I feel like Alexander Reed’s book on industrial music, Assimilate, explained my whole life to me. Reed writes that industrial music recognizes that “we’re born into a hierarchical network of control systems from which it’s our impossible duty to escape.” That intuition could explain my interest not
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We’re frequently exhorted to be thankful for what we have. “You have a roof over your head, a refrigerator full of food, and a gaggle of gadgets and streaming services, what more could you want?” Our guilt over our discontent soon becomes a new source of discontent, spawning a
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Dear Senator Wyden, We spoke several times when I was a reporter for Wired magazine about net neutrality and technology policy topics. But today I’m writing to you in my capacity as a citizen of the world. I have rarely reached out to your office outside my role as
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Some journalists have a strict writing process. I don’t. I just start writing wherever I can. Many journalists like to start with what’s called the “lede,” which is an intentional misspelling of “lead” and basically means “introduction.” Others like to start with the “nut graf,” which is the
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Note: I originally sent this to my newsletter February 2, 2019. I sent it again in May, 2020 following 36,000 news media employees, including me, losing their jobs amidst the pandemic. I sent it once again in May, 2023 with the following preamble: Newsroom layoffs have been in the
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A few years ago Re/Search founder V. Vale asked who the next William S. Burroughs or J.G. Ballard are. “Who are the people alive on the planet who are predicting the future as well as Burroughs and Ballard?” he pondered. What follows is an expansion of my response
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I read A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLanda earlier this year. I’d worried that it might not hold up 20 years after its initial publication. The idea of applying systems theory to social science is no longer novel, and I’ve read DeLanda’s markets and
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I’ve been thinking about Ethan Zuckerman’s paper on the roots of the crisis in trust in journalism. Zuckerman connects the bottoming out of trust in the media with the loss in faith in institutions in general, including the government, labor unions, schools, and big business. It asks more
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This is the talk I prepared for the Sunday Assembly in Portland, Oregon last February. The actual talk diverged quite a bit from this, but since it wasn’t recorded, this is the closest approximation to what went down that exists. I’m supposed to talk to you about coping
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Back in 2014 I wrote a longish blog post about race and sexual violence in the works of Alan Moore. Naturally, people hurled the old critic-silencing questions: “Do you think you can do better than Alan Moore?” and “Why don’t you spend your time making your own art instead
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Obsessing over productivity is a sickness of a hypercapitalist society. But in a world where you’re only as good as the the amount of work you’ve done in last 168 hours, productivity systems are survival strategies. I’ve obsessively tweaked my own routines and apps over the years
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My biological clock is ticking: I’m fast reaching age at which I will be too old to enlist in the military. It’s a strange thing to be wistful about. One of the biggest reliefs of my life is that I didn’t have to go to Iraq or