"The Wild West of the open Internet"
All I want in this world is Internet fast enough to illegally stream Game of Thrones. (And for Solange and Jay-Z to patch things up. Naturally.) Yet today, in a predictable-but-nevertheless-disappointing vote, the Federal Communications Commission decided to move forward with a proposal that could potentially slow the interwebs for all of us. Adios, Game of Thrones! I hardly knew ye.
1. Opentopia is a streaming-video site that lets you watch other people's webcams. It's both totally voyeuristic and totally unsettling. But its creator (a "gold prospector in the Wild West of the open Internet") insists his site is about more than mere voyeurism: It's a lens for looking at privacy, reality, and ultimately -- ourselves.
2. Curbing online misogyny could be easier than we think. Several online communities have managed to banish harassment already. Now the big guys, like Facebook and Twitter, just need to catch on.
3. Art is a Facebook status about your winter break. This poem may be the best defense of modern technology I have ever read.
This is "GIF-iti," and it is entrancing. More examples here.
Pocketables: A not-so-short history of Nintendo, the Japanese company that "took over the American living room." (5099 words/20 minutes)
Postscripts: LazyCoin. Fro-No. Goat-brain beer. How your iPhone is saving literature and lonely people saved Facebook. The history of brusqueness. The lineage of the standing desk. Things that will destroy your faith in humanity, part 10: Yahoo Answers, political dating sites, popcorn cosmopolitans.
Until tomorrow!
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