Saturday, June 14, 2025

Getting Wired.4

(Fourth in a series.)

Whether we were aware of it or not, our creative teams at HotWired/Wired Digital in 1996-7 were helping design the future of media. There was no roadmap but there was a sense of urgency. And as one of those ostensibly in charge, I figured the kind of manager the staff really needed was one who knew when to stay out of their way.

This was a time of invention.

But our staffers also desperately needed someone with a direct channel to Wired co-founder and CEO Louis Rossetto. Without Louis’s blessing, many of their promising new ideas would die on the vine.

So I became that person.

Politics of the left-right variety had very little to do with how the events I am chronicling here unfolded. Politics of the inter-personal variety would have everything to do with the outcome, however.

Before I could lobby Louis on my staff’s behalf, I had to understand in detail the ideas they were proposing, which ranged from simple to complex, original, flaky, redundant, cynical, silly or promising. So I established an open-door style of management, which wasn't terribly difficult because there were no doors on my office. We all sat together in one big open space spread over two floors connected by a spiral staircase in the middle.

There were a few airless conference rooms so we gathered there when we could, although as the sleep-deprived father of a new baby, I occasionally had trouble staying alert in them. But my assistant booked consecutive 15-minute sessions from early morning until evening for me every workday and repeated cups of coffee took care of the rest.

There were endless subjects to talk over because initially we were in essence a multimedia company covering everything. The staffers usually wanted to meet me in groups — there were several on each team. But a few specific individuals preferred to meet me one-on-one — these were among the more personally ambitious types.

It didn't take long for me to fall in love with the Gen X cohort as a group. They were a tad older than my oldest child, who was born when I was at Rolling Stone. They were a bunch of smart, cranky iconoclasts stretching the limits of Internet technology to tell stories in new ways. They were cynically idealistic with a creative spirit that was infectious. They also were rebellious.

They reminded me of the Rolling Stone crowd, actually, from 20 years earlier. They had their own interpretation of sex, drugs, and rock & roll, which was displayed usually — but not always —after closing time, sometimes on the roof. A few of them partied hard. Alas, I didn’t join my staff members in any of these activities. While they partied, I was singing babies to sleep to “You’re So Pretty” by the Cranberries.

But I did know that the neighborhood around our office still contained some of the same bars and clubs we'd hung out at back in my RS days, although probably under new management. Over the years, South Park had gotten gentrified from a quaint tree-lined loop where black families lived in a tight community into what was now a disjointed hipster lunch hangout/epicenter of the digital revolution.

You might say the music was different now but the venue the same. Meanwhile, at the corporate level of Wired Inc., big plans were afoot. Louis and the leadership wanted to take the company public and cash in like the dot.com entrepreneurs the magazine celebrated, and they put together an all-star cast of VC’s to do it. But when they first tried to do that in the summer of 1996, a temporary hiccup in the stock market for red-hot tech stocks caused them to withdraw the offer.

Later in the year a second try at an IPO failed as well, which was a much more serious signal that trouble lay ahead. But by then I was too busy managing our scores of workers and our emergence as a viable web-based media company to give it more than a passing thought. 

On the industrial level, we were becoming extremely proficient not only at launching new websites, but building production systems to push out our voluminous flows of content. Publishing stories on the web required a series of editorial and technical steps by staff members with different skills and this all had to be done by hand. (Automated platforms like Wordpress appeared years later.) 

So we had to devise our own process that ushered each piece through the various stages of production quickly and efficiently until it was ready to go live.

I insisted that one of those steps be fact-checking. Among our numerous correspondents was a young fellow named Matt Drudge in L.A., who seemed to have his finger on the pulse of rumors circulating around Hollywood and Washington D.C. But we discovered many of his reports required serious fact-checking before we could publish them.

(In the spirit of the times, very soon one of Drudge’s rumors would almost take down the President of the U.S., but that’s another story.) 

The traditional production schedule of a daily or a weekly print outlet simply couldn’t work for us since we were able to publish pretty much anytime we wished, which was all the time. This was the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle, which had just been ushered in by the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the maturing of cable TV, but there were no real news industry standards yet for how to manage organizations on the web facing this kind of “always-on” reality. 

