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Monday, May 19, 2025 [39]

Searls of Wisdom for April 2025

Remember April? April was a month in a long line of months that left me (and,
one presumes, a lot of people) asking themselves, "how did we end up here?"
Well, that's what you have this weird newsletter for. And we'll get to that, I
promise.

In terms of stuff I did since last time we chatted:

  • Cut a couple ([40]1, [41]2) good Breaking Change episodes. The content is
    questionable, but the audio quality has never been better
  • Summarized what I consider to be the [42]easiest-to-assess traits of strong
    programmers
  • Started using [43]GitHub Copilot in Agent mode, and recorded my [44]vibe
    code deflowering live on YouTube
  • [45]Made Reddit angry by using a computer to [46]generate background images
    for my house's rooms in HomeKit

I also started a vlog. Right now it just lives in this album in my Photos
library, but initial reviews are unanimously positive!

I started a vlog

As I start writing this, I'm sitting on an A350 bound for Tokyo, and the flight
attendant just announced we won't have WiFi over the Pacific, because Viasat or
whoever hasn't launched their latest satellite yet. As a writer and programmer
whose greatest impediment to creative output is the risk of distracting myself
on the Internet, learning that I would be forced offline for 13 hours triggered
a familiar relief. My body softened. Maybe I'll actually get some sleep. If I
play my cards right, I might manage to write one whole e-mail between now and
when I land. [Update, 19 days later: I did not.] In any case, being kicked off
the 'Net for a few hours once in a while can be restorative.

In fact, as luck would have it, one answer to the question posed at the outset
("how did we end up here?") is also, more or less, "because Internet." So
today, let's talk a bit about the World Wide Web and how tangled in it we've
become.

In a world experiencing an unprecedented degree of economic volatility,
fifty-fifty ideological polarization, and routine technological upheaval,
there's at least one trend line moving in a clear and consistent direction: 
[47]people [48]across [49]the [50]world [51]increasingly [52]agree [53]things 
[54]are [55]bad [56]and [57]getting [58]worse.

Why is this? And if everyone feels that way, why does the prospect of
leveraging that unanimous sentiment into effecting positive change feel more
hopeless than ever? How can it be that living standards have never been higher
and public sentiment has never been lower?

The answer eludes us because it is the water we swim in. Or, rather, the [59]
Information Superhighway we ride on.

People are so accustomed to today's global and instantaneous exchange of
information that we seem to suffer a collective amnesia as to how recent an
innovation it is. One reason it's sneaked up on us is that information is
inherently invisible, so the most successful information technologies penetrate
our minds with minimal disturbance to our environment. In fact, the world
mostly looks the same as it did forty years ago. And while it would make for
rather dull cinema to consider that Marty McFly could totally get by wearing
his 1985 wardrobe in 2025, at least he wouldn't have to worry about whether his
hoverboard would work over water. We may not have gotten the flying cars we
were promised, but at least we can hang our hats on how much friction we've
eliminated from payment processing.

[60]An elder millennial's history of the Information Age

Every year or so, I find it clarifying to take a few moments to reflect and
look back at the progression of the Information Age over my lifetime. We've
come a long way:

