| Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter: |
| • The Big Read: As Microsoft and Google move in, a battle over hallowed ground erupts |
| • The Arena: The NFL and Netflix likely share a supersize dream |
| • Artificial Intelligence: our new Glossary of AI Jargon |
| • Plus, our Recommendations: Trackers of Gilded Age glam; requiem for the rock stars; and a Year of the Snake treat |
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| Wait, is that a Musk idea—or a Trump idea? It's getting harder and harder to tell the difference, with their playbooks increasingly looking like replicas of each other. |
| One example of this mashup caught everyone's attention this week: the Trump administration's buyout offer to federal employees carried the same email subject line as Elon Musk's buyout offer to Twitter employees in 2022. |
| By comparison, another example of their parallel thinking drew less notice: Just as Musk's X is adding financial services, so is Trump's Truth Social. Only a day after X announced a new partnership with Visa, Truth Social on Wednesday said it has earmarked as much as $250 million to spend on a similar effort of its own, which it calls Truth.Fi. Exactly what Truth.Fi will do with the money—and what financial products it will sell—remains largely unclear, though the company says it might launch ETFs or perhaps stockpile bitcoin. |
| X and Truth Social apparently both want to accomplish the same thing. They want to turn themselves into what in Asia is called a superapp or an everything app. Tencent's WeChat is the ur-superapp. It has media and messaging features along with shopping and finance ones. In America, though, people have shown little interest in such one-stop-shop apps despite past efforts by tech companies to blend media and finance. (Remember when PayPal almost bought Pinterest?) |
| Truth Social hopes to fare better and draw customers from its pro-Trump crowd. Fortunately for Truth Social, Trumpists have lately been complaining loudly about the traditional financial system "debanking" them—purportedly closing customer accounts because of the holders' politics. While they generally point to rather dubious evidence, the claim has nonetheless become a major MAGA talking point, one Trump has trumpeted. Just last week, he brought up the matter directly with Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan in a public exchange at Davos. Meantime, Republicans in both the Senate and the House of Representatives seem ready to investigate the matter in a series of Congressional hearings. |
| With Truth.Fi launching, I expect Trump will keep talking about debanking, since it could make conservatives disillusioned with big banks more likely to put at least some money into Truth.Fi. Of course, it will likely face competition for the same customers from another right-wing Mecca: Musk's X. For both companies, Trump supporters are the largest viable market. |
| I'm chuckling a little while thinking about what Trump.Fi might actually offer. Maybe a triple-leveraged ETF that markets itself as an anti-woke play by shorting companies with liberal brands? I could actually see such a product attracting real interest among conservatives. |
| Before anyone insists no one would ever buy such a thing, I'll point out that we're several years into the meme stock era, which has proven that people will buy anything regardless of the underlying financials—anything! And come to think of it, if the Trump administration does give liberal-leaning companies the short end of the stick, shorting them en masse isn't a terrible idea. |
| What Will Trump Ban Next? |
| Astonishingly, Trump hasn't yet banned DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup whose app has practically been the only thing talked about in tech for the last week. As our Martin Peers pointed out a couple days ago, if America considers Chinese-owned TikTok a threat, surely DeepSeek would also qualify as one? |
| DeepSeek used part of Meta Platforms' open-source AI to construct its much-watched AI. I wonder if that might compel Trump to eventually not only ban DeepSeek but also look to add restrictions around open-source technology. It's not that much of a leap. Trump is very much an America-first protectionist, and Silicon Valley's long-held belief in open-source tech could strike him as giving away the country's most precious goods for free. |
| If Trump did put a block on open-source tech being exported from the U.S., we'd still see more DeepSeek moments, said Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, a platform that offers open-source AI models to developers. Even if the U.S. had an open-source ban, other countries likely wouldn't follow suit: Some European or Asian outfit could still develop open-source tech that someone else could then use for another threatening breakthrough. |
| "Even if open source was forbidden in America, it's a global market—a free market," said Wolf, speaking from his home near Amsterdam. "It would make it hard for one country to control everything." |
| Still, from Trump's perspective, the best stuff is American made—so really, what's the likelihood of some foreign company making something worthwhile? |
| All right, now let me get back to my TikTok feed.—Abram Brown |
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| Virginia is for lovers, they say—all sorts of lovers. Lovers of history. Lovers of gigantic data centers. |
| Those two very distinct sets of lovers don't have warm feelings for each other, though, as our Theo Wayt explains in this week's Big Read. Virginia is the data center capital of the world, and with the AI era driving huge demand for more data centers, developers are building more and more of them in the state. Mostly everyone these days is big on anything related to AI—except for some dedicated historical preservationists and other activists who think such progress is coming at the expense of the past by tarnishing the state's landscape, which hosts countless historical sites. |
