2026 showed up this week. So before another calendar year speeds past this newsletter, I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves in this latter half of a truly chaotic decade. I anticipate this is going to be a chaotic year for many of us — so I just wanted to wish you all well and share a bit about where my head is at.

First, in case you haven’t been watching me at my day job, I put a list up in December with ecommerce trends I expect to see shaping how things are getting bought and sold online in the year ahead. That was for an online retail industry audience, but it touched on a few points that are relevant more widely.

Specifically, one thing that has my attention in the media world is the so-called Google Zero idea that organic search traffic will diminish to the point of being negligible. That would be driven by search engine users seeing AI-generated responses that don’t require clickthroughs to original sources, all but rendering traditional search results irrelevant.

I’m a skeptic of this maximalist take on where things are trending. Yet, at the same time, I do see truth in the direction with which this vision aligns. News media outlets, much like online retailers, have long depended on organic search as a major channel for discovery. Many companies in both arenas have reported difficulties of late, with rising opportunities in traffic from AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Optimizing content for these AI tools is not necessarily as straightforward as it is for Google Search and Bing. However, some best practices do seem to carry over, possibly because ranking well in traditional search may boost visibility in AI platform citations.

Personally, after living through the highs and lows of Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms as web traffic sources in the 2010s, my bias is toward dispersing dependency and avoiding over-reliance on any single channel or platform where algorithms can change or toll booths can be implemented overnight.

That said, I’ve found the new opportunities in traffic from AI platforms to be an interesting challenge — and one where I’ve seen some fun results while keeping traditional search visibility and social video channels alive.

If you’re dealing with any of the same challenges, I’d love to chat.

In the meantime, back to the original spirit of Sidebars. Here are some quick recommendations.

Side reads and watches

• “Pluribus” on Apple TV, which is one of those shows that keeps drilling deeper each episode and Sean T. Collins has been reviewing the Dickens out of on Decider

• “Make It Ours,” the Virgil Abloh biography by Robin Givhan, chronicling the late polymath’s journey out of Illinois, into the fashion world, and beyond

Side shoutouts and links to friends

• “The Forgotten Five,” a gorgeous new character-driven comic that my indefatigable friend Alex Segura has been serializing in collaboration with his fellow writer Sara Century and artists Pat Kennedy and Dean Kotz

• Pop Heist, just one of the true pleasures of pop culture reading online today, thanks in no small part to the interviews, articles and reviews some of my former colleagues have been contributing over there

• Justin Aclin’s newsletter, where my talented and thoughtful pal has been interviewing other creatives about how they do what they do and plugging in his own observations

I’ll keep this one short, but before anything else I just want to wish each of you a healthy, safe, and fruitful New Year ahead. 2023 was a tough one for a lot of people I know.

On a global level, the violent loss of life and suffering in Ukraine, Israel, and Gaza remains horrific and sobering. It’s hard to wish for too many things at this point in 2024 above peaceful and sustainable resolutions in those conflicts.

Meanwhile, my LinkedIn feed has had a steady flow of layoff announcements. Watching friends go through multiple layoffs within the past two years (in some cases within one year) has been difficult, and if you’re one of them, just know that you’re not alone. It’s a rough environment, even with national unemployment numbers as low as they are broadly. Also: Reach out on LinkedIn if I can ever be of any help. I’ve seen brilliant, seasoned professionals take three, six, and even nine months or more to find their next stops in various career paths — especially within media and marketing.

And speaking of new roles, you may already know that I joined the team at Digital Commerce 360 in November. It’s an exciting move for me, because it’s in B2B media, focusing on retail and ecommerce, which is an area I’ve covered before and is going through its own historic shifts. I’ll be working with a great team of journalists, data analysts, and researchers on some daily reporting, deeper industry reports, and other new projects I can’t wait to tackle in 2024.

You’ll even see my byline showing up each week on stories like this one about Zulily shutting down and recent holiday online shopping trends.

Like countless other areas of life and business in the world, retail and ecommerce are in the middle of a large-scale recalibration in the wake of COVID-, supply chain-, and inflation-related volatility. At my most optimistic, I see 2024 as a year where new norms have the potential to stabilize — or at least revert closer to a mean. There are so many unknowns in the geopolitical and national landscapes right now, however, making it hard to anticipate what the next shock waves will involve.

