📰 Twitter and dating: What it was like to meet men in the DMs.
As the chaos sowed by Elon Musk has many of us contemplating what we might do in a world without this deranged bird app, I’m thinking about just how life-changing—and sometimes horrible—the direct message feature has been. Musk now technically owns the content of all our “private” notes, and there’s a lot happening in mine. I used my DMs to find and talk to interview subjects. In DMs, I connected with other journalists who have PTSD, one of whom recommended my current—and invaluable—therapist. Through DMs, I became friends with an author who set me up with my literary agent. When Tina Brown hired me to work on her book The Palace Papers, it was after a mutual contact DM’d me to ask if I was interested.
📰 Everything Is Silicon Valley Now | Defector
For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly.
📰 Inside Long Island Youth Baseball’s Famous Dad-On-Dad Rivalry
📰 Sarah Polley’s Journey from Child Star to Feminist Auteur | The New Yorker
📸 Things I’ve Seen, by Patti Smith | The New Yorker
📰 Elon Musk’s useful philosopher - New Statesman
Over the past decade or so, the billionaires of Silicon Valley have graced us with their visions for the far future of our species. Musk wants us to colonise Mars as the first step towards extending the “light of consciousness” beyond our planet. Jeff Bezos wants to see a trillion people in floating space colonies, lest we succumb to “stasis and rationing” here on Earth. Longtermism furnishes their egomaniacal plots with a seemingly moral (and scholarly) makeover.
