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March 16 · Issue #102 · View online
A newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair collected and written by @poploser.
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The Subtle Nudges That Could Unhook Us From Our Phones
Notifications and alerts have become the trendy synecdoche with everything wrong with technology.
It is tempting to blame our failure to resist our phones, apps, and feeds on a lack of self control. As with so many things in life, the recipe for a healthy relationship with technology seems to boil down to a command of one’s impulses.
But how you use your phone, and the apps on it, is ultimately about decisions—and decisions hinge on more than self control. They’re also informed by rational and irrational judgements, subconscious biases, and information gaps (among other factors), all of which contribute to a quirk of human behavior that has long fascinated psychologists, philosophers, and economists: People will often make a decision at one point in time that becomes inconsistent—or works against their apparent interests—at a later point in time.
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How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life
Dots are deceptively, insidiously simple: They are either there or they’re not; they contain a number, and that number has a value. But they imbue whatever they touch with a spirit of urgency, reminding us that behind each otherwise static icon is unfinished business. They don’t so much inform us or guide us as correct us: You’re looking there, but you should be looking here. They’re a lawn that must be mowed. Boils that must be lanced, or at least scabs that itch to be picked. They’re Bubble Wrap laid over your entire digital existence. I like the dots—they let me turn off the alerts, but when I’m ready I can look at my phone and see what’s up quickly—four new emails, three Twitter mentions and so on. I prefer that to the screaming LOOK AT ME NOW stuff.
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For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
I suppose we need to talk about Farhad. He stopped reading Twitter for news (except kind of not, except sort of yes) and it changed his life. Or something. This comes almost exactly a year after Andrew “I’m Brave Because I Put the Bell Curve on the Cover of the New Republic” Sullivan did his digital detox, and it wasn’t interesting then either. It hasn’t actually been interesting in at least a decade, so why do people keep writing them? Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father. After trying, and failing, to get him to own up to the fact that his assertion that he had “unplugged” from social media was not true, I asked him whether perhaps his use of social media was messing with his own self-perception. He didn’t respond to that question.
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How the Parkland Students Got So Good at Social Media
It has become obvious that many of the most well-known students at Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Fla., are adept at using social media, and Twitter in particular, where many journalists spend much of their time talking to one another. With their consistent tweeting of stories, memes, jokes and video clips, the students have managed to keep the tragedy that their school experienced — and their plan to stop such shootings from happening elsewhere — in the news for weeks, long after past mass shootings have faded from the headlines. Many observers have simply assumed that, like fish in water, the students are skilled simply because they have been using the platforms for most of their lives. That is not entirely true.
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How Gun Buffs Took over Wikipedia’s AR-15 Page
The page was viewed more than 200,000 times on the day after Parkland, a hundred times its usual traffic. But those users didn’t find much information about mass shootings or political efforts. In fact, the Colt AR-15 page made no mention of gun control at all, instead spending over a thousand words describing the technical details of the gun’s various parts. That focus on hardware was by design. For months, the “Colt AR-15” page has been largely edited by a group of gun enthusiast editors.
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The Story of the Internet, as Told by Know Your Meme
There was a time that whenever a meme popped up on the web, I just got it. That time is long over and more often these things bleed into my feeds and I don’t have the first fucking clue what they are referencing. Know Your Meme is invaluable in this capacity. A decade deep, Know Your Meme remains an impartial observer of that amorality, one that functions not just as a time capsule, but as a vector for the viral spread of its subjects. The jokes it catalogs leech from platform to platform and get bigger once the site’s editors write about and codify them; sometimes they spiral out of control. Know Your Meme is a huge accomplishment and a public service, but the internet has changed dramatically in the last 10 years — and in the last two years and even in the last week — and this anniversary is as much a chance to look forward at the future of internet culture, queasy and disoriented, as it is to look back.
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Kurt and all the dude writers
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🌶 All the fonts on a bottle of Sriracha. ⚱️ Russ Solomon, founder of Tower Records, died while drinking whiskey and watching the Oscars. 📱 Feedless is social media without the feeds. |
Bringing Down a Media Empire
A look at Ryan Holiday’s book about the fall of Gawker.
Armed with $10 million or so from Thiel, Mr. A. and Harder dug up everything they could find about Denton, his colleagues at Gawker, Gawker itself, its parent company Gawker Media and some of the other people Gawker offended. They also needed a novel legal theory about what Denton had done, figuring that the First Amendment would protect Denton and Gawker.
When, in October 2012, Gawker made the momentous decision to publish without permission excerpts from a sex tape involving Hogan and his former best friend’s wife, Thiel not only had the perfect protagonist in an equally angry and determined Hogan but also a legal theory based on the idea that Hogan’s privacy had been invaded (as had Thiel’s five years earlier). Unbeknown to Denton and his company’s lawyers, Thiel had decided to bankroll Hogan in his legal battle against Gawker and Denton. In classic David and Goliath fashion, Denton tragically underestimated his foes and paid the iron price: As has been well documented elsewhere, Denton lost the five-count lawsuit in a Florida courtroom and was slapped with a $140 million verdict. Gawker Media had no choice but to file for bankruptcy; its carcass was sold to the highest bidder.
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Out of Print: NME's Demise Shows Pressure on Consumer Magazines
The print version of NME is no longer. Some good history here. |
Apple Buys Texture, a Digital Magazine Subscription Service
I don’t know what to make of this yet, but we are Texture subscribers (and my wife could easily be described as a “power user”) and keeping an eye on how this plays out.
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How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement
Sitting in a homely bistro on Malcolm X Boulevard, music journalist Greg Tate is bundled up in a peaked beanie, bright yellow scarf, and plenty of padded layers. His threads offer protection from the chill setting down on the Harlem streets outside, streets that have offered a home to a galaxy of Black American icons—from Duke Ellington to Cam’ron—across the last century. When a little-known mixtape track by local rapper Vado starts to pour out of the speakers, Tate breaks from his salmon salad to shake from side to side. At 60, one of the most influential hip-hop writers to ever strut these curbs still keeps his ears wide open.
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Ichiro Suzuki's Return to the Seattle Mariners Won't Resolve His Internal Battle
How five days in February reveal what Seattle’s signing of Ichiro cannot. The future Hall of Famer is haunted by the life he can’t escape.
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David Foster Wallace and the Horror of Neuroscience
His 2004 short-story collection Oblivion has always been a somewhat confusing book: dense, obtuse, cold, fragmented, a little cruel. However, while penning a PhD thesis on the intersections between neuroscience, theories of consciousness, and modern Anglo-American literature—a Wallacian labyrinth of thought if ever there was one—I think I have come to understand Oblivion for what it really is: A work of horror fiction, whose unique brand of horror is rooted in Wallace’s reading about the brain.
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Why, in China and Japan, a Copy Is Just as Good as an Original
In China and Japan, temples may be rebuilt and ancient warriors cast again. There is nothing sacred about the ‘original’.
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