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.

McSweeney’s content on academia is always darkly hilarious, and this is no exception.

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.

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.

It’s uncomfortable for me to think about how close my “digital traces” research is to surveillance and YOLO data mining.

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.

I wasn’t sure about a retheming of Mille Bornes for this game, but this post on design decisions was actually really reassuring.

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

McSweeny’s strikes again.

Some strong arguments from Dash here.

The Kobayashi Maru scenario is one of the best things to come out of Star Trek, and this is one of the best takes on it I’ve read.

I’ve seen this argument floating out there, but this is the first time I looked at some of the numbers.

If there were such a thing as a good army fighting a good war, it would be the Allies in World War II. It’s wildly irresponsible to overlook the awful things done by that army in that war for the sake of holding both up as “good,” though.

It never occurred to me that you could use a Kindle in such a “de-Amazoned” way… and it also infuriates me that Amazon still interferes this much.

I agree with a lot of this post.

Interested by Ken’s take here, even if it doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about gestures at everything.

Also, this line cracked me up:

Pete Hegseth’s chief qualification to be Secretary of Defense is that Trump saw him on the teevee a lot and his tattoos are not, technically, Nazi symbols.

Excellent article that sums up a lot of my thinking on this show.