at Georgetown University, launched an ActBlue fundraiser comprising of Mastodon users."
It's been pretty successful: almost half a million dollars at the time this article was written. It's another example of how Mastodon users are politically engaged, more active per capita than any other social network, and ready to contribute.
It's also a facet of Mastodon's wider userbase that there were some criticisms this money was being raised for the Presidential election than, say, local mutual aid. From my perspective, both are important: perhaps there's a way to learn from this in order to fund a wider mutual aid campaign, but contributing to an election campaign to stop an authoritarian, nationalistic second Trump administration feels incredibly important.
Political purity tests and fractions unfortunately are a feature of Mastodon's communities, and will likely continue to be - but one positive way of looking at it is that it means they care, a lot, and are interested in ways to improve the lives of vulnerable people. That's an incredibly good thing that should give us all hope for the future.
[ Link ]
BitClout Wasn’t So Decentralized
"Here’s a thing. It costs $1. If you buy one, the next one will cost $2. If someone buys it, the next one will cost $4. Et cetera. The price of the thing always goes up, leaving every buyer (except the most recent one) with a large guaranteed profit. Of course they can’t sell the thing to realize the profit, but that too is a benefit: If they can’t sell, the price can’t go down.
"Man, 2019 was just amazing. That was an economic model that you could advertise ."
It genuinely is incredible. Matt Levine is incredulous that anyone could think that they could avoid SEC regulation because something was "decentralized" - but even then, BitCloud wasn't really decentralized .
In a way, I'm a little envious: it seems like one could have raised millions and millions of dollars for some crypto venture and actually, with complete impunity, openly spent it on something else that really had nothing to do with a token scheme. Imagine what could have been funded that way!
As Matt points out:
"And then you could just take the money! And be like “what, I told you I wouldn’t spend it on developing the protocol, and I didn’t.”"
What a time. Anyway, I'm sure nothing like it is happening in the tech industry right now.
[ Link ]
Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case
[ Lauren Feiner at The Verge ]
"A federal judge ruled that Google violated US antitrust law by maintaining a monopoly in the search and advertising markets.
“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” the court’s ruling, which you can read in full at the bottom of this story, reads. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”"
This is seismic, both for Google and for the web. As The Verge points out, this is so far about liabilities, not about any prescriptive remedy. But as one of the major factors in the decision was the payments that Google makes to browser manufacturers, it seems likely that any remedy will change how this works. In turn, the impact across tech could be significant.
Apple received $20 billion from Google in 2022 to be the default search engine (it shares 36% of ad revenue from Safari users with the company). That's a big number, but nothing compared to its $394bn in total revenue. But for Mozilla, the impact might be more profound: in 2021, these payments represented 83% of its revenue . What happens to it without this underwriting?
It's too early to say exactly what will change, but this is also potentially a gift for the new batch of AI startups that are trying to seize search engine ground. The era of the internet flux that we've found ourselves in - wherein everything is once again up for grabs and seemingly-entrenched incumbents change dramatically at a moment's notice - shows no sign of slowing.
[ Link ]
The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media
[ Joel Gascoigne ]
"The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term."
Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne talks about how the rise of the new, decentralized / federated social networks allow publishers to retain control.
"They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to."
I'm a Buffer customer. I love that it works with both Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as every other major social network. More than that, I've long admired Joel's approach while running Buffer: it's a transparent company that works in the open and genuinely values independence. I wish there were more like it.
[ Link ]