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      2 justin․searls․co
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     10 
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     18 
     19 What follows is an issue of [36]my newsletter, Searls of Wisdom, recreated for
     20 you here in website form. For the full experience, subscribe and get it
     21 delivered to your inbox each month!
     22 [37][                    ] [38][Sign up]
     23 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
     24 Monday, May 19, 2025 [39]
     25 
     26 Searls of Wisdom for April 2025
     27 
     28 Remember April? April was a month in a long line of months that left me (and,
     29 one presumes, a lot of people) asking themselves, "how did we end up here?"
     30 Well, that's what you have this weird newsletter for. And we'll get to that, I
     31 promise.
     32 
     33 In terms of stuff I did since last time we chatted:
     34 
     35   • Cut a couple ([40]1, [41]2) good Breaking Change episodes. The content is
     36     questionable, but the audio quality has never been better
     37   • Summarized what I consider to be the [42]easiest-to-assess traits of strong
     38     programmers
     39   • Started using [43]GitHub Copilot in Agent mode, and recorded my [44]vibe
     40     code deflowering live on YouTube
     41   • [45]Made Reddit angry by using a computer to [46]generate background images
     42     for my house's rooms in HomeKit
     43 
     44 I also started a vlog. Right now it just lives in this album in my Photos
     45 library, but initial reviews are unanimously positive!
     46 
     47 I started a vlog
     48 
     49 As I start writing this, I'm sitting on an A350 bound for Tokyo, and the flight
     50 attendant just announced we won't have WiFi over the Pacific, because Viasat or
     51 whoever hasn't launched their latest satellite yet. As a writer and programmer
     52 whose greatest impediment to creative output is the risk of distracting myself
     53 on the Internet, learning that I would be forced offline for 13 hours triggered
     54 a familiar relief. My body softened. Maybe I'll actually get some sleep. If I
     55 play my cards right, I might manage to write one whole e-mail between now and
     56 when I land. [Update, 19 days later: I did not.] In any case, being kicked off
     57 the 'Net for a few hours once in a while can be restorative.
     58 
     59 In fact, as luck would have it, one answer to the question posed at the outset
     60 ("how did we end up here?") is also, more or less, "because Internet." So
     61 today, let's talk a bit about the World Wide Web and how tangled in it we've
     62 become.
     63 
     64 In a world experiencing an unprecedented degree of economic volatility,
     65 fifty-fifty ideological polarization, and routine technological upheaval,
     66 there's at least one trend line moving in a clear and consistent direction: 
     67 [47]people [48]across [49]the [50]world [51]increasingly [52]agree [53]things 
     68 [54]are [55]bad [56]and [57]getting [58]worse.
     69 
     70 Why is this? And if everyone feels that way, why does the prospect of
     71 leveraging that unanimous sentiment into effecting positive change feel more
     72 hopeless than ever? How can it be that living standards have never been higher
     73 and public sentiment has never been lower?
     74 
     75 The answer eludes us because it is the water we swim in. Or, rather, the [59]
     76 Information Superhighway we ride on.
     77 
     78 People are so accustomed to today's global and instantaneous exchange of
     79 information that we seem to suffer a collective amnesia as to how recent an
     80 innovation it is. One reason it's sneaked up on us is that information is
     81 inherently invisible, so the most successful information technologies penetrate
     82 our minds with minimal disturbance to our environment. In fact, the world
     83 mostly looks the same as it did forty years ago. And while it would make for
     84 rather dull cinema to consider that Marty McFly could totally get by wearing
     85 his 1985 wardrobe in 2025, at least he wouldn't have to worry about whether his
     86 hoverboard would work over water. We may not have gotten the flying cars we
     87 were promised, but at least we can hang our hats on how much friction we've
     88 eliminated from payment processing.
     89 
     90 [60]An elder millennial's history of the Information Age
     91 
     92 Every year or so, I find it clarifying to take a few moments to reflect and
     93 look back at the progression of the Information Age over my lifetime. We've
     94 come a long way:
     95 
     96   • Forty years ago, my parents had a black-and-white television connected via
     97     coax to an antenna mounted on our house's roof. I have dim memories of
     98     nightly news broadcasts glowing through the curved glass of Dad's
     99     then-massive 30" CRT television; the static causing the anchor to dance and
    100     flicker like a flame. We got an hour of news each night from any of three
    101     sources (well, four, since we were within range of Canada's CBC over VHF),
    102     and each covered the same mostly local, mostly mundane topics in a format
    103     that was mediated by longstanding journalistic norms
    104   • Thirty years ago, they upgraded to a color TV and basic cable service,
    105     which brought with it access to CNN. The news now came to us 24/7. Its
    106     coverage was national rather than local—blanketing dozens of media markets
    107     would have been cost-prohibitive—and this surely accelerated the
    108     nationalization of partisan politics. But CNN's novel format was dull and
    109     unfocused as producers struggled to figure out how to fill so much airtime.
