Jennifer O’Connell says it well in the IT (“Jennifer O’Connell: Being an adult does not mean being stressed and anxious all the time”)when she denounces the high-stress, always-on, anxiety culture which is accepted as the ‘norm’ and even lauded as a goal by some. Stress is a short term thing, it’s not meant to be […]
Mozart has topped the CD sales chart for the year, according to qz. The music business as we know it is dead. It’s fitting that the final nail in its coffin would be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—the 18th-century composer, long-dead himself—who this month became 2016’s top artist by CD sales. Mozart owes the win to a […]
Good points from John Naughton in the Guardian today about the recent Tesla car auto-pilot crash: For that kind of discussion to be possible, however, mainstream media will have to change the way they report self-driving cars. Every time a Tesla or a Google car is involved in a crash, by all means report it. But also […]
Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are […]
Danah Boyd has an interesting piece on the Reality Distortion Field that is modern tech. Viewed through the original call of Cyberspace from 20 years ago, during the halcyon early days of the ‘net, it’s a glimpse into the future that awaits, and its not pretty. At first I thought I had just encountered the […]
So, a glitch in a software update to the Nest left users quite literally cold as their nest devices stopped working. Very irritating, and the nine-step, time consuming fix sounds quite awkward to say the least. But there’s more: Making matters worse is the lack of recourse. Buried deep in Nest’s 8,000-word service agreement is […]
They are, in fact, two different things: capitalism is a system of ownership; markets a method of exchange. Although the two have sometimes gone together, this need not be so. Crony capitalism in which a few monopolies or cartels run much of the economy gives us capitalism without markets. And market socialism would give us […]
News has broken that twitter might be abandoning it’s rather unique 140-character limit for messages, or at least allowing for longer ‘click for more’ type messages. So what’s the point of that? Competing with Medium? Yes and no, it’s largely an effort to keep people in the garden that they’re building. What’s really changing here, […]
Which is exactly what it’s not called, because that’d be far too honest. Instead, it’s proclaimed as the new ‘sharing economy’, where everyone can work as much as they need, hours are casual to suit you, you’re a ‘partner’ not an employee! Pure bull. It’s yet another way that capital accumulates capital, and exploits whomever […]
I love subversion like this: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34958282