  • Forty years ago, my parents had a black-and-white television connected via
    coax to an antenna mounted on our house's roof. I have dim memories of
    nightly news broadcasts glowing through the curved glass of Dad's
    then-massive 30" CRT television; the static causing the anchor to dance and
    flicker like a flame. We got an hour of news each night from any of three
    sources (well, four, since we were within range of Canada's CBC over VHF),
    and each covered the same mostly local, mostly mundane topics in a format
    that was mediated by longstanding journalistic norms
  • Thirty years ago, they upgraded to a color TV and basic cable service,
    which brought with it access to CNN. The news now came to us 24/7. Its
    coverage was national rather than local—blanketing dozens of media markets
    would have been cost-prohibitive—and this surely accelerated the
    nationalization of partisan politics. But CNN's novel format was dull and
    unfocused as producers struggled to figure out how to fill so much airtime.
    My family also had a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem and an America On-Line
    subscription that charged us by the minute—neither of which posed a
    problem, as there was so little to do on the World Wide Web. Still, for the
    first time, we could reach out and retrieve information on demand, even if
    it was limited to outdated and uninteresting marketing fluff hidden behind 
    [61]AOL Keywords
  • Twenty years ago, our Comcast service was upgraded to include broadband
    Internet. Publications now had real websites and computers had real
    browsers. When news was breaking, I'd visit my favorite bookmarks and
    repeatedly mash F5 to receive updates. Information could finally travel
    instantly across the globe, but distribution depended on the initiative of
    individual users to search and surf for it. A smattering of self-hosted
    weblogs emerged as noteworthy upstarts, but media as actual people
    experienced it remained unchanged—monolithic outlets mediated news coverage
    at the whims of enterprising editors and eccentric billionaires, just as it
    always had
  • Ten years ago, we were all glued to our phones. Incredible as ubiquitous
    wireless connectivity was, the chief innovation of the era was the
    disintermediation of information. Legacy outlets that tossed newspapers
    onto doorsteps were quickly outflanked by social media apps that pushed
    notifications onto home screens. Whether you were pulling-to-refresh
    Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the contours of our new information
    ecosystem began to take shape: an endless firehose of "content" from
    billions of voices. Before long, a handful of platforms achieved so-called
    "network effect" and injected themselves as the new mediator class,
    personalizing each of our feeds by cherry-picking content so as to maximize
    our engagement and their advertising revenue
  • As for today, we are witnessing the apex of the previous era and the dawn
    of the next. With each generation of mobile connectivity, we've invented
    new ways to saturate every available megabit of bandwidth and every spare
    moment of attention. Most people spend multiple hours each day lost in an
    infinite scroll of vertical video. Textual thoughtleaders have given way to
    video influencers. Active curation has succumbed to passive consumption. If
    the 2010s represented an eruption of hot takes being spewed across
    ideological lines, the magma has cooled throughout the 2020s as users have
    been sorted into like-minded pools of lackadaisical discontent. For most
    people, "news" no longer exists—people simply hear things. Who they hear
    from and about what is selected by an algorithm designed to provoke
    newly-invented emotional reactions that the market greatly values:
    unfulfillment so as to scroll past more ads, uninhibition so as to make
    more purchases, unsatisfaction so as to keep coming back. By now, most of
    us have long since traded away our capacity for emotional regulation in
    exchange for the promise we'll never experience boredom again
  • And what of tomorrow? One can only imagine what fresh hell they have in
    store for us. Will human creators be replaced by celebrity avatars? Will
    targeted display ads give rise to individualized video trailers starring
    you in a film about how an irrational mid-life car purchase will make an
    idealized version of your high school crush want to sleep with you? And who
    needs an imaginary friend when your kid could grow up with an omnipresent
    AI companion to shape their cognitive and social development—while also
    subtly influencing which brand of chips they'll buy? I'm honestly hopeful
    the answer is yes! (If only because such a future indicates we still have a
    functioning economy with access to fresh water…)

The timeline above might feel truthy to you. Maybe it maps to your experience
as well. And forgive me if this all reads as obvious—you've probably also
looked back from time to time and considered the dizzying pace at which the
world has changed. Growing up, progress was defined by more access to more
perspectives delivered in less time and less money. But now, with the benefit
of hindsight, it's starting to feel that information itself has been
transformed as well: more personal and more engaging, but ultimately less
actionable and less satisfying.

[62]We don't love to win, we hate to lose

A line from [63]Interstellar acts as its thesis, cohering a narrative that
extends light years and spans generations. Perhaps appropriately, it takes an
AI to tell the human characters this:

    Newton’s Third Law. The only way humans have figured out how to move
    forward is to leave something behind.

Humans are generally very sensitive to loss, and the psychological phenomenon
known as "[64]loss aversion" describes a powerful force motivating people to
stand athwart history and moderate the pace of change. We know it best for all
the ways it leads humans to make irrational, unwise decisions (staying in a bad
job too long, holding onto your worthless NFTs, refusing to cancel Netflix),
but the reason loss aversion exists to begin with is that in nature there are
countless more ways in which avoiding loss is adaptive behavior. I'm sure some
ancestor of mine hundreds of thousands of years ago only survived because they
refused to let go of a banana… loss aversion isn't all bad.

