Five Things I Learned in 2023

Not a great year, Bob.

Photo by Engin Akyurt.

Today is the last day of 2023 and I’m seeing a lot of folks put out “Here’s what I accomplished in 2023!” year end posts. I’m going to be honest: I attempted to start a post like that once or twice, and then gave up almost immediately. I don’t feel particularly proud of what I was able to get done in 2023. My experience has been dominated by my attempts to further build up my online media company and health challenges in my family, both of which have taken a toll on my motivation and ability to make stuff.

But it felt wrong to leave the year without writing some kind of reflection. So today, I thought I’d share about some things I’ve learned this year (or maybe things I already knew but had reinforced?). Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Everything we love feels delicately held together

I’ve spent the past 15 years of my life writing and podcasting about the entertainment industry, but it’s safe to say that the past few years have been the most tumultuous that I’ve witnessed. This year, we saw a double strike stretch on for over a hundred days and do billions of dollars of damage to the show business economy (to be clear: I fully blame the studios for this state of affairs). But beyond the economic damage, what I keep thinking about are the countless stories we won’t hear from folks who just barely missed their big break or who found the past year economically unsustainable and left the industry. Just an enormous loss of institutional knowledge and brain drain that I think will take years for the industry to recover, if it ever does.

It is nowhere written that an idea like Hollywood has to exist, or that a critical mass of people will always be around to buy tickets to theaters that project movies on big screens. Sometimes it feels like Hollywood takes its audience for granted, as if people will always come back no matter what happens. But more and more, people are spending their time elsewhere and once new habits around entertainment have been built, they are hard to break.

Hollywood is in disarray. The media industry is in freefall. The podcast industry is imploding (well, a bit). For many years, these were industries whose highest ranks I’ve aspired to. These days, they seem so delicate as to be on the verge of collapse, leaving me wondering if there’s anything more reliable than what’s on offer.

2. The bad people still own everything

Whether it’s Elon Musk burning Twitter to the ground or David Zaslav treating our cultural history like it’s another line on his P&L or Substack (the owners of the site this newsletter is published on) hanging up a “Nazis welcome” sign on their doorstep, 2023 was a great year for demonstrating that bad people own everything and they are going to use that ownership to make the world a worse place.

I’m not a wilting hothouse flower. I understand that this is the way things have always been — it’s not like the robber barons of the 19th century were particularly ethical in how their empires were built. But as a millennial, I grew up in an era of techno-optimism, when people believed that the democratizing power of the internet might return more power to the people and allow us to create a better future together.

The internet has certainly provided economic opportunities for creators that have achieved some nominal level of success and notoriety — I know because I’m one of them. But what’s also become clear is that it was always somewhat silly to believe in techno-optimism in the first place and its present-day proponents have morphed into horrifying caricatures.

In other words, whatever the positive effects of social platforms are, they can be significantly counteracted when a billionaire narcissist can just buy the whole website and turn it into his plaything. I’m speaking generally of course, and not about any specific example.

3. The temptation to think people know what they’re doing is intense

It has been a bizarre, out-of-body experience to watch respectable institutions and individuals try to defend and normalize some of the most oblivious people making catastrophic decisions.

Let me provide an example.

Above is an excerpt from The New York Times Dealbook interview with X CEO Elon Musk. In the interview, Musk is asked about the fact that advertisers no longer want to spend money on X after he publicly supported an antisemitic conspiracy theory. In response, Musk tells his advertisers, “don’t advertise” and later, “go fuck yourselves.” In the same interview, Musk also said that earth will judge these advertisers (his potential customers!) and mistakenly called interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin by the name Jonathan.

This was a disastrous interview and if anyone other than Musk had given it, the Times would’ve written what’s actually happening, which is that we are watching a billionaire whose business interests are critical to America’s economy and national security spiral and melt down. Instead, the coverage makes the interview seem like just any other conversation, but with a little profanity. [For actually useful coverage of this interview, I’d recommend

Dave Karpf

’s post about it.]