Here’s hoping things trend in a positive and improving direction for all of us.

Side work

• Sarah’s and my final episode of "The AI Artifacts Podcast" for the year, a 2024 predictions episode

• Our eighth episode, where we got into recent media/AI company deal talks and renewed controversy around facial recognition

Side reads and watches

• "The Church on Ruby Road," which was the Doctor Who Christmas special this year featuring Ncuti Gatwa, who looks like he’ll be an electric new caretaker of the show’s title role

• "The Age of AI" by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, a book that is extremely strong on historical context, even if the rapid public advancements of 2022 leave some parts (published in 2021) already feeling dated

Side shoutouts and links to friends

• Sean T. Collins, whose year-end roundup of top TV shows of 2023 at Decider is required reading

• Sean Dove, whose Brobots books with J. Torres are favorites with my 7-year-old and is getting a new "Brobots: The Complete Collection" edition published in January

• Duane Swierczynski, whose new novel "California Bear" is coming out in January and has both my Californian attention and interest

"The AI Artifacts Podcast" incubated for months before my co-host Sarah Luger and I released the first episode in October. As far back as July, we knew we wanted to do a series that cut through the noise of AI hype that’s been unavoidable for the past year. We wanted to spotlight where real value can be delivered while also remaining sober about the choices and real issues that mass adoption raises.

Three episodes in, it has been a great learning experience behind the mic. If you haven’t heard them yet, the first installments have included:

• Episode 1: How will 2023 be remembered for AI?

• Episode 2: Guest Thomas Huitric talks resources required to deploy AI at scale

• Episode 3: Guests David Hojah and Erin Janklow of Parrots, AI for patients with cognitive issues

The mix of commentary there is no accident. We wanted to include technical expertise, startup founders, and our perspective to show what we do know, what we don’t know, and that nothing about the rise of AI, machine learning, and LLMs in 2023 has been happening in a vacuum.

As we were planning this podcast’s first season, I bounced ideas off plenty of friends and former colleagues. One piece of feedback I laughed off more than once addressed how difficult it is to monetize and generate revenue off of podcasting. Fortunately, Sarah and I aren’t in this for the money. "AI Artifacts" is as much for us to learn from as it is for making the best episodes we can put together for the audience. (Though if that opportunity presents itself we obviously won’t be disappointed.)

So far, my favorite moments have included all of these highlights:

• Ep. 1: Talking to Sarah about novelty vs. real utility among AI products

• Eps. 1-3: Going 1-2 against Sarah in "Two truths and l'AI," where I dig up real news stories and ask her to spot a fake one that’s generated by ChatGPT

• Ep. 2: Where Thomas Huitric discussed the water resources needed for training LLMs, but we also raised the issue of how much data will be required to train the next version of ChatGPT

• Ep. 2: Speculating about what will come next after The Beatles released their AI-powered track "Then And Now"

• Ep. 3: Exploring the very real need among ALS patients and caregivers that Parrots is working to solve with AI

• Ep. 3: Digging into the responsibility that comes with user data, particularly in medical contexts like the ones that Parrots operates in

If they weren’t conversations that didn’t interest us first, they wouldn’t be part of the show. We’ve got two great guests lined up for the next two episodes and beyond, who will dig into topics including regulatory environments, creative use cases for AI tools, and more.

Let me know what you think any time, and please check us out and rate us as you’re able on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your platform of choice.

Side reads and watches

• The Atlantic’s Peter Thiel profile, wherein he is quoted as saying "Why can’t we be elves?"

• Director Martin Scorsese’s "Killers of the Flower Moon" (2023), which was the tightest suspenseful three-and-a-half-hours I have spent in a theater in years

• Season 2’s finale for "Loki," which I’m still processing but didn’t hit all the notes I hoped it would

• That trailer for the new season of "Fargo" with Jon Hamm

Side shoutouts and links to friends

• Roger Riddell, whose Chicago-based "Cult House" podcast has been blowing up with his musician and artist interviews, especially his 39th episode with metal frontman Wednesday 13

• Alex Segura, who shared some new Dick Tracy (I love some Dick Tracy) art from the new comic he’s working on

• Taylor Host, who has been doing a new series of cancer patient talks and perspectives on YouTube for the Jackie Banana Foundation

The best performer scored a 54%.

