Are the AI tech bros conning us? And also themselves?

Last month, I bought a new Apple iPad to use for travel. Since I bought the last one in the mid-2010s, I thought the $450 price pretty cheap for a very powerful tool. But I was also aware that the Erudite Partner had two weeks before bought the same iPad for notably less. What led to the price increase?

Alex Reisner, a staff writer at The Atlantic, blames the AI boom [giftlink]. He's provocative.

Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster: A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

... The prices of some laptops have gone up as much as 50 percent, and low-cost computers are being hit the hardest. Affordable entry-level computers may “disappear by 2028” according to one forecast. And the memory shortage is expected to continue for years.

The memory is being put into data centers, which tech firms are expanding at incredible speed. They are planning to multiply total U.S.-data-center capacity by a factor of eight over the next few years. The demand for electricity at these sites is already so great that some companies are repurposing jet engines to power them. ...

He thinks the tech moguls who are building the AI future have blithely launched themselves into a morass.

... The problem with generative AI, in the industry’s own jargon, is that it does not scale. The cost of growing from, say, a thousand users to a million is a key factor that venture capitalists examine when they evaluate start-ups. They want to see that the cost of adding each new user decreases over time, so that the company can support millions of users and make increasing profits. ...

With generative AI, the work of building efficient, scalable systems has not been done. And the problem is exacerbated by the ever-larger generative-AI models, which have grown from 175 billion parameters in 2020 to more than 1 trillion today, according to independent estimates (the actual sizes of the models powering products such as Claude and ChatGPT are secret). 

The large in large language model [LLM] should not be a selling point. But the industry’s observation that bigger models tend to outperform smaller ones has given rise to a totemic belief in “scaling laws” that suggest any problem can be solved by simply making models bigger. 

Yet the returns are diminishing. The bigger an AI model is, the less it improves with each added parameter, and so it must be made bigger at a faster rate just to sustain steady progress. I asked a few AI researchers whether they could name any other real-world software that scales so poorly. None of them could think of any. ... By economic and engineering measures, generative AI might be the worst technology ever deployed. 

But, Reisner concludes, the tech barons are enthralled by their messianic delusions.

Chatbot companies are aware that their products are inefficient. ... we seem stuck with LLMs, perhaps because they have been so aggressively marketed. They are now being added to everything, whether you want them or not. In 2024 and 2025, they were integrated into both Windows and MacOS, which means that more computing power is now needed to run a basic personal computer. Smartphones are also being sold with upgraded hardware as companies anticipate new AI features. Inefficient AI is also being added to common programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word, meaning that computers need to be more powerful to run this software.

This is all especially bad because computers are no longer improving at the rate they used to. Since the 1950s, manufacturers have learned to make microchips steadily faster, smaller, and cheaper, a trend known colloquially as Moore’s Law. But in the past few years, components have gotten so small that manufacturers have run into molecular-level limitations on shrinking them any further, which has slowed progress significantly.

Ultimately, inefficiency may be of little concern to the people within the tech industry who believe that they are replicating intelligence itself. There is an almost-religious conviction among many in Silicon Valley that something mindlike could arise from LLMs, which are ultimately just statistical language-generating software—this, despite the software’s inability to recall basic facts, its lack of common sense, and its complete dissimilarity to a biological brain. ... But the mythological lure of AI is so strong that many engineers believe that nothing should stand in their way. Not even the basic task of writing efficient software. 

Is Reisner correct that AI is powering toward a messy, expensive, debilitating dead end? I'm certainly not qualified to evaluate, but I'm glad to have read his case. You can do that yourself at this gift link.

What makes Reisner's case highly plausible to me is where it touches on an area in which I do think I have the capacity for discernment. (And you, the reader, likely do too.) In the US political arena, these tech boys act like intoxicated teenagers with unmerited riches to throw around. Nobody can directly gainsay them; with their kind of money, they are surrounded by supplicants, flatterers, and, of course, politicians eager for a piece. An experienced con man like the Orange Toddler may seem to them a mark, but he's the true professional swindler. 

Scientific and business "geniuses" have lent themselves to fascist regimes in the past. The results were not to their liking; the Trial of the Industrialists at Nuremberg exposed cooperation with Nazi war crimes and mass murders. (Yes -- many escaped justice become "the West" decided they were useful to the Cold War... but that's another story.) Some of these guys are making themselves targets for a future fall.

Robber barons better look out

Karen Attiah is done with being anyone's good girl. The journalist from Texas was something of a rising star at the Washington Post, before Jeff Bezos decided to rein in "his" writers. She led the newspaper's Global Opinions section. She wrote her own opinion pieces about race, gender, culture, human rights -- the stuff that disquiets billionaire boys. She was fired for, perhaps among other causes, not being properly respectful about the murder of right wing agitator Charlie Kirk, condemning the crime, but posting on BlueSky: "Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence." Seems merely accurate to me, but apparently too much for her boss. There are lawsuits ...

The Met Gala was one of her beats -- beautiful people performing varieties of beauty for charity and ego gratification. On her Substack, she lets loose on that scene, now sponsored by Bezos.

... Beauty is necessary for evil. Art has always been a way for extraordinary wealth and destructive power to justify their existence. 

When we marvel at the riches of Europe, the wealth in its museums, the jewels in castles and the Vatican, that beauty could not have existed without the ruthless exploitation of the poor, and of Europe’s colonies abroad. The beauty of many lifesaving medical treatments and scientific achievements emerged from the exploitation of wars, of grotesque medical experiments on prisoners and colonized peoples.

In many ways, today’s tech titans are no different from the colonial masters of the past. Wealth and power romanticized and fetishized the cultures they have ruthlessly extracted from, while destroying the people. 

