Things I read in October.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn in The Correspondent on the online advertising industry.
the algorithms are generating clicks, but not necessarily extra clicks
The Largest Autocracy on Earth
Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic on how Facebook is acting like a nation state. I think it would be a good to add that thought to Zuckeberg’s ideas about the Metaverse. Also, Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian about the latest whistle blower from Facebook. Also it had actually rebranded into SecondLife Meta by the end of the month.
I Want To Believe in Ted Lasso
Laurie Penny discusses Ted Lasso. This paragraph really stood out for me.
The idea that giving power to one good man is all it takes to obviate the worst parts of human nature is essentially a conservative fantasy, just as it is in the Bible… the entertainment industry is still hopped up on the hero’s journey as the solid, central, single formula for bankable storytelling, so every story has to boil down to one key individual struggling alone against the odds, defeating enemies, and achieving his or very occasionally her ultimate victory. Rugged individualism is rarely allowed to fail, these days, in a culture that refuses to imagine failure as anything other than tragic.
Human History Gets a Rewrite
William Deresiewicz writes about The Dawn of Everything, David Graber and David Wengrow’s new book in the Atlantic. Definitley next on my reading list, and sounds like Piere Clastres’s Society Without The State. Sadly this was only the first of three volumes the two had planned to write together.