US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken met with China’s Xi Jinping today to discuss everything from AI to the war in Ukraine. But “TikTok did not come up,” Blinken told reporters at a short press conference following his meetings today. Seriously, that’s all he said. Maybe next time.
[The New York Times]
Our latest episode of Decoder is about the brand-new TikTok ban — and how years of congressional inaction on a federal privacy law helped lead us to this moment of apparent national panic about algorithmic social media.
This is a thorny discussion, and to help break it all down, I invited Verge senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner on the show. Lauren has been closely covering efforts to ban TikTok for years now, and she’s also watched Congress fail to pass meaningful privacy regulation for even longer. We’ll go over how we got here, what this means for both TikTok and efforts to pass new privacy legislation, and what might happen next.
Look, this is fine advice from Adam Mosseri — build an audience, not traffic, as we say so often around here — but it’s just so weird to lean this far into the idea of engagement for regular people. These platforms all feel like work now, and increasingly less fun work. No wonder everyone is going to the DMs!
Our pals at Rest of World have a deep dive into the TSMC chip fab in Arizona, one of the major plants funded by the Chips and Science Act. It was meant to come online this year, but it’s fallen well behind schedule, and culture shock is a major reason why:
Several American former employees said they felt relief after quitting. In group chats, engineers celebrated the departure of their friends. “TSMC was the worst possible place to work on Earth,” one American ex-TSMC engineer told Rest of World. Another, who recently left the company, described TSMC as having “a purely authoritarian work structure.”
Shades of Foxconn in Wisconsin, but at least this time there’s an actual factory.
For teens and gamers, Discord has become their entire online social lives. Co-founder Jason Citron thinks the internet is headed more in that direction.
Today’s episode of Decoder is all about Disney, the massive activist investor revolt it just fought off, and what happens next in the world of streaming. Earlier this month, Disney survived an attempted board takeover from businessman Nelson Peltz. While investors overwhelmingly sided with Disney and CEO Bob Iger, the boardroom showdown made something very clear: Disney needs to figure out streaming and get its creative direction back on track.
To help me better understand what’s happening here, I brought on my friend Julia Alexander, who is VP of strategy at Parrot Analytics, a Puck News news contributor, and, most importantly, a former Verge reporter. She’s a leading expert on all things Disney, and I always learn something important about the state of the entertainment business when I talk to her.
You know, in case that sort of thing is relevant to you.
[Create Digital Music]
A bunch of places covered AI-generated images of an unholy Jesus/shrimp hybrid going viral on Facebook earlier this year, but the attention didn’t cause Zuck to take any action to slow the situation down. Here’s JC Noods laying back on a Lambo, a post which has 36,000 likes on Facebook right now. The AI internet is going great, y’all.
One of the odder things about the Vision Pro is that it doesn’t support a lot of standard VR and 3D video formats, like the side-by-side videos you can find in lots of places. Mike Swanson has a deep dive into Apple’s proprietary immersive video format, which uses a square frame and layered videos for each eye.
