In all their hashtagged glory
Dunno if you guys heard, but there was a little sport called basketball on this afternoon. I wish I cared about anything the way some people care about basketball. SIGH. At the same time, I suspect my indifference is saving me lots of undue stress and lost hours of productivity. Besides, the game’s most-noteworthy outcome was this GIF. Right? And we have more silly GIFs where that came from. Onward!
1. “How many times do we use Google every day? How many times do we just feed its unstoppable machine?” That’s the Italian artist Alessandro Ludovico, talkin’ to me about his conceptual art project Google Will Eat Itself and why we should be skeptical of power structures on the web. GWEI is a fascinating piece: It makes money off Google ads and uses that money to buy Google shares, essentially “self-cannibalizing” the search giant. But when it comes to the weird and thought-provoking, Ludovico and collaborator Paolo Cirio are just getting started: Their work is subversive, resonant ... and often illegal!
2. This man has written more than 350 one-star Amazon book reviews, for no apparent reason. Why is he such a jerk? And, much more importantly, can anything -- should anything -- be done to stop him?
3. 80 million Americans have never heard of hummus. Eighty million Americans lead unfulfilled lives.
TGIF, you guys!!
Postscripts: A club for cat-loving anarchists. An opera for Steve Jobs. “Here they are, in all their hashtagged glory.” Is art a selfish waste of time? Is the Internet run by 16-year-olds? Fictional places to go IRL. The digital BFF renaissance. Un-Happy. Turkish Twitter. Today, in WTF: A livestream of a bad first date; a 25-year-old author with a YA empire to her name.
Until Monday!
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