Society

Sol Price is the most influential retailer you've never heard of. A man who never sought the spotlight, but whose legacy and lessons cover the entire landscape of modern retail.

Tracing the increased concentration of power in our elites, and how Trump is in the process of consolidating it in his person.

I wrote the original version of this post for the March 2018 issue of Linux Journal. You can find it here. Since images from archival material in the magazine no longer load, and I want to update t…

Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily.

A Brief Meditation of Moral Witness

Oligarchs, Courtiers, and the Corruption of Thought

At Foundation for Economic Education, Patrick Carroll (“Responding to Reich, Part 10: How to Have Infinite Growth on a Finite Planet,” Feb. 18)  Patrick Carroll attempts to explain why critics of capitalism are wrong to say that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. As for the idea of infinite growth on a finite...

Dictators love a crisis. “For reasons of both personality and political ambition, Trump needs a crisis to govern — or rather, to rule. And if the actual conditions of reality will not give him a state of exception, he’ll create one himself.

The US loves to hate cheaters. The reasons why tell us a lot about how we view marriage.

Today’s trend goes back way further than the modern influencer.

Nostalgia is lying to you about how good things were.

AI capex is so big that it's affecting economic statistics, boosting the economy, and beginning to approach the railroad boom

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the historic protests in Seattle that shut down a meeting of the World Trade Organization, but it also marks the time when the first Independent Media Center came to life. Amid the clouds of tear gas, hundreds of volunteer reporters documented what unfolded. That week indymedia.org received 1.5 million visitors — more than CNN — and produced a daily video report and newspaper. It was the first node in a global citizen journalist movement. We speak with those who know the story best. Jill Freidberg is co-founder of the Seattle Independent Media Center and co-produced the Seattle WTO documentary “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” Rick Rowley is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and independent journalist with Midnight Films, as well as co-producer of “This Is What Democracy Looks Like.” Tish Stringer and Renée Feltz are co-organizers of the 20th Anniversary Indymedia Encuentro taking place this weekend at the Rice Media Center. Stringer is film program manager at Rice University and author of a book on Indymedia, “Move! Guerrilla Films, Collaborative Modes, and the Tactics of Radical Media Making.” Feltz was at the Seattle WTO protests and helped found the Houston Independent Media Center. She’s a longtime Democracy Now! producer and reporter, including for The Indypendent, a newspaper that grew out of New York City Indymedia.

In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that

Everyone’s offering their thoughts on enshittification these days. I notice this phenomenon…seems like there are conversations that go on which I tap into for a bit before the move alon…

This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religi…

A reader recently sent me ​a Substack post​ they thought I might like. “I bought my kids an old-school phone to keep smartphones out of ... Read more

Roxanne Shirazi, a librarian at CUNY, recently commented on the AI hype in her field: I attended a library vendor AI demo/upsell today and I wish I could explain to them that everything they are selling could be achieved by hiring like two more people in our library. And yet this entire team was dedicated...

Drinking Sunday coffee in the hyper-normal

But Today Doesn't Feel Like Yesterday

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

Cosmos is — or was — a popular science magazine published by the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. David Ho is an oceanographer at the University of Hawai’i. Cosmos posted an articl…