The book 1.0
Internet people like to talk about “the stack,” or the layered architecture of protocols, software and hardware, operated by different service providers that collectively delivers the daily miracle of connection. It’s a complicated, dynamic system with a basic value baked into the core design: Key functions are kept separate to ensure resilience,... See more
Maria Farrell • We Need to Rewild the Internet
Beware the Curators: Why Life Beyond Algorithmic Recommendations Requires Skepticism | Future Commerce Insiders
futurecommerce.comAndré has the excitement of someone who is traversing new ground, but he’s also serious about the work.
Hanif Abdurraqib • Andre 3000 is at Peace (For Now)
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the 'content' of any medium is always another medium.” In the case of neural media, the content is all of network media. This is quite literally the case with large language models and image generators trained on massive corpuses of text and imagery scraped from the web.
Neural Interpellation
If you’re lucky, perhaps something you post will temporarily spark a surge of engagement, but those same spectators, exhausted by the onslaught, will soon shift their weary attentions to the next recommended item flowing close behind. This relentless pace rewards passive consumption, not active interaction with individual creators. The... See more
Cal Newport • The Rise of the Internet’s Creative Middle Class
And that is what really gets me going: the dynamic between what’s going on in the world, and what it means for us as human beings.
What my writing is really about
The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.
Mindy Seu
Perhaps one way to motivate and encourage regulators and enforcers everywhere is to explain that the subterranean architecture of the internet has become a shadowland where evolution has all but stopped. Regulators’ efforts to make the visible internet competitive will achieve little unless they also tackle the devastation that lies beneath.