Move from (Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, Deezer, YouTube, Apple Music) to Apple Music, Spotify or Google Music!

Leaders of the tech industry need to make it clear that they support a medium that loves speech and supports dissent, but does not tolerate hate.

There’s an old saw about the web that says that when the web democratized publishing, everyone should have become a writer, but instead most of us became consumers. (Nevermind that email and SMS have most people writing more in a day than their Victorian ancestors wrote in their entire lives.) There’s more than a hint of disparagement and elitism in that saying: everyone should have taken up writing, which is obviously superior to reading or watching or (gasp!) consuming. And I worry that that same sentiment creeps in when we argue the supremacy of text over image on the web. Writing is an important and valuable skill, but so are many other things. Here’s another way to think about it: over the past year, video after video has emerged showing cops shooting unarmed black people. Those videos have been shared on the web, and while they haven’t yet led to anything resembling justice for the victims, they have contributed to profound discussions around race, militarized police forces, guns, and more. They are not sufficient to bring about desperately needed social change—and there’s an argument to be made about whether they are at risk of becoming mere spectacle—but I think it would be hard to deny that they are an important element in the movement, that they have had a major impact. … I worry that the push to keep the web defined to words, while pragmatic and reasonable in many ways, may also be used to decide what stories get told, and what stories are heard. Many more people are using their tiny computers to record video and audio and take pictures than are writing; as much as I may love writing, and as much as I know that transmitting writing via cables and air is a hell of a lot easier and cheaper than transmitting video, I’m not sure I can really stand here and say that the writing is—or should be—primary. One of the design principles of the web is to pave the cowpaths: it looks to me like there are some new paths opening up, ones we may not have expected, ones that aren’t going to make many of our jobs easier. Maybe instead of putting up signs saying there are better paths elsewhere, it’s time we see where these ones take us.

As prolific and internet-known as Meechie and his crew are, they are multiple steps removed from owning, in a tangible sense, their art, leaving them vulnerable to both YouTube’s whims and to having their creativity lifted by outsiders. Atlanta, where Meechie is from, is legendary as a place where teens generate culture, and then go uncompensated as their style and tastes are usurped by a corporate machine hungry for Black Cool. Cultural sharing is ancient. That the speed and relative borderlessness of the internet makes cross-platform, global dissemination seem like a consequence of tech is a convenient amnesia. The propensity to share predates the young black creators doing so online. But they ought to claim lineage. Remember, for instance, the blues. … Part of the reason the originators of viral content are stripped from their labor is because they don’t technically own their production. Twitter does, Vine does, Snapchat does, and the list goes on. Intangible things like slang and styles of dance are not considered valuable, except when they’re produced by large entities willing and able to invest in trademarking them.

The lesson of that kind of reading is a simple one. It has taught me that my own life is ephemeral. Despite all the heroic myths about the unique, irreplaceable preciousness of our daily lives, I am absolutely convinced that someone, someday 50 or 100 years from now, will be working at a computer near where I am seated right now, and he or she will come across the address of my office mentioned in this article—902 Broadway—and will read with amusement or wonder or puzzlement about my experiences. I greet you, and the people who follow you, and the ones after them, and I hope that I give you a moment’s satisfaction, and that you take as much pleasure from your search as I did.

People are so sensitive these days! People are just offended by every little thing! Millennials, amirite?! --- Are there people upset about stupid nonsense? Absolutely. If it becomes “a thing,” however, it’s because the media made it “a thing.”

procedural salt flats, mountains, forests

We spoke to some of our favorite bot-makers about their favorite Twitter bots — their own, and made by others in the #botALLY community — to surface some lesser-known projects worth following.

It started out as a routine missing persons case. But by the time the internet was done with her, Elisa Lam had become a macabre celebrity, a conspiracy magnet—and the inspiration for a TV series.

Pandora dominates this dismal, depressing, unpromising market completely, and it will continue to do so until Congress fixes the pre-1972 sound recordings issue. The next time you have a fleeting thought about how internet radio sucks, and could be better—well, now you know what’s to blame. It’s copyright. (You can always blame copyright).

Talk given on September 14, 2015, at the FREMTIDENS INTERNET conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. There are a few guiding principles we should follow in any attempt at regulating the Internet.

Talk given on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC. I think it's time to ask ourselves a very designy question: "What is the web actually for?" I will argue that there are three competing visions of the web right now. The one we settle on will determine whether the idiosyncratic, fun Internet of today can survive. Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS. Vision 2: FIX THE WORLD WITH SOFTWARE Vision 3: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN CONSTRUCTION (Vision 1 is the right one.)

A talk at dConstruct 2013. I'm here by way of atonement, because I used to be a real jerk about fandom, and I used to make fun of them, and think they were wasting their time. And then I had this kinda life-changing come-to-Jesus moment that I want to talk to you about and this really weird artifact that got produced partly because of me, and it's completely changed my thinking. And as I've gotten to know fandom and really like them, I've come to believe that they kind of represent a future and a model for what communities are like on the Internet when you have actual people using machines to talk to one another rather than this kind of invented sense of what social life and social networks are supposed to be like, the way we've engineered them.

