Sublime

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The web hasn’t had its artisanal moment. Right now, giant, ad-based networks created by six men that everyone begrudgingly uses with diminishing emotional returns, control the vast majority of the web.

Sublime • Notes on Scale + Quality

The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

Ben Thompson • Aggregator’s AI Risk

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there som... See more

L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource

"Live Players"

An exploration of cultural power dynamics, the decline of traditional gatekeepers, and the impact of technology on our interconnected world and individual agency.

static1.squarespace.com

From my perspective, this wasn’t the beginning of the Internet Revolution, but the end. We were starting to care less about how this technology could augment humanity and more about how it could bolster a flagging stock exchange.

Douglas Rushkoff • Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

There is little room for randomness in exploring the vast amount of information actually available to us. This is deliberate. Google and others’ stated mission is to reduce this vast complexity. Their less trumpeted goal is to profit from it, at the expense of our own potential for random encounters, and thereby for our own evolution.

James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

That’s why Simonson and Rosen have named their theory “absolute value.” The Internet, they say, will be a brand-assassinating technology, flooding the world with information and drowning out the signal of advertising for many products.

Derek Thompson • Hit Makers

In the creator economy, the curatorial role has been replaced by algorithms, and this is a problem for several reasons. The algorithm cannot sense vibes. It doesn't understand culture. It cannot understand how a piece of creative work does or does not fit within a certain milieu. It cannot tell what is worth recommending and what is not without fir... See more

Tom Beck • Curator Economy, Not Creator Economy

To broaden our view: we must look at image production (and cultural production in general) not just as a specific vocation, but as a novel consumer behavior. The popular Technology Adoption Life Cycle framework proposes that different psychographic consumer segments—early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard markets—can be penetrate... See more