The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins is one the most haunting books I've read in recent years. It's about the Cold War-era, US-backed mass killings of suspected communists around the world. Between 500,000 and 1.2 million people were killed in Indonesia alone between 1965
Missouri House Republicans voted to defund libraries, but defend 12 year olds getting married. That’s right, the GOP thinks it’s fine for parents to force their kids into what amounts to sexual slavery, but the chance of seeing a drawing of two naked men kissing is a line
This is an excerpt from my work-in-progress murder mystery novel Good People Do Bad Things. In this scene, the narrator Miles is a journalist interviewing Orion, the former front-man of the defunct 1990s industrial rock band Servitor. The conversation has turned to magic and the occult. -- “Are you familiar
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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Everyone says we’re living in the Golden Age of television. Maybe it started with Buffy and The Sopranos, or maybe with The Wire and Battle Star Galactica. But whenever it started, it’s been a welcome refuge from the movie industry and its never-ending parade of sequels, remakes, and
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I can’t be the only one that’s noticed this, but it seems that in the early days of the ‘net, people were digital nomads, wandering from one social network to the next: LiveJournal, the blog-o-sphere, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. You’d show up on a new social
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My friend Tom likes to ask people two questions this time of year: 1) What is your favorite monster? 2) What monster do you find the scariest? The idea is that you can learn a lot about someone based on their answers. For example, if I recall correctly, Tom’s
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Every night dozens of people around the world don masks and costumes and venture into the streets to fight crime. Phoenix Jones and Master Legend are perhaps the most famous, but there are hundreds of costumed would-be crime fighters and their activities range from attempting to apprehend criminals to watching
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The first two Ministry albums I heard were With Sympathy and Filth Pig. I can’t remember which one I got first, but they sounded completely different not just from each other, but from what I expected Ministry to sound like. I expected something like Skinny Puppy or Nine Inch
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Facebook COO Sharyl Sandberg has kicked up a mini-controversy by admitting to Makers.com that she leaves the office at 5:30PM every day, and has done so for years. In the Valley, where work is a religion, leaving early is heresy. Earlier this week “Jon” published The 501 Developer
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tobias has a great post up about blogging. I don’t take issue with the thesis of the post, but there’s something there that I’ve been thinking about: Blogs tend to not express or reflect on political action, taken or organised by the blogger; rather, the act of
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Another idea which it seems like someone must have come up with already: ransoming art/content/whatever. The idea is simple: a content provider sets up a donation box and publishes material enough money has been made. It seems this may only work for someone with an established reputation as
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I’m gonna do some idea-blogging over the next few days, trying to get some ideas out there for some feedback (or at least so I don’t forget them). I’ve had this “games as musical interface” idea for a couple years. A number of “generative” and “fractal” music