We’d like to think that the old colonial ways of enslavement and invading territories for natural resources were in the past. 

No, the ugliness of extraction has just evolved— under the sparkle of “innovation”. In just 30 or so years, our new tech colonial masters have learned how to mine our desires, personal data, thoughts, messages, and creativity. They are trying their hardest to replace humans with AI or robots, and calling that progress. 

Their exploitation has expanded from those we deem to be of the lower class, and has expanded to forcing their soullessness on journalism, on fashion, and on art. Soulless tech money is now not just dirty, robber baron money in no small part because their technology is an existential threat to (relatively) privileged writers and thinkers like me.

But unlike the colonial masters of the past, these tech titans have the power to manipulate our digital realities through elegantly coded changes to the algorithm. American power means we prefer frictionless ease and the convenience of consumption. But ultimately, we are the ones being consumed.

What these male tech architects are designing is far more potent than haute couture. They have taken our data, our thoughts, our attention, our creativity, and the most finite of resources, our earthly time. With these precious elements, they are redesigning our habits, our work culture, our relationships, our incomes—and yes, our psychological reality itself.

A future in which many of us become digital sharecroppers is something to fear. There are very few legal mechanisms for accountability for algorithmic harm. There is no universal basic income to support those who are being forced out of work by unimaginative bosses who wish to impose AI to replace jobs.

We are headed to a future in which it will be a privilege to work with humans. ...

 Now there's a terrifying picture of the future, one which is not the only way to envision where we are going, but certainly a possible way. I am grateful for Attiah's incisive courage. I am grateful for her rage.

Rural sacrifice zones courtesy of MAGA

It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:

A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU). 

Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .

• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri: 

... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.

And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.

I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?

... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.

My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow... 

Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice. 

• Meanwhile, wherever they see a likely target, ICE/DHS is scooping up rural warehouse spaces in which to lock up immigrants they want to deport, all to meet Trump and Stephen Miller's quest to Make America White Again. 

Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:

On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” 

By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws. 

The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....

... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects. 

“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...

 The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:

... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit. 

Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years.  ...

The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."

AI for the love of lucre

Yesterday I ran across a polling finding that stopped me cold. According to the Pew Research Center: 

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’.

Apparently the sense that some kind of radical break is imminent is very powerful among us. (For the record, for myself, I doubt this. History records societies and the species evolving over time, not through genuine disjunctions. We're stuck in time, and not going to escape.)

But the notion of a coming apocalypse does seem to have become the norm among our tech overlords. And their vision seems a combination of vicious and silly. But what would you expect from a bunch of emotionally crippled white men unleashed by their wealth?

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer who investigates one of the core questions of this time:

How the Tech World Turned Evil 

... The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. 

That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.

There's a good deal of Greek mythology about what happens when humans think we are as gods. If their educations were a little wider, the bros might have heard of Icarus. 

Peter Theil of Palantir has made himself the spokesman for tech hubris. Noah goes on: 

... Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

... Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024. Amazon and Meta lobbied against Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them. 

ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days after his second inauguration, issued an executive order reversing what he later called “my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry.” 

Trump also eased up on antitrust enforcement and within a year drove away the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms.

Seems pretty evil to me, though evil rich guys are a dime a dozen in history. There's not as much novelty here as they like to think. Noah insists that human beings need to do an intervention to stop these boys and their toys.

... to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). 

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity, and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think otherwise.

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon. But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is rich—and it’s really, really rich. 

If our societies can't figure out how to intervene, I suspect material reality will. Climate apocalypse seems more likely than the bros' Singularity. 

Some of our tech billionaires have lost it

 

A rowdy little demonstration greeted the tech-bro billionaire's appearance at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this evening. His lecture series is on the topic of the Anti Christ. ... he suggests (seriously!) that activist Greta Thunberg might actually be the anti-christ we should fear. 

Being rich is no guarantee against stupid. Dude seems to think he's hooked into demonic forces. Perhaps he is a demon? This sort of fantasy doesn't usually end well.

Meanwhile, he doesn't care who he hurts. PLTR is the stock symbol for his corporation Palantir which is providing the data for mass public surveillance of our communities, the violent lCE kidnapping of immigrants, the genocide in Gaza, union-busting efforts and more.  

Thiel has stated his opposition to democracy, he actively supports defunding universities and public education, and aligns with Christian Nationalist movements that support white supremacy and the subjugation of women. He might wear a suit-and-tie and use his immense wealth for influence - but he dreams of a techno-feudalist society.

Some folks have other ideas.

The crypto scam: still nothing but a con for crooks

Mission District, SF

According to NBC News:

Today a growing number of people in the United States have crypto kiosks at their local grocery stores or gas stations. There are roughly 30,000 bitcoin ATMs (BTMs) in the United States, according to Coin ATM Radar, a website that tracks them. The Coinstar machine where they haul in loose change for cash might now also sell bitcoin. Bitcoin Depot, North America’s largest BTM operator, has kiosks in 48 states and is still expanding. The operators can charge users hefty transaction fees, and the stores often receive payment for hosting the BTMs.

These machines (and other brands) are in every corner store in my home neighborhood which is full of poor workers and immigrants. Can't blame the folks who take a flyer on this thing; I've even seen charities boasting they'll take contributions in crypto. It must be real, right?

Nope, it's not. Here's economist Paul Krugman with the true story: 

Crypto Is Still for Criming

... the entire crypto enterprise is corrupt. Money-laundering and scams that exploit naïve investors aren’t unfortunate behavior that taints a potentially useful enterprise. For crypto, they are the whole game, more or less the only reason cryptocurrencies exist.

That may sound like an extreme statement, but you should bear in mind that Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, was created in 2008. That makes cryptocurrency ancient by tech standards — not much younger than the iPhone, much older than Apple Pay. Ever since crypto’s invention, enthusiasts have promised that blockchain tokens will find widespread legal use cases, displacing conventional means of payment, any day now. But it keeps not happening.