That meant that some of us at the top had to be always-on as well. 

Looking for advice, I started to meet with a handful of other Bay Area executives pondering similar workflow problems at CNET, Knight-Ridder, Yahoo, @Home and others. 

The specific website issues were basic ones: How to position banner ads, display color-coded links, indicate sponsored content and the like. Some of the folks in our ad-hoc group went on to help form the nonprofit Online News Association in 1999.

Meanwhile, throughout 1996 and the first half of 1997, Wired was aggressively entering into new partnerships and business deals. The global news service Reuters embedded a personable editor named Dick Satran in our newsroom as we negotiated a deal to distribute our digital news globally.

This was a major development. Now the Wired brand could circle the globe like the Associated Press with a strong technology focus. We felt we could quickly take ownership over this new content space. That was an external goal we set for ourselves.

Internally, in order to rationalize the chaotic jumble of sub-brands into a cohesive whole, we decided to rebrand the entire enterprise Wired Digital, with one main product called Wired News. Our prior identity as HotWired would have to hit the dust. This was a logical but difficult decision that required all of my skill managing up to convince Louis that it was the right thing to do.

In the aftermath of the failed IPOs, Louis had become somewhat isolated from the senior execs on the digital side, so they asked me to convince him of the branding change, since he and I continued to have our spirited weekly discussions as always.

Plus I fully supported the change myself; HotWired seemed dated by then.

Louis didn’t like the idea, but I worked with him and eventually he came around to it.

As part of this transition, we had to sell off some of our popular but less brand-relevant properties, notably the successful alt-health channel "Ask Dr. Weil," edited by Steven Petrow. We sold it to Time Inc., which led to a personal reunion for me with Time senior executive Dan Okrent, an old colleague from The Michigan Daily days (1966-9). 

As I showed Okrent around our shop, we compared notes on our separate journeys since college through competing media worlds -- him at the pinnacle of the traditional media world in New York; me at the bleeding edge of new media world in San Francisco.

We both knew our worlds were colliding head-on in real time; neither of us knew which one, if either, would prevail. 

In order to fill out the staff for Wired News, we hired a few experienced editors to provide guidance to the younger staff members, since few of the latter had actually attended journalism school or spent time at newspapers, magazines or broadcast media companies. What I hoped was that we would create a blend of the old and the new that preserved journalistic standards while breaking new ground.

And we did break stories, for example by revealing clues in the html coding behind the website of the Heaven’s Gate cult about why 40 of them committed mass suicide in San Diego in 1997.

But during the spring and summer of 1997, despite our best efforts on the digital side, dark storm clouds were beginning to appear on Wired Inc.'s horizon. The failed IPOs had undermined confidence in Louis's leadership and an ambitious set of younger execs had been moved by outside investors into positions of influence inside the company.

They began plotting a coup.

Aware of these rumblings for management change, I chose to double down on my loyalty to Louis and his vision; especially because my dozens of young staff members were literally pouring their hearts out building a new media company according to that vision -- one where their own dreams might also have a fighting chance to come true.

This was all probably going to be ending badly for me, I began to realize, but it wouldn’t be the first (or the last) time for that to happen. Besides, loyalty to the person who had believed in me and given me the freedom to build a successful product called Wired News was the right thing to do — for me, for him and for my staff.

Meanwhile, the hourglass for all of us was quickly running out. 

(To Be Continued)

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Friday, June 13, 2025

Getting Wired.3


(Third in a series)

Early in 1996, our workforce at HotWired expanded. We had outgrown the original office adjacent to Wired magazine, so we moved a block south to another converted warehouse at 660 Third Street.

For me, if the parallels from my time at Rolling Stone two decades earlier weren't already in mind, they now became inescapable. From a window next to my desk at HotWired I could look directly into the office across the street at 625 where Howard Kohn and I had written our three-part series about Patty Hearst and the SLA 20 years earlier.

