Modern cars are creepy.

This is an excellent and detailed overview and I’m better for having read it.

Bookmarking as yet another example of Elon Musk’s free speech reputation being undeserved.

What a stupid thing this whole “banning TikTok” thing has proved to be.

I’m not terribly attentive to music or film quality, but the complaints about access to streaming media resonated with me.

I bought this book well over a decade ago. Preparing for grad school, where I expected to study games and learning, I was fascinated by the idea of a work of philosophy that used games as its central metaphor. Well, it isn’t the easiest book to get through, so I made some progress and some notes (most of which missed the point) and then let it drop for a long time.

I don’t like Big Tech, but I’ve become more wary of regulation in recent years because folks like Masnick have compellingly made this argument over and over: It’s the smaller, better companies and sites that suffer the most from it.

Horrific story; not sure why we’re so eager to punish the unhoused.

I’m bookmarking this so I can sit with it and return to it. It is powerful, searing, and condemning.

I don’t think I’ve ever been more angry about the gig economy than when reading this post.

Look, I don’t know all the finer points of this debate, but Mullenweg has repeatedly struck me as petty and juvenile, so it’s hard to imagine taking his side on any of the more substantive issues here.

Some more reflection by Doctorow on Bluesky and Mastodon.

Some of my favorite stories are those that are big and well known enough that they have invited us to retell them over and over in new ways. This is why I will never tire of new takes on Spider-Man even if I agree that cinematic takes on the character have been rebooted too many times recently (also, put classic Marvel characters in the public domain!). It’s also why, after reading The Future, I was drawn in by Naomi Alderman’s take on the four gospels, writing four stories that barely intersect with each other and barely intersect with Jesus, retelling the gospels in a new way.

This is the best possible response to a bad situation.

Some good observations here.

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.

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.

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.