Grading last entry’s testimony predictions: 3-for-3, and I take no pleasure. (Some pleasure.)
The immortal soundbite arrived on schedule: Senator Hatch asked how Facebook sustains a business users don’t pay for, and Zuckerberg’s pause-then-“Senator, we run ads” is already a t-shirt. The stock rose ~4.5% during testimony, exactly as the survived-theater thesis predicted. And the legislative outlook remains a fog of task forces. But logging the less-memed substance, because it matters more: the hearings revealed a governance vacuum, not just a literacy gap. Question after question circled “who audits the algorithm?” and the honest answer, from anyone, is currently “nobody with subpoena power and a compiler.” GDPR (my beat) is the only concrete framework arriving this year, and it arrives from Brussels. The US regulates its most powerful industry via the EU’s copy-paste. Strange timeline; load-bearing timeline.
Counterprogramming from the UK, filed in advance: TSB, a British bank, attempts a big-bang core-banking migration next weekend — 5.4 million customers, one cutover, years of dual-running deemed too expensive. Migrations of this shape have a genre history in this archive (big-bang cutover, rollback theater, victory declared at 99%), so I’m pre-registering the date and saying nothing else. Either they rehearsed and it’s boring, or next fortnight writes itself.
TIL: our GDPR deletion pipeline passed its first end-to-end test, a synthetic user, forgotten, verifiably, across all forty-three stores in under 24 hours. Six weeks to deadline. The lawyers’ forcing function has produced the best infrastructure work of my year, a sentence I’ll be unpacking with a therapist or a keynote eventually.