One of many similarities between the two companies was the almost constant stream of celebrities who wanted to visit us when they came to San Francisco. At Rolling Stone, it had been rock stars, of course, but also journalists, professors, actors and politicians.

HotWired was no different, but the visitors now included future billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, as well as what seemed like every other aspiring Internet entrepreneur on the planet. Also there were tech-savvy musicians like Brian Eno and politicians like Bill Bradley, a former Olympic basketball player and senator who was running for president. 

Among those who visited me were reporters from the Washington Post, Newsweek, the L.A. Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, NPR and the major TV networks. They marveled at the scene as I sprinkled my newly memorized web terms liberally into sound bites that made me sound like much more of an expert than I was.

But many of the reporters also confided to me that this whole scene made them uncomfortable because if the digital revolution succeeded it seemed likely to threaten our profession. Not to mention what it would mean for our society at large.

I was hopeful they were wrong on both counts, but 30 years later, it’s clear they were right. The devastation to the media world is obvious for all to see. Just look around. So many newspapers have closed that in most cities it is a surprise to discover that one still exists. Thousands of once-important newspapers have closed their operations since the Web started disrupting their business models circa 1994.

Old media companies couldn’t just “give it away” when it came to content. They needed the revenue from subscribers and sponsors and newsstand sales and classified ads to keep operating. One of the early harbingers of their doom was the overnight success of Craigslist, launched across town in 1995 by an unassuming fellow named Craig Newmark.

San Francisco newspaper executive Phil Bronstein reminded me many years later that I had warned him when Craigslist first appeared that he should try to get the Hearst Corp. to buy it and that they they might regret not doing so later. That was an understatement.

Newspapers have not been the only victims. TV and radio have suffered greatly from the digital revolution as well, losing audiences and advertising share. As have magazines. Book publishing has been decimated.

Meanwhile, the new media world has splintered into a thousand shards of digital sites catering to niche audiences and even more niche opinions. Losing the media industry was one thing. Losing our democracy is quite another. Fringe theories, conspiracy thinking, extremist movements have all flourished in the Digital Age, ultimately threatening our most precious freedoms in the process.

But that was not the story as we envisioned it back at HotWired in 1996.

At that moment, a stock market frenzy was making Internet millionaires out of 26-year-olds right and left, and it was widely known that Wired, too, was preparing for its own IPO -- initial public offering — later that year. 

One of the documents I carried around with me as a reminder of where we headed was the Wired prospectus for potential investors. It described how Wired Inc. would help lead the rise of an Internet economy to become a global media empire.

No small part of that vision hinged on the efforts of our team at HotWired, since the kinds of multiples envisioned in the prospectus could never be generated by an analog magazine alone.

So at HotWired we were experimenting with a wide range of content strategies, including a search engine (HotBot), advertising models (the banner ad was a HotWired creation), the earliest web blogs (like Suck), interactive bulletin boards, audio programs (presaging podcasts) and digital video, which included a fledgling TV program called Netizen TV.

We also foresaw the future of interactive broadband video. We were involved with Microsoft and NBC when they created MSNBC with that in mind. I was among a small group of Wired execs who flew to New York during the negotiations that led to the cable network’s formation — we ate steak and smoked cigars and toasted a future we thought might include Wired and by extension each of us.

They were heady times.

For the first time in my working life, I held options to purchase shares in my employer’s company that would vest over time — four years to be exact. And as a vice-president, my holdings were large enough to potentially make me a modestly wealthy man in the process -- a prospect that had never even occurred to me before.

But hey, I’m getting ahead of myself in the story, which is much bigger than the fate of any one person. Back then in 1996, pretty much anything still seemed possible. 

(To be continued.)

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Thursday, June 12, 2025

Getting Wired.2

By the time I joined the HotWired team in late 1995, I'd been working in media for almost 30 years. This was not necessarily a good thing in the eyes of my new colleagues, who were busily upending the analog media world I came from with a digital alternative they considered far superior.

“Content wants to be free” was a standard rallying cry at HotWired, which was not yet two years old and was undergoing a massive growth spurt fueled by corporate advertising revenue. We were hiring people almost as fast as we could; I joked to friends that our interviewing strategy was to lock the door behind candidates so they couldn't leave once they were inside. 

