The Vergecast - This week in Twitter, Elon Musk, and batteries

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

We’ve got a whirlwind of an episode this week on The Vergecast. Nilay, Paul, and Dieter bring back Silicon Valley Editor and host of Converge Casey Newton to discuss Twitter’s bad week and what the heck is going on with them. But before that, there’s a whole lot of other things that came up. We reviewed both the Galaxy Note 9 and Android 9 Pie this week, so Dieter runs through everything you need to know about the two launches. We’ve also got two fresh segments this this week. Deputy Editor Liz Lopatto updates us on this week in Elon Musk, and culture reporters Megan Farokhmanesh and Bijan Stephen stop by to tell us what’s happening in culture section of The Verge. There’s a whole lot more in between that — such as Paul’s segment, “Phone prison,” that he does every week — so listen in to hear it all. 01:36 - Battery week 02:14 - Note 9 review 09:58 - Android 9 Pie review 18:11 - This week in Elon with Liz Lopatto 21:51 - Tesla allegedly covered up drug trafficking and spied on employees at the Gigafactory, whistleblower says 23:03 - Verizon’s 5G home internet launch will come with free YouTube TV or Apple TV 4K 23:26 - Sprint and LG will release a 5G smartphone in the first half of 2019 31:02 - This week in culture with Megan and Bijan 38:18 - Twitter’s fear of making hard decisions is killing it 1:01:05 - Twitter officially kills off key features in third-party apps 1:08:00 - Paul’s weekly segment “Phone prison” 1:11:20 -Google may add Windows 10 dual-boot option to Chromebooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode of Vergecast is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Hiring used to be hard, multiple job sites, stacks of resumes, a confusing review process. But say hiring can be easy and you only have to go to one place to get it done, zipprecruiter.com slash verge. ZipRecruiter sends your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards, but they don't stop there with their powerful matching technology. ZipRecruiter scans your thousands of resumes to find people with the right experience

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Mostly batteries. A lot of batteries. I am your friend, Nealai. Paul Miller is here. Hello. Dieter's in studio growling at me. Yeah, what happened? If this is going to be a gimmick, I need to come in prepared.

What's the gimmick? Well, Neely is your friend. Paul's your friend. And Dieter is your friend. your attache. Please tweet at Deeter for next week. Is that like a briefcase? Yes. Deeter's briefcase.

Okay. Deeter's in New York, which is very exciting. We got a big episode today. We have both this week in Elon with Liz, this week in Internet Culture with Megan and Bejan. Casey Newton himself is going to join us to talk about what is happening with Twitter. I plan to give him zero points. Casey's first podcast, Converged, wrapped up.

Susan Palace, we're going to talk to me about that a little bit, but mostly we're going to dunk on Twitter. Let's be honest. Let's start. First, I want to say the battery issue. This week was Battery Week on the Verge. If you've been on the site, you've seen it because we've been putting it in front of you constantly. But it is so cool. Liz Lapato, Michael Zlanco are two editors.

It's a great job putting in a bunch of stories. We have a great Verge science video with the CTO of Tesla talking about how he wants to build city-sized batteries to power cities. Just go check out the battery issue. I just want to hype it at the top. Yeah. It is a, I just, I read a bunch of. of the different articles. It's just so astounding how much our world

could be changed by like a 10% better battery. Yep. It's like a whole quality of life upgrade. Yeah. Actually. No one can quite get there. Speaking of quality of life upgrades from a bigger battery, the Note 9 review by Dan Seaford went up the day you're listening to this Friday. Yeah. Whatever

day that is the day. Straight segue into the news. I do it my best. How do you feel about the 9th? I think it's great. Turns out the best thing about it is the 4,000 milliamp battery. The thing just will not die. You cannot kill it. Are we talking a day? Well, if you use it all day, you have a day.

So you get a whole day? Yeah, like a real, honest to God, genuine, full-on day. He said he was getting six to seven hours of screen time on it, which is often how Android users measure their screen time. And that's on a phone with a 6.4-inch screen. It's a huge screen. It's a massive screen. As a camera.

It's a Samsung camera. Yeah. So it's on par with the S-9. It has some gimmicks that are gimmicky. The one good gimmick, though, is it will... The bad gimmick is it'll, like, auto-detect that you took a picture of a dog and, like, adjust it for the dog and, like, highlight its shoes or whatever. But if you take a picture of somebody that's blurry or they're blinking,

it'll pop up a little warning saying, hey, that picture sucked. Wow. Which is cool. That's great. But, you know, Dex is slow. The stylus is cool if you like styly. But Dan doesn't... It's fine.

Yeah. There's, like... It's Samsung stuff. Bigsby is bad. Samsung is... We've been saying it every year for like four years now that Samsung software is less annoying than it used to be. And it's like...

The graph of the less annoying, like, it's getting less steep. So they're doing less to make it less annoying, but it's still a little bit better. You know what I mean? So it's like on that incline. Like an S curve? Yeah.

You might say that. Yeah. So there you go. But big long battery life. It's just, is it worth $1,000? Yes. But not for most people. Like, if you want a dance theme, there's more, it's the more phone that's got more of everything, including cost.

Most people should not spend $1,000 to get this phone. Most people will be much better served saving $300 to $400 and getting a cheaper Android phone if they want an Android phone. Yeah. But if you want the things that this thing has, it is worth $1,000, which is a very weird distinction to make, but that's kind of where it lives. Well, I mean, is it worth the money? the only question in our review fundamentally. Right. And if it's funny because all anybody has ever wanted from a phone in the past like two years,

just make it a little bit thicker and put a huge battery in it. Yeah. And the first time Samsung tried that, it did not go well. No, it did not. It went explosion. Yeah. They've done, made a lot of, it's tough to say this, but we're going to have to see. Yep.

I think now with every phone, we just have to see if it literally explodes. But they've made a lot of promises about their checks and safety stuff. And so here is the phone with the big battery that everybody has always wanted and it seems to deliver. That's almost as much as you can say about a phone right now, right? Like it's got a reasonably good camera

among the best. It has a huge, beautiful screen. It has a battery that lasts a long time. And the stuff that the Android vendor did is only moderately annoying. What else can you do? I'm in this weird position where another segue here.

Do I or don't I? I get mad at Samsung for not shipping Android 9 on it yet. I mean, the thing is just out. And, like, Android 9, I just reviewed it. It's not, it just came out of beta, like, you know, two weeks ago, a week ago. Yeah. So I don't think I get mad. But I know I will be mad because I know that they're not going to get, even though they should, because Oreo is built fundamentally to make upgrades easier, it's not going to get it in a timely fashion because Samsung.

There's no idea it gets to before next year. Right. Yeah. Well, a bunch of phones are going to get it before next year, right? All the phones that were on beta, I'm sure, are going to get it before the end of the year. The essential phone got it on day and date. Motorola just announced like seven phones

that are going to get it by the end of the year. But those are all kind of the easy ones. The hard ones are LG and especially Samsung. I mean, they have to like introduce Pixvita Pi. Yeah. Hello. I mean, it's a dog with shoes. He's shy.

Dogs love pie. Do you guys think Samsung get like a leg? I feel like Google had a lot of high profile problems with the Pixel 2 generation. And I don't know if they were maybe a little overblown or not. But does Samsung get

like Marks as like the reliable phone maker despite like hey the battery thing? I was going to say. That was a fluke

where it could have happened to anybody. But when the phone comes out they're typically good phones and they're available in quantity and

you know, you get what you expect. Yeah. Right. And I think the real question for Android, especially now with the EU ruling

where they're going to disaggregate Play Store from Android and all that stuff is do Android customers expect the latest version of Android or do they just expect a new phone? Right. Right. And because the updates came through play services and all that. So you just buy a new phone, it's different than your old phone.

But what you're not expecting is what Google is saying Android, the next version of Android would do. Right? Like our Android is the bulk of Android customers just a year behind where Google is always, and that's fine because the nature of time is such that they're just getting a new phone slightly behind Google's promises, or is everyone is mad at Dieter, potentially is mad at Dieter, about Samsung not putting Android on in this thing in time?