At this point, 17 years after crypto arrived on the scene, there are still no — I repeat, no — significant legal use cases. This is despite many efforts to make crypto a real medium of exchange. ...

But if crypto has no legitimate uses, why are crypto assets worth more than $3 trillion? Well, the marketing of crypto has been brilliant, with many small investors in particular still being sucked in by the combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. Promotion of crypto by legitimate enterprises, which profit from crypto sales, has been relentless. Venmo is a digital payment system that actually works and is in widespread use — even the fruit and vegetable stand around the corner from me takes it. But every time I use Venmo it tries to sell me crypto:

And while crypto has failed to find legitimate uses, it has flourished as a vehicle for illegitimate uses: extortion, money-laundering and, as we’ve seen, bribes to politicians....

Ah, now we know why Donald Trump and his merry band of crooks have become crypto evangelists. Just another way to rob the American people ...

There's still not just one Israel

Many commentators  (see for example Anshel Pfeffer) have pointed out that the Israel only barely had a government enjoying democratic legitimacy before the Hamas massacres. Whatever general support Benjamin Netanyahu had enjoyed has evaporated in the horror of his government's failure to ensure basic security within the country. So, although Israelis largely feel and project unity in their Gaza campaign, underlying tensions will be exacerbated by its war.

Economic historian Adam Tooze takes a look at the contradictions within Israeli society which made the context for both Hamas's vicious 10/7 assault and underlie Israel's campaign of responsive vengeance against Palestinians. 

Glistening modern Israel. Ted Eytan

From afar, it's easy to assume that Israelis all have the same interests, but Tooze provides a more nuanced take. If he is right, there are at least three societies engaged in an internal struggle in that benighted country -- and that without even taking into account its displaced and repressed Palestinian inhabitants. This chart captures the depth of existing Israeli divides.

Click to enlarge.

Clearly, the struggle in the Middle East is about life and death in the most stark and extreme sense. In Gaza the struggle for millions of people is already one of bare life against death. In Israel, despite the existential shock of October 7, the play of political economy goes on and this reflects the fact that Israel’s economic success for the last 20 years has always stood under the sign of violence. It was built on what was obviously an illegitimate and unstable order. As one interlocutor of the Financial Times remarked:

“We built the high-tech industry during security challenges … What’s bizarre is how normal it’s become,” he said. “People realise that there is risk everywhere. It’s just a matter of mitigating it.” Even amid the turmoil, some workers in the high-tech sector are returning to work. “People will have to go — as crazy as what I’m about to say is — [back] to some normality”

The question, after October 7 and Israel’s destruction of Gaza is what that normality can possibly look like.

Tooze is relatively easy to read. In this post, he's taken up what competing outrages might gloss over. Take a look.

Time for a schools rant

San Franciscans have recalled three of our school board members and our more conservative friends are gloating. Here's a sample from Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

The Lessons of San Francisco: It's possible to be too woke for the wokesters ... there are flashing red warning signs about racial identity politics, historical erasure, and the attack on merit-based selection in schools. ... While board members were busy striking poses, the kids were suffering and parents were incensed.

I think of Charlie Sykes as a very significant ally in the great struggle of our times -- the ongoing struggle to preserve democracy in this dis-United States. But he and his comrades understand very little about San Francisco public schools and their governance, so they are over-interpreting the school board recall.

The job from which three board members have been ejected is inherently dysfunctional, as are our public schools and perhaps the city itself. Let's dig a bit:

• The school board has been composed of seven members, elected for four year terms citywide.

• These campaigns are expensive and offer little to the winners except slightly higher citywide name recognition.  For too many school board members, a seat is just a political stepping stone. (There have long been honorable exceptions -- but the committed ones are exceptions.)

• The job is essentially unpaid, offering a mere $6000 a year -- so members all need other jobs.

• Doing the job is very demanding. I once lived in the same household with a member. She received several pounds of paper by courier every day from the schools' professional administrators. She was expected to read and absorb it all -- you can guess what happened to most of it.

• A very high percentage of the voters who elect these school board members do not have children in the public schools. What do they (we) know? Children of all ages are only 13 percent of city residents. Many voters are childless -- or among the preponderance of white residents who, even if they have children, have left the public schools.

• The actual running of the system is accomplished by professional management hired by the board. In recent years, our public schools have a lousy record of attracting a long term, committed superintendents. This is not a good job, though maybe (like the board) a stepping stone.

• The school buildings are old, sometimes crumbling, and the system is broke physically and financially. SFPD loses students every year as families find they can't afford the city. With the students goes the state funding on which the system relies.

 • Most of the teachers are doing their best, but they have a hella tough job in a crumbling system. They can't afford to live here any more than their students' families can. Their union fights aggressively to save the teachers from being blamed for the general mess and is a political power house. This is a major factor in the situation of the elected board members -- they are both management and supplicants.

• Despite decades of stratagems, all unpopular and many burdensome to parents, the city has failed to integrate its schools. At the higher grades, there aren't enough white students to make much of a difference. So "integration" is trying to mix together students from various racial and immigrant communities. This has always crashed into the cultural reality that many Asian-origin and especially Chinese families cling to the public schools as the necessary entryway to good lives. They care a lot and very specifically about their kids' experience. Although individuals certainly differ, many Black and Latinx families are less future-oriented and less inclined to fight education battles collectively as communities. This can create explosive situations -- and does.

So what does the recall reveal? Not much. Some incumbent school board members failed at their impossible job of keeping the volatile ship on an even keel -- and then there was a pandemic. And everything got worse.