But nobody wanted to leave -- if you were Gen-X and into creative media work in the mid-1990s, this is exactly where you wanted to be.

As for me, I was twice as old as most of the other employees, and my career had been almost entirely in the alternativemedia, not the mainstream. From my days in the underground press to SunDance to Rolling Stone to the Center for Investigative Reporting and from New West to Mother Jones and public radio plus other stops along the way, I had pretty much remained outside of traditional journalism institutions.

But in those jobs I did adhere strictly to the values and standards of traditional journalists.

My new colleagues were early-stage writers and reporters and editors and designers and photographers and engineers and interface experts and audience research specialists and several other categories of workers, almost all of them in their mid-to-late 20s.

To most of them, I was probably sort of like a nutty uncle.

They used a techno lingo unfamiliar to me, with terms like web browser, domain name, interactivity, bandwidth, interface, pixels, TCP/IP, url, html, coding, style sheets, IP address, network domain and on and on -- so many strange words that I scribbled them down on a scrap of paper and kept it in my pocket exactly as I did with foreign language phrases when visiting non-English-speaking countries overseas.

After a few months, I finally got around to asking someone what all of these words actually meant. He smirked and quipped: "Don't worry what they mean; just sprinkle them liberally into your speech and your market value will triple."

As I pondered that, the daily political site my team produced called The Netizen began to flourish. We rapidly built a large audience during the early months of election cycle 1996, which attracted the interest of Wired's co-founder and CEO, Louis Rossetto. 

He had a reputation as an articulate visionary but an extremely difficult boss; many employees seemed fearful of his outbursts. He was a fierce advocate of libertarian political views, a lifelong Republican, pro-corporate and bluntly dismissive of leftist ideas. 

So when Rossetto first summoned me to a private meeting I really didn't know what to expect. Most of my previous work had appeared in left-leaning publications, and he probably assumed my politics were defined by that. Maybe he wanted to suss me out.

From our very first meeting, the Louis I got to know was quite different from his image. He was smart and opinionated, true, but also quiet-spoken, thoughtful and happy to debate the issues of the day with me at great length. Most importantly, he was committed to remaining open-minded about how we covered those issues in The Netizen.

That kind of tolerance was essential if I was to remain part of the Wired organization, which I already knew I wanted to do. Louis and I quickly developed a mutual trust that allowed us to argue through the various sides of the issues we were covering and agree to disagree when we could not reach a consensus.

Meanwhile he never interfered in my actual editorial choices, though they repeatedly differed from what I know he would have preferred.

The ultimate test came when one of our cantankerous Netizen columnists decided to write a piece savagely critical of Wired itself. He decided to lambast the institution and everything it stood for in his daily column. 

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! This surely would be too much for Louis to handle, I thought.

As the hit piece was about to post, I was gathering up my family pictures from my desk to put in my briefcase since I assumed that I'd soon be out of a job again. But first, as a courtesy to Louis I let him know what was coming. His response was shocking and refreshingly direct: 

"Let him rant!" 

We ran the piece unedited. My job was secure. 

For me, that moment confirmed that Rossetto was committed to his principles, which started with free speech for everyone.

Looking back on that incident, I realize that by then dealing with bosses other people considered difficult was becoming something of a habit for me; after all, I'd studied under one the masters, Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. Others may have feared these men and their legendary outbursts, but I genuinely liked them and developed a deep fondness for both Jann and Louis that lasted well past my jobs with them.

A few months after the “Let him rant” episode, Louis suddenly summoned me to his office again for an unscheduled meeting. Again, I assumed there must be bad news of some sort, but instead he surprised me by saying he wanted to move me to the top of the org chart as V.P. of Content Management for all of the websites in the HotWired network.

I was content producing The Netizen and hadn't sought this role at all but of course I agreed to it, especially because it came with a hefty raise, and at home we had another baby on the way. 

In my new role, dozens of people now reported to me, including my former bosses who were about half my age and seemed stunned by the change. 

