W David Marx: Only Fads: A Culture (and Economy) of Labubu. Fads are nothing new, but an online-first culture has made raw trendiness the primary cultural value, which is moving the base of cultural production away from the U.S. (more)

Default Friend: Not Right, Not-Left, Just Online. The story I can’t get out of my head today is the one every other newsletter is talking about: the launch of The Argument, former Atlantic writer Jerusalem Demsas’s new media project that promises not just to “diagnose problems” but “persuade people of solutions.” (more)

Derek Thompason on 1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind. “Automobilism is an illness, a mental illness. This illness has a pretty name: speed... [Man] can no longer stand still, he shivers, his nerves tense like springs, impatient to get going once he has arrived somewhere because it is not somewhere else, somewhere else, always somewhere else.” - Octave Mirbeau, French novelist, 1910 (more)

not ideal, but possible/pragmatic (solution) (more)

Culture meta-GameRule/Value of Tolerance toward SubCultures (outgroups?) co-existing and interacting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_pluralism - live and let live (more)

lack of Diversity (of thought, species, whatever) (more)

BrainTrust series of novels by Marc Stiegler - ASIN:B086RX2Y2Z (more)

Dan Hon: s17e09: What does it take to trust?; The Young Lady’s Illustrated Tour Guide (more)

Adrian Hon: A Thousand Primers, Not Just One. Andy Matuschak’s essay, Exorcising us of the Primer, highlights the limitations of Neal Stephenson’s influential The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. (2024-07-10-Matuschak ExorcisingUsOfThePrimer) (more)

Dan Hon: s14e03: Success Criteria; Chat. 1.1 Another thing that stuck in my head from Tim Bray’s essay about search on Mastodon was his section on success criteria. Here’s the first para, but I encourage you to read the rest..... (more)

neo-Enlightenment for a Network Society: see (2021-07-07) Network Enlightenment (more)

An Exciting Leap Forward for Glitch, becoming part of Fastly. Why are we joining forces with Fastly? There are a couple of great reasons. It starts with having more support and resources to keep improving Glitch. We’re hiring for incredible people to come help with this work, starting today with engineering roles on the Developer Relations team, and watch for Glitch-focused support, community and engineering roles coming soon, too. (more)

Fog Creek is now Glitch! We’ve renamed Fog Creek to Glitch, Inc. to represent our single-minded focus on Glitch (more)

group of folks trying to grow a scene around sense-making: Ronen Tamari, Gabriel Chartier, kristen pavle, etc. (more)

webdev, etc. https://x.com/gabriel_export (more)

Ryan Gil: A Crucible Moment. A Metaverse is a big idea — the Open Metaverse can be even bigger. Perhaps the biggest idea of our modern times. It can fundamentally change not only what we know, but also how we connect as a networked species. (more)

Gergely Orosz: Twisting the rules of building software: Bending Spoons (the team behind Evernote). *Today I'm happy to have the Bending Spoons team here with me. We have Luca, Francesco and Federico. When I first tweeted about Bending Spoons and how I discovered the interesting things that you're doing, I had Italian developers ping me and telling me, oh, I actually applied to Bending Spoons. They're the hottest place to be in Italy. And I asked them, when did you apply? (more)

James Pethokoukis: The techno-optimist Up-Wing lesson that William Gibson's 'The Peripheral' (Jackpot series) inadvertently teaches. There’s so much pessimistic, Down-Wing science fiction out there that I have to scrounge whatever snippets of Up-Wing, techno-solutionist optimism wherever I can. (solutionism) (more)

up-wing/down-wing, a different lens than right-wing/left-wing

Distraction by Bruce Sterling (1998!) ISBN:0553576399 (more)