Media & Culture
Using media to think deeply about complex issues
Tara McMullin and
Media & Culture
The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture... See more
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt
Your Spotify Wrapped for 2024 is the weight of all these things, whether we want to deal with it or not. AI-powered podcasts are the result of expunging the lives of the real humans who built these ideas, replacing them with a facsimile of human connection. Your data feeds into Google, and it builds you the idea of a friend in return. Artists will... See more
Niko Stratis • Wrapped will never love you back
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
Michelle Orange • How the Village Voice Met Its Moment
The problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage
Liv Boeree • Tweet
The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re... See more
challenges-15-00029-v2
The article critiques prevailing paradigms of digital literacy, proposing a consciousness model rooted in media ecology to address the structural biases of digital communication technologies that hinder sustainability efforts.
LinkReaching wide audiences requires all-terrain language, and the urgency of the present moment, amplified by chronological feeds, doesn’t allow for much stylistic variety. Efficiency is key — compressing as much information as possible to the least amount of words is the ideal of all communication.
While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... See more
While I do agree that many areas of interaction, like... 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.
—
I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world
... See more