Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 68

Why I Believe Trump Will Win in 2020

I think Trump will win due to an unprecedented use of information warfare by our adversaries that will simultaneously activate and deactivate different voting groups within our country.

Faction 1 (Woke Liberals): The extreme left who need to believe in a candidate’s morality before they can support them, and I think they’re easy to convince not to vote
Faction 2 (Anyone But Trump): Those who hate Trump and will vote for anyone to get him out. They can more easily be convinced not to vote
Faction 3 (Independents): Are undecided, and will either be swayed by disgust for Trump or disgust for the Left. They are easy to convince not to vote
Faction 4 (Trump Devotees): Adore Trump, and they will vote in extremely high percentages

This is not a formal analysis, and I am neither a pollster nor a political scientist. This is simply how I see the factions that will be in play leading up to the election.

I believe November’s outcome will pivot on information campaigns that push and pull on these various groups—specifically, the Woke Liberal faction and the Anyone But Trump Faction.

For the Woke Liberals, it’s fairly easy to get them not to vote. You simply have to convince them that Biden is an antiquated sexist who acted inappropriately to women in the past—possibly up to the point of rape. That’s probably going to be easy to do, so the only remaining question will be how many of these voters move to the Never Trump camp.

The Never Trump camp is harder to dissuade because they’re already holding their noses. They’ve already told themselves they don’t need to like the Democrat, and that they just have to do their duty and get Trump out.

My problem with them is the reasoning seems shabby. It feels hard to vote someone out when you don’t believe in the alternative. In that scenario, any complications around voting are magnified. If you’re busy at work that day, if there are fewer polling places, etc., etc. There are a million small reasons that can add up to stop you from voting someone out.

So now let’s look at various pieces on the board.

There is a massive backlash against the Woke Left in this country. The country is far less left than the left thinks it is, and those who are moderately conservative have been aggravated by extreme left views. This is a huge activating function for turning Independents either towards Trump, or against voting altogether.

Forget the fact that it was he who completely failed to respond back in January/February.

If Trump can convince Independents that the left hurt the economy, many of them will vote for him. The longer the lockdown goes on in various forms, which continues to cause additional damage to the economy, the more Trump will be able to point at someone’s pain and say, “See! That’s what they did to you!” If this becomes a battle of narratives and emotions around economic pain, I don’t think Biden and the left will have a chance. Trump is remarkably good at blaming other people for his mistakes and getting people to believe him.
Biden can do extraordinary damage to himself during the next several months. Trump cannot. If there are to be any gaffes, revelations, or bombshells that surface before November, they will most likely harm Biden, which will influence the Independents, Wokers, and Never Trumpers to abstain or switch to Trump.
Inaction favors Trump. If things were to be so convoluted and distorted that people didn’t know which way was up, the result is most likely to be people staying home and not voting. That means that the dedicated Trump fans—which are guaranteed to vote in extreme numbers—will be the strongest force on the field.

There are, of course, some trends that hurt Trump.

People generally hate him as a person—even many conservatives
If the economy continues to worsen (which seems inevitable), any clear-headed person is likely to place at least some of that blame at Trump’s feet

I simply worry it won’t be enough.

I think disgust for the left will be too strong a force—combined with Trump’s ability to point blame at that same left for the economic damage caused by the lockdown.

That, combined with Biden being such a horrible candidate, will cause independents to either not vote or vote for Trump.

The surfacing of non-Woken-approved behavior on the part of Biden—combined with his likely collection of fresh gaffes—will take the extreme left off the board.

So that really leaves the Trump Acolytes vs. the Never Trumpers. How much can the left rally to produce a white-hot hatred for Trump that knocks down all other considerations, and actually motivates people to go out and get the job done?

I think they’re shit at it. They can’t rally anyone for anything. Whenever they open their mouths to name an enemy and march against it, they end up choosing Christmas songs, which further alienates the center of the country.

The left sucks at narrative. And the narrative is going to matter more than ever in this one.

We have all this division. We have all this chaos. We have all this anger. We have all this pain.

Those things are crying out for a story, and the left doesn’t have one. Their story is Trump is bad.

