Media & Culture

Savior Complex is a slyly simplistic title.

That's why we have intermediaries, and why disintermediation always leads to some degree of re-intermediation. There's a lot of explicit and implicit knowledge and specialized skill required to connect buyers and sellers, creators and audiences, and other sides of two-sided markets. Some producers can do some of this stuff for themselves, and a... See more

Online political debate mainly involves cherry-picking the most outlandish members of the enemy side and presenting them as indicative in order to make the entire side look crazy.

The culture war is essentially just each side sneering at the other side's lunatics.

I think the defining economic reality of the modern platform media world is that all the platforms realized that an infinite supply of teenage creators are cheaper to deal with than media companies or groups of media individuals or powerful creators. And I’m curious for your read on the number of YouTubers that you see retiring or taking a step... 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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The stasis debate is actually just about two specific topics: (1) whether 21st century culture offers the feeling of artistic progress, where new styles/practices devalue previous ones, thereby creating clear chapters in the historical timeline, and (2) whether there are new techniques in symbolic activity that expand how we perceive the world and... See more

In the digital age, cultural artifacts are eroded by abundance. Timelines layer and compress artwork, images, and artifacts into corners of the internet. In my corner, I stumbled across a speech entitled “Perfume, Defense and David Bowie’s Wedding” delivered by Brian Eno in 1992 at the Sadler Wells Theatre in London. In it, Eno predicted the... See more