If I was going to head up this brilliant, unruly band of web revolutionaries, by acting as “the adult in the room” (as some called me), I was going to have to do it my way.

(To be continued)

HEADLINES:

  • Air India jet carrying 242 crashes in India with 'no survivors' likely, marking 1st Boeing 787 crash (ABC)

  • Gavin Newsom declares ‘democracy is under assault’ in blistering attack on president (Guardian)

  • ‘Come and get me’: Gavin Newsom has entered the meme war (WP)

  • Anti-ICE Protests Spread to NYC, Chicago After LA Imposes Curfew (Bloomberg)

  • Hundreds arrested in L.A. protests; more demonstrations planned across the U.S. (LAT)

  • Protests grow across the U.S. as people push against Trump's mass deportation policies (NPR)

  • Several cities braced for protests against President Donald Trump's sweeping immigration raids, as parts of Los Angeles spent the night under curfew in an effort to quell five days of unrest. (Reuters)

  • Trump Declares Dubious Emergencies to Amass Power, Scholars Say (NYT)

  • The White House Is Delighted With Events in Los Angeles (Atlantic)

  • In the decade he has been in the political spotlight, Trump has shown a desire to turn the U.S. into a police state, with him at the top. What he's now doing in Los Angeles is a warning to the rest of the nation, HuffPost's Paul Blumenthal explains. [HuffPost]

  • The Silence of the Generals (Atlantic)

  • When the Troops Are Sent In (Slate)

  • Immigration raid at Omaha meat production plant leaves company officials bewildered (Politico)

  • Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired (Guardian)

  • Musk backs off from feud with Trump, saying some posts ‘went too far’ (WP)

  • The US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which influence school lunches, medical advice and nutrition standards, are expected to be released as soon as June, two sources familiar with the matter said. (Reuters)

  • US withdraws some diplomats and military families from Middle East amid Iran tensions (CNN)

  • Trump says China tariffs will stay high after two days of talks (NBC)

  • Trump’s China ‘truce’ is nothing of the sort (CNN)

  • Google offers buyouts to more workers amid AI-driven tech upheaval and antitrust uncertainty (AP)

  • More than two dozen states filed a lawsuit this week in the 23andMe bankruptcy case. They are arguing that customers should own the rights to their DNA. (WP)

  • Greenland and Iceland saw record heat in May. What does that mean for the world? (AP)

  • Brian Wilson, Pop Auteur and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82 (NYT)

  • Cognizant's CEO tells us his counterargument to the idea that AI will decimate entry-level white-collar jobs (Business Insider)

  • Fake Images and Conspiracy Theories Swirl Around L.A. Protests (NYT)

  • A frustrated Zuckerberg makes his biggest AI bet as Meta nears $14 billion stake in Scale AI, hires founder Wang (CNBC)

  • Meta Hires Top Researchers From Google, Sesame for New AI Lab (Business Insider)

  • AI companies in China are trying to stop college entrance exam cheating. (WP)

  • Amazon Teases Next James Bond Will Face Off Against Threat Of Collective Bargaining (The Onion)

 

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Wednesday, June 11, 2025

Getting Wired


Late in 1995, after helping David Talbot & crew launch Salon, I was invited over to tour the headquarters of Wired magazine by one of the editors, John Battelle, who knew me from my years teaching at U-C Berkeley.

The magazine’s office had cubicles, computers, rock ‘n roll playing in the background and a few dogs lounging around.

But the real attraction lay on the other side of a common kitchen area where HotWired — the online side of Wired magazine was located.

It was a striking scene. Row after row of 20-somethings sat working on laptops perched on doors balanced over sawhorses, with the Chili Peppers blasting and a whiff of marijuana in the air. A couple of my former interns stood up to greet me and showed how they were designing content for a wide range of websites.

Right after I left the office, I called home to say, "I've just found the next place I want to work." I also put the word out on my network.

It took several weeks for the call to come from HotWired offering me a job as producer of what would be the web's first daily political news site, called The Netizen.

Although the starting salary was barely half what I'd previously been making, and I did have the needs of a new family at home to consider, I accepted the offer without hesitation and said I could start the next day.

