All Things Alt-Tech

Nov 06 2022 38 ep. 15 mins 4

Digital media veteran provides unfiltered commentary on alt-tech and the emerging digital ecosystem. If you are interested in next generation social platforms & browsers, privacy & free speech issues, or general banter on the creepy online media industry, this one is for you. Fair warning: contains rampant speculation, rants and potentially infectious ideas on crypto & stock speculations!

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Podcast: Big Tech’s Great Leap Forward: Towards a Chinese Style Internet

Nov 06 2022 18 mins

Where we’re going, is to towards a censored, sanitized, corporate, Internet where the Party comes first, and any questioning of the new great leader will be cracked down upon. There is already a good example of what this looks like: China. According to the Chinese government, what it does is to protect "the safe flow of internet information and actively guides people to manage

Hail the new ministry of truth: Big Tech

Nov 10 2020 18 mins

Yet again, fact is stranger than fiction, as more and more parallels between Big tech and the Ministry of Truth abound. Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, Zuck, and Sundar Pichai were all summoned in front of Congress for another hearing (Twitter and Facebook both decided that the laptop from hell had to be memory holed; hidden from the collective consciousness of America as we entered the el

Censorship in the Soviet Union vs the US: is history repeating?

Oct 20 2020 17 mins

In the USSR, to maintain the various official government narratives, certain facts, news and entire persons had to be silenced at all cost. In fact, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, one of their first decisions was to limit free speech through censorship, of course all the while claiming they were promoting freedom. In the same year, the Soviet government signed

2020: News is now a branded entertainment product

Oct 07 2020 12 mins

Is the economy recovering or deteriorating? Does wearing masks help? Is the virus a life-threatening issue? Do lockdowns work? Is there a working vaccine? These are fairly straight-forward questions, but you get two decisively different answers depending on your choice of news source. There’s often two different camps to each question -- and what’s the denominator for those

The fraudulent dot-com 2.0 economy: from zero-asset businesses to zero-product businesses

Sep 24 2020 20 mins

What do most Big Tech companies have in common? Let's see. Uber owns no cars, Airbnb owns no real estate, Facebook has no content of its own, YouTube: owns no videos, Instagram: no images, etc. People who defend the 'zero-asset' model of Airbnb and the others, will stress that building an online business is all about the network effects and providing the infrastructure for users. W

Big tech, the Tiktok ban & how the US is wrecking tech innovation

Sep 07 2020 20 mins

We to go back to dissect the big tech hearing in the us congres, where Bezos, Pichai, Zuckerberg and Tim Cook were summoned and questioned. The big tech leaders knew very well about two core issues at hand: 1. Antitrust: they are, in essence monopolies of their respective spaces, and that’s why they came prepared with canned responses (it’s why they stated their testimonie

Social media culture: how big tech gamified away real conversation

Jul 15 2020 14 mins

A lot has been said about how the twitter and Facebook algorithms tailored to stoke aggression and provoke conflict. If you’re Facebook, and you are optimizing for time on site and page views, it's hardly surprising they end up surfacing polarizing content. If it's engagement you want, then showcasing content that plays on primal emotions will get you there. It’s not just th

The Facebook advertiser boycott — does it make a difference?

Jul 04 2020 11 mins

A list of 400 big businesses have decided to boycott Facebook and pause their Facebook ad campaigns. This is in protest to Facebook’s so called enabling of hate speech. They are demanding that Facebook establish a permanent civil rights infrastructure to evaluate Facebook's products and policies for discrimination, bias, and hate. They are demanding that Facebook remove

Parler vous? A Twitter alternative surges following new social media bans

Jul 02 2020 14 mins

Most recently, Twitter censored Trump over his warnings to protestors seeking to set up an anonymous zone in Washington DC. He said ‘if they try, they’ll be met by serious force’. Apparently, that message was not allowed by the Twitter. Because, apparently, Twitter gets to decide which of the messages of a president are fit for broadcast. Of course, that’s not the first

Uncomfortable truths about Bitcoin, Tether… and Wirecard?

Jun 29 2020 13 mins

Hodler bias: you want something to go up in price, so you disagree with all the bearish facts. You see investors perform mental gymnastics around the uncomfortable facts, and this is something that unites Bitcoiners, Tesla 'investors' and Wirecard victims alike. Bitcoin will play some sort of role, but it’s not obvious that it will be a critical one. It could remain as a smug