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Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.

We live in a world where movies aren’t considered art, but intellectual property. They’re “content,” little chunks of stuff that can be licensed, exte

I continue to believe that, for all its convenience, streaming threatens to wipe out a rewardingly inefficient, friction-filled, locked-in, ritualisti

A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.

Sometimes, we need to experience a moment of mortality like this to remember our days of even drawing another breath — let alone surrounded by friends

I continue to believe that, for all its convenience, streaming threatens to wipe out a rewardingly inefficient, friction-filled, locked-in, ritualisti

A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.

Jon Carmanica spends the majority of his time fawning over pop-confections like Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or Kacey Musgraves. The pop that “matters” to

I want to push for the idea that a record doesn’t have to mean something. That the point of music isn’t always to decode it and extract meaning from i

I continue to believe that, for all its convenience, streaming threatens to wipe out a rewardingly inefficient, friction-filled, locked-in, ritualisti

I often wonder why musicians don’t seem more alarmed by the rise of these songwriting generators. But perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch with how th

A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.

cognitive polarization

I often wonder why musicians don’t seem more alarmed by the rise of these songwriting generators. But perhaps I am hopelessly out of touch with how th

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. Maybe a virtual computer in the cloud, but ideally your computer. That way

Today working on a phone or laptop is associated with upper-middle-class knowledge work. In ten years, it will be a kind of low-status, blue-collar, m

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by far the most useful preventative medical advice that I've ever received has come from unleashing coding agents on my genome, having them investigat

It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. Maybe a virtual computer in the cloud, but ideally your computer. That way

James’ extensive and outstanding work as an editor has never been recognised. It started early: in his introduction to the revised edition of The Addi

the fact that everything is ‘possibly’ fake and inconvenient or expensive to consider, means that most people just stop trusting most things as true (

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn

When we die we always leave things unfinished.

I want to write when I've had a strange thought on a train, or when I'm working something out and writing it down is the only way to do it. Without it

When I look at a lot of what I’ve been writing for the last few years it’s infrequent and too often about things and not enough of what I think about

A single person armed with Stripe, Shopify, cloud software, automated bookkeeping, and now AI can do what once required a small staff. Dynamism had be

Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging

The moment some obscure demo drops, it’s everywhere, Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Instagram, whatever. Everyone knows about it instantly. That sen

these days, if you can’t see the noose of a politically charged security apparatus wrapping around previously-abundant artificial intelligence, I’m no

It's not even optimistic to say we have to try, it's just necessary. To give up, to stop trying, is to accept that things can't change. As Audre Lorde

Smart people are a dime a dozen and often don’t amount to much. What counts is being creative and imaginative.

It's not even optimistic to say we have to try, it's just necessary. To give up, to stop trying, is to accept that things can't change. As Audre Lorde

We need 20 year olds to have the freedom to try things, the freedom to explore, the freedom to end up having careers that they couldn’t have imagined

There are two types of people making stuff: content creators and artists.Both are creative. But there is one distinct difference: Content creators are

I don’t understand how anyone can say they’re anti something that’s potentially creative. If it’s not working for you today it could work for you a ye

when i'm tied up in consumption, creation is lost to me; i am no longer the writer, the creative, the poet, the artist, but the eater, the viewer, the