Ed Zitron has written a tremendous manifesto railing against the tech industry. Carve out some time in your day to read the whole thing.

The average person’s experience with technology is one so aggressive and violative that I believe it leaves billions of people with a consistent low-grade trauma. We seem, as a society, capable of understanding that social media can hurt us, unsettle us, or make us feel crazed and angry, but I think it’s time to accept that the rest of the tech ecosystem undermines our wellbeing in an equally-insidious way. And most people don’t know it’s happening, because everybody has accepted deeply shitty conditions for the last ten years.

Now, some of you may scoff at this a little — after all, you’re smart, you know about disinformation, you know about the tricks of these companies, and thus most people do, right?

Wrong! Most people don’t think about the things they’re doing at all and are just trying to get by in a society that increasingly demands we make more money to buy the same things, with our lives both interfered with and judged by social networks with aggressive algorithms that feed us more things based on what we’ll engage with, which might mean said things piss us off or actively radicalize us. They’re nagged by constant notifications — an average of 46 a day — some useful, some advertisements, like Apple telling us there’s a nailbiter college football game regardless of whether we’ve ever interacted with anything football related, or a Slack message saying you haven’t joined a group you were invited to yet, or Etsy letting you know that you can buy things for an upcoming holiday. It’s relentless, and the more time you invest in using a device, the more of these notifications you get, making you less likely to turn them off. After all, how well are you doing keeping your inbox clean? Oh what’s that? You get 25 emails a day, many of them from a company owned by William Sonoma?

As I understand it, people don’t really block ads or delete spam emails? This is madness.

He then goes into excruciating detail about his experienced with an $238 Acer computer.

On November 21, I purchased the bestselling laptop from Amazon — a $238 Acer Aspire 1 with a four-year-old Celeron N4500 Processor, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, and 128GB of slow eMMC storage (which is, and I’m simplifying here, though not by much, basicallyan SD card soldered to the computer’s motherboard. Affordable and under-powered, I’d consider this a fairly representative sample of how millions of people interact with the internet.

I believe it’s also a powerful illustration of the damage caused by the Rot Economy, and the abusive, exploitative way in which the tech industry treats people at scale.

It took 1 minute and 50 seconds from hitting the power button for the laptop to get to the setup screen. It took another minute and a half to connect and begin downloading updates, which took several more minutes. After that, I was faced with a licensing agreement where I agreed to binding arbitration to use Windows, a 24 second pause, and then got shown a screen of different “ways I could unlock my Microsoft experience,” with animations that shuddered and jerked violently.

Now, why do I know that? Because you’ll _never guess who’s a big fan of Windows S? That’s right, Prabhakar Raghavan, The Man Who Killed Google Search, who said that Microsoft’s Windows S “validated” Google’s approach to cheap laptops back when he was Vice President of Google’s G Suite (and three years before he became Head of Search).

To be clear, Windows Home in S Mode is one of the worst operating systems of all time. It is ugly, slow, and actively painful to use, and (unless you deactivate S Mode) locks you into Microsoft’s ecosystem. This man went on to ruin Google Search by the way. How does this man keep turning up? Is it because I say his name so much?

Throughout, the laptop’s cheap trackpad would miss every few clicks. At this point, I was forced to create a Microsoft account and to hand over my cellphone number — or another email address — to receive a code, or I wouldn’t be able to use the laptop. Each menu screen takes 3-5 seconds to load, and I’m asked to “customize my experience” with things like “personalized ads, tips and recommendations,” with every option turned on by default, then to sign up for another account, this time with Acer. At one point I am simply shown an ad for Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage product with a QR code to download it on my phone, and then I’m told that Windows has to download a few updates, which I assume are different to the last time it did that.

It has taken, at this point, around 20 minutes to get to this screen. It takes another 33 minutes for the updates to finish, and then another minute and 57 seconds to log in, at which point it pops up with a screen telling me to “set up my browser and discover the best of Windows,” including “finding the apps I love from the Microsoft Store” and the option to “create an AI-generated theme for your browser.” The laptop constantly struggles as I scroll through pages, the screen juddering, apps taking several seconds to load.