Trump’s story is that everything was fine before China started a virus and the liberals broke the economy.

And far, far too many people will take that story, because, at least it’s an answer. It’s an answer with handles. It’s easy to follow.

To me that wins the undecided vote, or at least a significant portion of it.

And then Biden and the DNC will combine their powers to kick as many balls into their own goal as possible, resulting in much of the left being paralyzed into apathy.

Activate the center and right with a clear narrative blaming China and the left
Move more independents to the right by highlighting the stupidity of the left
De-activate the left by highlighting Biden’s flaws
Mobilize a pro-Trump voting block that’s even bigger than last time

That’s the move that will win it for them, and I fear it could actually be taken by a wider margin than last time.

And finally—as a magnifier to all of this—I believe Russia will exacerbate every single aspect of this in the favor of Trump. I think they could easily spend more than a billion dollars to move the population as much as possible as I’ve described above.

Based on all the polling, it seems like Trump only needs 3-8 percentage points to win.

Unfortunately, I think between the narrative advantage they have, the massive backlash against the left from the middle, the large number of people who are actually pro-Trump and not telling anyone, and the help from Russia—they will easily move things by that amount.

I really hope I’m wrong, and that would be really easy as well.

The economy continues to crash and it’s so glaringly obvious that it’s Trump’s fault
The Russian influence on social media has a small to medium effect, but not nearly enough to change things
The never-Trumpers come out in massive force and easily win

I really can see that happening as well, but it seems more logical and positive, which brings me to my last point.

Every single thing that’s happened with Trump has been unexpected. It’s inconceivable that he won. It’s inconceivable that he wasn’t removed from office. It’s plainly astounding that he’s sitting in the White House right now at all.

So it just seems patently stupid to think—oh, don’t worry, the never-Trumpers are going to win this for us! Case closed!

That’s exactly the hubris that has us in this position now.

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Is China Making a Major Strategy Mistake?

I’ve been thinking a lot about China’s new strategy of rising to prominence, which is covered in a number of recent articles.

For the last several months I’ve been thinking about how China is just winning in all these areas.

They’re silently colonizing Africa
They’re about to take full control over Hong Kong
They’re getting even more aggressive in the South China Sea
They’re becoming even more hostile towards Taiwan
They continue to hack and conduct espionage against the US with impunity for the purpose of stealing intellectual property
They’re ramping up intimidation tactics against anyone who speaks out against them, even outside of China

At first I was thinking that this was guaranteed to work, and that we need to raise the alarm so we can counter it. But now I think China might be making a serious strategic error.

They’re being so blatant about these tactics that they’re likely to label themselves as hostile—in the minds of other countries—for decades to come.

So they might get extraordinary gains for the first 5-10 years, as they no doubt already have, but once the whole world figures out how predatory and self-centered they’re behaving they’ll make policy decisions that will exclude China for decades.

Most importantly, that includes finding other countries to produce their goods. Japan just did that, which seems largely prompted by COVID, but is likely also related to China’s action in the local theater over the last few years.

I don’t see China as inherently evil; I see them as reacting in a toxic way to past trauma.

It just seems to me like China would be far more effective if they played the long game here, i.e., being nicer to the rest of the world and at least pretending to be cooperative. I mean, even if they had full Mr. Burns level goals in mind (which I’m not convinced of), it’d still be most effective to play nice and spread the tentacles.

As it stands now, they’re going to expand those tentacles at maximum range and speed, and they’ll be cut off quickly once the world realizes they’re an overt enemy.

This is not the sort of strategic error I would expect them to make. Although, it could be that they already thought about this, and they’re 1) either in a major rush for some reason, or 2) they believe that the gains they will get in the beginning (before everyone turns against them) will be enough to keep them dominant even after the world turns against them.

That bet seems risky to me.

We’ll see.

Notes


Image by Johnathan Bartlett.
I received a very nice letter from a Chinese gentleman who agreed with my analysis, but who—like some of my other Chinese friends—was reticent to grant China’s innocence the way I was. He was worried that China is actually more broken even than I was describing. But it was a very nice email from a fellow human hoping for a better world.