I'm not upset that three of these members got booted. I remain upset that this rich city with generally decent values can't manage to run a better public school system that works somehow for students, teachers, and all communities. I don't claim to know how to get there. The successful recall should mean something changes. Let's hope whatever the new iteration looks like, it's better.

Tech industrial hope and fantasy for Nevada

Working the election in Reno, NV in 2018 to snag another Democratic U.S. Senate Seat (that would be Jackie Rosen) and a Democratic governor (that's Steve Sisolak), I necessarily became interested in how the city and Washoe County functioned. The place was obviously changing fast. Once "the Biggest Little City in the World," a pitstop on Interstate 80 for California gamblers and outdoor adventurers, it was growing like mad. When we talked to voters, they complained about crowded schools, rising home prices, downtown construction, and increased numbers of unhoused people.

At the time, I realized I was seeing a new sort of economy, which I thought of as "tech industrial." Its crowning manifestation was Tesla's Gigafactory, touted as expected to add over 20,000 jobs, directly and indirectly. In the nondescript warehouses south of the town and the glitzy casinos, there were mysterious blockchain prospectors and server factories. Something was happening here. 

These days that Democratic Governor we helped elect has become a proponent of "Innovation Zone" legislation which would allow Blockchains LLC to build a new, 36,000 person city in nearby Storey County, current population a mere 4000 desert rats. The county doesn't want to be developed, at least this way. The state sees potential jobs and perhaps eventually revenue; the tech entrepreneurs would get the freedom to experiment, according to CEO Jeff Berns.  

“Now we’re saying to the state: ‘Look, the county doesn’t really want us to do this,'” Berns said. “This is the impact on our whole state of what we’re attempting to do. Yes, there are hundreds of things that can go wrong. But if it goes right, think of what it could mean for the state.” 

With Sisolak’s endorsement, Blockchains is asking lawmakers to establish new laws that would allow wealthy developers with an innovative technology and large land holdings to break away from existing counties and create a new local government, known as an “Innovation Zone.” 

Blockchains, which controls about 67,000 acres of land outside of Reno and recently purchased water rights, wants to build a technology park and new city along the Truckee River that would incubate blockchain technology, which offers a decentralized form of information storage that experts say is more secure and could give individuals more authority over their data.

The new city would set up its own local government, apparently run on the company's blockchain-based currency, and generally promises to be something new -- and profitable -- under the sun. 

Not surprisingly, there are critics. Environmentalists worry about where the new city would get its water. This is, after all, a desert. The Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe is concerned that the Blockchain project would hinder their restoration efforts which seek to repair the lake. (EARTH FOCUS: The New West and the Politics of the Environment is a wonderful Nevada film that tells that story.)  

And, there's the fact that Berns has been a major political supporter to Governor Sisolak, helping to fund his campaign.

Berns said he approached state officials because the company’s plans, if successful, could have a significant fiscal impact on the state. With plans to launch a digital currency tied to the dollar, Blockchains said it would charge a micro-fee on transactions that could generate revenue.

... “My vision for this is a place where people can come to create,” he said. “In innovating new ideas, you have failing. That’s just the nature of innovation. We have failed probably 50 times already on what we’re trying to develop. So I want to create a place where that’s OK.” The goal with the Innovation Zone is to create a place to develop new blockchain technology.

Whether Berns and his buddy Sisolak have a chance to subject Nevada to this vision remains to be seen. The state legislature has to sign on and Nevada has many competing interests. But in a state whose paradigmatic urban center is Las Vegas (with 85 percent of the population), betting on hope and fantasy comes naturally. Maybe the tech industrial vision being peddled outside Reno will make a go of it. 

Steven Colbert thinks not -- he thinks this scheme is a classic "Uh Oh!" It's worth watching through the intro to get Colbert's take on the story.

San Francisco's big dick does right by voting rights

Wherever you go in this city, the still-novel Salesforce Tower looms.

Salesforce, the data/software company has an important presence in Atlanta. It has announced unequivocal support for inclusive voting rights, against the Republican push for suppression in Georgia, according to Judd Legum. 

The news came by tweet: 

A person’s right to cast their ballot is the foundation of our democracy. Georgia HB 531 would limit trustworthy, safe & equal access to voting by restricting early voting & eliminating provisional ballots. That’s why Salesforce opposes HB 531 as it stands.

Watchers

Not sure this is a disguised camera, but it might be.

I think about this when wandering about Walking San Francisco. Home surveillance cameras like Amazon's Ring are certainly picking up my perambulations around city neighborhoods. Who is that person with the camera (on the street I am often not accurately identified by gender) who goes by looking at houses intently? I take seriously the concerns of privacy advocates.

The cameras, they say, intrude on other people’s privacy by recording motion detected up to 30 feet away. The rights of passersby such as dog walkers, mail carriers, and children playing across the street are being violated without their consent, said Mike Katz-Lacabe, a member of Oakland Privacy, a coalition of people who are concerned about privacy and surveillance.

“Personally, I don’t want to live in a surveillance dystopia where my neighbors are essentially spying on me on behalf of my local law enforcement,” he said. ...

[Evan] Greer, [director of Fight for the Future,] said ... “I think it’s very Silicon Valley to assume we can either have a world with package theft, or we can live in a totalitarian surveillance state — but you can’t do both,” she said. “Given the choice, I’d rather live in a world with a little bit of package theft and a little less fascism.”

San Francisco Chronicle

Now I'm not bothering anyone or even approaching any doors. I might photograph your door as I walk by, if you've painted it in interesting colors or hung something novel off it. San Franciscans do the darndest things to express their individuality in their house exteriors, even in neighborhoods where the underlying architecture is mundane.

Other examinations of the proliferation of private-residence, cloud-enabled security cameras raise other concerns. Apparently Amazon's video cache of Ring observations has been hacked. And just having the cameras has trained their owners to be voyeurs.

