All of this has happened before, all of this will happen again. It was a quiet echo of the past, and perhaps a hint of things to come, when TechCrunch took a break from exploring the ethical questions inherent of helping American soldiers survive combat (they are against) to publish a pair of hit jobs on Alexandr Wang. The problem, according to crazy people, is Wang’s public position Scale AI won’t factor sex or race into hiring decisions, which is, for a certain kind of online lunatic, something very close to mortal sin. But the year is no longer 2020, and these hit pieces hit different — not only because of the loud support Alex received for once unspeakable, if totally obvious moral truths (literally just “racism is bad”), but because of how much time it took the activist press to strike. Alexandr’s initial post went viral almost two weeks before their first attack, while the second only landed a few days ago — much more chaotically written, also widely panned, and almost immediately stealth-edited to strip the stinking trash heap of its most offensive language. In the end, it was only the goofy TechCrunch that opted into histrionics, and not even they would commit to the bit. We’re in the vibe shift now. Workplace struggle sessions are over, and all the clowns who used to run this insane asylum have vanished into obscurity.

Right?

Certainly the world has changed, but I do think it’s all a bit more complicated. As of June 2024, a handful of prominent venture capitalists are publicly supporting Donald Trump, a once unthinkable act. But as Pirate Wires broke last week, actual donations from venture capitalists haven't meaningfully changed. In fact, with Silicon Valley Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman on the board — a man who takes up space — things are up and to the left. So what has changed? Are we just talking more openly on X, a newly-open social media platform, with fewer social consequences?

As Jack Dorsey explained last month, the social internet is increasingly balkanized, a view Balaji recently echoed. But that doesn’t mean the crazies are gone. A few days ago, I dipped over to Zuckerberg’s “news free” Threads to enjoy journalist Ryan Mac’s meltdown after Meta publicists said they didn’t like him in a series of leaked emails (I’m a man of simple pleasures), and was immediately soaked in vitriol. All the worst media people on the planet are very much still active. Yes, they’re spewing garbage on smaller platforms to fewer people, but Threads isn’t dead. It’s growing. With that growth will come increased attention, which will in turn begin to shape our future. And if the future is defined by this?

Jesus Christ.

The chaos of Elon taking Twitter private may have confused power, but even a subtle shift in platform relevance or law could once again favor the prior Stasi mall cops, who just a few years ago would have gone to war for Alexandr’s resignation, and probably would have won. The lone wolf citizen journalist will never be enough to push back against a professional class of full-time sensemakers “breaking” and shaping news. The technology industry, and America more broadly, needs a counterpoint.

Pirate Wires matters.

It's been 18 months since I raised a round of financing, with the goal of building something bigger than myself. This week, as my team eases into a little well-deserved time off for America’s birth, I’ve been reflecting on our progress, and how we fit into the world. Here, my perspective on the macro trends in technology that drove our culture to its present state of broken trust and cultural disunity, the new crop of identity-forward, distribution-focused media companies rising from the ashes of the early internet content farms, and a way forward for pirates.

…

At a certain level of Rich Person, it really does seem like every guy in tech wants to own a bunch of writers. Chris Hughes bought The New Republic, Marc Benioff bought TIME, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post — all complete disasters. But while the details in each of these cases have varied, the central problem facing every one has been the same: a commitment on the part of the Rich Person to not rock the boat, and a misplaced reverence for a newsroom full of people who have forged identities in opposition to technology, business, and often our country.

The Old Things are what they are, and will always be thus. To build something truly new, you have to build it from scratch.

For years, and especially by 2020, the notion our country needed new media institutions was not uncommon, and in tech the question of how such an institution should properly operate was a popular subject of discussion. In this, while not a ground up effort, one recent attempt in media does provide a good bit of insight into how these conversations get basically everything wrong —

After acquiring a 7.7% stake in Buzzfeed back in May (now closer to 9%), former Republican presidential candidate and Based Business Guy Vivek Ramaswamy shared a lengthy post offering his “advice” to Buzzfeed’s founder and CEO Jonah Peretti. To save this failing company, he explained, the path was clear: pivot to AI, embrace the creator economy!, and rebrand.

Now, Jonah already pivoted to AI (infamously (it won’t help)), and “have you heard of the creator economy” would have been more interesting ten years ago. However, the brand suggestion… okay no, that was also wrong. But it was wrong in an interesting way. All political voices must be welcome, Viv explained, rather than solely the Evil Woke Left, and the company must embrace a Policy of Truth (sound familiar?), rather than Lies and Fake News. But while “diversity of thought,” which is to say a strong commitment to no single thought in particular, works as a fun debate retort to regressive racial politics, it’s not how you find the truth, and it’s certainly not how you build a brand. When a man stands for everything, he stands for nothing. And nobody subscribes, for money, to nothing.

This is where our average Rich Person really doesn’t get it. He undertands the press is influential, but he finds that fact more frustrating than he does exciting, so he never takes the time to figure out exactly why the press is influential.

When I decided to raise, I thought I had a pretty good idea.

What I knew.

There was nothing really “new” about New Media except it happened on the internet. Twenty years ago, most newspapers were defined by their neutral, “objective” voice, while their business was shaped by defensible distribution channels and advertising revenue (classifieds, inserts, ads). The truth is, they were already dying long before the social internet, gutted partly by television, and then aggressively by search and tools like Craigslist. Fundamentally, Buzzfeed’s model wasn’t really different than the New York Times. It was just… less.

New Media startups didn’t own their distribution. They did however pour ungodly sums of money into surfing distribution channels owned by other people with the goal of driving traffic back to their sites, and to their advertisements — no classifieds, no inserts, just a lot of eyes on display. Given the tremendous potential reach of any single piece of content online, that must have made it all feel really new. But it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t even novel in the world of media.

All the old papers were already online, and they quickly followed the young guys into the chaos of clicks. As mobile grew more popular, Facebook grew more dominant, and once the world’s attention was concentrated in one place every media company in the country started going viral just enough to make them feel like they were the future. It was a mad gold rush, so obviously venture capitalists got involved, and once that happened valuations became dumber than you can possibly imagine. A few years later, Zuckerberg flipped the free traffic switch to “pay me,” and everything began to die. Unless of course you’d built up email-based subscriptions before 2017 or so.

Do you know who charted the “new” course in subscriptions?

The New York Times launched a paywall in 2011, six years before Vice’s famously deranged $5.7 billion valuation (for comparison, the Times was trading around $2.3 billion at the top of that year), and by 2014 they were featuring a wide array of newsletters. The Gray Lady wasn’t interested in farming clicks, she was laser focused on your inbox. Sharing stories across the new medium was cute, and certainly the writers were all distracted by the rush of Twitter. But leadership was focused on rebuilding their company online, which could only begin with distribution. This is not to say the old thing was the new thing all along. This is to say there was never actually a “new” thing. There were just a bunch of stupid rich kids screwing around on the internet, and a lot of dumb money (some things never change). Separate from its actual content, a news company is, and has always been, distribution + paid + ads. Just as in the physical world, you either had all three online or you didn’t, and if you didn’t you were doomed. 

By the mid-2010s, the instability of social media was obvious to everyone, but for most huge players it was way too late to adapt. Once Substack democratized the bootstrapped newsletter, which guaranteed the most popular writers and publishers ownership of their readership by way of the email, a fresh media Renaissance was inevitable, and random online shitposters quickly became more influence than Vox or Vice or any of the other huge encumbants.

What I learned.

I started writing Pirate Wires in the summer of 2020, right at the inflection point when it was both a little easier to capture distribution, and still difficult to speak your mind without a bunch of people coming for your job. Long story short, there was nobody in my lane, or certainly not in tech, and I slowly built the kind of news company I always wished existed.

People sometimes call me “techno optimistic.” While I don’t consider this an insult, I’m not. I just value technology and business at the conceptual level, which I think looks strange to people used to “eat the rich” type decel shit. But I critique technology, and techology businesses, all the time. In a way, this is probably the thing that best defines my work. I just come at these things with a fresh perspective, which a large, growing, and completely marginalized tech demographic happens to share.

Pirate Wires aggressively covered the social media “misinformation” mall cops from the very first summer I started publishing, with close attention paid to the relationship between journalists, the activists strangling most large tech companies from within, and the state. This led me to Twitter, an early favorite muse of mine, and Dorsey, from his first sad appearance before Congress to his triumphant return, and his ambitions in a new, decentralized social media protocol. I interviewed Jack a couple years later, and broke the motivation behind his departure from Bluesky — a major story. But I’ve written and published honestly, from my perspective, about all of these companies.

We relentlessly covered Apple’s pathetic submission to its mob of activist employees, and were on the front lines of every single piece of Elon’s wild saga to X. We’ve written about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Amazon, Microsoft. What are they working on? Is it exciting, helpful, wondrous? Great, who is trying to destroy it, and why? Or, is the work pretty terrible, for the country or the industry? Why? What does that mean? And what should we expect next? More recently, Pirate Wires was the first outlet to cover Google’s racist Gemini disaster — a topic so outside the Overton Window the mainstream press might never have covered it had we not forced them — and broke the architecture of Gemini, one of the most important tech stories of the year.

I wrote about San Francisco local politics when the subject was somehow both considered silly and “mean.” Today, that discourse is a core part of tech culture, and Pirate Wires pretty much owns the space of data-driven reporting on the city’s nonprofit industrial complex. Our early interview with Grimes was the first to cover her outsized cultural role in the industry, which itself intersected AI heavily, another topic we were early to. Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, Brian Armstrong — we’ll always interview the major players. But the internet’s insane, and that Clown World increasingly shapes our reality, so we cover all kinds of crazy shit.

