Tech industry veteran (Apple, Square, Tumblr), old school indie Mac/iOS developer (PodWorks, Birdfeed), maker of apps at Brooklyn Computer Club.
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Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
The Galacian girls do it for pearls, And the Arrakeen for water! (But if you desire dames like consuming flames, Try a Caladanin daughter!)
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David Hockney: “Will It Ever Work?” (iPad drawing, 2011)
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Scott Conrad Kelly: “Signs of the Times (2017). Mountain.”
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The perennial lesson of the internet is that it will forever find ways to subvert its egalitarian and democratic promise, delivering instead levels of inequality that would make North Korea blush. Musk is not personally responsible for turning Twitter into a celebrity-focused inequality engine, but he’s Exhibit A of why that development has been a bad idea.
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On Twitter, while the median number of followers per account has always been just 1, the mean has been steadily rising. It was 208 in 2012; it was 707 in 2016; and it’s probably much higher today. Having a million Twitter followers used to be an astonishing achievement; now someone like Katy Perry can add 10 million followers in less than a year. Similarly, Elon Musk has added 5 million new followers in the past six months. (Five years ago, by contrast, his follower count stood at a comparatively normal 225,000.)
This isn’t a case of a rising tide lifting all boats: Twitter, as a platform, is growing notoriously slowly, with total monthly users growing only by about 11 percent in the past 3 years. The really amazing thing about Katy Perry’s 110 million Twitter followers is not its absolute magnitude as much as the fact that the site’s entire monthly active user base is only about three times that size.
Which is to say: Twitter is becoming increasingly concentrated on a tiny core of power users. It’s less and less a distributed mode of many-to-many communication, and more and more a broadcasting hub for the elite—a highly unequal place where their least-considered, Ambien-addled opinions get amplified to a global audience of millions.
h/t @buzz
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In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” Edward Bernays — often described as the father of the modern public relations industry — explained that advertising propaganda is about social control: 'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.'
Facebook and the very real problem of keeping student data private
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I think about this moment every time Trump tried to impugn the FBI.
4.08 Tunguska
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This is the feeling I cannot seem to shake, before the election and after. Like the shades of the Inferno, we suffer; and like them, we are desperate for respite, change, for news, and for something new. Yet everything new is a calamity, and the present seems further away than the past and future. Every day is a week, every week a month, every month a year. Our memories and our dread have a sudden clarity. But the present… the present is somewhere else. Dante, too, is in his own country, but he is in exile.
Tim Carmody: The experience of time in Dante’s Inferno
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