Bullet Points: On Bluesky, the Vision Pro Jackpot, and the Quiet Period before the Election

(Plus, a bonus take - Bill Ackman is an insufferable dweeb)

Hi folks,

It’s time for another edition of Dave-shares-a-bunch-of-disconnected-links-and-commentary.

I might have another, more substantive essay this week, which will focus on making fun of Sam Altman. (He wants $7 trillion to build GPU chips, to enable his imaginary artificial general intelligence paradise. People aren’t talking enough about how unserious his vision of the future actually is. We should maybe talk about that some more before someone gives him 7 trillion dollars.)

But, in the meantime…

(I was aiming for a rendering of a robot twiddling its fingers impatiently. This is all I could come up with. It kinda fits my mood right now, so I’m gonna go with it.)

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(1) BlueSky is now open to the public. (My invite codes are worthless!) Kate Knibbs interviewed BlueSky CEO Jay Graber, which is a great place to find more details.

I’m hopeful-but-worried about how this will go. This is the real rubber-meets-the-road moment.

The thing that has long impressed me about BlueSky is the approach they took to community-building. I wrote about this in a May 2023 post, “BlueSky is just Twitter, without the burden of everything ruining Twitter.”:

Bluesky and Mastodon both run on protocols. But Mastodon’s growth strategy has been centered around the inherent value of protocols and federated networks. Bluesky has focused instead on seeding the network with Twitter’s power-users. They’re building a community on top of a protocol, rather than building a community around the principle that protocols are good. And the people joining Bluesky have spent decades participating in online communities. They are extremely online, in the best possible ways. There’s also a huge contingent of trans shitposters, who seem thrilled to be in a Twitter-like space where they can just make their jokes without facing a barrage of death threats for once. And they’re funny as hell.

Of course the hard part comes later. Bluesky still has less than 100,000 users. It has 2 million+ on the waitlist. One of the main ideas behind making Bluesky a protocol is that it will provide better solutions for content moderation at scale. We won’t have any clue how that all works out until Bluesky actually has to face the problems that come with scale. A reasonable retort to all my excitement is “Talk to me at 100 million, not 100,000, Dave.”

I’m optimistic about the underlying potential of replacing Twitter with a protocol like Bluesky though — not because of what a protocol is, but because of what it isn’t. A protocol is not a publicly-held company, with shareholders and vulture capitalists and all the dynamics that produce what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” cycle. One of the main themes that has emerged from my history of the digital future project is that “big money ruins everything.” There is no Big Money in developing the AT protocol. No one is eyeing the down payment on their next megayacht with Bluesky. It’s basically the polar opposite of Web3.

There are, at this point, about 5 million people on Bluesky. A couple million have joined in the past week, since they threw open the doors. As the wheels keep falling off the Twitter-wagon, and as Threads continues to say “politics? News? LOLNAH.” (in an election year!), I expect that number will keep going up. And the larger the population gets, the more the shitty-Twitter-bluecheck-types will come and try to ruin it. That’s a looming problem for them to repeatedly solve.

One of the central lessons of the past decade online is that (1) content moderation is a feature, not a bug, and (2) content moderation is expensive. The larger the platform, the more resources you need to put into content moderation. Bluesky’s business model is “TBD, but definitely not ads.” I would like that to work. But I worry that it’s going to become a problem.

Bluesky was launched on the theory that you can solve the content moderation more cheaply, while also empowering the user base, through decentralization. That is the business case for “protocols, not platforms.” And it seems like the Bluesky devs really believe in that mission.

But Bluesky grew on the theory that “people would just like to have old-Twitter again, goddammit.”

We’re about to find out whether the devs can get a growing user base to buy into their original project, or whether the user base will say “what the hell is all of this? Just provide good content moderation!”

Another longstanding rule of online behavior is that most people will just use the default settings. And they’ll complain or give up if those default settings provide a bad experience.

So we’ll see how this goes. If Bluesky manages to pull off content moderation at scale, but still cheap, then that will be a major step towards building a better internet. I think it’s possible. But I don’t know if it’s likely.

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(2) I’ve been reading reviews of the Apple Vision Pro. There are… a lot of them. My opinion hasn’t really changed from the piece I wrote last June, “On Jackpot Technologies, or what Apple’s new headset is actually *for*.”

There isn’t much of a viable use case for this device, today. Certainly not at a $3,500 price point. But I suspect that, a decade or two from now, we might look back and remember it as being as big of a deal as the first iPhone. And I ask you to read that sentence in a foreboding tone.

Here’s what I wrote last June:

When I look at Apple’s Vision Pro, I see a luxury device for a degraded future. But I also can’t go outside and breath the air right now.

(…) we’re on track for a world where, some weeks, there will be wildfires in Canada and you just can’t go touch grass in Washington, DC. And I suspect that’s a world where those who can afford it will find a headset like the Vision Pro very appealing.

It’s a Jackpot technology. It isn’t for anything in today’s world. It’s purpose-built for a diminished future.

