Media & Culture
Using media to think deeply about complex issues
Tara McMullin and
Media & Culture
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive.
Charlie Warzel • I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)
Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms.
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
... See moreMark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the Futures That Have Never Arrived
Hua Hsu, December 11, 2018, New Yorker
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
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt
In any case, it’s enough to make anyone feel crazy. Over the last decade we’ve watched — and while I’m talking about the tech industry, I think we can all say it’s been everywhere else too — the things we love get distanced from us so that somebody else can get unbelievably rich, the things we used to do easily made more difficult, confusing and/or... See more
Edward Zitron • Never Forget What They've Done
In writing this history of the 21st century, Blank Space, I noticed that one important marker of our era is the cultural success of widely loathed people , such as Paris Hilton, Kanye West, and Donald Trump. They all figured out a powerful media hack for which there is no known antidote: Sociopathic behavior spurs the media to write lots of... See more
W. David Marx • Only Fads: A Culture (And Economy) of Labubu
But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more
Dirt: Complicated Culture
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on... See more
Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity
The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us.
Nicholas Carr • Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait
“Toward a phenomenology of the phone”