When I opened the start bar — ostensibly a place where you have apps you’d use — I saw some things that felt familiar, like Outlook, an email client that is not actually installed and requires you to download it, and an option for travel website Booking.com, along with a link to LinkedIn. One app, ClipChamp, was installed but immediately needed to be updated, which did not work when I hit “update,” forcing me to go to find the updates page, which showed me at least 40 different apps called things like “SweetLabs Inc.” I have no idea what any of this stuff is.

I type “sweetlabs” into the search bar, and it jankily interrupts into a menu that takes up a third of the screen, with half of that dedicated to “Mark Twain’s birthday,” two Mark Twain-related links, a “quiz of the day,” and four different games available for download.

The computer pauses slightly every time I type a letter. Every animation shudders. Even moving windows around feels painful. It is clunky, slow, it feels cheap, and the operating system — previously something I’d considered to be “the thing that operates the computer system” — is actively rotten, strewn with ads, sponsored content, suggested apps, and intrusive design choices that make the system slower and actively upset the user.

It is an incredibly long way of saying buying a $250 computer will result in you owning a shitty computer. I haven’t owned a non-Apple computer in so long I had no idea. A shitty Windows computer or a shitty Chromebook does nothing for me or really anyone.

Not to take away from his point, but if you can afford a $250 computer, just save a little more and get a refurbished or pre-owned MacBook Air for about the same price. It won’t have the latest technology or features, but it will be infinitely better than a Chromebook.

I believe billions of people are in active combat with their devices every day, swiping away notifications, dodging around intrusive apps, agreeing to privacy policies that they don’t understand, desperately trying to find where an option they used to use has been moved to because a product manager has decided that it needed to be somewhere else. I realize it’s tough to conceptualize because it’s so ubiquitous, but how much do you fight with your computer or smartphone every day? How many times does something break? How many times have you downloaded an app and found it didn’t really do the thing you wanted it to? How many times have you wanted to do something simple and found that it’s actually really annoying?

How much of your life is dodging digital debris, avoiding scams, ads, apps that demand permissions, and endless menu options that bury the simple things that you’re actually trying to do?

You are the victim of a con. You have spent years of your life explaining to yourself and others that “this is just how things are,” accepting conditions that are inherently exploitative and abusive. You are more than likely not deficient, stupid, or “behind the times,” and even if you are, there shouldn’t be multi-billion dollar enterprises that monetize your ignorance.

There has always been a business to exploit the naïve and stupid. There’s a sucker born every minute.

I don’t feel in “active combat” with my computer or my phone. I can turn off notifications. I’ve never had a computer “break.” I’ve downloaded apps that have micro-subscriptions attached that I didn’t want to opt-in and so I simple deleted the app. I have ad blocking software everywhere. I don’t experience this “trauma” that Zitron espouses.

Maybe I’m in a bubble?

“If you’re not paying for the product, then you’re the product,” is one of the most repeated quotes from the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. I fully understand this concept. Do you?

Tech companies and platforms only exist to make money. They continue to make the lives of those who participate in their platforms, who are too stupid, tired, naïve, or ignorant, terrible. Everything is bad because of obnoxious, vicious and malicious digital manipulation. It’s why the next four years in the United States and maybe the world is going to be objectively bad and why I’m actively pulling away from these platforms.

You probably should too.

Drew Magary, writing in his Funbag column for Defector, has some smart insight into how things are and why.

…growing up in the analog age meant that I was forced to interact directly with people to get what I wanted. If I wanted a pizza, I had to call the restaurant and talk to a teenage idiot manning the phone. If I wanted to hook up with a girl, I had to ask her out on a date (terrifying). If I wanted to bully someone, I had to physically pick them up and hang them on a door hook by their underwear. Not all of these interactions went smoothly, but that’s how you learn to be a social animal. You fuck up a face-to-face exchange, you learn from it, and then you handle the next exchange better. You don’t learn all of this in a straight, upward trajectory. This is because people are messy, so you have to learn how to deal with each person in your life a certain way. No one starts off a master schmoozer. That takes experience.