The Washington Post surveyed more than 50 owners of in-home and outdoor camera systems across the United States about how the recording devices had reshaped their daily lives. Most of those who responded to online solicitations about their camera use said they had bought the cameras to check on package deliveries and their pets, and many talked glowingly about what they got in return: security, entertainment, peace of mind. Some said they worried about hackers, snoops or spies.

But in the unscientific survey, most people also replied that they were fine with intimate new levels of surveillance — as long as they were the ones who got to watch. ...

Matthew Guariglia, an analyst for the online-rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, [commented:] “Who hasn’t looked out and watched other people through their peephole? There’s a kind of morbid fascination to it,” he said. “The problem is when it’s not just you behind a peephole but a camera that’s on at all times, saving to a cloud you don’t control.”

We're losing privacy most everywhere and we don't usually even think of it. We all carry underlying, mostly unconscious, daily fears; we wish we were protected. And you just know that the downsides of all this surveillance will be felt most heavily where they always are, where people are least empowered to talk back to the watchers -- in poor communities and in communities of color.

San Franciscans protest Amazon complicity with ICE

People organized by Bay Resistance, Causa Justa, San Francisco Jobs with Justice and many more groups took to Market Street on #PrimeDay to deliver a massive petition to Amazon demanding the company stop selling its face recognition technology to immigration enforcers.

Amazon refused the petition.

Protesters shouted their solidarity with Amazon's warehouse workers who accuse the company of making a killing off their backs.

"We're humans, not robots," William Stolz, an Amazon warehouse worker in Shakopee, Minnesota, told CNN Business. "They're treating us like machines."

When a company becomes the world's retail colossus, people demand responsibility.

A sign for San Francisco's season

Notices of small business closings along busy, effervescently gentrifying San Francisco streets pop up all the time these days. Few equal in grace this one from the long time proprietor of Ali Baba.

Let's hope Husein Dawah is correct that a successor enterprise will open soon. It's a puzzling and painful fact of this morphing city that many, many of the businesses which close are not rapidly replaced. The commercial streets with heavy foot traffic are dotted with empty storefronts.

We tend to blame greedy landlords and there seems to be something to this. According to SFist,

"A lot of [landlords] have unrealistic goals as to what the value of the property is," says Daniel Bergerac speaking to Hoodline. Bergerac is a Castro business owner and the outgoing president of the Castro Merchants association, and he suggests that in the current retail environment, local landlords seem to want too much out of their properties — and holding out for tenants who can pay instead of lowering the asking rent is leaving more properties empty longer.

The same article suggests that more and more building owners are absentees: perhaps their parents owned a building with flats and retail space; the inheriting generation just hands the rental over to a property management company to squeeze for cash.

And then there is the city permitting process, a nightmare as anyone who has dealt with it and with building inspection can testify. (I don't know quite when the latter got so bad; when I stopped doing remodels around 1990, inspectors were mostly old hands who understood balancing the codes with the realities of old structures. Apparently no more.)

The same SFist article suggests that the new residents don't get out much, defaulting to Instacart, Door Dash, and Netflix. Well maybe -- but anyone who has tried to walk on Valencia Street of an evening will doubt that lack of traffic is keeping storefronts empty.

And, of course, there is the fact of people who live on streets, getting by miserably in the gilded city, and often sleeping in the doorways of the vacancies.

The vacant storefront situation is so acute that our politicians have ordered a census of the problem and threaten to penalize landlords who hold out retail spaces.

We're seeing market failure here among the glitter. At some point, it ought to valuable to all the money floating around here to use these spaces to make more money -- but for now we're out of equilibrium.

Black people in the city

This film, now playing, is San Francisco in its foggy vagaries, absurd curiosities, and wrenching beauty. It's true fiction from and about the city's shrinking Black population. See it if you have a chance. I cried and you might too. The movie will run for awhile here I'm sure, but will it play elsewhere?
...The story of African American displacement in San Francisco has clear through-lines. Southern Black people migrated to the Bay to work in war industries in the 1940s from the South, Louisiana and Texas prominently. Many more settled in the East Bay than here, but a community scraped out a foothold. Redlining confined Black residents to decaying "inner city" enclaves. In these neighborhoods, vibrant Black churches, businesses, and culture thrived, centered especially in the Fillmore District. This cluster was decimated by "urban renewal" -- aka "Negro removal" in the 1950s and 60s. The Black population as a proportion of all residents peaked at 13 percent in 1970 and is now down to under five percent, as residents have been forced out by rising housing prices and a declining market for a less-educated labor force. The closest thing we have to a Black neighborhood is bits of the Bayview, once home of the shipyards and now poisoned by industry's toxic droppings. These days, expensive condos built where once San Francisco sited its waste dump are raising prices even in this last holdout of African Americans.

It's a crazy, ugly picture -- too much tech cash is chasing too little land and too little living space on a naturally gorgeous peninsula. No wonder people want to live here, but "here" is a rapidly changing, violently discriminatory, reality.

People who read this blog may know that I am also Walking San Francisco's 596 precincts, trudging both sides of every street and posting a smattering of snap shots from each small electoral area. I began in late 2012 and expect to finish by the end of 2021; I've completed 430/596 today. The photos are more focused on homeowner idiosyncrasies and architecture than on people, but I've met and photographed hundreds of San Franciscans.

And recently I've realized I'm experiencing what feels like an anomaly. I know well the historical description of Black displacement I've recited above. Yet in nearly every little electoral area I explore, I seem to see at least one Black person. Then I got a glimmer. Black people "stick out" because none of these places (except by the rock outcroppings under the projects in the movie; I've walked there) are Black communities. The remaining Black people in this city live "mixed in" among other San Franciscans.

