Media & Culture

But here's the thing: being able to say, "wherever you get your podcasts" is a radical statement . Because what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that's supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that's not owned by any one company, that can't be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have... See more

A decade ago, you paid for a smartphone to get 24/7 access to a world that, while demanding of your attention and full of advertising, was made up of a greater share of pleasurable, novel, or at least elective stuff: social media; entertainment; communication with friends; a bit of freedom from your desk at work, if you wanted it. (It provided... See more

The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage

Howard Blum, a former staff writer, is the first to declare the Voice “a precursor to the internet,” an idea that recurs, with diminishing shine, throughout the book’s five hundred and thirty pages. Notes of elegy sound throughout, laments for something too good to last, but also for a moment of honest and urgent revolt. When there seemed no such... See more

Complicated Culture

Daisy Alioto with W. David Marx.

dirt.fyi

why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet.

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I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world

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When everything is cheerfully “retro,” Fisher argued, we lose our grasp on history—and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything-goes embrace of “happy hybridities” is an empty gesture. “What pop lacks now is the capacity for nihilation, for producing new potentials through the negation of what already exists,” he

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The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.

What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day.