I think it's probably more the former, but people buy phone, people buy Android phones the way that we use to buy feature phones. You want a cool new thing, you buy a new phone. Yeah, I think what's cool is, like, in the market, like presumably new pixels coming this year. Yeah. I know it because I've seen it.

Yeah. And leaked photos. Everyone's seen it. Yeah, with a gigantic notch. It would be amazing if instead of putting out that pixel, they were like, we actually leak this on purpose, and our suspicions are confirmed. This notch is stupid. Yeah. We'll see you in a few months.

Here's what I want. I'm just one more thing about the pixel three. Everyone's mad about the notch. It's very big. And everyone's still angry that most Android phones with notches also have chins because, like, that seems dumb. The iPhone doesn't have a chin because they can curve the OLED screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It occurs to me that if Google wanted to on the Pixel 3, they could turn that chin into something useful.

They could make like a capacitive strip that you could tap on to go home and swipe up on and maybe even swipe back on for a back button. And then they could get rid of those on-screen buttons. And they could even put a little like horizontal line on it that like pulsed with light a little bit just in just in case you need it. Do you think Matias Duarte had any hand in this extremely palm design that you're describing? I just, it's just an idea that I had. You're just kidding, though. You're just kidding, though, right? You're just making a joke that's a reference to Palm, right?

That's not saying that they would do that. That's 100% how they're pre-worked. Yes. But you're not saying Google would. No, there's no way that's going to happen. Do this whole swiping shenanigans. No. And then like, yo, we invented capacitive buttons.

They will not do that. They at, well, do you ever when Samsung put out a phone and they're like, it's two screens, and it was really just one screen with like a strip of black? Yeah. That was honestly one of my favorite film launches ever. I was taking the photos like, is this just one, is this one big screen? And I'm like, yes, but we covered up the middle part with the line of black.

So it looks like two of them. Android does have this history of like experimenting with how are you going to do the very basic. So we should go right into the, Deter Review to Android 9. What about the scroll ball? Oh, yeah, the scroll ball. Oh, yeah, the scroll ball. HCC's greatest innovation. Technically blackberries.

Yeah, it was a blackberry. knockoff. That's true. Remember when Sony just put jog dials and anything? The HDC made it feel. I've reached the jog dials.

I'm waiting for jog dials come back. Anyway, you reviewed Android 9. I did. It's good. I gripe a lot about the gestures. I think that they're not as

fluid as they are on the iPhone and that is fine, but it's also like a little bit it's a little bit like jarring sometimes. Because you talked about on a high performance phone they are.

Yeah, they're technically fluid, but you're saying the actual interaction doesn't feel fluid? The physics of it and like the ergonomics of it are bad. So if you want to open up the app drawer, you need to do a swipe all the way to the top of the phone. And like, your phone, if you have an Android phone, it's probably a big, tall one, and that swipe is impossible.

Instead, you should just do the double swipe up, and that's much faster and easier. And they shouldn't even giving you the option. They should have simplified it. But whatever, like, the more interesting thing to me, and this actually relates to an article that I still need to write about the smart displays is the things that appear on your screen are like, it's becoming a collaboration between you and the Google Assessessus. So it will just start showing you buttons that it guesses you want instead of you putting the icon where you want on the home screen. And so it's a more, you know, the phrase we keep using is opinionated because it was like Sondarpe Chai's code word when he was talking about the Nexus line turning into the pixel line and about Google's version of Android becoming more differentiated than from stock Android. So I didn't say this because it's like really cliche, but this is one of the more Googly versions of Google of Android rather than. than Oreo was, for example.

They really did a ton on the pixel to have Google be part of it. The gestures make it so easy to go to that overview screen instead of just going home. And the overview screen is useful enough that you're going to end up just tapping that search button there a lot.

And doing that makes money for Google. Not that displays ads, but it puts you into that Google search experience. Yeah, I've been using it on my pixel too, and it's great. What I said at here was it's, Deter disagreed. Yeah.

But I said it's like a whimsical operating system and that Google can't help but show you all of its ideas even if they're like half baked and insane. And that makes it just fun. You're like what what wild Google experience will happen when I touch this phone? And like I think Google's design language is much more appealing right now. Like iOS to me feels like it's just very, it's very formal, right? Like the way it works and what were Deter disagree with me is like iOS is full of like hilarious fun things that happen.

Because it's like Apple's brand and like there's an emoji and like all that stuff. But all of Google's like interaction design just seems more casual in the half because it's like unfinished. But the other half is like I think they're trying to make the phone more playful and they're literally their visual design language is more playful than Apple's right now. Yeah. Well, they're also willing to like Paul was saying with like scroll ball, right? They're willing to throw ideas out there and then they don't have to commit to them for a. I feel like the iOS is much slower in some ways to change. Now, the counterpoint to that is like...

They'll abandon what you love. Android just can't seem to get rid of the back button. They just can't. They can't do it. There's no reason, I mean, like, because if you swipe over from the left, you're going to open up these app drawers. So the result of them experimenting with this new way to lay out an app, then to make they, like, they were proselytizing material design and part of the way that it wasn't

meant to be, but part of the way people understood it, was that you had to have a drawer on the left side of the app. And so when you swipe over from the left, you'd open up a drawer of options. Because that became such a common design thing in Android, it precludes Google from making a swipe in from the left operate as a back gesture in the way that it can in an iPhone because too many apps have that drawer there.

So like all that experimentation in a weird way ends up putting them in a box with like wanting to experiment in other areas. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing you're describing is why the iPhone is ultimately easier to use for more people. Right? Like, things don't change. When they do change, they're very consistent. Apple's very good at being like,

we've taught you how to use this feature for a year in iOS, and we know that you want this feature to do the next thing. Right. So the next year, we're just going to add the next thing. Right. So this year with the iPhone 10, we're like, we taught everybody about swipes. Next year we're going to expand the swipe library. Yeah.

Right. They're very good at sort of like deliberately layering functionality so that everybody knows how to use it at once. Google is much more experimental. And I think that if you're listening to the Vergecast, I assume you are curious about how computers work. If you are listening to this and you are not, you're going to have a bad time. But if you're curious about how computers work or how operating systems are designed or interfaces work, like Android, this version of Android to me seems very rewarding. Yeah.

Because you're always encountering some other idea about how things should work. And like, if that's the one you want, you can like pick it. It's a little less utilitarian. It's certainly more confusing to use, but not, I think, in a bad way. Yeah. In a way that just rewards a different kind of person. One of their design goals was to make it simpler for new users and make it simpler for iPhone converts. That's, I think, one of the reasons that gestures exist.

They've, they took every, they mess with their do not disturb settings every time and they messed with them again. there's fewer options. It's a little bit simpler. They suggest when you start dismissing notifications over and over again, just like, do you want to just turn this off? Yeah. We could just turn this off for it. They're really clipping it up for it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely an element of Clippy. Yeah, but it's not as, their Clippy is like, it's built into the UI of the OS in a really fundamental way. So it only shows up in search when they finally launch slices. Those action buttons are in the launcher. The suggested apps are in the overview.

are at the top of the app launcher. Whereas on the iPhone, it is very clippy in iOS 12 because you'll just be put it along and all of a sudden there'll be a random series suggestion to create a new shortcut on your home screen. Half of the time now,

I only talked like five different people. And so like my iPhone, like unlocking my iPhone is like a like a roulette of like who are they going to suggest I text? Yeah. Yeah, but you want to text this guy. You seem to text this person a lot. I did want to talk about.

about like slices. Yeah. I know it's not super done. Not available yet. I think that's super important. And Apple and Google are doing a very similar thing, which I think is, it's very helpful to developers. I'm like, oh, okay, Apple wants to do something called shortcuts.

Google wants to do something called slices. Basically, we should design a hook into our app that is unaction and allow people to put those. Yep. It's great. I feel like it's how I've always wanted to use. computer, have something that's task-oriented instead of app-oriented. If you're not subscribed to the Virgin's newsletter or command line today, Paul wrote a very good

version of it that drew a line from the thing we're talking about right now to Apple's open-doc standard. Cyberdog. The original dog would shoot. Cyberdog. There was a great browser. There was a WordPress called Wave with like a line over the A. It was a lot.

