In 2018, legal scholar Tim Wu wrote in the New York Times that: Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. This piece well predates the current AI boom, but “all destination and no journey” is a pretty good explanation for why using AI to create art is mainly compelling to people who…
Get in, loser, we’re doing an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post. Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era: The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately,…
Some of you know me because of a daily political newsletter project I ran in 2017-2018 centered on American politics. I am eight years older and wiser, with much more clever and original ideas, so I come to you now with a new project: a weekly political newsletter slash website centered on Toronto. The project is called Show Up Toronto, and it launches today. The scope may be smaller…
In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations. Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you…
I feel objectively worse than I did in 2016. We have so much more information about how bad things are going to get now, and the fascists have had eight more years to prepare for how to roll out cruelty en masse on day one. We have so much less slack in ameliorating the worst impacts of climate change, after yet another eight years of inaction. I’m terrified.
Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time,…
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, for no reason at all connected to the news or the state of social media or the way we’ve constructed an economic sytem that allows petulant man-children to set billions of dollars on metaphorical fire because strangers on the internet made fun of him while simultaneously pretending that homelessness is an intractable inevitability that can only be…
The concept of “work” is a Rorschach test, an inkblot that you can project pretty much anything onto. There are definitions that speak of a meaningless Sisyphean grind inside an oppressive and cruel economic system designed to extract the maximum possible short-term value from all its constituent parts. There are also definitions that evoke the sincere joy of putting care and attention toward…
Sometimes it feels like there’s no point to writing unless I have a competely original idea. This is an impossibly high bar to clear—there aren’t no original thoughts left, but they are exceedingly rare. Often I’ll discover while researching that the core of my idea showed up in three thinkpieces within the last two weeks alone, or more likely that Ursula Franklin already figured it all out the…
At any given point in my life I’ve wanted to be spending more time writing. This includes the tween years in which I wrote and published fanfiction every afternoon after school, undergrad when I studiously scheduled three blog posts a week despite having very little of substance to say, and that year and a half when I ran a daily newsletter that took over my life.