    110     My family also had a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem and an America On-Line
    111     subscription that charged us by the minute—neither of which posed a
    112     problem, as there was so little to do on the World Wide Web. Still, for the
    113     first time, we could reach out and retrieve information on demand, even if
    114     it was limited to outdated and uninteresting marketing fluff hidden behind 
    115     [61]AOL Keywords
    116   • Twenty years ago, our Comcast service was upgraded to include broadband
    117     Internet. Publications now had real websites and computers had real
    118     browsers. When news was breaking, I'd visit my favorite bookmarks and
    119     repeatedly mash F5 to receive updates. Information could finally travel
    120     instantly across the globe, but distribution depended on the initiative of
    121     individual users to search and surf for it. A smattering of self-hosted
    122     weblogs emerged as noteworthy upstarts, but media as actual people
    123     experienced it remained unchanged—monolithic outlets mediated news coverage
    124     at the whims of enterprising editors and eccentric billionaires, just as it
    125     always had
    126   • Ten years ago, we were all glued to our phones. Incredible as ubiquitous
    127     wireless connectivity was, the chief innovation of the era was the
    128     disintermediation of information. Legacy outlets that tossed newspapers
    129     onto doorsteps were quickly outflanked by social media apps that pushed
    130     notifications onto home screens. Whether you were pulling-to-refresh
    131     Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the contours of our new information
    132     ecosystem began to take shape: an endless firehose of "content" from
    133     billions of voices. Before long, a handful of platforms achieved so-called
    134     "network effect" and injected themselves as the new mediator class,
    135     personalizing each of our feeds by cherry-picking content so as to maximize
    136     our engagement and their advertising revenue
    137   • As for today, we are witnessing the apex of the previous era and the dawn
    138     of the next. With each generation of mobile connectivity, we've invented
    139     new ways to saturate every available megabit of bandwidth and every spare
    140     moment of attention. Most people spend multiple hours each day lost in an
    141     infinite scroll of vertical video. Textual thoughtleaders have given way to
    142     video influencers. Active curation has succumbed to passive consumption. If
    143     the 2010s represented an eruption of hot takes being spewed across
    144     ideological lines, the magma has cooled throughout the 2020s as users have
    145     been sorted into like-minded pools of lackadaisical discontent. For most
    146     people, "news" no longer exists—people simply hear things. Who they hear
    147     from and about what is selected by an algorithm designed to provoke
    148     newly-invented emotional reactions that the market greatly values:
    149     unfulfillment so as to scroll past more ads, uninhibition so as to make
    150     more purchases, unsatisfaction so as to keep coming back. By now, most of
    151     us have long since traded away our capacity for emotional regulation in
    152     exchange for the promise we'll never experience boredom again
    153   • And what of tomorrow? One can only imagine what fresh hell they have in
    154     store for us. Will human creators be replaced by celebrity avatars? Will
    155     targeted display ads give rise to individualized video trailers starring
    156     you in a film about how an irrational mid-life car purchase will make an
    157     idealized version of your high school crush want to sleep with you? And who
    158     needs an imaginary friend when your kid could grow up with an omnipresent
    159     AI companion to shape their cognitive and social development—while also
    160     subtly influencing which brand of chips they'll buy? I'm honestly hopeful
    161     the answer is yes! (If only because such a future indicates we still have a
    162     functioning economy with access to fresh water…)
    163 
    164 The timeline above might feel truthy to you. Maybe it maps to your experience
    165 as well. And forgive me if this all reads as obvious—you've probably also
    166 looked back from time to time and considered the dizzying pace at which the
    167 world has changed. Growing up, progress was defined by more access to more
    168 perspectives delivered in less time and less money. But now, with the benefit
    169 of hindsight, it's starting to feel that information itself has been
    170 transformed as well: more personal and more engaging, but ultimately less
    171 actionable and less satisfying.
    172 
    173 [62]We don't love to win, we hate to lose
    174 
    175 A line from [63]Interstellar acts as its thesis, cohering a narrative that
    176 extends light years and spans generations. Perhaps appropriately, it takes an
    177 AI to tell the human characters this:
    178 
    179     Newton’s Third Law. The only way humans have figured out how to move
    180     forward is to leave something behind.
