Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
I couldn’t imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit on social media. There was almost a pathos to their internet addiction. Log off, I thought. Just email each other.
Anna Wiener • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
Semafor Raises $19 Million, Replacing Money From Sam Bankman-Fried (Published 2023)
Benjamin Mullinnytimes.com
Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That's fine, actually. We don't need eternal rulers of the internet. It's okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn't be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to us... See more
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, a... See more
Venkatesh Rao • The Extended Internet Universe
Direct, unfiltered exposure to said flumes—the torrent of porn, propaganda, and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated and never actually seen by human eyes—was relegated to a combination of AIs and Third World eyeball farms, which was to say huge warehouses in hot places where people sat on benches or milled around gaz
... See moreNeal Stephenson • Fall; or, Dodge in Hell: A Novel
Everything that has occurred in Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades also occurred in the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that wild-ass high tech venture capitalism is a late-20th-century California phenomenon needs to read about the maniacs who built the first transatlantic cable projects. The only things that have changed since then are that the... See more
Wired • Mother Earth Mother Board
Increasingly, our online worlds are being built by individuals, not just communities.‡
Nadia Eghbal • Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
Substack sits on top of a trend that’s very dear to me: the democratization of monetized information. In simple terms, writers can earn money by sharing valuable information without the dependency on a publisher or newspaper. That’s not just better for creators but also for consumers because they can have a direct relationship with each other.