Can We Build a Better Internet?

Two things happened in the past week, and I see them as loosely connected. The first is that Substack, after spending weeks tripping over its own horrible comms strategy, reversed course on monetizing Nazi publications while arguing that they were merely adhering to their original guidelines. Whatever. I think the larger issue is that when you hang out a big “Nazis Welcome” banner, your value tends to drop precipitously because, despite what Silicon Valley thinks about the marketplace of ideas, most people don’t want to live their lives like they’re perpetually stuck in a freshman college dorm with a bunch of edge lords arguing about race science. Major credit goes to Jonathan M. Katz and Marisa Kabas for their reporting and organizing efforts to get Substack to change course.

For my part, this means I’ll be sticking around Substack for the time being, and I’ll also be turning on pledges and subscriptions on February 6th, which is two years to the day of launching Commentary Track. If you pledged money over at Patreon and now want to bring that over here, or if your financial situation has changed, and you can no longer afford to pledge, all of that is fine. Just be sure to make those adjustments before February 6th. Also, once paid subscriptions go on, those subscribers will get exclusive content that I’ll announce closer to February 6th.

This leads me to the other thing: A terrific piece by The Verge about how Google has homogenized websites. In reading this piece, I feel more certain than ever that we need to encourage individual voices with a direct connection to readers rather than the glut of content farms trying to game Google’s algorithm.

Because the web is so vast that it must be searched, Google Search, in theory, isn’t a bad idea. Furthermore, Google is well within its rights to mandate the terms of that search. This has led to Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO,” where you produce your content and site design in such a way as to be maximally appealing to Google, thus letting you rank higher in the search results, thus resulting in more traffic, and finally that sweet precious ad revenue. I used to have a begrudging acceptance of SEO seeing it as the equivalent of putting on nice clothes. You can have the best ideas in the world, but presentation matters, and if it means there’s a dress code, then that’s not the worst thing in the world.

But as The Verge points out, Google hasn’t instituted a dress code as much as they’ve mandated a uniform. It causes all websites to look the same and talk the same because they’re adhering to practices outlined by Google. When you constrict individuality in this manner, you get this flavorless content paste. While I don’t want to romanticize the Geocities and Tripod pages of days past, there was an exciting freedom of making a website the way you wanted it to look rather than straining into the single form Google demands if you want to make any money from your publication. It’s particularly insulting when you remember that Google alone owns over a quarter of the ad market, and they’re making every publication tap dance for scraps.

Every major publication knows what Google demands, so they’re all behaving in the same way, at which point you’ve come right back around to luck. That’s why companies like Valnet and Static Media buy so many websites. They can’t afford to bank on just one site; they need to create redundancies so if one movie website doesn’t rank on Google, perhaps one of their other properties will with the same information. Of course, at this scale, someone ends up getting the short end of the stick, and it’s always the writers who are creating these articles in the first place. They’re paid criminally low rates (you may as well be writing “for exposure” since the $10 or $20 you’ll make for your work is worth less than just saying you’ve got your byline on a recognized outlet), and will likely be replaced with AI in the coming years as machines write for machines.

Which leads to the problem of expertise and how it can be easily forged. Remember that “A.I.” isn’t artificial intelligence. That’s tech industry branding. It’s really an “LLM”, a “Large Language Model,” which means it’s trying to figure out what you want it to say like predictive text on your phone. And if all that’s necessary is spitting out a semblance of the correct words in the correct order, you’re not getting answers you can trust. More than likely, you’re getting the following chain of events: A bigger publication paid a reporter/staff writer to report on something; a smaller publication paid a freelancer to quickly condense and repeat that; the LLM then gobbles that up and spits it back out to something that seems correct but could still be false. Of course, that’s how plagiarists work: they want the words without the understanding that goes along with them.

Writers and readers are in a crisis created by larger forces of the tech industry. In the case of Substack, they’re still not so big that they’re immune from pushback, and thankfully, writers and readers banding together and applying consistent pressure were able to get the company to change (even if they’re too stubborn to admit they acquiesced to the easy request). Google is obviously a different beast, but I feel like they’re asking us to play a losing game where we compete with too many other sites that all look the same for the handful of table scraps (i.e. whatever remains of the ad market that the tech giants haven’t gobbled up).

I don’t want to play that game, and I’d rather build a relationship with my readers where they know me and I know them, and we’re not just all turned into a homogenized mass looking at articles that were churned out for quantity rather than quality. If you want something better, then I hope you’ll continue to read this newsletter, and donate to support it. Please be sure to sound off in the comments about what you’d like to see, what you think I could be doing better, and how we can break free of a system that doesn’t value us as.

Recommendations

A third newsletter that deserves credit for reversing Substack’s position on monetizing hate speech is Platformer. Platformer was big enough and savvy enough to sway Substack leadership, and it’s clear they’re going to keep holding the company to account. It’s also a good newsletter to follow if you want to keep an eye on Silicon Valley in general.

Over on the 4K/Blu-ray side, think about picking up the 4K of The Fifth Element for $11.99 (61% off). While director Luc Besson tried to come back to sci-fi with something equally epic and weird with 2017’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, he couldn’t match the bonkers energy of his 1997 movie starring Bruce Willis as a cabbie who has to save the universe. While admittedly the movie does indulge in the irksome “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope (and if you want to see that trope smashed apart, check out Poor Things), it’s also brimming with imagination. It’s worth checking out for Gary Oldman’s performance alone, which, to quote a friend of mine when we saw it back in ‘97, is like “hick Darth Vader.”

