VOL 4, NO 5
★
Thievery corporation. / As has been well established here, I am pro-piracy. This is for all sorts of reasons, though mainly it’s an anti-capitalist stance. My general belief is that companies have ceded the right to control access to things by being profiteering assholes who care little about protecting the things they sell or paying the people who create them. (Exceptions, obviously, abound here. If you can pay a person who made a thing directly for the thing they made, do that. Small publishers/producers/distributors? Sure. But as you move up the chain, it gets more and more convoluted and pointless. Where you draw that line is really up to you.)
But also, you know, Facebook can fuck right off. (If you don’t want to click through, the TL;DR is Meta fucking torrented terabytes and terabytes of books to train their AI, which is about as grotesquely ironic a use of content piracy as I can imagine.)
As usual, I don’t really have a point to make here, but I’m watching the growing resentment against companies like Meta and Google and Amazon and Twitter — the people who not only kind of ruined the internet but also hollowed out real-world media/content/art/criticism/whatever in the process — with a perverse interest. I have regrets (as many of us should) for the small role I played championing these technologies way back when, and certainly times seem bleak in the digital (and, certainly more depressingly, actual) world, but I’m wishing on distant stars for a bit of wide-spread shit eating, and perhaps a move back toward a web that we can feel at least a little good about, and maybe even enjoy.
Also: The social web is the web. ❝Support for links is the basic requirement of the web. If you don’t support links not only aren’t you the web, you’re anti-web.❞. ✊
☆
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith / The Vanishing American / 1994
☆
Confusions. / 📰 Failure is not a binary state. / 📱 WikiTok, a TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles. / Paper Apps. / 🛹 On skateboarding and Prufrock. ❝Like a SoCal skater used to the everyday sunshine and convenience of their local park, Prufrock is a professional-level procrastinator. His actions are all in the imagination, putting off decisions to play out possibilities in his head instead. In indecision he finds a limbo where nothing gets done because nothing is done, there is always time ‘for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’❞ / 🍿 Warner Bros. has started dropping free movies onto YouTube. / 📺 Concrete TV. / An Attack On Titan reading list. / I’ll Save It Myself. / 🎧 Artisanal Japanese record needles. / “Crazy” by Gnarles Barkley, a dramatic reading. / ⚱️ Fay Vincent and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died. / 🔥 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Simple Sabotage Field Manual. / 👾 The Video Game History Foundation library and archive. / A new Donkey Kong thing. / ☠️ Kill Sticky Headers. / Kill book blurbs. / 🥚 How to boil an egg. / ✌️
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