As the content industry consolidates in weird and unsettling ways over the next few months, understand the stakes: venture-funded publications, aware of how quickly their borrowed social audiences appeared and therefore understanding how quickly they could go somewhere else, will rightly crave security in the form of an exit. The best might go public, and find new ways to justify their independent existence, creating something like full-service content agencies, producing news and entertainment and ads as their ever-shifting context permits. Others will simply attempt to pitch their value to Facebook (or whatever) as something valuable to companies other than Facebook (or whatever). Those purely dependent publications that fail–maybe those middling, boldly cynical latecomer social mills about nothing??—will take stock of their remaining parts, and realize that they assemble into nothing. They will only be able to lurch forward until the money runs out.

In this edition of his monthly column, the premier writer on new, emergent, underground music addresses how the framing of music can radically redefine it. I love vaporwave and ‘internet music’, I really do. At its best it’s a provocative, complex and highly modern statement—but can you imagine it getting stupider, then more commonplace, then sticking around for more or less a decade? And towards the end of the decade, a well-meaning ebook gets published called Internet Music: The Weird and Wonderful World of Online Sounds, its title all spelled out in unicode characters and a naked 3D virtual woman floating above a blue watery backdrop on the cover? Wouldn’t you want a more exciting decade?

Social media and smartphones are just a form of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Clicking the “like” button on Facebook is no different than clicking the “like” button on a speech generation device. The different is how many people can hear what you have to say. People who were previously isolated because of mobility or speech issues can find friends with shared experiences and interests. They get to be less alone. People who oppose the use of screens aren’t trying to silence disabled people. The problem is that they aren’t thinking about us at all. When confronted with what smartphones can do for disabled people, anti-screen folks will claim that they are not talking about us. The thing is, when they look at a café and see people using their phones, there is no way to distinguish between the people who use phones as disability aids and people who just happen to find speaking through social media a perfectly adequate or even preferable mode of communication. A false hierarchy is formed, and of course, the ways some disabled people speak is at the bottom of it.

The problem is not that the online self is “inauthentic” and the offline self is real; it’s that the self derived from the data processing of our digital traces doesn’t correspond with our active efforts to shape an offline/online hybrid identity for our genuine social ties. What seems necessary instead is a way to augment our sense of “transindividuality,” in which social being doesn’t come at the expense of individuality. This might be a way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity, and the compulsive need to keep serially producing in a condition of anxiety to seem to manifest and discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Instead of using social media to master the social component of our own identity, we must use them to better balance the multitudes within.

MetaFilter began in 1999 as a sort of humane proto-Reddit. Why did a site for sharing “best of the web” links become a place where strangers help each other in real life in extraordinary ways?

Also, take more of them. But better.

In an age where we interact primarily with branded and marketed web content, Cameron’s World is a tribute to the lost days of unrefined self-expression on the Internet. This project recalls the visual aesthetics from an era when it was expected that personal spaces would always be under construction.

The Fat Jew and his ilk—Fuck Jerry, Beige Cardigan, Betches and other shitpic peddlers—have no doubt kept a lot of users coming back to Instagram, likely even a substantial portion of the three hundred million monthly active users that the site boasts. For years now, Instagram has served up sponsored posts to those users, bringing in revenue for itself and its parent company, Facebook, while taking little action in response to how users actually behave on its service. It believes that if it deprives users of certain tools, users will change their behavior to fit Instagram’s narrow view of how the service should work. It simply does not account for those that don’t. The Fat Jew might be hiding behind Instagram’s lack of functionality and profiting because of it, but he’s not the only one. Instagram is too.

Josh Ostrovsky, aka ‘The Fat Jew,’ rakes in six figures from his joke-sharing Instagram account and just signed with CAA. But his joke-stealing ways have irked the comedy world.

Hello! You have just been sent this link because you explained a woman's joke to her on Twitter! Or maybe you made her own joke back to her, except not as funny, or derailed her joke by talking about something else, or something similarly well-intentioned but cringeworthy. Whatever the case, we must regretfully inform you that you have almost certainly made her feel insulted, bored, annoyed and/or angry. This is probably not what you wanted.

Here’s the secret: endings are actually kind of awesome. No organization is started with the hope that it will become an antiquated behemoth that blocks progress with bureaucratic bloat — they calcify over time. Accepting the possibility of the end means periodically taking a critical look at your work and recognizing when its time has passed. Letting go of a project or an organization returns all of the resources it’s tying up — funding, attention, time, the emotional labor contributed by you and others — to the ecosystem. Whether by you or others, those resources will be recombined into new, surprising forms. Calcify not like a kidney stone but like coral: announce that your work is done so that others can build on your accomplishments.

Welcome to the land of musical serendipity, where you can get from Nazis to an album of Kurt Vonnegut reading Slaughterhouse-Five in a few clicks.

If your goal is to fix this broken medium, please consider that, historically, people have relied on different media for different social purposes, and have relied on a clear understanding of how the technical properties of each medium determine the social and temporal scope of its messages.

Space sounds and images.

The site offers a very clear picture of a society where wages are so low that they are no longer worth striving for, where ambitious young people cannot advance their educations without going into debt, and where the misfortune of illness results in financial catastrophe. For the people in phases of their lives where they had to serve as a caretaker to an ill partner or relative, the sex work offered flexibility, even if their earnings were often unpredictable or paltry.

If you make a joke, and people get really offended, it's almost certainly because you violated this rule. People don't get offended randomly. Explaining that "it was just a joke" doesn't help; everyone knows what a joke is. The problem is that you used a joke as a means of being an asshole. Hiding behind a dummy or a stage persona or a bot won't help you.

On tweeting less in 2015.