The Writers Room: 10/24/2023
Today in The Teardown Writer's Room: how platforms exert or lose control over our relationships and interests
I’m returning with my three-topic format as promised but wanted to send this (forward from here) every week on Tuesday instead of Monday. So, here we start today!
As a reminder, The Writer’s Room is where I’ll publish my thoughts on drafts and other ideas for The Teardown. I’m optimistic that I put these little bits of information in your hands once a week.
Cancel Culture: Apple Edition
I don’t intend to regularly post news but found the recent mild-cacophony over Jon Stewart’s show intriguing enough to link here. In short, it’s reported that Jon Stewart and Apple are mutually parting ways over disagreements about content. What content? Joking, talking, and interviewing around the topics of AI and China.
Apple’s interests in China are well known. The country is an enormous market for the iPhone and still integral to the iPhone (and other Apple devices) supply chain. That said, I agree with John Gruber’s take on Threads:
Indeed, I watched and paused many times. The show never quite caught my attention. The Daily Show was equal and sometimes unequal parts humor and deep analysis. The Problem lacked not humor per se, but an overall sense of entertainment. It was not that enjoyable.
There Will Never Be Another Twitter
Filed under the not-news category is a possible post on the decline of Twitter and curiosity around what will come next. Twitter was and still is a website that befuddled power users and novices alike. Exactly what was it for? Breaking news? Political napalm? Stories about bathroom activities?
Twitter was sort of whatever you made it. You followed and interacted with graphs of people that helped you define the value of the service to you. Those graphs started small but over time grew in size (some), and certainly in value - not always positive, not always negative, but always more relevant to you.
Unfortunately, many power users have migrated elsewhere since Elon Musk’s ascendancy to the throne and subsequent relatively unfavorable changes to the platform. The question though, is, where should everyone go? We don’t yet have an obvious singular answer and may never. Eugene Wei in a very long piece that I have yet to finish summarizes nicely:
It’s not clear there will ever be a Twitter replacement. If there is one, it won’t be the same. It may look the same, but it will be something else. The internet is different now, and the conditions that allowed Twitter to emerge in the first place no longer exist. The Twitter diaspora has scattered to all sorts of subscale clones or alternatives, with no signs of agreeing on where to settle. As noted social analyst Taylor Swift said, “We are never ever getting back together.”
We All Know Google Is In Control
I’m casually following the FTC’s antitrust case against Google. In short, the FTC accused Google of dominating the search market through a series of deals with other companies and tactics designed to eliminate competitors. Have a look here for an interview in the Harvard Gazette discussing the case.
One of Google’s chief arguments is simply that consumers can choose another search engine very easily. Navigate to Bing or DuckDuckGo, and, wham! You’re not stuck with Google. And while that is possible, we all know that it’s really behaviorally not true.
Yes, we use Google in part because of its agreements with other companies, notably Apple. The default search engine in iOS is Google, and that’s because Google pays something like $10B a year to Apple to keep that default locked on Google’s engine.
Yet, Google really was the best for quite a long time. And maybe it still is. I’d like to dive deeper into this topic because I do use some other search players for certain topics, products, etc. With that, I’ll end with an exchange from Hacker News. Someone wrote (referencing Bing’s web-crawling bot):
Nobody is stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website
And I responded:
I know your comment is about the bot, but the other side is, yes - Google is absolutely stopping Bing from driving traffic to their website. Not Google's bot, but Google's default deals on iOS, browsers, etc.
Even if Bing's index was measurably better, most folks wouldn't think to switch given how easy it already is to stick with Google.