    181 
    182 Humans are generally very sensitive to loss, and the psychological phenomenon
    183 known as "[64]loss aversion" describes a powerful force motivating people to
    184 stand athwart history and moderate the pace of change. We know it best for all
    185 the ways it leads humans to make irrational, unwise decisions (staying in a bad
    186 job too long, holding onto your worthless NFTs, refusing to cancel Netflix),
    187 but the reason loss aversion exists to begin with is that in nature there are
    188 countless more ways in which avoiding loss is adaptive behavior. I'm sure some
    189 ancestor of mine hundreds of thousands of years ago only survived because they
    190 refused to let go of a banana… loss aversion isn't all bad.
    191 
    192 Anyway, loss aversion is why attempts to take away the Internet as we
    193 experience it today—as we saw earlier this year with TikTok and as I witnessed
    194 again on this plane—cause people to get upset. In January, the Internet was
    195 pounded with videos of 20-somethings half-jokingly [65]swearing fealty to the
    196 CCP to advocate for their favorite app. On today's flight, a finance bro threw
    197 a tantrum demanding outsized compensation for missing a full day of trading as
    198 he pointed to his ticket, which erroneously labeled the plane as being
    199 "WiFi-equipped."
    200 
    201 We can all relate to how it feels to have something we find precious taken away
    202 from us, like bananas or TikTok or WiFi. We are less attuned to, but still
    203 plenty capable of lashing out over, intangible potential loss—as we've seen in
    204 the debate over [66]net neutrality or the spectre of [67]ISP data caps. But
    205 when it comes to this particular discussion where the sort of philosophical
    206 loss being described can only be conveyed through a careful comparative
    207 analysis over a period of decades? We're cooked.
    208 
    209 We all might harbor nostalgia for the way things were, but loss aversion can't
    210 help us reclaim such distant past. Any attempt to actually go back would itself
    211 be perceived as an unacceptable loss. Like it or not, humans are now a race of
    212 TikTokers—at least until some new thing outdoes TikTok in a manner that people
    213 like you and me will only read as depraved but in which the rest of the world
    214 will view as incremental progress.
    215 
    216 [68]What exactly was lost?
    217 
    218 Even people clamoring for a return to the pre-Internet glory days of Real
    219 Journalism wouldn't actually be willing to trade in their smartphones for one
    220 measly hour of nightly news from a handful of national broadcasters. In
    221 general, it's easier to wholesale vilify a new technology (video games!
    222 smartphones! TikTok!) than to drill into its unintended consequences while
    223 simultaneously acknowledging its merits. So instead of buying a dumbphone and
    224 moving to a cabin in the woods in the vain hope that it will transport me back
    225 to the 90s, it seems more useful to sit and have a think about the positive
    226 attributes of the long-dead media ecosystem and consider what it might look
    227 like to reclaim those benefits in a modern context.
    228 
    229 On reflection, I can think of two important benefits of the highly-constrained
    230 media environment of the pre-Internet era that almost sound quaint by today's
    231 standards:
    232 
    233 First, it turns out that a scarcity of sources—not speed or accuracy of
    234 reporting—is what gave news media its authority in society. For the most part,
    235 people walked around with a shared understanding of the world they occupied,
    236 accepted a broad base of agreed-upon facts, and associated the oppositional
    237 "other" as belonging to distinct, geographically-defined media ecosystems.
    238 Americans largely believed their neighbors were good people, didn't doubt the
    239 safety of fluoridated water, and mostly imagined their enemies as people living
    240 in countries that didn't air Murrow or Cronkite. This situation resulted in all
    241 kinds of terrible outcomes for people whose interests fell outside the narrow
    242 range of that day's [69]Overton window, but it did foster a sense that "we"
    243 were on the same "team" operated by a common government that would from time to
    244 time "do things." It's hard to imagine a single country for which that
    245 sentiment still rings true today. Fringe ideas that would have been banished to
    246 stuffed-and-mailed-from-home newsletters with fewer than fifty subscribers in
    247 the 1970s now form a latticework of overlapping constituencies necessary to
    248 winning any level of elected office in the United States.