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Frame: Defining My Life Theme

I have been thinking for the last couple of years about how to capture the underlying theme for all my intellectual pursuits.

I like to read, sure. But why? I like to learn stuff. I’m curious. But what is the goal? And I like to describe things and then share those descriptions.

All great, but what’s the point?

I think I might have it.

I think my primary, long-term interest is: the capture and articulation of goals for a given entity, combined with the building of frameworks that allow one to realize those goals.

And Federations of Planets.

This is critical for individuals trying to make their way in life. It’s critical for families. Businesses. Towns. Cities. Countries. Planets.

Capture what you’re trying to achieve
Build a system that will let you do so

Each of these steps can be broken into many pieces, of course, and it’s possible to go one level higher as well.

Building frameworks for achieving the goals of any given entity.

That actually captures both. So the one breaks into two, and from there they both break into many.

In my book, The Real Internet of Things, I wrote about this as Desired Outcome Management (DOM).

For the time being, I’m going to call this idea, Frame. First, it’s short and simple. Second, it implies structure, framework, and foundation. All good things.

I intend to write a book about this specifically, although I’m not in any particular rush to do so. For now I’ll settle for updating my about page, which I’m not looking forward to.

Like I say in that about page, if you’ve not written one for yourself, you absolutely should. It’s remarkably enlightening and difficult.

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Frame

I have been thinking for the last couple of years about how to capture the underlying theme for all my intellectual pursuits.

I like to read, sure. But why? I like to learn stuff. I’m curious. But what is the goal? And I like to describe things and then share those descriptions.

All great, but what’s the point?

I think I might have it.

I think my primary, long-term interest is: the capture and articulation of goals for a given entity, combined with the building of frameworks that allow one to realize those goals.

And Federations of Planets.

This is critical for individuals trying to make their way in life. It’s critical for families. Businesses. Towns. Cities. Countries. Planets.

Capture what you’re trying to achieve
Build a system that will let you do so

Each of these steps can be broken into many pieces, of course, and it’s possible to go one level higher as well.

Building frameworks for achieving the goals of any given entity.

That actually captures both. So the one breaks into two, and from there they both break into many.

In my book, The Real Internet of Things, I wrote about this as Desired Outcome Management (DOM).

For the time being, I’m going to call this idea, Frame. First, it’s short and simple. Second, it implies structure, framework, and foundation. All good things.

I intend to write a book about this specifically, although I’m not in any particular rush to do so. For now I’ll settle for updating my about page, which I’m not looking forward to.

Like I say in that about page, if you’ve not written one for yourself, you absolutely should. It’s remarkably enlightening and difficult.

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Analysis of the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Report

TOPIC: In this episode, Daniel takes a look at the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report. He looks at the key findings and talks about what they might mean to us going forward.

The newsletter serves as the show notes for the podcast.

The Dataviz Game on Point

Verizon’s Breach Report is one of the best infosec reports out there, and I’m always excited when I hear it’s been released. This year—with the lockdown—that’s even more the case. So I decided to do a dedicated edition of show for it.

I have to say, the report started strong with the very first thing I see being a super clean data visualization like we see above.

You can download the full report here.

So let’s get into it.

Key definitions

There’s lots of religion around definitions (trust me, I have my own church), so it’s important to lock that down in the beginning. These are the three that I see the most disagreement on when people talk about this report.

Incident
A security event that compromises the integrity, confidentiality or availability of an information asset.



Breach
An incident that results in the confirmed disclosure—not just potential exposure—of data to an unauthorized party.



Hacking
1) Utilizing stolen or brute- forced credentials; 2) exploiting vulnerabilities; and 3) using backdoors and Command and Control (C2) functionality.




