This week's notable links

[ Reid Hoffman in the New York Times ]

"As Vice President Harris defines her vision for how best to lead the United States in this moment in time, she has an opportunity to take the torch passed to her by President Biden in an explicitly pro-innovation direction. Instead of governing by tweet, Mr. Biden passed bipartisan legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that authorized hundreds of billions of dollars for new manufacturing construction and investment."

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explains why Silicon Valley should get behind Harris, counter to the example set by Musk, Andreessen, and a few others. Hoffman is a co-signatory of VCs for Kamala, which makes clear that most Silicon Valley funders are in favor of the Democratic candidate and current Vice President.

Hoffman make the case clearly:

"Under the Biden-Harris administration, U.S. stock market indexes hit all-time highs, with the S&P 500 increasing by 48 percent. Unemployment dropped below 4 percent. The number of U.S. manufacturing jobs hit its highest level since 2008. While Mr. Trump’s great ambition was to build a big beautiful border wall, Mr. Biden actually secured the necessary funding to build large-scale factories for manufacturing semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, solar cells and more. And we’re now constructing them at stunning rates."

I'm more pro-regulation than Hoffman is. Harris should maintain a strong antitrust stance, too, I believe, as well as providing new protections against the worst excesses of AI and other technologies that might harm vulnerable groups. But it's certainly true that her administration will be better for innovation than her opponent, even if the latter might be better for lining the pockets of a few select billionaires.

This is also true:

"In a speech Ms. Harris gave on the future of A.I. in 2023, she noted that we must “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation.”"

It is a false choice. Regulation, principles, and a duty of care to the public are not anti-innovation: in fact, they promote it. And that's the direction we should all be heading in.

#Democracy

[ Link ]

[ Dmitry Antonov and Andrew Osborn at Reuters ]

"A family of Russian sleeper agents flown to Moscow in the biggest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War were so deep under cover that their children found out they were Russians only after the flight took off, the Kremlin said on Friday."

What a bonkers story. It's crazy to me that these kinds of sleeper agents are still real - or that they ever were at all. Imagine what it takes to fit in with a culture completely, from language to mannerisms to cultural understanding.

Also, many of these voices appear to adhere to their pulp fiction archetypes:

"Andrei Lugovoi, a former spy wanted by Britain for murdering dissident Alexander Litvinenko with atomic poison and now serving as head of an ultranationalist party's faction in the Russian Duma, said on Telegram: "Our people are at home with their families. And for each of them it is no pity to hand over a bunch of foreign agent scum.""

I wonder how many sleeper agents are still out there, acting on behalf of Russia and every other nation.

#Democracy

[ Link ]

[ Jason Snell at Six Colors ]

"In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services."

This is an interesting piece about how Apple's services revenue is set to overtake its hardware business.

Over on his blog Pixel Envy, Nick Heer worries :

"It would be disappointing if Apple sees its hardware products increasingly as vehicles for recurring revenue."

I'd go further. The beauty of Apple's product line is that they're comparatively well-made products that push the boundaries of user experience, bringing technology breakthroughs to a creative audience: as Jobs put it, "bicycles for the mind". Customers (including me) accept higher prices because the products are exceptional, but that depends on a product line that is complete.

If the product offering is a higher-priced hardware device and premium monthly services on top of it, the investment starts to have diminishing returns. It's a loss of focus on what made Apple great, and why people keep coming back to it. It's greed, essentially: continuing to push the Apple user base further and further, assuming the breaking point is very far out.

That puts them at risk from being disrupted by someone else. Windows ain't it, but at some point someone is going to come in with a really great set of hardware on an alternative stack. The question won't be whether it beats Apple as-is, but simply whether it's good enough at a lower price point. And then that company will grow their offerings, until before you know it, Apple has serious competition. It's disruption 101, and the further Apple pushes out its expense and friction, the more susceptible it becomes.

#Technology

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[ Nieman Journalism Lab ]

"The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop."

This report is in-depth and fascinating. It seems obvious to me that having more news sources with specific focuses is a really good thing, but also that ensuring that they are sustainable is crucial. Many journalistic outlets were created by journalists with business models as almost an afterthought, so as certain kinds of funding dried up they became less viable.