It was a lot. People were very excited about this. No one remembers this except for us, so we should move on. Let's bring back HyperCard also. This episode of The Virchast brought to you by Dollar Shave Club. No matter what you do in the bathroom to get ready. Wow. Dollar Shave Club has everything you need to look, feel, and smell your best.

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All right, here's Liz with This Week in Elon. Hello, and welcome to This Week in Elon Musk. I am the Virgil's deputy editor, Liz Lapato. And I'm going to start with recapping last week in Elon Musk because it's going to be crucial for this week. So you may remember that he tweeted a thing about taking Tesla private and then all hell broke loose. There's been a bunch of speculation about SEC investigations, how much did the board know, all of that stuff. I'm going to leave that primarily to financial reporters. If you're interested in it, Bloomberg, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal have been doing great business reporting about what the board knew and when.

And I'm just going to keep this pretty simple and pretty focused because the lesson so far to me personally is that social media is bad and we should all delete our accounts and we would all be a lot happier. The reason I think this is that the big incidents from this week have to do specifically with social media, but also the buyout tweet was, of course, a tweet. a social media. Maybe we just should not have that capability. So here's what happened. Azealia Banks, who is a musician, maybe best known for 212 a couple years ago, was going to collaborate with Grimes on a song, flew out to L.A., was staying at Elon Musk's house, and then on Sunday posted the Instagram. I waited around all weekend while Grimes coddled her boyfriend, and then did an interview with Business Insider about how much Musk knew about his financing. So, okay, here we go.

There was a bunch of, like, extraneous sort of insults regarding Musk's personal appearance, Grimes' personal appearance. I'm just going to, like, leave that there. But essentially what happened was that he was stressed out, trying to find funding, and looking for investors, and that he was scrambling. Bags told Business Insider that she wasn't trying to eavesdrop because, quote, I'm truly not that person. I couldn't hear specifics, but I could hear that he was scrambling because, in fact, he didn't have. has funding secured. So that happened. I don't know what to make of it. I don't know if you know what to make of it. Musk says he doesn't know her and hasn't matter. Tesla declined to comment on Banks' claims about Musk looking for investors. So there's that. Over the weekend, it emerged

that Musk was in discussions with Saudi Arabia's public investment fund, which just acquired a 5% stake in Tesla. A couple of other things, his tweet surprised even board members, who now have two sets of lawyers for some reason. The New York Times is speculating about Elon Musk's mental state and has an article up where the doctor's recommendation appears to be never tweet. And Charlie Gasparino has said the SEC has ramped up the investigation into the Tesla privatization plans. He says that they are sending subpoenas to Tesla and that Musk's statements involving funding secured are a crucial part of that. And then this is just a direct quote from Gasparino. Subpoena's signal investigation has reached the quote formal stages. But we have not hit the end of

social media ridiculousness because yesterday, you may remember the alleged saboteur slash whistleblower Martin Tripp. So he had a Twitter account, which at this point kind of seems like a mistake. And he started tweeting the serial numbers of batteries that he said were unsafe. Now, Twitter suspended him because he's not Alex Jones or a Nazi, and they tend to act faster that way. So that's removed. Tesla has denied there's anything wrong with these batteries. I don't know what to tell you, but if you are like me, you are kind of reaching the end of your rope. with Twitter because it is making your life bad.

Anyway, the moral of this story is never tweet, and I will see you next week in Elon. Well, I can tell you that the thing, so much happens in Elon. Yeah. That after Liz recorded this week in Elon this week, a whistleblower is alleging that Tesla's Gigafactory has drug cartels in it that are stealing what precious metals? Yeah. Like copper. There were investigations focused on claims of mass.

massive theft and substantial drug trafficking. The complaint also includes allegations of Tesla spied on employees' electronic devices. Yeah, catch the drug cartel. Yeah. It's a lot. This weekend, we're going to take this week in Elon. We're going to turn to this hour in Elon. No, it's so much every week that Liz and I have been talking about taking it,

and we're going to keep doing it on a thing, but literally publishing it on the website every week. Yeah. Because there's so much. So we're going to work on that. I have a Bloomberg terminal-like service that's all Elon news. It's never, never stuff. Kara Swisher had a great, she's on the New York Times op-ed board now. She had a great Elon piece that literally begins with.

What people are really asking about Elon is, is he crazy? And then you can just check that out and read her answer to that question. It does not turn the way you think it does. All right, let's talk about 5G for just a little bit, because it's happening. Yeah. It's a lot. Just to be honest. We're about to hit new phone season.

I think everybody expects a new iPhone in September. New pixels sometime after that. The Note 9 just came out. We're entering that mode of new phones. With it come new phone announcements. A bunch of 5G announcements with it. So that's kind of the season we're in. I'll just read some of these headlines.

Sprint LG are releasing a 5G smartphone in the first half of 2019. Verizon's 5G home internet will come with free YouTube TV or an Apple TV 4K, which is an interesting choice to make. Samsung. Straight to the deals. straight to the deals. Samsung just released their first 5G modem. Qualcomm had one before. It seems like we're going from the mode of,

hey, we're going to talk about 5G at tech conference time at, you know, CES, EFA, that sort of thing. And now we're straight up into Mobile World Congress. Now we're into, okay, products are happening on the cycle. Well, Samsung is saying theirs is the first modem that is, was created after the spec was finalized. Like, Qualcomm made a modem. Yeah.

Hey, what if this is 5G? Well, Paulcoms, when they put out that mode, and they're like, we own most of these patents, so we're not to stuff. I mean, like a mafia-esque. What if this is 5G? Exactly. I'm just going to go ahead and make some unsubstantiated predictions.

Substantiated by like my memory of how the 3G and the 4G transitions went. My first prediction is you should not buy the Sprint and LG 5G smartphone because it will be four feet thick. weigh 50 pounds. Yeah. And also bad. Just my guess. The Thunderbolt.

The Thunderbolt. HTCX Thunderbolt. Oh my God, that thing. Well, the Evo. Yeah, the Evo 3G. Then there was an Evo 3D. There was an Evo 4G and an Evo 3. I think Andrew has the Evo.

Our producer has the Evo 3D. Here's the other question. All this 5G talk, I kind of don't believe anything until I see coverage maps and until I like see actual results from like real, real device. out there getting signal. Yeah. Like, eh, it doesn't feel, something about it feels often. There are devices out there.

There are test markets. There are devices out there. This home internet thing is a little bit more real than not, like fixed 5G. Yeah. I get, this is like a weird thing that happens to journalists. Like, people want us to show up and talk about new technologies. So we go to that, it's a good way to meet people in the industry. And everyone's always like, what will 5G mean for consumers?

And I'm like, well, their phones will be faster. And I think what the expectation is is not, you know, just that. It's that we're going to put more cell radios in more things because 5G can cover more things. Yeah. They can do it at lower power. The network design will change in like meaningful ways because it's like millimeter wave and you need more, right? Like that actually right now our world is sort of architected around how 4G cell works, LTE works. Yep. And 5G is actually a huge change in how cell networks work or operate or, designed and that we will make some substantial behavioral changes with it.

And I've heard that case from lots of people. I think that case is really interesting. Well, it's also like it's a case that I'm sympathetic to because we have told the story on the verge many times of how a technological change drove a drove to a human cultural change. But this is why I'm saying, show me the maps. Right. I can't judge whether any of these claims are, like, realistic or true until I know, until it's, like, starting to get more real on devices and, like, more hands.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Wait. Or what you're driving at is, like, because obviously, I feel like 4G was supposed to be in my laptop and in my tablet and not so much. So I think that's like. It wasn't going to need a home internet connection. But you're saying the physicality of how you can. can deploy 5G makes those things actually more plausible?

So you're describing computing devices, which is, you know, everything is computing device, but you're deciding these, like, very classic computing devices. And there are lots of reasons about Qualcomm and Intel hating each other that they didn't, like, do it. Are you talking about sensor network? Yeah, it's like that. It's like what if... Google City? Yeah, what if the way, because of the way 5G needs to be deployed, you need many more small base stations.