Anyway, loss aversion is why attempts to take away the Internet as we
experience it today—as we saw earlier this year with TikTok and as I witnessed
again on this plane—cause people to get upset. In January, the Internet was
pounded with videos of 20-somethings half-jokingly [65]swearing fealty to the
CCP to advocate for their favorite app. On today's flight, a finance bro threw
a tantrum demanding outsized compensation for missing a full day of trading as
he pointed to his ticket, which erroneously labeled the plane as being
"WiFi-equipped."

We can all relate to how it feels to have something we find precious taken away
from us, like bananas or TikTok or WiFi. We are less attuned to, but still
plenty capable of lashing out over, intangible potential loss—as we've seen in
the debate over [66]net neutrality or the spectre of [67]ISP data caps. But
when it comes to this particular discussion where the sort of philosophical
loss being described can only be conveyed through a careful comparative
analysis over a period of decades? We're cooked.

We all might harbor nostalgia for the way things were, but loss aversion can't
help us reclaim such distant past. Any attempt to actually go back would itself
be perceived as an unacceptable loss. Like it or not, humans are now a race of
TikTokers—at least until some new thing outdoes TikTok in a manner that people
like you and me will only read as depraved but in which the rest of the world
will view as incremental progress.

[68]What exactly was lost?

Even people clamoring for a return to the pre-Internet glory days of Real
Journalism wouldn't actually be willing to trade in their smartphones for one
measly hour of nightly news from a handful of national broadcasters. In
general, it's easier to wholesale vilify a new technology (video games!
smartphones! TikTok!) than to drill into its unintended consequences while
simultaneously acknowledging its merits. So instead of buying a dumbphone and
moving to a cabin in the woods in the vain hope that it will transport me back
to the 90s, it seems more useful to sit and have a think about the positive
attributes of the long-dead media ecosystem and consider what it might look
like to reclaim those benefits in a modern context.

On reflection, I can think of two important benefits of the highly-constrained
media environment of the pre-Internet era that almost sound quaint by today's
standards:

First, it turns out that a scarcity of sources—not speed or accuracy of
reporting—is what gave news media its authority in society. For the most part,
people walked around with a shared understanding of the world they occupied,
accepted a broad base of agreed-upon facts, and associated the oppositional
"other" as belonging to distinct, geographically-defined media ecosystems.
Americans largely believed their neighbors were good people, didn't doubt the
safety of fluoridated water, and mostly imagined their enemies as people living
in countries that didn't air Murrow or Cronkite. This situation resulted in all
kinds of terrible outcomes for people whose interests fell outside the narrow
range of that day's [69]Overton window, but it did foster a sense that "we"
were on the same "team" operated by a common government that would from time to
time "do things." It's hard to imagine a single country for which that
sentiment still rings true today. Fringe ideas that would have been banished to
stuffed-and-mailed-from-home newsletters with fewer than fifty subscribers in
the 1970s now form a latticework of overlapping constituencies necessary to
winning any level of elected office in the United States.

Second, it sure feels like the scarcity of scope of available information had a
tendency to focus society on a tractable set of clearly-defined problems. When
engaged voters in Detroit subscribed to one of its two regional papers, the
number of topics under debate was constrained by how many column-inches would
fit in the "A" section of either. As a result, it was actually possible to keep
abreast of "the issues" (arbitrary as they might be) throughout an election,
form comprehensible opinions, and support candidates based on their positions.
This reality began dissolving with the advent of social networks and new media,
before disappearing entirely once algorithms started drawing from that well to
populate everyone's feeds. Today, we doom-scroll timelines that are customized
to our unique desires and anxieties, effectively corralling each of us into a
community of one. The thought of plopping a half-dozen random voters into a
focus group with the expectation their policy priorities would circumscribe a
preordained set of traditional issues simply beggars belief. (The political
press tends to confuse this phenomenon with polarization, but it's actually
worse: polarized disagreement presupposes agreement on what people disagree
about.) Hell, pluck any two people for whom a pollster would rate as
"highly-engaged" and—forget about reading the same paper—they probably wouldn't
have even heard of each other's self-reported #1 issue.

