It’s been a rough few months for the technology industry. Stock prices have plummeted. Meta, Amazon, Google, Spotify, and Twitter have all laid off a sizable chunk of their workforce (the list goes on, too). Everybody is talking about how ChatGPT and other generative-AI chatbots are role-playing as Skynet, and the older tech giants are feeling out of step. But whereas Google and Microsoft are deep into the chatbot arms race, Meta looks like a late-aughts tech dinosaur.

It’s time to shake things up, to turn the ship around. To innovate. Meta’s big, new idea: Charge people for basic support features and … a blue check mark.

On Sunday, Facebook and Instagram announced Meta Verified, a subscription service that will give benefits to people who pay a fee and confirm their identity. The perks include algorithmic boosts to posts, human customer service, and added protection from impersonation. Meta’s paid verification follows Elon Musk’s controversial decision last year to include its famous blue check marks in its Twitter Blue subscription package. Not long after Twitter’s decision, Tumblr launched its own paid verification plan, which was initially meant as a joke mocking Musk’s ham-fisted business strategy but ended up increasing the company’s revenue. Netflix is also looking to squeeze extra money out of its viewers with its plan to end password sharing across different households.

Taken together, the vibe feels a bit like trying to use a familiar service and getting hit with a pop-up that says, “Thank you for using Web 2.0. Your free-trial period has ended!”

[Read: The end of the Silicon Valley myth]

I am not a Meta power user, and I certainly won’t be paying for a blue check mark. Still, the Verified announcement depressed me. It felt at first like Meta had gone full Spirit Airlines, that paying for customer service is akin to ponying up for glasses of water or any carry-on larger than a purse.

But the Spirit comparison isn’t quite right. Spirit has always operated as a budget experience, intended to undercut the competition at the expense of creature comforts. Facebook, though, is following the trajectory of the airline industry writ large. It is a once-revolutionary service that, over time, has transformed into something more soul-sucking. And although Meta still churns out tens of billions in profit each year, real signs of trouble are on the horizon. Just like the airline industry before it, when faced with a rocky economy, Meta decided to nickel-and-dime its users by asking them to pay for things one should reasonably expect to come standard. (A Meta spokesperson said in an email that the feature is “specifically focused on the top requests we get from up-and-coming creators. In this case, because we know creator accounts have or are looking to grow a large following, this then puts them at an increased risk for impersonation attempts.”)

Though it feels like they’ve been a scourge since the birth of aviation, checked-bag fees were introduced in 2008. According to a 2013 profile, an Australian consultant named John Thomas came up with the idea in response to rising fuel prices that threatened to sink the airline industry. United Airlines was the first to charge a $25 fee for a flier’s second bag. It took only a few weeks for the rest of the big airlines to follow suit. Within three months, some airlines started charging fees for all non-carry-ons. The industry made billions.

Nobody seriously thinks that Facebook or Twitter will rake in anything remotely comparable (one report suggests that Twitter has only 290,000 Blue subscribers worldwide, which comes out to roughly $2.4 million a month). It’s easy enough to conclude—and people certainly have—that Meta is just out of ideas after its lackluster pivot to a legless metaverse. But the problem seems deeper: Meta doesn’t even know what kind of company it is anymore.

Meta may very well think that it provides an essential service, just like an airline. Facebook and Instagram certainly offer convenience via sheer scale—massive numbers of people exist there, even if in some zombified-account form. Indeed, an increased focus on verification and identity confirmation makes sense, especially if we are hurtling towards a future where machines will convincingly sound like machines. But customer service and protection from impersonation ought to be universal; perhaps such digital courtesies are going extinct, just like the complimentary in-flight meal on a cross-country trip.

But Meta is obviously not an airline; the services it provides aren’t essential and, despite its ubiquity, its users are not captive. If anything, its flagship platform is hemorrhaging cultural relevance. Facebook itself feels like a place strewn recycled memes, where a common sight is once-popular fan pages inexplicably turning into multilevel-marketing-scheme accounts for CBD products. Who beyond those scammers would pay for an algorithmic boost?

Nor is Meta behaving like its tech forefathers, who gradually got us to pay for digital items. In 2013, I spoke with Paul Vidich—a former Warner Music Group executive who was involved in negotiations with Steve Jobs to start selling songs on iTunes in the early 2000s for 99 cents each. Vidich told me then that he’d agonized over the correct price point but figured that the combination of a huge music library, a one-click interface (with a credit card already on file), and a cheap price might wean the Napster generation off its freeloading. “It’s something you don’t have to think twice about before buying,” he said.

Vidich was right, and people purchased tens of billions of songs in the pre-streaming era. Apple got people to shell out because it brought the record store into our home. And, after a period of piracy, it allowed guilty consciences to compensate artists, however slightly, at a price that was hard to turn down. But Meta Verified isn’t really offering ease or … much of anything, really. Instead, it’s asking users to pay for services that keep them safer on its own platforms—a bit like the Mafia tactic of paying for “protection.”

