The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November. The news meant landed a little different for […]
Hayes Valley is one of the neighborhoods that’s gentrified most since I first moved to San Francisco. What was a collapsed freeway encircled by shabby Victorians and empty lots is now a bougie strip of bars and glossy retail. Strapping young people fill the plaza. Dives have turned into destinations. The main street, meanwhile, is stacked with retail outlets for stores you probably heard about first on the internet. Allbirds, Away, Warby Parker. You know the […]
• Loved this Mia Sato report from Gary Vaynerchuck’s VeeCon. Internet-driven fandoms are such fertile (and often terrifying) territory. • The rise of the internet’s creative middle class. • Robots building offshore wind turbines. • How Houston moved 25,000 people from the streets into homes of their own. • Megan Tatum on queer campaigners using the net to organize in a conservative Muslim country.
Katie Notopoulos gives a reasonable rundown of the web that used to exist before the 2010s (a wild and disintermediated place where independent creators had a chance to thrive) and the one that exists a decade later (centralized into a handful of aggregators and platforms that everyone is reliant on.) The internet of the 2010s will be defined by social media’s role in the 2016 election, the rise of extremism, and the fallout from privacy […]
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