the little heard of first and a half amendment

This conversation this week is so on point and sloshes through the muddy water of the internet platforms towards something much clearer

Jon and @cwarzel.bsky.social discuss the ways that algorithms and social media incentives have upended free speech.

btwn the state sponsored censorship hypocrisy and stuff like this it really feels like a theme of being alive right now is power feeling like it doesn’t even have to try - just treating everyone with obvious contempt

seems like this observation held up

grateful to share some of my internet brain damage with Jon and talk about extremely online mass shooters, how the press is struggling to cover the assassination, and why we seem determined to have our important conversations on platforms that aren’t built for them

i wrote this in *2017.* since then the right wing media has grown extensively. and yet it looks like no lessons learned. www.buzzfeednews.com/article/char...

said it yesterday but the people who commit this violence increasingly show us that they deeply understand how our information ecosystems process it. It appears to be part of the appeal for them. And yet the response doesn't really change. www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Wrote about the week. How the shooter's ID didn't appear to matter to ppl. How the discourse takes place in very same spaces that incubate/perpetuate hate & violence. How shooters now know that their acts will be flattened, analyzed, argued over & amplified. How all of this feels so dark & poisonous

i think that, very broadly speaking, this is a p good lesson about computer

this one fucked me up good

Wrote about the week. How the shooter's ID didn't appear to matter to ppl. How the discourse takes place in very same spaces that incubate/perpetuate hate & violence. How shooters now know that their acts will be flattened, analyzed, argued over & amplified. How all of this feels so dark & poisonous

Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13

it’s early but it seems like maybe this is relevant again (wrote it last week fml)

the influencer government at work!

update: male loneliness epidemic solved

being online right now feels like being harry and marv just getting walloped by paint cans to the face ... except it is posts

I think this is one of the best things published in the last few years. I think about it almost daily. I revisited it today and saw it was published exactly 5 years ago yesterday www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-t...

very clear that these ai enhance tools are a scourge

sorry to put harry on blast (was top of my mentions when i looked & im tired) but like...come on! this is very clearly an accelerating event. i've spent so much time over the last ten years covering the asymmetrical dynamics of politics and social media and i know what this cycle looks like

all signs point to this being just an incredibly destabilizing moment. very very bad stuff. we're in a very dark place.

being totally comfortable speaking this way to millions of people is one of many signals that we're in an extremely dark place

this is every journalist headshot, vol. 2

if i write another book this probably needs to be the cover (Niranjan Shrestha/Associated Press)

I wrote about what I think is a genuinely revealing document of elite depravity and impunity. It is shocking and sickening. But it's also a crucial moment. We're about to see what happens when conspiracy theorists actually get what they asked for but it turns out not to be what they want.

another way to view this is as a *massive* failure of the secret service to allow unvetted people to be that close to the president and surprise him in a closed space

I wrote about what I think is a genuinely revealing document of elite depravity and impunity. It is shocking and sickening. But it's also a crucial moment. We're about to see what happens when conspiracy theorists actually get what they asked for but it turns out not to be what they want.

phone's too thin

hey im putting something together for my boss for his birthday. yeah can you write a letter or better yet an insane poem or horrifying drawing about the unspeakable crimes you all have committed together

it is like...orders of magnitude more overt than i imagined! a genuinely unbelievable document

some breathtaking stuff in the Epstein book pdf

not a hot take but it remains p remarkable that trump was just like ‘this isn’t real’ and its both real and somehow creepier than described and probably little will change

My theory is that the arrival of traffic measuring metrics supercharged distrust in media. Yeah, there's clickbait, but I think the real issue is that audiences actually get really tired of being given the thing they signal that they want. Even when its not a race to the bottom, it hurts trust

It's seeming likelier and likelier that AI really could eliminate a lot of jobs very soon. Just not in the way boosters have suggested. www.theatlantic.com/economy/arch...

In the days after last week's Minneapolis shooting, I've been continually haunted by the shooter's video and the nihilistic contagion that seems to spread in mass shooter fandom communities. I spoke to @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social about how to process this terrible phenomenon w/o helping perpetuate it

An excellent piece by @cwarzel.bsky.social about the Minneapolis attacker & the murder fandoms & NVE networks that act as a feedback reinforcement loop developing future atackers. Really important reading for everyone trying to make sense of where we’re at today & w/ gift link.

my personal feeling is we should have a federal program that pays for every us citizen to spend one beautiful late summer day at the US open watching tennis

I had an amazing talk with @cwarzel.bsky.social about this, check out his article

In the days after last week's Minneapolis shooting, I've been continually haunted by the shooter's video and the nihilistic contagion that seems to spread in mass shooter fandom communities. I spoke to @alexbnewhouse.bsky.social about how to process this terrible phenomenon w/o helping perpetuate it

trick question. it's 4 simultaneous jubilee 'surrounded' tapings happening at once, all in the same room. every 17 minutes Mr. Beast blows an airhorn and everyone has to perform a series of challenges in an Amazon-branded arena. losers are demonetized.

idk maybe im just a loser but i feel like there's a better dem strategy online than we're just gonna do 4chan memes too

also! some of these guys now *run the governments' social media accounts* and post things that are virtually indistinguishable from old Nazi propaganda!

bunch of these are going around today & i found this explanation to be the most honest of the bunch. some ppl who are taking a principled stand to stay on twitter are just there bc the ppl they like talking to are there, they don't like getting dunked on here, and find nazis less annoying

i would point to this interview if i was trying to explain how sometimes people who don’t think of themselves as journalists or reject the notion altogether can be the most effective interviewers newrepublic.com/post/199737/...

can really see this dynamic with media companies and their disclosures, like this one. i’m not singling out the post here…any critical coverage i do comes with one of these, too bc pubs have taken partnership deals to try to keep these ai labs from just taking content (or directing them elsewhere)

complete with bible verse patch on the tactical vest

anyone else here get totally laid out by the flu shot this year? normally nbd for me but this one knocked me like a covid booster

The photos in the post below are by Gabriele Galimberti and I interviewed him about them after they went viral in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy. Was a fascinating interview www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

nowhere is the abject failure of 24-hour news cycle reporting more painfully evident than in aftermath of school shootings

i watched the disturbing video that's supposedly from the Minneapolis shooter and (with the caveat that it seems real but i've not seen confirmation of that) what seems clear is that more and more of the people who commit these acts do not have comprehensible politics, in fact that may be the point