Meta is a company in crisis. For the past decade, its core business has been defined by companies it purchased—namely Instagram and WhatsApp—and a string of desperate pivots, many of which led nowhere. The running theme behind each of these attempts at innovation is a false confidence born of the company’s immense scale. It has always struggled to see itself the way outsiders do, which is perhaps why leaders like Mark Zuckerberg thought Facebook could revolutionize mobile phones or become a leader in workplace-communication software. The company believed that, after years of terrible publicity and privacy scandals, what people wanted was for Facebook to reimagine the internet in its own image through the metaverse. It did not seem to realize that one of the biggest problems with the metaverse is Meta itself.

But Meta can take some solace in knowing that it’s not alone. The end of Big Tech’s free-trial period marks the waning days of a specific internet era. Perhaps, as my colleague Ian Bogost has argued, it’s the end of the social-media era. Maybe it’s merely the end of social-media companies as culturally ascendant institutions, and the beginning of our thinking of them as failed states or corrupt utilities—the new cable companies.

Either way, it’s hard to look at the hype and energy around the commercial-AI boom and compare it with the stagnant air that surrounds platforms like Twitter and Facebook. There’s an odd juxtaposition between our excitement and fear over sentient AI and the arrival of almost infinite synthetic media and the desperation of the internet’s old guard asking us to pay to confirm our identity. This feels like a year when an unsettling and unpredictable future may arrive—whether we want it to or not. I just wouldn’t bet on it coming from Meta.

When Susan Wojcicki was named CEO of YouTube in 2014, she was in relatively good company as a woman leader in Silicon Valley.

The long-serving Google employee is one of the highest-profile females in Silicon Valley.

House Judiciary Committee writes to top Silicon Valley executives amid claims conservative speech is being suppressed.

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Nikki Haley, one of the many Republicans who swore to stop Donald Trump in 2016 and then became a loyal supporter, is now running against Trump. Her campaign is already a collection of meaningless platitudes and she is unlikely to win, but she is the essential example of why the current GOP cannot be trusted with power.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Requiem for the Spartans Eagles are falling, bears are going blind: Bird flu is already a tragedy. Trump’s last-ditch gamble to avoid indictment

Why Did She Bother?

I will admit, as a charter Never Trumper, that I was also an early adopter of “Never Haley.” This is because I attach never to any candidate in 2024 who feinted at opposing Trump and then bent the knee to him later. But even in a party of cowards and hucksters, few people can rival Haley when it comes to platinum-tier opportunism.

Back in 2016, the then–South Carolina governor made a number of excellent points about why Donald Trump was unfit for public office. “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the KKK,” she said at a Marco Rubio rally seven years ago this month. (Yes, a Marco Rubio rally. Such things once existed.) “That is not a part of our party. That is not who we are.”

But it’s who Nikki Haley was, at least for a while. We might attribute some of her later cringe-inducing sycophancy for Trump to her position in his White House, but even after the January 6 insurrection, as the former Republican operative Stuart Stevens noted recently, “Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA.” In late 2021, months after the Capitol attack, she said of Trump that “we need him in the Republican Party” and “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.” She’ll never snatch the green jacket from the Master’s Open in Sucking Up from Lindsey Graham, but she’s certainly putting in the effort.

The video announcing Haley’s candidacy was as vapid and weightless a product as any in recent political memory. Of course, it checked all the right boxes: Family, devotion to public service, all the usual generic gloss, and all of it presented as if the past seven years had never happened. As an Indian American woman in a party whose standard-bearer is an endless stream of misogynistic and racist nuttery, her chances seem remote. (Right now, Haley is polling somewhere between Mike Pence and a dust bunny; she’s tied at 3 percent with a hypothetical Rubio candidacy.) So why is she running at all?

One possibility is that she’s getting out in front and taking some heat from Trump as a way of providing top cover to other candidates who will then reward her with the vice-president spot. It’s also possible that she thinks she can win. But it seems that Haley is just another Republican politician who is willing to make deals with the MAGA base if doing so is the price of remaining in public life. Haley, like Graham, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, and so many others, sees principles as disposable, making her yet another example of why the GOP cannot be trusted with power. Haley knows how to say the right things about how the violence of January 6 was bad, but to this day she refuses to hold Trump accountable, and so there is no way to know if she or any other candidate will withstand the antidemocratic demands of Republican primary voters. For Republicans in elected office, the GOP base is now so hostile to our democratic institutions that loyalty to the Constitution has become an unaffordable political luxury.

Another warning sign is that Haley and others have no apparent interest in changing any of these views among the GOP electorate. For all her talk about “a new generation,” Haley knows that the Republican base doesn’t want to move on. Those voters, to judge from the polls, want Trump, unless he can’t win; in that case, they’d like a Trump who can win, a candidate who reeks of Trump’s cheap political cologne but who will wisely wear somewhat less of it while campaigning in the crowded spaces of a general election.

Some of the critics who come at the Never Trumpers from the right will likely argue that rejecting someone such as Haley means, in effect, that Never Trump means Always Democrats, based on the magical thinking that Haley and other Republicans, if only given the chance, can restore some sanity to the party. After all, Haley’s a relatively centrist Republican, the kind who was at home in the old GOP of candidates such as the two George Bushes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. She isn’t going to lose all her political moorings just because the base fell in love with Trump for a while, is she?

Allow me to remind you that Elise Stefanik exists. She was once the kind of Republican that Haley claims to be, but led by her ambition and fueled by her liquid-nitrogen cynicism, she has since fused herself to Trump. (And it’s paying off for her: At 38 years old, she’s the House GOP conference chair.) To win in 2024, Haley and every other Republican candidate are going to turn into some version of Trump, or Stefanik, or Vance, and this makes every one of them untrustworthy around the levels of national power.

To note this is not to be a permanent friend or foe of any one party. Rather, it is a recognition of political reality. As a former Republican, I’d welcome the spirited primary between, say, former Governor Larry Hogan of Maryland, Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, and former Governor Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. But because I currently live on this planet, I recognize that the GOP race is going to be a Trumpier-than-thou contest among imitators of Trump’s hideous shtick, all of them pretenders to Trump’s gilt-and-glitz throne.

Donald Trump is still the leader of the GOP and its choice (so far) for president in 2024, and Haley, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others, is courting Trump’s base. This means appeasing people who refuse to hold Trump responsible for trying to overthrow our government. As I wrote when Trump ran for reelection in 2020, and as I will continue to insist so long as the GOP resists reckoning with his legacy, no person or party should ever get a second chance to betray the Constitution.

Related:

What Nikki Haley can learn from Carly Fiorina Why aren’t more people running for president?

Today’s News

The Congressional Budget Office said that the U.S. is on track to add almost $19 trillion in new debt over 10 years, about $3 trillion more than was previously forecast.   Some residents of East Palestine, Ohio, have refused to return home a week after an evacuation order was lifted, concerned about long-term health effects from the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals. The Justice Department is closing its sex-trafficking investigation into Representative Matt Gaetz and will not charge him.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Electric cars are basically just cars now, Emma Marris writes. Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf makes the case against internet pile-ons.

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Evening Read

Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic; Youness Srhiri / Anadolu Agency / Getty

Don’t Be Embarrassed to Commit to the Bit

By Michael Waters

Before last summer, Adonna Biel, a 27-year-old who works in communications, did not consider herself a fan of the high-energy rapper Pitbull. She knew the hits—“Timber,” featuring Kesha; the club smash “I Know You Want Me”—because Pitbull was elemental to the 2010s pop music that Biel had grown up hearing. But she’d given Pitbull little thought until last July, when she heard that he was performing an hour away from where she lived in Washington, D.C. She mentioned it offhandedly to some work friends. Things escalated. Within days, Biel and five of her colleagues—who had spent hardly any time together outside of the office—got their hands on VIP tickets.

Not only that: They assembled a collaborative playlist of Pitbull tracks. They rented a car, which they dubbed the “Pitbus,” to take them to the concert. On the ride over, one co-worker passed around a bald cap. (Pitbull is famously bald.) And at the concert itself, Biel bought a Pitbull shirt.

They did it all, Biel told me, to commit to the bit—a phrase with roots in the stand-up-comedy scene but that has, in recent years, come to describe something of a Gen Z and younger-Millennial life practice. When you want to act in a way that’s a little embarrassing or out of character, it’s easier to frame it as a kind of extended charade.

Read the full article.

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On Monday, I wrote about the balloons shot down over North America by U.S. jets, and I suggested some classic rock about invading Martians. Today I’ll direct you to some classic television that you might have missed back in 1970, a British show titled UFO that I fell in love with instantly as a 10-year-old and plan to rewatch soon. UFO was one of the many shows that tumbled out of ITC, the production company founded by the legendary Sir Lew Grade. Some of these shows—Danger Man and The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan, and Space: 1999, starring Martin Landau—were great. Others were, shall we say, idiosyncratic but watchable. (Robert Vaughn, star of the ITC series The Protectors, admitted in later years that even he didn’t really understand some of the plots in the show.)

UFO is a blast, right from Barry Gray’s late-1960s, swinging-Piccadilly instrumental theme song to the imagined world of 1980, in which the show is set. The governments of our planet, you see, have figured out that aliens are coming to Earth to harvest our organs (of course), and so they have secretly set up the Supreme Headquarters Alien Defense Organization, or SHADO, which is hidden under a film studio outside London and led by an American astronaut masquerading as the studio boss. (Why a film studio? Oh, shush.) This whole thing is supposed to be a gigantic secret, which is a neat trick, because SHADO has forces everywhere, including jets, a submarine, and tanks, along with a fully crewed moon base where all the women wear purple wigs—as one did on the moon in 1980, apparently. The whole thing is almost hallucinatory in its sets, colors, and cheap special effects, and I love every minute of it.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

Good morning, and welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer reveals what’s keeping them entertained.

Today’s special guest is the London-based staff writer Helen Lewis. In addition to her extensive Atlantic coverage of U.K. politics and the British monarchy, Helen wrote about a recent art-world controversy in November and, last month, coined a whole new label for a strange internet trend. She’s currently engrossed in a new royal period drama on Netflix, will read anything by the late novelist Hilary Mantel, and calls the TikToker Mamadou Ndiaye a “David Attenborough for Gen Z.”

But first, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The death of the smart shopper What’s the smallest amount of therapy that’s still effective? Short story: “The Third Law of Magic” The Culture Survey: Helen Lewis

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The Empress, on Netflix, which is a German-language period drama that tells the story of Elisabeth, or “Sisi,” the 19th-century empress of Austria. Beautiful, divisive, suffocated by the demands of royal life—very much the Habsburg Meghan Markle. (Until I visited Schönbrunn Palace and the museum dedicated to her in Vienna last summer, I had no idea there was a full-blown Sisi industry.)

Elisabeth lived in a time when the Habsburg Empire was being dragged into modernity; a key plotline of The Empress is whether the emperor can raise the funds to build a railway across its lands, which stretched into the current borders of Italy and Hungary. She was herself an oddly modern figure, running away from court to self-actualize in Corfu. She almost certainly had an eating disorder and she had gymnastics rings installed in her room at the Hofburg palace so she could do calisthenics. She also refused to have any portraits painted of her after the age of 42, a practice I intend to follow.

The Empress is more fun to watch than The Crown, because I know the history less well and therefore have no idea what the “right” answer is to the dilemmas the characters face. Should the Habsburgs go to war or try to stay neutral? I don’t know—but then, neither did they. [Related: Black lamb and grey falcon: part I (published in 1941)]

An actor I would watch in anything: Gary Oldman. In Apple TV+’s Slow Horses, he plays a low-level spymaster called Jackson Lamb who oversees a group of no-hopers from a horrible office in a particularly charmless part of London. His performance is exquisite—if that’s the right word to use of a character whose main attributes are dandruff and farting. [Related: Darkest Hour is a thunderous Churchill biopic.]

The upcoming event I’m most looking forward to: Phaedra at the National Theatre, written and directed by the Australian playwright Simon Stone. Along with Robert Icke, another exceptional writer-director, Stone works regularly at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, which is led by Ivo van Hove—the megastar European director behind the successful Broadway version of A View From the Bridge and the West Side Story revival. If you ever visit Amsterdam, go to ITA! On Thursdays, the shows are performed with English subtitles, and the ensemble is the most talented company of actors I’ve ever seen. Someone once described them to me as being like thoroughbred racehorses.

"[The last gallery show I loved was] the recent Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, London." Above: Raphael's 'Woman With a Veil.' (Uffizi)

The best work of nonfiction I’ve recently read: I have to say, I approached Prince Harry’s Spare with low expectations—I thought it would be the written version of Netflix’s saccharine Harry & Meghan documentary. Wow, was I wrong: As I wrote in my Atlantic review, “where else would you find charging elephants, hallucinations about talking trash cans, Afghan War stories, royal fistfights, and a prince’s frostbitten penis in a single narrative?” [Related: The cringeworthy end of Harry & Meghan on Netflix]

An author I will read anything by: Terry Pratchett. Hilary Mantel. Janet Malcolm. All left behind solid back catalogs that I am parceling out to make last longer. [Related: Hilary Mantel’s art was infused with her pain.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: The recent Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery, London. His Madonnas are famous, but the highlights for me were Woman With a Veil, which is usually displayed at the Pitti Palace, in Florence, and the portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici, which is currently on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York. The colors were astonishing, particularly because these paintings are more than 500 years old.

In Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks—an anti-self-help book about rejecting bad productivity advice and embracing the moment—he talks about an exercise where you have to look at a painting for three hours straight (bathroom breaks are permitted). That sounds like my idea of torture, but Raphael’s Woman With a Veil might make it bearable. [Related: Oliver Burkeman’s time-management advice is depressing but liberating.]

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: I’m fascinated by “transient mental illnesses”—medical conditions that arise in specific historical and cultural contexts, like St. Vitus Dance, fugues, hysteria, or dissociative identity disorder. So I frequently revisit an Atlantic piece from 2000 called “A New Way to Be Mad,” which looks at people who want to have their limbs amputated, and the debate among surgeons over whether to grant their wish.

A YouTuber, TikToker, Twitch streamer, or other online creator that I’m a fan of: Mamadou Ndiaye (@mndiaye_97) on TikTok. He is dryly funny about animal behavior: David Attenborough for Gen Z. Also, he has to work around the bizarrely strict TikTok content guidelines, so I’m learning many useful synonyms for killed (e.g., merked, un-alived, past-tensed, turned into a hashtag).

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My highbrow answers to this are “One Art,” by Elizabeth Bishop; Philip Larkin’s “The Life With a Hole in It”t; and Wendy Cope’s “Rondeau Redoublé.” (I nearly had “She always made a new mistake instead” tattooed on me as a 20-something, but there is nowhere on my body flat enough.) [Related: Coming to terms with loss in Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘One Art’]

But the honest answer is Clive James’s hymn to schadenfreude, “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” It is absolutely majestic in its pettiness: “What avail him now his awards and prizes, / The praise expended upon his meticulous technique, / His individual new voice?” [Related: A book that honors a complicated figure]

Read past editions of the Culture Survey with Jane Yong Kim, Clint Smith, John Hendrickson, Gal Beckerman, Kate Lindsay, Xochitl Gonzalez, Spencer Kornhaber, Jenisha Watts, David French, Shirley Li, David Sims, Lenika Cruz, Jordan Calhoun, Hannah Giorgis, and Sophie Gilbert.

The Week Ahead Super Bowl LVII, which will feature a halftime show by Rihanna (broadcasts tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET on Fox) Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, an ambitious history of Silicon Valley by the journalist Malcolm Harris (on sale Tuesday) Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the latest film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe (in theaters nationwide Friday) Essay

Long Live the Octogenarian Sex Album

By Jason Heller

(Jacob Blickenstaff / Redux)

After Smokey Robinson announced his upcoming album, many music listeners were aghast. The Motown legend, at the age of 82, unfurled the most blatantly sexual record title of his career: Gasms. It didn’t help that the album, which will be released in late April, includes songs such as “I Wanna Know Your Body” and, ahem, “I Fit in There.” Predictably, the subsequent volley of Viagra jokes alone could’ve crashed Twitter.

Yet Robinson’s catalog has given him every right to proudly unleash an octogenarian sex record—which, who knows, might now be a genre in the making. It wouldn’t be the first genre Robinson innovated. Not only did he revolutionize popular music as one of the architects of soul with Motown in the 1960s, but he also invented the subgenre known as “quiet storm,” named after his superb 1975 solo album, A Quiet Storm. On it, he crystallized a silky, sophisticated R&B that never tumbled into funky porn. Still, on the album’s No. 1 Billboard R&B hit, “Baby That’s Backatcha,” there’s no misinterpreting Robinson’s celebration of reciprocal lust: “Oh, baby, that’s tit for tat,” he sings. “I’m givin’ you this for that.” Many of Robinson’s peers in the ’70s—Barry White, Al Green, his Motown labelmate Marvin Gaye—rivaled his sultriness. But they all took cues from the maestro, who had long proved his ability to swoop from heartbreak to bravado in the span of a syllable.

Read the full article.

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Check out images of an unusually low tide in Venice, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, a unique dining experience in China, and more in our editor’s photos of the week.

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When Rihanna walks, or is raised, or is lowered onto the Super Bowl stage on Sunday, she will not merely be kicking off the game’s halftime show. She will be culminating Rihanna’s Road to Halftime, presented by Apple Music. The world’s most valuable company is in the first year of a reported five-year, $250 million deal to sponsor one of the most watched live-music performances anywhere, which happens to fit between two halves of a game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles. For $50 million a year, a tech behemoth does not just want a good show. It also wants a music video with fans of all 32 NFL teams singing Rihanna’s hit “Stay.” It wants a 10-part streaming-radio series about the greatest Super Bowl halftime shows ever. And it wants to curate an “official collection of 32 playlists featuring the top songs that each NFL team listens to in the locker room, the weight room, and on game day.”

This is a big partnership for Apple and the NFL—and it probably feels like a disappointing consolation prize for Tim Cook and Co. Last year, Apple reportedly vied for the rights to NFL Sunday Ticket, the league’s enormously popular viewing package that lets fans watch their hometown team from far away. The company that beat it out was Google, which in December agreed to spend about $2 billion a year for the rights to Sunday Ticket. But Amazon, not Google, became the first company to put the NFL behind a streaming paywall, coughing up about $1 billion a year to air one Thursday Night Football game a week on Prime Video starting this season.

Big Tech, somewhat suddenly, wants in on the NFL in a way that it hasn’t before. Silicon Valley has long had partnerships with the league and its broadcast partners; perhaps the most famous ad ever run by Apple, its commercial introducing the Macintosh, first aired during the 1984 Super Bowl. More recently, Microsoft has sprung to be the league’s official tablet provider, and its blue Surface tablets are inescapable when the camera pans to the sideline on Sundays. But the connections between the league and tech companies have become much deeper in the past two years, even as tech has hemorrhaged jobs lately. The world’s largest companies and America’s most popular sports league have hit a symbiotic stride. Each is now a unique provider of what the other wants: immense scale and cultural relevance for the tech companies, big money and endless access to technological advances for the league. If anything feels weird, it’s that the match didn’t happen sooner.