2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. The billionaire-class is responding by inventing entirely new categories of energy-consuming devices, while hand-waving at breakthroughs in cold fusion and hypotheticals about geo-engineering. Oh yeah, and there’s like a 50/50 shot that Donald Trump wins the next election and puts electoral democracy on hiatus. (There’s also a better-than 50/50 chance that the Supreme Court will overturn the doctrine of Chevron deference, which will functionally destroy the administrative state regardless of the election outcome.)

So, <nervous laughter> yeah. I didn’t buy the iPhone 1. It was too expensive and hadn’t really grown into its use-cases yet. I waited a couple years. I think the same might be true for the Apple Vision Pro. But, like, in a very, very bad way?

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(3) Okay… So I’m actually going to offer an electoral-politics take.

I am a political scientist by training and by vocation. I’m not sure if most subscribers know this. The current project of reading-all-the-old-tech-magazines is only loosely tied to my doctorate.

My general take on the 2024 Presidential election is that it hasn’t really started yet.

We know now that the two major candidates will be Joe Biden and Donald Trump. We’ve known that with a fair amount of certainty for over a year though, right?

Three weeks ago, I wrote a brief thread on Bluesky about how frustrating the next six months of electoral journalism was bound to be.

And, sure enough, last week the Hur report came out, and all the mainstream news outlets declared PEOPLE ARE SAYING BIDEN IS TOO OLD IT SURE SEEMS LIKE PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT OH GEEZ I GUESS THIS IS A PROBLEM FOR HIM THAT WE SHOULD COVER RELENTLESSLY (Paul Waldman’s “anatomy of a media freakout” is particularly worth a read).

This is bad. It’s frustrating. It’s obnoxious. It isn’t a great sign. And/but also…

Election Day is still so far away.

There will be hundreds of news cycles between now and then. Hundreds of story beats, gaffes, meaningful events and meaningless intrigue. It is fair to assume that the Hur report will have no measurable impact on the election outcome, because our memories of this moment will be subsumed beneath nine months of more-recent recollections.

(Here’s a relevant thought experiment: How much do you recall about the big political news events of May 2023? We are equidistant today from May 2023 and November 2024.)

The media freakout over Biden’s age might indeed portend bad news about the 2024 election. But it doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know.

• This is going to be a very close election.

• Biden is an imperfect candidate. (So is everyone else, btw.)

• Biden and Trump are not held to an equal standard, either by the media or by the public. (But especially by the media.)

• The stakes of this election are existential in scale. No one should feel comfortable or complacent.

But also…

• The election will occur on November 5th. Nothing we do today will make it take place any sooner or later.

So I think it’s a good idea to calibrate our attention during these early months, when the election hasn’t even really begun in earnest.

American elections are a multi-billion dollar industry. They take way too long. And that does not benefit American democracy.

I visited Australia in May 2016. I was there to give an early book talk, seven months before Analytic Activism was published. And I stopped by the office of GetUp, which is Australia’s equivalent of MoveOn.org. The national election had just been declared. GetUp was on high alert, putting everything into the electoral campaign. There was a countdown clock on one of the walls. They were gearing up for a long, grueling, six-week campaign.

As an American political scientist, this broke me. Six weeks? SIX WEEKS?!? The 2016 election in the U.S. had been in full swing for over a year already. The conventions hadn’t even happened yet. We had been immersed in the campaign forever and it was still six months away.

The United States doesn’t have a more functional democracy than Australia for all this campaigning. We don’t have a better-informed citizenry either. Nor do we have more responsive elected officials. We just… have a campaign industry that consumes our attention cycles forever, mostly focusing on horserace coverage rather than anything of real substance.

…So, yeah, my official-political-communication-professor take on the Hur report coverage is really not great, but not real important either.

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(4) Lol, Bill Ackman is such an insufferable dweeb.

I think it’s worth repeatedly pointing out that the bulk of Ackman’s wealth comes from “an incredible bet Ackman made in February 2020 predicting that the economy was about to be devastated by COVID. The trade turned $27 million into $2.6 billion in a matter of weeks.”

Yes. So incredible. The guy looked at the looming shutdown of the entire economy and said “huh. Seems like that’ll be bad for the stock market.” (FWIW, I also saw that one coming. But instead of shorting the stock market, I stocked up on flour and toilet paper.)

That’s the problem with the billionaire class. They equate wealth with genius, get upset when the rest of the world doesn’t properly genuflect, and then create a big mess on pointless grudges that cause real-world harms.

(Related read: “The Tech Plutocrats Dreaming of a Right-wing San Francisco”)

Y’know what would fix this? A wealth tax. …Hell, it seems like a wealth tax would even fix Ackman’s marriage!

I know we aren’t going to get a wealth tax anytime soon, because we live in an era where we can’t have nice things, and even if we could the Supreme Court would invent a reason to take those nice things away.

But, oh, what a wonderful world that would be…

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That’s everything I wanted to get off my chest. Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in your inbox with another proper essay soon.

-DK