It’s hard. I don’t know how to resolve the conflict between Information wants to be free and Writers deserve to be paid . But it’s worth noting that the internet of yesteryear, where almost every article was free to read, was also the internet that drastically reduced the value of highly researched, carefully argued writing. That internet helped... See more

I came of age in the Napster days, when only fools spent money on anything digital. Early on, we decided that we’d rather pay for the internet with attention instead of money. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and at first, it was!

It was like having a big party sponsored by Mazda, and all that meant was having the Mazda logo on the Solo... See more

Decades of propaganda about television being bad for you in the twentieth century created this anxiety, but the promotional machine around those early twenty-first-century shows made it chronic: the bizarre need for artists to disavow the medium they work in, and for viewers to disavow the thing they enjoy.