    249 
    250 Second, it sure feels like the scarcity of scope of available information had a
    251 tendency to focus society on a tractable set of clearly-defined problems. When
    252 engaged voters in Detroit subscribed to one of its two regional papers, the
    253 number of topics under debate was constrained by how many column-inches would
    254 fit in the "A" section of either. As a result, it was actually possible to keep
    255 abreast of "the issues" (arbitrary as they might be) throughout an election,
    256 form comprehensible opinions, and support candidates based on their positions.
    257 This reality began dissolving with the advent of social networks and new media,
    258 before disappearing entirely once algorithms started drawing from that well to
    259 populate everyone's feeds. Today, we doom-scroll timelines that are customized
    260 to our unique desires and anxieties, effectively corralling each of us into a
    261 community of one. The thought of plopping a half-dozen random voters into a
    262 focus group with the expectation their policy priorities would circumscribe a
    263 preordained set of traditional issues simply beggars belief. (The political
    264 press tends to confuse this phenomenon with polarization, but it's actually
    265 worse: polarized disagreement presupposes agreement on what people disagree
    266 about.) Hell, pluck any two people for whom a pollster would rate as
    267 "highly-engaged" and—forget about reading the same paper—they probably wouldn't
    268 have even heard of each other's self-reported #1 issue.
    269 
    270 So, what did we lose by gaining infinitely-connected networking technology? We
    271 lost a shared sense of the world we collectively inhabit, as well as the most
    272 pressing issues facing it. As a result, it's no wonder that people from
    273 seemingly every developed country believe things are going to hell: modern
    274 information distribution organizes around ideological borders as opposed to
    275 geographic ones and is scientifically engineered to engender
    276 emotionally-charged, high-stakes attachment to any of a thousand disparate
    277 animating issues.
    278 
    279 So that's neat.
    280 
    281 [70]Maybe this is coming to a head
    282 
    283 Intellectuals like you and I who can still be bothered to read and write text
    284 in excess of a thousand words have, in recent years, started to detect that
    285 something is amiss here. I, for one, have been worried about this shit since
    286 well before it was cool. The approaching endgame started to materialize with
    287 Facebook's [71]introduction of the News Feed in 2006 and began to feel
    288 locked-in with the Internet's collective [72]pivot to video in 2015. These
    289 moments stand out as milestones in both of two parallel timelines that have
    290 played out with approximately zero awareness of or interaction with one another
    291 (until recently):
    292 
    293  1. The educated, book-reading class has tackled the changing information
    294     landscape with the same journalistic detachment as it would any other
    295     "social epidemic," like second-hand smoke or teen pregnancy. Its movement
    296     can be charted by a familiar progression of the sort of sleeper-hit
    297     nonfiction books we see written in response to any such societal issue:
    298     from [73]identifying the problem to [74]exhorting individual resistance to 
    299     [75]offering parenting advice to [76]bargaining with the changing world
    300     before eventually [77]pathologizing its effect on children. This culminated
    301     in a variety of tech-skeptical [78]policy prescriptions, [79]antitrust
    302     suits, and [80]saber rattling by the Biden administration
    303 
    304  2. While journalists merely adopted the dark, the alt-right was born in it,
    305     molded by it. As early as 2005, I remember memes originating on [81]4chan
    306     and later showing up on [82]GAF before landing on [83]IGN and ultimately
    307     being deposited as sediment in the collective male gamer id. Sometimes the
    308     meme pipeline was harmless, like when [84]"Rickrolling" emerged from
    309     4chan's duckroll trend in 2006, but it was just as often horrifying. I ran
    310     into Brianna Wu several times the year [85]Gamergate broke out, and I
    311     genuinely struggled to reckon with the real-world consequences she suffered
    312     at the hands of a few basement-dwelling edgelords. 4chan's notoriety peaked
    313     when it birthed [86]QAnon, but one can draw a straight line from the image
    314     board to any of the [87]men's rights movement, cesspool of [88]pick-up
    315     artists, or phenomenon of [89]incel mass shooters. By 2024, dank meme
    316     laundering had taken many of these deplorable positions mainstream, and a
    317     male-coded political constituency ("the [90]Manosphere") emerged around 
    318     [91]Barstool Sports and [92]Joe Rogan, espousing a masculine [93]
    319     primitivism skeptical of effete knowledge work
    320 
    321 Both tracks have seen phenomenal success in their own way.
    322 
    323 The poindexter liberals in their ivory towers of intellectualism wrote a bunch
    324 of books about how smartphones are bad and as soon as it became about "the
    325 children", they inadvertently turned the Christian right against the same
    326 technology that had radicalized them in the first place. The streams are really
    327 crossing now that Republican states are climbing over each other to [94]ban 
    328 [95]phones [96]in [97]schools and [98]social [99]media [100]accounts for
    329 minors.
