culture

Whatever initial appeal this argument has, it owes to the unpleasantness of corporate drudgery in general, not to the predicament of female corporate drudges in particular. Invariably, the job that features in articles like Andrews’s is soul-sucking, pointless and therefore presumed to have been chosen solely for the prestige it confers (although... See more

In reality, Spotify was subject to the outsized influence of the major-label oligopoly of Sony, Universal, and Warner, which together owned a 17 percent stake in the company when it launched. The companies, which controlled roughly 70 percent of the market for recorded music, held considerable negotiating power from the start. For these major... See more

The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.

The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

“There’s no way to make these systems without human labor at the level of informing the ground truth of the data — reinforcement learning with human feedback, which again is just kind of tech-washing precarious human labor. It’s thousands and thousands of workers paid very little, though en masse it’s very expensive, and there’s no other way to... 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

Even if, for a while, I feigned hatred of rock and roll, that only made sense on the presumption of its continued reign. Much the same could be said about liberal democracy. Today, American global hegemony looks like nothing more than a desperate reprisal of a role that must be ceded sooner or later; gone is the possibility of taking it for granted... See more