#capitalism
Links, July 2023
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and...
BuzzFeed News
I'd like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they've finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did. I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company. Those times are well and truly over, both at the personal level and the macro economic level. The backbiting merry-go-round...
The layoff business
London, United Kingdom
When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment. At least in the time since I’ve entered the profession, software engineering has been a “seller’s market”. The pay is good, there are lots of...
A year in ads
When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team. Proposition: online publishing is generally supported by some combination of a paywall, donations, a benefactor, affiliate commerce, or ads. Financial Times is entirely behind a paywall....
They give it away
I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly, to the point that we became a sort of insufferable clique. The product problem was interesting because it was one of the few places working at a publisher where you...
This is not the apocalypse you were looking for
— This is not the apocalypse you were looking for, Laurie Penny in WIRED
Local power and the social order
— American Genry, Patrick Wyman in Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
The Internet Is For End Users
— The Internet Is For End Users, Mark Nottingham in Internet Architecture Board RFCs
Rich writers showing themselves up about COVID-19
— The Afflictions of the Comfortable, Michael Massing in The American Prospect