Five Things: Minnesota, Whatsapp, ICE, Prairie, Social Media
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
This last week was a week with little sleep for me. I was stuck deep in a rabbit hole and learned a ton about AI agents and how to build them with Google Antigravity. My brain went in to overdrive and I developed more ideas that I could possible turn into code. And then my dog had diarrhea and I spent some nights walking around the block with her, just to come up with more ideas I had to chase. It’s been more than 20 years that I build software myself and it is sure fun to be able to do it again, even though I still really can’t code that much. I just have ideas and some sense of the tech stack I need to put the blocks together. I am super stoked that this is possible now with all the coding agents out there. Now I just have to get the first thing released before my head starts spinning again and I move to the next thing, stupid shiny object syndrome…
Have fun with these Five Things! 🕺
Trump’s Fight With Minnesota Is About More Than Immigration
The speech crystallized one of the core themes of Trump’s politics, which has become the overwhelming argument of his second term: that the country’s foundational idea of a civic nation — one whose people are bound by a shared commitment to principles rather than ancestry or cultural identity — is a sort of liberal swindle. In Trump’s America, shared prosperity requires exclusion: a policing, by force if necessary, of the boundaries of who gets to call themselves American based in large part on where they come from.
It is both fitting and not incidental that this agenda has been made so visible this month in Minneapolis, where immigration agents shot a woman dead and, in recent days, fired tear gas and smoke grenades at protesters on residential streets. On Wednesday, after a top Trump Justice Department official declared Minnesota’s resistance to the federal deployment an “insurrection” on social media, Walz posted on X that his state “will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace.”
Of course Trump is targeting liberal Minnesota, but I am sure that the Minnostans will fight back and won’t let Trump win.
How WhatsApp Took Over the Global Conversation
WhatsApp is phatic before it is anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app’s servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing. Koum introduced “read receipts,” to show that texts were being sent and seen. At first, he imagined miniature icons that would represent a message’s odyssey through the network—showing servers and hard drives—but Borzov suggested something simpler: one check mark to show that WhatsApp had received your message and two to show that it had been delivered. When the message was opened, the check marks turned blue.
Whatsapp is everywhere and no other messenger is even coming close. This really bums me, because I do not think this is a good product and also because I built a messenger 20 years ago and that was too early and it didn’t take off. My instincts were right, but the timing was off.
You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.
Many of ICE’s critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs—Jan. 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc.—for a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier: ICE’s recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who’s joining the agency’s ranks. We’re all, collectively, in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America’s streets.
And we are all, collectively, discovering just how deadly of an arrangement that really is.
What a freaking nightmare and it so reminds me of the SA and SS.
Where The Prairie Still Remains
Prairie is Iowa’s natural landscape insofar as any landscape is natural. Humans have shaped the American Midwest ever since the glaciers retreated. For some 10,000 years, Iowa was a dynamic place. Indigenous Americans lit frequent fires that kept encroaching woodlands at bay, allowing the grasslands that dominate the Great Plains to migrate east into Iowa and Illinois. Only in the last 200 years did farmers transform these acres into neat cornfields.
Today, less than a tenth of 1% of Iowa’s original prairie remains. Plows broke the vast majority of prairie down in the 19th and 20th centuries, transforming a biodiverse ecosystem into a crop factory — what Jack Zinnen, an ecologist for the Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, calls an “agricultural desert.” Set aside before industrial agriculture arrived in Iowa, pioneer cemeteries like this one have become the prairie’s final resting place — one of the few where the land remembers what it once was. Some of these cemetery prairie remnants tower over the surrounding farm fields, long roots holding the rich, undisturbed soil together as the rest of Iowa erodes away under repetitive plowing, flowing downriver.
It’s really hard to imagine that Iowa looked so different two centuries ago.
My New Year plea: let’s all start posting online again
I’m not sure when we turned our back on posting freely, but the tide has definitely turned – and if I can feel it turning, as a person born in the 90s, then it’s a foregone conclusion sadly. A third of all adults on social media are posting less than they did a year ago. Some call it “posting zero”. The New Yorker calls it “posting ennui”. In an essay published in the summer about the narcissistic internet, staff writer Kyle Chayka heralded the apocalypse of the social media ecosystem. Soon enough, he suggested, we’ll stop bothering posting altogether. Then the internet will be a ghost town full of what has already infected it: AI slop and sexbots.
I am so tired of posting stuff on social and I am still annoyed that Twitter has turned into such an unusable shithole.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico