Pirate Wires

Welcome to Pirate Wires, an American media company reporting at the intersection of technology, politics, and culture. The promise of the internet was boundless information for every person on the planet, and it basically delivered. Our modern publishing giants gifted us a powerful chest of tools, and more knowledge, more evenly-distributed, than any generation in history. But from draconian political censorship to an historic, increasingly-unmanageable flood of bullshit, our de facto rulers in this world post-2.0 also now present us with a significant series of acutely 21st Century challenges. As power centralizes, we sail for the outskirts, and in all of this noise, we aim to find the signal. Each of our regular newsletters represents a unique vertical of coverage — the Industry, where we explore the business (and drama) of technology; the White Pill, our optimistic, aspirational science and technology vertical; Dolores Park, our debut local politics vertical, where we cover the city of San Francisco; the Pirate Wires flagship, with guest posts and feature stories, notes from the nation, and a bi-weekly letter from Mike Solana, our editor-in-chief; and many more to come. Welcome to new new media. Pirate Wires lives behind a paywall, where it will remain. TANSTAAFL, nothing’s free. The kind of writing primarily designed to catch eyes on polarizing social media algorithms from hell in service of scoring advertising revenue inevitably flattens to a single voice. For the last ten years, that is the voice that bored us to tears and starved us of the truth. Nearly to death. Welcome to the Pirate Nation. Subscribe, or die — -SOLANA