The pervasive feeling of loss in this city is not just, or even primarily, an individual agony; it is communal. Feeling safe and at-home as an individual is a demographic privilege that accompanies knowing one has, somewhere, a community home-place. Whites enjoy it in this city most everywhere; some people of some Asian origins have it in some parts of the city; LGBT people of diverse "races" have it in some areas; Latinx people have it in shrinking locales and must live in fear of losing it; Black people can almost no longer claim it at all. Such is San Francisco today.

Housing scarcity is about theft from lower wage workers

The Times published this as part of its ongoing campaign to shame the San Francisco area into building more housing at higher density. Guess what? They are right. We need a lot more affordable housing.

But what ought to be equally obvious is that this illustrates that the distribution of goodies in the tech economy is out of whack. That guy in the suit is simply taking too much of the pie. (Note they make him a lawyer who presumably adds some recognizable value to the ecosystem rather than a tech bro peddling his latest brain fart.) As long as society requires janitors and gardeners and bus drivers and nurses and teachers ... the capitalist bargain has been that the winners would pay them enough to live. Not to live like the high flyers, but to live.

If you are going build an economy where new millionaires are minted every minute, you are going to have to pay the support staff enough to participate, at some level, in the necessities of life. Companies won't like that, but it is the cost of soaring entrepreneurial opportunity.

Solving the housing shortage in the Bay has to include redistributing some of the new wealth among a broader community. That should be obvious, but the chorus of critics routinely skip that part of the equation.

It's not density that city people hate; it's housing injustice

The national media is full of stories about how coastal California needs more houses, but -- for reasons pundits treat as either cupidity or stupidity -- we resist efforts to build what we obviously need. The collapse last week of this year's attempt to pass state Senator Scott Wiener's bill set off another predictable round. SB 50's essence was to allow more building near public transit lines, though there were plenty of devilish details. This, from the NY Times, is a representative specimen, irrefutable on big picture analysis, uninformed on the nitty-gritty level where politics plays out:

Over the past eight years, the San Francisco Bay Area has added about 676,000 jobs and 176,000 housing units. The entirely predictable result has been a surge in rents and home prices along with a rising homeless problem that has jetloads of tourists convinced that one of the richest places on earth is actually a dystopia of misery and destitution. Despite its reputation for all things liberal, California has the highest poverty rate in the country — about one in five people — once the cost of shelter is figured in. This is not for lack of jobs or money, but because its cities are so exclusive that they are essentially turning working-class residents into poor people.

... S.B. 50, an ambitious but divisive bill, was shelved until next year. The bill would expand the state’s housing supply by forcing cities to allow apartment buildings in the low-slung bungalow neighborhoods on which the state was built. ...

Each year state legislators go through a Groundhog Day routine in which they introduce dozens of new housing bills that are full of technicalities and minutiae but fall into two basic categories. The first are bills that make it easier to build housing so that the long-term shortage can be rectified. The second are bills that provide more money for subsidized affordable housing and expand tenant protections so that people who already have affordable homes don’t lose them. ...Where does it go? All we can count on for now is that next year will feature a renewed fight over S.B. 50. And dozens of other housing bills. And the housing problem getting worse.

Like a lot of San Franciscans, I'm thoroughly convinced that we need more housing and that means more density. I'd go to bat for a believable plan. Yet I am not at all on board for Wiener's bill; in fact it looks like a con job to me.

• The bill's assumptions about developer behavior are nonsense in the San Francisco context. Roll back local controls and you will merely allow more condos for rich people . Even the Times has figured that out.

  As land costs rise, developers can make more money building at the top end of the market and ignoring the middle.

• Housing developers have to be required to build affordable units, probably at something close to a 50/50 ratio of rich to middle class housing to keep new buildings from just making the situation worse.

• If the state legislature is going to weigh in on urban housing and density, they need to get their feet off city's necks and repeal pre-emption measures that effectively outlaw effective rent control (Costa-Hawkins) and incentivize clearing existing apartment buildings of renters to sell them off as condos (Ellis). They also need to offer more money for public transit if they are going to dump more people into existing systems.

• It's hard to take seriously a commitment to equity when suburbs are incentivized not to develop public transit because to do so would mean they had to house more people.

• It's hard to take seriously a law that's been written to let Marin County off the hook for its density provisions. Look, I love all the green spaces over there, but Marin is the 13th richest county in the country according to the American Community Survey. It could do more to house more people.

• If some sort of grand bargain between localities and the state is going to happen, it probably needs a more trusted broker than Senator Wiener. He's my rep; he's been kicking around San Francisco politics for over a decade -- and he's never seemed to meet a private builder development project that he didn't like.

Tim Redmond who has been observing these housing fights for decades laid out at 48 Hills what it might take to break the logjam on increasing density in the San Francisco Bay Area.

... Imagine the billions of dollars that will pour into the state coffers with the next round of [tech] IPOs. Why isn’t Wiener asking that all of that money go to stabilize and protect existing vulnerable communities – including the construction of a vast amount of (sure, dense) affordable housing, served by new, state-funded transit?

The [San Francisco Board of Supervisors] are asking the right questions. I doubt Wiener would accept the type of amendments that would make his bill acceptable – and if he did, I doubt the Legislature, which is under the thumb of the real-estate industry, would accept them.

For anyone who has read this far: why am I writing this? Housing policy is not one of my regular topics. But irritation with the smug superiority with which national media approach our devastating housing situation has me thoroughly pissed off. If you want to hear from people who work in this arena everyday, let me suggest San Francisco's Housing Rights Committee.

Life, death, and colliding cultures in the 'hood

Down the block from us, a young man sleeping in a car was shot a couple of weeks ago. According to media reports, the killer pulled up and departed on a bicycle. There are no subsequent reports that anyone has been charged.