So now you get like this different kind of coverage map inside of a city, right? which has higher bandwidth in more places, and every car has a 5G mode a minute. Like, what happens next? It's like, that's a lot. Like, it's a lot to think about. Or this fixed 5G wireless stuff, what happens when, and there are places I think where Verizon is actually doing this, where they're walking away from a fiber deployment and they're going straight to a 5G deployment. Right.

So now we can actually put broadband. You're saying wireless carriers might be competitive in home broadband space, Leela? Yeah, but you know what they need under it? they need a fiber network and access that fiber network is extremely constrained. Okay, yeah, can we get to this? You're going to make a 5G, I've got my 5G phone that

gets two gigabytes down sure. Where's the back end for that? Like, I'm happy when I could get 20 down in my house that is like built on top of like a fiber bundle. Yeah, it's a lot, right? The reason I wanted to bring

it up is the news is coming out. And I think the super important context is most of the conversation about it is about this very interesting potential second order effect. We're going to change the network. We're going to change how the devices work. Literally the physical network topology will change. And then there's a second order effect where like our lives will change. And that is true because we've now seen it happen twice with both 3G and 4G. But I think the pressing concerns are like what Deeter says.

Like show me the network. show me the fiber bundle that's going to actually support this. Show me who owns that fiber bundle so that if I'm a small... If I want to be competitive with the one provider in my wife's hometown of 400 people, and I want to show me how I get access to the back hall so that I can do that. Right? Like I don't, none of these things are clear yet. It's the same players doing the same stuff as ever.

What would you say? So 3G was, I can use the web on my phone. 4G was I can watch video all the time on my phone. Yeah. So now. Now my self-driving car will be a phone. Like, it's like, it's like that.

It's like everything in my house is now connected independently to the network. I want a peer-to-peer mesh network. You're just, you're on a decentralized tip, my friend. I am all, all about, you know, the thing is, we don't have to get a protocol to talk to each other. Face-to-face. You need a product. I want like a formal. debate protocol to talk to you, like Robert's Rules of Order.

Hey, hey, but... Yes, you do. It's called language. We share English. This episode of Vergecast brought to you by the Audi E-Tron. The question of electric car has always led to more questions. Can I contend with the elements? Will it have enough range? How long will it take to charge?

Is it off for enough space? However, the all-new Audi E-Tron might just be the answer. With long-range capabilities, high-speed charging, and quattro all-wheel drive. It's a first fully electric SUV from Audi. The future is electric. Visit AudioUSA slash ETRon to learn more and stay informed. Hey, I'm Russ Frustick, the host of the History of Fun podcast. Each week we explore the hidden backstories behind the things you love to do.

For example, did you know the neopets were led by high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology? Also, this kind of blew my mind. The original Mr. Potatohead was, wait for it, a real potato. If any of that sounds interesting to you, new episodes of The History of Fun are added every Monday. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite podcast. All right. This week in our culture. Hi, I'm Megan Froeckmanish, a reporter with The Verge. And I am Bejohn-Steven, your best friend and a culture writer at The Verge.

And here are the headlines from the culture section this week. So at first, we have Twitter suspends Alex Jones for a week. Yeah, this is a funny one because this is the first real enforcement action Twitter has ever taken against Alex Jones. Who, if you didn't know, is the proprietor of Info Wars, which is a notorious conspiracy and general misinformation news site. Anyway, basically, Jones has in recent weeks been de-platformed, which means that he's been kicked off of basically every other social platform, including Apple's podcast, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify, and Vimeo. Wow, so Twitter is the only holdout.

Twitter is the only holdout. And this points to a much larger problem with the platform, which I think everyone has identified, re the spread of weird Twitter Nazis. But it's that Twitter thinks of itself as this giant public space without any real rules. And so then banning Alex Jones is notable because it means that they're sort of maybe trying to take their rule seriously,

but the larger problem is that they never do. And so in a week, he'll be back and spreading his misinformation all the way across the internet. Up next, Ninja's unwillingness to stream with women is a problem that points to a larger problem. Yes. So Ninja is Tyler Blevins. He is Fortnite's biggest streamer, Twitch's most popular streamer. So he has said before and then recently said again to our sister's site, Polygon, that he doesn't like streaming with women.

And so he basically explains that if he has a conversation with a female streamer, that people are going to take it out of context, it's going to start all these rumors and clickbait, and it's just not worth it for him. So this obviously made a lot of people upset. He later went on to Twitter to clarify and explain who's actually talking about harassment. That's the issue he wanted to get at. So this is really tricky because on one hand, when you have the platform's biggest streamer coming out and taking what some might call a cowardly stance, saying he's just not going to do it, not going to give the implicit endorsement of a shared stream. stream to women on the platform, like, it sucks. It sucks because there's nothing these women can do. It's not like they've done anything wrong. But this is complicated because, you know, a lot of streamers have come out in support of him as well, men and women, saying that he's just trying to

protect his family and that online streamers, online celebrities have to deal with people digging through their personalized, feeling entitled to things like tweeting at their loved ones, like that kind of thing. And so this is actually a much deeper problem. It's not just about Ninja here or his decision. It's about the fact that Twitch's biggest streamer doesn't feel safe. And what that means for the rest of the community because if he can't take a stand against this, like what hope does somebody smaller have? Right. So obviously, like, Ninja has the power to set trends with this platform.

People are disappointed that he hasn't, and that's understandable. But again, like, we have to look at the larger picture here of this is a real problem that needs to be addressed. So how do we actually start addressing that? And we don't have time to answer that. But we do have time for a speed round. And I think, Megan, you're reading this headline? YouTube just gave the nun the best viral marketing campaign and could have hoped for. So basically, I don't know if you've ever heard of this movie called The Nun.

I personally had not. It's like the fifth movie in the Conjuring series, if you care about that. Love to Conjure. So there was a non-skippable ad that was a jump scare that so many people were upset about. There was like a viral tweet warning people against it. It actually technically violates YouTube's rules for being a jump scare. And so YouTube pulled it. However, everyone is now talking about this probably terrible movie.

And the fact that you can't watch the ad, you have to actually go look it up. Like, it's an incredible campaign. Oh, man, in other viral marketing news, Oh, goodness. MoviePass posts huge quarterly loss, shareholders sue. So that's pretty fucking explanatory. But obviously, MoviePass has been in trouble for a while, ever since it lowered the price of its unlimited movie deal to $10 a month,

which is bonkers, by the way. People have been seeing a lot of movies. And just this week, MoviePass's parent company posted its quarterly earnings report, which showed that, and here I quote, operating losses have ballooned from less than $3 million this quarter last year to 126.6 million in the three-month period ending on June 30th, 2018. That is a burn rate of $73 million a month, which is not money that that company really has. And you can tell because the stock price is at this very moment.

I'm seeing $4.5.00. Oh, R.P. soon. What's up next? So, I like to think this story was written just for me. It's called Why the Laws of Physics being Will Smith's birthday sent probably won't kill him. So Will Smith on his 50th birthday is going to bun. jump out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon. That's insane.

And in my nightmare scenario, I imagined him bungeeing out and then immediately stringing back up into the helicopter blades, like very final destination style. However, Angela Chen has written a very reassuring story about why physics mean he's probably going to be okay. He better be okay. I can't lose his Instagram. I really can't. He's the world's best blogger right now.

And last up, we have a piece I wrote called Toward a Taxonomy of Men Online. And basically, I have a theory. There are large adult sons, which, if you don't know anything about that, go read Gia Tolentino's piece of The New Yorker, which came out last year. And there are internet ads. Those are two categories of men we know and love online. There are two additional categories. And I'm convinced that these four categories explain every man online, every public man online. And the other two categories are uncles and nephews. So this all came about because Stephen Miller's uncle owned him in print in a national magazine last week about his immigration policies, saying he was a hypocrite.