    330 
    331 Meanwhile, a handful of hentai-hoarding incels on 4chan spewing memes and
    332 conspiracy theories wound up getting to choose the Vice President with J.D.
    333 "maybe the Internet was a mistake" Vance. The lines are again blurring as
    334 ambitious Democrats like [101]Pete Buttigieg and [102]Josh Shapiro court The
    335 Male Vote by showing up on right-leaning podcasts men apparently listen to. And
    336 whether it's evidence of [103]horseshoe theory or a sign of a broader belief
    337 that technology companies are fucking up our civilization, MAGA diehards like
    338 Matt Gaetz [104]have found common cause with liberal firebrands like Lina Khan
    339 in support of breaking up the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon.
    340 
    341 Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I'm actually
    342 feeling optimistic that we're approaching the precipice of something that
    343 will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea
    344 change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit:
    345 skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite
    346 ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in
    347 the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use
    348 of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems…
    349 fine, actually?
    350 
    351 I don't expect any of the solutions being proposed today to, you know, work.
    352 But it definitely feels like we've hit a critical mass such that the changes we
    353 see in information technology during the next decade will look markedly
    354 distinct from the last four. 🤞
    355 
    356 © 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.
    357 
    358 
    359 References:
    360 
    361 [1] https://justin.searls.co/
    362 [3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
    363 [4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
    364 [5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
    365 [6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
    366 [7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
    367 [8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
    368 [9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
    369 [10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
    370 [11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
    371 [12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
    372 [13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
    373 [14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
    374 [15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
    375 [16] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
    376 [17] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
    377 [18] https://justin.searls.co/links/
    378 [19] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
    379 [20] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
    380 [21] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
    381 [22] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
    382 [23] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
    383 [24] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
    384 [25] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
    385 [26] https://justin.searls.co/about/
    386 [27] https://justin.searls.co/search/
    387 [28] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
    388 [29] https://searls.co/
    389 [30] https://github.com/searls
    390 [31] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls
    391 [32] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
    392 [33] https://instagram.com/searls
    393 [34] https://mastodon.social/@searls
    394 [35] https://twitter.com/searls
    395 [36] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
    396 [39] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/
    397 [40] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v36-hedgelord/
    398 [41] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v35-gpt-casserole/
    399 [42] https://justin.searls.co/links/2025-04-14-the-best-programmers/
    400 [43] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-11-11h17m26s/
    401 [44] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/2025-04-19-17h46m37s/
    402 [45] https://justin.searls.co/takes/2025-04-14-10h39m58s/
    403 [46] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-13-20h54m45s/
    404 [47] https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/01/25/canadians-believe-the-country-is-moving-in-the-wrong-direction-nanos/
    405 [48] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/pulse-check-april-2025
    406 [49] https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/ce-qui-preoccupe-les-francais
    407 [50] https://tg24.sky.it/mondo/2025/03/26/unione-europea-sondaggio-eurobarometro
    408 [51] https://www.ipsos.com/es-es/predicciones-para-el-2025
    409 [52] https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/725066-alarmujacy-sondaz-dla-tuska-zle-oceny-sytuacji-w-kraju
    410 [53] https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/noticia/2025/01/01/61percent-dos-brasileiros-acham-que-economia-esta-no-caminho-errado-aponta-datafolha.ghtml
    411 [54] https://www.afrobarometer.org/publication/ad816-south-africans-score-their-government-poorly-on-its-economic-performance/
    412 [55] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AD958-Nigerians-see-grim-economic-picture%5EJ-favour-reinstating-fuel-subsidy-Afrobarometer-19march25.pdf
    413 [56] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-06/What%20Worries%20the%20World%20April2024-ja.pdf
    414 [57] https://www.arabbarometer.org/2025/01/the-authoritarian-impact-does-political-mitigation-really-matter-to-egyptians/
    415 [58] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/AD935-Kenyans-blame-govt-economic-management-for-increasing-cost-of-living-Afrobarometer-9jan25.pdf
    416 [59] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
    417 [60] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#an-elder-millennials-history-of-the-information-age
    418 [61] https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1gck7fx/partially_lost_aol_keyword_content/
    419 [62] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#we-dont-love-to-win-we-hate-to-lose
    420 [63] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)
    421 [64] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
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    423 [66] https://redditinc.com/blog/an-analysis-of-net-neutrality-activism-on-reddit
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