On day one, I was introduced to a small staff of producers and designers with hardly any journalism experience. But they were smart, highly motivated and ready to invent something.

I quickly hired two of the brightest young journalists (and former students) I knew from Berkeley and set out to work with the developer team -- the head engineer was a former colleague from Mother Jones, and we set a crash course to build The Netizen.

We launched the website in something like 28 days.

It was a presidential election year, so we hired three experienced political writers as our correspondents and they fanned out across the campaign trail to cover the re-election effort of incumbent Bill Clinton and his Republican challengers, including the eventual nominee, Bob Dole.

I had been assured complete editorial independence for the operation, and it quickly attracted a very large audience among the early adopters then flocking to the web. Day after day we published smart, snarky takes from all sides of the political spectrum with a decidedly libertarian streak, in accordance with the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley.

For me it was exciting -- new ideas sprouted daily, young staffers were quickly developing editorial skills, and we were able collectively to generate controversy almost without trying.

Email was still a new phenomenon, and the feedback from readers that poured in upon publication included some that were outright abusive, often misogynistic, which disturbed me and was a harbinger of things to come.

Thinking back with the benefit of hindsight, I had an early glimpse of how hate, lies and conspiracies might flourish in this new environment, but I didn’t know what to do about that at the time.

Free speech was free speech, I told myself somewhat naively. And outside of the negative stuff, I liked the chaotic two-way communication cacophony of the web. It was a free-for-all.

Our readers blasted off at our writers in ways traditional journalism never had experienced. Those of us from legacy media were used to being the last word on a topic. In this new media, as I told a Poynter symposium, we were only the first word. It was a conversation, not a broadcast.

Everyone on staff handled it in relatively good spirits as The Netizen quickly rocketed into position as one of the leading news sites on the web.

If I was the pilot, it felt like I was guiding a ship far out into space, destination unknown.

(To be continued.)

HEADLINES:

  • Newsom says president is stepping toward authoritarianism (WP)

  • Newsom asks court to block Trump's use of military to support LA immigration raids (AP)

  • Los Angeles Mayor Imposes Curfew in Downtown (NYT)

  • US Deploys Marines to LA as Protests Spread to More Cities (Bloomberg)

  • Troop deployment to cost $134 million; LAPD looks to assert calm; legal battle over Marines heats up (LAT)

  • Trump’s California troop deployment is impeachable, CBC chair says (Politico)

  • Donald Trump says Los Angeles ‘would be on fire’ if troops had not been deployed (Financial Times)

  • ‘He’s waging a war on us’: As Trump escalates, Angelenos defend their city (WP)

  • Speaker Johnson, backing Trump's LA actions, says Newsom should be 'tarred and feathered' (ABC)

  • Trump's decision to send the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles has created substantial political risks for California Governor Gavin Newsom. (Reuters)

  • An exchange from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing indicates that Trump has on his side a Pentagon chief apparently ready to carry out any order he gives him, possibly including a potentially illegal one to shoot American citizens. [HuffPost]

  • Kennedy Removes All C.D.C. Vaccine Panel Experts (NYT)

  • The Abrego Garcia Indictment Raises More Questions Than It Answers (National Review)

  • Republicans Have a Revenue Problem (Atlantic)

  • A Federal Program to Protect US Cities Against Extreme Heat Has Just Evaporated (Mother Jones)

  • Rural Republicans used to back NPR. Then MAGA changed everything. (WP)

  • Study finds little agreement between Republicans and Democrats on media sources they trust (AP)

  • When Donald Trump calls, one Big Law firm answers (Business Insider)

  • Israel deports activist Greta Thunberg after military seized Gaza Freedom Flotilla ship (CBS)

  • From Gaza prisoner to ‘the Israeli agent’: how rise of Abu Shabab could ignite new phase of war (Guardian)

  • Netanyahu’s government could collapse over Israel’s ultra-Orthodox military draft law (AP)

  • World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says (BBC)

  • An ever riskier world economy (Financial Times)

  • Meta launching AI superintelligence lab with nine-figure pay push, reports say (Axios)

  • Apple’s New Software Focuses on Design Aesthetics Over A.I. (NYT)

  • Food Banks Begin Accepting Donations From Homosexuals (The Onion)

 

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Tuesday, June 10, 2025

The Provocateur

Courtesy of Mark Fiore:



Watching reporters walk along the narrow line between police and protesters in L.A. Monday took me back 57 years to 1968 in Memphis and Dr. Martin Luther King’s last march in support of the city’s sanitation workers, who were on strike for better working conditions.

