Know when to ~stop searching~
Man, what a time to be alive. I'm not entirely sure I'm into it! Today I watched Hillary Clinton give a speech on a bunch of dudes from the Internet. I think I first encountered the term "alt-right" last year, when Gamergate was looking for its big rebrand...? In either case, congrats! You guys did it. Political discourse now looks a WHOLE lot like 4chan.
there's a metaphor in here somewhere (link)
1. Meet the new class of political media that Facebook has made. It's composed of savvy marketers and partisan entrepreneurs, spinning their posts for maximum outrage. Between them, these men (and it's mostly men) command an audience in the millions. So rest assured knowing the electorate learns from news sources with names like "Fed-Up Americans" (!).
2. Mark Zuckerberg's vision for the future sounds like "Ready Player One." But with more buzzwords, from what I can tell? And probably less fun. The Facebook CEO has outlined, for Popular Science, all the ways he plans to change the world. Let's just say it goes way, wayyy beyond some dopey social network.
3. The future of immortality is VR, possibly. There are already artists attempting to create their dead loved ones virtually. It's only one way that technology is starting to -- gulp -- "disrupt" death. "To live on the Internet," it turns out, is also "to die on it."
4. The hardest-working women on the Internet ... are these Kate Middleton bloggers. (They're like three parts insane workaholics and one part insane voyeurs.) There's apparently a small army of these women, live-tweeting Middleton's life; it's a fascinating glimpse into the extremes of fandom and labor online.
5. "How trolls are ruining the Internet" -- or how to generalize the hell out of the Internet's problems. (I am actually not a huge fan of this piece, but I think it merits further discussion!) It seems like we've developed this tendency to reduce all bad online actors to "trolls." But there's a whole lot of nuance between some comment shitposter and a virulent harasser, no?
And back by popular demand: ... an ebook, of sorts! Some of you will recall that you used to be able to get each week's stories as a download. The service I used shut down (le sigh), and the alternatives aren't ... great? But here, I gave it my best shot, let me know what you think.
just practicin' for tokyo 2020 (link)
Postscripts: The hippest Internet cafe of '95. The worst fortune cookies ever. The latest and greatest scummy tactic of online news scammers. The 14 most useful food apps and the 8 best Olympics memes. The next hot trend at restaurants: menus with EMOJI! Bandcamp is the coolest online music store. No Man's Sky is ... very boring. Speaking of, Slow TV's on Netflix, and I am *amped* for the knitting. Here's a phone book for Snapchat and a calendar for #hashtagged days. Here's the awkward first online friendships of Myspace Tom and George Takei. One-star Yelp reviews of national parks; bad predictions for the web. Why Snapchat is hell for the brokenhearted.
"Know when to stop searching" sounds like self-help, but it's actually good advice for Googling. How YouTube works and how Nextdoor plans to stop racial profiling. What its like to Pokemon in a place that's poor and black. A complete history of the GIF. An early #ff to @angela_nikolau and @manygradients. Last but not least, we couldn't close without mentioning these: Here's the Rolling Stone, Awl, NYT, NY mag and Denton versions of a Gawker eulogy.
Until next week!
@caitlindewey
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