#culture (178 links)
- A year of new avenues robinsloan.com
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.
Subcultures were the main creative cultural force from roughly 1975 to 2000, when they stopped working. Why? One reason—among several—is that as soon as subcultures start getting really interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them. Subcultures have a predictable lifecycle, in which popularity causes death. Eventually—around 2000—everyone understood this, and gave up hoping some subculture could somehow escape this dynamic.
- A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden maggieappleton.com
- The X of Generation X culture.ghost.io
This brings us to today, where the loudest complaints about “cultural stasis” tend to come from Gen X adults whose cultural interests have long been anchored in obscure and openly-artistic cultural forms. From their perspective, today's cultural capital does feel very tame. Being "with it" requires listening to top-charting albums, watching blockbuster movies, and being well-versed in internet memes. Compared to Gen X, Millennials who grew up on the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC would have fewer qualms about a pop culture centered around Harry Styles fandom, Harry Styles albums, and Harry Styles cinema gossip. Meanwhile Gen Z, in its rebellion against Millennials, appears to appreciate obscurity as a virtue again, but this is a new obscurity, not based in artistic complexity and historical knowledge but the discovery of amateur videos lurking at the edges of the internet.
- The Other Internet robinrendle.com
It wasn’t until my early twenties that it clicked for me: the web doesn’t have to be like this! You don’t have to participate in the con! You can make websites that are joyous and funny and charming, websites that don’t contribute to the meat grinder. You don’t have to steal anyone’s email address or exploit and coerce folks into giving you money. The world wide web could be—if we imagined it correctly—more than money.
Also how it _was_ (mostly).
- New Colour: Coldcut’s Journeys By DJ - 70 Minutes of Madness thequietus.com
One thing that stands up, pretty much whoever you speak to, is the identity of the greatest DJ mix album of all time – that accolade goes to Coldcut’s incredible 70 Minutes Of Madness, their offering for the Journeys By DJ mix series, released in 1995. The wildly inventive mix, which incorporated hip hop, techno, funk and drum & bass (along with the Doctor Who theme tune and a host of crazed spoken word samples), redefined what a DJ mix should be, perfectly capturing the cut & paste ethic of the mid-90s in the process, while arguably inventing what became the pop mash-up.
Lengthy retrospective/interview from 2015 with Jon More, Matt Black, Kev Foakes (aka DJ Food), and Patrick Carpenter aka PC on Coldcut's 70 Minutes Of Madness mix.
- No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees sahillavingia.com
Via Popular.
- Small tech scattered-thoughts.net
Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just people making a living writing software on their own terms.
Via Popular.
By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia.
- Invisible men - How objectivity in journalism became a matter of opinion | Books & arts | The Economist economist.com
Back in the 1920s, Lippmann might have agreed with much of this. He saw objectivity not as a magical state of mind or a view from nowhere, but as a practical process. Journalism should aim for “a common intellectual method and a common area of valid fact”, he wrote. That does not mean using euphemisms in place of plain language, or parroting both sides of an argument without testing them. Indeed, when journalism has erred in recent years, it has often done so by misinterpreting objectivity, rather than upholding it. The most persuasive calls for moral clarity today articulate something close to Lippmann’s original conception of objectivity.
- The TikTok War – Stratechery by Ben Thompson stratechery.com
- The shit chute - Justin Stach justin.stach.uk
The shit chute is a process for making sure that if you have to deal with toxic projects, HiPPOs, JFDIs etc is that you get it through your team without ending up covered in shit.
- The right way to watch Neon Genesis Evangelion polygon.com
This spring, Netflix will bring the mid-’90s animated series Neon Genesis Evangelion to the platform. For fans of the series, it’s an occasion on par with the…
It is the principle that bad news tends to accrue at a lower management level, because no one wants to be the person who moves a project risk marker from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ on a RAG chart. As a result, pessimism and a belief that the project will overrun ‘bubbles up’ to a certain decision-making level but never beyond, as if hitting the thermal layer that exists in the ocean. Eventually, the issues reach critical mass and force their way through, leaving senior management wonder why everything ‘suddenly’ went wrong, when in fact the signs that the project was troubled existed at a lower level for some time.
Crossing boundaries … Tilda Swinton in the 1992 film adaptation of Orlando. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were…
- I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Fortnite Battle Royale In Fortnite Battle Royale, the world’s most popular video game, released last September and today being played by millions of people at a…
- The Wire, 10 years on: ‘We tore the cover off a city and showed the American dream was dead’ theguardian.com
‘Greek tragedy for the new millennium’ … Michael B Jordan, Tray Chaney, Larry Gilliard Jr and JD Williams in season one of The Wire.Photograph: HBO W hen, in…
- The Existential Terror of Battle Royale blog.codinghorror.com
It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most…
- This little light salon.com
Once upon a time in the Pixar offices my dad played ball with me, and “Luxo Jr.” was born Spencer Porter 09.04.2017 • 12:30 AM • 0 Comments 0 Comments Sometimes…
- Why Are QR Codes Everywhere? medium.com
- ‘The Wire’ — Game Day theundefeated.com
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language. And some spoilers. The goal was for the aggression to stay on the blacktop at Baltimore’s…
- Return of the KLF: ‘They were agents of chaos. Now the world they anticipated is here’ theguardian.com
It was towards the end of August 1994 that burnt, tattered and waterlogged scraps of £50 notes began to wash up on the shores of Jura, the mountainous, sparsely…
There was no better time than the 1990s to be young, female, and angry. Riot Grrrl's feminist thrash finally offered women an alternative-music scene of their…
- On Tea - Ann Leckie annleckie.com
- Doing Business In Japan | Kalzumeus Software kalzumeus.com
- Double Solitude - The New Yorker newyorker.com
Credit Illustration by Antoine Maillard At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the…
I gave a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago. During the question-and-answer period that followed it, the subject that seemed to most interest a number of…
- Welcome to the Block Party theawl.com
In a 1997 segment on the short-lived tech TV show The Site, host Soledad O’Brien sits at a bar in front of a laptop computer, talking to Dev Null, a full-scale…
- Five years, building a culture, and handing it off. - Laughing Meme laughingmeme.org
After 5 years, the time has come. This is my last week as Etsy’s CTO. Five years ago I joined a tiny site, with a struggling software product. I wasn’t sure how…
- Welcome To The New Age Disco: The Untold Story of London Techno, 1989-1997 daily.redbullmusicacademy.com
I remember when a friend of mine moved to Paris in the 90s to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He came back to England, disillusioned, five years later, calling the city "a museum" – mummified, stagnant, a victim of its own past glories, bought up by rich outsiders who'd out-priced the creative vibe that drew them there in the first place. The locals, wistful and resigned, referred to their city as "The Sleeping Beauty", looking on enviously at how London was ablaze with the best art, the best music, the best nightlife, the best creativity of any stripe, while they were left with only fine wine and memories, as Uncle Monty might have put it. Is London headed the same way as The Sleeping Beauty – an exquisite corpse, too dolled up and expensive for the creativity it's still trading on to flourish, or even survive?
Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his…
- Totally Mexico! How the Nathan Barley nightmare came true | Television & radio | The Guardian theguardian.com
At 10 years’ remove the show seems less a comedy and more a documentary about the future.