Society

Find out how much an acre of land costs in every state. Decide where to buy land by comparing average price per acre and see how much land you can afford.

Learn about the gaming motivations of transgender and non-binary gamers, and the games that are particularly popular and unpopular among this cohort. Find out how their gaming profile is unique and not just a linear mixture of male and female gamers.

In a piece from January, Cory Doctorow outlined the enshittification lifecycle of online platforms: Here is how platforms die: Fi

We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for the whole world. You got a problem with that?

In 1997, Wired magazine published an article called The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020 (archived). The subtitle rea

It understands the value of education and manages its teachers well

The European Union published its proposal for a digital euro late last month, which will be issued by the European Central Bank (ECB) if it ...

If it walks like a duck...

David Volodzko has reduced me to something I rarely encounter as a culture critic.

L.A. County’s Sheriff’s Department is famed for deputy gangs. These cliques function little differently to any other gangs, complete with tattoos, rituals and criminal enterprises, and …

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Why the debate about social media is not about tech or the internet at all.

The Opposite of Good Fires is Wildfires.

A dazzlingly fast chatbot cannot replace the authentic and reflective voice of a thinking, living human being.

The layoffs were announced to staff on July 5th.

Meta’s take on mimicking Twitter feels like it was built around brand safety. You don’t get fulfilling internet experiences when you build around brand safety.

The strategy for winning is simple: do good work and tell the world about it. In that order! This implies some level of stealth as you are doing the good work. If you plan to lose weight, don’t announce it… lose the weight and then do the reveal. Early feedback frames the problem and might … Continue reading Stealth, not secrecy

Republican nominee engaged in so-called stochastic terrorism with his remarks about “Second Amendment people” and Clinton

1. The use of mass communication to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. 2. Remote-control murder by lone wolf.

In 2011, an anonymous blogger defined the term “stochastic terrorism”. Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass commun

Rick Anderson, University Librarian at Brigham Young University, writes on a peculiar fact of library life: false and misleading copyright warnings to be found by photocopiers. Under certain condit…

Twitter’s eroding reign over microblogging may collapse as Meta’s new platform, Threads, emerges as a serious contender, with a staggering 30 million users signing up on launch day. Increasin…

The threat suggests that Threads is the most serious rival yet to Elon Musk’s chaotic social platform.