Key numbers

Top tactics utilized

This year, they looked at 3,950 breaches and 157,525 incidents—32,002 of which qualified to be analyzed by them
45% of breaches involved Hacking
Errors were causal events in 22% of breaches
72% involved large business victims
58% had personal data compromised
70% were perpetrated by external actors (30% involved insiders)
Organized crime was behind 55% of breaches
86% were financially motivated
Web Apps were involved in 43%
37% stole or used credentials
22% involved phishing
Phishing is usually going after credentials, but stealing money is continues to rise in popularity


Verizon’s analysis

Top actions for incidents vs. breaches

They say external actors have always been the majority, and that the rise of internal breaches is from better reporting, not increased frequency
The top actor was by far Organized Crime, at 55%
Nation-state, end-user, and system admins each took around 10% of the actor pool
The Error incident type continues to increase, with most other types falling
Hacking, social, and malware have fallen the most
The top 2 incident threat actions were DoS, and Phishing
The top 2 breach threat actions were Phishing and Use of Stolen Creds
Errors are now as common as social attacks, and more common than malware attacks
The top malware type is Password Dumper, because it really is about getting those creds

Hacking types and vectors

The top three ways of getting the malware are email link, direct install, and download by other malware
Within hacking, web applications accounted for over 95% of breaches
Over 80% involved using brute force or stolen creds
There was relatively little vuln exploitation or use of backdoors/C2
Social actions arrived via email over 96% of the time
Breaches that take days or less are rising, while those taking months or more are declining
They’re showing cyber-espionage as being down, which is surprising to me
DDoS is way up, both in numbers of attacks and the weight of them


My analysis

Misconfiguration is becoming a huge issue

I find it really interesting that in the top threat actions for breaches—so, successful incidents—the top 5 included: phishing, stolen creds, misdelivery (error), and misconfiguration (error).

Different techniques used in different phases of the attack

On page 101 they mention that they’re standardizing their recommended controls on the CIS 20, which I think is smart.

So it seems like the major themes are:

Phishing (which is usually used to steal credentials)
Email security (because phishing)
Web applications (which are used to extract and input stolen credentials)
Stolen Creds (which are usually used against web apps)

In short, credentials.

And the second big theme seems to be misconfiguration, which I’ve always been on about, and is also why I’m so obsessed with recon.

All summed, this is another phenomenal report by the team at Verizon. I think I liked the structure and visuals of this report more than any other so far, so happy to see them constantly innovating on how they present their data.

Tons of data is useless if you can’t find compelling ways to display it, and I commend them for their work in that regard.

Remember, what you see above is just some highlights that jumped at me, but different readers will notice different things. So I definitely recommend you read the report yourself.

See you next year for the 2021 version.

READ THE FULL REPORT

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A Massive Collection of Zoom (Virtual Meeting) Backgrounds

We’re all doing more virtual meetings now, and virtual backgrounds have become a way to add some individuality to your visage.

Yes, you can use videos as your background in most applications.

When COVID first started, a ton of places started offering interesting backgrounds. It turns out that you can use pretty much anything you want for one. All you need is a quality image or video.

A lot of professional studios and artists released some of their own backgrounds as well, and after I saw like 10 of these collections on the internet I vowed to make a collection of the collections. So here it is:

How to change your background in Zoom

Images


Unsplash’s List
Studio Ghibli’s Backgrounds
Anime Backgrounds
Pocket Lint
The Good Housekeeping Collection
GotYourBack’s Optimism List
Den of Geek’s Geek Backgrounds
Canava’s List

Fine Art / Corbis Historical / Getty Images

TechRepublic’s Collection
Tom’s Guide List of Pop Culture Backgrounds
The Dad’s Nerd Backgrounds
Art Backgrounds from Modernmet
PC Mag’s Geeky List

Famous Paintings
Variety’s List of Movie/TV Backgrounds


Videos

Coverr’s Videos
Wibbitz Video Backgrounds
Kapwing’s Videos

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Are There Such Things as Anti-Fragile Stocks?

I was thinking recently about COVID-19, and stocks, and the concept of antifragility, which was coined by Nassim Taleb.

Here’s how he introduces it in his book with that title:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Using that, let’s say that something is Antifragile when it improves from adversity. Not just survives. Improves.

So I was thinking about all these factors that we’re facing—many of which I talk about in my recent piece called COVID Will Accelerated Trends That Were Already Coming. Some of these include:

A move to automation, resulting in lost jobs
A move to remote work
A push for basic income
Consolidation of fewer winners
A rise in surveillance
Esports
Escapism
Etc.