So, what did we lose by gaining infinitely-connected networking technology? We
lost a shared sense of the world we collectively inhabit, as well as the most
pressing issues facing it. As a result, it's no wonder that people from
seemingly every developed country believe things are going to hell: modern
information distribution organizes around ideological borders as opposed to
geographic ones and is scientifically engineered to engender
emotionally-charged, high-stakes attachment to any of a thousand disparate
animating issues.

So that's neat.

[70]Maybe this is coming to a head

Intellectuals like you and I who can still be bothered to read and write text
in excess of a thousand words have, in recent years, started to detect that
something is amiss here. I, for one, have been worried about this shit since
well before it was cool. The approaching endgame started to materialize with
Facebook's [71]introduction of the News Feed in 2006 and began to feel
locked-in with the Internet's collective [72]pivot to video in 2015. These
moments stand out as milestones in both of two parallel timelines that have
played out with approximately zero awareness of or interaction with one another
(until recently):

 1. The educated, book-reading class has tackled the changing information
    landscape with the same journalistic detachment as it would any other
    "social epidemic," like second-hand smoke or teen pregnancy. Its movement
    can be charted by a familiar progression of the sort of sleeper-hit
    nonfiction books we see written in response to any such societal issue:
    from [73]identifying the problem to [74]exhorting individual resistance to 
    [75]offering parenting advice to [76]bargaining with the changing world
    before eventually [77]pathologizing its effect on children. This culminated
    in a variety of tech-skeptical [78]policy prescriptions, [79]antitrust
    suits, and [80]saber rattling by the Biden administration

 2. While journalists merely adopted the dark, the alt-right was born in it,
    molded by it. As early as 2005, I remember memes originating on [81]4chan
    and later showing up on [82]GAF before landing on [83]IGN and ultimately
    being deposited as sediment in the collective male gamer id. Sometimes the
    meme pipeline was harmless, like when [84]"Rickrolling" emerged from
    4chan's duckroll trend in 2006, but it was just as often horrifying. I ran
    into Brianna Wu several times the year [85]Gamergate broke out, and I
    genuinely struggled to reckon with the real-world consequences she suffered
    at the hands of a few basement-dwelling edgelords. 4chan's notoriety peaked
    when it birthed [86]QAnon, but one can draw a straight line from the image
    board to any of the [87]men's rights movement, cesspool of [88]pick-up
    artists, or phenomenon of [89]incel mass shooters. By 2024, dank meme
    laundering had taken many of these deplorable positions mainstream, and a
    male-coded political constituency ("the [90]Manosphere") emerged around 
    [91]Barstool Sports and [92]Joe Rogan, espousing a masculine [93]
    primitivism skeptical of effete knowledge work

Both tracks have seen phenomenal success in their own way.

The poindexter liberals in their ivory towers of intellectualism wrote a bunch
of books about how smartphones are bad and as soon as it became about "the
children", they inadvertently turned the Christian right against the same
technology that had radicalized them in the first place. The streams are really
crossing now that Republican states are climbing over each other to [94]ban 
[95]phones [96]in [97]schools and [98]social [99]media [100]accounts for
minors.

Meanwhile, a handful of hentai-hoarding incels on 4chan spewing memes and
conspiracy theories wound up getting to choose the Vice President with J.D.
"maybe the Internet was a mistake" Vance. The lines are again blurring as
ambitious Democrats like [101]Pete Buttigieg and [102]Josh Shapiro court The
Male Vote by showing up on right-leaning podcasts men apparently listen to. And
whether it's evidence of [103]horseshoe theory or a sign of a broader belief
that technology companies are fucking up our civilization, MAGA diehards like
Matt Gaetz [104]have found common cause with liberal firebrands like Lina Khan
in support of breaking up the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon.

Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I'm actually
feeling optimistic that we're approaching the precipice of something that
will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea
change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit:
skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite
ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in
the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use
of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems…
fine, actually?

I don't expect any of the solutions being proposed today to, you know, work.
But it definitely feels like we've hit a critical mass such that the changes we
see in information technology during the next decade will look markedly
distinct from the last four. 🤞

© 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.


