This is no small issue, is what I’m saying. Whether we encounter language we find objectionable (or whatever) passively or actively is central to how we ought to consider it. Making monsters out of Racist Teens just to vanquish them seems lazy at best and ugly at worst.

We can and should support the companies we love with our money. Companies can and should have balanced streams of income so that they’re not solely dependent on just one. We all should consider the business models of the companies we trust with our data. But we should not assume that, just because we pay a company they’ll treat us better, or that if we’re not paying that the company is allowed to treat us like shit. Reality is just more complicated than that. What matters is how companies demonstrate their respect for their customers. We should hold their feet to the fire when they demonstrate a lack of respect.

So much of this news story is hauntingly familiar to me from fieldwork with Samoan migrants: the role of family, the half-hearted attempts to verify a person's identity that fail, the strong spiritual connection Te'o thought he felt with Kekua, and the hoax itself.

by Whitney Phillips and Kate MiltnerIn 2012, more than ever, the internet became the way we shame people now. Here to talk about online justice and public shaming are academic internet experts Whitney Phillips and Kate Miltner. (Whitney recently ...

Too many to ever play them all, but a good place to look if I’m hankering for something new.

Details on 1Password 4.1 and how to use bookmarklet in Chrome and Safari to open the current URL in 1Password's browser. So incredibly useful.

So the attempt to launch a from-scratch, celebrity-free outlet for longform music journalism has failed. Can a Kickstarter fail “spectacularly”? I don’t know. But reaching 17% of a proposed goal is something, for sure. This isn’t schadenfreude, though; there’s nothing in the Uncool idea to root against, per se. It’s more an opportunity to consider how campaigns like this, when undertaken in good faith, can underachieve. In brief: the idea may be modern, but the underlying realities are rooted in basic political economic realities that date back a very, very, long time.

For when your favorite song just isn't long enough

On the bright side, by interpreting the confusing policy in the most alarming possible light, the tech press has forced Instagram to toe the line more carefully than it otherwise might have. That's a win for users

EmilyKun from the Hatventures Minecraft server drew this picture of herself, Siejo82, and me exploding from a giant sakura tree that I filled with TNT and then lit too soon.

I don't think the issue is irony. I think that the issue is the cult of the trivial. And it only matters insofar as it makes people feel better or worse. I have observed that many people spend an inordinate amount of their lives devoting obsessive attention to subjects while simultaneously working to demonstrate that they don't take those subjects at all seriously. Not just that they don't take them seriously but that they couldn't possibly. This tends to be expressed in a tone that we typically identify as ironic, but I doesn't have to be, and the focus on irony misses the essential point. I think that people need a sense of narrative in their life, they need self-belief, they need to feel like their life stands for something. And I genuinely believe that the way a lot of people spend the majority of their time-- electronically mediated, participating in a constant digital conversation about whatever has captured the mass attention, and making fun of absolutely everything about it-- is just deadening of any sense of purpose or deeper meaning.

Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi breaks down the meager royalties currently being paid out to bands by streaming services and explains what the music business' headlong quest for capital means for artists today.

I would challenge the idea that trolls, and trolls alone, are why we can't have nice things online. There is no doubt that trolls are disruptive, and there is no doubt that trolls can make life very difficult. That said, trolling behaviors signify much more than individual pathology. They are directly reflective of the culture out of which they emerge, immediately complicating knee-jerk condemnations of the entire behavioral category. Until the conversation is directed towards the institutional incubators out of which trolling emerges -- as opposed to just the trolls themselves -- no ground will be gained, and no solutions reached.

‘Internet addiction’ doesn’t exist. It can’t, because it’s a logical impossibility, a category error, and there’s no good evidence that heavy internet use, in itself, is a risk to mental health.

Maybe the indie experiment only existed to create Grimes, the ultimate internet content producer who makes content directly aimed at internet viewers. She is the best example of ‘not being a band/musician’, but instead a ‘playing by the rules’ content generation machine that resonates with humans wasting time on the internet.

COTQ is featured here.

Recently I was approached by a newspaper reporter (who shall remain nameless) about a possible article on trolling. I agreed under the condition that I could talk about the importance of defining one’s terms. I was also asked to put the reporter in touch with a troll. I asked “Brian Macnamara,” who sometimes trolls under the name Paulie Socash (further info on Paulie here). In the end, the paper wasn’t able to run the piece (perhaps unsurprisingly, given Brian’s responses), but I asked for permission to post both sets of answers.

Famous GIFs.

A history of Tumblr and the monetization issue it faces.

To assess a film's odds of success (because even crowdfunders don’t want to back a loser), a prospective funder would want to know what people in the know—who are part of the “industry” in one way or another—make of it. This is the point often missed by those hailing Kickstarter as a revolutionary project that could emancipate the artists: What defines potential “success” for their film is still very much defined by the industry heavyweights.

And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.

There are jailed dissenters around the world, with harsher sentences for lesser crimes, wasting in silence. We shouldn’t forget them and we shouldn’t forget the message Pussy Riot was trying to spread. However, we should let rebellion and reform grow organically from within a country and then foster and support it with an outsider’s perspective; we shouldn’t place ourselves and our lives and our Twitter feeds directly into someone else’s story and someone else’s struggle. If it’s not about you, don’t make it about you.

This is supposed to be funny and fascinating, but I find it mostly sad. These people don’t need snark, they need mental health care.

In response to my long reply. This is incredibly useful!

Commenting on Tom Ewing’s comment about how the word ‘troll’ has come to be applied to non-trolls. Once a word is upstreamed into popular stream of discourse, everyone with a bone to pick wants to grab it off its hook on the wall and see what it can do for them.

Paul Ford: I don’t really make decisions. Instead, I pick my friends carefully. Then I go where people ask me to go; when no one needs me to go anywhere or do anything I work on longer essays that I’ll publish some day.

Curiosity, sincerity, activism, and sexism.

Readability and Instapaper are two awesome reading tools that actually aren't in competition since Readability is mostly a network and Instapaper is mostly an app. But, foolish fanboy enthusiasm on both sides has got people choosing "sides" between the apps and turning legitimate feature debates into some sort of moral judgment of the people building the tools. Based on what I learned during a similar stage in the evolution of the blogging market, I fear these petty squabbles will hurt both tools and leave the market open only to the biggest, best-funded, most soulless competitors and that both these cool, innovative tools will lose.

Our consciousness and memory are moving into the ether, so the need for our senses is diminished. And the interface for this transformation turned out to be text.

Which brings us back to the question: Have we reached peak Facebook? And no, we haven’t. Even if Facebook never adds another user, it will keep growing: It has become a fundamental substrate, a difficult-to-avoid component of any site or app that requires users to register—making it essential to nearly every major web innovation now and in the future. There’s a related question: Is Facebook ever going to be cool again? That’s like asking “Is the phone company cool?” The interface may not be exciting anymore, but the network is very, very cool, in the disruptively awesome way that enormous things are: volcanoes, aircraft carriers, the New Deal.