The networks we use to communicate across fields and distances, to find our friends and learn from people unlike ourselves—and to organize ourselves to respond to acute crises and long, grinding institutional failures—are the same networks that are making so many of us miserable and/or deranged.
Posts in: the internet
Flip through (YouTube) channels like the old days. /via bencrowder.net
The internet isn’t for humans anymore. Bots use the internet more than we do; use shapes design.
If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.
— My own little patch - Rach Smith
The scale of the algorithm exceeds even our own understanding; its returns benefit only its owners and leave the rest of us awash in noise and bereft of understanding.
— Unscalable, Hand-Crafted Lists of Links - Christopher Butler
Boring Sound Kit
A sound kit for prototyping and play.
Abandoned blogs
Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site.
The Revenge of the Home Page (newyorker.com)
Enumerating all the ways the internet currently sucks. Example:
You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.
No one wants this.
The article does end on a positive note:
You read the Wikipedia entry and there is a lot of useful information supplied by a community. One of the sources cited is a non-fiction book. You go to your local library’s website and although they don’t have the exact book, they do have others by the same author. You place a hold on two of them, then go get your shoes on.
/via Chris Glass
Is the kottke.org comment section the best community on the web? I’m not a member yet, but I have been a lurker and it seems like a great place to hang out digitally.