"beyond inflated key user metrics, our in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape" has to be one of the worst buried ledes of all time
"As a rule, I wouldn't have said that resource burning, hype driving, copyright infringing AI companies tend to be anywhere near the left of the political spectrum. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that those tend to be quite distinctly right-wing (and libertarian at that) "qualities"."
"[W]hat is currently sold to us as “Artificial Intelligence”... is neither intelligent nor entirely artificial, yet it’s pumping the internet with automated content more quickly than you can fire an editorial office. No system predicated on these assumptions can hope to discern “misinformation” from “information”: both are reduced to equally weighted packets of content, merely seeking an optimization function in a free marketplace of ideas. And both are equally ingested into a great statistical machinery, which weighs only our inability to discern."
Andy Baio's "told you so" about Ello. would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. VC kills everything it touches
"Our networks don’t create harms, but they reveal, scale, and refine them, making it easier to destabilize societies and destroy human beings. The more densely the internet is woven into our lives and societies, the more powerful the feedback loop becomes."
"we go to the cinema to suspend our disbelief and imagine a fantastical world. it's the same drive that the protagonist feels. we want to believe that she is experiencing the supernatural, we want the tension to explode into something we can point to as the Monster, the Villain, the Dark Force. but it refuses to give us that, because reality doesn't give us that."
finalists for the Tiny Awards, honoring websites that 'best embody the idea of a small, playful and heartfelt web.'"
"an open-source, privacy-first web font platform designed to put privacy back into the internet" with "a zero-tracking and no-logging policy" though it makes me nervous that there is no like... explanation of why they're doing this, and how they're paying for it, and how long it will last!
"Have you ever been high/drunk and you walk into a CVS and the security guard is staring at you? That’s what Threads is. It’s deodorants locked behind plastic. It’s TikTok Hype Houses. It is Joe Biden’s reelection campaign. It’s a sneaker collab between Nike and JP Morgan. It’s your favorite stand-up comic showing up in a commercial for Carvana. "
on Threads: "It’s like watching two large cryptocurrencies trade with each other. No cultural value is ever really generated, but the numbers go up. And these creators all operate with a nervous intensity that feels almost biblical, constantly jumping to and from recycled trends, hoping to please a finicky and vengeful god that treats them like an invasive species. And, save only a few, most of the Meta creators I’ve met seem to, in return, deeply loathe the content they make, the people who like it, and Meta, itself."
extremely smart, damn "You need manorialism to make little farmers produce surplus, and you need moderation to make openly hosted user-generated content ad-monetizable"
"Despite late capitalism, despite all the things we’re going through, the internet already runs on dedicated volunteer labor."
"making my writing available for automated summarization? So someone can sell ads by a depersonalized version of my stuff? The feeling is nausea."
"There’s an ambiguity here as to where the real value lies. Is the reaction testament to the value of the song (or the computer game, the Christmas present or whatever else)? Or is the artefact just an instrument used to provoke the impulsive emotional reaction? The simultaneity of artefact and response suggests a novel synthesis of criticism with behavioural experiment." [...] "reactionaries’ explicit purpose is to restructure society around ‘natural’ hierarchies of race and gender, and to dehumanise those who, for example, exercise the perilous freedom to cross the English Channel in a small boat." via https://www.metafilter.com/198362/The-Cult-of-Reaction
"an introduction to some common legal issues, along with a few practical considerations" (much of which seems to apply to hosting ugc in general?)
"It’s really nice to be on the edge of a community... and to be able to smoothly transition inwards and outwards as time passes. My Twitter timeline is a record of my passing interests and side-projects.... Something in the structure of Twitter makes it ideal for this kind of mixing and matching, a lurker’s paradise. [...] By leaving communities implicit, Twitter allows for a much more nuanced sense of what it means to be part of something."
'Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. [...] [I]n a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to "Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish users who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?"'
"The only reliable source of profits is in the extraction of raw materials: chiefly, pulling the black corpses of trillions of prehistoric organisms out of the ground so they can be set on fire. Which means that the feudal rulers of those corpselands—men like King Salman, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques—ended up sitting on a vast reservoir of capital without many productive industries through which it could be valorised. So, as a temporary solution, they stuck it in the tech sector."
stirring presentation on early lgbt digital spaces (including printouts of Community Memory) and the concept of leaky/imperfect/expansive archives
"Feign importance with repeating app sounds!"
"We’ve gone from the world of abundance in cloud computing where the cost of compute time per person was nearly at post-scarcity levels, to the reverse of trying to enforce artificial scarcity on the most abundant resource humanity has ever created. This is regression, not progress."
"Imagine you go back in time to the 1970s to change the history of the internet to your own liking. Based on the events described in the reading, how would you do it? How much funding would you need to achieve the changes you seek? Where do you get that funding from at the time, and how difficult is it to obtain? What does your answer to these questions say about the “great man theory” of history?"
"The basis of performance shifted from small binaries to smooth interaction. [...] Navigation shifted from keyboard to springboard. [...] Log-in disappeared completely. [...] Discovery shifted from search to app store. [...] Engagement shifted from links to icons. [...] Business models expanded to IAP, subscriptions, and app purchase. [...] Security shifted from sandbox to app review...."
"This website is hosted across a network of solar powered servers and is sent to you from wherever there is the most sunshine."
fantastic, provocative essay about how decentralized and p2p networks are not immune to exploitation
"Gemini is a new internet protocol which: Is heavier than gopher; Is lighter than the web; Will not replace either; Strives for maximum power to weight ratio; Takes user privacy very seriously"
"Even the fancier controllers of Valve’s Index kits don’t let you separate your fingers to produce the Ws or Vs necessary for some words. [...] It’s a lovely avenue of human connection, but I can also imagine linguists frothing over VR sign language. There’s a great example in Syrmor’s video where a currently learning interpreter called Quentin explains that because the W restriction means they can’t use the normal word for ‘world’, they instead mimic the appearance of a portal opening up in VR. They’ve also got different ways of signing words depending on your gear, which is both fascinating and mildly concerning." that must feel weird
"The problem with the internet is that takes up all three areas on a Venn diagram depicting the overlap between speech and action, and while this has always been the case, we’re only now admitting that it’s a bug as well as a feature."