Brian Feldman explains what’s wrong with Cyberpunk 2077.

Another historic headline: the Supreme Court has rejected the absurd lawsuit by the state of Texas that was attempting to overturn the election results in battleground states Trump lost.

Adam Liptak, writing for The New York Times:

The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

The order, coupled with another one on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that a conservative court with three justices appointed by Mr. Trump refused to be drawn into the extraordinary effort by the president and many prominent members of his party to deny his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his victory.

The best response to the frankly insane lawsuit from Texas came, naturally, from Pennsylvania, who correctly accused Texas of sedition:

In a series of briefs filed Thursday, the four states that Texas sought to sue condemned the effort. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania said.

Allen West, a single term congressman who once tortured an Iraqi detainee and is now, of course, the chair of the Texas GOP, issued a statement¹ that ended with what can only be read as a move from sedition to a call for actual secession: “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution”.

All of the idiotic, Trumpian theatrics aside, it’s useful to remember that this extralegal bullshit failed because the election wasn’t close. Twenty years ago, a much less brazen GOP, with a slimmer Supreme Court majority and less polarized cultural environment, was able to overturn the presidential election. It’s hard to celebrate this as a victory.

Helen Branswell, writing for Stat:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, a seminal moment in the effort to curb a pandemic that has so far infected an estimated 16 million people and killed nearly 300,000 in the United States.

This historic decision, which came pretty quietly on a Friday night, means vaccinations will now begin in a few days. There’s still so much work to do, and months of difficulty and continuing to remain vigilant ahead, but what an incredible accomplishment.

Charles Duhigg, writing for The New Yorker, with as damning a portrait of contemporary VC culture as I’ve seen. The entire piece is masterly crafted, using the failure of WeWork as a lens on the rot at the heart of tech and finance today. A few choice quotes:

V.C.s seem like these quiet, boring guys who are good at math, encourage you to dream big, and have private planes. You know who else is quiet, good at math, and has private planes? Drug cartels.

Turns out the VCs aren’t even good at math.

On being “founder friendly”:

Particularly in Silicon Valley, founders often want venture capitalists who promise not to interfere or to ask too many questions. V.C.s have started boasting that they are “founder-friendly” and uninterested in, say, spending an afternoon a week at a company’s offices or second-guessing a young C.E.O. Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me, “Proclaiming founder loyalty is kind of expected now.” One of the bigger V.C. firms, the Founders Fund, which has more than six billion dollars under management, declares on its Web site that it “has never removed a single founder” and that, when it finds entrepreneurs with “audacious vision,” “a near-messianic attitude,” and “wild-eyed passion,” it essentially seeks to give them veto-proof authority over the board of directors, so that an entrepreneur need never worry about being reined in, let alone fired.

Whereas venture capitalists like Tom Perkins once prided themselves on installing good governance and closely monitoring companies, V.C.s today are more likely to encourage entrepreneurs’ undisciplined eccentricities. Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank venture capitalist who promised WeWork $4.4 billion after less than twenty minutes, embodies this approach. In 2016, he began raising a hundred-billion-dollar Vision Fund, the largest pool of money ever devoted to venture-capital investment. “Masa decided to deliberately inject cocaine into the bloodstream of these young companies,” a former SoftBank senior executive said.

What one exec called “willful ignorance” is probably better classified as criminal neglect:

Many WeWork executives suspected that the S-1 might cause problems when it became public, but they didn’t say anything, because “there was this massive pot of gold just over the horizon,” one former executive told me. “Basically, we chose willful ignorance and greed over admitting this was obviously batshit crazy.

“And you know what? If it had worked, and we had gotten rich, then everyone in tech and Wall Street would be saying that Adam was a genius right now, and that WeWork is an example of how American capitalism is supposed to work.”

The idea of building a canoe in the middle of everything else falling apart deeply resonated.

Two years ago, a shelf of ice half the size of Rhode Island calved from Antarctica, where the effects of climate change are being witnessed in some of the most profound and acute ways. Now, that iceberg is set to crash into the island of South Georgia, off the coast of the southern tip of South America. While it has shrunk in size over the years, the iceberg is still roughly the same size as the island it’s headed for.