Specifically, the team behind the new index looked at foundation models, which are large AI language models intended to be used for a wide variety of use cases. In evaluating each of them, the FMTI authors asked questions such as which resources were used to build each model, how human labor has been used, and what types of feedback mechanisms are in place.

Coming in at No. 1 on the list of models was Meta’s Llama 2, which outperformed everyone else but still scored only 54%.

Coming in next were BLOOMZ with 53% and GPT-4 with 48%.

The motivation behind publishing the index seems simple. "As the impact of this technology is going up, the transparency is going down," Rishi Bommasani, who contributed to the project, told The New York Times.

In the wake of social media’s rise and increasing public debate over how user data should be used and how permissions should be properly obtained, this group wants to track how norms and practices are emerging in AI.

"Hopefully once this is out, some people inside these companies will go hey, we really should be doing this because all of our competitors are — I hope this will become a basic thing that people come to expect," Bommasani explained to VentureBeat.

Side work

• I’ve got a new collaborative AI-related project coming myself: Check out aiartifacts.net to be the first to hear the podcast later this month.

• Over on the blog, I got into why Microsoft spent so much time and money to finally close the Activision Blizzard acquisition.

Side reads and watches

• Season 2 of "Loki," which I’m admittedly a little cool to so far, but am enjoying for the Ke Huy Quan scenes

• Walter Isaacson’s "Elon Musk," the biography I wasn’t sure I really needed but do appreciate for the writing and vivid scene-setting that Isaacson dependably renders (as you would expect from him)

Side shoutouts and links to friends

• Alex Segura, my old pal and a prolific author (in crime fiction and comics) who has an outstanding Substack newsletter to subscribe to if you love either of those topics

• Kiel Phegley, who has a new video trailer out for his hockey graphic novel "Strikers," which I mentioned here previously

• Melinda Taub, who in addition to being hilarious professionally and personally has a new book, "The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennet, Witch," reimagining Jane Austen’s "Pride and Prejudice"

Here are my big takeaways.

First, congrats to BioticsAI, which took home the show’s top honors. It’s a startup that uses AI to identify fetus malformations, which is an incredibly high-stakes problem to tackle — and certainly one of the most noble pursuits on display at the show.

AI hype isn’t new to tech, but it is having a moment, thanks in part to web3 and blockchain losing some luster, but also because OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta (among others) have kicked off a public arms race to get the large language models and related services they offer into everyone’s workflows and tech stacks.

It has also illuminated dollar signs in venture capitalists’ eyes, setting the stage for this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt show floor, where having an explicit “AI” section almost seemed redundant, given that booths throughout the rest of the floor had found ways to work AI into their names, signage, and marketing claims. Many of these were compelling—don’t get me wrong—but there were clearly some entities out there whose AI claims were looser and less fully baked than others, if you catch my drift.

That said, watching pitches on the Battlefield stage is a treat. Disrupt hosted founders from around the world, and it’s inspiring to see these people make the trip to put their work in front of thousands of people and try to make their case to the investors or potential partners and customers who may be watching.

I didn’t make it to most of the higher-ticket talks, which included Shaquille O’Neal or Kevin Systrom (though I really do enjoy his latest news app). I was mainly there to meet some old friends and get to know a few new faces, which I’ll be able to share more about later.

(Soft announcement: I registered a new domain on Friday, and there’s nothing there yet, but there will be very soon, including a project I’ve been collaborating on with someone a few subscribers to this newsletter may know.)

No, I’m not taking Maven Ventures Founding Managing Partner Jim Scheinman’s (shown below) advice from this talk on how to found a billion-dollar AI startup. (Spoiler: The secrets are having a good management team, big vision, and large total addressable market.) It is going to be fun, though, and it will have quite a bit to do with AI.

Stay tuned.

