Journal tags: newsletters

Ethan tagged me in a post. I didn’t feel a thing.

“I’d love to invite a few other folks to share their favorite newsletters”, he wrote.

My immediate thought was that I don’t actually subscribe to many newsletters. But then I remembered that most newsletters are available as RSS feeds, and I very much do subscribe to those.

Reading RSS and reading email feel very different to me. A new item in my email client feels like a task. A new item in my feed reader feels like a gift.

Anyway, I poked around in my subscriptions and found some newsletters in there that I can heartily recommend.

First and foremost, there’s The History Of The Web by Jay Hoffman. Each newsletter is a building block for the timeline of the web that he’s putting together. It’s very much up my alley.

On the topic of the World Wide Web, Matthias has a newsletter called Own Your Web:

Whether you want to get started with your own personal website or level up as a designer, developer, or independent creator working with the ever-changing material of the Web, this little email is for you. ❤✊

On the inescapable topic of “AI”, I can recommend Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter by Professor Emily M. Bender and Doctor Alex Hanna.

Journalist Clive Thompson has a fun newsletter called The Linkfest:

The opposite of doomscrolling: Every two weeks (roughly) I send you a collection of the best Internet reading I’ve found — links to culture, technology, art and science that fascinated me.

If you like that, you’ll love The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:

A newsletter for the terminally curious

Okay, now there are three more newsletters that I like, but I’m hesitant to recommend for the simple reason that they’re on Substack alongside a pile of racist trash. If you decide you like any of these, please don’t subscribe by email; use the RSS feed. For the love of Jeebus, don’t give Substack your email address.

Age of Invention by Anton Howes is a deep, deep dive into the history of technology and industry:

I’m interested in everything from the exploits of sixteenth-century alchemists to the schemes of Victorian engineers.

Finally, there are two newsletters written by people whose music I listened to in my formative years in Ireland…

When We Were Young by Paul Page recounts his time in the band Whipping Boy in the ’90s:

This will be the story of Whipping Boy told from my perspective.

Toasted Heretic were making very different music around the same time as Whipping Boy. Their singer Julian Gough has gone on to write books, poems, and now a newsletter about cosmology called The Egg And The Rock:

The Egg and the Rock makes a big, specific argument (backed up by a lot of recent data, across many fields), that our universe appears to be the result of an evolutionary process at the level of universes.

There you go—quite a grab bag of newsletter options for you.

I like reading RSS feeds. I’ve written before about how my feed reader feels different to my email client:

When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book. And, yes, books are also things to be completed—a bookmark not only marks my current page, it also acts as a progress bar—but books are for pleasure. The pleasure might come from escapism, or stimulation, or the pursuit of knowledge. That’s a very different category to email, calendars, and Slack.

Giles put it far better when described what using RSS feeds feels like :

To me, using RSS feeds to keep track of stuff I’m interested in is a good use of my time. It doesn’t feel like a burden, it doesn’t feel like I’m being tracked or spied on, and it doesn’t feel like I’m just another number in the ads game.

To me, it feels good. It’s a way of reading the web that better respects my time, is more likely to appeal to my interests, and isn’t trying to constantly sell me things.

That’s why I feel somewhat conflicted about email newsletters. On the one hand, people are publishing some really interesting things in newsletters. On the hand, the delivery mechanism is email, which feels burdensome. Add tracking into the mix, and they can feel downright icky.

But never fear! My feed reader came to the rescue. Many newsletter providers also provide RSS feeds. NetNewsWire—my feed reader of choice—will try to find the RSS feed that corresponds to the newsletter. Hurrah!

I get to read newsletters without being tracked, which is nice for me. But I also think it would be nice to let the authors of those newsletters know that I’m reading. So here’s a list of some of the newsletters I’m currently subscribed to in my feed reader:

The Whippet by McKinley Valentine:

A newsletter for the terminally curious.

Sentiers by Patrick Tanguay:

A carefully curated selection of articles with thoughtful commentary on technology, society, culture, and potential futures.

The Fitzwilliam:

Policy, ethics and applied rationality with an Irish slant.

The Science Of Fiction:

How science shapes stories about the future and how stories about the future shape science.

Adjacent Possible by Steven Johnson:

Exploring where good ideas come from—and how to keep them from turning against us.

Faster, Please! by James Pethokoukis:

Discovering, creating, and inventing a better world through technological innovation, economic growth, and pro-progress culture.

undefended / undefeated by Sara Hendren:

Ideas at the heart of material culture—the everyday stuff in all our lives

Today in Tabs by Rusty Foster:

Your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletter.

I’ve been reading the excellent Design For Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog. There was a line that really stood out to me:

The idea that it’s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous.

It stood out to me because I had been thinking about certain practices that are widespread, accepted, and yet strike me as deeply problematic. These practices involve tracking users.

The first problem is that even the terminology I’m using would be rejected. When you track users on your website, it’s called analytics. Or maybe it’s stats. If you track users on a large enough scale, I guess you get to just call it data.

Those words—“analytics”, “stats”, and “data”—are often used when the more accurate word would be “tracking.”

Or to put it another way; analytics, stats, data, numbers …these are all outputs. But what produced these outputs? Tracking.

Here’s a concrete example: email newsletters.

Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?

You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that’s tracking.

Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?

You may well answer that this is a widespread—nay, universal—practice. Well yes, but a) that’s not what I asked, and b) see the above quote from Design For Safety.

You could quite correctly point out that this tracking is out of your hands. Your newsletter provider—probably Mailchimp—does this by default. So if the tracking is happening anyway, why not take a look at those numbers?

But that’s like saying it’s okay to eat battery-farmed chicken as long as you’re not breeding the chickens yourself.

When I try to argue against this kind of tracking from an ethical standpoint, I get a frosty reception. I might have better luck battling numbers with numbers. Increasing numbers of users are taking steps to prevent tracking. I had a plug-in installed in my mail client—Apple Mail—to prevent tracking. Now I don’t even need the plug-in. Apple have built it into the app. That should tell you something. It reminds me of when browsers had to introduce pop-up blocking.

If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn’t they lose their status?

But that line of reasoning shouldn’t even by necessary. We shouldn’t stop tracking users because it’s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong.