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There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

Anil Dash • The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Jeff Hammerbacher, an early Facebook engineer, told me. “That sucks.”

Ashlee Vance • Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

George Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal

Either way, the consequences are what people think of you. While that used to be none of our business, now we have numerical, public-facing proof. As Joseph writes, “When author and British Vogue contributor Stephanie Yeboah hard-launched her boyfriend on social media, she lost hundreds of followers.”

kate lindsay • Is getting a little coffee embarrassing now?

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.5 Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.

Cal Newport • Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

this is just coney for conservatives

Chef Koski x.com

it always astonishes me that the New York Times feels the need to store a document considerably larger than War and Peace on my phone. It also astonishes me this document only has one subject – how to target online ads to Dan Davies – and that nonetheless, the New York Times isn’t very good at that.

to the vector belong the spoils

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There are good uses for AI at a newspaper, Amanda Katz, a former Opinions editor at The Washington Post, argues. But what’s puzzling is why everyone keeps trying to make AI do the tasks that “we humans most want to keep for ourselves.” ⁠ ⁠ Last week, The New York Times reported that the Post intends to dramatically... See more

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In 1985, the great technology critic Neil Postman wrote, “to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social change, to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is, at this late hour, stupidity plain and simple.”