Does testosterone make you gay? Are gay incels turning trans for access to the sexual marketplace? Should we offer UBI in a wireheading city in the American desert? Speaking of the American desert, should we terraform the Salton Sea? Should we gene drive Burmese pythons out of existence? Give me a genetically modified racoon, I want new domestic pets. Give me geoengineering. Give me megaengineering. And here’s a wild thought: should crime be illegal?

Mainly, I’ve learned to follow my interests — my taste — and to publish things I want to read myself. The more I do, and the more my writers do the same, the more popular we become. In journalism, I think there’s a moral corollary here as well: the more we share our biases, the more our readers trust us, and in 2024 trust is a precious currency. Altogether, the company is technically succeeding, which is no small thing in media today. This landscape is brutal, and not only in terms of the business macro. Fundamentally, every news company trades in attention, which means there is no thriving here without successful navigation of a relentlessly memetic hellscape.

Tech is positive sum, another reason people working in the industry tend to have a hard time understanding media. But content is a hits driven business, and all your contemporaries are fighting for the same, finite inbox real estate. In this, I’ve found no one is more dangerous than a “friend” working on a publication with some overlap in style or coverage.

Oh, they love you. Come to dinner, let’s grab drinks. Have you met [whatever stupid famous retired writer I don’t care about because I don’t have time to read for pleasure anymore]. By the way, who is your designer? Who produces your podcast? I love that writer so-and-so you hired, should we “collaborate”? But then they come for everything you have — your products, your scoops, your staff. All is fair in love and war, and for them its both. Sure, every clone is doomed to fail. As long as we don’t betray our values or our aesthetic sensibilities, nobody will ever do Pirate Wires better than Pirate Wires. The company’s goated. But damn, it’s still annoying.

Oddly, while not as dangerous, the tech memetics are even more annoying.

Today, while every billionaire ex-wife in America is funneling tens of millions of dollars into virulently communist NGOs and “press startups,” every billionaire in tech is either cheering for Pirate Wires from afar, or pretending to build “the industry’s first alternative news site” while literally subscribed to my daily. Sir, it’s not going to happen. There are many reasons it’s not going to happen. One is “taste,” which you don’t have. But the big one is the thing you are trying to build already exists, which is — by the way! — how you got the idea.

The good news is you don’t need to build an ‘edgy new tech press outlet’ that doesn’t want communism. I already did that. You’re welcome. All you have to do is support us, which, for a based rich person, is very easy to do. First, subscribe to Pirate Wires. If you’re already subscribed, gift 20 more subscriptions to your friends [I’m not kidding, click here and do it already ffs]. You probably don’t realize the power you have on social media, but explicitly linking to Pirate Wires and telling your followers we are important, and they should subscribe, is a powerful assist to our work. If you’re running a hugely famous technology company (and I know you all read this) hit me up about a team subscription. Finally, and most importantly, give us information.

Why are you sharing scoops with journalists who hate you? Do you not understand how this works? I’m realizing it’s possible you don’t understand how this works. New information is the lifeblood of a media company. When you share it with a hostile outlet, you are feeding them. When you withhold it from a value-aligned company, if even inadvertently, you are starving them.

Send us your scoops. Send us your stories. Are you enjoying tech’s vibe shift? It didn’t just happen. Support the team that doesn’t want you liquidated, or don’t complain about the hateful tech press when they’re at your door with pitchforks. Will I still defend you when you’re unjustly maligned? I mean of course I will, you know how much I love drama. But I will find it extremely annoying.

I’m often asked what’s next, not only for Pirate Wires but for media, and specifically at that crossroads with technology. Are Silicon Valley billionaires about to generate an army of AI writers, and flood the world with brilliant content? Will the wordchads be replaced?

I would love that to be honest. I would love to get a dog and moody cabin and to read Gibbon by the pool until I die. But my sense is tech people who believe all our human writers are about to be replaced are confusing their fear of “cool people” (an illusion, nobody in media is cool) with some Hail Mary hope for their extinction. That, or they’re suffering from the same aesthetic blind spot that led them to believe they could successfully compete with me. But people aren’t going anywhere.

There will always be a human interest in other human beings — not only in terms of questions surrounding what they are doing or building or where they are going, but what other people, who they trust, think about other people. That is just how we work. That is just what we are. Advances in technology will only amplify the most intriguing voices writing and filming and streaming. You’ve probably noticed the ElevenLabs integration we launched, featured at the top of this piece. I just cloned my voice. A couple years ago, that would have struck you as a miracle. This technology will improve. The world is changing — fast. We will not only be writing about new technlogy, but leveraging new tools to grow. Pirate Wires is building an army. There will be many more humans in this army (we are hiring by the way, send me your takes), and probably also robots. That isn’t scary. That’s just a science fiction novel that we get to live inside.

For folks who’ve been here from the ground floor, thanks as ever for reading. For new folks, welcome. Thanks to every one of you for subscribing. We have miles to go.

Happy Independence Day. Subscribe, or die.

-SOLANA