One of my first mantras when I started this blog was I hate Twitter, but that was shorthand for the broader view that social media is a trainwreck. Of course, the existential difficulty presented by these platforms is that while they can be highly toxic, as long as the market remains, one must have a presence if one has a ...
As 2021 winds down, and this blog approaches the mid-point of its tenth year, I ask the following question: Can certain folks stop trying to “fix copyright” in deference to the digital age now that the internet experiment has failed? For over twenty years, the principal argument underlying the “copyright is broken” narrative has been that the legal framework limits ...
David knows of course that it is the start of a new year—a time when one is expected to write some kind of review of the year gone by and/or a few thoughts anticipating the year to come. But as 2019 careened toward the obligatory crescendo of December’s final days, I would find him staring blankly at his computer monitor muttering, ...
I was reading an editorial the other day written by Stephen Witt for NPR shortly after the passing of John Parry Barlow in 2018; and it occurred to me that internet activists seem to fit one of two profiles—Mourners and Evangelicals. And both are full of shit. Witt does an excellent job summarizing the early barefoot wanderings of the college-dropout, ...
