Francesca Bria and her collaborators analyzed open-source datasets of “over 250 actors, thousands of verified connections, and $45 billion in documented financial flows” to come up with a single-page website visually showing such connections.

J.D. Vance, propelled to the vice-presidency by $15 million from Peter Thiel, became the face of tech-right governance. Behind him, Thiel’s network moved into the machinery of the state.

Under the banner of “patriotic tech”, this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.

Our investigation shows how these firms now operate as state-like powers—writing the rules, winning the tenders, and exporting their model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to democratic governance.

In just about a year, Bluesky has doubled its userbase from 20 million to 40 million. Last year, it benefitted from “the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election as president, and Elon Musk’s continued degradation of X, Bluesky welcomed an exodus of liberals, leftists, journalists, and academic researchers, among other groups.” Writing in his Platformer newsletter, Casey Newton reflects back on the year, surfacing up the challenges Bluesky has tried to solve in reimagining a more “feel-good feed.”

It’s clear that you can build a nicer online environment than X has; in many ways Bluesky already did. What’s less clear is that you can build a Twitter clone that mostly makes people feel good. For as vital and hilarious as Twitter often was, it also accelerated the polarization of our politics and often left users feeling worse than they did before they opened it.

Bluesky’s ingenuity in reimagining feeds and moderation tools has been a boon to social networks, which have happily adopted some of its best ideas. (You can now find “starter packs” on both Threads and Mastodon.) Ultimately, though, it has the same shape and fundamental dynamics as a place that even its most active users called “the Hellsite.”

Bluesky began by rethinking many core assumptions about social networks. To realize its dream of a feel-good feed, though, it will likely need to rethink several more.

I agree with Newton. I’m not sure that in this day and age, building a friendlier, snark- and toxic-free social media platform is possible. Users are too used to hiding behind keyboards. It’s not only the shitposters but also the online mobs who jump on the anything that might seem out of the norm with whatever community a user might be in.

Newton again:

Nate Silver opened the latest front in the Bluesky debate in September with a post about “Blueskyism,” which he defines as “not a political movement so much as a tribal affiliation, a niche set of attitudes and style of discursive norms that almost seem designed in a lab to be as unappealing as possible to anyone outside the clique.” Its hallmarks, he writes, are aggressively punishing dissent, credentialism, and a dedication to the proposition that we are all currently living through the end of the world.

Mobs, woke or otherwise, silence speech and freeze ideas into orthodoxy.

I miss the pre-Elon Musk Twitter. But I can’t help but think it would have become just as polarized and toxic regardless of Musk transforming it into X.

I think the form of text-based social media from the last 20 years is akin to manufacturing tobacco in the mid-1990s. We know it’s harmful. It may be time to slap a big warning label on these platforms and discourage use.

(Truth be told, I’m on the social networks—see the follow icons in the sidebar—but mainly to give visibility into my work here, though largely unsuccessfully.)

Jason Spielman put up a case study on his site for his work on Google’s NotebookLM:

The mental model of NotebookLM was built around the creation journey: starting with inputs, moving through conversation, and ending with outputs. Users bring in their sources (documents, notes, references), then interact with them through chat by asking questions, clarifying, and synthesizing before transforming those insights into structured outputs like notes, study guides, and Audio Overviews.

And yes, he includes a sketch he did on the back of a napkin.

I’ve always wondered about the UX of NotebookLM. It’s not typical and, if I’m being honest, not exactly super intuitive. But after a while, it does make sense. Maybe I’m the outlier though, because Spielman’s grandmother found it easy. In an interview last year on Sequoia Capital’s Training Data, he recalls:

I actually do think part of the explosion of audio overviews was the fact it was a simple one click experience. I was on the phone with my grandma trying to explain her how to use it and it actually didn’t take any explanation. I’m like, “Drop in a source.” And she’s like, “Oh! I see. I click this button to generate it.” And I think that the ease of creation is really actually what catalyzed so much explosion. So I think when we think about adding these knobs [for customization] I think we want to do it in a way that’s very intentional.