Listen 🎧🎼: Eugene Wei on Dialectic: Ep. 11: Amusing Each other to Death
I had a blast talking to Eugene Wei, one of my favorite writers and thinkers on social media, community, culture, technology, media, and film. You may know him from his iconic pieces like Status as a Service, Invisible asymptotes, and TikTok and the Sorting Hat.
We reflected on how social media continues to shape us and our culture and how algorithmic entertainment creates “frictionless positivity” all while contributing to a sense of frustration, aloneness, and even nihilism among young people. We also chat speculation culture, power laws in media, Eugene’s theory of how television shows have reflected the decline of community and meaning for the last 60 years, what it might mean to foster our humanity, and many other questions that we all need to work to answer.
Available on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and podcast platforms.
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Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino by John Gruber
I’ve been critical of Apple under Tim Cook’s leadership for a long time. Lately things have been getting worse. Let’s be clear—Tim is clearly a world class executive in some ways, and Apple’s run over the last decade has been commercial incredible. I am critical because I care about the company and I think its products, decisions, and impact affect all of us, and will for years to come. Most of these are nitpicks. That said, a couple of areas that have been consistently disappointing: (1) Apple’s disposition toward developers and the iOS platform / App store policies, its frustrating management of a number of would-be platforms (like Siri and iMessage), and (2) its hesitance in bringing truly moonshots to market in the last 15 years (not withstanding the Vision Pro, which was an impressive shot but seems to have been launched without much ongoing enthusiasm).
Longtime Apple writer, reviewer, critic, and frankly, supporter John Gruber wrote a piece that many of you probably already saw last week. It’s worth a read. It’s the most negative I’ve seen John on anything about Apple that I can remember, and he writes a scathing critique of how the company has handled “Apple Intelligence” and particularly how they message its capabilities. Apple has wildly overpromised and underdelivered:
It’s easy to imagine someone in the executive ranks arguing “We need to show something that only Apple can do.” But it turns out they announced something Apple couldn’t do. And now they look so out of their depth, so in over their heads, that not only are they years behind the state-of-the-art in AI, but they don’t even know what they can ship or when. Their headline features from nine months ago not only haven’t shipped but still haven’t even been demonstrated, which I, for one, now presume means they can’t be demonstrated because they don’t work.
Look: its more likely than not that Apple will be fine. I continue to buy their products, and you likely do too. They’ve got a seemingly infinite balance sheet. And most importantly, they’re more structurally advantaged for the AI future than almost anyone else, thanks to their advantage in chip architecture, manufacturing, and supply chains.
But it’s hard to make sense of how advantaged Apple is structurally and yet how incompetent they seem strategically with respect building toward being the platform for every developer to provide on-device intelligence in their products and services. Maybe they will be fine in a couple of years and my critiques will look impatient and silly. But as Gruber so keenly notes, lost credibility is a tremendously difficult thing to rebuild:
Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Siri and Apple Intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn’t yet occurred or doesn’t happen soon, then, I fear, that’s all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.
How to Make Something Great by Ryo Lu
H/t to Blake for sharing this great little essay. It is full of advice we’ve all heard before, but articulated succinctly and powerfully.
There’s a quiet, almost mystical art to starting with something so unrefined that you’re unsure if it’s mud or marble, and patiently revealing its shape until others recognize its beauty. In the end, they’ll say: “Of course! It’s so obvious.”
The gift of great creation is that, when done right, it looks both astonishingly fresh and deceptively familiar.
Creation is a beautiful thing. Mysterious, yet eventually obvious.
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