FeedCity

I'd like to hear from tech vendors, asap, which ones will help American voters learn what's true independent of whatever "truth" the government wants us to believe? Who will stand with the people? A good question for all of us to ask. Ask news orgs the same question.

I see they have a piece about the "Manosphere." Stop blaming men. Lose that habit now. It's toxic.

It's worth listening to On The Media, interview with Masha Gassen, saying that the authoritarian government will want to define what's true and not. Since we now understand that most of the information flow now goes around the NYT, CNN etc -- even Fox, and largely through soc...

Election day, 2024.

BTW, there's a lot of talk about new ways to communicate that don't depend on silos that could be sold to billionaires. One way to do it is with my product FeedLand. It manages news streams for feeds you subscribe to. I think every publication should share news from feeds they depend on, experts they quote, other news sources they read. We can build our own networks this way. We've done it before and can do it again. The advantage of this approach is that it is truly decentralized and not at all complicated to use. Here's the news stream I provide for readers of my blog. It's the most popular feature on the site. With FeedLand you can create your own.

Progress hasn’t stopped, but it’s never easy, and never without backlash.

I've actually written a lot, but haven't wanted to publish most of it. So many reasons why the Dems lost. Maybe I should just list them. Biden shouldn't have run again. There would have been a primary. Given the result of the election this week, we should have found out wha...

Not much time to write today and tomorrow.

Singsong congratulations from the leaders of America’s biggest companies.

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire: After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote. His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even ...

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark: The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open. Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and ...

Tom Nichols, for The Atlantic: Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court...

PS: I bet Bezos wishes he had bought Twitter.

Final note (I think). The pain you feel at first may abate. It did for me. I had pushed down memories of 2020. It was a horror show, and Trump was the main character. So the first thing I had to deal with is that I don't want to remember that. Too painful. But once I realized that's not where we are right now, it's a totally different situation, that's when the creative impulse rose as the pain receded. We have one short term thing to do -- keep the campaign running, and long term we have to recognize division we add, and counteract it. We are the party that welcomes everyone regardless or race, religion, country of origin, age or gender. All of them. No exceptions. The election result represents big change. It's a good time to make more changes.

"Richest man in the world" doesn't begin to cover Musk's ambition. He wants "all the money in the world."

Also to the Twitter founders, amassing that much power and centralizing it as Twitter did, had a cost that we're paying now. But it's very hard to stop when the juggernaut is rolling. I understand, but in the future we have to think about this more clearly. When a medium becomes too big and centralized, there's trouble ahead. It was accidental that Trump was the one to take advantage of this to route around journalism and go direct, but it was not accidential that Musk did.

My longtime friend, Mike Arrington said next time have a primary. He has a point. Would Harris have been the nominee if the Dems had had a normal primary process? Who knows. Maybe the voters could have told us then that what happened yesterday was coming.

Speaking of Musk, maybe he will temper Trump's desire for retribution. It may be a vain hope, but I'll cling to it anyway. Doing business in a world of retribution might not be too conducive to the creativity needed to run innovative tech businesses. A climate of fear doesn't inspire great software. I know the quality of products Musk makes, I own and love my Tesla Model Y. Best car I've ever owned or driven.

Ben Thompson wrote in his Stratechery newsletter: "What is fascinating is how this fundamentally transforms any attempt to evaluate the Twitter acquisition. From a business perspective it’s a massive failure, and might always be: Musk paid too much for Twitter as it was, and ...

Speaking of Carville, yesterday's Trippi podcast with Carville as the only guest was the best podcast I've ever heard. I recommended it yesterday as inspirational. Now that we know the outcome of the election, it's a marker of where we were before the results were known. A world that no longer exists. But like stories written in 2016, the markers are useful to see where we once were and how we got here, and what we can learn from what happened between. I wish it had turned out the way these two great friends thought it should have. But it didn't. But there was a hint that they knew what wouldn't work this time. No spoilers.