The game Monopoly basically copied an anti-capitalist game created by one Lizzie Magie: The Landlord’s Game.
Finished reading: The Corner that Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A strangely riveting book, and unlike anything I have ever read. I don’t even know how to describe it. 📚
My first thought when I read the-fediverse-is-the-future pieces is: Great, now whenever anyone anywhere online is posturing, preening, snarking, lying, manipulating, and trying to stir up hatred of their enemies, we all can see it!
The fediverse would be a great thing if so many of the people using the various social media platforms weren’t simply seeking to continue all the bad behavior that made Twitter “the hellsite.” I don’t think enough people have learned from that experience. My fear is that the fediverse will just end up being the helliverse, so I’m thankful that micro.blog makes federation opt-in.
Brian Eno, from a 1995 diary entry:
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Wish I had seen this before I wrote my “Resistance in the Arts” essay. But I think if I had read a lot more Eno I probably wouldn’t have felt the need to write the essay at all.
The Feast of the Annunciation is on March 25, but the lectionary gives us the story also on the fourth Sunday of Advent, so this is a good time to read Andrew Hudgins’s great poem “The Cestello Annunciation.”
Last night at St. Alban’s, we had an utterly wonderful service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The history of the service — it’s relatively new as these things go — is fascinating.
Charlie Warzel: “A shift away from a knowable internet might feel like a return to something smaller and purer. An internet with no discernable monoculture may feel, especially to those who’ve been continuously plugged into trending topics and viral culture, like a relief. But this new era of the internet is also one that entrenches tech giants and any forthcoming emergent platforms as the sole gatekeepers when it comes to tracking the way that information travels. We already know them to be unreliable narrators and poor stewards, but on a fragmented internet, where recommendation algorithms beat out the older follower model, we rely on these corporations to give us a sense of scale. This might sound overdramatic, but without an innate sense of what other people are doing, we might be losing a way to measure and evaluate ourselves. We’re left shadowboxing one another and arguing in the dark about problems, the size of which we can’t identify.”