Roundup: Tesla's terrible month

Happy new year, Disconnect readers! I hope you enjoyed the holidays.

The roundup is back with all the recommended reads, labor updates, and other news you’ve come to expect, and in this issue we also recap what’s been going on with Tesla these past few weeks. It isn’t looking good!

But before we get into that, I did want to address the future of the newsletter as we enter a new year and get closer to Disconnect’s first birthday in February. You might have seen my update last week, but if not, I wanted to let you know that I’m in the process of migrating the newsletter from Substack to Ghost. The process is moving along quite well, but I reached the point on Friday where I needed a few questions addressed by the Ghost team. (I expect to hear from them on Monday or Tuesday.)

My plan is to have the migration complete by the end of January at the latest, but it’s likely it will be quite a bit sooner than that. As a subscriber (free or paid), you shouldn’t have to do anything, and I’ll send out an update from Ghost and Substack once the migration is complete.

Platform discussion aside, I also took some time over the holidays to reflect on what I want Disconnect to be. It had a great run in 2023, and I think being on the cusp of 10,000 subscribers shows that you agree.

This year I’ll still be responding to current events in tech where I think my initial thoughts can add some value, but I also want to do more deep dives into aspects of the tech industry I don’t see adequately fleshed out elsewhere. That was really the goal of Disconnect in the first place: to cure my frustration with freelancing after finding it hard to place those kinds of pieces or get paid fairly for the work that goes into them.

So, there will still be some Elon content — being a Muskologist, I just can’t escape him — but I’ll be focusing less on the day-to-day and more on the big picture of his companies and ideology. (Sometimes an action can be a good jumping off point for a deeper dive though.) But as Silicon Valley radicalizes and flexes its muscles, there are other characters and companies that also deserve some light to be shed on them.

I’m excited for 2024 and for Disconnect’s forthcoming first birthday. Stay tuned for more news soon!

I had a piece on the challenges facing the US push to adopt EVs in Business Insider this week, and spoke to Naomi Klein over on Tech Won’t Save Us about social media, right-wing conspiracies, and how it’s messing with our politics.

Have a great week!

— Paris