Side work

• Assessment on my blog about why Instacart and Klaviyo’s presumed unicorn IPOs were such a big deal for tech right now

Side reads and watches

• The first chapters of "The Song of the Cell" by Siddhartha Mukherjee, recommended to me by an old friend this week and living up to his pitch

• The amazing work that same friend has been doing with the Jackie Banana Foundation, which was set up to help cancer patients traveling to get treatment

• That last episode of "Ahsoka," which I won’t spoil but did appreciate for the new contributions to Star Wars lore

On the blog last week, I reviewed some numbers that indicate AI is getting thirsty. Microsoft got the spotlight, mainly because of its work with OpenAI and the data available in the company’s most recent environmental report, showing its rising year-over-year water consumption, which is happening even as the company targets 2030 to become net water positive with its operations.

Ultimately, the report showed that Microsoft had a 34% year-over-year increase in water consumption in its 2022 fiscal year, using nearly 1.7 billion gallons.

An Associated Press article got into the situation on the ground in Iowa, where Microsoft facilities were used to do the training that made ChatGPT possible. In July 2022, just before OpenAI finished training GPT-4, Microsoft’s Iowa data centers reportedly took in 11.5 million gallons of water.

These demands shouldn’t go unnoticed, especially as Alphabet and other companies are racing to provide competing AI products. They may not be as public as Microsoft with their water consumption rates. Still, researchers believe users’ questions to large language models may have a cost that is measurable by the milliliter.

Side work

• It’s only recreational this week, but I’ve cracked the 80 posts on the way to 100 in the story on "Diesel Springs Science Fair." New players have entered the game.

Side reads and watches

• My long-time friend and former colleague Kiel Phegley has a new hockey/"Mighty Ducks"-style graphic novel called "Strikers" coming out, and if you’re on Goodreads, there’s a giveaway you can enter to win a free copy.

• How wild are these purported alien remains being shown in Mexico?

• I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched that season-ending Aaron Rodgers injury in his first game for the Jets.

Is Gen Z going to end pop culture once and for all?

Pop culture writing gave me my professional start in the world, so reading recently and over the past year that most 18–25-year-olds don’t believe there’s "such thing as 'mainstream' pop culture" sets the question-mark thought bubbles off in my head. I got into it in a blog entry last week about what might be really going on — as well as what marketers, news publishers, and entertainment companies should make of these assessments.

In short, Gen Z didn’t invent being a hipster about gravitating toward movies, music, and authors that their friends and family didn’t like first. However, they are living at a moment in history when COVID-era isolation, a bounty of user-generated content, and a proliferation of quasi-private/off-main-feed communities all facilitated the fragmentation of their attention, as well as the niche group identities with which they can align themselves.

At the same time, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about the loss of mainstream pop culture as a whole. It may not be experienced by the same readily accessible critical masses of people who used to view cable TV channels in the 1980s and 1990s. The Mickey Mouses, Marios, and Pikachus of the world are still marketable and present, though. And Gen Zers are still borrowing nostalgia from previous generations in the form of faux vintage T-shirts just like their parents did.

I don’t know about you, but to me that’s still participating in mainstream pop culture.

By all means, read the rest of the original post and let me know if you disagree. I’m fully aware that I’m a Xennial looking out of my own demographic window to make assumptions about the youngs in this case. (But that also doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong.)

Side work

• Believe it or not, seeing all three hours of "Oppenheimer" this week was actually work (hope to give you more about that at a later date).

Recent side reads and watches

• "Oppenheimer," which is easily among my favorite Christopher Nolan films, thanks heavily to the world-class performances and framing of the material

• Elise Hu’s "Flawless," which covers the topics of beauty and surgery in Korea through a few lenses that bring a great deal of researched historical insight, but really hit the strongest notes with me in its exploration of the tech gaze and how notions of self-optimization in social media contexts should be understood

• "Ahsoka," the new Star Wars show that may be a little slow-going at times through no fault of the actors who carry it, though it has deployed some nice bridges to the franchise’s continuity between "Clone Wars" and "Rebels" and where things are at now

Charles Martinet, the voice of Mario, to end new contributions

In the early days of Nintendo’s Mario games, after they debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the main character’s voice wasn’t necessarily part of the experience. Though voice clips entered games in limited ways on the Super Nintendo, it wasn’t until the Nintendo 64 that console players heard the voice they now associate with the iconic red-and-blue-outfitted plumber. (I’m consciously distinguishing from PC games such as "Mario Teaches Typing" and "Mario’s Game Gallery" here.)

