Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/09 - Obama to Netflix

Episode Date: March 9, 2018

Waymo joins the self-driving truck party, Twitter wants you to go verify yourself, Snap wants to break even, Facebook streams Major League Baseball, some weekend long-reads, and why that Obama going to Netflix story is a tech story. The long-reads recommendations: Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous (Bloomberg BusinessWeek) The Story of The Internet, As Told By Know Your Meme (TheVerge) This Is What Happens When Bitcoin Miners Take Over Your Town (Politico) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for March Night 2018. Today, Waymo joins the self-driving truck party. Twitter wants you to go verify yourself.

Snap wants to break even. Facebook wants to stream Major League Baseball. I'll give you some weekend long reads. And finally, why that Obama going to Netflix story is actually a really big tech story. Here's what happened today in the world of tech. This has certainly been the week for self-driving truck announcements. Waymo said this morning that starting next week, it will be operating self-driving cargo trucks in the Atlanta area,

delivering freight to Google's data centers, said Waymo, quote, this pilot in partnership with Google's logistics team will let us further develop our technology and integrate it into the operations of shippers and carriers with their networks of factories, distribution centers, ports, and terminals. A human overseer will be in the cabin, of course, but it doesn't sound like Waymo is testing that hub model that we described Uber testing out earlier this week.

Ars Technica notes that Waymo's ambition has long been to achieve what is known as level four automation that would entail vehicles that can handle city streets. Last November, they even let some of their minivans go fully driverless. As Timothy Lee says in Ars, quote, it's a good guess that the company is aiming to achieve the same level of autonomy for its trucking fleet. Given the pictures in Waymo's announcement, it looks like the trucks are prominently labeled,

so if you're driving around Atlanta next week, look for a bright blue semi with Waymo's logo on it. Two related Twitter stories today. First, in what Recode has called a very casual live stream, Jack Dorsey took to Periscope to follow up on his promise to openly discuss the health of the Twitter platform. In that stream, he said that Twitter was working on getting users to verify themselves. Previously, of course, you could apply for verification,

those little blue checkboxes on Twitter profiles, but Twitter only granted it on a case-by-case basis. And when verification was originally launched, it was basically only intended for celebrities as a way to distinguish from fake or parody accounts. But now Twitter apparently is concerned that the blue checkmark confers credibility, or even that Twitter might be standing by the veracity of what a given person tweets.

And given all the fake news controversy recently, that seems to be increasingly problematic to Twitter. The intention is to open verification to everyone, Dorsey said in the stream, and to do it in a way that's scalable, so we're not in the way, and people can verify more facts about themselves, and we don't have to be the judge or imply any bias on our part, end quote. It seems that the intention here might be that accounts without verification would somehow grow to be viewed as suspicious and therefore encourage people to be more critical of certain tweeters. What is unclear to some people is how much this would help in that regard.

G. Eliot Morris tweeted, and when everyone's verified, no one will be. The methods for this verification are unclear, though the verge notes that other platforms like Airbnb, require users to submit a Facebook profile, which seems unlikely given Twitter's own login credentialing system, or a phone number or even a government-issued ID. Dorsey also said that Twitter still finds it valuable to balance identity with anonymity on its platform because he wants Twitter to be a place where someone can speak their mind without being put, quote, in harm's way. The very related other story today came from a study of more than 4.5 million tweets

posted from 2006 to 2017, which confirmed that inaccurate news spreads faster on Twitter than accurate posts, and that human users, not bots, are primarily to blame. The journal Science published the study, which said that falsehoods are 70% more likely to be shared on Twitter, and the average true story took about six times as long as a false one to be seen by a threshold of 1,500 people. people. Interestingly, when known bot accounts are added into the mix, the bot accounts are only able to spread true and false news in equal measure, suggesting that when it comes to fake news, we have met the enemy, and he is us. In the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer summed up the state of affairs this way, quote, in short, social media seems to systematically amplify falsehood at the expense of

truth, and no one, neither experts nor politicians nor tech companies, knows how to reverse the trend. It is a dangerous moment for any system of government premised on a common public reality, end quote. If you're interested in reading more about this sort of thing, this most recent issue of science also includes a good overview of the whole study of fake news, called, appropriately, the science of fake news. Another story from earlier. in the week. On Wednesday, we talked about rumored SNAP layoffs, and yesterday those layoffs were confirmed. But the information is also reporting that the possible reason for those layoffs is that SNAP CEO Evan Spiegel wants the company to break even in 2018. According to the

information, a company-wide note to employees went out several months ago, wherein Spiegel outlined an ambitious goal for the year. But it was not clear if break-even was in terms of intended to come through increasing margins or expansion into new markets or even on what accounting metric would be used to measure the break-even point. On Twitter, the information's Tom Doten noted that Snap lost $720 million in 2017 and speculated that, quote, barring a 3x growth in revenue, they'll have to cut headcount to get to break even. In the very first instance of a major U.S. Sports League giving Facebook exclusivity,

Bloomberg reported that Facebook has landed a deal for the exclusive rights to stream 25 Major League Baseball games on the social network in the U.S. starting April 4th. Most of the games will be on Wednesdays, Major League Baseball will produce the broadcast, and the usual sources familiar with the matter put the price at $30 to $35 million. Facebook had non-exclusive rights to 20 MLB games last season, and in the last season, and in the last season, year, the company has struck deals with Fox Sports to stream UEFA Champions League Soccer and also the Mexican Soccer League. And the first baseball game streamed this year will be between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets. So if you're a Phillies or a Mets fan and you want to watch that game, you're only going to

have one option. Facebook. Since it's Friday, I wanted to give you guys some long reads for the weekend. And first up, when Paul Ford writes a thing, you read it. And he has a piece today in Bloomberg Business Week titled, Bitcoin is Ridiculous, Blockchain is Dangerous. Really, it's an essay after my own heart, wherein Paul compares the current madness for crypto to his own personal experience during the dot-com bubble and bust. Along the way, he tries to explain the blockchain in the normal people can understand this stuff sort of way, that Paul seems to be uniquely good at.

