Enshittification and extraction, those are the ideas I wanted to put in play together here — and also to think about what solutions they might present.
At which point Ezra Klein’s conversation with the two experts begins.
What feels bad to the guests:
Doctorow: What I would do is contrast what happens when things aren’t great now with how I felt about what happened when things weren’t great before. So I think when I was a larva on the early internet, and I saw things that sucked, I would think: Someone is going to fix this, and maybe it could be me.
Now when I see bad things on the internet, I’m like: This is by design, and it cannot be fixed because you would be violating the rules if you even tried.
Wu: I feel it’s like a tool I cannot trust. I feel like the tools I like in my life, like a hammer — I swing it, and it does something predictable.
The internet seems like it’s serving two masters. I search for something, I get a bunch of stuff I don’t really want, and I don’t really know what I’m getting. I want to write one email or check one thing. I end up in some strange rabbit hole, and three hours go by, and I don’t know what happened.
So I feel like I’m constantly at risk of being manipulated or taken from, and I don’t trust the tools to do what they say they’re going to do. And I feel that makes using it kind of like living in a fun house.
That’s just the beginning. If you read the entire transcript (or listen to the podcast), you will go down a rabbit hole. But I think you’ll find it worthwhile. Plus, you’ll learn stuff. Stuff you might even use.
I found the artwork in this music video stunning. Thought I’d share:
The discussions started roughly a decade ago, when an account manager at Xcel Energy, the electricity and gas utility provider, expressed confusion, officials at Colorado Mesa University recalled.
A public school on the state’s remote western slope, Colorado Mesa had recently doubled in size, but its energy usage had hardly budged as it began installing an advanced geothermal heating and cooling system.
Since its geothermal buildout began in 2008, the university has saved more than $15 million in energy costs, money it has passed on to students through lower tuition and more scholarship funding.
Hundreds of boreholes drilled approximately 500 feet beneath athletic fields and parking lots tap low-temperature thermal energy to help heat and cool campus buildings in what is now one of the largest such networks in the nation.
The system’s high efficiency—later confirmed in an independent analysis by Xcel —means campus buildings require about half as much energy for heating and cooling as similar buildings, allowing the university to expand its campus without a corresponding increase in energy usage.
As the Trump Administration targets renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, developing highly efficient thermal networks like Colorado Mesa’s offers another path for communities to transition away from fossil fuels.
“It’s been the best-kept secret in all of western Colorado for a long time,” Kent Marsh, vice president of capital planning, sustainability and campus operations for Colorado Mesa, said. “We just have never really done a good job of tooting our horn.”
When you start to dig into the kind of people that run the internet – the Zuckerbergs and the Altmans of the world – the profiles of the individuals are incredibly similar. They make up a tribe of soulless, dead-eyed men who, likely because of their neurodivergence lack the ability for empathy. They speak, move, and laugh robotically. They are not really people at all, and we would all be better off without them
Thanks for the superb owls.
We have a couple of owls who live near us. I find them fascinating.
When you start to dig into the kind of people that run the internet – the Zuckerbergs and the Altmans of the world – the profiles of the individuals are incredibly similar. They make up a tribe of soulless, dead-eyed men who, likely because of their neurodivergence lack the ability for empathy. They speak, move, and laugh robotically. They are not really people at all, and we would all be better off without them