At times like these, the first thing you note is the mixture of anger and fear in the young faces of both sides of that line.

The danger is high. One misstep by anyone and disaster could ensue.

However you might choose to characterize the situation in L.A., one thing is clear. This is exactly the kind of scenario Trump has been preparing for in his grab for complete power.

This may well be how the U.S. and its fragile democracy will teeter over into authoritarianism, not this time but in the future. Trump has already taken illegal steps by federalizing the national guard and deploying marines — steps California has challenged in court.

Keeping the peace is not Trump’s intent. His acts seem meant to provoke a conflict that turns violent, giving him an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and further escalate the situation.

Playing into Trump’s hands were the small numbers of anarchists who threw objects at the police, defaced buildings and started fires. We’ve seen these agitators infiltrate large protests on the west coast in the past, whenever they can melt into the crowd and elude arrest.

That the overwhelming majority of protestors are peaceful, law-abiding residents was one key to the process of de-escalating the confrontation. As of late Monday night, most of them had dispersed, lowering tensions and raising hopes that this crisis will pass — for now.

The other key was the restrained but forceful professionalism of the LAPD and other local law enforcement agencies.

That left the provocateurs — both on the streets and the White House — naked and exposed for all to see.

Mark Fiore is a PulitzerPrize-winning cartoonist and former colleague of mine at KQED. Please check out his Substack page.

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Monday, June 09, 2025

Remember Manners?

The latest from L.A.:

“The State of California will file a lawsuit on Monday challenging President Trump’s order federalizing its National Guard forces, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on social media, as the city of Los Angeles braced for a fourth consecutive day of clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement officials over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.”(New York Times)

(I published an earlier version of this essay five years ago.)

One legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic, little noted at the time, was the increased use of robots in our society. They didn't need masks or social distancing and they didn't take sick days, vacations or parental leave.

They also didn't take offense when treated badly or needed to be thanked for doing a good job. In fact they didn’t require any emotional involvement whatsoever.

As robotized services including Alexa and Siri became more embedded in our households, a question that occurred to me was what long-term impact were they having on the way we communicated with each other.

It started, as do all things, with the children. Kids quickly learned to ask Siri or Alexa to do something in a commanding voice, which then became angry if the robot could not comply with their wishes quickly enough.

I wondered how a child growing up in such circumstances would treat his or her employees in the future.

When voice commands first became a thing, I found myself speaking in a respectful voice and often thanking Siri for her help. Siri never replied. The engineers who developed her hadn't programmed "you're welcome" into her vocabulary.

Thus, my politeness fell on deaf ears.

Of course, this type of software is supposed to be intelligent, i.e., learning from interacting with us, but in my experience our robotic friends were in no way learning to be more polite. (2025 update: this is changing with AI.)

As for humans, when we are not rewarded for being polite, we tend to become less so. Gradually, for example, I learned to issue simple straight-out commands to my voiced units. There is no point in engaging in social niceties with an entity that doesn’t respond accordingly, is there?

But what was I conditioning myself to become?

When it comes to the people who have designed the relevant software in this case, many of them value direct, logical and blunt sentences. Programming in social skills simply is not a premium during an intense Agile development cycle.

As our society populates the environment with robots, maybe one effect will be that nobody will have much of a reason to be nice anymore.

This would, of course, resemble our political culture, where politeness and respect for others disappeared some time ago.

Indeed, being not nice is often a virtue in modern America. And those who cheer on the misogynist, racist, homophobic demagogues at political rallies? They resemble nothing so much as robots.

