The Internet’s Inevitable Enshittification

How platforms decay, as explained by Cory Doctorow to NPR. Finally a name for what we may not consciously recognize but deep down know is going on.

… I think Facebook’s a good example. Facebook went through the whole lifecycle of platform decay. They started off by offering a really good deal to their end users. They said, “Hey, leave MySpace, come to Facebook. It’s just like MySpace, except we only show you the things that you asked to see, and we’ll never spy on you.”

And then once those users were locked in — because once you’re in a place with all of your friends, it’s really hard to leave — they started to take away some of that good stuff they gave them, and they handed it to advertisers and publishers.

To the advertisers, they said, “We were lying when we said we weren’t going to spy on these guys. We’re totally spying on them. Here’s all the data you need to target them for ads that we’re not going to charge you much money for.”

And to the publishers, they said, “We are also lying when we said we’d only show them the stuff they asked to see.”

And then once the publishers and the advertisers were locked in, well, they took away those surpluses. The ads got more expensive. Publishers had to put more and more of their content — not just to get recommended, but even to be shown to the people who subscribed them. And that’s the final stage, the stage where there’s just only the residual value left on the platform that the platform owner thinks will keep the users and the business customers they bring in stuck to the platform. And that’s when we’re at the beginning of the end.

Further reading.

Experimental Matrimony

Ah, the emptiness of modern comforts…

Can a song be both great and ridiculous?  Fifty years on, I’m still wondering.  But I still love this and almost everything from Roxy’s first five albums.

How To Spot A Deepfake

All you got to do is watch, with your ears.

At the encouragement of Fakerbot, I listened to several of the AI-songs out there before they all got yanked after a couple of days. But some of them are back up!

Hearing early Beach Boys”I Get Around” era Brian Wilson falsetto on “Be My Baby” – the song that drove his entire professional career – is sublime. Listen before they take it down again.

I also heard some pretty bad AI Nirvana.
The best of the lot is definitely Elvis singing Iggy Pop.
You can’t even tell it’s simulated!

Oh No Crypto Bro

I’ve followed this story with some delight. Apparently Michael Lewis, who wrote The Big Short, has been trailing FTX guy Sam Bankman-Fried around, so we’ll certainly get a kick-ass film out of it someday. Among many, many remarkable facets to the tale is that the crypto market has supposedly lost $2 trillion of valuation this year… and Wall Street has barely flinched.
When Sequoia Capital – allegedly the most intelligent venture capital firm – invested $210 million in FTX last year, it asked to see financial reports and instead was told “we’ll send you a few bullet points.” It’s traditional when investing that much into a firm to have someone on the board, but Bankman-Fried wouldn’t let anyone on the board of directors, which was him, an attorney, and an FTX employee.
For a company “worth” $32 billion at one point.

Zero oversight! What could go wrong?

I’ve followed developing news with Patrick Redford of Defector, who is typically hilarious. But there are several excellent reporters and twitter feeds. Ed Zitron on Twitter is great.

Here, a professor of finance at King’s College splains it to us. He keeps showing photos of Phil Spector for Sam Bankman-Fried, so gotta respect his game:

It’s an exciting time to be in the crypto world.

Dear Mr. Brody

I’ve been watching this and it’s pretty fantastic. Via Amazon Prime Discovery trial, which I will cancel when finished. The producer who had all the letters in storage boxes was Edward Pressman – who produced Phantom of the Paradise. Have you guys ever seen that?

I’m Not Your Crypto Tool You Tool

Hopefully no one here watches the sportsballs, as recently you would have seen this ad ad nauseum.

Periodically I enjoy trying to make sense of speculative digital currency, most of it not even underpinned by scarcity. It makes my brain hurt.
Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFT – sounds like electronica I’m too old to fathom.

And apparently it’s terrible for the environment: a single Bitcoin transaction consumes the same amount of power that an average American home uses in a month.

Twitter, please roast this clown:

I can just not stop laughing that Matt Damon’s pitch for crypto is “Be like a brave explorer, invest your life savings in crypto.”

This commercial where Matt Damon compares buying $5 in ElonAssCoin to the Wright Brothers inventing flight or astronauts exploring space really hypes me up!

Sorry, Not Sorry

For the uninitiated, Music from “The Elder” was KISS’s greatest misstep in a long career with more than a few. After 1980’s Unmasked bombed (they didn’t even tour behind it!), the band decided it was time to get back to basics, working again with the producer who had given them their most successful album, Destroyer. Instead, Bob Ezrin’s cocaine habit talked Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley into a concept album to rival Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

This is hilarious for many reasons, but especially funny when you consider that 99.998% of previous KISS songs were about partying and getting laid. Even Ace Frehley, the crazy, off-the-rails alcoholic in the band, knew this was a terrible idea. It was conceived as a soundtrack to a movie that didn’t exist! Here’s the story, courtesy of Wikipedia

The basic plot of “The Elder” involves the recruitment and training of a young hero (The Boy) by the Council of Elders who belong to the Order of the Rose, a mysterious group dedicated to combating evil. The Boy is guided by an elderly caretaker named Morpheus. The album’s lyrics describe the boy’s feelings during his journey and training, as he overcomes his early doubts to become confident and self-assured. The only spoken dialogue is at the end of the last track, “I”. During the passage, Morpheus proclaims to the Elders that The Boy is ready to undertake his odyssey.

How could this be anything but a cocaine album?