Love this interview with Tony Stubblebine, CEO at Medium, on pivoting away from the attention economy, ending platform monopolies with the Fediverse, and complementing the rest of the internet through human curation.

The Google antitrust ruling 🎁🔗 will reshape digital advertising. But what would breaking apart Google's ad tech business actually mean for publishers?

An intriguing perspective from ad ops executive whether you find yourself nodding along or not:

What happens next? We rebuild. But the rebuild is going to be messy. The biggest risk isn’t just lost revenue; it’s increased costs, increased complexity and lost efficiency. Higher barriers for new publishers. That’s the part that will hit the hardest.

[…]
Big publishers will be fine. They have the scale. They have the leverage. They already work directly with DSPs and have tech stacks with built-in flexibility.

But small pubs? The ones serving real communities, telling niche stories, entertaining passionate audiences? They’re the ones who might get left behind.

That he framed by first positioning Google as our digital Rome:

Google didn’t invent the internet, just like Rome didn’t invent roads. But they built a system that connected everything. They made it easier for creators, storytellers, entertainers, journalists and niche publishers to enter the space and survive—sometimes even thrive—on their own terms.

Here's a belated World Book Day post 📚🤓

I’m currently swiping through The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

Recently finished Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. It’s a short and excellent read. Highly recommend getting a copy from Verso Books.

Book samples in my queue:

• Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know
• Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech

Derek Thompson’s podcast episode, The End of Reading, featured conversations with a journalist and an academic about our relationship with reading.

🎧 Also on Apple Podcasts | The Ringer

Interviewee #1: Rose Horowitch

Wrote a piece for The Atlantic about the alarming decline of reading among elite college students.

Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Interviewee #2: Nat Malkus

Penned a report interpreting American student achievement tests, documenting a downtrend that started around 2013. He notes that "gallons of ink are spilled" on the many proposed culprits. The internet. Violent video games. Parents, teachers, policymakers. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. Lack of ambition, perfectionism, laziness. It’s a long list.

I've always associated equanimity with stillness. This essay reframes it entirely. It's a mobility of the mind, says the author, not stillness.

Equanimity is best recognised by its inherent mobility of perspective-taking. As a mode of perception, equanimity is on the move, looking over things (internal and external) with hovering attention. Equanimity is not about serenely settling. It is not averse to the presence of judgments, just to their rigidifying. It ranges over whatever may appear, fluidly noticing, for example, both the disturbing and the tranquil with the awareness that one depends on the other for its meaning.

Why does it matter? Because, in our polarized landscape, anything that helps dissolve hardened dogmatism is a gift.

I appreciate this "mobility of the mind" perspective even more after reading Paul Ford’s piece, Accepting All the AI Opinions. We're missing empathy in the AI debate. We're too quick to pick sides when we should be trying to imagine other people's corners:

“AI” is not just one big thing, but a set of intense, wild, overlapping reactions to a technology that humans created. As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to realize that I, too, can only see my little corner of the weird new world.

John Herrman, New York Magazine:

AGI, like G-less AI, automation, and even mechanization, are indeed stories, but they’re also sequels: This time, the technology isn’t just inconceivable and inevitable; it’s anthropomorphized and given a will of its own. If mechanization conjured images of factories, automation conjured images of factories without people, and AI conjured humanoid machine assistants, AGI and ASI conjure an economy, and a wider world, in which humans are either made limitlessly rich and powerful by superhuman machines or dominated and subjugated (or perhaps even killed) by them (Industrial Revolution 3: The Robot Awakens). In imagining centralized machine authoritarianism in the future, AGI creates a sort of authoritarian, exclusionary discourse now. A narrative emerges in which the decisions of AGI stakeholders — AI firms, their investors, and maybe a few government leaders — are all that matter. The rest of us inhabit the roles of subject and audience but not author.

Patch is a hyperlocal publisher with a grand vision: be everywhere. Its newsletters have reached over a thousand US communities and, thanks to AI, that number ballooned to 30,000 in just a few months.

St. John, who has been leading Patch for over a decade, concedes that the AI newsletters don't deliver as robust of a news experience as its human-curated products, but they do keep more people informed.

Is getting caught up enough? Not quite.

Nieman Lab covered what came before the big AI newsletters experiment—human curators. In it, a former Patch project manager noted:

I would agree that there is information there. And [AI newsletters] still bring local news in. But to me, it’s missing a bit of what makes local news local.