internet culture

Put through that process, reality usually hits like a truck. Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor... See more

I use technology in order to hate it more properly. –Nam June Paik https://t.co/8lJQifwyqD

Adobe created PostScript in the early 1980s and licensed it to Apple, its first success. Three-plus decades later, Adobe is valued at $38 billion. PDF is a direct descendant of PostScript, and there are PDFs everywhere. In code as in life, ideas grow up inside of languages and spread with them

They believed, that instead of trying to change the world outside. The new radicalism should try to change what was inside people’s heads. And the way to do this, was through self-expression. Not collective action.

— Hypernormalisation

This idea clearly spread and maintained to the present day. Where putting a graphic on a hat or shirt is “impacting... See more

Once front-running other participants in financial markets or cultural production becomes a common strategy, trends become inefficiencies – temporary blips of difference or spikes in value that are bound for correction. Being early as a meta is replaced by catching people offsides. Betting on the return to the mean.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her

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If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag... See more

Another few decades later, in 2024, it’s difficult to even remember the world that came before this. No Logo feels dated in 2024 because it’s a dispatch from the twilight of the (comparatively) unbranded world that has since been overwritten, the logic of branding having escaped its traditional corporate confines, now internalized by subcultures,... See more