Even today, The Times has a piece about Musk’s belief in the “free market” of ideas, while conveniently ignoring the fact that Musk arbitrarily banned journalists from Twitter who criticized him. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people speculate that Musk actually has a 4D-chess-style plan to actually destroy Twitter, conveniently ignoring Occam’s Razor and the idea that maybe he’s just not very good at this.

The urge to normalize is not just strong with the Times but with other prominent authors. Walter Isaacson’s book about Elon Musk also completely failed to meet the moment. And in 2023, respected author Michael Lewis torched decades of his credibility by coming out in favor of… Sam Bankman-Fried? The guy whose actions brought down one of the biggest crypto exchanges ever and who’s likely going to a jail for a long time? [Don’t even get me started about the Times’ coverage of Donald Trump…]

For centuries, society has fed us the narrative that the wealthy people in charge not only deserve to be there but actually know what they’re doing. What the past few years have asked is: What if they don’t? Many people are having trouble adjusting to that reality and it’s just been a huge bummer to watch.

4. People have not thought through how to use AI

Here are a handful of stories about how companies have tried to implement AI this year:

• Gizmodo published a story about how to watch the Star Wars movies/TV shows in chronological order, which was riddled with inaccuracies.

• Sports Illustrated was caught publishing stories from writers who didn’t exist.

• Microsoft’s MSN website published an AI-generated story calling a dead NBA player “useless” and its AI chatbot responded to questions about elections with misinformation

This isn’t just companies behaving like, “Hey, we haven’t thought through some of the third or fourth order impacts of AI.” This is them charging into the future seemingly without any regard for the immediate impacts of this technology, and with little to no human oversight.

Between the rise of deepfakes, AI voice cloning, and chatGPT, misinformation has been able to thrive on the internet. You’d think this would be a good time for tech companies to double down on Trust and Safety and renew their commitment to making sure their platforms aren’t vectors for spreading lies that may cause harm. Instead, they’re pulling back on their investment in the truth.

With a major election on the way and with Midjourney already able to create photorealistic images and with AI voice cloning already able to make a reasonable facsimile with shockingly little in the way of voice samples, we’re truly on our own when it comes to distinguishing fact from fiction — a recipe for a misinformation disaster.

I’m not looking forward to it.

5. More people care than you think

I’ll try to end on a positive note.

One of the saddest spectacles of life online these days is when a celebrity dies and my social feeds are flooded with the kindest thoughts and remembrances of that person. My first thought is always, “Wouldn’t it have been nice for that person to hear about how you felt when they were still alive?”

We rarely tell people how much they mean to us when they can appreciate it. I think society conditions us to find it embarrassing to share our love and appreciation of people in general — why else would their deaths be the thing that prompts an outpouring? (Positive note coming soon, I swear).

My second thought is that there are always more people that care than you think. They may not express that care to out loud or to others, but there are so many people who are silently invested in you and your success — enough to make it so that you’re not alone.

As someone who makes stuff for the internet, I’ve experienced this myself via the kind notes people share with me about how one of my shows has been meaningful to their life in some way. Or via my Patrons, many of whom graciously support me, month in and month out, just because they want to see me succeed in whatever I’m working on. Or via my friends and family members and collaborators, many of whom are patiently willing to listen to me pitch one of my wild new ideas at them.

The other thing I’ll add to this is that if someone’s work does mean something to you: tell them! It will enrich both of your lives. It feels good to reach out to people and try to make a connection because even if it doesn’t always work out, sometimes it does and that makes it worth it. I’ve reconnected with multiple people this year who I’ve known since my childhood. There’s something beautiful about being able to check in on someone throughout one’s life that is hard to describe.

Next year, I hope we can all focus on those that mean the most to us. They’re the only ones that are going to get us through this mess.

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Thanks for reading Decoding Everything this year! I’ll have my “Top 10 movies of 2023” list coming out shortly, and I’m planning to cover Sundance this year so stay tuned for a very eventful January.