VOL 5, NO 3
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Let’s go OK-holing (and other confusions). / Things happened and as I am trying desperately not to post about happening things, it was best to sit tight for a couple weeks. You know, let it all blow over. Which of course it never will.
I’ve been substantially less online these last few years. First I dialled back a little and then a lot. And then I started killing accounts. In the aftermath of the things that happened, I added TikTok to the kill pile after one or two of my searches were interpreted by the algo as permission to funnel me into a world of wild conspiracy theories. Like crazy, batshit stuff, and I couldn’t make it stop. (Previously my feed was mainly Ted Lasso clips, just the James Spader bits of Boston Legal, guys cracking open packs of baseball cards, recipes, and, yes, the dances. Love the dances.) While I probably could have retrained it in a couple weeks, the whole thing felt pretty gross. (And the app was a bit of a time sink anyway, which is often my motivator for deleting anything. I take my weekly iPhone screen-time report very seriously, though I won’t tell you what the total hours ever says and if I ever do, assume that number is a lie).
I guess my point is we should all log off because certain doom has never felt more, uh, certain.
❝Our curse these days is that because of mass literacy, mass education, mass communications, we are subjected to every stupid thing that these people do, and we’re all highly aware of all the stupid things that they are doing to dismantle the perfectly, basically, perfectly functional society that we had going on.❞
Related (since we’re here anyway): the new aesthetics of fascism.
I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t click on either of those and instead just scrolled down to the fun link about things people stick in their holes.
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The Rise of Fascism / R. B. Kitaj / 1975–1979
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Confusions. / 💻 The Mac app flea market. / Stacher7, a good Mac app for downloading videos. / 📺 TV Time Machine. (I might have to do this for my collection of holiday TV episodes.) / TV Simulator. / 🎙️ AI is about to ruin podcasting. / Podcasting kind of sucks now anyway. ❝More people than ever are listening to podcasts and talking about podcasts and thinking about starting their own podcasts. But the podcasts that are thriving are talk shows — increasingly celebrity-driven talk shows — that are cheap to make, can easily be turned into streaming YouTube videos, and command big ad dollars. Narrative podcasts — the multi-episode, investigative journalism-fueled shows that boomed after the release of Serial in October 2014 — have followed an inverse trajectory.❞ / ⚾ Baseball also kind of sucks now. / 👾 DOOMscroll. / Video game marquees. / All of the iPod clickwheel games have been saved. Bless. / 🕳️ Out of Orifice, a collection of 36 objects designed to enter our orifices. / 📻 The Panama Playlists, collecting Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. / Electroclash still fucks. / 🚬 How many cigarettes? (The answer is “Never enough.”) / 🎨 CARTA, archiving online art. / Go to museums, look at screens. / 🔗 URLtoAny, convert URLs to Markdown, PDF, Text, images and more. / 🎾 The pickleball takeover. / 🤘 Rock skipping (which some people apparently call “stone skimming” for some stupid reason) scandal! Best scandal since the weights in the fish thing. / ✌️