That voice in "Super Mario 64" came from actor Charles Martinet, who will end his three-decade run recording new Mario-isms, according to an announcement on Monday from Nintendo.

"Charles is moving into the brand-new role of Mario Ambassador," Nintendo indicated in a social media post. “With this transition, he will be stepping back from recording character voices for our games, but he'll continue to travel the world sharing the joy of Mario and interacting with you all!”

Martinet’s respect from Nintendo — and fans — has been earned many times over, as evidenced by the franchise’s success during his tenure. Of the 16 top-selling Mario games globally Martinet has been a part of 12 of them, including eight of the top 10.

Yes, there have been other voices along the way. Lou Albano (RIP) from "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" comes to mind. Chris Pratt, of course, stepped on for better or worse in 2023’s "The Super Mario Bros. Movie." In the realm of games, however, Martinet has been the anchor for Mario lines across the Kart, Party, and traditional titles.

His departure leaves open questions about how Nintendo will handle Mario going forward, though. Chiefly, will they cast a new mainstay, or will they leverage what they’ve got to keep Martinet’s sound intact with new scripts using AI? Voice actors doing interactive/game work aren’t subject to the same SAG/AFTRA contract that is currently at the heart of the Hollywood actors’ strike. Martinet estimated in 2021 that he had recorded more than 5 million audio files for Nintendo, which sounds like a repository that is plenty large enough for the company to attempt such a thing.

Regardless, Martinet has already made his mark on Mario for multiple generations of gamers. His continued presence as an ambassador will undoubtedly be appreciated.

Side work

• On my blog: What District Judge Beryl A. Howell’s new decision means for copyrighting AI-created works

• So close to dropping a big link here any day now on something I can’t talk about yet

Recent side reads and watches

• "Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence" being exhibited at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, one of the heaviest and most unforgettable explorations of art, history, and life I have ever seen in a museum (on display for another two months)

• "Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma" by Claire Dederer, who avoids being predictable and fairly deals with necessarily uncomfortable questions about audiences, works judged separately from their authors, and artwork as commercial products

• "X-Men: Hellfire Gala 2023” No. 1, which bookended the most-read era for me across X-titles in at least a decade with a greater density of large-scale changes-per-page-turn than I can recall encountering in a single issue

How book publishers expect to use AI

If you haven’t read the diagnostic in The New York Times from this past week about AI’s impact on the book industry, dive in. And you may be surprised when you see the key takeways. What interested me most was the idea that book content really isn’t the problem publishers want AI to solve; they seem to care a great deal more about audience reach and marketing.

Just look at this quote:

"The challenge for publishers is not generating more content, it’s solving the discovery problem," said Madeline McIntosh, the former chief executive of Penguin Random House U.S. "That’s really where the gold mine is."

The article gets into a handful of applications: book design, writing stories, and related work. But publishers are understandably hesitant about some of these use cases. First, they see a vested interest in keeping their libraries out of the datasets used to train large language models. Sarah Silverman clearly holds this view — and is suing OpenAI over ChatGPT’s knowledge of her book “The Bedwetter.” Publishers and authors also care about another key detail: Text composed by machines cannot be copyrighted (and even machine-assisted text will have to journey through the court system to show how the law will be applied).

All of this is happening on the heels of a resurgence in print book sales. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a spike that finally lifted the volume of units purchased past their peak in 2008, with 843 million books sold in 2021 and 789 million sold in 2022.

Bookstores didn’t exactly see a parallel return of good fortune. If fact, they took a deep hit during lockdowns. But 2021 and 2022 at least looked better than 2020.

All of this got me thinking about another article in my feed from the past week, though: "What If Authors Covered Books Like Musicians Cover Songs?" by Alice Nuttall on Book Riot.

