Short video: Spend a day with me, a fulltime independent writer of the technology newsletter Citation Needed.
@molly0xfff I'm a fulltime independent writer of the technology newsletter Citation Needed. #adayinmylife #spendthedaywithme #independentjournalism #newsletter ♬ original sound - Molly White
We’re going to keep covering this story because, frankly, it’s the only story that matters right now, and one that not everyone manages to see clearly. The political press may not understand what’s happening (or may be too afraid to say it out loud), but those of us who’ve spent decades studying how technology and power interact? We see it and we can’t look away. So, here’s the bottom line: when WaPo’s opinion pages are being gutted and tech CEOs are seeking pre-approval from authoritarians, the line between “tech coverage” and “saving democracy” has basically disappeared. It’s all the same thing. We’re going to keep doing this work because someone has to. Because understanding how technology and power interact isn’t just an academic exercise anymore — it’s about whether we’ll have an innovation economy left when this is all over.
I will never stop covering the harm done by Trump’s anti-trans orders, but there is already so much of it. I learned in the first Trump term how to separate the personal from the professional, at least when on deadline. But once the draft is done, and edits are in the can, and I’m laying in bed at night trying to fall asleep, it all comes back to me: Do I need to plan for a quick getaway if some Trump lackey decides the loudmouth tranny journalist needs to go? How do I prevent myself from burning out again like I did during the first Trump term? How do I deal with the guilt of not being able to cover everything? These are the thoughts that haunt me when I’m not pouring myself into work or whatever movie or video game I’m playing to distract myself. ... I worry about the future of my community, but there’s no time for that now. There are too many stories to write.
Ed Zitron is worried about the "future that tech's elite wants to build," and thinks you should be too.
Journalists’ flawed math and ignorance of crypto markets turn tokens into fake fortunes.
apparently preventing fraud is “anti-crypto”.
according to this Fortune headline, the SEC going after fraud and deceptive business practices after a company publicly announced they were going to breach a previous agreement with the agency is an “anti-crypto campaign”
This is particularly hilarious given that Fortune has skewered Gary Gensler for failing to go after the FTX, Celsius, and Terra frauds.
Schrödinger’s regulator can’t go after fraud before the company collapses, but if it collapses and the SEC didn’t warn us, they failed.
Remember when mainstream news outlets published a bunch of incredibly irresponsible articles about how rich people were getting off crypto, and then people bought in and got wrecked over the two years of "crypto winter" that followed?
Anyway here's a WSJ headline I just saw: "Young Men Are Making Risky Bets on Crypto and Politics—and Raking It In Right Now" (gift link)
And an excerpt:
I’ve been banging the drum about the need for a federal anti-SLAPP law for a long time now, and one has just been proposed. Call your Congresspeople!
More on the bill from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
people talk about “the media” and “journalists” and they picture the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or cable news.
and sure, “the media” is the Big Five. but it’s also non-profit newsrooms, independent journalists, international and/or non-US publications, worker-owned media collectives, bloggers, local newsrooms, citizen journalists, podcasters, critics, community radio stations, documentary filmmakers, trade publications, freelancers, fact checkers...
if you applaud attacks and legal intimidation against “the media” and “journalists” because you are picturing the former, remember that it is ultimately the smaller fish who will suffer the most from it.
don’t let the failures of some (major) news outlets disillusion you with media as a whole. and especially don’t let those failures desensitize you to attacks on free expression.
we can criticize media failures while also fiercely defending media freedom.
it is scary to see people responding to trump’s baseless lawsuits against the NYT and others with a shrug because of their complaints about those outlets’ coverage of him.
we can oppose lawfare against media institutions and also hold those institutions properly to account for poor coverage.
allowing authoritarians to target media institutions you don’t like only works until they decide to start targeting the ones you do — often ones with far fewer resources than the NYT and its ilk.