culture

To be honest, my appetite for this sort of online blowup diminishes hourly. Though I’m as prone to schadenfreude as any other media professional trying to hold onto relevance in an increasingly winner-take-all economy, there’s something about watching extremely online people have noisy meltdowns that makes me feel like I’m inhaling my own body... See more

The crowd is the flâneur’s indispensable counterpart: the crowd turns people into observable objects . In Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man in the Crowd’ the protagonist pursues an intriguing figure through the streets of London for a whole night without ever being able to see his face: in big cities, one can stroll through busy streets without... See more

Streaming sites have thus transformed into enterprises whose business is not limited to the sale of music-related services, but relies increasingly upon the collection, aggregation, and exchange of user data. A key issue this article pursues concerns the changing status of music within the commercial strategies of online streaming. While previous... See more

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company... See more

iron law of the internet: any movement or subculture will be judged by its most cringe members

Luxury surveillance is a phenomenon where "some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of." You might buy a GPS bracelet to track your biometric data (which will be used by other firms), while others might be forced to wear one (and still pay for it) as part of their... See more