Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
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Martin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet
amazon.com
The idea there is “news of the day” was created by the telegraph, which first made it possible to move decontextualized information over great distances at great speed. But “news of the day” is a figment of our imagination, it exists only because of communication speeds.
Neil Postman • Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and
... See moreJohann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system.
Tim Wu • The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
Google was the endpoint of this process: It may represent open systems and leveled architecture, but with superb irony and strategic brilliance it came to almost completely control that openness. It's difficult to imagine another industry so thoroughly subservient to one player. In the Google model, there is one distributor of movies, which also ow... See more
Michael Wolff • The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet
"Now, that vision is fraying. The social fabric of the internet is built on very specific assumptions, many of which are giving way. Licklider envisioned the internet as a patchwork of decentralized networks, with no sense of how it would work when a handful of companies wrote most of its software and managed most of its traffic. Licklider conceive... See more
The Verge • We have abandoned every principle of the free and open internet
The web’s first era was about information flowing freely—think Google giving you access to the world’s knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era. The second era was the social web—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. People began to create their own content, and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active partic... See more