As someone who loves seeing different directors take on the same plays — and whose first Kindle purchase was "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" by Seth Grahame-Smith — I thought Nuttall brought up some great points.

Anyway, because AI was already on my mind, I asked ChatGPT (v3.5) to show "the first scene of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' as it would appear if it were the first chapter of a book written in the style of Hunter S. Thompson." Here’s what it produced:

Chapter 1: The Madness of Elsinore

The night descended upon Elsinore like a deranged specter, suffocating the air with the stench of intrigue and the promise of chaos. The castle's stone walls whispered secrets of treachery, and the moon above seemed to glimmer with an unholy glow, casting eerie shadows upon the Danish kingdom.

In this eerie landscape of madness, a lone figure stood amidst the swirling fog, his name: Hamlet. A troubled soul, he was the prince of Elsinore, but tonight, he was more like a raving spirit, plagued by questions and dark thoughts that gnawed at his sanity like a rabid beast.

Hamlet's mind was a twisted carousel of emotions, each one more vivid and intense than the last. He had just buried his father, the former king, whose death still clung to the air like a grim omen. But it wasn't just grief that tormented him; it was suspicion – a gnawing, relentless paranoia that twisted reality and blurred the lines between friend and foe.

As he paced restlessly through the castle's shadowy corridors, the prince encountered his old pals, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But tonight, even their familiar faces seemed strange and deceitful, like chameleons hiding in plain sight.

"Hamlet, old buddy! Why the long face? Let's hit the town and drown our sorrows!" exclaimed Rosencrantz, a devilish grin plastered on his face.

Guildenstern chimed in, "Aye, 'tis the cure for all that ails thee, my friend!"

But Hamlet's eyes narrowed, and he peered through their façade. He knew something was amiss, like a gut feeling screaming in his ear, warning him to beware.

"Enough of your drivel! What brings you to Elsinore? Are you messengers of fate, or harbingers of doom?" Hamlet snapped, his words a venomous lash.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exchanged glances, their faces revealing nothing but feigned innocence. "We come at the behest of the king, my lord," said Rosencrantz, a hint of unease betraying his tone.

"The king, you say? The same king whose hands are stained with my father's blood?" Hamlet's voice trembled with a mix of sorrow and fury.

Rosencrantz stammered, "We serve the king, but we are your friends too, Hamlet. We mean no harm."

Hamlet's mind was a tempest, a whirlwind of suspicion and uncertainty. His heart told him not to trust them, for everyone had a hidden agenda in this twisted realm.

"Friends, you say? In Elsinore, friends are but vipers in disguise!" he spat, his eyes blazing with intensity.

As the tension escalated, a ghostly apparition appeared on the castle's ramparts. The figure of the late king, shrouded in ethereal mist, beckoned to Hamlet with a haunting urgency.

"Hamlet, my son," the ghostly voice echoed through the night. "Avenge my murder, expose the treachery that poisons Elsinore!"

Hamlet's mind reeled, torn between madness and truth. Was this a mere hallucination born of his tortured psyche, or was it the bitter reality of a kingdom entangled in a web of lies?

In this kaleidoscope of deceit and desperation, Hamlet found himself at the crossroads of sanity and madness. A choice lay before him: to succumb to the darkness that threatened to consume him or to embark on a journey of vindication and chaos that would shake Elsinore to its very core.

And so, with the moon as his witness and the specter of his father as his guide, Hamlet embraced the insanity of Elsinore, plunging headfirst into the heart of darkness, where truth and deception intertwined like lovers in a deadly dance.

Buckle up, dear readers, for the tale of Hamlet, the Prince of Madness, was about to unfold in this twisted kingdom of shadows and intrigue, where the line between reality and delusion blurred, and the scent of revenge hung thick in the air like a drug-induced haze.

I’ll let you judge that for yourself. The paranoid tone rang true, but there’s no substitute for the real thing. Personally, I’d rather do another read-through of Ryan North’s "To Be or Not to Be."

Side work

• Watch for an update here next time with a link to something I’m excited to finally share (as soon as I secure the domain).