At first I tried to imagine what stocks could survive in this situation. And I think it’s fairly easy to do that, although the question always has to be: survive at what timescale? Maybe the airlines will be fine eventually, but when exactly is eventually? I’m not willing to find out.

So here’s a more interesting question: when it comes to pandemics and economic slowdown, which stocks improve the most if things go poorly, yet still do fairly well if things don’t get that bad?

I came up with three.

AAPL Chart by TradingView

Amazon. They’re becoming planetary infrastructure, and they have a CEO who appears to be interested in everything from movie theaters to pharmacies to education. He basically wants to become what the government should have been. And while that’s scary and exciting, it’s also going to make their stock one of the best picks for a long time. If things go poorly, they’ll be there to keep things running. And if things go well, they’ll be there to expand into new spaces. Win, win.
Zoom. They seem to have captured the space of doing things remotely. Of course there will be competitors, but the way they’ve set themselves up to succeed is pretty impressive. If things go horribly regarding pandemics and declines, we’ll all need them more. And if things go well, they’ll still do fine. Win, win.
Facebook. Regardless of what you think about their effect on humanity, it’s clear that Zuckerberg is a voracious businessman. His purchases of Instagram and WeChat were phenomenal, and once again we have the dual benefit. If the world craters for a bit, everyone will be on Facebook. And if the world shakes it off quickly, the world will still be on Facebook. Win, win.

The internet (and the unemployment line) is full of people who think they “figured something out” about the stock market, right before they lost it all.

I have very little faith in my stock picks above because they’re stock picks, in the stock market. There’s also another whole line of thinking from smart people that say the NASDAQ is going to get pummelled in the next few months or years.

I honestly don’t know enough about this space to even tell who’s an expert and who isn’t. So I have very little money invested in this, and I’m doing it mostly for fun.

I’m basing my picks on what I think I know about human psychology, sociology, and what people are likely to do if things crash or if we recover quickly.

I honestly think these three stocks could do well either way. Hence, antifragile.

I’m marking this post as unalterable, because I want to measure just how lucky/unlucky/stupid/brilliant I am going forward in time. All edits to this post will be in the notes below, not in the prediction text above.

We’ll see how it goes.

Notes


You know how some people try to actually make you listen even more to them by prefacing things with, “I’m not an expert but…”? Well, this isn’t one of those situations. I’m seriously not qualified to give stock purchasing advice. Hell I made my first stock purchase like 5 years ago. I’m a noob. And even worse, I don’t even think being an expert makes you safe. So, seriously. Consider this post to be a thought exercise and nothing more.

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 229

THIS WEEK’S TOPICS: Feds Release Top Vulns, China Brainwave Tracking, Europe CISSP Masters, Army Electronic Warfare, Microsoft Third-largest Patch Tuesday, Technology News, Human News, Ideas Trends & Analysis, Discovery, Recommendations, and the Weekly Aphorism…

The newsletter serves as the show notes for the podcast.

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Responding to Questions About Hard Determinism

I just received this email from a reader about free will, and I actually get a lot of these because of my numerous articles on the topic.

I thought his email was so well put together that I should answer publicly. So here are his questions, along with my answers inline.

If everything has been predetermined, how come we can make rational, informed, choices?

The same way a computer can. Computers can be smart and rational when it comes to solving problems, and nobody would argue that they have free will.

Would it also not be silly to think about things because of no matter what it was predetermined for you to do it?

I’m releasing a full video essay on this topic soon.

The answer to this is that we’re human and we can’t live without behaving as if we have free will, and as if our “choices” matter. That is how we must function in a moment-to-moment, day-by-day basis because that’s how we’re built. But it doesn’t mean we have to accept that perception as truth. There are many situations where our senses lie to us in ways that we can prove objectively.

For example, when you touch your nose, the sensation of your nose and finger arrive at different times in the brain, but the brain groups them together to make it feel simultaneous. Even with this knowledge, we live in the reality of our senses, not in raw truth.

