#culture (158 links)
- The Other Internet robinrendle.com
It wasn’t until my early twenties that it clicked for me: the web doesn’t have to be like this! You don’t have to participate in the con! You can make websites that are joyous and funny and charming, websites that don’t contribute to the meat grinder. You don’t have to steal anyone’s email address or exploit and coerce folks into giving you money. The world wide web could be—if we imagined it correctly—more than money.
Also how it _was_ (mostly).
- New Colour: Coldcut’s Journeys By DJ - 70 Minutes of Madness thequietus.com
One thing that stands up, pretty much whoever you speak to, is the identity of the greatest DJ mix album of all time – that accolade goes to Coldcut’s incredible 70 Minutes Of Madness, their offering for the Journeys By DJ mix series, released in 1995. The wildly inventive mix, which incorporated hip hop, techno, funk and drum & bass (along with the Doctor Who theme tune and a host of crazed spoken word samples), redefined what a DJ mix should be, perfectly capturing the cut & paste ethic of the mid-90s in the process, while arguably inventing what became the pop mash-up.
Lengthy retrospective/interview from 2015 with Jon More, Matt Black, Kev Foakes (aka DJ Food), and Patrick Carpenter aka PC on Coldcut's 70 Minutes Of Madness mix.
- No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees sahillavingia.com
- Small tech scattered-thoughts.net
Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just people making a living writing software on their own terms.
By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia.
- Invisible men - How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion | Books & arts | The Economist economist.com
Back in the 1920s, Lippmann might have agreed with much of this. He saw objectivity not as a magical state of mind or a view from nowhere, but as a practical process. Journalism should aim for “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact”, he wrote. That does not mean using euphemisms in place of plain language, or parroting both sides of an argument without testing them. Indeed, when journalism has erred in recent years, it has often done so by misinterpreting objectivity, rather than upholding it. The most persuasive calls for moral clarity today articulate something close to Lippmann’s original conception of objectivity.
- The TikTok War – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
- href.cool: Links of the 2010s href.cool
- The shit chute - Justin Stach justin.stach.uk
<blockquote>The shit chute is a process for making sure that if you have to deal with toxic projects, HiPPOs, JFDIs etc is that you get it through your team without ending up covered in shit.</blockquote>
- Crossrail: A Hole New World - London Reconnections londonreconnections.com
It is the principle that bad news tends to accrue at a lower management level, because no one wants to be the person who moves a project risk marker from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ on a RAG chart. As a result, pessimism and a belief that the project will overrun ‘bubbles up’ to a certain decision-making level but never beyond, as if hitting the thermal layer that exists in the ocean. Eventually, the issues reach critical mass and force their way through, leaving senior management wonder why everything ‘suddenly’ went wrong, when in fact the signs that the project was troubled existed at a lower level for some time.
- Why Are QR Codes Everywhere? medium.com
- Exponential growth devours and corrupts m.signalvnoise.com
- On Tea - Ann Leckie annleckie.com
- Doing Business In Japan | Kalzumeus Software kalzumeus.com
- Welcome To The New Age Disco: The Untold Story of London Techno, 1989-1997 daily.redbullmusicacademy.com
<blockquote> I remember when a friend of mine moved to Paris in the 90s to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He came back to England, disillusioned, five years later, calling the city "a museum" – mummified, stagnant, a victim of its own past glories, bought up by rich outsiders who'd out-priced the creative vibe that drew them there in the first place. The locals, wistful and resigned, referred to their city as "The Sleeping Beauty", looking on enviously at how London was ablaze with the best art, the best music, the best nightlife, the best creativity of any stripe, while they were left with only fine wine and memories, as Uncle Monty might have put it. Is London headed the same way as The Sleeping Beauty – an exquisite corpse, too dolled up and expensive for the creativity it's still trading on to flourish, or even survive? </blockquote>
- Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true | Television & radio | The Guardian theguardian.com
<blockquote>At 10 years’ remove the show seems less a comedy and more a documentary about the future.</blockquote>
- Mono no aware - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org
<blockquote>Mono no aware (物の哀れ?), literally "the pathos of things", and also translated as "an empathy toward things", or "a sensitivity to ephemera", is a Japanese term for the awareness of impermanence (無常 mujō?), or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.</blockquote>
- Lifestyle Programming successfulsoftware.net
<blockquote>If you aren’t going to be satisfied with anything less than being a multi-millionaire living in a hollowed out volcano, then an all-or-nothing, VC-backed start-up crap shoot is probably your only option. And there are markets where you have very little chance of success without venture capital. But really, how much money do you need? Is money going to make you happy? How many meals can you eat in a day? How many cars can you drive?</blockquote>
<blockquote>Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to emulate. Startups stopped seeing themselves as just one part of a bigger web. Now they wanted to be the only service that their users would ever need …just like Facebook.</blockquote>
I miss the old days.
