Well put:

TCL plans to get more into original content, fueled by a dystopian strategy that seems largely built around minimizing costs and pushing ads.

This is a solid article. I think the opening is reflective and that there’s an effort to be open minded (more than I would be). It’s also amazing to me, though, how explicitly the goal here seems to be profiting from a surveillance-supported content mill.

All the guilt I felt about cancelling our local news subscription vanished during the corporate slog I had to go through to actually make it happen. Looking forward to redirecting funds to news orgs with a little more respect for their subscribers.

Like anyone who’s read Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (now free to read here, and you should go read it), I’ve thought a lot recently about its central conceit of an online message board where people stiffed by insurance radicalize each other into gruesome acts of violence. The story is hard to read: It’s vicious in its implied critique of U.S. healthcare companies, but the people being radicalized are also ugly in their response to those companies’ callousness.

Post election is a great time to realize the dangers that KOSA poses.

Some interesting reflections (and reasons to up one’s baseline existential terror) in here.

Listen, The Onion is great, but sometimes McSweeney’s is where it’s at.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read much on all of this, but I can’t imagine any coverage better than this article.

This is a friendly reminder that DRM sucks and that corporations have perverted the digital technologies that should make things easier for libraries and their patrons into ways to squeeze more money out of us while giving us less control.

Interesting stuff here. I think most complaints about OpenAI “censorship” are hogwash, but it’s still fascinating—and worrying—to see how much control the company exercises over its product.

Here’s hoping the Senate shows some spine. Gift link.

Cory Doctorow’s review of Naomi Alderman’s The Future mentioned this book, so after wrapping up the former, I decided to start the latter. It’s not what I expected—Doctorow’s comments suggested the whole thing might be about billionaire survivalist bunkers—but in a good way! It turns out that it’s a broader take on a broader attitude behind survivalist bunkers and the way that attitude manifests in other ways.

I had a hard time deciding on a rating for this. I do have some issues with the book, including its appeals to neuroscience (which is always a pet peeve of mine) in a book that otherwise has a productive skepticism toward empiricism as the end all, be all of human discovery. I’m also intrigued by Rushkoff’s critiques of how we approach social justice but I could use some more elaboration on those critiques so that they don’t just come off as contrarian (to be clear, I don’t think Rushkoff’s writing in bad faith, but there’s enough superficial resemblance to bad faith critiques from other actors that I’d like to see him elaborate more).

Some Sundays, you cancel your church plans so you can Zoom into a relative and her girlfriend’s spur of the moment “let’s at least get legally married now in case things get bad before our September wedding” service.

My kid is being raised by a mother who is entirely done with anything that smacks of religion and a father who is very non-literal and not very exclusivist, so it’s unsurprising that she tends to pick and choose when she wants to do church stuff with me. If I’m driving over to Louisville to attend church in person, she’ll usually come with me. If I’m attending church via Zoom because Louisville is over an hour away, she tends to read or play in her room instead. A few weeks ago, though, when she realized it was Communion Sunday (in Community of Christ, the first Sunday of the month), she insisted that I call her over when it was time for communion so that she could be part of that.

I (someone who doesn’t really believe in a literal resurrection) have been scheduled to preach in February on Paul’s “if there’s no resurrection, this is all in vain” in 1 Cor. 15. Gonna have to think about this one.

I listened to the first parts of this as Doctorow was reading it on his podcast; the spacing out between chunks was distracting me and making it hard to follow, so I ultimately bought an epub (harder to download than it should have been) and restarted the story. Then, I took a two-day break near the end of the book—all of this to say that I wonder if I would have liked it even more if I’d read straight through.

Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions.

What a wild story.

The unceremonious end of Redbox is a reminder of how much stuff we make and buy, and how, when companies fail to plan for end-of-life or go out of business, they often leave a bunch of devices that suddenly become e-waste behind.

Lots of interesting reflections here.

This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web.

This is a question that everyone should ask—and then be infuriated by the answer.

Lots of interesting stuff in here, including the difficulty of content moderation, and yet another way that generative AI is screwing everything up.

Whenever I put this shirt on for a November jog, I wonder what the Venn diagram is between those who believe gender is biological and immutable and those who believe we have to show one turkey jogger with lipstick, eyelashes, and a pearl necklace so that we know she’s a woman.

I am too young (and was for too long too disconnected from politics) to know much about Jimmy Carter except for a vague understanding of the common wisdom that he had been a poor president and of the progressive reclaiming of him in recent years. I’ve had my eye on this biography for a while: I nearly bought it at full price from my local bookstore, but when a used copy was on sale at the library for $3, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.

Even after many years of attending, being a member of, and now serving in Community of Christ, I’m still alternately surprised by how many things are the same as my Latter-day Saint upbringing and how many things are different. In the latter category, even though I’ve intellectually understood this for a while, it still surprises me that the World Conferences of Community of Christ (renamed from General Conferences in the 1960s) are sites of debate and discussion rather than a series of sermons.