The longer answer is something I call General Absurdism, which is the universal distance between human experience and underlying reality. This gap applies to so many things. In Absurdism (proper), it applies to the search for inherent meaning in this chaotic universe. And it also applies to our perception of agency and free will.

We experience one thing (making choices) while another thing is true (we cannot affect outcomes if our actions are the result of previous inputs). Those things are in conflict, but that’s ok. Ice cream is a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, but that doesn’t make it any less glorious.

Do you think that even if we can’t control the present or the future we can at the very least chose how we deal with it or our mindset of the situation? Or is that all determined to?

Determined here really just means out of our control. If there is true randomness that goes against determinism, but doesn’t give us any control.

Yes, it’s all determined. Even how we choose to deal with things that we contemplate.

Again, computers can do that. They can see a chess move is made, contemplate the future, and make a choice that seems best for their goals. That’s not free will.

Do you believe we exist or are we just illusions? If we can’t chose what we do, how can we as a concept exist?

Well, we all have a collective perception that we exist. And everyone seems to mostly have the same perception. And there is a strong argument that the only possible thing we can be sure of, is that we are conscious. Because feeling conscious is itself the proof.

As far as whether we really exist, well, that depends on what you think qualifies? If we’re running in a simulation but we’re still here doing these things, and still conscious, do you think that’s reality? I do. Is it as much reality as another kind? I don’t know.

At what point do we consider something real?

When a whole bunch of individuals in the collective develop the scientific method, and we can independently verify truths about the environment. Again, that doesn’t tell us how real it is. Maybe we’re in a virtual reality engine somewhere. Maybe we’re in one of a trillion universes. Whatever.

The question is what you consider to be the cutoff for real. I personally think whatever this is definitely qualifies.

Is there a possibility that we could be wrong? I have been accused of using circular logic when trying to convince people they don’t make choices and are mindless cause and effect machines even though all the science says otherwise. Is it just a copout? Because no matter what they do we are right because it was determined to do so?

Yes, it’s possible that we’re wrong.

If we live in a world with true, Libertarian Free Will, like the kind given by a god, then we would be wrong.

As an atheist I don’t see any evidence for this, but it could absolutely be true. It’s just very, very unlikely.

If free will is a lie is self-control not real? Does that mean it does not matter how hard a person tries to change they never will of their own?

I wrote a whole piece about this, called Free Will’s Absurdist Paradox.

This is where the paradox comes in.

Yes, self-control is ultimately an illusion. But as a human, living this human life, it’s quite real. It’s real from our perspective as these weird, complex animals that we are.

Answer me this. Do people love their romantic partners? Do they love their children? Does ice cream taste good? Yes. Of course they do. Those things are true because they’re about perception. They’re interpretations of reality from a human point of view.

If you are an unfeeling, super-evolved AI life form from the other side of the multiverse, and I show you the atoms of an ice cream cone, does those atoms taste good? The question doesn’t even make sense, because both “taste” and “good” require a perspective.

When you wake up every morning you have to try to be a better person. You have to try to help your friends and loved ones live better lives. That’s human truth. That’s human reality.

At the same time, it’s not really possible to do anything other than what you’re going to do. So maybe you did improve yourself. Or maybe you stayed in bed. You don’t know and nobody else does either.

As humans, all you can do is lean into the illusion and be the best possible version of yourself. Absurdism is about embracing that paradox and living on despite it.

Sam Harris thinks that morality is objective and be scientifically deduced. I want to agree. But how does that work if we have no free will? How can people make good choices or make the world better if they have no choice at all?

He sees the world the way I’ve described above. He knows it’s all an illusion.

When he talks about trying to make good or bad choices, and trying to maximize well-being, he’s talking about doing so from within the illusion. As he’s talked about in his books, the alternative is laying in bed paralyzed, without ambition and without purpose.

We are humans, and we have to operate most of our lives within the human framework. That means behaving “as if” we were free agents.

Our intellects allow us to simultaneously see the paradox.

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It’s Time to Get Back Into RSS

A lot of people who were on the internet in the early 2000’s remember something called RSS. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it allowed content creators to publish updates to the world in a well-understood format.

