Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Before starting the most successful media company in the history of the Internet, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti was apparently an armchair Marxist and postmodern theorist. Some people believe this essay, first published just after Peretti graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1996, lays the theoretical foundation for Buzzfeed’s media empire. Peretti’s piece originally appeared in…
Earlier this year, Juan Hernandez was having exciting conversations with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative about what to do with his next round of funding. Hernandez, the CEO of Creser Capital Fund, had received $500,000 two years earlier from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s mammoth philanthropic organization for his nonprofit, which provides loans to Latino entrepreneurs….
Brands are spending billions of dollars on ads without knowing for sure that they are actually being shown to humans. The companies they pay to help figure that out are struggling with the task. At least 40% of web traffic is made up of fake users, or computerized bots, according to cloud-services provider Cloudflare. And…
It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light,…
The comic book company that publishes the graphic novels and comics of Neil Gaiman announced this weekend that it would no longer work with him after a storm of sexual misconduct allegations and that it would halt the publication of his forthcoming “Anansi Boys” series. The company, Dark Horse Comics, wrote on X on Saturday:…
In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle…
It’s hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies.
Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did an interview with The Verge outlining the company’s plans for AI, augmented reality, and wearables. Unlike Meta’s previous metaverse pivot, it seems like the company is much more confident this time that they’re building the future. Zuckerberg told The Verge’s Alex Heath that Meta’s new Orion glasses, which…
AI is becoming synonymous with things that are unbelievable, generic, or just a little bit off. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; MadMusclesPlans/X It’s an exciting time at the cutting edge of AI research. Massive companies are spending tens of billions of dollars to build, train, and deploy new AI models with which they hope to automate a…
Two years ago, retail media networks were at a crossroads. At the time they were weighing whether to become traditional walled gardens or allowing the programmatic ecosystem open access to data. Retailers are long past that point. Hundreds of store operators launched retail media businesses in the past couple years alone. And most of the…