The NFL has courted corporate partners for many decades, but the ones to latch on most closely haven’t historically been tech companies. Just think about last year’s Super Bowl, which featured its fair share of tech ads, especially from crypto companies: Still, the halftime show was sponsored by Pepsi, and some of the best ads came from companies such as GM, Hellman’s, and Rocket Mortgage. “If you look at who likes to be associated with the NFL, it’s consumer-goods companies, whether that’s beer, cars, whatever,” Bob Thompson, a former Fox Sports Networks president, told me. “And then media companies,” such as Disney or DirecTV, which might advertise in addition to airing games.

In the simplest sense, what has changed is that the tech giants are now media companies themselves, with big streaming services they are eager to grow. The rise of Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and YouTube TV has made the tech-NFL relationship far more natural than when Apple was only selling expensive hardware and Amazon was only selling physical things out of warehouses. Amazon, for example, has some of the same interest in the NFL that a big movie studio might have while advertising a blockbuster, or that a retailer such as Taco Bell or TurboTax might have in using the NFL to sell a range of consumer goods.

Buying game rights ratchets up the companies’ platform to sell us things, in part because the very thing we’re watching on is something they’re selling us. Google could use the very existence of Sunday Ticket to plug YouTube TV subscriptions: After all, everyone knows Google, but not everyone might know YouTube TV. “Now, believe me, they’re gonna know YouTube TV, and they’re gonna be searching for it because of that access to the Sunday Ticket,” Hank Boyd, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland’s business school who has previously consulted with both the NFL and companies that work with it, told me. And while Google can’t replace national commercials during games that broadcast networks still produce, it will have what would normally be local advertising slots to sell, which it can use them to boost all kinds of Google products.

No deal is risk free, but one between a company the size of Apple, Google, or Amazon and the NFL is close enough. The tech firms “recognize the fact that if you want to aggregate a very large audience and be pretty much guaranteed that it’s going to be there, there’s no better property than the NFL,” Thompson said. The NFL is not the most valuable business in America. The tech companies throwing millions and billions of dollars into it are. But if one measure of power is the ability to hold eyeballs on demand, the NFL is the most powerful force in our entire culture, miles ahead of the organizations behind prestige streaming dramas, big-budget movies, and the State of the Union address or anything else in politics. Of the 100 most watched American TV broadcasts of 2022, 82—and 19 of the top 20—were NFL games. Particularly for a move like Apple’s $50 million halftime show, it would likely take an enormous failure—“like if we had a Janet Jackson–Justin Timberlake episode,” Thompson said—for Apple to feel like this investment was not a success.

The NFL’s cultural clout is unrivaled, and the league has become so big and full of so much money that Silicon Valley is part of only a tiny group of businesses that are immune from sticker shock. In the Super Bowl ad market, some 30-second commercials cost an all-time high of $7 million. Even classic consumer brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Skechers, and Burger King have balked at buying spots in the past few years. And when it comes to ballooning broadcast-rights fees, traditional companies such as Disney will eventually meet their limits, and even a cash-splashing streamer such as Netflix has decided to sit this one out. “We’re not anti-sports. We’re just pro-profit,” the company’s co-CEO Ted Sarandos said recently.

But the league also makes a perfect stage for a tech company to advertise new toys that are much different from what traditional broadcasters can offer. Amazon powers an entire NFL advanced-stats platform that becomes an advertisement for Amazon’s cloud-computing and machine-learning prowess. During Thursday Night Football, Prime streams a second telecast with Amazon-generated stats plastered all over the screen. When Google starts selling Sunday Ticket packages, the subscription could become a billboard for lots of Google tech. Given the AI wars now playing out, don’t be surprised if the newest advances soon make their way to an NFL broadcast.

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But if Big Tech craves the NFL, the NFL craves Big Tech too. The league is perpetually intent on not falling behind or finding itself frozen out of someone else’s big breakthrough. In the past, Thompson and Boyd both noted, this line of thinking has pushed the NFL to do simultaneous deals with every big broadcast network (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC/ESPN) rather than leaving one out. By partnering with so many of the biggest tech firms, the NFL is hedging to ensure it won’t miss the next quantum leap in streaming tech, player tracking, advanced stats, real-time sports betting, or something else. Which company will come up with it? Who knows, but probably an NFL partner.

The marriage between the NFL and Big Tech feels like destiny. They are, after all, the two most inescapable dynasties in America, a point now being typed out in Google Docs on a MacBook Pro as my phone buzzes with an ESPN alert about Sunday’s game. Each suits the other in nearly perfect ways, and their unmatched sizes box out almost everybody else who might want in. “I’ve kind of been like, ‘Well, what took you so long?’” Thompson said. “Maybe the NFL wasn’t ready, and maybe [the tech companies] weren’t ready, and now that time has come.” The result is a historically sharp and sudden shift in how we consume the NFL. The league’s Big Tech era is just beginning, and no one knows where it might take us.

