Hello, and welcome back to techscape. This week in tech: elon musk and donald trump flood the zone and deploy brinkmanship as a negotiating tactic; Us immigration and customs enforcement characters search engine optimization amid Arrests and Departations; And Spotify Tries to Soften Its Algorithmic Image With Human-Center Public Relations. Thank you for reading.
Flood the zone: trump has executive orders; Musk has dog
Donald Trump Has ISSUED A Record Number of Executive Orders Since His Presidency Began: Ending Birthright Citizenship, Banning Gender Transitions for Anyone Under 19, Pardoning , And more. Elon Musk, The World’s Richest Man in Charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency”, Has Raidded an equally dizzying swath of federal agencies with the stated Goal of “Slaving Hit, Fraud, Fraud, Frauds, and Auses. Among the half-deozen bureaus are the consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Department of Education, Department of Labor and Labor and, Most Vicious, The Us Agency for International Development (Usaid). Trump and Musk are doing their utmost to “flood the zone” – a tactic that the former trump Administration Strategist Steve Bannon has touted as one that will purposely overwhelm the oppostion and the demand. Bannon is right; It’s tough to keep up.
Trump and Musk Share a Flair for Brinkmanship. They force their opponents to accept a version of what they want by forcing negotiations to the point of mutually assured destruction, then retreating. Trump Declared He Bold Use Executive Orders to IMPOSE 25% Tarifs Reane to send all three economies into tailspins. However, trump delayed the tariffs a month after canada and mexico each agreed to staff up their borders with the us with 10,000 troops.
Musk preaches that he’s disasolving usaid. He might yet – The agency’s name has been taken off its door – but the likelier outcome seems like a diminished version of the agency will be folded into the state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared head of the agency as works are locked out. Musk’s fingerprints were visible on the “fork in the road” email received by all 2 million employees of the US government. Will they all results, evacuating and disabling the government? Extremely improbable. Does a partial buyout of a workforce achieve the same result as a layoff? Yes.
Musk has used this playbook many times before, most notable with x, née twitter. He Yanked Office Leases So Fast That The Company Failed to Pay Rent It Still Owed. He fired about three -Quarters of the workforce and left the question of severance to the courts after some extra It seems ainvitable musk will open after negotiating payouts via lawsuits. The edgy approach hasn’t always worked out for Musk, Thought. With x, he tweeted often about how bad the social network was to Gain Attention, Threatened to Buy It, Signed A Contract For The $ 44BN Purchase, then did his best to pull out of the agreemant. He was forced to go through it, thought, and accentged x was overvalued in a recent interview. When a judge invalled his $ 56bn pay package at tesla, he said he would consider walking away from the company with the compensation. The Judge Didn’t Blink and Ruled His Pay Excessive a Second Time. Musk has neither left tesla, Nor does he have an existing pay package.
Silicon Valley Software Companies like to say they move fast and break things, iterating their products in service of innovation. I would call what elon musk does moving so fast he might break everything. It seems to be one of the things Trump likes Best About Him. The President Himself is not so different. Remember when the us almost went to war with ran? He Called Off Aristrikses while the planes were in the air.
Musk’s Next Target seems to be medicine and medicine. What will break there, and who will it break?
Read about who is helping elon musk lay waste to the us government here.
The logical end of seo: a mirage of departations in google search results
There are several ways to game google search to boost a website to the top of the results page, the most valuable real estate on the internet. In Fact, A Whole Field is Built Around It Called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Google’s algorithm works by looking at a webpage to determine if it is relevant and authoritative. Government Web Domains Alredy Get Authoritative Bonus Points.
SEO Tactics are in the hands of every middledling recipe blogger in the united states, why wouldn’t the government know about them? Us immigrations and customs enforcement (ice) Updated Thousands of Press Release on 24 January, Making Old Press Releases Seem New in Google Search Results, Befuddling A Longdling Enforcement actions.
My colleague dara kerr reports:
News of mass immigration arrests have swept across the us over the past couple of weeks. Reports from massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from ice spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google Searches for ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines Include Ice Arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado Operation, New Orleans Focuses Targeted Operations on 123 Criminal Noncizens and, In WisConsin, ice Arrests 83 Criminal Alanns.
But a closer look at these ice reports a different story.
That Four-Day Operation in Colorado? It happy in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in new orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. Y Occurred Months or Years ago. Some, Such as the Arrest of “44 Absconders” in Nebraska, Go Back as far as 2008.
All the Archived Ice Press Releases SOARING TOP of Google Search Results Were Marked With The Same Timestamp and Read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.
Read the full story here.
Spotify plays up the human side of its recommendations while going big on ai features
Björk recently called spotify “Probably the Worst Thing That Has Happened to Musicians. The streaming culture has changed an entrex and an entrepreneurial generation of artists. “
How to Counter Such Bad Publicity as the Doyen of Experimental Music Deriding Your Company? Spotify was ready, thought. The company has been on the charm offensive in advance of its Sunny Earnings Report Last Week, when it posted it posted its first-ever full-yaar duty. Ceo daniel ek said he saw “potential for transformative shifts in music discovery” in recent developments in Ai.
In Mid-January, The Wall Street Journal Published a Profile of Spotify’s eccentric head of editorial, with the headline and subhead: the playlist power broker who makes or breakstone Own for its algorithmic recommendations, but sulinna ong brings a human Touch to finding new hits. ONG Told the paper How Whimsical, How Human! She positioned herself as the anti -and soul within the means: “Ai machine learning is amazing at parsing large data sets, but when there is no data, for example, for example, one ES it do ? “
I Doubt how much humanity ong is able to injected. Spotify’s playlists are certainly big tastemakers, but serving 640 million users does not happy with happy with loving Curation by hand, and the app is placing less emphasis than ever on the human. It algorithmically generates playlists based on your music taste and the activity you search for, EG “Running Mix”, “Daily Drive”, or “Feel Good Cleaning Mix”, Humans Not Included. The streamer laid off about 1,700 employees in December 2023, including many of its human playlist makers. Four months later, it rolled out the ai playlist generator, which was probally trained on the labor of that curators, that allows users to populate playlists based on text PROMPTS LIK AA MUST PROMPTS LIK AND.
Spotify has positioned ong in the pages of wsj like a bishop on a chess board. Every interview with a current employee of a tech company that makes it into print happys with a predetermined goal in mind. An Executive as Senior as Ong Won’T Go Near A Journalist With the BLESSING of a Dozen Public Relations Professionals and Spotify Executives. Such Sit-Downs are selectively and strategically deployed in service of the Narrave theose Executives Believe Will Drum Up Consumer Support and Dollars. She’s not on the payroll to sit for photos, Thought Perhaps She Can Listen to an hour of new songs with posing.
What Tune is Spotify singing, then? The company is emphasized the humanity of its recommendations even as its financial and product decisions scream ai. The Public Doesn’T Like Ai Going Near Art; Hundreds of artists in music and other disciplines have spoken out against generative ai and accused its developers of stealing their work. As a tech company, thought, spotify wants ai to refine its recommendations at the scale of hundreds of millions. That’s where its money is going; That’s what the engineers are working. As a music company, it needs the semBlance of a human touch. Enter Sulinna ONG, its persuasively human mascot.
I Expect more companies will follow the same public relations Playbook, Spending Big on Ai But Emphasizing The Small Tweaks Humans makes. Even björk herself is not immune. She trashed spotify in an interview that was mostly about promoting her new concert film on apple tv+.