| To think a little more broadly, it's easy to picture a similar jostle of hostile forces happening nearly anywhere in America. |
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| The NFL and Netflix treated the world to what might be a new holiday tradition: football games on Christmas Day. Tens of millions of people tuned in—from more than 200 countries. |
| "Our partnership with Netflix on our Christmas Day games—having those games distributed globally—was a great first step for us," Peter O'Reilly, executive vice president for the NFL's international events, told our Sara Germano. "As the media world changes and there are more global platforms like Netflix, it helps us reach our priority markets." |
| The games illustrate what sports and streaming both see as a key growth factor: winning over audiences from abroad. That's why we could see a Super Bowl played outside America quite soon, our Sara Germano reports. One foreign city has already done quite a lot to make itself hospitable to the NFL. |
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| For a technology that's simplifying so much of our lives, it's ironic how complicated so much of artificial intelligence's inner workings are. So I asked our Rocket Drew, who was an AI researcher before he was a reporter, to develop the first edition of what we expect to be a frequently updated bible: a glossary of AI terms, which we hope can open your eyes to the real difference between open weights and open source, and much more. |
| —Abram Brown, editor of The Information's Weekend section, fears he too could end up on the Twitter menswear guy's watch list. Reach him at abe@theinformation.com. |
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| Following: Corsets and Critiques |
| As haute couture week kicked off fashion month in Paris, my feed filled with videos and photos of sumptuous gowns, and I did a double take: Were these dresses pulled from the 2025 collections or the historical archives? Jean Paul Gaultier had corsets; Schiaparelli brought back brocade; Saint Laurent's menswear set featured chandeliers. (Some of my guides to the looks included amateur critics like Lyas Medini and Linda Sumbu.) |
| Indeed, the season seemed to have a very clear through line: Fashion, like politics, is reentering the Gilded Age. |
| They do say culture is upstream of politics, so these designers would have started their collections well before Donald Trump declared that his second administration marked the beginning of a new "Golden Age." I'll be curious to see if the same trend also pervades the collections in New York, Milan and London over the next few weeks. |
| Do these fashionistas realize the Gilded Age wasn't gilded for everyone? Well, the collection assembled by Schiaparelli creative director Daniel Roseberry sure does have an intriguing title: "Icarus."—Julia Black |
| Reading: A Ssssstellar Fairy Tale |
| I come bearing a gift befitting the Lunar New Year, which is the Year of the Snake: "Sister Snake," a funny, dark fable about a pair of immortal sisters. Emerald and Su began their lives as—you guessed it—snakes, and they have since acquired the power to assume human form. (They exist by consuming qi, the life force of mortal beings, a craving they do their best to control in an effort to blend in. Each creature's qi tickles the palette differently. Goat qi, for instance, has "an unpleasant, grassy aftertaste," while the qi from a human lover reminds Su of cloves and cherry cola.) Like all siblings, Emerald and Su often feud, and as the novel opens, they've been living apart for decades: Emerald as a Brooklyn bohemian, Su as a megawealthy Singaporean. "Sister Snake" slides between those two cities as the dead bodies pile up around the sisters. |
| In several moments, "Sister Snake" sinks a fang or two into modern concerns about identity and gender. This sets up some of the book's better punch lines, as when Emerald reveals her true identity to a close friend. To her relief, he accepts her. "No big deal," he says. "You're basically paleo."—A.B. |
| Watching: Hootie Who? |
| Within the first minute of the gritty rock-umentary "Dig!" a front man from one of the featured bands leans into the camera to shit-talk the mainstream music scene from the late '90s. No one is having sex to Hootie & the Blowfish, he says, so it's time to start a revolution. And that's just the opening scene. |
| "Dig!" originally debuted in 2004. The Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl has called it nothing less than "the best rock 'n' roll documentary of all time." It is a sprawling but intimate chronicle focused on two West Coast indie bands, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, who began as close friends and ended as sworn enemies. Partly that's because they had very different end games in mind: The Brian Jonestown Massacre went to great lengths to resist going mainstream and selling out, whereas The Dandies got an early contract with Capitol Records and were under pressure from the start to achieve commercial success. |
| Those albums put out by The Dandies had a prominent place in my Discman rotation in the 2000s, but The Brian Jonestown Massacre was and still is a very "if you know, you know" independent outfit. Like the latter, "Dig!" has achieved cult-hit status, and I jumped at the opportunity to see an extended-cut 20th anniversary rerelease, "Dig! XX," in select theaters. At IFC in New York this week, fellow moviegoers and I were howling with laughter at blooper reels of the bands clumsily feuding to make it in music: crashing each other's gigs and picking a fight with David LaChapelle, a renowned music video director. |
| With "Dig! XX," you come for the onstage brawling and the oozing charisma of the '90s alt-rock scene. It has all the charm of a bygone era, before MP3s changed the game for good.—Sara Germano |
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| Where the work is always mysterious and important, hun-nee. |
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