And it made me realize that obviously uncles are a thing. Uncles are chaotic. They have chaos energy and they thrive on unrest. And nephews are sort of their, a smaller, weaker version of a large adult son. They're less large, but more adult. And uncles define nephews and nephews define uncles. Anyway, the whole piece is bonkers. But if you're interested in learning why the men online in your life are the way they are,

I highly suggest you give it a read. All right, that's it for us. Thank you so much for listening to these two large adult. sons. I'm Megan underscore Nicolette on Twitter. And I am Bijan Steven on Twitter. And yeah, have a great day. Bye y'all. That, Megan and Bijan. All right, Casey Newton is joining us. Hello, Casey. How are you? Hey, Nila. I'm doing great. Nice to be with you all. So first, I just want to congratulate you on the first season of Converge, which... Thank you. People love. We got a lot of great feedback.

And I know that during your finale, you directed the people to tweet at me. Message received, my friend. I haven't listened yet. I'm sorry. Casey told everybody if they won a second season. They should tweet to me. Oh, great. Okay.

Indeed, they have been. We wanted to gauge the listener response and to see if this was something they wanted in their lives. So we're out there. We're listening. And I can confirm that your entire family has Twitter and wants more. No, it's great. I definitely want to do a second season. We're going to work on that.

But here's what. I think is true. We are cruising towards the midterm elections in this country. And every week for the past few weeks, I've told the Verge cast audience, hey, we're not going to do politics on this show. We're going to talk about those gadgets. But if you want politics coverage from the Verge, go read Casey Newton in his newsletter of the interface where he does a great job of it, tip of the spear, the whole thing. I would say that this week, one, I wanted you on to congratulate about Converge. That's the happy part. Thank you. But this week, the second piece is Twitter has been so stupid this week that I feel like we can't, we can't pretend it's not happening anymore. And I wanted you on to talk about what is happening in the world of platforms. What is happening specifically with Twitter? It's more than just like free speech. Today they killed third party Twitter clients.

It's a lot. But yeah, just where are, what is happening with these platforms? Start with Twitter. I know you cover Facebook a lot too, but let's start with Twitter because it feels like the explosion of of mismanagement with Twitter this week has just been off the charts. Sure. And like the highest level thing to say is that Twitter is not a well-run company, right? Like no matter what your policy views are for the platforms and how you think they should handle hate speech or extremism, the factor. remains that every other major platform intervened before Twitter and it intervened in a more

decisive way. Are you suggesting Twitter should have a full-time CEO? Some have said that. Some have said that they should hire a chief operating officer to replace the one that left to go run a finance company. There are a lot of things that Twitter could do and has chosen not to. When you say intervene, you mean with the Alex Jones situation specifically, yeah? That's right.

So, you know, Twitter's position on this has been exasperating. First, they said that upon their review of his tweets, he had not been found to have violated their rules. Then a great CNN reporter named Oliver Darcy just did a simple Twitter search and found dozens of instances of Alex Jones appearing to break the rules. He submitted those to Twitter. Twitter turned around and said, well, yes, you're right. You got us. he broke the rules eight times I'm sorry seven times but five of those occurred before we had changed the rules to make those things against the rules so those don't count so he's really only broken

the rules two times and we're not going to tell you how close that makes him to being banned and then it was just a couple days later that Alex Jones posted a video on Periscope in which he said that all of his listeners should quote get their battle rifles ready because all of his enemies are coming in some sort of violent revolution or something. So Twitter finally said, okay, that's a direct incitement to violence. But instead of saying, let's just get this guy off the platform once and for all, like Facebook has done, they said, we're going to give him a seven-day timeout. And as I pointed out in a tweet, it is weird that, you know, a lot of us just quit Twitter

for a week as a form of self-care. And Twitter, like, it's a punishment. And it's functionally identical. Yeah. But then I want to point out also, check towards. He went on Sean Hannity's radio program. Yeah. He's now on this other tour of, like, big mainstream media outlets.

He's saying, I need to rethink that. So to Hannity, he gave, first of all, I mean, I know we have a podcast and read ads. But if Jack Dorsey was on our podcast, I don't think I would interrupt him to read a home security ad and make him wait. Which was an incredible radio moment. But I would say Dorsey gave to Hannity a very cursory sort of. speech about platform moderation. Not really any details, just the thing that all the platforms seems like they need to do, which is tell conservatives, we're not out to get you and get out of that conservative victim complex

that seems to be pervasive right now, the censorship complex. And then he's going to the post, Tony Rom, we used to work at Recode, and another reporter there did an interview with him. And he's like, I need to rethink the core Twitter experience and how we express our values through these incentives, which sounds like a radically different thing to me and almost like whiplash of how Dorsey is thinking about Twitter. Am I getting that right or is it less whiplashy? Where are they? Yes, it's totally putting the cart before the horse, right? Like, the first question is, how do you enforce your own rules? Like, can the people on your platform actually be held accountable for the things that you say that they're not supposed to do,

but they do all the time that you ignore in many high-profile cases. And maybe prove that you can enforce some standards of behavior before saying, oh, and by the way, we're going to rethink the core of the service. Now, I do think that there is a good criticism of Twitter, and by the way, Ezra Klein made it in a really good piece last week on Vox.com, that said Twitter is a sort of fundamentally polarizing force. Like you read the tweets and you pick your team, and then you just spend a lot of your time on Twitter yelling at the other team.

And so it sort of creates these dynamics where sort of the most inflammatory tweets go viral. And over time, that polarizes us more and more. So if Jack Dorsey wants to look into that and make changes to account for it, I'm all in favor of it. But in the meantime, he has a variety of unfolding crises and no clear solutions for how he's going to fix them. Or no clear. I have put a different way. I have zero trust that he, if he came up with the right ideas to solve them, that he could actually get them done and executed well in the product. This is a man who cannot help let us edit tweets, for example, right?

I mean, it's a joke, but for real, they have done a pretty bad job of just making, like, proving that they can iterate their actual, like, software product. And so if they can't do, like, they're just, they're failing to execute on multiple levels. Yeah, I mean, one of the core criticisms of Dorsey, which I think is fair, is that he is somewhat prone to inaction. He can get paralyzed on some of these tough calls, and he would rather sort of make the smallest possible move. I realize now he's saying he wants to change everything, but sort of historically, he has been slow to act. And if you look at how rapidly Twitter has iterated as opposed to something like an Instagram or a Facebook, it's very, very slow, right? And so, So yeah, Deeter, to your point, Twitter has a lot to prove when it comes to showing us that it can implement useful changes. So Dorsey's like out on this media tour. And I think he's going to be on like Brian Stelter. Brian Seltre at CNN is going to interview him next. Like yeah, he's doing that set of media, right?

The big national sort of mainstream political publications outlets. What's the point? What do you think his goal is? I have like a like a, like a, I have. two answers to that. One, the joke answer is that this is the tour of self-owns and that Twitter just wants to kind of go around getting itself into more and more trouble, which is consistent with my view of Twitter as essentially the Bluth family from Arrested Development reincarnated. You know, the more truthful answer is that you've got a congressional hearing coming up next month

where Dorsey is going to testify before the Senate about, you know, Russian disinformation and influence campaigns on platforms, including Twitter. And it probably benefits him to talk to the Washington Post, which is read by Congress and its staffers, to say, hey, listen, we know we've got problems. We're working on things. We're going to, you know, shake this company to its very foundations. So it's kind of like the look busy to her. Where I think it's bad is that any PR person will tell you, you don't want to put out your CEO out there if he doesn't fundamentally have very much to say. And Dorsey really doesn't have much to say here. In fact, he gave an interview

to the Hill today where he said, look, we've been really inconsistent about Alex Jones. It's like, on one hand, like, I respect the honesty. But it's actually, it's undermining my trust in this company even more, right? The company's got to like

make a call and stick to it and not just constantly say, gosh, yeah, we botched that one again. I will say that today, Square announced that they can now read a chip card in two seconds. Yeah. So, They're doing work. Square is a really good company. I think we should refer to Square as Jack Dorsey's other company that isn't destroying democracy.

