Travel back in your mind to the late 90’s, when perhaps the most complicated question on people’s minds – other than why does AOL keep mailing us all these discs? – was “who moved my cheese?” We’re talking peak self-help era when someone named Spencer Johnson could sell tens of millions of copies of a parable posing that inane question.…
How to Fix a Digital Cesspool
God bless Cory Doctorow. A prolific writer with dozens of books to his credit, he is whip smart and hell bent on fixing all that ails the internet. Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” in 2022, defining it as deliberately worsening a service out of – what else? – pure greed. The focus here is on apps and in Enshittification we’re…
Phones and Laptops and EVs, Oh My
Mtoto wa nyoka ni nyoka – “The child of a snake is a snake” This Swahili proverb is quoted by one of the indelible subjects we meet in Siddharth Kara’s gut-punch of investigative journalism, Cobalt Red. The full-time guardian for her three grandchildren, at 69 Lubuya is the oldest person Kara interviewed on his many sojourns to the Democratic Republic…
Too Late to Revert Back to FM Radio?
“Everyone wants an answer: What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?” posits journalist Liz Pelly in the concluding chapter of her bestseller, Mood Machine. This after 230+ pages of findings from investigating the music & podcast giant for half of its checkered 20-year history. She takes us back to its early days, debunking the claim that it was founded to save…
Ask Yourself a Question
Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain? Don’t you just love a bargain?…