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In 2011, Google found its search results facing severe scrutiny because so-called “content farms” (websites that produced high volumes of low-quality content) were dominating the search results. Google’s SERPs were also cluttered with websites featuring unoriginal and auto-generated content – and even, in some instances, scraper sites were outranking content originators

Graduate HCI classes are far better because there is so much depth to the field. Basically, through a combination of understanding human psychology, knowing the right questions to ask, and understanding how to properly model how people will use a system you can make software that flows naturally. That last point, sometimes referred to as Cognitive Engineering, is extremely important.

Purpose is the bedrock of a motivating role, but even if the purpose is there, disengagement can result from two other key issues: Lack of growth opportunity, or A poor feedback/improvement loop.

One of the top reasons for distrust and disengagement among employees is feeling like their needs are unmet, their feedback is not heard, and things will not improve

People have been known to put up with fairly egregious situations if they can see incremental progress toward improving them.

“We are talking about a specific time [in history], 1823. We’re not talking about 1750 or 1870. Clearly, there was one thing on the mind of the king and the whole country, which was the Oyo Empire and how do you liberate yourself from economic dependence and having to pay tribute? That was the focus. This movie is not about the whole history of Dahomey, it is about a specific time where all the stars were aligned against continuing the slave trade.

“What is the goal of film?” said Gates. “Is it to educate? Is it to portray history or is it to capture themes and the spirit of issues facing the human condition? I’ve seen plenty of films that deal with the civil rights movement, slavery, where the filmmaker, the screenwriter will find that one random white person who was kind of sort of around and design the entire film around them as the hero and the protagonist.

“Now, is that historically accurate? I guess that white dude was around. Are you translating the spirit of the civil rights movement when you do that? No, you’re actually doing something incredibly offensive by centering whiteness in a story that is supposed to be about Blackness and about Black liberation. And so my question is, you throw historical inaccuracy out there, like you back it up. What do you think this film is doing that you find offensive?

The trouble with being a woman and making your art look so natural is that the world believes you unaware of your own magic; you’re less skilled artist than unaware naif merely happening upon great talent.

The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe author Sarah Churchwell argues that storytellers too easily evade the ethical question about Monroe’s representation. “Marilyn was not only a fiction; she was not simply an icon,” she writes. “And it is wishful thinking to believe that focusing exclusively on the surface does anything but make her superficial.” Blonde, for all its posturing and virtuoso stylings, shores up a mythology — in death, Monroe remains a vessel into which directors and actors can pour their ideas about the entertainment industry and the broader patriarchy, female beauty and female image-making.

I think all writing — and criticism is very much included in this — is a form of autobiography, and I thought that I wanted to lean into it a little bit, and talk about what these shows meant to me.

One way the agency achieves its aim is the installation of hardware. Documents show Roskomnadzor mandated installation of “censorship boxes” by local internet providers. These devices allowed the Russian government to become the man-in-the-middle when public sentiment turned against it, giving it the power to throttle services utilized by government critics. They also allow the government to pull the plug on services whenever it deems it necessary. Twitter access has been repeatedly throttled. The agency has also completely blocked access to Facebook and Instagram and ensured VPN services are unusable by Russian citizens.

In some cases, censors recorded their screens showing detail down to the movements of their computer mouse as they watched over the internet. They monitored overtly political videos and, at other times, focused on less obviously worrisome content, like this viral song by the young rapper KEML. Bashkortostan is known as a hub for rap in Russia.

David Foster Wallace once said that:The language of images. . . maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life. When you consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they had probably seen maybe a hundred kisses. They'd seen people kiss a hundred times. My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they ever kissed. Before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses. I know that the first time I kissed much of my thought was, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?”

A lot of the 80s and 90s critiques of postmodernity did have a point—our experience really is colored by media. Having seen a hundred movies about nuclear apocalypse, the entire time we’ll be looking over our shoulder for the camera, thinking: “Am I doing it right?”

what I think the Know Your Meme report illustrates so well is that we’re now currently in a world where we have two different kinds of social platforms: Ones that make new culture and ones that consume that culture. And, according to the report, the two most important platforms for creating new internet culture (which is now just pop culture) are Twitter and TikTok.In fact, according to Know Your Meme, about 60% of the memes we’ve seen in 2022 were created by Twitter or TikTok. And the three biggest apps behind those two —YouTube, Reddit, and Instagram — all trail far behind, contributing around 10% each.

The current growing malaise in the podcast world is because the advertising industry, and thus the entertainment industry, still treat different kinds of digital media on the internet as entire industries that are somehow separate from each other. This is how you end up with weird micro-fads where very important people say things like “it’s all about audio now,” or “the next big thing is live video or short video or VR video,” or sit on some panel and say that everyone’s into GIFs or whatever. (It’s also the exact same mindset that allowed a lot of investors to get suckered into NFTs.) All of this, inevitably, leads to massive companies dumping jaw-dropping amounts of money to over-saturate what are essentially just different file types. But none of that means anything on the internet!

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. (Donella Meadows, 2008. Thinking in Systems)

So, to survive, you might say a design has to discover an evolutionary path from the familiar to the new, from the present to the future, through a series of steps into the adjacent possible.

The principle holds for infrastructure too. The internet started with the adjacent possible: coopting telephones.The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight. (Exapt Existing Infrastructure)

"People seek simple solutions [and] the truth is kind of boring sometimes. Anybody who's got good innovations on reducing polarization, getting the truth to be as interesting as the crazy stuff, that would be well worth investing in," Gates told Forbes.

“No Campus Free Speech Controversies at the Vast Majority of Colleges This Week” isn’t a headline that can exist.

I think that the difficulty in top-down moderation means that platforms have a great responsibility to provide users with tools to block, mute, go private, and avoid certain terms and topics.

Most of my own readers are disillusioned leftists and liberals, but certainly I host many conservatives here, and I’m fine with that. And, yes, it’s entirely possible for the anti-woke beat to become a shtick, and because there are financial incentives involved, for writers to dedicate more and more time to it. That in turn can provoke people to fixate on problems with language norms or minor culture war kerfuffles, to the detriment of bigger issues of greater intrinsic concern to the country.

Woke and anti-woke are not the same in a simplistic way, but it’s true that they’re caught in a mutually-reinforcing cycle.

Honestly, I’ve never thought of myself as a contrarian leftist at all; I just think of myself as an old-school materialist and civil libertarian leftist who’s unhappy with the evolution of contemporary liberalism. It’s perfectly fair, though, to argue that my priorities are off and that I spend too much time worrying over liberal culture than about structural injustice.

When I complain that there’s a strain of liberal historiography that seems to deny that people of color have ever had agency, and in doing so makes white people the protagonists of history, that doesn’t seem anti-woke to me; it seems to be an argument for a more expansive vision of what respect for people of color entails.

I think the woke/anti-woke binary is a dead end. Everyone has already taken their places on the stage, and the back-and-forth that exists feels tired and rehearsed. I am 100% open to the idea that the discursive and language controversies I talk about so often are of less importance to deeper issues of structural politics. I might have lost the plot. But as social justice politics have become the language of institutions, albeit opportunistically on the part of those institutions, the need for a vibrant counternarrative has only grown. I think for all of its pitfalls and susceptibility to corruption, “anti-woke” discourse is profoundly necessary. Critical thinking about cancel culture is necessary. A world where Goldman Sachs flies Pride flags outside its offices is a world where left-wing skepticism of woke morals is needed.