Well, I mean, they put out a great cash register. Yeah. From my perspective, Twitter was, there was two companies that didn't look like assholes in this whole banning Alex Jones thing. Apple, who started it. Yeah. And Twitter, who didn't go along. I feel like Facebook and YouTube especially really look kind of cowardly in the same. sense that they didn't ban based on some specific incident that they could cite.

They're like, oh, now is the time there's cover fire to ban somebody that we don't like. Now Twitter is kind of all over the place and it's kind of weird, but I was giving Twitter a lot of credit, especially because they were coming off of a pretty bad cycle as far as the whole shadow ban controversy. It seemed like they were like, hey, we're going to wait for some very specific moment to ban as per our policies. I think what you are illuminating, Casey, I'm very interested in your take on this. What you are illuminating is it seemed like both Apple and Twitter were standing on principle

and it quickly became revealed that Twitter was not. Right? Like Twitter was like, actually we don't know what we're doing, so we're doing nothing. Casey, is that? Because Apple very clearly is like, and there's like weird questions about Apple too. Like they pulled them out of the podcast thing because that's a directory of links to hosted files elsewhere. and, you know, we feel comfortable curating a directory, but the App Store, we're worried about the regulators realizing that we totally control this platform the way Google, like,

there's a lot there to unpack with Apple. But Tim Cook is a man of principle. I think that is very clear. And Apple is a company that prides itself on principles. Casey, it feels like Twitter wants to be that company and has no, like literally no idea how. Yes, 100%. But let's talk about Apple for just a second. right, because everybody wanted to raise to give Apple credits like,

oh, finally a company with some moral leadership. Well, you know, Alex Jones has been on that platform a long time. And I would wager that very few people at Apple probably had any idea that Alex Jones had a podcast on iTunes until YouTube, for example, gave Jones a strike earlier this year. And there was kind of a big round of press about it. So I see it less as Apple swooping into Save the Day and making a principled stand as I see it as like all of these companies, sort of making these tentative steps and reinforcing each other. until Apple, the big dog, made a definitive move. And then, yes, it did give the others air cover to sort of make a dramatic action. But as Neely just noted, there's still an app inside their store which streams all of the same content,

which contains all the same incitements to violence. So, you know, Apple still has plenty of answer for, if you ask me. Yeah, I mean, I don't think any of these companies are in a good spot. I just, well, because they're trying to be speech police. It's not going to work out. This is going to really come back to bite all these companies. Yeah, so to Paul's point, like, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want to be the supreme decider of what is moral, right, on the Facebook platform. Clearly not.

He wants judges, right? Jack Dorsey wants to stand for free speech, but, like, have to draw a line somewhere further down the line. The thing we don't want is, like, you know, the grand poobov speech on these monopolistic platforms. But Twitter's not that big. What if the answer was when somebody gets banned and, like, what was the policy? And they just come out and said, we are caprician. and we just did what we thought was right, and our terms of service say that,

you know, we could do whatever we want, whatever we want, buy. Yeah. Like, unapologetically do it. Now, it's super problematic, but, like, would that world, I don't know, like, somebody should just try that. Peter, let me make an imperfect analogy.

Let's say that y'all own a shopping mall, and I come into your shopping mall with a megaphone and a bunch of angry people, and I get on my megaphone, and I shout, the lizard people are coming to steal your babies, and ruin democracy and y'all need to go home

and get your guns to protect yourselves from the lizard people revolution we like most people would not sit around having discussion about gosh should like the president of the mall really weigh in here

and tell the lizard people to get off the property that would actually be incredible if the president of the damn mall was like I agree the lizard people should be driven from the property I was going to say like

you're speaking truth here Casey I was fine with it until you said told people to go home and get their guns At that point, it became a problem. Yeah. No, so to square the difference between what you're saying, Casey, and what Paul is saying, which is, I think, very, very difficult.

The mall is like a place of commerce. It's like a constrained. So is Twitter. Hold up. Just hold up. It's like a literally a physically constrained private space. So is Twitter. Where people go to, like, buy pants.

And just hold up. They don't do that on Twitter. That's why I picked that one. where people go to like do shopping and the owner of them all has every right to like create whatever space environment in that that he wants. Yeah. Fine. Twitter is not every right. You can't, you can't ban certain protected groups.

Sure. Yeah. I think we just understand. This is a thing that you can like go into. Most people in America are choosing to not go into them anymore. Walls across America are going out of business because you feel like you have. this choice, right? Twitter feels like this, Facebook too, they feel inevitable.

They are an inevitable part of living your life online right now, right? Leaving Twitter, leaving Facebook, leaving Instagram, these are like actions people talk about or not having them, or actions that you talk about as explicit opt-outs of something, right? You're taking some sort of stand. Yeah. Whether that's saying is valid or not is actually a really interesting question, but you're the person who doesn't have Instagram. you're like, now you're the new person doesn't have TV.

Yeah. Those things are all marketed as information distribution services. And the long running joke is like, is Twitter a media company is because that implies they have responsibility for what they distribute. And I think what they're struggling with right now is do how much responsibility do they have? And on one side is Paul saying they distribute speech, that should just be whatever. And on the other side, I think, is this massing notion.

I'm saying it's hard to be a censor. It's hard to be a sensor and not have it swing both ways. I would argue that we run a media company. We really do. It's surprising every day that they let us do it. We make choices. We're basically like an Info Wars. Yeah, that's what we thought.

The lizard people are coming. You heard it here first. But we make these big editorial judgments. What if Twitter banned the verge? They said the verge was inciting people to violence. The verge was fostering discord. The verge was publishing fake news. Whatever the reasons were.

Sure. What if Twitter banned the verge? Right? Now, I'm not saying that would make Twitter illegal. I'm saying that would be, you wouldn't be happy. And your audience wouldn't be happy. And your audience, Twitter would be saying to your audience, you're too dumb to pick your media.

We have determined that your media choices are. are invalid. And I think that this, I'm dying to hear what Casey has things, but I think the metaphor of the mall or the newspaper bundle or even the cable channel list of channels that they literally pick what you get and what you don't get is vastly different than services in our life that feel so inevitable. And they have a different kind of responsibility. And I don't think anyone has articulated what that is.

Casey, does that seem like the conflict or is it? a different conflict entirely. Yes. It 100% is the conflict. I guess at the end of the day, though, I do believe in the right of private companies to set rules of behavior for what transpires on their service. The alternative is that people can post whatever they want and everyone just throws up their hands and say, gosh, it was too hard so we couldn't, you know, prevent people from inciting others to violence. To Paul's point, would it be bad if Twitter banned the verge? yes, it would be particularly bad if they banned us for a reason like fostering discord, which you know, by that standard, you could ban anyone for any reason. And I do think that would be bad.

But if you have someone who has repeatedly incited violence, as Jones has, particularly somebody who has done so across every platform he has ever been given access to, that just doesn't seem like a hard call to me. That seems like if you're going to make any call about anything ever, it would be this guy. So that's where I, I guess, draw a line. And then I think there's also not inciting violence, yes. Also like the blatant conspiracies and mistruse about Sandy Hook. Like those are real big problems, right? They're also clear calls.

And if you are an editorial publication, you can say, well, it turns out in the marketplace of ideas, we're the buyer. And we can choose not to buy this and like promote it in these feeds that we run. That's, it's still sticky, right? Like how many publishers chased what Facebook was buying and then cratered their businesses because Facebook decided to stop buying it. Both Twitter, I did this in the podcast like a month, two months ago. That's how we talked about Facebook, disclosure my wife works for Oculus, part of Facebook.

Both Facebook and Twitter are, they're trying to be content. They're trying to set up a categorical imperative system of ethics that are rule base, that they could just have a general, like, system of rules that from which other, you can derive further rules that will give you the answer to whether or not you ban Alex Jones. And it turns out that that is very hard, it may be impossible to do, what we're, what we're we want is for them to just be object utilitarians and they just try and foster the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people. And they, you know, base a few, you know,

shorthand rules on that so that they can, like, not have to, like, make that calculation every time. Okay. Casey, I want you to just give me sort of the state of play on platform information warfare right now. And then I want to just move on to dunking on Twitter for killing its apps. Sure. Much cleaner. Like, we're never going to answer. Like, it's happening. And I think we're in this moment, if you are at all interested in this, I really encourage you to read Casey's newsletter of the interface because literally you were driven to write about this every single day in newsletter form because there's so much. So what is just a sort of state of play right now? What's happening and what's next? Sure. So, you know, friendly reminder that about a month ago

Facebook announced that there is an active influence campaign underway on Facebook and we don't know who is behind it. It looks very much like the campaign that the Russians waged in 2016. and it might in fact be them, but they've gotten much more sophisticated than they were. And so they're continuing to try to root out those threats. They're working with law enforcement. It seems likely that there's some sort of, you know, that the authorities are working on this too. We don't know very much. The midterms are getting very close.

