The Difference Engine: Interview with Bruce Sterling. I guess I’ll start by asking where the term ‘slipstream’ came from. BS: It was invented by my friend the late Richard Dorsett while the two of us were discussing a category of non-genre fantasy books that we had no name for. “They’re certainly not ‘mainstream,'” I said, and “Why not ‘slipstream?'” he suggested, and I thought it was a pretty good coinage. (more)

The GraphQL Cloud Platform https://dgraph.io/ (more)

Pacifica launches a new online therapy service that integrates with its self-help app. Pacifica’s self-help app was created to make cognitive behavioral therapy exercises accessible to more people. Now the startup is launching a Therapist Directory for users who want to take the next step. The service allows them to find a provider, attend consultations online using Pacifica’s platform and complete exercises as part of their treatment. (more)

UI style focused on being interactive by giving user a smallish number of things to click on. (more)

I research and build software tools and interfaces to help us think and create (tools for thought). I’ve been writing online since 2014 – this blog is home to a half million words I’ve written about software research, creative work, community, and the life I live in between. https://thesephist.com/

ink - inkle's narrative scripting language (more)

aka Perils of the Overworld - a videogame Robin Sloan started building, but froze. https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/

The House That Fish Built – (Newsbound). A new storytelling medium is emerging. But what do we call it? (more)

Robin Sloan: House of Cards (CardDeck) (more)

aka Twitter Storm - swarm of Twitter posts (more)

System for certain kinds of groups to share their own digital gardens with each other, not the whole world. From Social Warrens. (more)

Nathan Baschez: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Hardbound Update. I believed that if someone invested a lot of work, time, and love, it could happen. It would be possible to create a totally new way to read, one that would connect with readers’ brains in a deeper way than ever before. It felt so inevitable to me (more)

co-founder of "Every" newsletter bundle https://twitter.com/nbashaw (more)

Baumol's cost disease, also known as the Baumol effect, is the rise of wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher productivity growth. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s[1][2] and is an example of cross elasticity of demand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease (more)

Neal Stephenson book (more)

Anne-Laure LeCunff: Interview with Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research. In 2008 or so, I got really interested in collective intelligence. I mean, it’s pretty obvious now with coronavirus that the systems that we have, the institutions that we have, aren’t able to make fast decisions—fast, informed decisions in uncertain times. (more)

David Perell: Summarize the Canon. Every discipline has a book that everybody references, but nobody reads. In physics, it’s The Feynman Lectures; in philosophy, it’s Godel, Escher, Bach; in sociology, it’s Das Kapital, in English, it’s Infinite Jest; in communications, it’s Understanding Media; in biology, it’s The Origin of Species; in computer science, it’s The Art of Computer Programming; in investing, it’s The Intelligent Investor; and in economics, it’s The Wealth of Nations. Build an audience by summarizing these books. By doing so, you’ll do yourself and the world a favor.

Jules Evans: Bowie's genius and Eno's scenius. In the mid-19th century, the grand old sage of Victorian culture, Thomas Carlyle, was worried that Christianity (religion) was wearing out, that the West needed a ‘new mythus’ to bind us together and connect us to the infinite. Carlyle decided that a substitute for the worship of Christ might be the worship of heroes. (more)

Jean Baudrillard (UK: /ˈboʊdrɪjɑːr/ BOHD-rih-yar,[13] US: /ˌboʊdriˈɑːr/ BOHD-ree-AR, French: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, critique of economy, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.[14][15][16][17] Nevertheless, Baudrillard can be also seen as a critic of post-structuralism[18] and has distanced himself from postmodernism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Baudrillard

Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of the practices, beliefs, and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time (cf consensus reality) . Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving force behind popular culture is mass appeal, and it is produced by what cultural analyst Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".[1] Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain topics.[2] However, there are various ways to define pop culture.[3] Because of this, popular culture is something that can be defined in a variety of conflicting ways by different people across different contexts.[4] It is generally viewed in contrast to other forms of culture such as folk cults, working-class culture, or high culture, and also through different academic perspectives such as psychoanalysis, structuralism, postmodernism, and more. The common pop-culture categories are: entertainment (such as film, music, television and video games), spectator sports, news (as in people/places in the news), politics, fashion, technology, and slang.[5] Popular culture in the West has been critiqued for its being a system of commercialism that privileges products selected and mass-marketed by the upper-class capitalist elite; such criticisms are most notable in many Marxist theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, as well as certain postmodern philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, who has written about the commercialisation of information under capitalism,[6] and Jean Baudrillard, as well as others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture