Decoder had a great episode where Hank Green interviewed Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, about his experience of building and maintaining the business. It covers a lot of topics like the state of the media nowadays, why creating content for platforms can be a mistake and the importance of distribution channels.

The Verge focused on their website and building a sense of community that attracted people back to the site. There are many media companies that suffered by allowing social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to act as intermediaries between them and their audience. Email and RSS feeds, while not likely to go viral, can provide a more sustainable foundation for businesses to build on.

This does not mean ignoring social media. It builds on the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) concept promoted by IndieWeb.

A story that stood out is one where Patel was traveling with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. They were going through the list of things that Nadella had done during the day. Patel asked how he got so much done. Nadella looked at him and said:

It's your time. You have to be selfish about it.

Satya Nadella according to Nilay Patel (Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future/Decoder)

This reminds me of a quote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Seneca

Maria Popova wrote a piece on The Marginalian on Seneca and the Shortness of Life that expands on his thinking about this subject.

Yanis Varoufakis appeared on the Keen On podcast with Andrew Keen to talk about his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is an interesting conversation but I found an answer that Varoufakis gave to be bleak when thinking of how society is structured around these digital platforms. When he speaks of digital fiefdoms, he means platforms like Amazon and Facebook.

Within the digital fiefdoms of the 21st century, you are not even a subject. You are certainly not a citizen but you're not even a subject. You are only a resource and an asset to be stripped by the owner. In other words, you have even fewer rights under technofeudalism that you would have had under feudalism. At least under feudalism you could petition your lord and be heard occasionally. Today, this is simply impossible. You enter one of these digital fiefdoms and the algorithm, on behalf of the owner, is matching you to individuals whether they are sellers or other users in a manner which maximizes the rent extractive capacity of the owner of the algorithm. And that's it. You are not a citizen. You are not a subject. You are little bit like in The Matrix, the movie, humans who had been turned into batteries or solar panels providing energy and heat to the system. In this case, the system being cloud capital.

What killed capitalism? Yanis Varoufakis' murder mystery about the death of capitalism and our descent into "techno feudalism"

I just finished the second season of Things Fell Apart, a BBC podcast series where Jon Ronson dives into the culture wars. The first season was excellent and the second matched it.

It focuses on the changes in the culture wars brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but moves through the deaths of sex workers in Miami in the 1980s to Plandemic to a family being terrorized while on holiday in Oregon to George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests to the Great Reset. It's just a fascinating listen.

I've always appreciated Ronson's empathy when interviewing people, especially when he disagrees with them. His curiosity helps me to try to understand why they think what they think. He lets them speak but also puts their claims against actual evidence and experts to see if they have any merit.

I liked how he signed off the series.

This has been a series about the culture wars that snowballed during lockdown told by some of the main players. There have also been stories about untruths and their consequences.

Excited delerium is not real and George Floyd wasn't suffering from it.

Judy Mikovits was not jailed by a medical establishment for exposing Big Pharma's deadly secrets and vaccines aren't killing millions.

I don't believe that Brandon, put on trial for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was a white supremacist. Nor that Covid and lockdown were engineered to enslave the people.

The family in the Big Bertha school bus weren't Antifa and the media shouldn't scare people that way nor forego evidence for ideology.

Children are not using cat litter boxes as toilets in American schools and being confronted with uncomfortable ideas is not the same as suffering from PTSD.

Finally, tempting as it always is, documentarians should try not to see the world in terms of heroes and dragons.

We all get things wrong sometimes. No one is perfect. But as this series has shown, when untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. And so it feels more important than ever to try and hold onto the truth, like driftwood in the ocean, because, if not, we might drown.

Things Fell Apart (Season 2, Episode 8: Mikki's Hero's Journey)