OPERATIONS: I have to get seven pages out of the house by 5pm and finish tomorrow’s newsletter READING: THE BOOK OF COMMENTARY / UNQUIET GARDEN OF THE SOUL, Alexander Kluge (UK) (US+) LISTENING:
So at 2pm I just put on Merrell black suede slip-ons, Carharrt utility pant, a submariner sweater, merino scarf and watchcap, leather gloves, slipped the wired mp3 player into the side pocket of the utility pant, and listened to two new music purchases while I walked into town, had a glass of wine and chatted with some people downstairs at the deli, wrote some notes on a new project, bought some cheese and walked home again.
“I wouldn’t look at this as a change in approach for Netflix movies or for Warner movies,” he said. “I think, over time, the windows will evolve to be much more consumer friendly, to be able to meet the audience where they are quicker … I’d say right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros. will continue to go to the theaters through Warner Bros., and Netflix movies will take the same strides they have, which is, some of them do have a short run in the theater beforehand. But our primary goal is to bring first-run movies to our members, because that’s what they’re looking for.”
During its bid against Paramount and Comcast for Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix assured company executives it would uphold existing agreements requiring theatrical movie releases if the deal went through. No surprise, looks like he lied.
All told, the company has lost more than $70 billion since the beginning of 2021 on its enormous long-term VR bet, a staggering sum that has left investors itchy and unimpressed as Zuckerberg has failed to convince the public of the high-fidelity virtual spaces he long insisted we’d be choosing to spend most of our time in.
Now, as Bloomberg reports, the company’s executives are eying gigantic budget cuts, as high as 30 percent, for the teams responsible for its Meta Horizon Worlds product and Quest VR headset — another nail in the coffin for Zuckerberg’s obsession that has been a major thorn in the sides of investors for years now. Layoffs could start as soon as January, but final decisions have yet to be made.
In fact, following Bloomberg‘s reporting, Meta’s stock jumped over four percent on Thursday, underscoring the degree to which shareholders have grown fed up with the company trying to make the metaverse happen.
Feedbin just went down, but apparently it’s just me. Which might be just as well, because if I see one more clickbaity fake-outrage gibbering about Pantone’s choice for Pantone Colour Of The Year then I might just delete everything anyway.
Octothorpes are hashtags and backlinks that can be used on regular websites, connecting pages across the open internet regardless of where they’re hosted.
As with all indieweb stuff, I lost the will to live less than halfway through the “getting started” section of the docs, but maybe this will be useful to someone, and maybe I should return to it after more coffee.
The Hare #9 [December 2025] by Andrew Chapman
Bronze Age/Neolithic complex find, Indian menhirs… and the original rock music
I take back my earlier comment about my newsletter host, Beehiiv, preparing to go down the enshittification route Turns out they’re building in a digital product sales platform and some form of podcast connectivity (but not hosting, which I think is probably a missed opportunity). This comes as some surprise. I could do without an AI website builder and I couldn’t care less about a new link-in-bio operation, but I imagine I’m in the minority there.
I keep thinking about podcasting, and being able to handle all that in the place where I do my newsletter might have pushed me a bit further in that direction. So we’ve probably all been saved. But low cost digital products have been on my mind for a couple of years, and very few places handle those well.
So, just a note to self that an internet company didn’t let me down for once.
Social media usage peaked in 2022 and has been on a steady decline since. An analysis of 250,000 adults across more than 50 countries by the digital audience insights company GWI found that adults aged 16 and older spent an average of two hours and 20 minutes per day on social platforms at the end of 2024. That figure is down almost 10% from 2022. The decline is most pronounced among teenagers and people in their twenties.
Usage has traced a smooth curve upward and then downward over the past decade. This is not simply the unwinding of increased screen time during pandemic lockdowns. The data also captured a shift in how people use these platforms. The share of people who report using social media to stay in touch with friends, express themselves or meet new people has fallen by more than a quarter since 2014.
Opening the apps reflexively to fill spare time has risen. North America is an exception to the global trend. Social media consumption there continues to climb. By 2024 it reached levels 15% higher than Europe. Meta and OpenAI recently announced new social platforms that will be filled with AI-generated short-form videos.
morning computer: some useful things first thing in the day.
My free weekly newsletter is at https://orbitaloperations.beehiiv.com/
I’ve tried a couple of other services to create publicly accessible playlists from Bandcamp-hosted music, but now Bandcamp are launching their own public-facing playlist function in beta. You can currently only build playlists in their mobile app, and there are some signficant guardrails and hurdles:
Built on ownership Fans can only add tracks they own to a playlist. That means every Bandcamp Playlist is a reflection of real support for artists, not passive streaming. No free-for-all streaming Fan listeners can sample tracks they don’t own, but after reaching the artist-set limit (3 plays by default), they’re directed to the album page to purchase. Supporting artists is baked in Visitors must be logged into a fan account to listen to Bandcamp Playlists, ensuring a connection between discovery and directly supporting artists.
However, I find it hard to raise a full-throated objection to any of them. Yes, discoverability is impacted, but the trade-offs for that are non-trivial.
Buy Music Club and BNDCMPR will still be options for people who want to send playlists beyond the cohort of people with Bandcamp accounts. I particularly like Buy Music Club for the way it flags the buy-button on every track. But. With the social media system fragmenting and falling down, our inboxes choked with newsletters, search mangled by AI and the slopocalypse cresting the battlements, curation matters.
So that’s what I’m thinking about today instead of doing any of the dozen things I’m supposed to be doing.
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter. Now: DESOLATION JONES: THE BIOHZARD EDITION, THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT audio drama podcast, THE STORMWATCH COMPENDIUM. Forthcoming 2025: FELL: FERAL CITY new printing, THE AUTHORITY Compact Edition, The LIGHTS OUT Anthology.
At some point, we realise all our little hopes and dreams for the web are pointless because it’s all out of our hands. And yet we can’t shake those dreams off, because it seems to us like the culture is so busted that the only way to connect it up is through the open web. Because the open web is open access and some form of the web pervades most of our lives now.
Sadly, the web we have is the mediocre network-tv version.
But this is where we all were forty-odd years ago with relation to the previous generations of dominant media. We lived inside broadcast television and print culture that we had no control over. So we got zine culture and tape culture and even a pirate radio revival.
People in the US in the Sixties used to talk about going out to “find America.” Now I see people doing their damnedest to find the web.