• Here are No. 42 and No. 43 my “Diesel Springs Science Fair” series, which is almost to the halfway point on its way to the 100-post goal.

Recent side reads and watches

• "Foundation’s Edge" Isaac Asimov’s first follow-up to the main three Foundation novels, thick on dated gender dynamics and familiar plot devices but strong on the world-building, big idea exploration, and suspense that bolstered the first three books

• "Principles: Life and Work" Ray Dalio’s telling of how he developed and committed to bedrock rules that helped him build Bridgewater Associates, an insightful read even if you don’t plan to start a hedge fund.

• "Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor" No. 1, one of the best openings to a Superman story I’ve read in a long time, thanks to Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch

Are we in a social media centrifuge?

Let me be upfront that I’m not writing this to rail against X (now Twitter). What’s been most interesting to me on that platform in 2023 has been how similar its path has been to Facebook (pre-Meta) about a decade ago when the company began tightening up organic reach in newsfeeds to incentivize paid view boosts. Online media has a rich history of publishers growing too dependent on single platforms for reach, be it in Google results, on Facebook, or on LinkedIn. Organic reach is a beautiful thing, but it’s always going to be at the mercy of the algorithms and business goals of the platforms where it occurs.

And you know what? At the beginning of 2023, Facebook still had more users than any of its competitors, with Meta platforms occupying three more of the top 10 slots globally.

In the intervening months, 2023 has seen something of a super bloom in new social networks. I don’t know if anyone reading this remembers what it was like in 2011 and 2012 choosing which share buttons to bake into your site. Google+ was still emergent, and sites including Digg, Reddit, Path, Pinterest, and others piled up pretty quickly to create absurdly large bouquets of icons at the bottoms of blog posts if you wanted to maximize user options. This year we have a host of new and emboldened contenders:

• Bluesky: Good for some fun conversations and commentary (from many users who first made it big on Twitter), though it’s also contending with racist content and moderation challenges

• Threads: High-volume all-around blend of info and familiar faces, with a heavy extra dose of Instagram influencers

• Post: Compelling premise, though Artifact is doing a lot of it with a more robust experience

• Hive: Seemed to have some momentum early on as a visual/meme-heavy feed

• Mastodon: Which isn’t new but gained waves of users in the past year

Personally, I’m actively using at least two of them, with accounts in various states of affairs on each. That’s mainly at the expense of my time on the app formerly known as Twitter, which for the past decade has been most valuable to me as a news discovery and source engagement tool.

Meta’s newest entrant, Threads, roped in 100 million users this summer. However, stickiness may not be there yet, judging from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments indicating that his company is still struggling to retain at least half of them. If his team figures that out, though, they could be on the way to claiming five of the top 10 slots above — not just four. In that scenario, Meta would just be capturing one more segment of social media users who have been spending time outside of its ecosystem.

For that ascendant Threads future to happen, though, it’s going to need to evolve, perhaps through desktop experience and/or becoming a destination for breaking news on par with what Twitter achieved.

An alternative may be that we see an increasingly fractured and diversified set of platforms, with news discovery tools like Artifact, Apple News, and perhaps Post growing in one direction, with Bluesky, Threads, and even X splitting up social users. And it’s worth noting — as seen in the chart from the beginning — that Twitter was always a relatively niche platform (albeit one that its current owner believes can grow into an all-purpose super app.

But that’s a whole other conversation.

Side work

• “What we know 3 years into the great remote work experiment,” a follow-up to a Medium post I wrote back in 2020

• “Diesel Springs Science Fair,” a synthetic look at non-existent science projects from some steampunk teens in a fictional Ozarks town

• Scenes from the Mist Trail at Yosemite National Park, which I drove into at the crack of dawn last Friday

Recent side reads and watches

• “Asteroid City,” Wes Anderson’s latest film, which isn’t my favorite Wes Anderson film (or even in my top five), but it was filled with brilliant performances and extremely fun set design

• “Fall of X” No. 1, which bookends an extraordinary (if in some cases predictably iterative) era of Krakoa-island utopia for the X-Men comics

• “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck,” which I didn’t walk away from with a lot of actionable life-changing insights but was entertained by appreciated for the perspective on relationships

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