A day or so after, Erudite Partner and I checked in with each other: were we scared by this? Not really. Maybe we should be, but this event felt both horrifying and depressingly ordinary. There have long been too many young men with guns and mysterious grudges around here. They exist in their world and we in ours; any threat to us would be an accidental intersection of separate worlds. I worry more that frustrated drivers navigating the congested street will hit a child leaving the school.

After the shooting, as is common around here, friends of the dead man set up a somewhat forlorn memorial in the style of the local young.

And then the neighborhood's underlying tensions kicked in. According to the Examiner,

Less than 24 hours after [Jonathan] Bello’s death, The City received an anonymous complaint requesting the clearing of a memorial erected in his honor — flowers, some 15 candles, a cross, several empty liquor bottles and the words “RIP Dae Dae” scrawled in bright orange and black lettering on the public sidewalk where Bello was targeted.

As of yesterday, the memorial is still standing, but a block resident/neighbor hit with a public nuisance notice from the city expressed his frustrations with some of his current neighbors.

“I think it’s outrageous to demand of us — to be conscripted into taking down a memorial and erasing this tragic event and the suffering of his friends and family as if the residue of a murder is just some kind of blight,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a resident of 115 Bartlett St...

... “There’s already layers of extreme disrespect baked into the dynamics of extremely rich people invading the working class community before you even arrive at the crossroads of asking relatively new neighbors to take down a memorial,” said Rosenfeld, who has lived in the Mission for 15 years and said that a lot of “gentrification issues play out on my doorstep.”

I too wouldn't want to be asked by the city to cross the border between worlds, because that's what a clean-up order in this situation amounts to. Where possible, we have to let each other be. That's no solution, but thoughtless interventions seem likely to make an inequitable reality worse.

San Francisco: tough times in a golden snow globe

For a decade, Cary McClelland was a documentary filmmaker and human rights campaigner in far-flung parts of the world -- Congo, East Timor, Zimbabwe. He came home and has collected oral histories from well over 100 Bay Area residents, shaping these narratives into Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley. From his introduction:

The problem is that the richer the cities get, the more unequal they get. Specifically, the more young, male, and white they get. And their diversity is being squeezed onto the streets and into distant suburbs by ever-rising rents and living costs. San Francisco’s income inequality grew faster than any other American city, making it the most unequal city in the nation in 2015. Salaries in the Bay Area have been on the rise, but the number of people living in poverty has also grown.

... The different cultures representing the city’s past are at risk of being whitewashed away. If you don’t have a role to play, there may not be room for you in the Silicon City.

... The challenge for the Bay Area is not whether it can choose one identity—libertarian tech supercity or state-sponsored liberal utopia—but whether it can find some harmony where the best of each can merge. We can recognize the inherent potential in the Bay Area’s current growth, and also wish that the change felt informed and intentional—not incidental and out of control—that it finds ways to make a future that includes San Franciscans new and old alike, where those who built the city can live alongside those who have just arrived. If it cannot happen there, with the wealth of the nation, its brightest talent, and most open hearts at hand, then where will it?

For any of us living here, this is all too familiar. As McClelland says elsewhere, the tech economy feels to those of us who have been around awhile (46 years in my case) like a "giant earthquake" we can never quite banish from consciousness.

Colin Rule, who founded a dispute resolution company that works with tech enterprises, catches what the new folks often look like to observers:

Some people get very, very panicky and emotional. It doesn’t have to be massive success, Zuckerberg success. But still they feel like, Look, I came here, and I started this company. I made a lot of money. So clearly the way I see the world is the correct way to see the world. Some of them, in reaction, become very . . . aggressive about it.

Caille Millner who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle and was born and raised here, remembers an early period in the tech explosion which felt less disconnected from the culture of this city on the left coast of the possible.

You see it in those early chat rooms, projects like Wikipedia and Craigslist, the guys who created Netscape. Those were Tech 1.0. A lot of those guys weren’t in it for the money. They were in it because that was how they saw the world. They were just too utopian, really. We’re just gonna do some weird, free-wheeling stuff. We’re gonna start this weird company and call it Yahoo! We’re gonna have “surfers” who are gonna look through the net and order things like librarians. No one took it seriously. No one thought like, Oh, this is going to become a serious business. No one thought this little company was going to become an institution.

But Elaine Katzenberger from City Lights bookstore has seen the big money destroy that sensibility.

The story of San Francisco is that it’s a boomtown. And boomtowns are never particularly good places to live. Those of us who came here for an alternative to that, we’re in the minority now.

San Francisco was always—at least rhetorically, and sometimes in action—a kind of community unto itself. Maybe it still is. But if San Francisco no longer represents an idea of humanism and freedom from the treadmill, then where do we fit in? What’s our role? The thing is, we are still here.

Except, of course, for those who are not still here. Mission District and Bayview activist Edwin Lindo is quoted extensively. He told McClelland:

... there is a dual social experience happening now. You have people who come here and work in tech, who live in a condo, maybe been here for about a year, and never meet someone who grew up here. The flip side of that is you have people who work in the local taqueria, or they work as a bus driver. They’re born and raised here, have three kids here, and they’ve never met a tech worker.

[It's] not that we don’t want new faces, but we can’t start displacing permanent residents for temporary ones. Because when they leave, we’ll be left with a gaping hole. It’s easy to turn a blind eye and say, “But look at San Francisco. It’s so beautiful.” But you judge a city not by how it treats those that are doing well. Let’s go into the hood, let’s go to Bayview, Hunters Point, let’s go to the Alemany Projects, let’s go to Double Rock. Why is it that we have twenty thousand homeless students attending schools in the San Francisco Unified School District? There’s an underworld that we’ve built, and that we continue to live in.

