The darkness is the natural dual of the adtech web, the zone of extreme overactivity above the surface of the cozyweb, with businesses trying desperately to penetrate into private spaces past the open-to-private boundary marked by email.This makes poetic sense. The adtech world is neither utopian nor dystopian. It is pragmatically mehtopian. It’s... See more
Paper books and Epubs are made by “publish and forget” principle, while web books, figuratively speaking, consume electricity on the server, even when nobody reads them. Of course, there is an advantage: a web book can be fixed, updated, supplemented. But if paper book can lie in the attic for several centuries and be read at any time, web book... See more
We love our physical books — a kind of machine — in ways few others love their machines, their software. We have relationships with these simple, hand-powered contraptions that can span decades. And so of course we want our experience with a book — digital or otherwise — to feel not only great but trustworthy. Print has had hundreds of years to... See more
To start with, content is becoming increasingly resource-intensive. This has a lot to do with the growing importance of video, but a similar trend can be observed among websites. The size of the average web page (defined as the average page size of the 500,000 most popular domains) increased from 0.45 megabytes (MB) in 2010 to 1.7 megabytes in June... See more
Outsiders manipulate us using stories, and we all like to think advertising only works on the other guy, but that's not how it is. Advertising works on all of us, so if you're too attached to stories, what will happen is people selling products come along, and they will bundle their product with a story. You're like, "Hey, a free story," and you... See more
The collection of names is a dictionary. It helps you map different experiences to the same name. Not knowing which name to pin an experience with is a sign of confusion - you’re missing a category. If lots of different names fit, it’s a sign of nuance and complexity. Perhaps, it’s a lollapaloza effect.