So what happens when tens of millions of people grow up with that experience reduced to a bare minimum? Well, you get a world where people don’t know how the fuck to talk to one another. Everyone you deal with is just a faceless Seamless driver, or a chatbot, or some stranger on social media whom you’ll never have to meet. You learn nothing from any of these interactions, which makes you a less capable socializer. This is no longer a generational issue. I now use food delivery apps, I’ve put randos on blast on social media, and I’d rather cut my arm off than take a voice call. If I don’t have to deal with another person, I won’t. And you know why? Because dealing with people is fucking hard. So millions of Americans, young and old, have skipped out on doing that work. It shows up in our electoral choices.

There’s no going back from this.

Will Leitch, writing on his Medium blog, talks about advice for your journalists. However, this bit about writing stuck out to me.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, when I told people I was a writer, they usually asked some variation of “how do you make a living at that?” But as I, and they, have hit our 40s, and our lives have played out, they’ve started saying something different. They pause for a second, and their eyes get a little dreamy, and they say some variation of, “Man, I always wanted to do something like that.” I always tell them they still can. And so can you. There is no greater feeling in the world than making something, than taking a blank page, or a fresh canvas, or an empty lot, or an unadorned room, and filling it with something that you made. It’s something you’ll never, ever regret. So go do it. Go make stuff. Make the world a little bit different because you were in it.

I need to figure out my stuff, but I’m getting there.

Nick Simmons and Evan Stanley. Check this out. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/EtjcBahLWM

— Gene Simmons (@genesimmons) December 15, 2024

Robert Rosenthal, writing at his site IlliniBoard, can’t stand the idea of running drones during free throws.

Here’s the situation. With five seconds left, Kasparas Jakucionis was fouled and went to the free throw line. Make one and he ties it. Make both and Illinois will take the lead. The entire State Farm Center is on edge.

As you may know, I can’t watch important free throws like that. Call me weak or whatever – compare me to someone watching a horror film through their fingers as they cover their eyes because that’s essentially what I’m doing – but I just can’t do it. At home, I leave the room and try to listen, usually peaking around the corner of a doorway. On press row, I stare at my keyboard until I hear the crowd celebrate or groan.

Jakucionis is handed the ball. The arena goes quiet as it always does for free throws by the home team. I stare at my keyboard to listen for a cheer or groan. And I hear… a drone? The familiar WHZZZZZZZZZ of the tiny little copter blades of a camera drone. The “swarm of 10,000 mosquitoes” sound.

Look, I don’t know if Kasparas Jakucionis heard the drone at all. Even in the absolute worst case scenario – just as he went to shoot, he heard the drone, it distracted him, and he missed the free throw – it still didn’t affect the outcome of the game. Had he made both free throws instead of missing that first one, Tennessee would have won 66-65 instead of 66-64.

But that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is that we chose a different competition in that moment. We were trying to win some “college athletics video of the year” award over a basketball game. We thought of the content over the kids.

I saw the drone in warmups and at the beginning of the game but did not hear it during the Jakucionis free throws. Robert’s seats are much closer than mine, so it might have been more noticeable for him. I have no idea. The drone didn’t make KJ lose focus. Coach Underwood lost focus, but I can’t blame the drone either.

I’m just happy Brad Underwood realized he should have called a timeout after the free throws after the game was lost. After ten games, this team is still learning how to play together, but there is no next year. This team has to learn how to close out games, or they will be in for an early exit in March. The good thing is that it’s only December.

I had no idea he had two Sinatra albums, and their profits go to a Down syndrome charity.

I don’t really share my thoughts on social media anymore, but today is a special occasion. I’m posting because it’s my ten-year wedding anniversary.

Marrying Maria McDevitt was unquestionably the smartest decision I’ve ever made, and I feel extremely lucky that we share our lives together. She continues to be my smarter, funnier, and prettier, better half.

I can’t wait for another decade (and beyond!) of laughter, love, and unforgettable memories together!

Why yes I did get married on 12/13/14. It was on purpose, of course.