- My Interview Questions for Potential Employers | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
- When Bowie met Burroughs | Music | The Guardian guardian.co.uk
- Why Valve? Or, what do we need corporations for and how does Valve’s management structure fit into today’s corporate world? | Valve blogs.valvesoftware.com
The current system of corporate governance is bunk. Capitalist corporations are on the way to certain extinction. Replete with hierarchies that are exceedingly wasteful of human talent and energies, intertwined with toxic finance, co-dependent with political structures that are losing democratic legitimacy fast, a form of post-capitalist, decentralised corporation will, sooner or later, emerge. The eradication of distribution and marginal costs, the capacity of producers to have direct access to billions of customers instantaneously, the advances of open source communities and mentalities, all these fascinating developments are bound to turn the autocratic Soviet-like megaliths of today into curiosities that students of political economy, business studies et al will marvel at in the future, just like school children marvel at dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History museum.
- Trickle-Down Distress: How America's Broken Meritocracy Drives Our National Anxiety Epidemic - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
To the question of anxiety: Should we be thinking about ways to make America more of meritocracy in the hopes of quelling our stress? Says McNamee: "A pure meritocracy is not possible and may not even be desirable." (Just ask Harrison Bergeron.) Far more important, he argues, is debunking the myth of meritocracy, harmful "because it provides an incomplete explanation for success and failure, often mistakenly exalting the rich and condemning the poor."
- The Death of the Cyberflâneur - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
Frictionless sharing has the same drawback as “effortless poetry”: its final products are often intolerable. It’s one thing to find an interesting article and choose to share it with friends. It’s quite another to inundate your friends with everything that passes through your browser or your app, hoping that they will pick something interesting along the way.
- BLDGBLOG: Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson bldgblog.blogspot.com
Let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Japanese Cooking/Cookery Lessons : Make Beautiful Healthy Dishes yukiskitchen.com
- In Search of Number One « Adventures in the infraordinary jameswe333.wordpress.com
My plan for this project is to make my way down and back up Essex Road in Islington from number one to number 400-odd visiting every business along the way.
- What Happened to Yahoo paulgraham.com
"So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software."
- Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme knowyourmeme.com
- The Data-Driven Life - NYTimes.com nytimes.com
In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed.
- Okay, kids, play on my lawn - Roger Ebert's Journal blogs.suntimes.com
My error in the first place was to think I could make a convincing argument on purely theoretical grounds. What I was saying is that video games could not in principle be Art. That was a foolish position to take, particularly as it seemed to apply to the entire unseen future of games. This was pointed out to me maybe hundreds of times. How could I disagree? It is quite possible a game could someday be great Art.
- russell davies: cognitive surplus - blog all dog-eared pages russelldavies.typepad.com
This helps me understand what happened to blogging when the prospects of financial reward crept in. It changed everything. And, presumably, unless people read and understand this, it's going to happen again when new creative tools are invented.