Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
There are lots of layoffs, lots of budget cuts, lots of scary articles about how little books are selling, or whatever. I’d argue, however, that we’re in a moment of recalibration. A lot of the digital world isn’t working, not just as it pertains to media. The Internet writ large isn’t as fun as it used to be. Yet there is, I think, an awareness of... See more
One of the book’s central innovations is Nguyen’s notion of value capture , whereby we are offered a simple metric designed to answer a complex evaluative question, and end up outsourcing our own values to that metric. How important and influential is my scholarship? Enter the h -index. How good and considerate am I as a passenger? Enter my uber ra... See more
Kate Manne • Substack is a Dangerous Game for Writers
The books were not organized by author, their author’s nationality, or even consistently by genre, but rather by how successful they were online—that was the algorithm Amazon Books used for determining the quality and value of literature. Engagement reigned supreme once again. Signs
Kyle Chayka • Filterworld
The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated. These bewildering changes often leave us raw. The cultural climate is shifting, particularly for women as we contend with the retrenchment of reproductive freedom, the persistence of rape culture, and the flawed if not damaging representations of women we’re consuming in musi... See more
Maria Popova • Bad Feminist: Roxane Gay on the Complexities and Blind Spots of the Equality Movement
The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.
Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller” (15 Feb 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Never before has so much culture been available to so many at such little cost.
There’s just one tiny problem.
Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly.
In many cases—newspaper subscribers, album purchases, movie tickets sold, etc.—the metrics have been shrinking or even collapsing.
... See more