Next month, there will be a hearing where all of the big tech CEOs are being invited to come and testify about this. But I sort of feel now like kind of like how we felt before 2016, where it's like we know something is going on. We have like hints of it, but we don't know really what it is or what it means. So it's a very exciting time. And if you'd like to know more, go to theverse.com slash interface and sign up. Good.

That was a great plus. Wow. Can I say one more thing? And then we can, I promise we can dunk on Twitter for the app thing. A super interesting break between the right and the left right now where they are saying the same things but vehemently disagreeing with each other. Like right now I tweet, you know, this thing should not be on Twitter. and a bunch of right-wing bots show up in my feet, quite honestly.

And they say, this is why we have to regulate Twitter to make it neutral. This is, they're censoring us. We need to regulate big tech. And it's amazing to me because I've spent years of my life saying we need to have net neutrality regulation because there's no competition for access. And it's a core free speech issue to not let various services of access over the pipes. It is literally the same thing. It is the same argument at two different layers of the internet because you're saying Twitter is a monopoly and if I don't have access to this distribution platform, my voice will be silenced. And I'm saying Comcast is a monopoly.

And if you don't get people access to its distribution platform, they will be silent. I just want to make it clear. I disagree with both of those stances. Okay. Yes. You're consistent. The government, let's say the government is full of my favorite people. with all my favorite hairstyles.

And they make a law and said, you got to treat everybody fairly. We're going to watch you. You got to have fair and equal access to these platforms. But what if the next day, someone with a different hairstyle is in charge of the government and they decide a different list of things are okay. And now that they have the power to moderate those platforms,

they can use it for really bad things. And so as much as I disagree with what Twitter, Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Google, Pinterest, Pinterest, Spotify, I think they are being, they're blundering and they are attempting to control speech in a way that it's not controllable in that way. And it's incompatible with how people live their lives and how people talk. You know, you had like H3H3 is talking about Alex Jones on a podcast. And Ethan is about to say why Alex Jones should have been banned. And his live stream goes down because he gets a strike from YouTube. We're talking about Alex.

You know, it's just, it's too slippery to control. But I do not want the government or some more powerful entity. I think the solution will be more distributed, more decentralized networks that will crop up directly in response to this sort of action. So in some sense, I'm like kind of glad. We're all going to go back to like V-bolt and forums about our favorite hobbies. You know, I'm going to say every week on Converge, Casey, asked the people, what should be on the blockchain that is it? And no one ever had the answer? There you go, buddy.

All right, Casey, tell me about these apps. So, look, in 2012, Twitter told developers, hey, Stop making third-party clients that mimic our functionality. And a bunch of third-party developers said, well, but yeah, but your apps are freaking terrible. So we're just going to keep doing it until you literally turn off the APIs. So what happened today is that Twitter finally turned off some of those APIs, specifically the ones that enable push notifications and enable an auto-refreshing timeline.

So if you're like me and many journalists and you have Twitter or tweetbot in my case in a corner of your screen with the timeline, into the top and you just see nothing but a waterfall of tweets all day, that doesn't work anymore. So it really is a step towards the ultimate death of these apps whose death again was announced in 2012. But just to bring it all the way back around to talk about paralysis at the top, Twitter has made this call, but they won't make it. They have said, we don't want these apps to exist anymore, and yet they've continued to

let them exist because they're afraid of people like us screaming about them. In my ideal world, they would have let third-party developers continue making clients forever because third-party developers are way better at it than Twitter. But we don't live in that world. We're living in this awful limbo. Yeah. Twitter, their letter they put out today was like, these APIs are deprecated. No one really uses them.

You know, we got to shut this. It's like, those are your choices. Yeah, well, they told everyone to stop using them. They did admit to being bad at communicating. I mean, they admit to being bad at they run a communication service. And they say, Jack Dorsey's like, we are communicating poorly about these rules. He said it so much that his own comms people are like, dude, stop it. Dieter just sides so much.

He side with his whole body. This is, RSS forever. That's all I'm going to say. Can you imagine if there's Google Reader right now? Well, there's a new standard coming out for something's called like active subscriptions or something like that. Pub sub hubbub. Yeah. It's basically, they're trying to read.

That wasn't a joke phrase, by the way. That's a real type of. They're trying to rebrand PubSub hubbub. But I think that would be a big mistake. I'm going to say one thing in Twitter's defense. I think we think about Twitter is being a company on the scale of Google and Facebook all of the time. And it's super not. Because they are so in that conversation.

Yeah. They are literally where the president speaks to the American people. They are inescapable. They are inevitable, as I said. They are not. They are a company that is scraping to make revenue there, multiple times smaller than either Google or Facebook. They don't have the ability to do all. Like Google's like, hey, search is great.

We're going to turn our attention to flying cars. Yep. We bought Nest. We don't know what to do with it. We rolled it into Google. We rolled it out of Google. Well, they rolled it back into Google. Now someone else in Google is like they're able, like they can just do nonsense all of the time because they have this core business that hums.

Facebook's like, we're making a plane. We're not making a plane. Eh, we're investing in aviation companies. Because they have a core business that works. Is there something Twitter should be expanding into? Is there other than... They've been trying real hard with video. You know, it's John Gruber today published a story about the death of these clients.

And he's like, I would pay a subscription fee to Twitter to be able to use a client that worked. Yeah. I think there's a lot of people that would pay for an exquisitely curated Twitter experience. I mean, just getting like an auto-scrolling feed of reverse chronological. tweets is becoming very hard to do on the desktop. You can do it in tweet deck, and then I don't know. I am extremely excited to not look at Twitter on my computer anymore. That's what this is going to lead to.

I've said on this show before, I like tweet deck because it's a little bit broken. I can't get it to work all the time because the API changes. So, like, in the middle of the day, it just stops working until I go back to acquit it and restart it. It's made me much happier. Last night I tweeted, just replied to me with your most recent self. No cheating. And then all day today, instead of reading Twitter, I would just read my replies and just look at happy people smiling into the camera. It was, you know, perfect strangers, I recognize very few of them.

But it was like, oh, this is how I used to feel about Instagram. Nobody is trying to take the perfect picture. There's no think fluencers. There aren't a ton of ads, honestly. It was just picture after picture of happy people enjoying themselves and, you know, mugging for the camera. It was great. If Twitter were a well-run company that deployed its resources appropriately, what I would have done in this case is while announcing this, I would have said,

and let me tell you about the investments we're making in our first-party clients, right? Like, let me tell you about some of the things that we're going to be bringing toward the native Twitter app, toward tweet deck, right? Like, help people understand that you know why they're using these apps instead of your own and tell them that at least some of those features are going to come to your apps in a reason. time frame. Oh, no, but Casey. That's how Twitter could generate some goodwill. In their statement today, in their blog posts, they said that they're committing to understanding why people

hire third-party clients over our own apps. Well, because they exist. They're committed to understanding. But literally, they fucking exist. Why hire? Why people hire third-party clients over our own apps? That's product manager lingo. Product manager lingo is like when

you use software, you're hiring it to do a job. So this is like now infected corporate blog posts. Maybe, maybe don't use that language. You know what they exist. What if you want to hire, say, I don't know, a butler. God damn. And I do. And one person is like, I am a butler.

And the other person is like, I will only buttle for you inside of a crumb tab. They're like, unpick the butler. Like the actual butler. Like, it's very simple. Wait, is the act of providing Twitter to twiddle? Okay, we're done. Casey, it's wonderful having you. Hey, I had a great time.

