The inflection point

We've finally made it, haven't we?

Just two more weeks before we can all finally cast our votes. (Or, for those of us who already voted, to finally have our votes counted. Major props to Jimmy Carter, who lived long enough to vote for Kamala Harris.)

Tune in to the America [1] season finale, the one in which we all get to express our preference and then find out whether the next few years will be an agonizing recovery from years of trauma or the start of a new era marked by painfully new traumas. [2]

I was chatting with a colleague the other day who said "honestly writing about tech in this environment is kinda like being a german tech writer in 1933."

He's not wrong.

Over the past few years, I've read a lot of accounts from people, mostly journalists, who covered the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. If you're curious and have a strong stomach, try William L. Shirer's trilogy from that era.

It's a remarkably familiar story, about a tightening grip over the information landscape. And anyone who thinks that the autocrat Donald J. Trump would not try to crush independent journalism is ... well, not paying attention, is the kind way to put it.

And all of that assumes that all the votes get counted properly and there isn't some weird October surprise or even some Election Day skulduggery that monkey-wrenches the whole thing.

So, how y'all feeling about things?

[1] Elon Musk stole the @America handle from whoever previously owned it on Twitter. If you're still hanging around on the toxic hellhole now known as X, well ... that's on you.

[2] No guardrails. Seriously, it would get so ugly so fast.