References:

[1] https://justin.searls.co/
[3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[16] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[17] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[18] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[19] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[20] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[21] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[22] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[23] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[24] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[25] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[26] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[27] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[28] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[29] https://searls.co/
[30] https://github.com/searls
[31] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls
[32] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
[33] https://instagram.com/searls
[34] https://mastodon.social/@searls
[35] https://twitter.com/searls
[36] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
[39] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/
[40] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v36-hedgelord/
[41] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v35-gpt-casserole/
[42] https://justin.searls.co/links/2025-04-14-the-best-programmers/
[43] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-11-11h17m26s/
[44] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/2025-04-19-17h46m37s/
[45] https://justin.searls.co/takes/2025-04-14-10h39m58s/
[46] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-13-20h54m45s/
[47] https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/01/25/canadians-believe-the-country-is-moving-in-the-wrong-direction-nanos/
[48] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/pulse-check-april-2025
[49] https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/ce-qui-preoccupe-les-francais
[50] https://tg24.sky.it/mondo/2025/03/26/unione-europea-sondaggio-eurobarometro
[51] https://www.ipsos.com/es-es/predicciones-para-el-2025
[52] https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/725066-alarmujacy-sondaz-dla-tuska-zle-oceny-sytuacji-w-kraju
[53] https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/noticia/2025/01/01/61percent-dos-brasileiros-acham-que-economia-esta-no-caminho-errado-aponta-datafolha.ghtml
[54] https://www.afrobarometer.org/publication/ad816-south-africans-score-their-government-poorly-on-its-economic-performance/
[55] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AD958-Nigerians-see-grim-economic-picture%5EJ-favour-reinstating-fuel-subsidy-Afrobarometer-19march25.pdf
[56] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-06/What%20Worries%20the%20World%20April2024-ja.pdf
[57] https://www.arabbarometer.org/2025/01/the-authoritarian-impact-does-political-mitigation-really-matter-to-egyptians/
[58] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/AD935-Kenyans-blame-govt-economic-management-for-increasing-cost-of-living-Afrobarometer-9jan25.pdf
[59] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
[60] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#an-elder-millennials-history-of-the-information-age
[61] https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1gck7fx/partially_lost_aol_keyword_content/
[62] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#we-dont-love-to-win-we-hate-to-lose
[63] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)
[64] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
[65] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24343063/tiktok-ban-goodbye-chinese-spy-trend
[66] https://redditinc.com/blog/an-analysis-of-net-neutrality-activism-on-reddit
[67] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/please-ban-data-caps-internet-users-tell-fcc/
[68] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#what-exactly-was-lost
[69] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
[70] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#maybe-this-is-coming-to-a-head
[71] http://web.archive.org/web/20060911084122/http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130
[72] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
[73] https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
[74] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692
[75] https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Wise-Family-Everyday-Putting-Technology/dp/0801018668
[76] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Screen-Time-Balance-Digital/dp/1610396723
[77] https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/0593655036
[78] https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230
[79] https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-will-face-antitrust-trial-over-instagram-whatsapp-acquisitions-2024-11-13/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[80] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-raises-alarm-about-dangerous-concentration-power-among-few-wealthy-people-2025-01-16/
[81] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoGAF
[83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGN
[84] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling
[85] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
[86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
[87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement
[88] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickup_artist
[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Incel-related_violence
[90] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere
[91] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barstool_Sports
[92] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Rogan
[93] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitivism
[94] https://generationfaraday.com/2025/03/17/indiana-takes-action-to-curb-cell-phone-distractions-in-classrooms/
[95] https://thecapitolist.com/senate-bill-proposes-phone-free-school-pilot-to-assess-academic-behavioral-impact/
[96] https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4863487-south-carolina-school-cell-phone-ban/
[97] https://www.katc.com/vermilion-parish/louisiana-bans-cell-phones-in-schools-parents-and-school-official-weigh-in
[98] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/30/texas-social-media-ban-warning-label/
[99] https://apnews.com/article/florida-social-media-ban-desantis-fd07f61e167bd9109a83cd7355b5f164
[100] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/23/utah-social-media-access-law-minors
[101] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgx7GvYSq64
[102] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKu58ue-i1c
[103] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
[104] https://www.fastcompany.com/91229051/matt-gaetz-trump-attorney-general-pick-lina-kahn-big-tech