The attorneys general of forty-six states, plus DC and Guam, have jointly filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Facebook over its acquisitions. Somewhat confusingly, the FTC is also filing a similar, but separate, suit.

During all the trials this summer, I found the anti-competitive angle a bit specious — I couldn’t see a resolution that would solve any actual problems, and the questions mostly seemed to point to solutions that were only going to make things worse (see: EU cookie compliance laws).

This feels like a right direction, if not the right call exactly. At best, it feels like the attorneys general are recognizing Facebook is a unique entity, and uniquely dangerous, which justifies a specifically focused remedy.

The thing is, though, Facebook has a Trumpian teflon veneer¹ to it and I’m not certain a loss for them at the end of the inevitable, long legal wrangling actually ends up making them pay the price for any anti-competitive behavior.

Take Instagram — the tale we tell about that acquisition is Facebook needed them to stay relevant but the fact is, Instagram needed Facebook’s infrastructure, particularly on the ad side, just as badly. For all the praise heaped on the Instagram founders over the years, there’s no guarantee they would have actually made a business out of their trendy app.

If Facebook is forced to spin them off as a separate company, the app still needs that infrastructure. To make it work, both technically and legally, Facebook could open up their infrastructure and resell it to Instagram as a customer — maybe that becomes a line of business for them or maybe it’s solely for one company, it doesn’t really matter. Nothing much changes other than a few thousand engineers have to spend two years building it all out.

And in the end, none of that does anything to address the structural problem of Facebook: they refuse to take responsibility for all the information pollution they spew into the environment.

The time to break this up was before it happened in the first place.

In her introduction to this piece, Tufekci sets it up as an exercise in sharpening an argument, specifically a piece she wrote for The Atlantic that Trump’s now-monthlong assault on the 2020 election is a style of a coup we should be paying closer attention to. She invited Cegłowski to write the counterargument, a style I frankly love, and he argues the election actually went relatively smoothly, that Trump’s bluster is something we should ignore (or, in the case of the complicit GOP, exploit for their own purposes), and the real problem facing the country now is a political one where the GOP is actually positioned to win elections outright.

While the setup here is something of a debate, and at the risk of sounding like a dreaded triangulating centrist, I might suggest they’re both right. Tufekci’s argument that what Trump is attempting is a kind of coup, if not an according-to-Hoyle coup d’état, is a warning obviously worth heeding because of the Overton window-shifting nature of the GOP’s illiberalism. One way to think of American conservatism as a whole is a kind of slow motion coup, that has spanned ideologies and even parties since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (or back to the very founding).

Cegłowski’s warnings, though, are more urgent and dire.

The lower down the ballot you go, the more unpleasant the results. State house majorities that seemed ours for the taking in Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and Pennsylvania instead got redder. We couldn’t even flip two seats in the Minnesota senate, where Democrats control both the state house and the governor’s mansion, and Walter Mondale roams the earth.

We didn’t lose these state races because of gerrymandering, or lack of money, or any kind of Republican tampering with the electoral process. Our failure was political, and all the more inexcusable because it took place in a year when the opposing party had failed at governing so badly that it had racked up a body count. And still we couldn’t make the case.

As Zeynep points out in her essay, these newly-elected Republican legislatures will now have the opportunity to redraw Congressional districts based on the 2020 census. Even with no change in the vote, this redistricting process would net the Republican party a House majority in 2022. And we know from history that the midterm vote is likely to favor them. So not only can Republicans expect to win a House majority in 2022, but they have a fair shot at winning it with a plurality of the national vote.

I do think Cegłowski is a bit quick to dismiss the anti-democratic features and outright voter suppression that have aided the GOP for generations now (and which they will surely begin to ramp back up with bullshit claims of voter fraud aided by Trump’s post-election bombast), but overall believe he’s correct about the political challenges ahead.

