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How Facebook has become one of the least trusted and most profitable companies in the world.

Tech journalist Steven Levy, talks about the company’s history on Fresh Air. He’s got a new book out, “Facebook: The Inside Story,” based on interviews with Zuckerberg, other top current and former Facebook execs – some of whom share their misgivings about the company – and Facebook critics.

I’m hooked on Facebook, yet I have strong misgivings about it. Living in the world requires compromising principles, and some of those compromises are appalling. And yet every day I wonder whether using Facebook is a compromise too far.

www.npr.org/2020/02/2…

Super Tuesday, Explained: I listened to this entire podcast episode and I’m still confused. Short version: Lots of states have their Democratic primaries today so it’s a really big deal.

open.spotify.com/episode/5…

The true story behind "You've Got Mail:" The movie was based on a real conflict between a New York Barnes & Noble and a local children's bookstore.

At that time, B&N was the big bad soul-crushing superstore chain killing indy Mom-and-Pop bookstores.

Later, Amazon beat down Barnes & Noble. Yes, the same technology that brought the characters of “You’ve Got Mail” together flattened B&N.

On the Decoder Ring podcast: slate.com/transcrip…

The reality is even more complicated than Decoder Ring portrays. B&N and Borders brought books by the tens of thousands to places that were previously bookstore deserts. Pre-B&N, if you grew up in the suburbs, as I did, or in rural America, your bookstore options were a few sad B. Dalton and Waldenbooks in malls, and that’s it, unless you shlepped into a major metropolitan area.

As a teen and into my 20s, I used to love to go to the mall to browse the four shelves of science fiction and fantasy books at the local bookstores. The B&N SF/F section was bigger than the entire previous bookstore.

And a number of factors, not just the Internet, contribute to retail decline: Retail space was overextended, retail chains engaged in fancy financial hijinks. And consumers just don’t view shopping as a recreational activity as much as they used to.

Today I voted, and spent a good chunk of time updating the local Democratic Club website and social media. Also did some publicity for the next meeting, which is Wednesday. Details here:

www.lamesafoothillsdemocraticclub.org/post/meet…

I highly recommend volunteering for politics – local politics – as an alternative to arguing about it, on social media or elsewhere. Arguing politics makes you bitter. Volunteering is far more productive – and it’s fun.

Cory Doctorow’s got a new blog. It’s Pluralistic.net.

pluralistic.net

It’s his usual mix of cyber-rights, science fiction and retro pop culture. Interestingly, he’s doing it as a daily digest rather than a series of individual posts. I like it.

The design is minimalist. No HTML, not even hrefs. I’m trying out the no-hrefs look here to see how I like it.

Cory and Dave Winer are my blogfathers; when I’m fiddling with an idea, it’s often because I saw one of them do it. Mike Elgan and Jon Gruber are former blogfathers. I’m still fans of both, but their blogging direction is different from mine now.

I don’t have plans to adopt a daily digest format. It doesn’t fit my blogging habits, which are random minutes throughout the day.

Cory’s tagline for Pluralistic.net: “Daily links from Cory Doctorow – No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don’t collect or retain any data at all ever period.”

Pluralistic.net is both a blog and a newsletter. Subscribe here.

mail.flarn.com/mailman/l…

Newsletters are making a comeback.

I have a newsletter too. I have had it for six years. It’s a daily digest of everything I post here. Subscribe here:

eepurl.com/gUT4s1

“Flarn” is a great domain name.

Everybody agrees that social media needs to suppress harmful content while promoting good content, but nobody can agree on what falls into which category. Many people are not acting in good faith, and will knowingly claim that bad content which should be suppressed is actually good.

None of this seems particularly insightful to me, but public policy discussions about social media tend to assume that there is some good faith arbiter somewhere who can absolutely separate good from evil.

That’s one of the reasons why the big social media platforms need to be broken up to eliminate their monopoly powers. Because that kind of power should not be centralized. This is a very old, solved problem; it’s why we have free speech.