Unreal Bird #14: Material World

The Cuyahoga river where it meets Lake Erie, featuring two historic steel bridges. Summer day, blue sky.
Kayaking the Cuyahoga.

Remember minimalism? In this issue, I reflect on that trend in tech and life. Plus, field notes on the "First Amendment Tax," the shifting relationship between AI and productivity, and the future of US power in Europe.

As always, scroll to the bottom to see dogs!

Thanks for reading Unreal Birds, a newsletter about how tech, media, and capital undermine democratic accountability. Forwarded this newsletter? Consider subscribing.

Subscribe to Unreal Birds

What I'm up to

It's been a busy summer. Soon, I'll have two pieces on the tech industry response to data center opposition—hopefully by next newsletter. I am also reprising a 2024 study on Ohio's election workforce, and I have an in-production paper for CIGI, with Sam Bradshaw, on the viability of orbital data centers.

Additionally, I've picked up some extra editing work for Tech Policy Press; the pieces below have my fingerprints on them, though all credit goes to the authors.

Want to support me? Read Tech Policy Press! They have a newsletter too!

Material World

Last week I happened to read an excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Small Stuff by Ian Bogost. I was drawn in by the headline and surprised to find an essay about the joys of the manual transmission.

The piece reminded me of something I read ten or eleven years ago when Apple murdered the 3.5mm headphone jack. It was the age of minimalism as an aesthetic and a lifestyle: millennials, unable to afford anything anyway, proudly proclaimed that owning things was beneath them. One popular piece described living with only one hundred possessions.

This might sound noble to you. As it will, though, The Discourse inevitably pointed out that owning very little is easier if you have wealth. Poor and working-class people have toolboxes and extra tupperware because repairmen and eating out are expensive.

Around the same time Apple killed the headphone jack, it released a laptop with only one USB-C port (and, ironically, a headphone jack.) In the era of streaming and cloud storage, USB ports had become gauche!

Oh, and by the way, Apple will sell you 50 GB of storage for a monthly fee, in case all your photos don't fit on your hard drive. And when you went to replace your wired headphones, a pair of air pods ran a cool $159 in 2018. Want to buy a third-party pair? Some Apple features, like simultaneous translation or Siri voice readouts, work exclusively on air pods. Oh, did you step on one? Good luck repairing them. You should probably just get a new set.

(Thank the lord that Europe forced Apple to kill the lightning cable.)

It's not just consumer electronics. Automakers, for example, are increasingly charging subscription fees for features like navigation, self-driving, seat warmers, and remote start.

Something similar is happening with software. Sony recently announced that starting in 2028 it will no longer sell PlayStation games on physical disks; the PlayStation 6 will likely have no disk drive at all. So much for the used games market. And I hope PlayStation users avoid the experience of Amazon shoppers who were surprised to lose access to their digital media purchases after rights transfers. For games preservationists, the move may mean shifting to piracy in order to save the industry's heritage from erasure.

In 2026, most tech is designed to extract money and information from you. The squeeze gets tighter every year. In exchange, you get the convenience of Google Drive and Netflix.

All of this probably makes me seem like a grouch. Convenience isn't nothing, after all. But there is a sense of freedom that comes with ownership—a sense that is eroded when you are asked to pay $8 a month for remote start on your Toyota. At a time when the ungainly phrase "techno-oligarchy" seems to be on everyone's lips, this consumer squeeze is the economic counterpart to the declining leverage of citizens against Silicon Valley.

No wonder we are living through a period of deep nostalgia for physical media. An honest-to-God video rental store just opened up down the street from me. It's a novelty, but I hope it stays open.

Field notes

"The First Amendment Tax," Ashkhen Kazaryan.

  • Kazaryan describes a process of chilling speech not through punishment-as-example but by making disfavored speech expensive. The government can punish news outlets, universities, and other actors through regulatory compliance processes, visa authorities, withholding of federal funds, manipulation of tax exemptions, and terrorist designations—all of which have financial and legal consequences for the punished and are likely to make others nervous about crossing purposefully blurry lines.

"The Twilight of the Chatbots," Ethan Mollick.

  • I've covered this theme before: the nature of LLMs as workplace tools is changing, with sophisticated users seeing productivity gains that far outstrip benefits for casual users. Mollick puts data behind this, noting that "Claude does more per prompt for more expert users." Much of the shift has come from assigning work to agents which can access tools and environments, doing work in longer and longer stretches. (He does not address the rising cost of accessing top AI models; I tried assigning Anthropic's Fable a task involving a couple contact lists and blew through my 5-hour token limit instantly.)

"Will American Power in Europe Run Out?" Sophia Besch and Tara Varma.

  • This essay for the Carnegie Endowment discusses Europe's various dependencies on the United States, including in trade, defense, and tech. For trade and tech especially, the continent has few options; building indigenous tech capacity will take decades, and alternatives like China come with even deeper risks. On the other hand, Europe has shown new willingness to make US saber-rattling costly. The authors call this a "normalized" relationship—the realpolitik replacement for the transatlantic alliance.

Snoot watch

A portrait of a white and black greyhound, focused on the nose, with brown eyes in the background.
On the nose.

Humble plea

This newsletter is mostly powered by caffeine. If you've made it this far, consider buying me a coffee at the link below:

Buy Me A Coffee