decay

The Onion announced that it plans to “end Infowars’ relentless barrage of disinformation for the sake of selling supplements and replace it with The Onion’s relentless barrage of humor for good” when it relaunches in January 2025.

In response, the Department of Premier and Cabinet’s State Planning Office said in the report that it had deemed the job numbers “reasonable” after using Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant.

Jesus fucking christ.

.io is the country code domain for the Chagos Islands — or the British Indian Ocean Territory — which the UK just agreed to relinquish control of.

The music industry traded tape for hard drives and got a hard-earned lesson.

The wonder, and the curse, of friendship is choice.

After a vape with a screen showing Twitter and Facebook icons on it went viral, I ordered the “Swype Vape 30K Puffs Touch Screen Disposable” to see if I could inhale some social media myself.

The potential of technology to empower is being subverted by tyrannical user interface design, enabled by our data and attention.

Many yearn for the “good old days” of the web. We could have those good old days back — or something even better — and if anything, it would be easier now than it ever was.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down completely. A third billionaire did what they do best, bought the app you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

I had just switched from Google Drive, and instead of making a new email address, I used an ancient Hotmail account that’s been tied to my Xbox account for over a decade. If you had told me I had photos in that email’s cloud storage, I wouldn’t have believed you. I’d swear up and down I never used cloud storage under that email address. Yet, a day after I updated my subscription, an “On this day” memories alert popped up.

I clicked on it — and, oh my, was that a mistake. Microsoft OneDrive wanted me to remember one of the darkest times of my life by shoving photos of an abusive ex in my face — photos I had forgotten existed.

An up close an personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.