Hello, go back to TechScape. On this week's Tech, Elon Musk and Donald Trump will flood the zone and deploy Brinkmanship as a negotiation tactic. US immigration and customs enforcement learn to optimize search engines amid arrests and deportation. And Spotify tries to soften the algorithmic image with human-centered public relations. Thank you for reading.
Zone Flood: Trump has an executive order. Musk has doji
Donald Trump has issued a record number of executive orders since the presidency began: ending birthright citizenship, banning gender transition for anyone under the age of 19, and the attack on January 6th Forgive the rioters. Elon Musk, the world's wealthiest person in charge of the “Government's Ministry of Efficiency,” attacks the equally dizzy belt of federal agencies, with the goal of “reducing waste, fraud and abuse.” I did. Among the half-dozen offices are the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor and the most vicious US Organization for International Development (USAID). Trump and Musk are making every effort to “flood the zone.” This is a tactic that former Trump administration strategist Steve Bannon intentionally promoted as overwhelming the opposition and the media. Bannon is correct. It's difficult to catch up.
Trump and Musk share brink-edge talent. They force negotiations to a mutually guaranteed point of destruction and then retreat to accept the version of what they want. Trump has declared that he will use the executive order to impose a 25% tariff on all goods imported into the US from Mexico and Canada. But Trump delayed tariffs a month after Canada and Mexico agreed to protect the border with 10,000 troops each.
Musk preaches that he is disbanding USAID. He still – the agency's name is being taken out of its door – but the likelihood result seems to be that a reduction in the agency's version will be folded into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared the head of the agency as workers are trapped. The fingerprints on the mask were seen in a “road fork” email received by all 2 million US government employees. Will they all resign, evacuate, and invalidate the government? Very unlikely. Does a partial acquisition of the workforce achieve the same results as a layoff? yes.
Musk has used this playbook many times before. Most notably, X, was used on Née Twitter. He pulled the office lease so quickly that the company failed to pay the rent it still leases. He fired about three-quarters of the workforce and left the issue of resignation to the court after some employees sued. It appears that there is less musk inevitable after negotiating payments via lawsuits. However, an edgy approach has not always worked out because of the mask. Using X, he frequently tweets about how bad it is for social networks to attract attention, threatens to buy it, signs a $44 billion purchase agreement, and then does the best to get out of the contract. I've done it. However, he was forced to go through it and admitted that X was overrated in a recent interview. When the judge overridden the $56 billion salary package at Tesla, he said he would consider leaving the company without pay. The judge did not blink and ruled that his salary was once again overextensive. Mask has not left Tesla and does not have an existing pay package.
Silicon Valley software companies like to repeat products that move quickly and break things and serve innovation. I call Elon Musk moving very fast. He might break everything. It seems to be one of the things Trump likes most about him. The president himself isn't that different. Do you remember when the US was about to fight against Iran? He halted the airstrike while the plane was in the air.
The next goals for masks appear to be Medicare and Medicaid. What will break and who will break?
Read here who is helping Elon Musk lay waste in the US government.
The logical end of SEO: the miracle of deportation in Google search results
There are several ways to match games in Google Search with games, towards the top page of the results page, which is the most valuable real estate on the internet. In fact, an entire field called Search Engine Optimization or SEO is built around it. Google's algorithm works by examining various factors on a web page to determine whether it is relevant and authoritative. Government web domains have already earned prestigious bonus points.
SEO tactics are in the hands of all the mid-way recipe bloggers in the US, but why doesn't the government know about them? US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) updated thousands of press releases on January 24, making old press releases appear new in Google search results, and longtime immigration lawyers search for enforcement actions. did.
My colleague Dara Kerr reports:
Over the past few weeks, news of mass immigrant arrests has taken the US by storm. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho describe ice agents that spread to the community and round people. Google quickly searches ice operations, raids and arrests and returns a flood of government press releases. Headlines include an ice halt 85 during the four-day Colorado business, with New Orleans focusing on targeted operations for 123 detectives and 83 criminals with ice arrests in Wisconsin. It's there.
But if you look closely at these ice reports, there's another story.
Four days of operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. 123 people targeting New Orleans? That was last February. Wisconsin? September 2018. This has thousands of examples across all 50 states. This is an ICE press release that reached the first page of Google's search results and actually looks like an enforcement action that occurred months or years ago. Some of the arrests of “44 absconders” in Nebraska will return until 2008.
The archived ice press release that soars to the top of Google search results was marked with the same time stamp and read “Updated: 01/24/2025”.
Read the full story here.
Spotify plays the human side of recommendations while growing with AI features
Björk recently replied with Spotify, “probably the worst thing that happened to musicians. Streaming culture has changed society as a whole and generation of artists.”
How to counter bad publicity like Doyen of experimental music that denied your company? But Spotify was ready. The company had made an attractive attack last week ahead of its sunny revenue report. I posted my first year-round profit. CEO Daniel Ek said he saw “the potential for a transformative change in music discovery” in the recent development of AI.
Wall Street Journal in mid-January Profile has been published Spotify's Eccentric Editor, Headline and Sub Head: Make or Break New Artist Playlist Power Broker: Spotify is known for its algorithmic recommendations, but Sulinna Ong brings a human touch to find new hits . Ong said he spends three hours a day lying on the floor listening to new songs. What a whim, what a human being! She positioned herself as an anti-android soul within the mechanical beast. ? ”
It is doubtful how much humanity ONG can inject. Spotify playlists are certainly a big taste maker, but they can't serve 640 million users. Algorithically generate playlists based on your music preferences and activities you search for, such as “running mix,” “daily drive,” or “comfortable cleaning mix.” Humans are not included. The streamer fired about 1,700 employees in December 2023. This includes many of the human playlist makers. Four months later, I deployed the AI playlist generator. This is probably because these curators are trained in the labors of these curators, allowing users to enter playlists based on text prompts like the music ChatGPT.
Spotify placed ONG on the WSJ page, like the bishop of the Chess Committee. All interviews with current employees of high-tech companies that print it happens with a given goal in mind. Executives as seniors as ONG don't go near journalists without the blessings of dozens of public relations experts and Spotify executives. Such sit-ins are deployed selectively and strategically, serving stories that executives believe will support consumers and hit the dollar. She's not on a paycheck to sit for a photo shoot, but she can probably listen to an hour of new songs while posing.
So, what kind of song is it on Spotify? The company emphasizes humanity of recommendations, as financial and product decisions scream AI. The public doesn't like AI to go near art. Hundreds of artists from music and other fields opposed the generation AI, accusing the developer of stealing their work. But as a tech company, Spotify hopes that AI will improve its recommendations on hundreds of millions of yen. That's where the money is on the way. That's what the engineers work for. As a music company, we need similarities in human touch. Enter Surinna Ong, the persuasive human mascot.
I hope more companies follow the same public relations playbook and emphasize the small tweaks that humans make, while spending a lot on AI. Even Björk himself is not immune. She destroyed Spotify mainly in interviews about promoting a new concert film on Apple TV+.