An immigrant Uber driver from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Leon Fikiri, points to one possible outcome of San Francisco's cultural divide:

... I have seen this story already: a society that doesn’t value human beings will end, just fail.

On the other hand, Edwin Lindo still loves this fractured city:

The city is something special. It raises people who seek justice. It provides you a sixth sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. And there aren’t many cities like that.

Unhappily, it seems that Edwin Lindo has gone on to struggle for black culture in Seattle.

It's abundantly clear that Cary McClelland wanted to write an uplifting book about this city. But he's an honest historian. His story is neither optimistic nor upbeat. But there are many sides of truth here, so I can thank McClelland for that.

The tech economy boom at ground zero

It is a witness to the out-of-control cost of San Francisco living space that when you live close to a transit hub, offers like this flyer pop up in the snail mail. After all, you don't use all your residence 24 hours every day; you could perhaps squeeze a few dollars out of your overpriced property by renting use of it out as an informal office facility.

During the internet boom of 2000, we were astonished to realize that behind us the basement of the single room occupancy hotel had been fitted out with banks of computers and made into a sort of call center -- briefly, until whatever was being sold there crashed. That building then reverted to serving as minimal housing of last resort for low wage workers and other poor people, as it does to this day. I can only wonder for how long until it becomes worthwhile for some developer to gut and repurpose.

Tech wealth isn't going to go bust this time around. So its imperative had become to monetize and colonize our living rooms.

No, we're not going to do it, because we are fortunate not to have. But given what people pay to live here, I have no doubt that this company will find takers in the neighborhood.

What to do about Facebook?

Or is it? Sign from Occupy 2012

Anne Applebaum writes that we must somehow regulate Facebook, proclaiming: The future of democracy is at stake. She likens our love/hate relationship with the behemoth to radio's value to totalitarians in the 1930's, pointing to Hitler's broadcast bile. (She also name checks Stalin although a cursory web search on Soviet radio suggests it was more mind-numbingly boring than effective propaganda -- not wide enough access.) She points out that at present we are leaving the decisions as to what flies in social media to the profit-seeking tech entrepreneurs who own the companies and who have not necessarily demonstrated they have the interests of society at heart. She concludes

If we don’t do it [regulate] — if we don’t even try — we will not be able to ensure the integrity of elections or the decency of the public sphere. If we don’t do it, in the long term there won’t even be a public sphere, and there won’t be functional democracies anymore, either.

That is, she's fully on the war path.

The hook for Applebaum's article is that Facebook, after over a year of cooperation, decided without notice or explanation to deactivate ProPublica's browser plug-in which tracked what political ads were targeted to users who installed it. I knew that; my Facebook feed stopped allowing me to post articles with previews one day recently and began flipping around randomly. By trial and error, I figured it was the ProPublica thing, removed it, and the feed now mostly works as I'd come to expect it to.

So I very much get Applebaum's point; Mark Zuckerberg is offering a front end view of our world that masquerades as a neutral public utility -- until he wants to control how we use his toy marketing environment.

Whether we think Facebook should be regulated hangs a lot on what we think it is/how we choose to use it. If it is primarily a venue to socialize and share fun stuff for which we pay by getting ads thrown in our faces, it's just a another slightly more friendly broadcast medium -- like TV, but addictingly interactive. If we use it as a source of information without a lot of discernment, we're nuts. I wouldn't look at anything cute or adrenaline-raising on Facebook unless I would be willing to browse the website that hosts it directly. That deprives me of some potential web connections, but it seems worth it. If I looked at a bunch of venues I'd never heard of, then I'd have to research them for accuracy. I'm used to the inaccuracies and coverage lapses of my known media outlets.

I participate in Facebook because I share my blog posts in that venue -- that is I'm broadcasting. Facebook doesn't seem to show my stuff around much; don't know if that's because my friends aren't interested (their right) or because of some incompatibility with the algorithm.

My blog appears in 3 1/2 web places: its home page: via Twitter automatically; on Facebook which I have kept up manually since August when the platform broke the auto-post function I had used; and intermittently as a "diary" on Daily Kos when the subject matter seems appropriate. I have friends who do not overlap in all those venues. That's okay with me, though I suspect it is not so okay with Mr. Zuckerberg's world-engulfing dreams.

There is something wrong with the reality that a private company -- a private person in fact -- determines what we get to see on such a vital access point for so many. And there's something wrong with the fact that media organizations have built their distribution mechanisms around Facebook only to find that an unpredictable algorithm has tweaked them away from their audience.

Vox has published a sort of symposium marking Facebook's 15th anniversary. Some entries were thought provoking:

• Meredith Broussard: We need more regulation of Facebook and tech companies. I think that we have done the experiments of “let’s try this and see how it goes.” And it has not gone as well as we have hoped. We need to have a conversation about this, as a public and as a community. I think part of the problem has been that we have a couple of a couple of people saying that this is how it’s going to be and trying to govern tech as a dictatorship. I think we’re a democracy, and we need to have a public conversation about it.

• Aminatou Sow: ... as citizens we cannot outsource our privacy and security to tech moguls. They always have ulterior motives and we are pawns in their game. We are living the consequences.

• Peter W. Singer: Facebook is a kind of mirror of what exists in real life. We use it, and the network of companies it’s bought — from Instagram to WhatsApp — to reflect out to the world the stories of our lives. ... The question of its net positive or negative, thus, will be answered by what we see in that mirror, and what each of us chooses to do about it.

• Antonio Garcia-Martinez: Technologies, particularly in the media sphere, seem to inevitably move from improbable contraption, to dangerous tool whose implications are worryingly discussed, and thence to dull and semi-obsolete utility.

What do you think about our ubiquitous companion?