Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The big lecture: Can AI and a new CEO save Snowflake, once a Silicon Valley darling?

• Silicon Valley’s surprising fashion obsession.

Plus: A Deep Digital Cleanup; Mark Ronson in the Museum; and Hidden Gems of Cinema.

On a sultry Monday evening Earlier this month, hundreds of activists flooded the west lawn of the U.S. Capitol building, chanting “People over profits” and carrying handmade signs urging social media companies like Meta Platforms and TikTok to protect children online.

The rally marked the first day of the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation Global Summit, a conference focused on the perceived dangers of emerging technologies like generative AI and social media recommendation algorithms. Speakers included whistleblower Frances Haugen and the attorneys general of Virginia and New Mexico, who recently sued Meta.

The four-day summit, above all, demonstrated just how pervasive anti-tech hostility has become, underscoring how Washington’s hostility toward Silicon Valley has expanded from impeachment hearings in Congress to actual bills that have a real shot at becoming the law of the land. (It’s already achieved the improbable: bipartisan support.)

When an organizer mentioned Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act during her opening remarks, some attendees sitting next to me instinctively booed. Speakers at a later breakout session on age verification repeatedly called NetChoice, the trade association that represents companies like Meta and Snap, the “scum of the earth.” I lost count of the number of times the audience erupted in wild applause at the mention of the Kids Online Safety Act, which had passed the Senate by an overwhelming 91-3 vote a week earlier.

“We’re not just here to listen, we’re here to take action,” said Clay Olsen, CEO of the Phase Alliance, one of the organizers. The more than 600 attendees at the event had just won a legislative victory, but they were far from satisfied.

Attendees spent much of the time strategizing about how best to push the Kids Online Safety Act through the House and similar legislation aimed at weakening the liability shield that has long protected internet service companies. The conference concluded with a trip to Congress, where activists met with House staff to lobby for the bills.

One of the meetings, which took place in the office of Rep. Blake Moore, a Utah Republican, took an unexpected turn when an aide produced a light blue bag with the summit’s logo on it: he had been there, too, and was more than willing to talk about the bills.—Paris Martineau

The big lecture

The Saga of Snowflake

If Sridhar Ramaswamy had spent his entire career working on the consumer-facing side of large tech companies, I suspect he would have attracted a lot of profiles at this point in his career. Ramaswamy is the kind of executive journalist we like to spotlight, the kind we label as “candid,” “blunt,” or “hard charging.”

Ramaswamy puts it more bluntly. “I am intense,” he acknowledged, as he sat down with me for this week’s Big Read. “Intense on an ongoing basis, with the wisdom to turn it up a notch or two when there is a real, real crisis.”

Ramaswamy, who previously led Google’s advertising arm, is the new CEO of Snowflake, a once-booming software company that has fallen on hard times. To revive the company, Ramaswamy will rely on his proud penchant for hands-on management. He also believes his executives need to have “a paranoia about success,” he said. “Most people don’t understand that. If you’re successful, there’s going to be a lot of competition; you have to be paranoid about competition.”

Silicon Valley targets unexpected summer IT item

What if I told you that the cult-favorite fashion accessory of the season was… nerd glasses? Nope, I’m not seeing anything wrong: my vision is fine, thank you very much. The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have become an unlikely must-have for techies.

Admittedly, it’s surprising for a few reasons. We’ve been waiting for a cool headset for a long time, and the number of failures in the category over the past 15 years (Google Glass, Bose’s Frames, and so on) has certainly increased.

Now people like Brian Solis, head of global innovation at enterprise software company ServiceNow, are thinking about whether they should own the company. more than one pair of the Ray-Ban Metas. (Well, the glasses are available in an increasing number of different frame styles and colors.)

“It’s one of those lifestyle products where consumers probably have multiples, like a bag or a wallet,” Solis told me. “There’s a style component to it.”

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, is out for a gallop on his yellow meme horse. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Present: Mark Ronson – and guests

Summer is almost over, and so is the “Art of Noise” exhibit at SFMOMA. A colleague recently pointed me to the museum’s immersive audiovisual adventure, which has been a huge success for the past three months and which ends on Sunday. Definitely get there before it closes, stop reading this, and go.

“Art of Noise” impresses with its vibrant displays on cobalt-blue walls, featuring hundreds of psychedelic rock posters from bands like the Grateful Dead. But the exhibit also takes things up a notch with live pop-in performances by Beck and Mark Ronson. The crown jewel of the exhibit is Devon Turnbull’s “HiFi Pursuit Listening Room,” where massive speakers in a room with floor-level guests deliver the kind of high fidelity that John Cusack meowed about to women who were always too good for him.

In one of the show’s final hurrahs, acoustic whisperer Turnbull will be joined by “special guests” for a seven-hour set from 10am to 5pm on Saturday. If you don’t believe the hype, Ronson described the experience in an Instagram post as “so pure and immense, the way it washes over you is overwhelming and transformative, almost sacred.”—Josh Koehn

Download: A Practical Feast

That feeling when you find a hidden colony of dust bunnies under a couch? Sure, they didn’t bother you at first, but now you want them road.

A similar feeling arises when you open Privacy Party, a browser extension that performs a comprehensive privacy audit on apps and sites like X, Instagram, and YouTube. Is your Venmo friends list accessible to everyone? Is your email address available to anyone with a LinkedIn? Is your data secretly being used to train AI models? You may not have thought to ask such questions, but Privacy Party can provide you with the answers.

Block Party, the company behind Privacy Party, was founded by Tracy Chou, a former Pinterest engineer. She originally founded Block Party in 2018 to help people automatically block trolls and online harassers on Twitter, but when Elon Musk bought the social network in 2022 and implemented new pricing for developers, her company lost access to Twitter’s API.

Block Party then moved from troll blocking to privacy protection, while maintaining the same ethos. “Better tools around privacy allow people to be confident online, without fear of their data being used against them,” Chou said.

For anyone who has even a passing interest, it’s worth a scan. I bet JD Vance wishes he had downloaded it sooner.—Julia Zwart

Watch: When the Megaplex Doesn’t Work

As a film buff with a penchant for the cinematic experience, Screen Slate is one of my favorite online resources. Here you can find interesting films playing in arthouse theaters in New York and San Francisco every day.

Unlike mainstream aggregators like Fandango or Google Movies, Screen Slate focuses on indie releases and throwbacks. You won’t see the final showtimes for “Deadpool & Wolverine,” but you will see listings for a 50th-anniversary screening of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” at the Museum of Modern Art and the 1997 smash “Face/Off” at Nitehawk, a New York City chain. (Both are actual examples of films I saw after spotting showtimes on Screen Slate.)

The site also highlights screening spaces that would otherwise disappear in a few cities that are filled to the brim with options. One of my favorites: Spectacle, a volunteer-run, one-room theater in Brooklyn for forgotten works. The space was once a bodega.-P.M