It has become difficult to recommend TV shows in this era of scattering across more streaming services than anyone can afford, as New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik wrote this week. However: Michelle and Robert King, the masterminds behind The Good Wife , are back with Cupertino. The show is actually appearing on legacy US broadcast network CBS. That means those in the US who have real TVs and antennas can watch the show for free, albeit swamped in ads, though they may have to explain to younger people what “CBS” is.
The premise: lawyers Michael Price (Mike Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) meet-not-cute outside the large technology company where Michael is a co-founder when they are fired simultaneously. Their former company is about to go public, so Michael’s co-founder is dumping him in order to maxx out his winnings while Olivia knows some things the founder wants buried. Quickly joined by also-just-fired Christy (Ella Stiller), the two found a law firm to represent people who’ve been screwed by technology companies. Their goal is not to set legal precedents – probably sensible, since the show has to live within actual law – but to force settlements, taking a percentage for the firm. Four episodes in, their cases have already involved prediction markets, chatbot-related tragedies, bored programmers’ jokes, and drone light displays.
The Good Wife was particularly smart about the intersection of law, politics, and technology, so it’s on form that soon the fledgling firm finds itself representing an AGI that is suing its company of origin demanding that its guardrails be put back so it doesn’t destroy the world. All in all, good fun and expertly timed for the general anti-Big Tech zeitgeist.
In 2008, on a visit to the San Francisco Bay Area, I happened to hear of a new group that sounded worth attention, which is how I attended one of the very first Quantified Self meetings. At that meeting, and at others in London since, most of the people I saw had specific issues they wanted to track to find patterns that could help them find solutions. This is the ethos reflected in the new book The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe by the journalist Gary Wolf, who co-founded the movement with Kevin Kelly.
It’s easy to confuse Quantified Self with the broader wearables trend that has since hit the mainstream – often the “worried well”. I’m not convinced that anyone needs an Oura ring to know if they’ve slept well, for example. On the other hand, there are plenty of conditions medical science is poorly equipped to treat where tracking can clearly help, and wearables offer new tools. Wolf’s book focuses on helping people answer questions about themselves. He calls it “personal science”.
Wolf does a good job of providing practical advice. For example, he warns against trying multiple changes at once, since it then becomes impossible to distinguish which ones are effective. In the early part of the book, he talks about how to record and use data. Later chapters pick specific types of issues – sleep, pain, and metabolism, for example – and highlight the techniques that have helped others via plentiful examples.
This is all quite different from the role of the Internet’s influencers and misinformation medical journalist Deborah Cohen warned about in her book Bad Influence, though it has a common origin in frustration with medical systems. Wolf is advocating using care and data to gain greater understanding of ourselves and our bodies, not “do your own research” in order to contest established science.
The year 1995 was the first flowering of web-based publishing, sometimes part of existing traditional media, such as the Daily Telegraph, and sometimes new independent sites. Two with aspirations to be New Yorker-like magazines offering thoughtful writing across many fields were Slate and Salon, which was founded by journalist David Talbot, who quickly gathered a group of writers, many of whom were active on The WELL. In 1999, Salon launched an IPO and bought The WELL, which it ran alongside its own “Table Talk” forums.
For a time there was a financial analyst who studied each quarterly filing to predict Salon’s imminent demise. Yet, somehow it didn’t die, even after closing Table Talk and selling off the WELL.
Until now. Yesterday, Salon announced it was ceasing publication immediately, saying “our publishing model is no longer sustainable”. The publication didn’t give details, but it wouldn’t be the first to say recently that traffic has plummeted since AI chatbots were integrated into search. The excellent six-year-old Rest of World, a non-profit that publishes technology news from the Global South is warning that it will close as an independent site in January because the site’s traffic has plummeted since Meta’s decision to deprioritize news and the rise of chatbots and AI summaries. At Semafore Media, Max Tani suggests additional factors including audience fragmentation, the technology industry’s shift to the right, and widespread retreat from news in favor of “friendly” podcasts, newsletters, and X accounts. With many more noting the same problem, there will likely be many more such losses to come as the embrace of generative AI shows its true costs.
Illustrations: Michael (Mike Colter) and Olivia (Rachel Keller) meet-not-cute on Cupertino.
Wendy M. Grossman is an award-winning journalist. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.
