An elegy for the Internet

If you're gonna get outraged (cough) about something this week, then please get outraged about this: Google's Chrome store has apparently allowed an extension by alt-right white supremacists. These idiots use the tool, together with a thing called "echoes", to bracket/harass people with Jewish names. The solution, obvi, is to bracket EVERYTHING -- which should really mess with their whole "echo" game.

i.e.: (((puppeh))) vs. (((bb-8)))

1. Toward a critical theory of Facebook Live, the videos so awful everyone's watching them. They're random, over-long, awkward, dull -- and very occasionally "transcendent." NBD, right? The medium's new. The streams will improve one day! Unless we're all just completing this dumb exercise because it's what Facebook displays.

2. Twitter is really a flaming hot mess, isn't it? The product's bad, yeah, but so is the company underlying it. These days Twitter's fate lies with @Jack, who is serving -- for the third time (!) -- as Twitter's CEO. And whether that dude can turn it around, well ... we frankly don't know.

3. Inside the weird criminal world of Liftblr, Tumblr's very own Bling Ring. There, teen bloggers with names like "Unicorn Lift" trade tips on how to shoplift things. They're not just stealing for the fame or lipstick, though -- it's also about politics. Tumblr's lifters see themselves as budding anti-capitalists.

4. Meet the famous actors no one ever sees. Despite the success of their characters, video game voice actors live in anonymity. And unlike their Hollywood counterparts, they also make virtually no money. :-/

5. What the hell happened to Jeremy Meeks? Two years later, the original "hot felon" is ~so grateful~ he became a meme.

>> You can download these links (and several others!) as a free ebook here.

everyone in this GIF is living their best life
(link)

Postscripts: Meme porn. Emoji Bibles. Wi-fi poetry. What's up with Imgur, the Web's best source of memes. Why new moms use Facebook all the time and how Lonely Island changed the Internet. Today, in online #content: reading it and writing it. 3 alternatives to the eggplant emoji; 394 cries, quantified. One overwhelming vision for the future, where everything's augmented and amplified.

The fall of Salon. The problem with fandom. An elegy for Internet, with a capital I. Toward a business model for GIFs and a theory of the DM slide. Gawker is right; Peter Thiel's wrong; politics is all bots & trolls now, I guess. (I'd say that's a metaphor but honestly it almost seems too obvious.) How to manage all the photos on your phone. What it's like to tour with someone who doesn't actually exist. Last but not least, forget football -- did you know PRO-GAMING has an injury crisis?!

Until next week!
@caitlindewey

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