1. Yes, Apple, we're also talking about you

Cal Newport reckons that it's time to dismantle the technopoly. Taking a cue from Neil Postman's (great) book, he defines this as the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Postman was writing in 1992(!) but if you think about the technopoly as it exists today, we're really talking about how every single technical development is thought of as an unalloyed good, from AI scraping the whole of human knowledge to Apple crushing creative tools into a product it sells (at a 40% margin). We'll come back to that one later.

2. And speaking of dodgy corporate behaviour

Along comes Google, which – against the orders of the DOJ – routinely destroyed internal communications. The only reasonable conclusion is it did this deliberately. A fine will be just “cost of doing business”. It's time to dismantle corporate repeat offenders.

3. Maybe Facebook might end up interoperable

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been a target of the far wing for a while, who see it as a charter for “big tech” to stifle their speech (which, of course, means not letting the right stifle the speech of its enemies). But as Cory Doctorow explains, it's also the only thing which stops big tech companies from censoring anything which might cause them to end up in court for libel. More than that, though, a case which is currently going through the courts might end up with Facebook and others being prevented from messing with tools which let you customise your feed on their services – for example, by filtering out all that “for you” crap which the algorithm wants you to get angry about.

4. This week's product I am a little obsessed with

An e-reader that's the size of a phone and runs Android? You have no idea how hard it is for me not to hit the buy button on this one.

5. Hey, so what about that Apple ad?

Like John Gruber, I didn't think too much about Apple's “crush” ad when it was shown as part of the introduction of the new iPad Pros (more on those anon). But the more I thought about it, the more I realised quite how tone deaf it was. The intention was to show all those wonderful creative tools being squished into an iPad, which could do it all. The execution was showing many lovely things being destroyed. How did that get past Apple's senior team? That's the bit which, if I were an Apple shareholder, I would worry about.

6. And so on to the product I'm not obsessed with

Yeah, new iPad Pros. Yeah, M4 processor. Yeah… same old iPadOS. For about the tenth year running, I'm left hoping this will be the year when Apple finally produces an operating system that can make the most of all that power. I suspect I'm going to be disappointed, again.

7. Tesla is doomed, redux

Honestly, if I held Tesla shares, I would be looking to sell them at the earliest opportunity I could take a profit. Unless Western governments intervene plenty of car companies will go to the wall because when it comes to quality EVs, Chinese manufacturers are miles ahead. So why am I mentioning Tesla is particular? Because it's vulnerable, and the stock is still massively overpriced because Musk has managed to convince suckers investors Tesla is a tech leader.

8. Where the world of scams is going

It's going to get really bad. Five years from now, this kind of fake person attack will be both commonplace and convincing, and I really don't know how we combat it.

9. You can't have it both ways, Elon

“X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbours yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.” This is another example of how the safe harbour provisions of US law for internet companies are a double-edge word. On one hand, they protect them from libel based on what their users say. On the other hand, they can't then claim all the intellectual property rights over that content as if they were publishers. X Corp isn't the only company to want a smorgasbord of rights, though: Meta had previously made the same kind of claim, and lost.

10. “Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists”

Headline of the week, easily. Moreover, Jack Dorsey man, WTF happened?