The Illinois Flag Commission has released the 10 finalists for the new state flag design contest. Voting for the new flag design will begin in January 2025.

4669 - Interesting idea. Terrible execution.

5321 - The butterfly is unique and cool. Perfect color choices. Should win, but probably won’t.

4220 - The negative space throws me off.

4129 - Never would have ever figured out those were corn kernels.

3754 - Boring and bland.

3679 - I dislike the emphasis on Chicago with the offset star. Should come in second, but will probably win.

2752 - Actually terrible.

2246 - The most interesting one. I like it, but I don’t like-like it. Congrats to Clanin Creative from Champaign though.

896 - It’s the current one with bars. Hard no.

200 - Super generic.

Nicholas Bate –

Those goals we have in mind for 2025. How do make them happen? Make them STICK?

Consistency is all powerful. The magic word is everyday.

If you want to get fitter: every day.

If you wish to produce your novel: every day.

Your start-up? Plan and research every day.

But, but, but! Don’t we need a day off? Surely we deserve a day off? I mean I can’t exercise every day? That would be harmful surely? If I write every day, I’ll get writer’s block.

Try it. Sure, if you were doing press-ups every day that might be problematic. But you won’t. You’ll do press-ups some days and just a long walk another day. The key is every day you think and act fit. Some days are big edit days on your novel. The key is to become a writer.

Anyhow, you get the point. Every day will make any goal happen. That’s every day. No excuses.

I’m so glad that I made the right financial decision in 2018 and ditched my $89/mo cable package so that I can now pay $83/mo for YouTube TV, $23/mo for Netflix, $16/mo for Disney+, $13/mo for Paramount, $15/mo for Prime, $10/mo for AppleTV, and $21/mo for HBO

— Chris Bakke (@ChrisJBakke) December 12, 2024

Sigh.

YouTube sent emails to YouTube TV subscribers, like me, today to inform them about an upcoming price increase for the service. Starting on January 13, 2025, the base plan will cost $82.99 per month, up from $72.99 per month. At launch in 2018, YouTube TV was priced at just $35 per month, but pricing went up to $50 per month in 2019. In 2020, YouTube TV’s price was raised to $64.99, which then went up to $72.99 in 2023.

The One Thing Substack Newsletter has a tremendous post titled The New Rules of Media. I don’t think I’ve seen something this strong, accurate, and eye-opening in a long time about our current media landscape. There are 20 rules, but I’ve highlighted a few of my favorites.

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend. People spend hours and hours a day with him; his show and its extended universe have become an on-demand loneliness killing service. The power (and value) of that relationship is unmatched. Puck is a parasocial publication, that’s why you hear the tentpole writers’ voices in solo podcasts.

The most compelling publications or media brands are the ones that can throw the best parties, because it shows they can mobilize an IRL group of interesting people, who are then consumers and customers and clients. (See Feed Me, The Drift, Byline / The Drunken Canal cinematic universe.) Media brands increasingly work like fashion brands: Consumers have to want to wear them. If no one wants to come to your party, you’re doing it wrong.

Broadcast on every channel, at least if you want to intensify your personality cult: text, livestream, video, audio. Jamelle Bouie broadcasts his ideas (and persona) on every platform at once. His TikTok commenters mostly ask him where he buys his very fashionable jackets. Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.

Rely on nothing you can’t take with you. For now, Substack email lists and Stripe charges are still portable. If they weren’t, I would move to Ghost, because Substack’s incentive is to get you as locked in as possible. (Patreon still keeps your Stripe info, therefore fuck Patreon.) The same goes for audiences: Direct traffic, through homepages or email inboxes, is the most reliable because no one can take it from you, but it’s the hardest to cultivate.

Nothing matters more than the relationship between a person, brand, or publisher and their audience. Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok. Every second for the viewer is just that viral video where the person picks between two pop stars. You’re always deciding what to pay attention to. The relationship between person-who-makes and person-who-consumes is paramount to long-term success, because if you are winning that game then you will be able to survive.

