Alex Dobrenko

A reminder: This newsletter is the product of one (1) guy, i.e., me, who spends hours every reading and thinking and trying to figure out a way to write in an entertaining and clear fashion, a task that I succeed at roughly 60 percent of the time. I’m able to do this (spend my working days Studio Ghibli-fying photos of my friends) thanks to the... See more

But sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it--a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have... See more

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.

Recent research has revealed the invention of agriculture is not as simple a story as we once thought. It seems the intentional cultivation of plants was not a single watershed moment that happened once and only once. Instead, human groups appear to have repeatedly begun the practice only to later abandon it, presumably as conditions or culture... See more

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.