One thing that I really wish was present in this report: platform. What was Substack's influence here? Or Ghost's? Are these WordPress shops? How many of them were aided by Automattic's Newspack, for example? These details could also be revealing.

We need journalism that keeps us more informed, and it's not a secret that many of our incumbent outlets are not doing the job. A healthy news startup ecosystem is one way we can get to a more informed voting population and stronger democracies in our local communities, nationally, and globally.

#Media

[ Link ]

[ Molly White ]

"With $45.5 million in corporate contributions, American cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase is the largest donor to Fairshake: a newly-minted super PAC focused solely on installing political candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry, and ousting those with a history of pushing for stronger regulations and consumer protections when it comes to an industry that has long been a regulatory “Wild West”."

"[Coinbase's] $25 million contribution, however, appears to be in violation of federal campaign finance laws that prohibit contributions from current or prospective federal government contractors. This would be by far the largest known illegal campaign contribution by a federal contractor."

Molly points out that there's a possibility here that Coinbase is using a loophole that had previously been exploited by Chevron. But it's certainly not clear that this is the case.

It's also worth calling out what "candidates who will be friendly to the cryptocurrency industry" means in practice this election cycle. It's far more likely that Trump-aligned candidates will fall into this camp.

#Democracy

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[ Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski at ProPublica ]

The majority of Donald Trump's net worth is wrapped up in Truth Social's parent company Trump Media & Technology Group. If he's elected, its deals and ownership structure will present conflicts of interests - illustrated by this ProPublica investigation into its streaming TV deal:

"The deal announced by Trump Media involves a series of largely unknown small players. Trump Media’s disclosures about the deal describe a nesting doll of companies that leave many questions unanswered about its new business partners."

"The sellers include a pair of Louisiana companies: [major Republican donor James E.] Davison’s JedTec LLC along with another called WorldConnect IPTV Solutions."

JedTec's issues are relatively straightforward. For me, the bigger mystery surrounds WorldConnect IPTV, which seems to be acting as a wrapper around a UK streaming company called Perception Group . In turn, Perception's servers seem to be colocated with Hurricane Electric , a backbone provider based in Fremont.

Perception seems like a bit of a mystery operation in itself: there's very little information on its website that really illuminates if there's any new technology here at all. WorldConnect, meanwhile, seems to have spent many of its early years helping right-wing Christian TV stations reach audiences across the UK's Freeview over-the-air digital TV service and the internet at large.

It's all super-strange. There's definitely more to discover.

#Democracy

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[ Kylie Robison at The Verge ]

"Perplexity’s “Publishers’ Program” has recruited its first batch of partners, including prominent names like Time, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and Automattic (with WordPress.com participating but not Tumblr). Under this program, when Perplexity features content from these publishers in response to user queries, the publishers will receive a share of the ad revenue."

This was inevitable.

It also opens the floodgates: there's a world where any publisher gets a direct revenue share for being a source, if they sign up and license their content. This seems like it has the potential to be a solid improvement, at least for publishers.

Which brings me to Automattic's involvement. As Matt Mullenweg says in the piece:

"It’s a much better revenue split than Google, which is zero."

Automattic will actually be sharing the revenue with customers of its hosted WordPress product. I'm not sure if that includes WordPress VIP, its premium product for publishers, but it does include its dotcom customers. Whether free hosted WordPress publishers who are used as sources by Perpexity see any kind of revenue share is also a mystery, which might put some foreign publishers in a bad place in particular.

In general, although there will certainly be kinks to work out, this sets a really interesting precedent. I'm curious to see how it lands.

#AI

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[ Bron Maher at PressGazette ]

"Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies."

I believe this would have been illegal were the UK still a part of the EU. Meta is in trouble for a similar sort of scheme. Here, though, in a UK free from EU constraints, there are no such issues.

It's a terrible approach, both in terms of user privacy, and in terms of the newsrooms' own business models: the people most likely to pay to remove ads are also the wealthier people ad buyers want to reach. So not only does this create bad feeling with the reader-base as a whole, but it reduces the value of the ads. It's lose-lose. (Also: who is actually paying for the Daily Express online?)

The irony, as always, is that contextual ads which adjust themselves to the content of articles are more lucrative than targeted ads that rely on reader surveillance. The business model reason to track users is overstated. But here it is again.

#Media

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