Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There is a family friend, a man I’ve known for decades. A highly educated man with total financial security in his recent retirement. A man who always had a good story to tell or an interesting side of a conversation to hold up. Then, a few years ago, he got on Facebook. Reading his timeline…
“Anything you want. Anyone you want. Anywhere you want. Anyway! Anyway!” —Priests, “Pink White House” (2017) Imagine you are in an airport, and you have forgotten to eat lunch. It’s a mistake you will pay for with a dull, expensive dinner. Hungry, meandering, you happen upon one of those iPads that line every other table,…
The “gig economy” has been hailed as a major disruption to the American workforce, as sites like Uber, Airbnb and Etsy offer workers new ways to make money and work a flexible schedule. But a new report offers a stark reminder that it’s not likely to replace the full-time job anytime soon. In a report released Monday, the JPMorgan…
.entry-header Scene: the perfect vacation experience, fueled by rented products. Go on vacation and you’ll undoubtedly encounter at least one couple who snaps photos of their perfectly manicured brunch experience. They took an Uber to get to the general area, asking the driver to play their favorite Spotify playlist for the 17 minute drive. Rather than walk the final…
ImageFacebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told Congress this year that he wanted the company to “be a platform for all ideas.”CreditCreditTom Brenner/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social…
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” – Gertrude Stein My first job as a product manager was in games. I worked at Playdom, Zynga’s primary competitor during the social gaming boom of 2009. The sophistication of our data analysis techniques and the platform supporting them played a…
“James Fields did nothing wrong,” the post on Facebook read, referring to the man who drove a car through a crowd protesting against white supremacy in Charlottesville in August 2017, killing one. The post accompanied an article from Squawker.org, a conservative website. In training materials given to its army of moderators, Facebook says the post…
The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online draws on in-depth interviews by scholar Whitney Phillips to showcase how news media was hijacked from 2016 to 2018 to amplify the messages of hate groups. Offering extremely candid comments from mainstream journalists, the report provides a snapshot of an industry…
In late April, the white nationalist Christopher Cantwell — commonly known as “the Crying Nazi” — made an appearance on a YouTube channel run by Andy Warski that boasts nearly 275,000 subscribers. Cantwell was there to talk about how he would build a whites-only country within the United States. At one point during the livestream,…