If you haven't listened to Converge, the full first season is up on your favorite podcast provider right now. You should check that out. Kay, what's the one thing you want people to think about as they listen to Converge? I want you to think about who you would like to see on season two. And if you think it could be tweaked in a way that would make more people listen to it, what would that way be? That would be great. And then tweet at Casey. Hashtag Benghazi.

I'll tell you, we're going to do season two. You can stop tweeting me about it. We're going to do it. But first, Casey has to get us through the midterms. It's a lot's happening. Get America through the midterms. Thank you very much, Casey. Check out the...

Verge.com slash your interface, right? That's right. And you can subscribe to the newsletter, which you should absolutely do because it is truly... It's hard to say it's a delight because it's about an awful thing. But Casey's a delight.

The newsletter is a delight. The subject matter is deeply depressing on most days. But check out the interface, listen to Converge. Thank you very much, Casey. All right, Paul. You.

Every week, buddy. Mm-hmm. You do a segment. It's called. Oh, God. Phone prison That's the name of the Verge cast Phone prison is brought to you by Darn Tough Vermont socks

Courageous enough to make socks without headphone jacks Made in the USA and unconditionally I'm being trolled by the sock company now For life visit darntuff.com slash verge for 20% off your first order That's darntuff.com slash verge Thank you darn tough for sponsoring phone prison.

If you put a phone in a darn tough sock, it wouldn't be able to get out because it's so darn tough. It would be like a phone prison. Just tell us about phone prison. Okay. TechDin fights your kids tech addiction using a box. Okay. So this is a box.

There's an also an app. It's a Kickstarter, of course. It's a box. You put the phone in the box. Then the box shuts like a window and the phone is trapped in the box until you say it's okay for your kid to have the phone back. So it's a way to like moderate the amount of time kids use. There's some agency. Is the phone always in the box?

No. Also the box charges the phone. So is it a phone case or is like a freestanding box? It's a box. It's like a toaster. It's like a poster. It's like a toaster. It looks like a toaster with a big for like a large piece of bread.

Yeah. A single slot mega toaster. You put the phone in. Does the phone pop up? It should have popped hurts in it. No, it should have, you know the very fancy toaster strudels that you,

like keeping the freezer that Pillsbury makes? I mean, it's like, hey, kid, you want to use your phone? It's not time yet, but enjoy this pastry. It's like, take that deal.

Tell me more of the phone prison. So there's an app, and so the parents know when the phone is in or out of the prison. Yeah. Kids can apparently, like, determine, like, have some level of autonomy where they can, they get a certain amount of time to use the phone. And they can earn points, I think. Oh, my.

To getting their phone out of the phone. But, like, there's some sort of flexibility. It's not always, like, on a set schedule of when the prison is locked. Operating. So you're saying there's, like, time in the yard for the phone. Yeah. Techton. How much does this cost?

I have no idea. Here's what I, my brother-in-law, you know, I have like a 13-year-old niece and nephew. My brother-in-law just installed like MDM software on their phones. All of the apps and the internet shuts off at 8 p.m. every night. All the apps disappear and the internet goes away every night at 8. Wow. And when they visit me, they're in Chicago, so they're in different time zone. So they definitely fooled him the last time.

They're like, it's not 8 o'clock yet. So it was only 7 o'clock here. They got that extra hour. It's like It depends on how early, early bird You get in on the Kickstarter It starts at 119 for super early bird Goes up to like 200 bucks

That's a lot I feel like you can just take the phone away You don't have to gamify Imprisoning the phone I don't know I like it All right Deeter you put Chromebook here Oh I just wanted to point out that

In addition to the pixel stuff We're expecting Chromebooks in Google's Presumably October event And people are starting to get excited because it looks like they might allow Windows 10 dual booting on high-end Chromebooks, maybe just a pixel book. Really? Yeah.

They've been looking, there's stuff in the commits. There's, like, there's a rumor that they're looking for certification from Windows to allow it. Yeah. That'd be great. What? Why not? I mean, I guess it tracks with Google's general, why not philosophy and product development. But, okay.

I mean, if it's a checkbox that they need to sell it into enterprise, it's worth it. That's such a weird checkbox to have. Eh. Like, I want your operating system, but sometimes I don't. Yeah. So the rumor is, it's like a, like a camp, a boot camp thing. The rumor is called campfire. Yeah.

Oh, God. I know. So it's not like a, you don't think they'd be selling these, like, out of the box. They already have windows installed. I doubt it. No, I'm sure it's like a campfire, like a boot camp thing. The other rumor, and I just, I love going to Carlin Box to read them diving into the repositories to find the code.

But the nocturn is the code name that they're expecting for the next generation pixel book and they're expecting it to be a detachable with a fingerprint sensor. So a Windows 10. This is one of the wonderful thing. So I wrote up like some rumor a little while back in it was like a prelude to a new

Samsung Chromebook coming out. There's a text document in the like the Chrome OS open source repository and this text document just lists all the code names and the features. And it's like a, it's like I think I think it's like a boot script or some sort of script that reads this file and it's like, oh, you need this feature, oh, you got this size screen, all right.

And so every new Chromebook that comes out, someone just adds the new Chromebook to this text document. And so every Chromebook is leaked. That's beautiful. I love it. Our editorial director, Helen Havlack, her MacBook died. So I dug a 2015 Chromebook pixel out of the reviews closet for her. And she spent this week being like, I love this laptop.

Yeah. That was a great laptop. Yeah. I kind of love it too. And I want on eBay to find one and they still sell for a lot of money. Yeah, I believe that. Well, I'm still going to buy one on eBay. I'm using a pixel book this week.

Using it right now. Yeah, I mean, so I was looking at yours and I was looking at that one and that one, there's something about that one that's just, it is one of the best computers ever made. Anyway, we're way over. Krustini. You're just saying Chromebook names right now? No, Kirstini. No, it's the Linux apps on Chrome.

Everything's coming up. Chromebook is what I'm saying. All right. Well, you just keep saying the name of breads. Well, I'm about the show. I want to tell you right now, watch Home of the Future. We talked about a lot on the show. Grant Mhara from Mythbusters, hosting that show for us on YouTube right now.

It's super fun. Go watch it. People really like it. We had Casey on. Check out the interface. That's verge. That's verge. It's Verge.

All available right now. Go listen to that with Casey. Casey is wonderful. Just consume everything he makes. Follow the Verge on Twitter. We're at Verge. On Instagram, at Verge. Apple Podcast, rate us, review us.

You want more tech podcasts. in a recode decode with Kara Swisher, recode media of Peter Kafka. This episode of Verschast brought to you by the Audi ETRON. Despite all of its technology, there's a lot that all-new Audi E-Eatron doesn't offer. For example, it has no tailpipe emissions, and there's no need to fill up with the gas stations as plug it at home. The Quatro all-wheel drive offers no reason not to tackle roads in almost any weather.

And at a long-range capabilities on high-speed charging. E-Tron is a new way to think about electric mobility, which makes sense. It's the first fully electric vehicle from Audi. E-Tron was built to defy the elements upend the conventional wisdom. So, in truth, it isn't really lacking anything. What a twist. After all, it's not just electric car.

It's an electric Audi. ETRON is here, and the future is electric. Visit AudiUSA slash ETRon to learn more and stay informed. That is it. You can tweet us. I'm reckless. Paul. Future Paul. Theater's backline.

Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode. Hi, Vergecast listeners. This is Amanda Kluid, Eater's editor-in-chief, and I'm here to tell you about a new show that we just launched on PBS with Chef Marcus Samuelson that I think you will really enjoy. Every Tuesday, Marcus explores the food and culture of a different

immigrant community across the United States. First, he explored the Arab American community and their cuisine in Dearborn, Michigan. Next up is Vietnamese food in New Orleans and then Haitian food in Miami, and the list goes on and on. I really like the show because I'm learning about foods and traditions and cultures that I didn't know existed in the United States. So I hope you like the show. I hope you learn something. Check it out every Tuesday night at 9 p.m. on eater.com slash no passport required or on PBS.