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Javier E

The End of the Silicon Valley Myth - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...672598

shared by Javier E on 30 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and overly reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it’s finally run hard up into its limits.
  • They’re failing utterly to create the futures they’ve long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they’re unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they’ve built
  • They’re paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors
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  • Their policies tend to please no one; it’s a common refrain that antipathy toward Big Tech companies is one of the few truly bipartisan issues
  • You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag
  • There’s a palpable exhaustion with the whole enterprise, with the men who set out to build the future or at least get rich, and who accomplished only one and a half of those things.
  • The big social networks are stuck. And there is little profit incentive to get them unstuck. That, after all, would require investing heavily in content moderators, empowering trust and safety teams, and penalizing malicious viral content that brings in huge traffic.
  • It’s not just social media that’s in decline, already over, or worse.
  • As its mighty iPhone sales figures have plateaued and its business has grown more conservative—it hasn’t released a culturally significant new product line since 2016’s AirPods—Apple has begun to embrace advertising.
  • as Google has consolidated its monopoly, the quality of its flagship search product has gotten worse. Result pages are cluttered with ads that must be scrolled through in order to find the “‘organic”’ items, and there’s reason to think the quality of the results has gotten worse over time as well.
  • YouTube, meanwhile, is facing many of the same policy quagmires as Facebook and Twitter, especially when it comes to content moderation—and similarly failing to meaningfully address them.
  • What a grim outcome for the internet, where the possibilities were once believed to be endless and where users were promised an infinite spectrum of possibility to indulge their creativity, build robust communities, and find their best expression, even when they could not do so in the real world
  • Big Tech, of course, never predicated its business models on enabling any of that, though its advertising and sloganeering may have suggested otherwise. Rather, companies’ ambitions were always focused on being the biggest: having the most users, selling the most devices, locking the most people into their walled gardens and ecosystems. The stuckness we’re seeing is the result of some of the most ambitious companies of our generation succeeding wildly yet having no vision beyond scale—no serious interest in engaging the civic and social dimensions of their projects.
Javier E

Toxic Political Culture Has Even Some Slovaks Calling Country 'a Black Hole.' - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vakia-politics-black-hole.html

slovakia authoritarian attitudes west liberal democracy violence politics history crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 20 May 24 - No Cached
  • Of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that shook off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who view liberal democracy as a threat to their identity and values — 43 percent compared with 15 percent in the neighboring Czech Republic
  • Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but 27 percent of Slovaks see it as key strategic partner, the highest level in the region.
  • many of its people — particularly those living outside big cities — feel left behind and resentful, Mr. Meseznikov said, and are “more vulnerable than elsewhere to conspiracy theories and narratives that liberal democracy is a menace.”
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  • The picture is much the same in many other formerly communist countrie
  • Slovakia’s politics are particularly poisonous, swamped by wild conspiracy theories and bile.
  • The foundations of this were laid in the 1990s when Mr. Meciar formed what is still one of the country’s two main political blocs: an alliance of right-wing nationalists, business cronies and anti-establishment leftists. All thrived on denouncing their centrist and liberal opponents as enemies willing to sell out the country’s interests to the West
  • “Meciar was a pioneer,” he said. “He was a typical representative of national populism with an authoritarian approach, and so is Fico.”
  • On the day Mr. Fico was shot, Parliament was meeting to endorse an overhaul of public television to purge what his governing party views as unfair bias in favor of political opponents, a reprise of efforts in the 1990s by Mr. Meciar to mute media critics.
  • The legislation was part of a raft of measures that the European Commission in February said risked doing “irreparable damage” to the rule of law. These include measures to limit corruption investigations and impose what critics denounced as Russian-style restrictions on nongovernmental organizations. The government opposes military aid to Ukraine and L.G.B.T.Q. rights, is often at odds with the European Union and, like Mr. Orban, favors friendly relations with Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.
  • In the run-up to the election last September that returned Mr. Fico, a fixture of Slovak politics for more than two decades, to power, he and his allies took an increasingly hostile stance toward the United States and Ukraine, combined with sympathetic words for Russia.
  • Their statements often recalled a remark by Mr. Meciar, who, resisting demands in the 1990s that he must change his ways if Slovakia wanted to join the European Union, held up Russia as an alternative haven: “if they don’t want us in the West, we’ll go East.”
  • But, he added, “the frames that the society and its elites use to interpret the conflict remain the same: a choice between a Western path and being something of a bridge between the East and the West, as well as a choice between liberal democracy and illiberal, authoritarian government.”
  • Andrej Danko, the leader of the party, which is now part of the new coalition government formed by Mr. Fico after the September election, said that the attempt to assassinate Mr. Fico represented the “start of a political war” between the country’s two opposing camps.
  • Iveta Radicova, a sociologist opposed to Mr. Fico who is a former prime minister, said Slovakia’s woes were part of a wider crisis with roots that extend far beyond its early stumbles under Mr. Meciar.
  • “Many democracies are headed toward the black hole,” as countries from Hungary in the East to the Netherlands in the West succumb to the appeal of national populism, she said. “This shift is happening everywhere.”
Javier E

