The White Album was the first major release to deploy incoherence as a deliberate artistic strategy. It contains space-fillers even though there’s no space that needs filling, and is sequenced in such a way as to accentuate its jumbling together of the archaic and the avant-garde, the meaningless and the profound, the generous and the toxic, the ragged and the luminous, the spiritual and the profane, the desperately moving and the too silly for words.
Facebook still has over 2.27 billion monthly active users who collectively spend more than 100,000 years—yes, years—of time on the site each and every day. They upload 300 million photos per day, leave 750 million comments a day, and share billions upon billions of pieces of content each day. It doesn’t matter to most of them that Facebook is a haven for fake news, or that their personal information is being sold to advertisers, or that their C.E.O. and C.O.O. have done things that should get them both fired, without even the blink of an eye. For most people, they’re just happy that someone “liked” the photo they took of that sunset on the beach last weekend.
[…] I began to see the insidious ways that the software changed how people work together. They’d become more disconnected; less likely to see and help one another, and often less able to.
(Aside: The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks is a must-read for anyone involved in digital products.)
The central issue is we’re developing into a plutocracy. We’ve got an enormous number of enormously rich people that have convinced themselves that they’re rich because they’re smart and constructive. And they don’t like government, and they don’t like to pay taxes.
[…] please know that if you turn on “Do Not Track,” it’s not doing anything to protect you unless you’re surfing Pinterest or reading Medium while logged out. It’s one thing to tell someone you want to be left alone, and another to get them to care.
More than 20,000 square miles of land is taken up around the world to accommodate tobacco farms, which use more than 22 billion tonnes of water, meaning a person smoking a pack of 20 cigarettes a day for 50 years is responsible for 1.4 million litres of water depletion over their lifetime.
