|
|
March 23 · Issue #103 · View online
A newsletter of innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair collected and written by @poploser.
|
|
I’ve been trying to get a handle on this Facebook story—what happened, what happens next, what it all means—for the last several days. Like anything Facebook related, the fallout is sprawling, the takes are plentiful. I had to give the story its own Instapaper folder and haven’t read much else this week. The conclusion I’ve come to is… I don’t know. Which is my answer to a lot of these things and is also probably why I’m not worth millions of dollars. But does anyone really have a handle on it? There are obvious questions: Should you delete Facebook? Well, that’s not so simple. Maybe regulate it? Also complicated! But the implications of all of this shit takes years to sort out and with the current pace of advancement, we’ll be worried about the next thing long before we understand what the fuck happened with this thing. Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not outrageous. It is unquestionably a bad thing that we carry out much of our online lives within a data-mining apparatus that sells influence to the highest bidder. For years we’ve been talking and thinking about social networks as interesting tools to model and understand human dynamics. But it’s no longer academic—Facebook has reached a scale where it’s not a model of society as much as an engine of culture. But the correct response to these counterpoints isn’t to throw up one’s hands and let Facebook run amok with user data. It’s to refocus antitrust itself, especially as it relates to the digital economy. If antitrust in its strictest sense used to be about defending the principles of an open market, in the Facebook era, it has to become about protecting the public interest against market forces.
|
|
|
Delete These iPhone Apps and Return to a Simpler Way of Life
This is humour. But also not. Delete HQ Trivia
It makes me depressed when I get the third question wrong.
|
A Startup Is Pitching a Mind-Uploading Service That Is “100 Percent Fatal”
This is not humour. But also is. Nectome is a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. Its chemical solution can keep a body intact for hundreds of years, maybe thousands, as a statue of frozen glass. The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
|
Why the PDF Is Secretly the World's Most Important File Format
This is exceedingly dull. But also fascinating. Let’s just admit something straight out: Standardization is boring.It’s a dull topic, but it’s something that is incredibly important in the world of archival. The reason for this is obvious, of course: If you randomly change the way you produce and store microfilm, for example, that microfilm becomes a pain to reuse.But this also cuts both ways. There are things that you don’t necessarily want out of a standard. Let’s say you don’t care about interactivity because you’re trying to digitize documents that date back hundreds of years.Still, there may be niceties you want, like the ability to make the text searchable. And perhaps you want to ensure maximum compatibility, working with all variants of a tool.All these reasons, and more, are why the PDF/A format was created in 2005. Unlike a standard PDF, which is designed to take advantage of the fact it’s made for a computer, PDF/A was designed to be maximally reproducible, to the point where it could replace a printed document if the original paper was lost.
|
How Social Media Is Driving the Culture of Public Art
This just is. But also shouldn’t be. This is not guerrilla street art, or murals commissioned by local government. This is Instagram art, which exists solely to be photographed and posted to social media. Which means that even if you do your level best to avoid the oversharing culture of the web, you can still come across these Instagram-ready murals, which have become some of the most popular landmarks among the service’s 600 million or so users.
|
Eighth Grade
|
😂 The Five Stages of Socializing With Your Children’s Friends’ Parents
|
David Lynch’s Night Truths
This is good. But also very good. Traumatized, perhaps, by the unremitting grim truths of evolution and human history, the human mind—that ancient, dubious assemblage of learned and inherent biases, habits of sensory triage, and cognitive rules of thumb—has become resistant to truth. This doubtful gift of being able to ignore the cold, hard, cheerless facts of existence allows us, as individuals and as nations, to be continually surprised by calamities, defeats, and disasters that in hindsight ought to have been—were—obvious all along.
|
Shout Factory Grabs a Crap-Ton of Roger Corman's B-Movies for Remakes, Reboots, and More
This is fun. But also niche. They plan to create new films and remakes based on the classic works from “The King of B-Movies” while others will be syndicated or licensed out. Does that mean we’ll get a new Humanoids from the Deep in the near future? Personally, this cult classics fan is excited because Shout! also owns the rights to Mystery Science Theater 3000, meaning the chance of more Corman movies coming to the Satellite of Love seems very, very likely.
|
|
Say Goodbye to the Information Age: It's All About Reputation Now
In the reputation age, we should rank the quality of information not by its the content but by the agenda of its source.
|
The Free Speech Grifters
Why are some of the biggest public intellectuals so fixated with a small minority of liberal college students?
|
Does Recovery Kill Great Writing? - The New York Times
As I emerged from alcoholism, I had to face down a terrifying question.
|
Inside the Oed: Can the World’s Biggest Dictionary Survive the Internet?
For centuries, lexicographers have attempted to capture the entire English language. Technology might soon turn this dream into reality – but will it spell the end for dictionaries?
|
In the 1950s Everybody Cool Was a Little Alienated. What Changed?
In the postwar period it was understood to be the fundamental malaise of modern life. Why aren’t we ‘alienated’ any more?
|
|
Pre-Order "Searching For Terry Punchout"
I wrote a book. It comes out in October, but you can pre-order it now.
|
Did you enjoy this issue?
|
|
|
|
In order to unsubscribe, click here.
If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here.
|
|
|