The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution.
Examples: Tax preparers that lobby against laws to simplify tax filing, private prisons that lobby to support increased incarceration, a bus company suing a carpooling service, an employee resisting attempts to automate their work.
Also, British colonial officials in India set a bounty on dead cobras to reduce their population, only to find that people were breeding cobras to collect the bounty. In 1902, in Vietnam, French colonial rulers set a bounty on rat tails—figuring people would kill the rats to cut off their tails. Instead, people captured rats, cut off their tails, and set the rats free to breed more rats. Later officials found that people were raising rats to collect the bounty.
I thought I had invented the Shirky principle because I couldn’t remember hearing or reading about it anywhere else.
Cory: “Vice surrenders: Literally the stupidest publishing strategy I’ve ever heard of (ever).
Predicting that a social media platform will rug the media companies that depend on it today doesn’t take a Sun Tzu – as cunning strategies go, the hamfisted tactics of FB, Twitter and Tiktok make gambits like “Lucy and the football” look like von Clausewitz.
Josh Marshall: The Republican effort to impeach Biden was a Russian operation.
… the ludicrous Republican impeachment investigation has now been exposed as a Russian intelligence op. This, even as Republicans do Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding by blocking support for Ukraine and only a few short years after Trump aides welcomed Russian moves to help the Trump campaign in 2016.
The entire Biden impeachment effort was built around a guy who was peddling Russian disinformation. This seems like significant news, unless … [finger to ear] … never mind, I’m being told Biden is still old.
I’d like for micro.blog to become a Mastodon superset, supporting the important features of Mastodon—including likes, boosts and compatibility with Mastodon clients like Ice Cubes. I would cancel my Mastodon account and use micro.blog to participate in Mastodon and the Fediverse. @manton
The Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast does a delightful episode on industrial musicals.
For more than three decades, it was common for American companies to put on “industrial musicals” for their employees. These elaborate productions could rival Broadway shows, and featured original songs about the company and its products. And while this music was never intended for the general public, once you hear it for yourself, you might just get hooked. This is a story about bathroom remodeling, corporate art, and one man’s obsession with a forgotten corner of pop culture. Featuring comedy writer and collector Steve Young
Young discovered industrial musicals in the 1980s when he was a writer for the David Letterman Show. Letterman did an occasional segment where he showed the viewers the covers of weird old record albums, read the title and made a snarky comment about each. Part of Young’s job was to scour old record stores and look for those records. Of course, industrial musicals were ideal for the show.
Young started out mocking the records and productions behind them, but he came to enjoy them noncritically.
I feel the same way about the 70s kitsch and 50s recipes I sometimes post. I started out mocking them, but over time I just came to enjoy it. Midcentury was a courageous, experimental and playful time. We’re more cautious and beige today.
Young says this about people who produced the industrial musicals:
There were so many that said, “We only have one setting: Use all our talent and make it as great as it can be, even if it’s a lawnmower show that’s going to be heard once at 8 am in a hotel ballroom. Because that’s just the reason they got into this world of work, because they enjoyed making things great.
That’s how I try to approach my work as well. I know if I’m writing a whitepaper, case study or guest article that what I’m writing is not literature. But I try to approach it as if I were writing the Great American Novel.
Treat your work as if it matters and it will matter.
Also: I was peripherally involved in the production of an industrial musical in the very early 1990s. It was a production for the computer trade publication I wrote for at the time, Open Systems Today. The writer/director/producer was my friend and then-boss, Evan Schuman, whose day job was as news editor of the publication. The whole experience was a blast—great fun, though I didn’t have much to do with it myself, I just served as a sounding board for Evan for his ideas and helped out a bit backstage during the production.
I did a little blog maintenance yesterday: streamlined the header to mitchw.blog, updating the about page and the my favorite posts page, adding a page on where to find me on social media and deleting several pages nobody was looking at.
I’m trying to make mitchw.blog into my home page (remember “home pages,” kids?) along with mitchwagner.com, which looks terrible and is badly in need of updating.
Micro.blog, the excellent service that hosts this blog, recently made it relatively easy to redirect mitchwagner.com to a single-page website hosted on micro.blog. The keyword here is relatively; I have ten thumbs when it comes to anything having to do with configuring DNS and domains. The mitchwagner.com domain is the domain I use for all my email—professional and personal—so I’m waiting to make the change to that domain until I have time to back out if I botch it.
I love that Pat Gelsinger’s plan for turning Intel around is to make things. He’s not turning to financial mumbo-jumbo, Web3, crypto, advertising, sprinkling AI magic dust and the other nonsense that Silicon Valley and Wall Street dudebros do when they want to grift the last nickel from a dying business.
Gelsinger’s idea is let’s make things! like Americans used to do!
I interviewed Gelsinger a couple of times when he was at VMware, and followed VMware closely during his tenure. He impressed me.
Vice is abandoning Vice.com and laying off hundreds (The Verge). Vice published for 30 years. Engadget is swinging the chainsaw too. Shit.
Google apologizes for ‘missing the mark’ after Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis. Wingnuts on Twitter are crybabying over Google’s alleged white erasure. (Adi Robertson / The Verge)
I’m always surprised to hear about companies still using faxes. Bring back pneumatic tubes!
App review: Map routes with your finger using Footpath
There is a road called Princess View Drive near our house that I have driven on many times, but I have never seen a princess.
The American Nazis (the organization formerly known as Republicans) aren’t coming for Jews—now. They say they love Jews.
They’re coming for migrants and LGBTQ people. They’re turning women into breeding cows.
But they will come for the Jews soon enough. We will not have to wait long.
“AI search is a doomsday cult…. Does anyone even want an AI search engine?”
During our last time going out to lunch before the pandemic, my dad (who was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust and later spent years in the Partisans fighting the Nazis) and I were walking toward a restaurant, and he expressed his dismay that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our country seriously enough. I suggested that while most Americans were concerned, they didn’t see the Trump era as being that ominous because they assumed the kinds of things that happened in his life could never happen here. My dad stopped walking, looked at me, and asked, “You think vhen I vas a kid any of us thought it could happen there?”
Apple warns users to stop putting wet iPhones in rice (Gizmodo)
That was a big clue on a crime show. The detective noticed that the murder victim had bought a large quantity of rice, and surmised that the victim was using it to dry out a wet phone, which proved important to solving the murder.