internet culture

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

Such guides go by many names—call them influencers, or content creators, or just “this one guy I follow.” Guided by their own cultivated sense of taste, they bring their audiences news and insights in a particular cultural area, whether it’s fashion, books, music, food, or film.

Perhaps the best way to think of these guides is as curators; like a... See more

This situation, where more data is the goal, means there is great collection software and terrible decision making software. We are told to star, favorite, and bookmark everything. Yet, like real life hoarders, we cannot say what exactly we collected or why. Nor can we find any of it. How many times have you spent an hour trying to find that one... 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

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

What would it look like if, in a McLuhan-esque, medium is the message sort of way, our tools said to us:

It’s gonna take you a while.

It’s normal to take a while.

It’d be weird if you made something beautiful so quickly.

The problem isn’t that you’re not working fast enough.

The problem is your expectations are not realistic.

Our AI helps you slow the... See more

Agentic software designs for and explicitly allows user-made desire paths and folk-usages of software. People will use software in whatever informal, distributed ways that emerge from real world contexts. Folksonomies are a great example of these informal taxonomies developed by users on social sharing platforms. Tumblr tags, for example, have... See more

It is not a critical approach towards values, policy, nor the subsequent consequences of these artifacts. We experience our political landscape through the veneer of our “ discourse interfaces” (that’s a Reggie phrase) .