Although digital platforms promise interpersonal connection and form the technical backbone of our online society, they are, first and foremost, spaces driven by capitalist logics of enclosure, control and profit-making. They are owned and operated by private corporations accountable to shareholders with voracious appetites for revenue. They have a... See more
“You are an expert ghostwriter who is helping an author turn his ideas into short-form essays. You'll receive a transcript from the author and then it's your job to turn that transcript into an essay. Do not change the style or tone or anything that identifies the author. Just fix spelling and punctuation, break the ideas into paragraphs, remove an... See more
it’s utterly impossible for an algorithmic video-sharing website like TikTok to be a “town square” in the same sense that Twitter was supposed to be. There are all sorts of McLuhan-esque reasons for this: text as a medium is much faster to read, the reply and quote tweet function is what makes Twitter dialogic, its focus on text makes verbal wit th... See more
Substack was built on the foundation that people don’t subscribe to content, they subscribe to voices they trust. In contrast, at Medium, it almost doesn’t matter who the writer is as long as the post is good.