is well-known as the voice of the financial establishment.

I wouldn’t even say that the WSJ is specifically the voice of the “financial elite” but I think it has been for a while the “respectable” organ of the republican media empire. When the Hunter Biden laptop story ‘broke’, the first place the Republicans attempted to run it was in the WSJ, as they do with their other most important stories, letters, and opinions.

I think something is changing at the WSJ, and Alito pre-buttal is just the most public sign that the paper is beginning to drop pretenses and give into being a more active and explicitly partisan paper, probably because the legitimacy of other conservative news outfits has been bled dry, and going into the election, the party is more willing to sacrifice more sacred cows to shore up weaknesses.

Just be aware of the publication date for those wandering in:

4 November 2020

It’s not surprising. A lot of these CEOs run around in cliques. They have forums, news letters, Chatrooms, and social events. When Silicon Valley Bank went down, the CEO of the company I work for was giving us news from other CEOs he was talking to from a shared Chatroom they set up, basically a discord for CEOs.

The other point is that many CEOs are slaves to trend and have a deep fear of missing out.

In a way, they’re organized, and combined with the above, that’s part of why when one big company hops everyone leaps behind them as if they’re moving as one (it’s all a dick-measuring Highschool clique contest though, which is why I don’t use the word conspiracy). I would not be surprised if Huffman and Musk both repeated their rhetoric to an adoring crowd of fellows before they took it to their feeds. It’s maybe why they speak so brazenly, because there is a little echo chamber of people who worship at the altar of Survivorship bias in the hope that heaven will send them more bigger-dick pills.

Some risk will be necessary. At some level we do have to let small instances with minuscule communities exist and participate in the wider fediverse, otherwise this whole thing will just fiat centralize.

The cautionary tale is email. In a way, Email is the most successful decentralized protocol. Anyone can technically throw up a client and start communicating with any other email server. The problem of course, is that if you do this in practice, your email will almost never get through to the majority of people. Why? Most of the large providers of email have formed what amounts to a whitelist of trust, and either outright reject participants they don’t recognize, or subject those outside participants to incredibly high standards that they themselves to not have to abide by.

So, email has practically become a centralized affair controlled by a few big stakeholders. A lot of small email providers have gotten out of the game in the last decade because they’re tired of dealing with it. It’s a mess.

I’m not against greater tools, but I’d inject that health is not solely measured by the lack of spam. A spam-free fediverse that’s just one instance and its three closest friends is not healthy. Whatever solutions are developed should leave open the door for small instances to still participate and have a honest chance at survival.

Something to keep in mind is that these companies aren’t concerned with total profit or revenue or anything like that - it’s all about the percentage. I suspect in the short term, these AI-articles will look very profitable. Networking effects, consumer habits, and SEO will carry the day for a time.

But what always screws these MBA types is the inability to recognize the specific natures of their business and the second order effects. Not all costs are representable on a spread-sheet.

Basically, the second order to me really boils down to this: AI generated content isn’t really a ‘brand’. Good writing shops tend to build a following with their writers and expectations with their editors. The writing, investigative, and editorial bent of a house is essentially what makes a shop. See The Economist and The New Yorker as examples. In other places, a lot of niche shops are selling personality as much as product with youtube, podcasts, and others.

this means there is no real ‘value add’ someone like an AI shop can provide. You are throwing yourselves down the hole of becoming a pure commodity, and as every business major knows, being a commodity sucks. Short term profitable, but literally no one cares about where a mass produced nail comes from and its a race to the bottom of price.

So, as time goes on, with the barrier for entry being incredibly low, every bill and joe who fancies themselves an SEO wizard has no reason to not jump in, so your competition rises and your ability to charge some value for (ads?) drops a lot. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. Many of the companies that would occupy this brandless, commodity-filling space are way better positioned to make a run at it than the GAMURS Groups of the world. Microsoft’s Bing chat and (probably soon to follow Bard) will whip your ass in the long-game. Why search Bing to get an AI article from the Escapist when Bing will do it for me? I really doubt anything churned out by an AI with some edits will be that much better per convenience.

This whole could easily collapse in on itself. Like a lot of people in the AI space, I’m interested to watch what happens when AI begins to consume and be built on its own content.