On Sunday night, when Rihanna launches into the chorus of “Umbrella,” “Diamonds,” or whatever else she may bless the audience with from the big stage, a lot of eyeballs will encounter Apple’s branding. But viewers will tune in on Fox, not on Apple TV+. Cupertino now has its own tiny slice of the NFL. How long until Apple is hungry for more?

Silicon Valley has a short memory. The Anglo-American settlements aren’t even 200 years old, but if you ask around, regional history restarts whenever there’s a new defining technology, which happens every couple of decades; we can barely remember the dot-com boom, never mind the radio era.

And yet, if you look closely, there’s a deep continuity. California was a closing link in the capitalist chain that encircled the world at the end of the 1800s. From the railroad to real estate to fruit to radio components, settlers built pre-silicon Palo Alto on new ideas about how science yielded efficiency and profit. The content stays the same, but the form changes: Before there were apps, there were websites, and before there were websites, there were microchips, and before there were microchips, there were horses, and the horses belonged to a man named Leland Stanford.

When he came to California in 1852, Leland Stanford was a hapless 20-something, a failed lawyer who followed his siblings into the frontier grocery business. Within a decade, he was one of the state’s few businessmen of significance and the Republican nominee for governor. This fast success was not a product of his talents or work ethic, which his contemporaries and today’s historians agree were unexceptional. Rather, like future founders who followed in his footsteps, Stanford was in the right place at the right time and he looked the part. As the least capable guy in a crew of unscrupulous Sacramento shopkeepers, Stanford became the face of these “Associates” after their successful pivot into railroads—a role the others were too smart to take during a period of intense class conflict. It was a position that earned him private wealth, public office, and popular scorn.

It was an easy and incredibly well-remunerated gig, but one consequence was that a lot of people hated him and his family. The white labor cartels held him personally responsible for the importation of Chinese workers and the resulting speedup and attack on wages. The location of the Stanford home was no mystery, and protesters made it a frequent target.

So Stanford gathered his family and servants and got out of town. In 1876, they bought a 650-acre farm, called Mayfield Grange, in Santa Clara County. No fan of the contemporary Grange Movement of organized farmers, Stanford renamed the area for a big tree next to the tracks: Palo Alto.

Railroads were never all that interesting to Stanford, and in this grassy expanse he finally found something worth his time: horses. He poured money into the South Bay ranch, which he named the Palo Alto Stock Farm, hiring dozens of workers to equip the stables. By the end of the 1880s, the stock farm had nearly 800 horses and a staff of 150 spread over 11,000 acres, the largest and finest institution of its kind in the world. Shipping horses back and forth to the West Coast from the farms of Kentucky and the markets of New York might have been a prohibitive expense for most, but not for Stanford the railroad man.

As his writing at the time shows, Leland Stanford saw himself as engaged in a serious scientific campaign regarding the improved performance of the laboring animal—hippology, or equine engineering. For Stanford the capitalist, the horses were productive biological machines, and in races he could analyze their output according to simple, univocal metrics. The trotters he raised raced with carriages behind them, restrained below a gallop to simulate a horse at work, not play. Faster horses were better horses, and if he could master the production of better horses, then he could improve the country’s capital stock. Stanford figured that if through the application of scientific methods he could build a program that would raise the value of the average horse by $100, that would be worth $1.3 billion—more than $30 billion today—to a country with 13 million horses.

Stronger, more durable horses led carriages and bigger plows faster and for longer, which reduced the costs of production and increased social circulation in unimaginable ways. Horses were the dominant mode of local transportation (especially during the dreaded “last mile” stage of delivery, which remains a problem for tech giants to this day). They were the military’s most important weapon and the chief source of agricultural power. The country was deeply dependent on them, as was demonstrated when a wave of equine influenza in the winter of 1872–73 infected roughly 100 percent of urban horses, killing more than 1 percent and temporarily debilitating the rest. The Great Epizootic ground eastern cities to a halt, stopping the horse-drawn boats on the Delaware, Hudson, and Erie Canals in addition to virtually all local transport. New York City streetcar operators had to drag the cars themselves, and much of Boston burned down when sick horses were too tired to pull fire engines.

In 1910, the peak of the pre-tractor era, horses and mules constituted two-thirds of farm implements and machinery by value—$2.6 billion of the $3.9 billion in national “crop-growing capital.” Around the turn of the century, finding ways to reduce horse costs was a pressing question for business, particularly in California, a rising agricultural power. The state’s growers used larger and more advanced machinery to get better yields than the rest of the country, and perhaps counterintuitively, late-19th-century mechanization meant high horse intensity. Horses were the engines of the West, and by 1870, California farms already had three times as many draft animals per farm than the national average. Ultimately that’s what the Palo Alto Stock Farm was all about.