HEADLINES:

  • California Will Sue Trump Over National Guard Deployment, Newsom Says (NYT)

  • Averting a Worst-Case Scenario in Los Angeles — Immigration raids and protests will continue so long as Trump is president. His opponents should do everything they can to stay within the law. (Atlantic)

  • Sanders warns of authoritarianism after Trump deploys national guard to LA (Guardian)

  • National Guard staging at federal buildings in L.A. (WP)

  • Protests of immigration raids continue as National Guard arrives under Trump's orders (LAist)

  • Troops sent by Trump arrive in LA with more immigration raid protests expected (BBC)

  • Newsom Criticizes Hegseth for Saying Marines Could be Mobilized in California (NYT)

  • Trump administration weighs broad cancellation of California funding (WP)

  • Trump’s tactic to ‘flood the zone’ is now threatening Mark Twain’s legacy (SFC)

  • Trump Says He Has No Desire to Mend His Relationship With Musk (NYT)

  • IDF ordered to stop Gaza-bound aid ship carrying Greta Thunberg (Guardian)

  • Gaza health workers say four killed by Israeli gunfire near aid centre (BBC)

  • A powerful, opaque al-Qaeda affiliate is rampaging across West Africa (WP)

  • Colombian president vows to hunt ‘mastermind’ behind shooting of political rival, after 15-year-old arrested (CNN)

  • Taylor Swift’s Master Plan (New Yorker)

  • 10 Times AI And Robots Have Already Done Horrible Things...Including Killing People (BuzzFeed)

  • AI Is Coming for Your Job, Much Faster Than Anyone Thought (Decrypt)

  • Trump Escalates Musk Feud By Nuking Mars (The Onion)

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Sunday, June 08, 2025

The War on Knowledge

This morning, I quote David Frum in the Atlantic:

“Yesterday, President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard to quell disorderly protests against immigration-enforcement personnel in Los Angeles. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared his readiness to obey Trump by mobilizing the U.S. Marines as well. These threats look theatrical and pointless. The state, counties, and cities of California employ more than 75,000 uniformed law-enforcement personnel with arrest powers. The Los Angeles Police Department alone numbers nearly 9,000 uniformed officers. They can surely handle some dozens of agitators throwing rocks, shooting fireworks, and impeding vehicular traffic.

“If and when those 75,000 uniformed personnel feel overmatched by the agitators, California can request federal help of its own volition. When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year, for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.”

As I and many other journalists have warned since Trump was elected, he will use protests such as those in L.A. as an excuse to expand his power. His ultimate goal is to establish himself as an authoritarian leader.

As Frum says, this is merely a “dress rehearsal.”

Thanks to Leslie McNeill for a section of clips on California’s response to Trump even before the protests, plus reports from many of the U-C campuses on critical research they are doing that is threatened by Trump’s war on knowledge.

HEADLINES:

  • Donald Trump orders National Guard to LA after clashes over immigration raids (BBC)

  • For Trump, This Is a Dress Rehearsal — Ordering the National Guard to deploy in Los Angeles is a warning of what to expect when his hold on power is threatened. (Atlantic)

  • Photos: A fierce pushback on ICE raids in L.A. from protesters, officials (LAT)

  • Agents Use Military-Style Force Against Protesters at L.A. Immigration Raid (NYT)

  • U.S. job growth slows (Reuters)

  • Trump threatens ‘very serious consequences’ if Musk backs Democrats (WP)

  • Trump Issues Jaw-Dropping Authoritarian Threat to Elon Musk (DailyBeast)

  • Inside the battles that shattered Trump and Musk’s alliance (WP)

  • Colombia's potential presidential contender Miguel Uribe shot, suspect arrested (Reuters)

  • White House security staff warned Musk’s Starlink is a security risk (WP)

  • New questions emerge from the new charges in Kilmar Abrego Garcia case (NBC)

  • Russia faces struggle to replace bombers (Reuters)

  • Weeping Trump Boys Told ‘Uncle Elon’ Blown Up In Rocket Accident (The Onion)

LESLIE’s LINKS:

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