What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as…

A response to a bad article, a bad book, and a bad publication

You can’t avoid Oracle. No, really, you can’t. Oracle is everywhere. It sells ERP software – enterprise resource planning, which is a rat king of different services for giant companies for financial services, procurement (IE: sourcing and organizing the goods your company needs to run), compliance, project management, and

Cover of The Eternal Network Together with Aymeric Mansoux I co-authored an essay that looks at the interrelation between Free/Libre Open Source Software(F/LOSS) and the Fediverse, an alternative social media network. Through seven different theses, the essay explores how this latest federated social network challenges both the established forms of production and governance in F/LOSS software, as well as the governance of social media platforms. Table of Contents: Meet the Fediverse The Fediverse as the Transition from Meme Wars to Network Wars The Fediverse as an Ongoing Critique of Openness The Fediverse as a Site for Online Agonistic Pluralism The Fediverse as a Shift from a Technical to a Social Understanding of Privacy The Fediverse as a Way Out of Data Sharecropping and Free Labor The Fediverse as the Rise of a New Kind of Usership The Fediverse as the End of Free/Libre and Open Source Software as We Know It Download the essay on Monoskop.

Are you heading to UpScrolled?

Why is LinkedIn so horrible? It goes even beyond the conceptual failure of most social media sites.

Greg Brockman said he started “getting involved politically” in 2025.

Americans mythologize economic competition, but it's actually the opposite of capitalism. If you want to create and capture lasting value, writes Peter Thiel, look to build a monopoly.

Merge Labs has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding from OpenAI and others. It aims to use ultrasound to read from and write to the brain.

I came of age in 1990s Baltimore. It was my very dangerous, drug-addled, murder playhouse. The city was pretty much disintegrating around me as I passed by on my skateboard, bought my first house, and had my first real adult career. It was a very different city then. It was not pretty. It had not been gentrified. It was a mess but it was my mess. I loved every crack in the sidewalk and still do.

In the seminal essay, Barbrook and Cameron insisted that there are other ways to build technology, and to do it democratically, writes Nathan Schneider.

Putting people in bikinis is just the tip of the iceberg. On Telegram, users are finding ways to make Grok do far worse.

Fans eager to hear new albums first are warned they give labels extensive access to their data

Famous booklet by the ex high ranking Marine

"There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I’m not going to talk about those."

In the age of Spotify and AI slop, tapes remind us what we’re missing when we stop taking risks.

Far be it for the billionaire class to have to answer to the riff raff on social media.

TheAgentCompany and its employees are fake, but the simulation environment created by CMU researchers to benchmark AI agents and test their abilities on real-world tasks shows that most AIs would make terrible office workers.

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

From an amoeba to a blue whale

Whatever it is, let me start it with gratitude. Gratitude is fertile ground. Put in the seeds of your dreams and desires. Keep the ground watered and pull the weeds....