More valuable than any single horse, or any thousand horses, were the insights into natural efficiency the farm developed. The “13 million horses × $100” calculation is the kind of disruption math that 21st-century start-ups use to persuade venture capitalists to sink millions into protean projects, but Leland had to convince only himself that it was worth his money, which he seems to have had no problem doing. Bringing industrial techniques, goals, and capital to the production of animals, Stanford’s farm was the prototype for what the scholar Phillip Thurtle calls the “laboratories of speed,” with their limitless resources, employment bureaucracies, (pseudo)scientific breeding methods, and focus on a single product. This was not an animal farm in any classic sense; it was an experimental engine factory, churning out high-performance horse flesh by the ton. Because it sold horses for their genetics—the blood more valuable than the muscle—the Palo Alto Stock Farm was really in the business of intellectual property.

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Horse breeders were at the vanguard of genetics, tracing lineages back over many generations and pricing studs for their genetic material. Winning a race was nice, but the real prize went to the horse that could produce winners by the cupful. As the paragon of a new ruling class that prided itself on overturning ossified assumptions, Stanford was sure that despite being a newcomer to the sport, he knew more than the rest of the breeders and trainers did. He was a man of science, and he had the money to go at it however he wanted. Stanford bought the untested stallion Electioneer (against professional advice, the story goes) as part of his first batch of breeders; the horse became one of the greatest of all time.

The prevailing wisdom was that the best trotters were pure-blooded, the product of a trotting stallion and a trotting mare. Crossbreeding trotters with Thoroughbreds, a prized racing breed considered high-strung, was thought to produce willful colts that were unable to maintain a trot. Stanford was unconvinced, and Electioneer bred promiscuously. Old hands had to eat their words when the Palo Alto Stock Farm produced both pure and mixed champions, though they tended to credit the extraordinary “brain-controlling force” in Electioneer’s genes rather than any breakthrough in the science, as the stock farm manager, Charles Marvin wrote. Soon, Stanford’s colts were selling for extraordinary prices, setting a record in 1892 when he sold the two-year-old champion Arion to the breeder J. Malcolm Forbes for $125,000—more than $4 million in today’s money. Stanford and his money changed the industry, and the brand-new Palo Alto Stock Farm quickly became the world headquarters for equine engineering.

Capital’s exigencies dictated that Palo Alto shorten the horse-production cycle. That meant training younger animals to trot rather than letting colts learn to walk before they ran. By deriving (or generating) information about his colts’ characters early, Stanford flipped the whole industry’s incentive structure. “The business of breeding has now reached a point where few feel able to wait six or seven years for the get of their stallion to bring prestige to the farm,” the racing expert Leslie Macleod wrote of Stanford’s impact in his review of the Palo Alto equine factory, “and hence he buys the blood that trots young.”

There were consequences. “When you get several yearlings to trot quarters in 0:40, and two-year-olds to show you a 2:20 gait, you must not be surprised if some tendon snaps,” Macleod conceded. “Some good material has without doubt been spoiled.” No reward without risk, but in Palo Alto they interpreted these failures as inevitable. They figured that if you’re going to fail, you might as well do that fast too. Better to snap a yearling’s tendon than feed him to age five just to see it snap then.

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The stock farm’s regimen of capitalist rationality and the exclusive focus on potential and speculative value was called the “Palo Alto System,” and it worked. All a man needed to improve the world was an uncompromising dedication to profit and the capital to realize the necessary scale. Stanford had both, and he created Palo Alto to house them. The twin whips of science—data and control—sped money around its circuit like colts around the track, accumulating valuable mass with every lap.

Leland Stanford was but a vector, albeit a robust, capacious one, his coat buttons pulled taut with historical pressure. Anything in his orbit tended to bulge the same way, including his vineyard (the world’s biggest) and his wife’s jewels (among the world’s gaudiest). He couldn’t own horses without transforming them into the world’s fastest. The scientific principles of control, measurement, and deliberate change opened a road to modernity, and capital was the draft mule that pulled the whole world down that path, California first. Here is where the 20th century’s fortunes were made, and so much of that demand flowed in one way or another through the body of Stanford. Like a financial King Midas, he turned everything he touched into an international speculative concern. Everything could be made more.

Stanford and the training staff achieved their goals, but his plan to enhance national horsepower died on the notepad—though genetics, intellectual property, and billion-dollar business schemes endure as Stanford specialties. Palo Alto still stands for capitalist transformation, but following the deaths of Leland Stanford Jr. and Sr. (in that order), the stock farm closed. Or rather, it changed form. The Palo Alto System’s new product was even more important to the American economy than horses were: Stanford became a university, and soon, an industry.

The Palo Alto System persists in Silicon Valley; it’s an underlying ethos that has structured the region’s conventional wisdom. Now, depending on the day’s market fluctuations, nearly half of America’s top 10 most valuable companies are headquartered near the stock farm. Apple, Google, Facebook, and many more: These are Stanford’s “get,” history’s fastest business colts. For better and worse, the Palo Alto System is in their DNA.

This article has been excerpted and adapted from Malcolm Harris’s new book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.