Sarah Drinkwater

The accumulated fruits of human agency and creative problem-solving are so ubiquitous today—in the form of agriculture and modern medicine, electricity and air conditioning, Uber and Amazon, Google and iPhones, widespread literacy and constitutional government, bank loans and credit cards, Zoom and Facebook—that we tend to assume them as the... See more

I think the McLuhan-esque take is to say that Fandoms are themselves voluntary culture-war militias recruited from the general population. An argument could be made that groups like Antifa, BLM, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, etc... are in essence fandom para-military orgs with $$$.

The optimism of Web 2.0 rested in large part on its pure excitement about the web as a fundamentally open-ended technology. In Free Culture, permissive intellectual property and remixing would unleash a wave of as-yet unimagined discourse and expression.

It’s interesting to think about how new generational consumer behaviors translate into new businesses. We’re seeing a slew of startups building better solutions to the housing crisis, the climate crisis, the education crisis. But there are also less obvious impacts from consumer behavior:

📢NEW PAPER! Where @davidthewid, @sarahbmyers & I unpack what Open Source AI even is. We find that the terms ‘open’ & ‘open source’ are often more marketing than technical descriptor, and that even the most 'open' systems don't alone democratize AI... See more