“They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry.”
“[W]hile the rest of the world’s smart phone adoption began with the iPhone, Japan was years ahead — but alone. The result was that Japan’s smart phone culture evolved separately from the rest of the world. There was less emphasis on large pictures and text was more acceptable since it had been the norm since the early days.”
“[O]ctopuses can alter the coloration of their skin, with darker colors typically being indicative of aggression. The authors found that octopuses with dark coloration threw debris more forcefully and were more likely to hit another octopus.”
“For all the grandiose talk about The Light Of Consciousness and The Future Of Humanity that has come out of Silicon Valley during its ascent, what it has delivered has mostly been spectacularly useless, lifeless, and anti-human. In this sense, it reflects its owners perfectly.”
“Twitter encourages a very extractive attitude from everyone it touches. The people re-publishing my Mastodon posts on Twitter didn’t think to ask whether I was ok with them doing that. The librarians wondering loudly about how this ‘new’ social media environment could be systematically archived didn’t ask anyone whether they want their fediverse posts to be captured and stored by government institutions.”
“But individuals also have real agency, and our actions determine the actual consequences of these Great Forces as they reshape our world. We have to understand both, and study both, and act on the world now remembering that both are real.”
“Savage was generous and genuine in puzzling out these topics with me, even after years of considering and reconsidering them already. As for the better-known controversies over what he’s written, he has a tendency to explain rather than apologize for his mistakes, or to explain more than he apologizes.”
“This all still sits there, now well after the celebration — a world built for one purpose, temporarily filled and now waiting indefinitely to be stumbled on again. Which makes it just like the vast majority of the billions of Roblox places.”
“Because the drought had worsened since the quotas were set, conservancy members had voluntarily left most of them unfilled. While wildlife surveys earlier in the year had suggested that 75 oryx could be killed without harming the population, for example, only three had been shot so far.”
“I knew before the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests that my mustache made me look like a bougie race man: a professional, seemingly humorless middle-class Negro, a moderate, who believes that presentation is a crucial component of the ‘advancement’ part of the NAACP mission.”