The idea—which seems strange to type out—is that millions of people in the world could create and publish ideas, thoughts, and content…and then people who enjoyed that content would collect sources into a reader, which was called, well, an RSS Reader.

I often wonder if Google could revive democracy by bringing back Reader.

Google Reader, the most missed product in Google’s extensive graveyard

Google Reader was the reader of choice, and it was glorious. People took pride in their curated set of sources, and we wrote a lot about how to best organize your feeds for maximum efficiency.

It was a direct connection between creators and consumers. By adding someone’s feed to your RSS reader you were saying, “Yes, I’d like to subscribe to your interpretation of reality.”

By curating the feeds in your reader, you were curating your view of the world. And that was made up of hundreds or thousands of individual voices.

We’re not sure who struck first—us or them—but we know it was us that scorched the sky.

Morpheus

It’s unclear what exactly destroyed RSS, but Google closing Google Reader definitely didn’t help. Another factor was the rise of aggregation sites like Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit, which seductively took on the burden of surfacing the best content.

So rather than having to curate your own feeds, you just land on a single site and have the “best” content presented to you.

A picture of me getting a story off of Digg in 2005

Reddit is awesome, for sure. And so were the other aggregators. But I think they stole something from us. First, they broke the direct connection between the reader and the creator, making it so that Digg showed you a story, not Kristen—who you’ve been following for years. And second, it removed the need to tend to one’s own input garden.

The less effort it takes to acquire something, the less value it will have to you.

I’m sure social media sites had an effect too, because—like aggregators—they were singular watering holes that guaranteed something exciting when you showed up. The common denominator is the move from more effort to less. It’s like in WALL-E, where we turn into morbidly obese people on hoverchairs being shuttled between stimuli.

Well, it’s time to garden again. It’s time to return to RSS.

Google Reader is still dead, but if I remove my nostalgia glasses, Feedly is probably better now than Reader ever was. It’s what I’ve been using for years now.

Be sure to follow lots of stuff you agree with, and stuff you don’t

I mean cooking as a passion, not as a cheaper alternative to eating out.

I see RSS curation like the practice of cooking one’s own meals. There’s something magical about picking specific ingredients, using custom tools to prepare them, and then consuming the output.

Or—perhaps an even better metaphor—cultivating a bookshelf. With the only difference being that bookshelves are usually constructed using only one’s favorite books, while I think an RSS reader should be designed for “exposure to other” as well.

Just as with any hobby, the effort adds meaning to the output.

The point is that curation of an RSS reader forces one to think about their inputs, and to exercise their values in doing so. Are you building a list of inputs that agree with you? Are you including people who you respect but disagree with? What about people you can’t stand at all?

What you choose to include will not just define how you see the world, but how well you understand other peoples’ perspectives as well.

So I challenge you.

Go sign up for Feedly
Add your favorite news sites
Add your favorite aggregators’ feeds (best of both worlds!)
Add your favorite thinkers and creators’ individual sites
Add every one of your friends’ sites
Add the top news sites of your political opponents
Add the sites from your various hobbies (cooking, cars, electronics, etc.)

Then, as the most important step, stop visiting the New York Times, CNN, Reddit, Hacker News, Lobsters, and every other site you rotate through all day.

Feedly also uses AI to highlight critical sections of the article.

Instead, just open your reader and get the content from there.

A story within Feedly

Not only will this reduce your anxiety and churn from constantly opening and closing various sites, but RSS also shows the content in a standard format, with less to distract you.

If you add .rss to the end of any Reddit URL you get its RSS feed.

Remember, you don’t have to give anything up. You can still have Hacker News, Lobsters, and yes—even Reddit—all in one place.

Summary

Ok, to sum up.

We lost something when we stopped following individual content sources
While Reader is gone, Feedly (and others) have done a good job replacing it
You don’t have to give up the power of the aggregators; just add them as sources
RSS is clutter-free consumption, with fewer ads, no popups, etc
Curating your input garden is a meaningful part of the consumption experience
It’s relaxing to know you only have to check one place rather than N places

Long live RSS.

Notes


Ideally, the return to RSS would be accompanied by the return to blogging. More
Here’s a write-up on the various RSS Reader options out there. More

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