The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

...ding, The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour. The central thesis of the book is that we are all writing more than we ever have in history in the form of tweets, Facebook updates, texts, emails etc. Seymour contends, however, that we are not so much writing as being written by the platforms we use and that we all have a propensity for trolling and narcissism that tech companies exploit with a kind of algorithmic agnosticism. Seymour chronicles t...

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Netflix Before Netflix: The Tabard Inn Library

...rug stores and other retail establishments. Eaton also had a home delivery book service called the Booklovers Library. The scheme didn’t last long but did result in the creation of a huge mailing list that Eaton attempted to use for other businesses. Does this sound familiar? My local Von’s grocery store has a DVD rental service kiosk out front that still gets use. No, I’m not going to build a Tabard Inn Library reproduction for myself but I certa...

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We Went to Japan

...n’s book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In that book Jameson links the particular stage of global capitalism we live in with the confusing “hyperspacial” non-hierarchical architectural spaces we navigate. Tokyo’s huge, meandering shopping malls, train stations and packed boulevards overwhelm, disorient and perfectly exemplify what Jameson describes in that book. We took a day trip to Kamakura to see the many Shinto shrin...

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Join or Die: Why You Should Join a Club

...Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I read this book when it came out and it had a profound influence on me, leading to years of joining clubs and organizations. The documentary is professionally produced and features some high level interviewees including Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg and David Brooks. More importantly, the doc includes people actually involved in a wide variety of orgs such as the Odd Fellows, a farm...

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Age of Apocalypse

...Satellite TV! Shop Ebay at 30,000 feet! I shut the TV off and picked up a book, but I kept getting distracted by the screen I could see in the row in front of me. It was displaying a nonstop parade of gruesome images–mangled corpses, gunshot wounds–what passes for “entertainment” on mainstream television. Which brings me back to the Age of Limits conference. In Kelly’s blog post yesterday, I wanted to interject to say that I noticed a depressive...

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