It allowed the previously voiceless to walk right up to the powerful and put stuff right in front of their faces, at any time of day
Martin Amis Is Dead at 73 An appreciation of the bad boy of contemporary British letters.
Hoogspanning More Dutch and Safety Posters
The most beautiful post offices? Why are none of them recently built? Recommended.
The strange revelations making me rethink Twitter
One regular user ponders what the social media site has really given us – and what it’s taken away.
Elon Musk has done many things to Twitter, both the app and the business, during his more than six months as chief executive and owner. He has laid off more than half the staff, changed the interface and functionality of the product and aggressively pushed users to sign up for a paid subscription version of the service.
He says that usage has gone up, but because he has taken the company private, we only have his word on that. According to most estimates, ad spending has plummeted. Musk himself has reportedly estimated that the company is now worth about $US20 billion ($30 billion), a negative 55 per cent return. He has, meanwhile, enlisted a small group of journalists – many of whom have taken a political journey similar to Musk’s in recent years – to sift through company emails and Slacks [the business messaging service] in an effort to reveal overreach on the part of the old regime in its management of the global conversation.
They published reams of lightly redacted emails, showing regular correspondence between Twitter’s trust-and-safety team and the FBI, and other organs of the state, which apparently spend a considerable amount of time scrutinising individual Twitter accounts.
(9) Reflections on a death, and life on the final frontier..
Expansion is a solution to many of our modern problems, too, I think. If Earth remains a closed system, it seems almost inevitable that it will wind up a poorer and less free system: A global surveillance state, with social credit scores, scheming bureaucrats, and probably waves of mass hysteria spread instantly by social media. In fact, that future is already here to a degree, it’s just not evenly distributed yet