How Asian Groceries Like H Mart and Patel Brothers Are Reshaping America - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-grocery-stores-america.html

groceries food asian industry

shared by Javier E on 18 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • The H Mart of today is a $2 billion company with 96 stores and a namesake book (the best-selling memoir “Crying in H Mart,” by the musician Michelle Zauner). Last month, the chain purchased an entire shopping center in San Francisco for $37 million. Patel Brothers has 52 locations in 20 states, with six more stores planned in the next two years. 99 Ranch opened four new branches just last year, bringing its reach to 62 stores in 11 states. Weee!, an online Asian food store, is valued at $4.1 billion.
  • Asian grocery stores are no longer niche businesses: They are a cultural phenomenon.
  • Asian American grocers still represent less than one percent of the total U.S. grocery business,
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  • ate which products the big-box chains stock.
  • But these stores exercise an outsize impact, she said, as they di
  • more than any restaurant, cookbook or online video, Asian grocers are driving this shift.
  • April 2023 to April 2024, sales of items in the “Asian/ethnic aisle” in U.S. grocery stores grew nearly four times more than overall sales
  • Miso, ghee, turmeric, soy sauce — their journeys to becoming widely available pantry staples all began with an Asian grocer.
  • H Mart is attracting the clientele of the big grocers, too. Thirty percent of its shoppers today are non Asian, Mr. Kwon said, and he’s made changes to continue drawing them
  • placing more emphasis on in-store tastings, explaining how ingredients are used and posting signs in both Korean and English. Similarly, at 99 Ranch, the announcements ring out in Mandarin and English, and Western music has been added to the store playlists.
  • Swetal Patel, a partner at Patel Brothers, said that as the chain has expanded its audience — he estimates that 20 to 25 percent of shoppers are now non South Asian
  • “I find it fascinating that there are things on the shelf that I have no idea what they are,” said Jill Connors, an economic development director for the city of Dubuque, Iowa, who started shopping at Hornbill Asian Market earlier this year because she and her husband became vegan and wanted high-quality tofu at a reasonable price.
  • The sheer variety of foods to explore “brings more joy to the shopping and cooking process,”
Javier E

The Purpose of Journalism Is to Get the Story - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...-media-bias-diversity-b0b736fe

journalism purpose storytelling DEI news bias

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric cicadas, the scream of a hyena. A tribe of cavemen sit grunting around a fire. An antelope turns on a spit. Suddenly another caveman runs in, breathlessly, from the bush. “Something happened,” he says. They all turn. “The tribe two hills over was killed by a pack of dire wolves. Everyone torn to pieces.”
  • Clamor, questions. How do you know? Did you see it? (He did, from a tree.) Are you sure they were wolves? “Yes, with huge heads and muscled torsos.” What did it look like? “Bloody.”
  • As he reports he is given water and a favored slice of meat. Because he has run far and is hungry, but mostly because he has told them the news, and they are grateful.
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  • The purpose of journalism is to get the story and tell the story.
  • Now the cavemen turn to the tribal elder. “What should we do?” “Short term, climb a tree if you see a wolf,” she says. “They don’t like fire and noise, so we should keep lit torches and scream. In the longer term, wolf packs are seen in the west, so we should go east to high ground.” That is the authentic sound of commentary, of editorials and columns. Advice, exhortation—they’re part of the news too. People will always want it, question it, disagree.
  • It is as if journalism is no longer about Get the Story but about Meeting People Where They Are and helping them navigate through a confusing world. But do you really think current editors know where people are? Do you think they know how to navigate? It all feels presumptuous.
  • The great news for journalism is there will always be a huge market for this. The need for news is built into human nature. Tech platforms change, portals change, but the need is forever.
  • The past two decades, accelerating over the past four years, newsrooms have increasingly become distracted from their main mission, confused about their purpose. Really, they’ve grown detached from their mission
  • the journalistic product now being offered has become something vaguer than it was, more boring, less swashbuckling, more labored, as if it’s written by frightened people. There’s an emphasis on giving the story “context,” but the story doesn’t feel alive and the context seems skewed
  • But even cavemen who eat bugs and wear hides are not always grim. Man wants not only to be informed but to be amused, entertained. He wants humor, wit, mischief, a visual tour of the latest cave paintings. Cave man want cooking app. And word games and reporting on the richest tribes: “Most Expensive Cave Dwelling Sells in Malibu.”
  • More disturbing, major stories go unreported because, the reader senses, they don’t relate to the personal obsessions of the editors and reporters, or to their political priors.
  • Facebook and social media can’t get the story. They can amplify it, give an opinion, comment. But they don’t have the resources and expertise; they don’t have trained investigative journalists and first-class experienced editors and a publisher willing to take a chance and spend the money. Social media has opinions, emotions, propaganda.
  • And the great thing for newspapers is if you get the story—if you are known to get the story, like the Washington Post in the Watergate years—you will be read.
  • In early 2023, Len Downie and Andrew Heyward, formerly executive editor of the Washington Post and president of CBS News, respectively, wrote a paper about how modern journalists see standards within their professions, and it seemed to me not only confused but a kind of capitulation. There had been a “generational shift” in journalism, and the many editors and reporters they interviewed think objectivity is more or less “outmoded,” a false standard created by the white male patriarchy.
  • What was really striking was there was no mention, not one, of the thrill of the chase, of getting the story—of journalism itself. It was all about the guck and mess, not the mission, and made them look like news bureaucrats, joyless grinds, self-infatuated bores.
  • They were obsessed with who’s in the newsroom when their readers are obsessed with what comes out of the newsroom.
  • current ways of encouraging diversity seem to yield a great sameness in terms of class and viewpoint, and in any case diversity is a mission within a mission, it isn’t the mission itself, which is: Get the story, tell the story.
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