Make sure you know why you’re doing something, especially if you’re a publisher or brand and you have limited bandwidth and / or resources. Your print magazine has a blog? Why? What is that accomplishing? Is it even good or does it make you look bad? Define your goals, inspect them thoroughly and be able to have an honest answer about why you want them. Media does too many things because they seem cool internally, when the audience doesn’t really give a shit.

Drew Magary, writing for SFGate, spends an entire column making fun of Bill Belichick.

The saddest thing you can do when you’re old and washed is to try to convince everyone you’re not old and washed. Take it from me, a 48-year-old man who doesn’t understand why kids today aren’t sufficiently appreciative of Def Leppard’s contributions to popular music. Culturally speaking, I have a fastball that moves slower than Bay Bridge traffic. Every time I try to pretend otherwise, God smites me by giving me more visible ear hair. Resistance is futile.

Speaking of futility, Bill Belichick.

Belichick was just hired as head coach at Cal’s longtime ACC rival, North Carolina. Everything about this move reeks of mutual desperation. UNC has never been a legit football program. That’s the top line here. This is not a seismic move. This will not alter the landscape of college ball forever. This is a mediocre program hiring a now-mediocre famous guy. Stanford and Bill Walsh gave this idea a try a few decades ago, and it failed miserably. The result will be no different this time. I don’t need to lay out my case much more than that. But I’d like to make fun of everyone involved here, so let me get into the details.

It reminds me a lot of the Lovie Smith hire at Illinois. It sounds great. He has a ton of pedigree. Hey, he even wants to hire his son.

I’m with Drew; it will fail spectacularly.

Nicholas Bate asks us to choose our word for the new year.

Choose a word. Any word. One word. Make it yours for 2025. Start thinking about it now. Whiteboard it. Write it every day on your planner. Put the word on a handful of 3 by 5 cards and place them in strategic places as an ever-present reminder. Make it BIG. Write it BOLD.

I didn’t have a word for 2024. However, I like Patrick Rhone’s word he picked so much that I think I will use it in 2025 for me.

If you have to have a full-blown 2000-word article fact-checking your interview with the individual you designated Time’s Person of the Year, perhaps that individual was a poor choice.

Seriously, this is shitty journalism.

Will Leitch, writing on his Medium blog, says it’s super important for everyone to find their distractions.

As we prepare for what awaits, we can take our solace, and our comfort, and our escape, in our worlds of diversion, of frivolity, of goofy texts about basketball or bad television or sudoku or which one of your friends looks the most like Timothée Chalamet. The world is larger than that. But day-to-day: That’s what our actual world looks like too. It is, after all, also history. I know Muammar Gaddafi’s death was a bigger deal than the Rally Squirrel was. But not in this house it isn’t. I think that’s OK. I think it is healthy.

I have plenty of things to distract me. Family, friends, more television and movies to watch than I have time for, more books to read than I have time for, and more blogs like Will’s to read and dream of distractions like the St. Louis Cardinals being competitive again.

Everyone who was ever a billed-in-the-opening-titles cast member of Saturday Night Live. I’m amazed how many of these people I’ve never heard of and so many cast members I’d forgotten. Hello, Laurie Metcalf.

Tricia Tisak, writing for The New York Times, has an interesting collection of 24 things that happened for the first time in 2024.

The selections range from groundbreaking scientific moments to technological breakthroughs and, of course, geopolitical events.

Malia Mendez for the Los Angeles Times –

Nicko McBrain bid farewell over the weekend to the last crowd of metalheads he will ever perform for as a touring member of Iron Maiden.

McBrain, 72, who has served as the British heavy metal band’s drummer for more than 40 years, announced his retirement from touring hours before the band’s Saturday show in Sao Paulo, Brazil — the closer of the Future Past Tour.

“After much consideration, it is with both sorrow and joy, I announce my decision to take a step back from the grind of the extensive touring lifestyle,” the London-born musician wrote in a statement on the band’s website, adding that Saturday’s show would be his “final gig” with the band.

McBrain had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed. He regained his mobility after weeks of physical therapy. It’s an amazing story.