Cegłowski has spent years organizing what should be close but winnable campaigns for Democrats across the country and keeps coming up short — he knows better than most the political challenges out in the real world, beyond the sniping on Twitter. And while it may make plenty of us angry to know the GOP can get away with — be rewarded even! — outright lying, collapsing democratic institutions, flaming an endless culture war, and dismantling the post-New Deal idea of governance at every opportunity, it’s hard to deny they’ve succeeded on nearly every front. His conclusions are a complement to Corey Robin’s: the Left needs to get its shit together or risk annihilation.

Reading this piece, I was reminded of a certain despair¹ I felt in the immediate aftermath of this year’s election, when it was clear Biden had won but had not officially been called. Other than Trump’s loss, the outcome was actually pretty great for the GOP, which held the Senate, gained seats in the House, and expanded victories across state and local legislatures. The Trump-led GOP, despite four years of outright incompetence, failed governance, and blatant discrimination against literally every minority in the country, managed to actually improve their share of the vote among every demographic except white men. Imagine predicting in 2016 that Trump would would have lost support among men without a college degree and increased his support among Black or Latino voters. The realignment that 2016 hinted at seems to have solidified, into what Cegłowski astutely shows as a bifurcation into “two disconnected public spheres”:

One of these spheres comprises the world of Fox News, talk radio, the Sinclair media empire, highly ideological local papers, and the Qanon stuff your uncle watches on YouTube. The other sphere is the world most of us inhabit, the world of NPR, the New York Times, cable news, and what used to be called the mainstream media.

These two worlds are aware of each other (this is not an argument about “epistemic closure” or “filter bubbles”), but in the same way that rival religions or sports fans are aware of each other. You don’t get to mix between them—you have to pick a side.

These worlds are also not morally equivalent. Helped along by Trumpism, the Republican public sphere has severed its connections with reality in a way that is not true on the Democratic side. They have also adopted transgressive political norms, including loathsome incitements to political violence.

This is a stark renunciation of Obama’s hope and change politics, or even the more pragmatic belief that the shifting demographics of the country would mean a natural leftward shift. Instead, there’s real work to be done to bridge those divided spheres and build a better country while simultaneously fighting against a political party that has succeeded wildly by simply tearing down. Of course, that’s always been the work.

Obama was many things as president, but there’s no denying his was a singular intellect and temperament.

The amount you enjoy the entirety of this post by Zach Tellman may depend on how much you enjoy nerdy digressions about programming languages — I found those bits interesting but the technical nuances are skimmable.

Overall, Tellman has written the best takedown of Paul Graham since Maciej Cegłowski’s genre-defining “Dabblers and Blowhards”. Where Cegłowski relied on wit, humor, and his personal background as a painter and programmer, Tellman has written a precise and damning technical dismantling of Arc, Graham’s stillborn programming language, that equally serves to highlight Graham’s failure as the public intellectual he so desperately wants to be thought of. Graham’s reliance on intuition, Tellman makes clear, has served him poorly in both pursuits.

Graham doesn’t work through the consequences of his own model because the model doesn’t matter; what matters is sharing some things that feel right and true.

Graham, with the possible exception of the equally lamentable thought leader Marc Andreessen, is the person probably most responsible for contemporary Silicon Valley culture, with its adulation of “first principles” thinking and scorning of anything that reeks of premature optimization.

The problem with this ethos, which has so captured tech over the past decade and half, is how disastrously it plays out when tech comes into contact with the real world. Communities, cities, even national governments rarely hold up to the scrutiny of “first principles” because they’ve developed and warped and eroded and been rebuilt over time; obeying local laws or regulations, or thinking through the consequences of disruption, start to look like the dreaded “premature optimization” if you’re Uber or Facebook, flush with VC cash and aiming to dent the universe.

“Profoundly unserious”, as Tellman so astutely puts it, is the exact right descriptor not just of Graham but the legions that have come to build their fortunes in his wake. These fortunes, owing much more to good luck than solving some intractable world-altering problem, distort reality for the winners such that they think they actually have something novel to say.

Like Graham, too much of tech has no interest in engaging with or even understanding the broader world they are disrupting. What they fail to comprehend, and what makes them so unserious, is how their philosophy is the same justification used by tyrants for as long as civilization has existed.