internet culture
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
Agentic Computing
Nara's meticulously staged domesticity is less an earnest embrace of tradition and more a savvy recognition of the internet's underlying logic: to succeed in the future, one must cloak themselves in remnants of the past.
Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties –... See more
Nara’s audience loves her nostalgic conservatism because it reorients them away from today’s particular brand of anxieties –... See more
Matt Klein • Future Burnout: On the False Promises & Expectations of What Comes "Next"
The World Wide Web is what I know best (I’ve coded for money in the programming languages Java, JavaScript, Python, Perl, PHP, Clojure, and XSLT), but the Web is only one small part of the larger world of software development. There are 11 million professional software developers on earth, according to the research firm IDC. (An additional 7... See more
PAUL FORD • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg
soft web poetic web
In Sarah Schulman’s book The Gentrification of the Mind , she laments, “Will everything (books, music, pornography, education, movies, friendship, camaraderie, love, and television) all be free if they’re consumed online and prohibitively expensive to experience in person?” She wrote this in 2012 and may not have anticipated how much further that... See more
Drew Austin • #184: Pure Pain Sugar
We’re seeing the progressive unbundling of human agency in memory creation, and I think it’s happening in clear phases.
The first phase started a very long time ago. Cameras, voice recorders, and digital notebooks were primitive tools for documentation. Sure, each of these tools were enhanced by technology. We chose what to capture and the tools... See more
The first phase started a very long time ago. Cameras, voice recorders, and digital notebooks were primitive tools for documentation. Sure, each of these tools were enhanced by technology. We chose what to capture and the tools... See more
Unbundling memory
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
PAUL FORD • Paul Ford: What Is Code? | Bloomberg
Here in 2025, however, Blueprint appears to be humming along and building an ever-growing following.
Two years in, the mainstream critiques of Johnson’s health regimen remain the same, simple and amusing. It’s either that he’s too rich or too exacting in his lifestyle for any regular person to emulate and/or that he’s doing so much to his body in an... See more
Two years in, the mainstream critiques of Johnson’s health regimen remain the same, simple and amusing. It’s either that he’s too rich or too exacting in his lifestyle for any regular person to emulate and/or that he’s doing so much to his body in an... See more
Bryan Johnson and the Birth of the Blueprint Religion
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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