The network behaves like a gobbling No-Face because the network is designed to behave as such. All of the new popular social media platforms offer more of the same. What’s the point?

Will Tallinn, on Netflix’s original productions: High output alone can’t account for Netflix’s garbage quality. In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and […]

Ethan Zuckerman: For many years, teachers warned their students not to cite Wikipedia—the information found there didn’t come from institutional authorities, but could be written by anyone. In other words, it might be misinformation. But something odd has happened in the past decade: Wikipedia’s method of debating its way to consensus, allowing those with different […]

From Robin Sloan’s newsletter, via Alan Jacobs: There’s something happening in fiction now, and to a degree in film and TV too: the time in which stories are set is scootching back, with writers fleeing to the safety of 1994 or 1987 or much earlier. Why? Because we didn’t have smartphones then. We didn’t have […]

Sul BackChannel (Medium), Aaron Zamost descrive la ciclicità degli eventi con cui il percorso di una startup viene narrato dai media: A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And […]