Our Brand Could Be Your Crisis
We Are Your Friends is not our youth, but it might as well be
Serious action
...I have a long essay in the latest New Inquiry issue about the metaphor of "microfame" and what sort of ideological work it performs. (It's not online yet,...
Closing the Loop
...of non-normative identities to circulate and receive validation on user-driven platforms like Tumblr and Instagram — whittled itself down to its most palatable iteration. With aid from online art and...
Sunday Reading
...flurry of online legislation moves through California legislature: "SB 1306 is the absurdity degree zero of online panacea hallucination: It creates a 'New University of California' that must offer credentials...
“The Beyblade Strategy” or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Focused Protection
...masking,” an idea popularized by J.G. Allen (otherwise notable for, as early as October 2021, loudly advocating to drop masking in schools as quickly as possible). “One-way masking” is the...
Champagne Wishes and Crypto Dreams
Of course there are crypto memoirs. But how do they theorize history?
zero-knowledge proofs
...a neglected area of castles studies – the spiral stair. [full study | PDF] as restaurants increasingly receive takeout orders online and through apps, they face a new challenge called...
Games of Truth
...the productive value of our uniquely wrought subjectivity to garner social recognition; we have to build the community (that once was a geographical given) as an online audience and hold...
Permanent Records
...my feelings change with time. When I look at my middle school students post photos and videos of themselves online, I have the instinctual reaction of adult horror at the...
Very Serious Populists
...Ben Shahn Voting Booths (1950) The point of online voting systems like Reddit is not to highlight the best content, but to build and maintain hegemony There is...
The Disconnectionists
...always had been. Despite his great ascetic effort, he could not reach escape velocity from the Internet. Instead he found an “inextricable link” between life online and off, between flesh...
Out of Sight
...of the calls was worth paying. Blind people from around the world have access to many technologies that get us online. Windows screen readers speak what’s on the screen, and...
Healthy Boundaries
...bloggers at Computerworld discussed the act of watch-wearing in terms of performativity, another online community took to social media to describe a more visceral response to the sleek piece of...
Wikipedia Politics
...a strange frame for the evanescent, ephemeral editing of an online encyclopedia. The sheer ambition of Wikipedia’s mission, “to make the sum total of human knowledge available for free to...
The Algorithm and the Watchtower
...year: “As you read this online, the United States government makes a note.” And as more recent reporting from the Times and ProPublica has disclosed, this is made possible not...
The Failure Addict
...around the different places online where someone might send some indication that they have noticed me, send some message that tells me I exist — one that says, Everyone thought...