Alex Dobrenko

Like many other dramatized conversations in AHWOSG , the Q&A—46 pages long, even longer than the book’s front matter—devours itself, transforming from quasi-realistic representation of an actual event to a meta self-interrogation, in which Eggers describes the comfort of his own upbringing, movingly reveals his late father’s alcoholism, and def... See more

I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that is better at dramatizing—embodying—the feckless confidence of one’s early 20s, that feeling that if only you and your genius friends could be set loose upon society you could transform it, terraform the political and cultural and artistic structures of the earth and make a new world, a better one. Grante... See more

This technology that currently (and increasingly) siloes us doesn’t have to. Perhaps there could be more funding for those innovations that have to do with shared, rather than unshared experiences. Or perhaps there could even be computational work done by new companies or institutions to produce technology which helps us reunite and share experienc... See more

What this points to is a critical change in the rhythms of everyday life which occur almost as collateral damage of the development in computation and their deployment in art and media. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre created the term ‘rhythmanalysis’ to discuss these processes. For him, to understand a society you had to analyse its rhythms ... See more

Growing up in the 1990s, before the much anticipated ‘digital switch over’ on the TV networks (perhaps a comparable moment in digital history to this one), it was a famous tidbit of British culture to note how there were often local power cuts at 7.45pm. These small power outages were caused when “Coronation Street” took an ad break, and Brits rush... See more

What sets Lore apart is the understanding that the most used platforms today – Instagram, X, Reddit – were not crafted to support fandom. Their architecture was for something entirely different, but fans have had no other choice but to engage on these sites. “We deserve a platform that is designed for fandom,” Naqvi argues, whether that fandom cent... See more

No longer will anyone need to hunt down the appropriate Reddit threads, open up dozens of tabs to read relevant articles and watch explanation videos on YouTube. Lore promises to consolidate it all into one place, in a more intuitive and interactive way than what current fandom sites offer. Official developments and fan theories can be tracked with... See more

Lore’s vibe is “all about high fantasy worlds and internet archaeology”, she writes to me in an email after our interview. The artistic backdrop to the website will serve as an aesthetic reminder of the “lost magic” that the internet has always had the capacity to nurture.

Lore aims to restore this absent dimension. It’s designed not as another social media website, but as what she describes as a “community-driven multiplayer internet”. The first private beta version of the site goes live today.