This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit downround.substack.comNetflix was once the golden child of the tech industry, with its streaming model held up as the future of content consumption. Now that every rightsholder has a streaming platform, and the end of the tech boom has led to drastic cuts in content budgets and the return of advertising, where does that leave Netflix?The boys chat. Raph offers his strident view as a man who does not watch scripted television.

This week, GPU maker Nvidia was briefly valued at $1 trillion, which is pretty wild for a company founded to cater to the whims of one of God’s most pathetic creatures: PC gamers.The surge in value is largely thanks to Nvidia’s critical position in the emerging AI economy. It turns out the company’s graphics cards technology, originally intended to support high-performance gaming, are actually very good at training the neural networks that drive platforms like ChatGPT.In this ep, we dive into how we got here. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit downround.substack.comApple’s developer conference is in a couple of weeks, and all signs suggest it is about to announce an insanely expensive AR/VR headset, which it hopes will be their next computing platform and maybe a smartphone successor somewhere down the line.In this ep we talk about headsets generally, the companies trying to make them happen, and why no one seems …

Despite the fact the social web seems inexorably on the march towards TikTok-style video feeds, there’s still a happy home on the web for big-brained lovers of text. Twitter, despite never being the biggest social network, has outsized influence. Now that Elon Musk is slowly transforming it into a big toilet, other challengers are poking their head above the parapets.In this episode we’re talking through the vultures who are circling Twitter’s instability and trying to become the next place where text-heads congregate — from Meta to Bluesky. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit downround.substack.comIt’s been a hot minute since we’ve taken a look at what Meta is up to. It’s a good time, because they’re currently making a hasty AI pivot like everyone else.Will it work? What happened to the metaverse? Will zoomers ever use Facebook? So many questions, so few answers.