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Great article. Introduced the term gorpcore into my vocabulary. Thanks!
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"There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism."
Dean Kissick on the art industry’s relationship to climate change and its neoliberal big money backers:
“None of these are complicated projects. Pharrell’s ‘100 Years’ won’t be released for 100 years. Paterson’s ‘Future Library’ is a library for the future. Visitors to Eliasson’s “Ice Watch” can watch the ice melt. Also, it looks like a watch. As society turns against nuance, expect plenty more massively expensive ...Read More
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“Why does every aspect of automated content selection have to be done by a single business? Why not open up the pipeline, and create a market in which users can make choices for themselves?
we’re now beginning to have a computational language that has the scope to formulate “computational contracts” that can specify relevant kinds of constraints in computational terms, in a form that humans can write and understand, and that machines can automatically interpret. ...Read More
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They're calling it the "platanito protest." Janitors with bananas taped to purple union shirts are marching in the streets of downtown Miami this afternoon to protest low wages and working conditions in an industry rife with abuse and intimidation.
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‘Influencing is heading into the void’: Natasha Stagg and Kate Durbin on the future of social media.
“Natasha: Fashion is a game, and I feel like I understand it, so I can’t stop being fascinated by it. I don’t understand sports or money or politics but I understand fashion. It’s a type of art that is aware of its industry. It responds to the states of corporations ...Read More
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"Want to reach voters across the aisle online? That’ll cost extra, a new study finds."
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“Rather than fighting or eliminating problems, consider the productivity of multiplying problems. As in Parrondo’s Paradox—the counter-intuitive game theory that pairs losing games to generate wins—problems are raw materials that can leaven and catalyze each other.1 Negative one and one are both the same distance from zero and can both ...Read More
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For anyone who thought the level of 'Corbyn anti-semitism' reporting at the Guardian seemed like a lot: On the strategic relationship formed between The Guardian and UK national security since their retaliation to the Snowden leak, under the editorship of Katharine Viner. From a new UK-focused investigative journalism outlet.
On their intelligence reporting and dubious "exclusives" after the fallout with uk intelligence services following Snowden: Since the Snowden affair, The Guardian does not appear to have published any articles based on an intelligence or security services source that was not officially sanctioned to speak. The Guardian has, by contrast, ...Read More
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Most people know about the placebo effect, which refers to the power of positive expectations to induce pleasant sensations or symptom improvements. (Placebo roughly translates to “I shall please.”)
Nocebo translates to “I shall harm.”
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Artists want to work with Balenciaga, buy it, and think about it. How did a fashion house become an art-world power broker?
"Carly Busta, an aggregating Truman Capote for the Berlin scene who runs New Models, a kind of Drudge Report for the art world, said in an interview earlier this fall that Balenciaga pulls its talent from a creative class, often Berlin-based, that has more crossover with the art world than ...Read More
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Platforms don't exist
Metal Machine Music by Ben Tarnoff •
bentarnoff.substack.com ↗︎
“The antitrusters want to make markets work better. By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets mediate less of our lives—to make them less central to our survival and flourishing.”
Emma Stamm explores how Mark Fisher’s notion of “acid communism."
"When cultural theorist, author, and blogger Mark Fisher passed away in 2017, he left behind an unfinished book manuscript. Acid Communism: On Post-Capitalist Desire was to continue the project of his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? In Capitalist Realism, Fisher wrote that decades of deregulation had all ...Read More
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A straightforward survey on the design of a few leftist magazines. The best quotes come from Jacobin Creative Director Remeike Forbes’ 2012 essay on design (linked to in the article)...
“Why should leftists have to make a choice between visual content that’s honest and impassioned and sober political analysis? Ironically, leftists who scoff at bold imagery suffer the same delusions of the Guy Fawkes Left; they opt for lazy applications of style over an attempt to grapple with a world ...Read More
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47 companies could be held responsible under criminal and civil laws, news from Madrid climate summit.