A friendly reminder that I get a small cut of the sales for anything you purchase through my Amazon Affiliate links. Please, I have kids to feed. And by kids, I mean my dog, Jack. He likes snausages.

What I’m Watching

One of the things I’m trying to do in the new year is celebrate my peers rather than feel acute jealousy. That’s a steep hill to climb with David Ehrlich, who is a titan of a film critic, and whose annual Top 25 video is a yearly sensation among movie fans. When I say his videos are transcendent, I meant that literally. They transcend the usual response to a year-end list (the binary of agreeing or disagreeing with maybe a curious recommendation thrown in) to making you feel the same kind of wonder and awe he clearly experienced watching these movies. I thought Beau Is Afraid was lousy, but this video allows me to understand through images alone why Ehrlich thought it was one of 2023’s best movies. That’s not to say his writing isn’t worthwhile (he’s one of the best and biggest critics working today for a reason), but his skill at making you appreciate the movies he loved through a year-end visual mashup is really special.

Watch the video below, and be sure to donate to Palestine Children's Relief Fund, the charity Ehrlich is supporting with this year’s countdown.

In other viewing, I’ve been really impressed by the first five episodes of the Disney+ series Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I’m not a huge fan of the first two books, but it feels like the Percy Jackson series hits the sweet spot of what Disney should be doing. They’re taking something that wasn’t adapted well the first time (the two movies from the 2010s), redoing it so that it’s more in line with the author’s vision, and it still appeals to Disney’s core demographic of young viewers. This seems like a more worthwhile investment than another season of Ahsoka, which is only for die-hard Star Wars fans who thought the first season was only okay.

What I’m Reading

I’m still making my way through Dune (some days I’ll tear through 50 pages, and other days I’ll feel like reading something else), but I’ve also started reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. My cousin got me the Kindle edition of this as a Christmas gift in 2011, and I figured I may as well give it a shot. I’m enjoying it so far, but it’s more of a book where I read ten pages at a time since, as good as Bryson’s writing is, science reading is just slower for me (it took me months to get through Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies).

In other reading:

What Is JewBelong’s Deal? by Emily Tamkin [Slate] - You may have seen JewBelong’s big pink billboards while driving around. They’re stark bits of text that say things like, “We’re just 75 years since the gas chambers. So no, a billboard calling out Jewish hate isn’t an overreaction,” although they can also be completely anodyne like “Anyone who hates Jews clearly hasn’t tried my Bubby’s brisket.” The people behind JewBelong are Jews with a lot of money and not a lot of brain cells, which is why they’re now falling into easy “Israel right-or-wrong” rhetoric like “Trust Me. If Israel Wanted to Commit Genocide in Gaza, It Could.” Even before the latest conflict in the region, JewBelong’s mission was that Judaism was a good product with bad marketing, and they were here to fix that. Of course, if that’s your belief, then your faith isn’t Judaism; it’s marketing, and JewBelong’s work bears that out. If you think that being Jewish is just a loud billboard away, then clearly any kind of faith tradition or history isn’t really a concern, which, as Tamkin points out, is why they’ve fallen into the same kind of rhetorical swamps that have plagued American Judaism for decades.

What I’m Hearing

I’ve been on absolute tear with You Must Remember This. I finished listening to their Dead Blondes series, and now I’m three episodes into Jean & Jane, which looks at the lives of Jean Seberg and Jane Fonda. One of the things I can always trust with this podcast is that host Karina Longworth is going to deliver engaging, exciting film history. It also cements the notion that pretty much every male director who we hail as a genius was likely a total bastard to women (e.g. Elia Kazan strikes me as absolutely insufferable, and that was before I learned how he tried to steal away credit from his then-wife Barbara Loden for her groundbreaking indie Wanda; also, Otto Preminger verbally abusing a teenage Jean Seberg until she was on the brink of suicide is pretty horrific!).

I also listened to an episode of The Daily where David A. Fahrenthold (who you may remember for his investigation into Trump’s non-profit) talked about how boosters are funneling money to teams through a new IRS loophole. It’s an interesting story because the NCAA is extremely exploitative, and a recent ruling moved that players could receive money under certain conditions. While Fahrenthold (a self-avowed Texas Longhorns fan) explains that this has now led to a black market, I still see that as a step up from before. Some money to players is better than no money to players.

This is all fruit of the poisoned tree that is college athletics. If you’re going to make billions of dollars from something, you can’t then turn around and claim amateurism for your labor force. I also feel like Fahrenthold misses some pretty contradictions, like how these booster groups (“collectives”) giving money directly to players under phony auspices doesn’t serve, as the IRS demands, “the public good,” but somehow it’s okay to pay the coach millions of dollars. Like is it really for the public good for Nick Saban to make $11 million per year? Saban is undeniably a successful coach, but I doubt people would show up to games if it was only him out on the field. I also question how making Saban a millionaire is good for Alabama other than it’s nice to have a successful football team.

I don’t know how to untangle the larger issue of paying players across different kinds of sports, but you can’t make billions of dollars on something and then hide behind, “our players just do it for the love of the game and the school.” It’s nice that players get scholarships, but also the schools want to break those players’ bodies, and then profit from the exhilaration of the collision. That seems like it’s worth more than a scholarship, especially when schools give scholarships to students who don’t have to risk CTE as part of paying for an education.

What I’m Playing

This is all I do now. Digital power washing is my life.