VOL 2, NO 5
☆
There is a type of dystopian fiction where garish advertising is embedded in the landscape—a necessary part of the fabric of an ironic shitty future world where poor people risk some combination of dignity and life for money. In these fictions—Minority Report or Idiocracy or a Black Mirror—the ads are pervasive, obnoxious and occasionally legally required. It's satire! A cynical look at where we are headed. A warning to turn back before it's too late. Don't build the Torment Nexus, dummies!
Sure glad I don't live in a society capable of creating great things only to hollow them out in the name of slogans and jingles and clicks and money. And if I did, wouldn't it be nice to have someone to blame?
❝After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.❞
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Buy the book (and other confusions) / 📰 The Onion is saved! / 📚 The most depressing thing you'll read today: Nobody buys books. ❝The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).❞ / 🌿 Weed strain name generator. Fun fact: I used to get paid to name weed strains and I should really examine every choice I made that took me away from that. / 🎶 When do we stop finding new music? ❝Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences.❞ / They found the unfindable song. (Spoiler: it was porn.) / Beatbox with Henry Kissinger. / 📺 All of Freakazoid is now on the Internet Archive. / 👾 As the Crow Flies is a simple browser game that looks like my beloved Vectrex. / The entire universe in Minecraft.
