12 Years Later, Here's What Happened to the Viral Mastermind Behind 'The End of the World'
"Hokay. So. Here's the earth..." If you were on the Internet in the early aughts, you probably already know exactly where the above sentence comes from. It's the first line from "The End of the World," the zany 12-year-old animation that depicts an…
Is a second Civil War underway in rural America? - Vanity Fair
On the road in rural Wisconsin, the author knocks on the doors of houses that bear the darkest American symbols and flags, behind them finding guns, ammo, and a modern philosophy of civil war
A mystery industry in the United States is putting a lot of glitter in their products–and they don’t want you to know about it. A little under a year ago, the New York Times published an article all about glitter. In it, journalist Caity Weaver went to Glitterex headquarters, one of the top glitter manufacturers...
What Really Happened When Google Ousted Timnit Gebru - WIRED
Timnit Gebru came up through Big Tech. When she switched careers from building AI to examining how it can spread racism and inequality, the giants kept courting her. Then she crossed an invisible line, and Google forced her out. Is Silicon Valley’s system of in-house ethics really going to protect us from the industry’s favorite toys?
Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine
There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms.
It took nearly five years into the internet’s life before anyone made a concerted effort to archive it. Much of our earliest online activity has disappeared.
Weird Twitter: The Symbolic Construction of Community through Iterative Reification
Is there such a thing as Weird Twitter? Earlier I wrote a blog post based on my (non-participant) observations of a Twitter subculture. Recently, there’s been some activity around it in the t…
Evgeny Morozov, Critique of Techno-Feudal Reason, NLR 133/134, January–April 2022
Countering current claims that digital capitalism is issuing in a ‘neofeudal’ age, as the rentier barons of Silicon Valley and Wall Street extract non-productive fortunes from their users and debtors, Evgeny Morozov returns to classic debates over the transition to capitalism to question the relation of the economic and the political.
Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism
"Within our present oligarchic, exploitative, irrational, and inhuman world system, the rise of crypto applications will only make our society more oligarchic, more exploitative, more irrational, and more inhuman."
Here’s my definition: A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over ano…