Collections

This is pretty good, and strangely consistent with my own idea of good taste Tasteful people pursue stuff with purpose, have an appreciation and curi

On paper, taste = discernment. In practice, taste = your sense of self, made visible.

For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But

A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produ

we’ve always been influenced in what we find beautiful or valuable or important, of course, but what’s new is the speed at which one is inundated with

You can use algorithms to surface new things. But algorithms are not nearly as good as human curators yet. Whatever pattern matching is going on insid

But there’s a difference between collecting and curating.With collecting, building the collection itself is often the end goal. Not so with curating.

The lost thread

Hyperconnected Culture and Its Discontents

I feel like there’s something so soulless about our culture—something deeply, deeply missing in people’s experience of life, a kind of superficiality.

“It is not easy to convince people that I am not dealing with ideas but with perceptions, not concepts but observations. It is easy to disseminate ide

Although still using the language of tools, in 1988 Illich explained, “I would like to get together a certain number of people to think about what too

Digital capitalism does not pose the same kind of threats as industrial capitalism, in part because it does not act on us through straightforward inst

anxiety surrounding AI art is less about computers becoming humans and more about humans becoming more robotic. social media is robotic, formulaic. ev

As Kevin Abosch, the Irish conceptual artist and pioneer of blockchain art, aptly put it: “The wise artist doesn’t fear emergent technology, but rathe

Part of the reason social media has felt even more “flattening” to one’s identity Is because social media has shown its benefit towards economic mobi

The major labels are finally facing a crucial reality: Independent music's market share keeps climbing, and controlling the infras

Hellman & Friedman's majority stake in Global Music Rights marks a watershed moment — private equity firms now control three major PROs (alo

Gen AI  for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on  rights man

What isn’t discussed as much — but is happening in parallel with equal if not greater force, is the shift in corporate music-industry power dynamics a

Music has emerged as private equity's recession-resistant darling, thanks to streaming's predictable revenue patterns and live ent

The major labels are finally facing a crucial reality: Independent music's market share keeps climbing, and controlling the infras

Hellman & Friedman's majority stake in Global Music Rights marks a watershed moment — private equity firms now control three major PROs (alo

Hellman & Friedman's majority stake in Global Music Rights marks a watershed moment — private equity firms now control three major PROs (alo

Gen AI  for music has captured ~$300M in funding so far this year across several high-profile deals, the majority of which either focus on  rights man

mac.are.na

When you say that the status quo draws people toward more individuated, personality-driven work, what do you think is causing that, both culturally an

to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

iUnlock doors with it.iMeet lovers through it.iOrder food with it.iSummon cars with it.iEven meditate with it.Apple designed the iPhone too well.So we

Nobody talks enough about what the passive income movement did to the content quality of the entire internet. If you've tried to google "best [anythin

What is this teaching me?

Latvia’s Flow won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and was created because he was somehow obsessed Blender, the free/open-source 3D modeling tool.

Scott Alexander’s recent post argues that the best response to AI displacement isn’t optimization or doomerism—it’s play. Figure out what you actually

what would one imperfect action teach me?

Today most algorithms that recommend or suppress content act purely on the basis of inferred popularity. They look at how much time people spend engag

as a network scales, it is inevitable that you need a way to sort & rank content. web 2.0 solved it by ranking for popularity but a better approach co

· Are we being reprogrammed by algorithms? In the last edition, I mentioned a recent tweet-er-xeet post by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Jack suggested