And the whole essay is insanely brilliant, as Paul always is. I wonder what Paul would say he's more talented at, programming or writing. I actually think he's probably the best writer writing about tech today. Here's a key paragraph towards the end, quote, bubbles are melancholy things, swirls of lies and optimism used to hide a million unrealized yearnings.

Bitcoin will crash because, of course, it will. Bubbles burst. The real estate and athletics management people go home, and the believers remain, meeting up, planning new markets. It could take years, it could take decades, but the blockchain freaks have a world in their heads, and they won't rest until it's real. That the rest of us live here, too, is the least of their concerns. Some of the things they'll do will be magical, community building, economically thrilling. Others may keep us up at night. End quote. Over at the verge, Caitlin Tiffany wrote a really fascinating piece about the website

Know Your Meme, which is called The Story of the Internet as told by Know Your Meme. A few interesting quotes, Know Your Meme believes that meme culture isn't malevolent so much as it's immoral. Quote, it's a mirror held up to the culture of the Internet, which increasingly does not care about the truth and only cares about the narrative, the myth. A couple other interesting notes. Bodybuilding forums were early on a weirdly reliable, early predictor of what might become a viral meme. Know Your meme believes that thinking that something must be good because it's popular

is really a legacy of living with broadcast mass media for the last hundred years or so, and it's a habit that we really need to unlearn. The life cycle of a meme has gotten shorter, something that I think, we've all sensed. And here's a key paragraph for you, quote, the internet doesn't actually love cats, but there is this very dense, highly connected internet cat industrial complex. People who really love cats who are super well connected to each other across several platforms, such that if you put just the right cat video in front of somebody, they can get it out to so many cat lovers

that all of a sudden you'll see it replicated a hundred times in your Facebook feed, end quote. And finally, I highly recommend the piece in Politico magazine by Paul Roberts with a title that neatly sums the whole thing up for me. This is what happens when Bitcoin miners take over your town. Subtitled, Eastern Washington had cheap power and tons of space. Then the suitcases of cash started arriving. And finally, I'm sure you saw the news broken by the New York Times

that Barack and Michelle Obama are in, quote, advanced negotiations to produce shows for Netflix. This was a story that transcended several different news niches. The show will apparently not be political, as the Obamas are quite interested in, quote, highlighting inspirational stories. Some of the ideas floated, included each Obama hosting their own sort of talk show around various topics, but also possibly working behind the scenes on documentaries and even fictional programs.

Russ Benxton joked on Twitter that, heck, even. Barack Obama is pivoting the video. So why is this interesting news? Well, I guess it's because we're used to former presidents writing the requisite memoir, as both the Obamas have reportedly been paid $60 million to do. But beyond that, there is no precedent really for former presidents transforming themselves into Oprah-style media brands, which this deal would certainly set the Obama's up to do. Part of this is the uniquely young age at which Obama left office, of course.

Most presidents are too old to have a high-profile new gig after leaving the White House. Think of Reagan and Bush Sr. And though Bush Jr. was also on the young side, it seems he has elected to be more of a low-profile gentleman painter post-presidency lifestyle. Also, the Obamas clearly have the sort of charismatic personalities that lend themselves to being media personalities. You can easily imagine both of them as quite good chat show hosts, media brands, even if they had never had anything to do with politics. But why exactly is this tech news? Well, had this been even 10 years ago, and a former president wanted to create a media brand,

he'd probably look to launch a magazine or talk to a network like NBC or look to create a cable channel. Instead, the Obamas are talking to Netflix, as well as it should be noted, apparently Amazon and Apple. that's how quickly the media landscape has shifted. Let's imagine that the Obamas have, in fact, decided, you know what, we want to stay relevant for the next decade going forward, and we want to have a media platform that will allow us to do that. They're not talking to the Hollywood people to make that happen. Well, maybe they have been doing that, to be fair,

but they're talking to the tech companies. The judgment call that is clearly being made here that the platforms that will be relevant a decade from now will not be old media. They'll be digital. When arguably the most famous people in the world decide that skating to where the puck will be means producing shows for streaming,

then that says something about how the media game has definitively and perhaps irrevocably changed. I mean, we saw it yesterday with that story about Star Wars on Disney's forthcoming streaming platform. Disney arguably is the biggest media brand in the world, and it too knows that it's got to crack digital to stay relevant. He was quite possibly tweeting about an unrelated topic,

but this morning I think the Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims summed up the way the landscape has shifted in the last decade. Quote, tech companies have become media companies, but media companies miss again and again their opportunities to become tech companies. That's all for today. I change the music because it's a Friday, and I want all you all to go out and live your best Friday lives. Your host for the show was Brian McCullough.

You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The podcast was produced by me and all the wonderful folk at techmeme.com. We'll see you on Monday.