Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to…
With the rise of AI personalities like Lil Miquela, who can be anyplace at any time, the future landscape of fame is here. So where do humans fit into it? Lil Miquela herself weighs in. Michael Jackson and Lil Miquela. Miquela wears hat and vest by PRADA. Photograph from Getty Images from the Getty Images Entertainment collection,…
storytext Twitter banned far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website InfoWars from its platform Thursday afternoon, a month after several of its Silicon Valley counterparts did so. Jones was suspended from Twitter for one week last month after he posted a video in which he said, “Now is time to act on the enemy…
.entry-header Scene: the perfect vacation experience, fueled by rented products. Go on vacation and you’ll undoubtedly encounter at least one couple who snaps photos of their perfectly manicured brunch experience. They took an Uber to get to the general area, asking the driver to play their favorite Spotify playlist for the 17 minute drive. Rather than walk the final…
Here’s a picture of Marlowe to make this post suck less. As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network that gives Alex Jones a platform to spew hate,…
Wil Wheaton has left Mastodon after facing pressure and hostility from both the community and the staff. Yesterday, Wheaton got bofa’d. A bofa is an adolescent prank named after its most popular iteration, bofa. The prank works like this; you drop bofa into seemingly innocuous conversation, and when they ask what is bofa, you say…
ImageFacebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told Congress this year that he wanted the company to “be a platform for all ideas.”CreditCreditTom Brenner/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social…
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
Can Twitter be saved? I’m not talking about last week’s social media stock price plunge. It’s the ritualization of Gamergate-style uproar and dishonest brigading that has me disillusioned with the platform. I know soul-searching about Twitter is a bit of a journalistic trope at this point, since we all seem to be simultaneously enraptured with…
Since announcing her new job with The New York Times, a widespread campaign of harassment has targeted Verge reporter Sarah Jeong for a number of tweets she wrote years ago. Many of those now reacting to these tweets have intentionally taken them out of context, and she has since received an unrelenting stream of abuse…