The Antitrust Division will hopefully respond with “No, your search engine was awesome, but it’s increasingly ad-filled crap. You’re too powerful, you’re too lazy, and America needs some real competition.”
One thing I’ve also noticed is the gradual loss of the understanding of “imagination” as a category; it can sound a little Reading Rainbow to talk about, but wouldn’t you know imagination is actually an essential part of the human condition. In so far as the words “spirit” or “spirituality” mean anything beyond woo-woo or cliché they must include... See more
Wandering—i.e., embarking upon a walk or journey with no particular destination—is good for the soul, and by extension society, and we should all prioritize more of it. Empirical support: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9169417/
In many instances, companies have leveraged structural advantages to achieve seemingly unassailable positions in their relative markets. Streaming services that host user-generated content (UGC) have significant advantages over other services due to copyright ‘safe harbours’, which has led to the dominance of services like YouTube. We have been... See more
What if that user base was steadfastly fixed to their own platform? If we could build a unified lobby of artists and fans, we would hold a much stronger hand in negotiation, and consequently may see more favorable deals negotiated in the use of sampled material and other roadblocks prior platforms have experienced. Legacy industry need association... See more
AuthorityHacker surveyed 1,200 music consumers and got some striking results: 93% said they did not value AI-generated music as highly as music produced by humans. And, while over 60% said they would consider listening to AI music, some 56% also said they would not willingly pay for songs generated using AI. Perhaps most striking: 89% of those... See more
In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively,... See more
It’s tired at this point to say that the weightlessness of postmodern meaning, its confused identifications, ultimately flattens towards fascism. But still, having a viewpoint is perhaps underrated.